by Ann Mah
“I’m a friend helping another friend,” he says firmly. “Now, come on. I’m going to keep kneeling on this dirty sidewalk until you agree.”
“Please, I really don’t want—”
“This is my best suit!” he says warningly.
I take a deep breath and reluctantly settle my weight on his shoulders, steadying myself as he stands. Oh God, why did I have to eat two lunches today of all days? But as we stand there, teetering like acrobats, I forget everything in the warmth of his hands as they hold my legs. I’m close enough to see the golden streaks in his hair, to smell his clean, fresh scent. A blush rises in my cheeks that I’m thankful he can’t see.
“You okay?” he calls, moving closer to the wall.
“I’m fine—oh!” I cling to the top of the wall and gaze out at a spacious garden planted with a wide lawn and shaded by a graceful gingko tree. There, near a nobbly root, must be the spot where my mother buried her pet rabbit, Little Blackie. There, in the back, is the gardener’s shed where my grandfather hid bars of gold bullion from the Japanese. Through long windows that flank the front door, I spy a curved staircase with wide banisters, perfect for little girls to slide down. I can almost picture my mother as a child, coming home from school dressed in a starched uniform, reading in the bay window, dancing around the garden with her sister. Inside, there would have been a polished dining room table where they watched their lavish meals dwindle to wartime rations of plain rice. Upstairs was their bedroom, where they trembled under the covers, fearful of the marching Japanese soldiers.
When my mother left this house as a young girl, did she know she would never live here again? Could she have imagined Shanghai’s changes, foreseen its countless guises of anguish from the Japanese occupation, to the Cultural Revolution’s worst atrocities? And when she returns now—as she and Aunt Marcy sometimes do—does she feel a leap of pride at the city’s frenzied expansion, in the Pudong’s gleaming high-rise buildings, in the moneyed sheen that coats the Bund? Or is there an ache in her heart for the years lost to the Cultural Revolution, the friends left behind and broken?
I could linger here for hours, the questions running through my mind, but when Charlie shifts his weight, I suddenly remember where I am. “It’s okay,” I say. “I can get down now.” He lowers me to the ground and I scramble off. “Thank you,” I tell him, and the sudden sting of tears in my eyes surprises me. “I am really grateful.” I blink quickly, but a few tears still fall down my cheek and I glance away, embarrassed by my emotions, by our sudden intimacy.
“It’s truly my pleasure,” he says gravely.
“Anyway,” I babble to fill the silence. “You’re so busy, I’m sure you have a million things to do right now, so don’t worry about me, I’ll just—” Suddenly he is close to me again, so close that I feel the rough brush of his wool suit against my wrist, see the stubble darkening his chin.
“Isabelle,” he says, “there’s no place I’d rather be than here with you.” He leans forward slowly.
The shrill ring of a cell phone make us both jump.
“Jesus! Is that me?” I throw open my handbag and dig inside, wishing I could hide my flaming cheeks in its dark, leather interior. There’s the phone, blinking and throbbing. I press End call and turn back to Charlie.
“Don’t you want to answer it?” he asks.
“It’s not important,” I say as casually as I can. “Now—” I put my hand on his arm, just as the phone rings again. Arrggh! Who the hell is calling me? I yank out the phone and glare at the screen. Ed. “Actually,” I admit, “I think I better take this call.”
He nods and reaches into his suit jacket to pull out his own cell. “I should check in with the consulate too,” he murmurs as Ed’s booming voice fills my ear.
“Isabelle! What the fuck are you doing? I’ve been getting calls from PR people all bloody afternoon. Nonstop. You missed Crystal at the Shangri-la, April at the St. Regis, Kelly at the Four Seasons…you better have a fan-fucking-tastic excuse!”
“Oh, hi!” I throw a covert glance at Charlie, who has his cell clamped between shoulder and ear. “Yes, everything is going just fine. Thanks for checking in.”
“Where the fuck have you been?”
“Oh, you know how it is.” I laugh weakly. “I just got a little caught up, er, checking out shops in the French Concession.”
“Caught up! I’ll show you caught up! You better not be off gallivanting around with some slick Shanghai pretty boy, or I’ll—”
“What? Don’t be ridiculous. You know I don’t know anyone in Shanghai. I’m totally alone.” I glance around nervously and jump when I see Charlie is off the phone.
“Don’t think I won’t come down there to straighten things out,” Ed says warningly. “Now get the fuck back to work.” He ends the call.
My hands tremble slightly as I shove the phone into my pocket. “Everything okay?” asks Charlie.
