Fish Heads and Duck Skin

by Lindsey Salatka

  Chinese women cruise town in the most confounding get-ups, all to look void of color. Here are a few of the anti-tan devices I see daily:

  1) Pants. This place is like a steam room on the sun four months a year. Yet I haven’t set eyes on one pair of Chinese legs.

  2) Arm condoms. This is the best way to describe these things. Chinese women wear short sleeved shirts, but when they go outside, they pull up bands of fabric with elastic at the top to hold them in place. They cover their entire arms and drape over their fingers at the bottom. Like a strapless dress for your arms. And that looks better than a tan.

  3) Visors. Actually, ‘visor’ doesn’t provide an adequate visual. Remember in Flashdance when Jennifer Beals wore that protective gear for her face because she worked as a welder at a steel mill? That’s what I mean by visor. Chinese people wear them around town. They would rather wear welding gear than get a speck of vitamin D. In my mind, Flashdance was the first and last time welding gear looked remotely cool or sexy.

  4) Parasols. I see more umbrellas in Shanghai on a sunny day than a rainy day. A lot more.

  “I’m hot, Mom. Why can’t we carry an umbrella like everyone else?” Piper asked me the other day. She’s a fellow olive and already gets that it’s not cool to be the tan kid in these parts. Poor thing doesn’t want to be almost pretty.

  “Because it’s not raining and we don’t live in Victorian England, that’s why. And here’s the other reason—you know that white stuff I smear all over your face and body in the morning before we step outside? That’s your built-in parasol, buddy. So, lucky you, both of your hands are free to play! Now go run around on the cement! You can even try to climb that skinny tree over there when the guy with the whistle isn’t looking.”

  Your friend,

  The Ugly (I mean Tan) Duckling

  37.

  “Slow down!” I screeched at Wendy’s back as she deftly maneuvered potholes with her son, Charlie, strapped into her rear bike basket. I rode Lila in the front child seat, bouncing clumsily over the potholes Wendy seemed to be missing. I was steadily losing ground. Daniel rode Piper and trailed way behind us next to Wendy’s husband, Tim, who had one hand on the handlebars, one hand pointing out architectural features on the street.

  “I can’t slow down!” Wendy squealed, stopping her bike briefly to explain. “I’m just so excited for brunch. I can’t believe it took us this long to find a time that worked for everyone—I haven’t had pancakes with syrup for six months. Do you know what they serve on pancakes at Malone’s? Honey! Bleck. This should be a crime. Plus, the pancakes themselves are like rubber—I think they use rice flour or something. This brunch is going to be nothing like a normal day attempting to eat decent Western food in Shanghai.”

  “How do they know how to make Western food at hotel brunches but nowhere else in town?”

  “Because the hotels hire foreigners to run their kitchens so tourists feel comfortable.”

  “Oh, then why don’t you go to brunch more often?”

  “Because it’s outrageously expensive! And besides, I don’t like to get drunk at breakfast more than a couple times a year—once a quarter at most. It makes Mondays too painful.”

  “Drunk at breakfast?”

  “Unlimited Veuve Cliquot, Tina. Plus, a kids’ club! Did you not read up on this? How long can you use, ‘I’m new,’ as an excuse anyway?” She smirked. “We will not be riding our bikes home, my darling.”

  “I’m not sure I—”

  “They’ll have to drag me outta there,” Wendy muttered, pedaling faster.

  “We’re in the Ellen party, table for eight,” I explained to the tuxedoed host. I wiped the sweat from above one eyebrow with my pinky.

  “Rye dis way.” He bowed and grabbed an armful of menus, leading us past the orchestra assembling in a clearing under a giant pink chandelier.

  “Wow,” Daniel said.

  “There you are!” Ellen jumped up to hug me and Wendy. Ellen’s husband, Jerry, was slight, with no. 2—razored red hair. He was a solid six inches shorter than Ellen if she weren’t wearing heels, which she was—three-inchers. Wendy’s husband, Ted, on the other hand, was also Asian and the exact same tallish height as Wendy, with the same cute set of dimples, and an almost identical haircut. I remember wondering if she’d married her twin and then dismissing that thought because eew.

  Ellen’s husband, Jerry, had never met Wendy’s husband, Tim. “My name is Jerry. Do you speak English?” he asked slowly as he reached out to shake his hand.

