by Gish Jen
Shade. She rested, her head spinning. So!
Then: What had she done? What — She tensed.
Nothing. Was it her imagination? Still she felt it, a presence behind her. A gaze, cool as the round marble inlay of a chair back. She tried to say something, but her voice dried in her throat.
He should say something.
But still he gazed, only gazed. Waiting.
What now? A bird shrieked. She saw it fly out from nowhere, its wings flashing black, then white.
She turned.
The report came back that due to an unspecified family crisis, the banker's son would be unable to marry for some years. In
fact, Theresa found out, well before their date in the park, he had run off with his father's concubine. So what shame was there? What loss of face? It was his family who had been disgraced.
Still she grew vacant. The path; the brush; the rocks; the gate; and beyond the gate, sun-white, a small deserted clearing. Her spine twisted; in her dreams she twisted, turning toward that clearing again, again. A perverse tropism.
Her parents consulted, debated.
Finally she was sent to Shanghai, to some close friends with an invalid daughter; Theresa was to keep that daughter company for a few months. She was not allowed to bring her cat. When her sister got married, Theresa heard about it in a long, poetic letter, beautifully written. Then the Communists. Her parents' friends wrote, urgently. With tremendous good fortune and not a few connections they'd found a way to send their daughter abroad, on a student visa. What to do with Theresa?
The mail foundered with the government; they received no answer.
Hong Kong, Tokyo, San Francisco. Theresa picked the English name Helen for her delicate friend. Like Helen of Troy, she explained: also it sounded like Hailan, her real name, Sea Blue. They frolicked in a melancholy way, half giddy with freedom and travel, half fearful and lonely and worried, and irritated too, having gotten along in China, but as the simplest of friends. It was strange, learning to make decisions together. Years later, they laughed to see the girls, Mona and Callie, in a three-legged race. That's the way they were, they said, bound together with some old rope — their overlapping history, their parents' relationship. Things in common, that made it easier to talk to each other than to strangers, but hardly meant that when they did they would agree. And they didn't agree, though after a few near-arguments, each did her part never to let that show; so that they grew at once closer and lonelier, like colors that, when knit
together, gleam all the more distinct. Every day brought compromise so basic neither one would talk about it, as though such prideless friendship belonged to a realm past conversation. "You guys are so formal with each other," Callie told Helen once. This was when she was in high school, trying to learn to be up front.
Helen handed her a dish. "So many family members, I already lost them all," she answered.
No elaboration. It was just before sunset, a time of day when the sun stared blithely across the kitchen, instead of studying the floor. Callie drew the curtains with a soapy hand, but even so the light washed everything out.
"It's not funny," said Theresa. Mona stopped.
"Was in the Chinese newspaper." Helen shook her head. "Really sad."
"Sometimes I think maybe he come to look for me, but cannot find me." Ralph's voice was sodden. "Nice person, Little Lou. Good heart."
"Sad," said Callie.
"Oh, so sad" Mona sighed heavily.
Theresa glared, but went on. "Anyway, so finally I call one place, and someone says yes, there's a Chinese man here named Ralph. She thinks she saw him go out for a walk."
"So happen," Ralph explained, "time I move there, I so tired, I forgot to ask them if someone call, please not to say anything."
"We were just lucky like that," said Theresa.
"Just lucky?" asked Mona, with an innocent look.
Theresa glared at her again, but before she could say anything, Ralph had already taken his cue.
"Not lucky, miracle!" he said.
And, of course, next came the black coat — and then, Older Sister!
First there was Theresa's ankle to take care of. Ralph tried to hail a cab, which he'd never done before. He put a tentative arm up; instantly one pulled over, in a rolling wave of black slush. Magic! Ralph marvelled at his own command. The driver leaned his head back. "Hospital?" said Ralph; and even before all the syllables were out of his mouth, the car lurched ahead, so responsive that Ralph was thrown against the seat. He straightened himself dazedly. At the hospital, Theresa was whisked into a perfectly white room; he was ushered in after her. She emerged on crutches, looking like a veteran.
