Typical American

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Typical American Page 2

by Gish Jen


  From his doorway, the first grocer scowled at him.

  The problem sets got harder.

  His lamp turned out to have a short in it.

  His problem sets started to come back red.

  More red.

  Who had ever thought the rice barrel could become an engineer?

  New York lost its gleam. He drifted through its streets as if through an exhausted, dusty land, no detail of which had changed in a thousand years.

  Then he remembered a form he was supposed to have handed in (some form, he had always been bad at that sort of thing) and, stopping into the Foreign Student Affairs Office, discovered Cammy arguing once again with Mr. Fitt. What a bully that man was! His whole long belly overhung Cammy's desk; he had his arms spread and bent, his fingers on her blotter. Cammy was holding her hands over her ears.

  Ralph's heart rumbled like a Peking Opera drum; it was the crescendo before — crash of the cymbals! — a hero appeared.

  "Think of your parents," urged Old Chao. His shirt pocket stretched with its load of mechanical pencils. "Think of your father. If he hears what you're doing, it will kill him."

  Ralph mooned harder, with oedipal glee.

  Now he had had some experience pitching woo before. For instance, during the War, after the pipelines were blown up, he and his classmates had ferried water up to the girls' dorm, each leaving his bucket at the door of a particular resident. The particular residents had fluttered gratifyingly in response. But this was America he was in now, which meant who-knew-what. Research: as his classmates grappled on with Finite Element Analysis of Structures, Ralph began watching Americans and, his English having improved, even talking to Americans — who, he was surprised to discover, actually liked to sit back, and scratch their sandy chins, and tell him what they thought a young Chinaman should know. This was how he learned that the ceilings in the White House were ready to fall down, as well as other things. That he ought never put a bumper sticker on a new car. That when dames had dandruff, it was often just flakes from their hairspray.

  The last of these wisdoms came from an old man in the luncheonette.

  "Dames?" chewed Ralph.

  "Holy Jesus," said the man, going on to explain not only what a dame was, but other basics. What was wrong with politics (dames); what was wrong with the Yankees (dames); and what was wrong with America.

  "Dames?" said Ralph.

  "Dough," said the man. He gripped his sandwich so hard, its contents bulged. "That's all anyone understands in this country. Dough, dough, dough."

  "Dames too?"

  "Dames got it the worst. You know what dames understand?"

  "Dough."

  "Diamonds. Pearls. Big fat fur coats."

  "Presents?"

  "You got it." He nodded so emphatically, his sandwich laid a pickle chip. "Big fat presents."

  On the way home, Ralph bought a scarf. The next week it was a jar of cold cream. Presents paved roads in China too; this was a type of construction he knew. Pins, belts, booties. A hat, a pot holder, a can opener. She would understand; that was how he felt in the stores.

  In person, though, he was just so much ardor next door, a boy whispering his heart through a solid garden wall. "Oo-oo-ooo," Cammy crooned, upon being presented with a box. "Shay shay!" But then she never wore any of the pins or anything else. Sometimes he wondered if she returned all of his presents for cash, the way she had with a radio she'd been given at a school picnic. He tried making little pen marks here and there on things he gave her, as tracers, but then couldn't bring himself to check for them in the stores. Instead he stood in front of her empty desk in the evening, after everyone had gone home, and touched her things — her typewriter, her scissors, her pencil cup, her blotter — as if trying to coax them into yielding up what somewhere in their atoms they had to know. Did she love him?

  That year was the year of the big blizzard, twenty-eight inches. The sidewalks turned to tunnels; cars were lost for the season. It seemed the drifts would never melt.

  But magically, one day, they had; and there then were Ralph and Cammy, going out for coffee every so often. The atmosphere had indeed warmed. If Ralph had not yet won her, at least he'd won her confidence. Now, over doughnuts, she told him how she'd leave her job, except that she'd sworn to Mr. Fitt's boss that she'd stay.

  "The dean," she sighed. "He's put me down for another raise. I don't know." She batted her lashes as though bothered by something in the air. "Do you think that's wrong?"

