I pressed my face against the cool glass of the window pane, looking into the gray. White flakes fell from the sky, covering the brown fence of our small yard. Covered by snow, our fence, our yard, our unit in the McDonough Housing Project, 1475 Timberlake Road, Apartment C, was no different from any of our neighbors'. It was Christmas Day, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993 — from the time I was 6 years old until the younger kids came into our lives, and Christmas lost its hold, I spent my Christmas Days waiting for my mother to come home.
I have no memory of when my mother left each Christmas Day with my aunt. I hold every memory of her return home. It was the same each year.
My mother wore her tan coat, the puffy one that she got from the church basement. It was too big for her. The hood fell over her face. Her hands were lost in the long arms of the coat. Her legs peeked from the bottom of the heavy coat. She walked slowly. She had her purse on her left shoulder. In her right hand, she held a clear plastic bag.
From the window, I could see what was inside the bag. I could see the two stuffed animals, the coloring books, the packs of crayons, the containers of Play-Doh, mittens and a scarf. I bit my bottom lip. These were the things I drew for my teachers, and whispered to my classmates about when they asked me what I got for Christmas. Every year the contents were the same. Dawb, my older sister, and I ran to the door. I turned the cold metal of the lock, and I settled my weight on my heels, using all the strength in my arms to pull the steel door open.
My mother pushed the hood back from her face when she saw us opening the door without her knocking. She smiled and the lines on her face deepened, shadows beneath her eyes, creases on either side of her mouth. Tendrils of black hair fell to her forehead. I thought she was beautiful. She brought the scent of the cold day with her. She extended her hand with the plastic bag. We rushed to take it from her. We sat on the cold tile floors and divvied up the goods, one for each, a scarf for Dawb this year and the mittens for me. Our mother and father talked quietly in the background, Hmong voices speaking Hmong words about the coming of the new year, the calling in of our spirits with chickens and eggs. We listened to them, waiting for a good place to interrupt, to ask if we could please go for an evening drive past the big houses on Summit Avenue or the wide open front windows of the houses around Phalen Lake; we wanted to see the glow of Christmas lights, the twinkling of the trees.
We did not ask our mother where she had been all day long. We did not ask her where the gifts came from.
Longing for a tree
The first Hmong family we knew who got a Christmas tree was Uncle Chue's. I remember going to their house and seeing the little plastic tree full of candy canes in the corner. There were no gifts that first year because they couldn't afford any, either, but the tree in the corner marked a shift in all of our lives — the dawning of a realization that the shine we drove past on our night rides across the nicer parts of town, we could bring into our own homes.
By then, we had moved out of the McDonough Housing Project. Our mother and father had bought a small house on the East Side of St. Paul. Built in 1895, 437 E. York Avenue was a shotgun house. It was 900 square feet. We had two-point-five bedrooms and a bathroom. In the wintertime, the old walls grew shiny with moisture because the badly installed electric floorboard heaters couldn't keep the house dry. Stretches of mold grew, fierce and dark, from the floor and ceiling, jagged scarecrow hands reaching for each other. The house next door was abandoned, its snow-covered yard lumpy with long, uncut grass. There was a small, debilitated pine tree that looked like a twisted witch's hat by its front walk.