Useful Phrases for Immigrants

by May-lee Chai

  Thinking about my own pathetic behavior helps me to get a grip.

  So I will myself to stop crying and I’m sitting on the toilet, realizing there is no paper, not to wipe my ass or blow my nose, when I hear the front door swing open.

  Click clack. Someone’s heels on the floor. Then thud thud. Someone kicking off her shoes. It has to be the girlfriend returning. I pull up my pants and look for a place to hide, but there is only me and the toilet. There is not enough room to squeeze behind the commode. I hold my breath as I hear the girlfriend padding across the apartment. She lets out a little squeal like a mouse in a trap as she finds Luce in bed. There is a creak of springs. She’s apparently launched herself onto the bed.

  “Hui lai le!” Luce exclaims theatrically, loud enough to wake the dead. You’re back! She obviously is hoping I’ll hear. I guess there’s open and then there’s not-this-open.

  And I find myself thinking of all that I could do in this moment to royally screw Luce’s life.

  Revenge fantasy #1:

  I could march dramatically into their bedroom and shout, “You lied to me! Shuo huang! Shuo huang!” I’d been crying so much, I might even be able to conjure up new tears.

  Revenge fantasy #2:

  I could march dramatically into their bedroom and shout, “What the fuck? Ni gan ma?”

  Revenge Fantasy #3:

  I could slam the bathroom door, scaring everyone, and stomp dramatically to the front door and slam that, too, leaving Luce to explain the mystery to her girlfriend.

  Revenge Fantasy ∞:

  I could imagine a million dramatic scenarios all to prove that I was not the patsy or a pushover. On and on and on. Each one more ridiculous than the last.

  PERHAPS IF I had a therapist, I might discover my desire to be a historian is tied to some deep misunderstanding of my own past, some traumatic need to revisit what is long gone, to dredge it back into the present for examination, for endless flagellation of those actors long dead, second-guessing their motivations, trying to explain and make right decisions that are long past.

  Perhaps what I really need is to embrace the Buddhism of my grandparents and to live in the present. To breathe in, breathe out, live in the moment. (Actually, I have no idea if this is the Buddhism of my ancestors or simply the lite version that has filtered down to my generation through Allen Ginsberg and the Beats and the Counterculture, but never mind. That is a debate for another time.)

  For example, if I am honest, I must admit that Luce’s apartment is not, in fact, all that nice. It was only nice in my mind because Luce made it seem cool and trendy and desirable to live in an old renovated hutong instead of a new building.

  In fact my hotel is far more comfortable, and when I leave Beijing in a couple days, I’ll be staying on the campus of Nanjing University, this time in the so-called foreign experts’ dormitories, which are modern and well-appointed. I scoffed at such luxuries when I was an undergrad, it had seemed inauthentic, but really, I am tired of roughing it while doing research. It will be nice to have a shower with hot water and air conditioning and a kitchen of my own with electric appliances.

  I know deep down that Jeremy’s death was an accident.

  Blaming myself is like blaming my mother. A way to keep the pain alive, to relive it, and in some way keep Jeremy alive, never moving on.

  In the present, I think about my options, revenge and otherwise. I think of all the awkward things that would have to be said. I think of the potential for anger and blame. I think of the people I have hurt in my own life.

  I realize I do not need to see what Luce’s new girlfriend looks like. I already know. Someone who glows brighter in Luce’s gaze than she ever has on her own.

  I find I can accept this.

  I SLIP out of the bathroom, tiptoeing down the hall, crouching my way past the bedroom door as though that will make me less visible.

  My shoes are still by the front door, but behind Luce’s backpack, where she’d dropped it in a moment of passion. I find my purse under the coat rack.

  Then I slip out the door.

  I’m not trying to make trouble for Luce and the new girlfriend.

  THERE IS a break in the smog today, and the sunshine is bright enough to make me squint.

