The Astonishing Color of After

Leigh does not see any more of her mother’s body than the sight of her legs sticking out from the end of the bed. She and her father Brian spend hours looking for a suicide note. They eventually find it in the garbage, along with the antidepressants that Leigh’s mother stopped taking. The note’s crossed-out message says that she loves them, that the pills were not working. Most ominously, it tells them, “I want you to remember” (7). Leigh is not sure what her mother wants her to remember.

The morning before the funeral, Leigh wakes up to a sharp rap on the door. When she opens it and looks up at the sky, she sees a crimson bird with a long tail. The bird has her mother’s voice and speaks her name. When Leigh reaches out to the bird, it flies away, dropping a single red feather. Leigh props the door open with a bucket and falls asleep clutching the feather.

When Leigh sees her mother’s body, “grayer than a sketch” in the open casket at the funeral (11), she knows that the body is not her mother and that her real mother is a bird. When Axel approaches Leigh at the funeral and requests to talk to her, she rebuffs him, saying that discussion is futile. Internally, she is troubled by the memory of being with Axel while her mother was dying. She imagines herself becoming estranged from Axel.

Leigh tries to tell her father and her friend Caro of her mother’s apparition as a red bird. Both her father and friend reference Leigh’s therapist, Dr. O’Brien, and imply that Leigh’s vision is a symptom of her grief. Leigh longs to erase the memory of the kiss between her and Axel, and to confess to him what she has seen. She tries to draw the bird but fails to convincingly capture the wings.

Leigh decides that the “mother-shaped hole” in her life is “a cutout of the blackest black” (19). From here on, she uses only charcoal in her artwork. She strives to cover the tangerine bedroom wall she and her mother painted with white, and she tries to take on the bathroom as well, but her father prevents her, failing to understand why she needs to repaint their existence.

Leigh continues to visit the porch at night and watch out for the bird. A week after the funeral, a small package is waiting for her outside the door. The bird appears and tells Leigh that the box is from her grandparents. Leigh realizes that the bird refers to her maternal grandparents, whom she has never met. When the box is still there the next morning, Leigh knows that the incident was real.

Leigh wishes that she resembled her Taiwanese mother more than her Irish Pennsylvanian father. At breakfast the cracks in Leigh’s relationship with her father begin to show, as she expresses her dismay that he, a prominent sinologist, will be working from home now that she does not have her mother to take care of her. He says he wants them to be closer and talk more. Leigh says she has a topic of conversation that she would like to bring up with him.

Leigh opens the box in her father’s presence. Inside is the cicada-shaped necklace that Leigh’s mother wore daily and a note in Mandarin from Leigh’s maternal grandparents. Dory refused to talk about her parents or teach Leigh Mandarin. Brian, who speaks the language, says Leigh’s maternal grandparents want to meet her. Leigh wants to go, hoping that she will be able to solve the mystery about the bird and her identity. Brian tells her that it is complicated, and when he prevents the journey to Taiwan, the bird no longer comes to visit.

Leigh recalls when, as a first-grader, she had to make a family tree without having any information about her maternal grandparents. When she asked her mother, Dory replied that her parents lived too far away. Then, in middle school, when Leigh asked Dory whether her family practiced foot-binding, Dory replied that her Chinese grandmother did. She also told Leigh that she lost touch with her parents because they had an argument and that she would tell Leigh the full facts of the story when she was older.

A “strange wind” fills Leigh’s house with red feathers and causes all the windows to fly open. This is the catalyst that Brian needs to book two plane tickets to Taipei, Taiwan.

On the plane to Taipei, Leigh receives an email from Axel but does not open it. She feels a coldness that makes her wonder whether she has also turned into a bird, like her mother.

Arriving in Taipei, Leigh and Brian make it to Leigh’s grandparents’ house. Her grandparents only speak Chinese, and Leigh feels self-conscious about her inadequacy in the language.

While Leigh and her father settle with the grandparents in the living room, Leigh brings out the box that was left by the bird. Acting as translator, Brian tells Leigh that her grandparents never intended for her to receive the box. They put the package together and intended to mail it but changed their minds at the last minute, and burned the whole thing. Brian gets angry when Leigh insists that the bird brought her the box. When he storms off, Leigh takes out her sketchpad and draws a series of images to show her grandparents that her mother has turned into a bird.

Leigh’s father announces that he can no longer stay with his in-laws because he feels that he is breaking the promises he made to his deceased wife. He will therefore go to Hong Kong, while a bewildered and furious Leigh stays with her grandparents and practices her Mandarin.

Alone with her grandparents, Leigh remembers some of the Mandarin expressions Brian taught her. Following a “strange, unexplainable compulsion” (63), she walks toward a dresser where she finds a slim, rectangular box with Chinese characters on it. She recognizes one of these characters as Ren, meaning people. When she opens the box, it contains the smell of incense and the intimation of voices. Leigh’s grandmother Waipo interrupts her and puts Dory’s cicada necklace around Leigh’s neck.

When preparing for bed after a day spent in Taipei and wondering about Axel, Leigh hears the whispery voices from the previous night. This time, when Leigh feels instinctively led to the drawer, she finds an old-looking book of matches as well as the feather and incense. She strikes a match to light the incense and “smoke fills the room, until there’s only black” (70).

When the smoke clears, Leigh finds herself standing and bearing witness to two family scenes from the past. The first is from when she was 12 and her mother was playing Beethoven sonatas while Leigh and Axel were sketching. The second, her father’s memory, is from a time Leigh was too young to remember. Both scenes depict happy family life and fill Leigh with longing. When the memories end and she is alone in her bedroom in Taiwan, the incense has vanished.

Leigh wonders about whose fault it was that her mother committed suicide. She secretly ponders whether she or her father were to blame.