“Um, yes. Fine.” I force a smile to my face. “Anyway…I’m sure you need to get back to the consulate, and I—”
“Would you like to have dinner with me tonight?” Charlie asks abruptly. “There’s this gorgeous restaurant, Yongfoo Elite. It’s in an old villa that used to be the British Consulate. You’d love it—it’s like stepping back in time to 1930s Shanghai.”
I hesitate, but the image of Ed’s face, wrathful and red, looms in my mind. “I’d really love to, but I can’t,” I say regretfully. “My schedule is absolutely insane. I’ve already missed three appointments and I have to visit at least four bars and three restaurants before midnight and then there are all the nightclubs—” I snap my mouth shut, aware that I sound like a raving, self-important lunatic.
Charlie shoots me a puzzled glance. “How about a drink?”
I want to rip up Ed’s schedule and throw the pieces in the Huangpu River. I want to entwine my arm through Charlie’s and spend the rest of the late afternoon strolling the Bund. I want to take a taxi to the Grand Hyatt hotel, ride the elevator up eighty-seven floors to Cloud 9, sip champagne, and watch the lights twinkle. Instead, I shake my head. “I really can’t.”
I’m not sure how to interpret his silence as we walk back toward Huaihai Lu. But as I hail a cab and crawl into the backseat, I can’t help but feel as if I’ve lost something. Charlie pauses with his hand on the car door. “You know, Iz—” His brow furrows with concern. “I couldn’t help but hear some of your phone conversation back there, and I just want you to know that if you ever need to talk to someone, I’m here.”
“Oh! Don’t worry about me.” I laugh. “The boss is crazy, all right, but I can handle him.”
His eyes widen slightly. “The boss? Is that what you call him?”
“Oh, I know it’s kind of archaic, but he really likes it. Soothes his enormous ego, you know.”
“But you shouldn’t feel like you have to lie to him. And no one should scream at you like that. Especially not your boyfriend.” A look of distress crosses his face. “You can tell me to mind my own business, Iz, but I really hope you know that people care about you. You’re not alone.” He reaches in to squeeze my shoulder before closing the taxi door with a quiet thump.
The words don’t sink in until the driver’s careened halfway down the block. Wait a second—boyfriend? He thinks that I was talking to…Oh no, he doesn’t know that Jeff and I have…I roll down the window and stick my head out. “Charlie!” I shout. “Charlie!” Oh, thank God, he’s turning around. “That wasn’t Jeff on the phone! It was Ed!” I clear my throat. “Jeff and I—we were never together!” Can he hear me over the buzz of traffic? I strain my eyes to see his face, but he merely gives a jaunty wave before my view of him is cut off by a bus. He didn’t hear me.
Great. It’s not enough that the one person I might be attracted to is the American-freaking-ambassador to China. No, now he thinks I’m unavailable, held hostage in some sort of psychologically abusive, codependent relationship. I slump in the backseat of the taxi as it carries me to the first of the
evening’s three dinners.
My plane leaves at noon, but I have one last stop to make, one final appointment on the Ed Itinerary. Outside and in, Jia Jia Tang Bao resembles a McDonald’s, with its fluorescent lights and plastic tables and chairs. I squint at the characters on the posted menu and haltingly place my order with the cashier, a gray-haired woman with eyes that grow curious when she hears my Chinese.
“Yi long xiaolongbao!” she repeats in a soft hissing lisp that I strain to comprehend. She examines my face. “Where are you from? Aren’t you Chinese?”
I repress a sigh. “I’m Chinese with an American passport.” And then I add, “But my mother—she’s from Shanghai.”
“You were born in America, but you came back to Shanghai?”
I nod and watch her smile expand until it fills her whole face.
A sign above the register reads: first order, then wrap, then steam, then eat. I peer through a smudged window into the kitchen to watch a trio of women knead and roll dough, their fingers a blur as each lump flattens into a paper-thin dumpling wrapper. A fourth woman, clearly the dumpling-wrapping expert, stuffs each circle with a dab of raw pork filling and deftly pleats it into a plump little cushion.
I take a seat, grab a pair of wooden chopsticks from the bucket on my scuffed table, and wait. And wait. And wait. With each bamboo basket wrapped and steamed to order, the crowd of hungry diners grows. They sit around me sharing communal tables, slurping bowls of clear soup (should I get a bowl of soup?) floating with squares of congealed blood (er, maybe not). Their voices rise around me, not the rough growl of Beijing, but a soft, lyrical lilt that I find incomprehensible. It’s Shanghainese, the city’s own dialect. Sometimes my mother speaks it with Aunt Marcy, each slipping into the comfort of their mother tongue, but she never taught it to me, dismissing it as impractical. It must be nice for her to return, to embrace her first language as a living thing.