  Fashionable young couples stroll by arm in arm. A taxi beeps its way through pedestrians trying to cross the street. A billboard advertising shampoo flashes a Russian model’s face. I can see the golden arches just ahead, a KFC at the corner, a Starbucks, a Pizza Hut. A shop window is plastered with posters for Motorola. A colorful umbrella over a pushcart advertises Coca-Cola.

  In the shade of some plane trees, an old man has set up a makeshift fruit stand with piles of orange persimmons spread across a striped tarpaulin. I can imagine a time when there will no longer be old men selling persimmons on the street, when such old-fashioned treats will be a memory, and everyone will buy fruit waxed and displayed in identical mounds in an air-conditioned store.

  I buy a jin of persimmons from the old man. He measures them on an old-style hand weight, putting the fruit in a metal tray on a pulley attached by wire to a metal bar with the weights marked on it. I hand him my crumpled bills, and he grabs a sheet of newspaper from the pile at his feet, rolls it into a cone and dumps my persimmons inside.

  Walking down the sidewalk, I pluck out a largish persimmon, pull at the skin and bite inside. The pulp and juice explode over my tongue, the sweetness coating every inch of my mouth, erasing that cloying blue icing taste, as well as the salt of Luce’s flesh and the briny flavor leftover from my snot and tears. I hunch over the persimmon melting in my hands, devouring its flesh until there’s nothing left but the skin, which I toss in the gutter and then start on another. I slip off the skin, and eat and eat, suck and chew and swallow, and bite again, again, again, savoring each drop of flesh, as though I’ll never be sated, as though I can make this moment last forever.

  SHOUTING MEANS I LOVE YOU

  HURRY UP.” MY father knocked on the bathroom door. “We don’t want to keep the General waiting.”

  “There’s plenty of time.” I glanced at my watch. “More than three hours.”

  “All that traffic! We can’t be late!” he shouted into the crack of the door. “Ye-ye told me, ‘Never forget what General Shih has done for the family.’”

  “I’m going to the bathroom! Go away!” I said. I was temporarily a teenager again, and my father was his old prickly self. We’d once shouted at each other for more than three and a half hours straight. My mother had cried, my brother had cried, and still we’d continued shouting.

  Now he was eighty and a widower, and it had been a long time since the fights of my adolescence. In recent years, my father had grown anxious. Everything scared him. The ongoing wars, the economy, the competition for schools. “I was lucky. I had it easy,” he’d said on the drive to San Francisco from the airport, the man who survived the Sino-Japanese War as a child. “What about the kids?” He meant my brother’s children. “I’m too old, I won’t live to see it, I’m going to die soon, but global warming, what will happen?”

  My stomach had knotted. Was it a plea for attention? Did he want me to reassure him that he was not old, he would live, he was not dying soon? Did he want me to deny climate change? I didn’t know how to console him.

  Now as I hurried to change my clothes in the bathroom and fix my make-up, I could hear my father fussing in my bedroom, opening the closet, rummaging for something. I wanted to ask him what he was looking for, but I also wanted to avoid an argument. I bit my tongue and rummaged in my make-up case for my eyeliner.

  But once we were on the highway, driving to the General’s house in the South Bay, my father was in high spirits.

  “Ye-ye told me General Shih is the most important person in our lives. You must never forget him. He saved our family. He got us the passports. Not everyone was allowed to have passports in those days in Taiwan. But he got them for us and we could come to America.”

  �
�I thought you were already in America by the time everyone else needed the passports. You came first. To Ohio.”

  “What?” my father said. “What are you mumbling about?”

  My father was mostly deaf, but he wouldn’t get a hearing aid. I took him to an audiologist, 70 percent loss in both ears, but he refused. A hearing aid was the end, in his mind. He remembered Ye-ye’s hearing aid in the 1970s. The coiled plastic cord that ran from the box hanging outside his ear to the battery in his shirt pocket, like he had a phone permanently attached to his ear. First Ye-ye got the hearing aid, then Nai-nai died, then overnight Ye-ye was old, then he was dead. That was how my father remembered it.