  Reassurance. It was all she'd ever wanted, though they did

  talk too about houses and cars, and about how she'd always dreamed of going to Paris for her honeymoon.

  "Hmm," mulled Ralph. "That's far."

  Then one afternoon in the spring, they were out, by chance, at dusk. They went to the same luncheonette they always had, but this time its front glowed gold; and when they emerged a little later, it turned out that they'd been talking longer than they'd realized, so that it was — who would have thought it? — already night. The clamorous street had turned private, a blue path such as should rightly lead to a hidden knoll, and so on. They headed for the park by the river, hushing their voices. The tree leaves rustled obligingly.

  "Of course you will happy," he told her.

  "I'm not happy."

  "You know " He hesitated, but courage fought its way to

  him. "You know, you are like star in sky." He gestured awkwardly, hat in hand.

  "I'm not a star."

  "You are like bird," he went on.

  "Bird?"

  "Bird. You know ... in sky."

  She looked at him as though she'd never heard of a thing higher than ceilings.

  "You know," he said. "Up."

  "Those are cliches." She started to sniffle.

  "Cree?"

  "You're just like the other guys. You are." Now she was crying. "You think you're different, but you're exactly the same! A peapod! You are! No one listens! No one cares a-a-bout m-m-me-eee..."

  What had happened? He didn't even know.

  Still she was crying.

  "Cold?" he asked finally; and when she didn't answer, he stretched his free arm around her, gingerly. Was this how women cried, their whole bodies trembling? He folded her toward him

  carefully, half expecting her to object. She dropped her wet face to his shoulder. Her breasts against his chest were nothing like earthworks at all.

  America!

  Crushing his hat between his knees, he gently kissed the top of her sweet-smelling head.

  With morning, though, came day.

  "Second form from the right," said Cammy, her face closed. "By Tuesday." It was as if she'd filed herself away. "If you have a question, Mr. Fitt would be happy to answer you."

  He went back to buying her presents. Things would change, he thought, they had to. But they didn't; so that when Cammy left suddenly, in June, Ralph was stuck with a veritable stockpile to bury away in the darkness of his black trunk. Her last day, Cammy softened enough to tell him how Mr. Fitt had fired her in open defiance of the dean.

  "Our plans," she lamented.

  Plans?

  Honeymoon. Paris. Snails. The dean had a house and car, and had had a wife, until the papers finally came through. With

  nobody except Mr. Fitt suspecting anything What a hard

  time he had given her! Over what — a few long lunches.

  Ralph picked a pencil out of her pencil cup. He pressed it to her desktop. The lead broke off neady, leaving a kind of headless cone, a wooden volcano. He did another.

  Cammy went back to ignoring him. Until Mr. Fitt strode out of his office; and then, though she didn't actually say anything, she did give Ralph a crooked smile, which Ralph took to mean she might have cared for him. He ought to have bought her diamonds, he thought later. Not that he had the money to buy her diamonds, but still he thought it anyway. He ought to have bought her a fat fur coat. He ought to have bought her a car.

  "Forget her" said his friends. "If
you have to give her a car, she doesn't love you."

  This made a certain amount of sense, even to Ralph. Yet he moped and moped — not eating, not talking, indulging his misery as though it were a child. His was a low-key style, the sort certain people can sustain indefinitely.

  And so, no doubt, he would have, had not the Communists liberated Manchuria in the fall.

  *3

  was dropping— -whoosh — but still: the Communists would not, could not, cross the Yangzi River. That much remained clear.

  Until the spring, improbable as ever, brought among its pretty new fashions, the greatest shock yet.

  Come home! In the last letter Ralph was ever to receive from his parents, his father had written, Your mother asks that you please listen this one time. But Ralph could not obey. He wrote back, The U.S. won't let us leave; they're afraid we'll use our training to help the Communists. People are being taken off the boats in Hawaii...