When Leigh visits a shop with her grandmother, she is pronounced a hunxie, a Mandarin term for biracial person. Leigh recalls all the times in her life when she was labelled exotic and other for her mixed-race appearance. Her feelings of being an outsider are exacerbated when Feng, an old family friend who speaks perfect English, comes to visit. Leigh observes with some discomfort that Feng resembles her grandparents more than she does and can communicate with them far better.

Unable to sleep, Leigh opens an email from Axel. Attached is a musical composition entitled “Goodbye;” it is the last part of a series Axel made about their day in the orchard the summer before Leigh’s freshman year of high school. Leigh thinks the kiss and her cold reaction to Axel at the funeral has ruined everything between them, that she was naive to think a single kiss between them would erase his feelings for his former girlfriend Leanne. However, she wonders whether Leanne knows anything about Leigh and Axel’s kiss.

The musical composition makes Leigh feel nostalgic because it reminds her of the charged atmosphere on her 14th birthday. This occasion is the first time she remembers her mother being depressed. Leigh is annoyed about her mother’s bleak mood but distracts herself by biking to an orchard with Axel, who is at this stage her best friend. Half Filipino and half Puerto Rican, Axel shares Leigh’s experience of being mixed race. Axel, whose own mother abandoned his family and who considers Dory a substitute maternal figure, thinks Leigh is being insensitive about her mother’s bad mood. However, he treats Leigh to a birthday picnic and the two bond over their love of art. When Axel gifts Leigh some figurative watercolor paintings and three recordings inspired by their day out, she sees them as a “confession of love” (96). However, a day later she learns that he asked Leanne Ryan out on a date.

Leigh wishes she could make the bad memories of the past uncomfortable year fade away.

While Dory’s mental health deteriorates in the fall of Leigh’s freshman year, Leigh distracts herself with hating Axel’s new girlfriend Leanne and making a new friend named Caro in her art class. When Caro and her mother Mel drop Leigh home, they find Dory curled up in a ball on the kitchen floor. Dory does not tell Leigh what happened, and Leigh worries about both her mother and herself.

On an outing in Taipei with her grandmother and Feng, Leigh resents Feng for resembling her mother and grandmother while Leigh does not and for talking nonstop. A shop, which turns out to have been Dory’s favorite, has recently adopted a red bird as the logo. Feng explains that this is because the owner recently saw a red bird high over the city. Leigh gets excited, thinking this must mean her mother is in the city; she insists that she and Feng should visit the tallest skyscraper in the city to get a better view. Up there they see the red bird. Leigh determines that she should visit all Dory’s favorite places in Taipei, so that she can track down the bird and reunite with her mother.

Unable to sleep, and preoccupied with the idea of her mother as a bird, Leigh leaves her grandmother’s apartment and goes out to the street, where she hopes for a sighting of her mother. However, there is only a man there, and his presence frightens her so much that she returns home. Back in her bedroom, the light in her room oscillates between daylight and darkness.

That same night, sleepless Leigh hears the flapping of wings and reaches for the box of incense and the red feather. When she touches the incense stick to the feather vane, she feels a hot sizzling sensation, and the room goes dark, preparing Leigh for another vision.

Leigh sees flashbacks of incidents following the onset of her mother’s depression. On one occasion, Leigh’s mother exclaims that “nothing is right” (117). To Leigh, however, it seems that everything is right except for her mother. Then there are flashbacks of the false promise of an improvement in Dory’s mood, and finally, of her body being lowered into a coffin. Leigh protests against this fate, thinking that her mother is a bird. She watches the feather crumble into dust.

This chapter reiterates Leigh’s disillusionment following that hopeful period when she thought her mother was better. Leigh also reaffirms her belief that her mother is a bird.

Leigh ponders what causes a person who seems so deeply loved to commit suicide. She is troubled by a memory of her parents talking but not making eye contact and wonders, “did we love her wrong?” (120).

Leigh recalls freshman year, when she goes over to Caro’s house and is moved by the warmth and openness of Caro’s maternal grandparents. Caro’s grandmother Gaelle asks Leigh how her parents met. Leigh tells the romantic story of her father, a PhD student, and her mother, a college student from Taiwan who was visiting Illinois, meeting at a mix-and-mingle event. They maintained a long-distance relationship when Leigh’s mother moved back to Taiwan and eventually eloped in Chicago.

At home, Leigh asks when she can meet her maternal grandparents. This proves a touchy subject, and both Dory and Brian deny her request, saying her inquisitiveness will cause trouble.

Leigh judges that the bird keeps appearing because she has something to say.

Leigh visits Dory’s favorite Taoist temple with her grandmother and Feng. There she adopts the Taiwanese custom of using bwabwei, crescent-shaped bits of wood, which are tossed in the air while the user asks a yes-no question. Leigh asks whether her mother’s bird is present in the temple. When one piece lands face up and the other face down, Leigh knows that her mother is indeed present.

Over tea with her grandmother and Feng, Leigh resolves to steal the tea leaves to feel close to her grandmother and like part of the family.

Feng, Leigh, and her grandmother go to a Buddhist temple, where her grandmother proclaims that Dory’s spirit is. Meanwhile, monks are performing a ritual in which they chant sutras for those who passed away less than 49 days ago. According to the Buddhist tradition, the 49-day period enables people to let go of their earthly ties before they are ready for rebirth. Leigh knows that she has 49 days to find the bird before her mother’s yellow tablet is burned. She sees the bird flying on the way out of the temple.

Leigh theorizes that the longer her mother is a bird, the more she will forget about Leigh. To help her mother remember, Leigh takes a pair of scissors to the clothes she brought with her from home and makes a net to catch the bird. She hopes that the smell of the clothes will make her mother remember her. Of its own accord, her phone begins to play a track that Axel composed for her.