  “I’m Ted. I’m from Cleveland,” he sighed as Ellen elbowed Jerry.

  “I’m hitting the buffet before they run out of crab,” Wendy stood and bee-lined to the seafood station.

  The women eventually migrated to one side of the table, the men to the other. Champagne flowed and plates stacked.

  “I’m having a hard time losing the baby weight,” Ellen said, before slurping a crepe like a spaghetti noodle.

  “Yesterday Tim complained about the entire meal category labeled ‘brunch’,” Wendy said. “He says these opulent meals are how restaurants repurpose leftover food from earlier in the week, all of which is mostly on the edge of rotten. To which I say, ‘Bring me your tired, your poor, your huddled blintzes!’” She tossed back a deviled egg.

  “The plate spinners are setting up, you guys, and the Sichuan masked dancers are queued up next. And all of this is happening right next to the chocolate fountain!” Wendy said as she walked up, balancing a full plate on each forearm and one in each hand.

  All I heard was chocolate fountain.

  It was glorious, like a dream inside of a dream. The food. The entertainment. The company. Even the restroom was immaculate and had toilet seats, toilet paper, sinks, even soap.

  On my way out of the bathroom, I took a right before heading back to the table. I thought I should check on the kids; it had been awhile.

  I hung a left into the large room at the end of the hall and almost walked into a cage. At least two dozen cages had appeared since we had dropped off the kids. They filled the center of the room. A white lab in a crate in front of me lifted his head to look at me, then set it back on his paws. Some kind of fluffy terrier in the adjacent cage barked and wagged his tail furiously. A large black-and-white cat in an enclosure against the right wall licked his paws and actively ignored me.

  I looked around and spotted Piper and Lila—they were sitting together on a round pillow propped against the back wall, each hugging an orange-striped kitten.

  A woman walked toward me with a clipboard. “I’m their mom.” I pointed to the girls. “What’s happening here?” I asked her.

  “Didn’t you know? It’s Animal Adoption day,” she said. “Every month, Animal Adoption Day falls on Expat Brunch Day. We target newer expat families to adopt the abandoned pets of those expats who recently moved home. Brunch is the optimal intersection of two lines that might otherwise never cross.”

  I looked at the girls holding the kittens, and my eyes welled up. I swayed a little bit, but I think that was from the champagne. Then I smiled. Because right then I knew, our family in China would finally feel complete.

  38.

  In any Alfred Hitchcock film, there comes a moment right before a central character meets his or her demise via birds, Grandma impersonator, or other sinister being, when (s)he sets free a blood curdling scream. When you hear that shriek, you know the character is done for. It’s not the sound of a survivor. It’s not the holler of someone playing a prank, or the shout you hear on a roller coaster or in a haunted house. It’s a notch or ten above those sounds. This immediate death scream is what Katie the tutor let fly when she next clicked her leopard print pencil heels into my apartment and laid her eyes on our new kittens. Kittens. Who were asleep in a cardboard box in my kitchen, not poised to leap up and rip her face off.

  “Wǒde mā ya!” Katie wailed after her mighty death roar, and then covered her head with her forearms and sobbed.

  This level
of response to baby animals seemed unwarranted. It would have astounded me more had Ayi not reacted in much the same way the day before, upon her first sighting of the cats. After her end-of-life screech, she had proceeded to whimper loudly while standing on a dining room chair—treed by two tiny balls of fur. It took several cups of tea—in my bedroom with the door pulled closed—to get her to stop hyperventilating.

  It was 10 a.m. when Katie arrived for our lesson, but it already felt like a long, rainbow-less day, as though the a.m. and p.m. had been switched somehow.

  By 10 a.m. I had already almost lost my life to a truck driven by a man who couldn’t see over his steering wheel while riding my bike in the gutter after dropping Piper and Lila at school. Then, when I got home, I’d caught the breaking news in the six-minute English segment on CCTV: a popular local baby formula had been tested and found to contain melamine, an industrial plastic, which was apparently a cheaper way to appear higher in protein. Six babies had already died from kidney stones. I hadn’t bought the local formula for Lila, but what about Ayi? Sometimes she went to the store for me when I wasn’t up for it. I’d asked her to only buy the imported formula, but had she understood me? Two days before, Ellen had told her ayi how much hair to have trimmed off her daughter’s head. “Only this much,” she’d said holding her fingers a half inch apart. Her ayi thought she meant that was how much hair should be left on her head. Now Rachel looked like Michael Jackson in 1969. And I didn’t know if Lila had been slurping plastic.