Though it was after hours in Theresa's building — a women's residence — under the circumstances, Ralph was allowed in. He waved his thanks to the lady at the desk. Clatt! — the elevator doors. Clatt! They opened again, like the shutter of a slide projector; and in front of Ralph shone private splendor. Flocked
wallpaper, moss green with gold, in a pattern of sinewy trellises; a matching moss-green carpet; and on the walls, electric torches. Flame-shaped bulbs spiralled up from gold-tone leaves. Ralph entered the hall reverently. Theresa stopped in front of door 9D. "Push that," she instructed, and he did, with such a respectful press that he had to ring again, with more punch, to produce the noise that would make the door open. Still nothing. No matter — Theresa handed him her pocketbook. She had keys. But just as he fathomed the bag's knot-shaped clasp, the apartment door swung suddenly, wondrously, wide. Ralph stared, handbag agape. He'd readied himself for a comb, a mirror, a change purse, maybe some paper clips. Here instead stood a woman.
And around her, China. Ralph took in the scrolls, the shoes by the door, the calendar, the lidded cups of tea, as if they were part of her person, an extension of her clothes; he found them so familiar — found her so familiar — that even a half second later he could hardly have said what he'd recognized. Then she spoke (a soft, breathy sound) and he realized he didn't know her after all. That's why they were being introduced. Belatedly he began to register some specifics. Delicate feet. Sturdy calves. Slight figure overall. A contained way of moving; she seemed instinctively careful not to take up too much space. Shoulder-length black, curly hair (a permanent). A heart-shaped face that, with its large forehead, and small mouth, and slightly receding chin, seemed to tilt forward. She had large eyes, but mosdy, it seemed, for his beat-up shoes. Shy, Ralph concluded hopefully. The considering type. Not a talker.
But Helen was not a listener either, so much as something else. Attentive. She sensed when a guest needed more tea before the guest did, expressed herself by filling his cup, thought in terms of matching, balancing, connecting, completing. In terms, that is, of family, which wasn't so much an idea for her, as an aesthetic. Pairs, she loved, sets, and circles. Shoes, for instance (he was right), and cartons of eggs — and, as it happened, can openers that rolled easily around a lid, never sticking. Not too
much later, a clean Ralph, with all-new clothes, left a deluxe model on the kitchen counter, with a red bow.
Helen opened every can in the cupboard.
Theresa reported this back to Ralph.
Then it was belts, circle pins. Ransacking his trunk, Ralph found a tam-o'-shanter; socks; booties; a pen-and-pencil set; a hairbrush, hand mirror, and comb. All of these Helen used, displayed, wore, not once in a while, but every day, blushing. He spoke her dialect, that's to say; and she, certainly, his. Oxtail soup, she made him, steamed fish with scallions. Now that there were no servants, Helen was learning to cook. Would he taste-test for her?
He would, although, paradoxically, it inflamed more than abated his homesickness to try a mouthful of a dish and pronounce, after some prodding, that it was too salty, too sweet, too spicy-hot. Her cooking was so agonizingly close to that of his family's old cook that his stomach fairly ached with the resemblance, even as his mouth thrilled. More ginger, he coached. Less vinegar. More soy sauce.
One day, she
had her crystal chicken just right, and her red-cooked carp too. Ralph proposed with a family ring Theresa had brought over, a single piece of spinach-green jade set in white gold. Not that he couldn't have afforded a new ring by then. From their friends at English language school, Theresa and Helen had discovered that most companies didn't care what papers their draftsmen came with; and just like that, Ralph had a job in an airy room, with his own tilted drawing board. Other people complained. The long hours, those hard wooden stools. If only the stools had backs, they said, then after hunching and hunching, they'd be able to rest a bit. And what were their prospects? Already they were beginning to discern what would be abundandy clear in another decade — that at the end of every project, they would all get laid off, and have to find new work at another firm, where, just as they were beginning to rise in the ranks, they'd be laid off again.
Ralph didn't mind, though. He was grateful enough to have
a place to go in the morning (with a doughnut shop on the way, no less), and every week, a paycheck.
Then came the possibility of Ralph's finishing his Ph.D. after all. This was serendipity itself; with the fall of the Nationalists, other Chinese students had become as illegitimate as he. "No status" — that was how they stood with the Immigration Department, suddenly naked as winter trees. What now? They waited. Rumor had it that, having kept the technical students here, the Americans were going to have to do something with them — probably send them all back to school. Sign-up sessions. Ralph went along with everyone else. No, he wasn't a Communist. Yes, his status was "no status." As for how he got that way, "English not so good, excuse please?"
