by ANNALISA SHELDAHL
My mom is visiting me in New York City for the weekend. She’s so pleased that one of her four children ended up here, the land of iconic museums, award-winning restaurants, and—most important to her—Broadway. Whenever she comes to visit, we always plan on seeing two shows and somehow end up splurging on a third, decided impulsively as we shuffle down West 45th Street, where heavy gold marquees advertise show names I’ve learned from her. “We’re not seeing anything Sunday morning yet…” she says, looking up from the TodayTix app splashed across her phone screen with a mischievous twinkle in her eye. (Spontaneity is my mom’s middle name.)
However, our first order of business on this Saturday morning is getting manicures. My mom gets her nails done regularly, and this weekend happens to coincide with her next salon visit. I rarely get my nails done, but I’m also not one to turn down a free manicure. We each pull up Google Maps, take a virtual spin around my corner of the Upper West Side, and decide on a nail salon four minutes away.
Inside, the nail salon is much like every other one I’ve been to in my life: faux pale wood paneling on the walls; bright, warm lighting; cushiony wheeled chairs at a row of desks for manicures in the front; and plush pedicure chairs along a back wall. Waxy houseplants crowd around the entrance. A woman greets us, instructs us to pick our nail colors from a wall, and then gestures to two adjacent manicure chairs. As well as being spontaneous, my mom is also chatty. In our family, we joke that it’s her “superpower.” Stick her in a room with a stranger, and they’ll emerge with plans to get dinner together next Friday. She immediately starts talking with the nail tech buffing her old manicure away. In direct contrast, I smile politely at my nail tech but say nothing, letting my mom’s conversation wash over me.
We’re a few minutes into my manicure when my nail tech asks me a question.
“Are you Asian?”
I consider her for a moment. Straight black hair pulled back in a ponytail, reading glasses balanced on her head, crow’s feet around brown eyes that are shaped similarly to mine. She has been speaking intermittently to her coworkers in a different language—to my ear, it’s either Mandarin or Cantonese.
“Yes,” I answer shyly.
“Where’s your family from?”
“I’m half Chinese. My mom was Chinese.”
I watch her expression snag at the words “my mom,” and she looks over at the woman seated next to me—sees the thick medium-brown hair, blue eyes, and skin that all passersby would call “white.”
“Yeah, it’s kind of complicated,” I say awkwardly, looking over at my mom now. We make eye contact, and she’s pulled into our conversation.
“You’re her mother?” my nail tech asks, still confused.
My mom, in her way of putting everyone at ease immediately, smiles and says, “Yes. Hi, I’m Karen. I’m her adoptive mother.”
“Oh, okay, because, I was going to say, you don’t look Chinese!” My nail tech lets out a throaty laugh to break the tension, but as the laugh fades, I see her mouth forming around the unanswered question: Where is your real mother? Though in our reticence to elaborate, she seems to detect that there isn’t an easy answer.
“Yeah, people get confused by the two of us sitting next to each other,” Karen offers charitably and then effortlessly changes the subject.
When our manicures are done—Karen’s a bright fuchsia with gold shimmer, and mine a neutral peachy pink—we tip our nail techs and make the quick return trip to my apartment. On the way back, I replay the conversation in my head. I’m struck not by its frankness, but by its familiarity. It’s one I’ve had numerous times: not just at a nail salon, but over dinner at a Greek restaurant with coworkers, in my apartment living room with new friends, on a third date in college. Each occurrence of this conversation driven by curiosity or prompted by mounting contradictions in my account. Didn’t you just say…?
Sometimes, like at the nail salon, I can count on a few shy glances and awkward laughs to change the subject and keep a passing interaction light. But for people I’ll see again—the recurring characters in my life—I feel I should be vulnerable with them, no matter how heavy it makes the interaction. That doesn’t make my inevitable discomfort any easier to swallow. I always have an instinct to hold the other person’s hand, tell them to brace themselves. The familiar words begin bubbling up in my throat, until they’re laid out in the open with a hard thud, like a bag of wet cement landing on the table.
When I was in high school, my parents died. First, my mom, of colorectal cancer. And then my dad, of non-smoker small-cell lung cancer. They passed away within 16 months of each other.
When my mom first told me and my younger brother, Evan, that she had cancer, she told us not to tell anyone. I was eight years old at the time, about to start third grade at a new elementary school, and an obedient child. My mom knew as well as I did that my kindergarten report card consistently had high marks in “Listens to and Follows Directions,” so when she asked this of me, I nodded my head and immediately agreed.