  It was a letter many students were writing, in outrage. The Americans, with their law and order, with their traffic lights everywhere — how could the Americans of all people do this? Later the students would guess that the Nationalists had put them up to it. At the time, though, they did not guess, they railed. It was illegal, completely illegal! Not to say wrong. Ralph was as mad as anyone, if only because the anger drew him together; his doubts, on the other hand, dispersed him. Would he have gone back if he could have? He wished he knew that he would have risked his life for his family and country — that he loved them the right way. Instead, he only hoped. He hoped that the Communists would prove unable to hold the country. How could they, when the United States wouldn't so much as recognize them?

  He refused to be made an American citizen. He thumbed his nose at the relief act meant to help him, as though to claim his home was China was to make China indeed his home. And wasn't it still? Even if his place in it was fading like a picture hung too long in a barbershop — even if he didn't know where his family was anymore? Or was it exactly because he didn't know where his family was? For certainly he felt more attached to them for their having turned abstract — missing them more than he had liked them, the missing being simpler. Though not

  that simple, not when a family disappeared the way his had, vanishing as if into a crowd, or into a clutch of wilderness, or into some kidnapper's hidden cove. Suddenly no more letters. Who knew why, who knew what had happened? Their story was an open manhole he could do nothing to close.

  Yet he dreamed about saving them anyway — of a simple ending, the missing lid found. The filial son, smashing apart the rock mountain prison. The filial son, talking things out with Mao. (Sure, Mao said, he understood, after all he had parents too.) The filial son, offering his wife Cammy in sacrifice, whispering I'm sorry as men drew their muddy fingers down her skirt.

  Cammy, he dreamed. Still, after ail these months, Cammy.

  This, when he could sleep. Other times he thrashed all night, thinking nothing, his body cramping, dry, racked, beside itself. He banged his ankles on the bed frame, his elbows and wrists against the wall; until, at daybreak, battered and exhausted, he could finally reflect on the whole sobering state of things — appreciating as if from a book how colossal his China was, how fragile his family's house, their garden, their little systems for keeping food from spoiling, for presenting his sisters to company in die very best light. Memories filled him — New Years' feasts, fireworks, chestnuts. His two sisters, a pair of not-boys. Know-It-Ail kept an all-white kitten; he itched just to think about it. His too large mother, his even larger father. He remembered second aunt with her cactus collection, fifth uncle with his beard, eighth uncle with that opium addict, socialite wife. His grandfather with all those spots on his face. The cousins with their bugs — those bugs — and that funny wooden bridge over the neck of the pond, collapsing once under their collective weight. A single warning creak; then there they all were, waist deep in mud and carp, laughing, their shoes unglued.

  Of course, there were other sorts of times too. His first day of middle school, in front of everybody, he mixed up the strokes of his own name. Then he was coming home; then he was in

  *5

  the far back courtyard, with the servants, breaking a rooster's neck. He was lopping off its head with a cleaver — ruining the meat! the servants yelled. So much talk! The kitchen help chattering, chattering, chattering...

  But here was a thing to be happy about. Now the servants chattering have become a choir in a silent movie, a line of O mouths — or a school of fish, blub blub. And his father striding up — underwater, he has turned boneless, a ballet dancer. His black gown clings, his shoes have been ruined.

  Ralph, in New York, kicked one of his hard leather wing tips across the room.

  His downstairs neighbor knocked his immediate protest with a broom handle. High-strung, this neighbor was. When Ralph tossed and turned, he did too, he said. He wanted Ralph to buy a rug. A rug! Ralph sent his other wing tip to join the first, and toed one of his slippers besides, imagining his father being tortured. Not that he hoped his parents were tortured. He hoped they weren't so much as touched, he hoped nothing happened, nothing. He saw a hairy Communist swagger into his father's study, belch, spit on the floor, pick up a scroll... and already Ralph was outraged. Fingerprints! The scoundrel's left fingerprints!