"Say again, please?"
"Whaaa?"
The volunteer let it go.
So much to celebrate!
To save money, Helen rented a Western-style, white gown with a matching veil. The ceremony was in the side chapel of a college church; the reception in a small, carnation-wreathed social hall. Pipes clanked. Tables wobbled. Outside, it sleeted. Yet Ralph and Helen, in the simple way of newlyweds, were delighted with the food, with the decorations, with the guests, with each other; even, later, with the pictures, though in truth the majority were out of focus and overexposed. The photographer was a drunkard. But who wanted to say so? Helen hung the pictures up anyway. A shot of her and Ralph. A shot of each of them with Theresa. She even hung the shot of all three of them together, which looked like nothing so much as a triple-headed ghost. "The Mystery of the Trinity," Theresa would joke later. Yet at the time she admired it as politely as everyone else. It was a good likeness, she agreed, a fine family portrait.
true. The one gnarl of her childhood was the knowledge that, if she did not die of one of her diseases, she would eventually have to marry and go live with in-laws. And then she'd probably wish she had died. How faint she felt, just listening to the stories other girls told — about a neighbor's daughter, for example, who walked all the way home from Hangzhou, only to be sent back. That was extreme, of course, but how about her friend's cousin who, married away into the countryside, was made to take baths in a big copper vat? Over a pit fire, as though she were a pork joint, in water that had already been used by her father-in-law, her husband, her husband's seven brothers, and her mother-in-law. Don't worry, Helen's parents reassured her, we'll find you someone nice, someone you like too. No one's going to beat you. But at best, Helen knew, she would be sent to scratch out some new, poor spot for herself, at the edge of a strange world, separated from everyone she loved as though by a violent, black ocean.
Now, America. For the first few months, she could hardly sit without thinking how she might be wearing out her irreplaceable clothes. How careful she had to be! Theresa could traipse all over, searching out that elusive brother of hers; Helen walked as little and as lightly as she could, sparing her shoes, that they might last until the Nationalists saved the country and she could go home again. She studied the way she walked too, lightly — why should she struggle with English? She wrote her parents during class, every day hoping for an answer that never came. She went to Chinatown three times a week, thinking of it as one more foreign quarter of Shanghai, like the British concession, or the French. She learned to cook, so that she'd have Chinese food to eat. When she could not have Chinese food, she did not eat. Theresa (who would eat anything, even cheese and salad) of course thought her silly. "In Shanghai you ate foreign food," Theresa said (da cai, she called it — big vegetables). "Why shouldn't you eat it here?" Still, for a long time, Helen would not, which they both thought would make her sick.
She was not at home enough, though, even to fall ill.
This could not go on forever. Eventually, faith faltering, Helen studied harder, walked more, bought new clothes, wrote her parents less. She did continue to spend whole afternoons simply sitting still, staring, as though hoping to be visited by ghosts, or by a truly wasting disease; but she also developed a liking for American magazines, American newspapers. American radio — she kept her Philco in the corner of the living room nearest the bedroom, so she could listen nonstop. She sang along: "The corn is as high as an el-e-phant's eyyye..." She did not insist on folding all her clothes, but used the closet too. She began to say "red, white, and blue" instead of "blue, white, and red" and to distinguish "interest" from "interested" from "interesting." She caught a few colds. And she married Ralph, officially accepting what seemed already true — that she had indeed crossed a violent, black ocean; and that it was time to make herself as at home in her exile as she could.
"I guess," said Ralph, uncertainly.
Helen sighed. At home, room had always been made for her in the conversation; people paused before going on, and looked at her. Here, she had to launch herself into the talking, for instance during a lull, as now.
"You know that saying about a wife's ankle?" she put in softly.
"What?" said Ralph.
"Don't interrupt," said Theresa. "She's talking."
"I can't hear her"
"That saying," Helen said louder. "Do you know that saying, about a wife's ankle? Being tied to her husband's?"
"Of course," encouraged Theresa. "With a long red string. From the time she's born."
"Well, I think maybe my ankle was tied to my husband's and sister-in-law's both."