  This was my excuse for why annoyance showed up instead of empathy in response to Katie’s kitten panic. “Seriously? Come on, they’re tiny, infant cats!” I whined and smacked my hand against my forehead.

  I closed my eyes so they wouldn’t roll and waited; I heard nothing but whimpers. I exhaled loudly and pushed my chair back. “How about some tea?” I said.

  “No.” she sniffed, uncurling her arms. “Do you have any Bailey’s?”

  “Bailey’s, as in Irish Cream?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think so. I can get you a beer? Or chardonnay?”

  “No, no thank you. I only drink Bailey’s.” She inhaled dramatically and then smiled stiffly, her lips pulling tightly over her teeth. “Shall we start?”

  I shrugged and sat down.

  She took several deep breaths and then pulled a slim stack of stapled papers from her briefcase and slid them toward me. “Mandarin has four tones,” she said. “It is very important that you listen for them, Tina, because otherwise two words with very different meanings will sound the same to you.”

  She gave me a few examples.

  “So depending on how I say the word ma, I am either saying mother, or horse?” I clarified.

  “Or cart or question word. Yes, that’s right,” she said.

  “That seems more confusing than it needs to be. Why wouldn’t you use the context of the sentence to understand a word’s meaning if, say, for some reason, you weren’t sure of the tone?” I asked.

  “In English you use context, in Mandarin we use tones,” she said.

  “I understand that as a culture, you don’t admit to using context, but isn’t it inevitable? I mean, how do you not use context when you hear an entire sentence?”

  “Mandarin doesn’t work that way. You must learn the tones.”

  “But I don’t hear the tones.”

  “You don’t hear them yet.”

  “No, I’m saying my ears don’t hear them; they don’t function that way. They aren’t dog ears; they don’t pick up distant sirens either.”

  The kittens mewed softly in the kitchen. Katie stiffened.

  “You know they won’t hurt you, right? I mean even if they wanted to hurt you, which they don’t, they couldn’t.”

  “Cats are not pets in China,” she said.

  “That I gathered, using context.” I chuckled.

  Her eyes flashed at me, then at her watch.

  “Can I just bring them out here? To show you how weak and defenseless they are?”

  Right then Lila toddled out, rubbing her eyes. “Mama?” she called.

  I walked over and scooped her up. “It’s your lucky day, Katie. You get to meet Lila instead.” Lila nuzzled her head into my neck. They hadn’t met on Katie’s first visit. “Katie, this is Lila, Lila, meet Katie.”

  Katie’s eyes bugged out of her head. “What did you say her name is?”

  “Uh, Lila?”

  “Ayi!” Katie called in alarm. Ayi hustled in. Katie spoke to her firmly in Shanghainese. Ayi took Lila from my arms and walked down the hall making chicken noises while Lila giggled.

  When Ayi was out of earshot Katie stood up and said, “Lila? You can’t call her Lila! You must give her a nickname if she will live in China!”

  I laughed. “Lila means ‘come here,’ right? I hear the ayis saying ‘Lila’ to the children at school all the time.”

  “No, it—”

  “Don’t get me wrong.” I raised my palm. “‘Come here’ is definitely a strange name for a child in China, but we won’t live here forever, so for now, it’s okay if people think I’m asking my daughter to come here.”

  “Lila doesn’t just mean come here, Tina. When you say it like you would say a name, it sounds like what we say on the first day of our menstruation.”

  I paused. “‘Lila’ means I just got my period?”

  “Yes, that’s what women from Shanghai say to each other.” She sat down and clasped her hands together on the dining room table and then studied them.

  I closed my eyes and put my face in my hands. “Wow. What an amazingly bad name,” I said.

  “Well,” she said looking up and smiling brightly, “The good news is that if you use different tones, it won’t mean that at all. If you say Li LA instead of LI la, it will sound much better. Call her Li LA.”