  Ralph could also envision a different scene, though. The man swaggers in, belches, spits. Ralph's father goes on grinding his ink. Now the glint — a cleaver. Ralph's father quotes from the classics. The Communist is breaking Ralph's father's neck.

  But that wasn't what has happened, that couldn't be.

  This is what Ralph would have liked to think about instead: a chicken cooked and cooling. The servants stalking mosquitoes at twilight, crafty, pouncing on the window screens. As a result of their efforts, the screens bulge toward the courtyard. Ralph's father is always telling them not to hit so hard, all they need to do is press a bit. He demonstrates, elegant. Mosquitoes prove indeed delicate, easily overcome. Still the servants swat gustily. Thwack! Another down! It's as much power as they'll ever enjoy.

  Outside, the cicadas whirr. Summer. The paddy fields have turned a feathery yellow. The lotus pads lift themselves huge out of the lake, plates for the gods.

  What Ralph did think, though — that was many other things. And especially, strangely, this: he shouldn't have taken that watch from his mother when he boarded the boat in Shanghai.

  Your father would like to give ...

  Or did he steal it? He remembered that he didn't, but still wondered, somehow, just as he sometimes wondered if there weren't something inside it, if that ticking weren't some secret life she was passing him, some essential heartbeat, without which the rest of the family was wasting away, bloodless. He's stopped wearing the watch, thinking of them. They are ancient paper lanterns, translucent, unlit, strung across the courtyard, too fragile to move — though when he sees Ralph, his father, still a brave man, tries to speak.

  We are alive. His voice is faraway, a sound heard through a wall; yet the corners of his mouth crease and tear with effort. Pained, he blinks. His eyelids crackle like candy wrappers. We are dead.

  Ralph launched his slipper across the room.

  More knocking, knocking.

  Knocking. And the next thing Ralph knew, he was having visa trouble.

  "Forgot?" said his friends. "Forgot the immigration office? Forgot to renew your visa?" They shook their heads, mystified.

  How to explain it? Something about not wearing a watch, he ventured. And he hadn't been sleeping right.

  But the only one who accepted his answer was Little Lou, who was like that, an absorber. As for the spouters, if they had a chief, it was Old Chao. "You should go to bed the same time every night." He knit his smooth brow. "Get up the same time the next day."

  Sound advice for a formless time. Ralph, though, hung in his

  *7

  own time, in the many times he'd wanted more than anything to destroy his father's w
orld. What son doesn't? But he wasn't supposed to succeed, that was the thing.

  As mysteriously as he'd let his visa lapse, he found he could do nothing about it.

  "Better go see the foreign student advisor," said Old Chao. "Better bring Fitt some candy."

  As if a friend of Cammy's could risk going to Mr. Fitt with an expired visa! Rumor had it that Mr. Fitt had tipped someone off about Cammy's raises, and that as a result the dean had been forced to take a leave of absence. The chair of the Engineering Department was taking his place for now, some said. Others said he was taking it forever. Ralph imagined Mr. Fitt on the phone again. He imagined the deportation team arriving instantly, with snarling dogs, and ropes.

  Xiang banfa. An essential Chinese idea — he had to think of a way. In a world full of obstacles, a person needed to know how to go around. What banfa did he have, though? All he could think of was how many stories he knew about people smarter than he was. The advisor in Three Kingdoms, for instance, who, needing arrows, floated barges of hay down an enemy-held river. It's night; the enemy shoots and shoots; downstream at dawn, he plucks from the hay arrows to last weeks. Now there was a Chinese man! Another story: the emperor despairs of finding a horse able to run a thousand li. Until his advisor tells him, just wait — and the next day returns with a dead horse he's bought. A dead horse? says the emperor. For five hundred pieces of gold? Replies the advisor, Ah, but when people hear what you've paid for a dead horse, they'll know what you'll pay for a live one. And sure enough, the emperor soon has so many to choose from that he easily finds the one he needs.

  If only Ralph had an advisor like that! But he had to be his own advisor; and though he tried to think, tried to think, he could not find any banfa. Endlessly, the weeks stretched out,

 

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