My mom tells me about the maidens by the pier with purses full of hope and mandarin oranges. On Chinese Valentine’s Day, women toss oranges into the sea—a tradition rooted in legends that promise good husbands.

I sit across from my friends in a cozy, eclectic café. Discussing our romantic mishaps over churros is our own tradition.

Here, the maidens have pierced noses and carry flame-shaped phone apps in their purses instead of mandarins. To find love, they don’t throw oranges; they throw themselves, kicking and screaming into a sea of flings and boys who never text back.

Sometimes, I feel like I’m floating between two worlds. In my home country of Malaysia, I am too progressive, too Western—a strange hybrid fruit in a basket of arranged marriages and cousins who weren’t allowed to date until they were twenty-five.

When I went home for the summer, Mom leaned in, smelling the opposite sex on my skin. “You got boyfriend, ah?” she asked, pausing her Cantonese drama.

There’s a Mandarin proverb—guan guan, or “bare branches”—for singles who let the family name wither in their hands. If young people are branches, then elders are the trunk that holds everything together, telling each wooden limb which direction to grow.

Sometimes, straying isn’t an option, because fallen branches are dead wood on their own.

I don’t know how to tell my mom I might never get married, that these branches may never bear fruit. So, I don’t tell her about Trey, with the tattoos and ombré hair. Or Drake, with the septum piercing. I don’t tell her about Jack either—though she finds out when she catches me texting at the kitchen table.

“Is Jack your boyfriend?” she cries, eyes widening.

Jack isn’t my boyfriend. But that’s what my mother calls him—to her mah-jong friends and at the airport while waiting for my plane to depart.

She squeezes my ribs outside Gate 55. Even though there are things she’ll never understand, she’s trying.

I glance down at the sea from my airplane window. Suspended in the sky somewhere between Malaysia and my new home, I dream of a place where the sun is warm and the boys always call you back.

Here, I plant an orange tree. It has a sturdy trunk, and its branches don’t snap off in the wind. But the flowers that bloom in spring drift and dance away, flying wherever the breeze decides to take them.