From that moment on, I began teaching myself a dance I would continue adding new steps to as my life went on. My mom’s illness rarely came up—my third-grade friends were more concerned with discussing crushes and sleepovers—but when it did, I began learning ways to skirt around it: smoothing over wrinkles effortlessly, leaving pieces of information out. My grades never slipped, my brother and I were never absent from school because of our mom’s illness, and there was always food on the table; our family was able to keep up the façade that everything was fine, so nobody had to know she was sick.
My mom had surgery to remove a part of her colon and underwent rounds of chemo, and by her next birthday in February, the cancer was gone. Then there was no reason to keep the façade up, as there was nothing to hide anymore. We took family vacations to Mount Rushmore, Niagara Falls, and Disney World. My brother and I played our clarinets in school band concerts. I graduated from elementary to middle school, and seventh grade passed unceremoniously. I remember having read somewhere that if someone with cancer could get to five years without it returning, that meant the person was in remission. Because my mom was first diagnosed when I was going into third grade, I eyed my first day of eighth grade with cautious optimism.
And then her cancer came back. This time, it was liver cancer, and it was much more aggressive than the first time. Much of her resulting two-year-long fight is blurry in my memory: sitting in oncology waiting rooms, watching my mom lose her hair again, wondering if she would beat cancer like she did last time, and realizing as she got frailer and frailer that she probably wouldn’t. About a month before she passed away, her doctors arranged for a hospital bed to be delivered to our house and placed in our formal dining room for her. One quiet night she was lying in the bed, and I curled up beside her. Her skin had the waxy hairlessness I’d come to recognize as a side effect of radiation, and she smelled medicinally sweet. I don’t remember if we said anything or if we simply lay in silence next to each other. All I remember is thinking, “Annalisa, you’d better savor this moment, because you don’t know how much time with her you have left.”
I was taking a nap the day she died, sometime after noon. My dad came downstairs to where my brother and I were, just as I was waking up; like two lines converging on a terrible axis.
“She’s gone,” he said, his voice barely making it across the room.
It’s a bright, mild day in early February, and I’m standing in line on a sidewalk in Tribeca. I’m worried I didn’t get here as early as I wanted to, but I’m hoping it’s good enough. There are about 40 people in line ahead of me. We’re waiting to get into a loft space where my local mahjong social group is having their first Lunar New Year celebration. The poster on Instagram boasted plenty of mahjong tables, an art fair, food, a raffle, and most interesting to me, mahjong-themed tattoos.
I don’t have many tattoos, and the two I do have are small and easily hidden. I got my first one, a crescent moon the size of a nickel, when I lived in Maine right after college. My second tattoo was also in Maine, a lotus flower symbol done on my inner ankle after I graduated from yoga teacher training. Ever since my mom passed away, I’d wanted to memorialize her somehow but had never found the right iconography. I thought of incense sticks or chrysanthemums, traditional Chinese symbols of mourning, but since I had to Google “Chinese mourning customs,” it felt a bit disingenuous. I considered a dragon, since that was her Chinese zodiac sign, but always chickened out at the idea of getting something so large and fierce. And then, when I saw the designs they’d be tattooing at this event, I knew exactly which one I wanted. My only concern now is signing up soon enough so I’ll get tattooed before the event ends.
Finally, it’s noon, and the line starts shuffling in. Each person receives a red envelope on their way in, emblazoned with a gold embossed dragon. “It’s the year of the dragon, isn’t it,” I think to myself with a half-smile. My mom would have been 71 years old this year.
When I get upstairs, there’s immediately a crowd around the tattoo sign-up sheets, and by the time I get to the artist I want, I have to flip the paper over. She’s the most popular tattoo artist at this event by far, and my nerves return. I know I could book an appointment with the artist outside of this meetup, but something about this event feels like the stars aligning. After putting my name down, I turn to the rest of the room and see if I can play a round or two of mahjong while I wait.
This isn’t my first event with this club. I’ve come to know a few people by name, which members like to play with the more advanced points system, and who the skilled players are. The attendees are mostly my age or younger, and a strong majority of them are of Asian descent. From attending several events with this club, I’ve noticed there’s something special about spaces where most people are of a similar, non-white ethnicity that can feel unifying and safe. Attendees feel empowered to ask each other about their backgrounds, and bonds are created. As we sit around the tables and shuffle the white and green mahjong tiles, people ask each other if they speak “Mando” or “Canto” (Mandarin or Cantonese, respectfully), where across the Asian diaspora their family is from, if they grew up playing mahjong with their grandmas.