"Ah no! To both? To my ankle too?" Theresa protested, laughing. Then, in English, "Are you trying to pull my leg?"
Tliey all laughed. "Good joke!" cried Ralph.
"Good one!" Helen agreed.
Weren't they happy, though? At least until it was time for them to move to a run-down walk-up north of 125th Street, whose air smelled of mildew and dog. It was the kind of place where the poorest of students lived, where the differences in housekeeping between the halls and the rooms were as dramatic as the occupants could manage. An economy. Ralph and Helen and Theresa had agreed on it. Yet they were belatedly shocked. So many Negroes! Years later, they would shake their heads and call themselves prejudiced, but at the time they were profoundly disconcerted. And what kind of an apartment was this? This apartment sagged. Theresa poked a finger in a soft spot of plaster, occasioning a moist avalanche. "We're not the kind of people who live like this," she said.
But their super, it seemed, thought they were. That Pete! He expected them to stand endlessly in his doorway, his half German shepherd jumping up on them as he rambled on about the boiler. As for their situation — Was it an "urgency"? he'd ask. Only,
yes or no, to not be coming — not to see about their plumbing problems, not to see about their ceiling problems, not to see about the crack in the back bedroom wall that seemed quite definitely to be widening.
"Leaks," said Ralph, batting the dog away. "Paint come down. Big crack." Politely at first. Then, with more vigor, "You do nothing! This building falling down!" The result was that Pete once said he'd "swing by sometime," once explained that his boss, the owner, had some months ago done a bit of work on the roof.
"So?"
"Well now, I don't know that ever
'thing a body says has got to have a point" he said.
Fan tong, Ralph called him — rice barrel. Helen and Theresa laughed. And here was the most irritating thing: fly open, feet up on his legless desk, dog at the door, he'd often be thumbing through course catalogs, exchanging one for another, sometimes working through two at once. Should he be a lawyer? A doctor? An engineer? As if he could be an engineer! As if he could get a Ph.D.!
A man, Pete said, was what he made up his mind to be.
"That man is fooling himself!" Ralph shook his head.
Helen, meanwhile, hired a plumber, scraped the loose paint so it wouldn't hang, walked Ralph's file cabinet into the back bedroom to hide the crack. Could this place ever be a home? Next to the file cabinet she put a tall bookcase, and straddling them, a small, wide one that only just cleared the ceiling.
"Smart y " admired Ralph.
"I saw it in a magazine," she told him. "This is called wall unit."
"Wall-unit," repeated Ralph. And later he observed that it was exactly in solutions like hers that a person could see how well they Changs were going to do in their new life.
"Not like that Pete," he said. "He's fooling himself"
Entertainment: Ralph took to imitating Pete's walk. He'd slump, a finger cleaning his ear, only to have Theresa gamely
cry out, "No, no like this," and add a shuffle, turning out her knees as Helen laughed. They studied the way Pete blew his nose, that they might get it right; they studied his sneeze, his laugh, the self-important way he flipped through his calendar. "Well, now, let me have some look-see," growled Theresa. "Typical Pete!" Ralph roared in approval. "Typical, typical Pete!" Ralph even mimicked Boyboy, Pete's mutt — strutting around, barking showily, calling himself "Ralph-Ralph." He paced back and forth, guarding the door with wide swishes of a brush tail; he jumped up on Helen and Theresa as they tried to dodge by with grocery bags. And pretty soon, no one knew quite how, "typical Pete" turned "typical American" turned typical American this, typical American that. "Typical American no-good," Ralph would say; Theresa, "typical American don't-know-how-to-get-along"; and Helen, wistfully, "typical American just-want-to-be-the-center-of-things." They were sure, of course, that they wouldn't "become wild" here in America, where there was "no one to control them." Yet they were more sure still as they shook their heads over a clerk who short-changed them ("typical American no-morals!"). Over a neighbor who snapped his key in his door lock ("typical American use-brute-force!"). Or what about that other neighbor's kid, who claimed the opposite of a Democrat to be a pelican? ("Peckin?" said Ralph. "A kind of bird," explained Theresa; then he laughed too. "Typical American just-dumb!") They discovered stories everywhere. A boy who stole his father's only pair of pants. A mother who kept her daughter on a leash. An animal trainer who, in a fit of anger, bit his wife's ear off.