  “Katie, I just told you, I can’t hear tones. I can barely tell the difference in what you just said.”

  “You must listen more, Tina. Now you have a reason to try.”

  39.

  Dear Jennifer,

  THE MOST AMAZING THING HAPPENED TODAY!

  When I woke up this morning, something felt different. As I rode Piper to school, the feeling remained, but I couldn’t pinpoint the origin.

  I was almost all the way home when it hit me. I stopped, mid-gutter, and dialed Daniel.

  “Doesn’t it feel different, TODAY!” I sang to him in my best Ethel Merman voice.

  “What? I don’t know what you’re—”

  “Just STOP whatever you’re doing and listen for a minute.”

  He said nothing.

  “Do you hear it?” I whispered.

  “Hear what? What should I hear?” he whispered back with only the tiniest hint of sarcasm.

  “The incessant, maniacal horn-honking that never stops?” I screeched. “Do you hear it? Because I don’t!” I bubbled in glee.

  Jennifer, what you must understand is that since arriving in Shanghai, the traffic noise, especially the horn-honking, has been like breathing—so constant that you only notice when it changes. Like white noise but more awful. We could hear the horns everywhere—inside our apartment, at Daniel’s office, in every restaurant, at the bank, at the massage parlor. Around the clock too, as in late late late and early early early. As I said, I hardly noticed it anymore, but still, there must be an underlying level of agitation when there is never a moment without a horn blasting.

  But as I sat on the phone with Daniel, I felt almost serene. And until today, serene is a word I have never once used to describe myself. Especially not in Shanghai!

  Daniel paused. “Holy shit! Cinderella!” he yelled to his assistant (Chinese people choose the darndest English names.), “Why are the horns not honking?” I heard a long, muffled reply.

  “He said they made horn honking illegal starting today. From now on, if you honk, there’s a 200 kuai fine.”

  “The whole city stopped honking today for twenty-five bucks?” I shrieked.

>   “Apparently.”

  “Can we declare this day a national holiday?” I cried.

  He laughed. “Big change on a dime. That’s China for you.”

  And then I danced right there, in the gutter, with the bike frame between my legs. I danced a love dance, with my arms over my head in honor of this crazy place. And no one honked at me! Because they couldn’t!

  40.

  “You are a white crane,” Mr. Han proclaimed with conviction. He held one arm up, one arm down, his lower hand close to the handle of his cane. In the six weeks that had passed, someone had lit the city furnace. Yet, somehow, Mr. Han wasn’t sweating.

  “I’m a white crane,” I repeated, sans conviction, feeling sweat roll into my socks. “Or maybe I’m a flamenco dancer in Southern Spain in August? I could be either, depending on my outfit.”

  He ignored me. “You are not rooted.”

  “That’s because I’m a bird, not a plant.”

  “The white crane is always rooted, very strong, very balanced.”

  I dropped my arms. “Can I ask a question? It’s not about the white crane.”

  “Why always questions? Never mind, it’s your nature.” He sighed. “After your question, will you focus on your roots?”

  “I will,” I lied.

  “Hǎo de,” he said.

  “I know my Mandarin is still terrible.”

  “There is some space for improvement.” He nodded.

  “But, even at my novice level, I can tell that my comprehension has improved. I can finally understand what people are saying, both to me and to each other, unless they’re speaking in a different dialect, but now I can tell when they’re speaking in a different dialect. Mandarin doesn’t sound like a jumble of angry sounds anymore.”

  “This is wonderful, Ting Ting! This is a huge step in your language acquisition.”

  “The problem is, now that I understand what they’re saying, I don’t like what I’m hearing. It seems like the only thing they talk about is money. How much did this cost? That’s too expensive; I only paid this much. Over and over, all day long. Plus, any greeting or good wish I hear is related to acquiring wealth, for themselves, their friends, or whoever. I don’t understand it. What about talking about current events? Or the weather? What about wishing for health, joy, or peace? In the US, when we send holiday cards to our friends every year, even on the cards we send to our customers, we would never write, ‘May this year bring you a bucketful of cash,’ because a wish like that would be crass; it would indicate that we’d lost track of what’s important. I mean, even if we want success and wealth for ourselves and our family and friends, we would never wish for it over health or happiness, not out loud anyway.”