When it’s inevitably my turn to share, I say, “I actually started learning American-style mahjong, and then when I moved to New York City, I joined a Japanese-style mahjong group, and now I’m here.” A different version of my lifelong dance, though the basic steps are the same. My biological mom didn’t teach me how to play mahjong, which I’m sure is what most people are expecting. It was Karen who started playing American-style mahjong during the COVID-19 pandemic, and since you need four people to play, she soon taught me, Evan, and my adoptive sister. And when I moved to the city, it was Karen who suggested I join a mahjong group to make friends.
One by one, the hours tick down. I check the tattoo sign-up sheet periodically; the artist is steadily making her way through her client list. I redeem my food tickets for Nom Wah dumplings and a yuzu seltzer, play a few hands of mahjong (losing more than I win), and chat with people I recognize. But underneath it all, like an anxious bass line, I’m waiting.
Finally, 40 minutes before the event is due to end, I get a call from an unknown number.
“Hello? Is this Annalisa? We’re ready for you to get tattooed.” My heart jumps, and a surge of nervous adrenaline propels me to the tattoo area, where I meet my artist, Gabrielle. I’m quiet, reserved at first, as she sets up the station for me.
“Which design did you want?”
“The fa tile, please. And the Instagram post said that I could do black, red, or green ink? Could I do it in green please?”
“Absolutely. Green is perfect for that one.”
There are a few differences between the American and Hong Kong styles of mahjong. The most obvious is that American-style is played with a card of set hands you have to make in order to win, whereas in Hong Kong-style you have to make four sets of three tiles and a pair. The designs of the corresponding tiles are largely the same, except for the dragon tiles. In all sets other than American-style, the red and green dragon tiles are designated with Chinese characters, zhōng and fa, respectively. But in American-style sets, both have a small, intricate illustration of a dragon. When I started playing with Karen, I was charmed by these little illustrations in her American-style mahjong set. It wasn’t until I went to the mahjong meetups in the city that I saw the Chinese characters design. Something that should be familiar to me, but isn’t. My mom tried to teach me and my brother Mandarin when we were kids, but I didn’t see the value. It wasn’t until I became an adult that my reluctance would come back to haunt me.
“So, why did you choose this design?” Gabrielle asks, drawing the first green line into my skin. I hesitate, feeling the same script return to my mouth. Perhaps it’s the intimacy of tattooing, or the safe space created by the people around me, but something encourages me to break away from the dance, if just this one time.
“Um, so, my mom was Chinese, she was born in the year of the dragon, and her favorite color was green. But…she passed away when I was in high school, and she never actually taught me to play mahjong. That was my adoptive mom, Karen, who encouraged me to join a mahjong group in the city, which is how I ended up here. So, in a way, this tattoo represents both of my moms, and me as well.”
“Oh wow, I’m so sorry to hear that about your mom,” Gabrielle says softly, eyes dark with sympathy. “That’s a really beautiful story, though.”
“Thank you.” I smile, feeling something shift within me. My muscles, tensed in anticipation of performing their familiar dance moves, relax.
Forty minutes later, the tattoo is finished.
“Okay, go ahead and take a look in the mirror,” Gabrielle encourages me. Gingerly, I rotate my arm out, and there it is. A delicate green tile above the crook of my right elbow: small, dainty, yet powerful.
“I love it. It’s perfect,” I say. I’m beaming.
After the event is over, my arm still tingling, I step out onto the city street and button my jacket closed against the February chill. In four months, after a lengthy winter of long sleeves, the small green tile will surprise me when I look in the mirror after donning a t-shirt. It will take a little getting used to, since it’s the most visible of my three tattoos. When people see it, the green ink will trick them into thinking it’s temporary, and I will rub my fingers across it to prove its permanence. I’m thankful the tattoo is so visible, as this way, it’ll start a conversation. The tile is a clear symbol of who I am and my complicated history, the evolution of my lifelong dance into a new movement.
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Annalisa Sheldahl is a writer and graphic designer living in New York City. Originally from northern Virginia, she graduated from Rhode Island School of Design with a B.F.A. in Illustration and a minor in Literary Arts and Studies. In her spare time, she enjoys walking in Central Park and going to bookstores to find her name on gift products she’s designed.
© 2026, Annalisa Sheldahl
Halfway Down the Stairs 