  Perhaps it was a good sign that he didn’t want the hearing aid. It was his final act of defiance against the encroachment of age. He’d had the heart surgery, the stent, the radiation for his prostrate. He gave up red meat, eggs, his beloved rou sung, because the desiccated pork was all cholesterol and salt and MSG. He’d gotten his cataracts removed one after the other, wearing first a left eye patch then a right. He resisted the cane for a long time, but then he fell last winter walking to the mailbox and had to crawl the length of his driveway to get back inside his house. That scared him. So he had two canes now, an indoor one and an outdoor one. He checked the rubber tips assiduously for wear.

  “When’s the last time you saw him?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “WHEN’S THE LAST TIME YOU SAW THE GENERAL?” I repeated.

  “I don’t know. Years ago. When did we come here?”

  “You came in 1952. Ye-ye, Nai-nai, Uncle Truman, and Uncle Dwight came in fifty-five.”

  “I think I saw him that time in Hawaii. When was that? Ye-ye was still alive.”

  “Maybe 1980?”

  “I don’t know. A long time ago.”

  My father fell silent, then dozed off. He had stayed up late last night preparing his gifts, wrapping them carefully, each gift in its respective bag. Then he’d seen my Barneys New York bag, the sleek black paper with the elegant white lettering and the thick straps, the one I’d gotten with my splurge purchase last sales season. I’d hid it in my closet before he came, but my father had found it somehow. He had a sixth sense for bags.

  Now it held the mochi and the General’s book (each in their separate paper bags within).

  As we emerged from the Bay Bridge into the intense sunshine onto the I-880 exchange, my Honda’s tires thumped over potholes or speed grading or god knows what else wrong with the infrastructure today. I thought the vibrations would wake my father, but he only shifted a little, his sleep undisturbed.

  He fell asleep easily during the day, basically whenever he was seated, in front of the television blaring the cable news, in the armchair with his copy of World Journal still open and clenched in both his hands.

  At night he couldn’t sleep at all. Had to take pills. First it was Ambien until the grandkids discovered him sleepwalking, wandering the house with his eyes wide open. He had no idea who they were, and it had scared them. Now it was lorazepam.

  But last night they hadn’t worked. He’d woken me in the middle of the night.

  “I can’t sleep,” he said.

  “You’re excited about tomorrow,” I said from under my sleeping bag. My apartment was too small for a guest bed or a sofa or any of those suburban amenities. When my father visited, I gave him the bed and slept on the floor.

  Then he turned on the overhead light and rooted through his luggage. He turned on the kitchen light and opened some drawers.

  “What are you looking for?” I sat up on the floor.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t get addicted,” he said. “I cut the pills in half.”

  But now in the car I worried that he’d taken too much. He was snoring, his chin in his chest. I remembered how my mother used to exclaim about his ability to sleep head forward. She needed to sleep head back. I hadn’t thought about these differences in a long time.

  As we approached the exit to Milpitas, Siri ordered, “Turn Right! Turn Right!” and my father awoke, shaking his head.

  “Are we late?”

  “A little,” I admitted.

  The General’s home was on a circular drive, small houses with green lawns and lovely trellises of pink bougainvillea.

  “These are million-dollar homes now,” my father sighed. “After teaching for fifty years, I still can’t afford to live here.”

  There was a time shortly after the turn of the new millennium I used to dream there’d be a second dot-com bust and I’d be able to afford a bigger apartment. No more.

  “You wouldn’t be able to get a house like yours here,” I said, trying to console him. In Ohio, he had 3500 square feet, a finished basement, a yard with trees. My parents had bought the house after I’d left for college. I’d never lived in their “dream house.” Now my father complained about the winters, the snow, the hot summers, the tornadoes, the cost of repairing the roof.

  “My house is too old,” he said. “The plumber says I need a new water heater. That’s ten thousand dollars. And the shingles need repairing. The gutters are one big mess. One more winter like last winter and I’m finished.”

  “Okay, here we are.” I eased past the recycling and trash bins on the curb and pulled into the narrow driveway.

