Circle

Five-Year Plan

28 Five-Year Plan A good Chinese American housewife has a five-year plan. It’s strategic, sparse, menacing. It stutters at nothing, a tin present tense, perhaps a new VCR in two years. A good Chinese American daughter washes windows and retains curvatures. And when I’m finished, I revise my five-year plan to exclude windowwashing , to include speaker of the house in two years, in four, maybe president. And a good Chinese daughter and housewife has a ten-year plan, but the sum of parts does not equal the whole. And when did this dimming and mapping start? When did kicking apart and putting back together tread? At birth, a contract must occur, because all Chinese parents ask new son-in-laws: Do you have pension? And it’s reinforced, the way a rubber snake sneaks and scares. It’s not amazing that we can balance eggs on our heads and fix a man’s heart together. We have degrees in everything and nothing. We can polish cats while solving proofs, like belching and breathing. And all this 29 premeditation, like sugar in theory, but really tastes aluminum, clogs the esophagus. It always grows back, never reaches twentytwenty and there is no standard deviation, no chance for seeing a spare owl or the red fox that wanders just beyond the border. All knew I would “make it,” or at least control it to a strangle so that the throat only brings in half the air. ...