  “Yep, this is the life,” my father said, gazing at the tiny, manicured lawn, the blooming rose bush before the front steps. “Too bad your apartment is too small. I can’t even move in with you.”

  He left his cane in the front seat.

  “Don’t you want that?”

  “Leave it!” he hissed. “Where’s the bag?”

  I popped the trunk and pulled out my lovely Barneys bag.

  My father snatched it from my hands. “Let’s go. We’re late.”

  I grabbed him under the elbow and helped him walk up the drive. “Are you sure you don’t want your cane?”

  “I’m going to be sitting,” he said with dignity.

  At the base of the steep brick steps, he handed me the Barneys bag and gripped the metal banister tightly then pulled himself up one step at a time. I hovered in case he fell back. At the top, he held out his hand, and I gave him back the Barneys bag. He nodded like royalty acknowledging a page.

  “Ring the doorbell,” he said.

  I tried the bell by the door, but I didn’t hear it ring. I could hear a television blaring inside, it sounded like a football game.

  I tried the bell again.

  “Maybe you’d better knock.”

  I knocked. I could still hear the football game.

  I pulled out my phone and looked up the number. I could hear the phone ringing inside the house. Finally someone picked up. “Wei?” said a woman’s voice. I handed the phone to my father.

  “We’re here!” he shouted in Mandarin. “We’re here!”

  “Where are you?”

  “Outside your house! Open the door!”

  “Where are you? Who is this?”

  I was afraid she might hang up, so I tried knocking on the front door.

  I could hear shuffling inside. Then the door opened. A very tall, very elderly man peered at us through the screen. He was dressed exactly like my father: khaki chinos held up by a brown leather belt, sweater vest, cotton oxford collar shirt, and golf cap. “General Shih!” my father proclaimed.

  “Professor!” The General beamed.

  The General ushered us inside. His living room was small but tastefully decorated with scrolls of calligraphy on the walls, doilies with hand tatting on the sagging sofa and over-stuffed armchairs, various cloisonné vases, and a giant flat-screen TV blaring on the far wall. It looked almost exactly like my father’s living room in Ohio.

  My father presented his gifts, opening the bag with the book in it for the General.

  “This is exactly the book I’ve been wanting to read,” the General said.

  Then he handed the bag of mochi to the General’s wife who grabbed it and took it into the kitchen.


  “Please sit,” said the General. “Would you like some tea?”

  The General hurried after his wife then returned carrying a metal try with two delicate looking teacups on saucers.

  “You can walk pretty good!” my father said.

  “My wife is the sick one,” the General said. “She just got out of the hospital.”

  “He put me there,” the wife said.

  “Careful, they are hot,” the General said, placing a teacup on the end table near my father’s elbow.

  “You’re too kind,” my father said. “My father told me, ‘Never forget the General. He is the most important person in our lives. He saved our family.’”

  “No, no, no,” the General said.

  “My father told me if not for you, the rest of the family would not have been able to come to America. You really helped them. You helped a lot of people.”

  “Your father was my teacher. He was a very good teacher.”

  My father and the General traded compliments like this back and forth, back and forth, and then the General’s wife announced, “It’s going to be too late to eat!”

  “I’ve made a reservation,” said the General. And for the first time, his eyes gleamed. He turned to me and said in slow, careful English, “Do you like Chinese food?”

  “Yes,” I said, wondering, did I look like someone who didn’t?

  “You’re very lucky,” my father said. “All these good restaurants! Where I live, we can’t get good Chinese food.”

  “I know the best restaurant,” he said, leaning forward almost conspiratorially. “As good as Hong Kong!”

  “It’s late!” his wife announced.

  “Are you going to invite your son? Invite your son! We can all go in my daughter’s car. She can drive us.”

  “My son,” the General said. “He’s probably working.”

  “Go ahead and call him.”

  The General bounded up the steps to his kitchen two at a time.

  My father called after him, “You can walk pretty good! At my age, I can barely walk at all.”