A waiter plops a damp basket of dumplings on my table and hurries away. Steam clouds my face as I reach for a dumpling, careful not to break the delicate wrapper. The first scorching slurp reveals a secret pocket of soup trapped inside. A second bite and I taste flecks of ginger in the ground pork filling, chew the tender wrapper.
After five meals a day in Shanghai, I can’t believe I’m still hungry. And, oh God, how many zillions of calories are there in a basket of pork dumplings? But they are irresistible, exquisite and so cheap, only six kuai, less than one dollar for twelve. When I get back to Beijing I’ll go on a crash diet. I’ll eat only brown rice and seaweed for an entire month. I’ll get up at five every morning and go running. I pop another dumpling into my mouth, relishing the burst of liquid. How do they get the soup inside? How?
The line forming outside the door indicates that this is not a place to linger, but I wait for a moment before eating the last dumpling. An older woman, her dark hair streaked with gray, sits down to share my table. We exchange a nod and a glance before she opens her newspaper and settles down to wait for her food. Her eyes slide over me so casually that I know she thinks I am a local, just another office girl out for an early lunch.
Which, in a way, I suppose I am.
Back in Beijing, the multipitted construction sites and blocky buildings are like a slap in the face. Up in our apartment, I watch a yellow crane swing across a sky that’s gray with early evening smog. The raw steel beams of the high-rise shell across the street have sprouted, though I’ve only been gone four days. A crowd of construction workers streams out into the street, their hard hats a flash of yellow against the piles of rubble. They’re on their way to the cafeteria, ready to hungrily gulp down a simple dinner of rice and unidentifiable meat and veg slopped from a gaping vat. They’ll go to sleep on thin mattresses in a dorm crowded with other migrant workers, wake up, and do it all over again. And again, and again, day after day until the building boom ceases and the need for their labor ends. What then?
A sound as quiet as a mouse’s snuffle breaks into my thoughts. I whip away from the window in time to see my sister disappearing back into her room with a swish of her hair. “Hi there,” I call out. No answer. That’s odd. And what’s she doing home at five in the evening? Little Miss Ambitious is usually glued to her office chair at this hour.
I pad down the hall and knock softly on her door. “Claire?”
She’s sitting at the desk in her room, long fingers tapping at her laptop, a pair of rimless glasses perched low on her nose. “Oh, hi, Iz.” She glances up with a harried air that says, I’m working.
“I’m just back from Shanghai,” I remind her.
She glances at a stack of papers on her desk and keeps typing. “Did you have a nice time?”
“Great,” I reply, and wait for her to ask me about it.
“Mm-hmm.” She peers closely at her computer screen.
“How are you?” I say finally.
“Busy.”
Well, someone is Crabby Crab von Crabmeister today. I start to tiptoe from the room, hesitate and say, “I’m going to order some food in a little bit. Do you want anything?”
She looks up, a gleam of interest in her eye. “Where are you ordering from? Do you have a menu? Can we order now? I’m starving.” She fires questions at me like I’m a witness on the stand.
“Uh, Xiao Wang Fu. There’s a menu in the kitchen drawer. And, sure, we can order now, I guess.” And I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, I add to myself.
“That’s okay, I’ll take care of it.” She throws me a suspicious glance, like she’s afraid I’m going to forget to ask for no MSG, or that I’ll mispronounce “easy on the grease” so that we get an oil slick in our broccoli and garlic sauce. Like I’d make that mistake again.
I’ve just finished checking my e-mail (Ed, Ed, Ed, and more Ed, and nothing from anyone else, not Geraldine, not Julia, and definitely not Charlie. Sigh) when our buzzer sounds. At the door I find a delivery boy staggering under the weight of half a dozen plastic bags. “Apartment 2012?”
“How much do I owe you?” I pull my wallet from my purse.
“Yi gong shi…” He consults a long receipt. “…420 kuai.”
It’s over fifty dollars. “Are you joking?” I start to laugh, but he shakes his head.
“Is the food here?” Claire steps into the front hall.
“I think there’s been some sort of mistake,” I tell her. “Unless we’re having a party and you forgot to tell me.”
“Let me see.” She pokes around a few of the bags. “Nope, this looks right.” She hands over a wad of cash and shuts the door. “I’ll get some plates,” she calls to me as I heft everything to the kitchen table and start unpacking the moist, steamy bags.
I pull out container after container of food that is either fried, drowning in sauce, or swimming in oil. Fried pork dumplings, pork fried rice, shredded pork with green peppers, braised pork ribs…Claire has gone whole hog, literally. “Didn’t you order any steamed broccoli?” I ask. “What about plain rice?”
She shrugs. “Thought I’d branch out a little today.” I stare at the kitchen table, its entire surface covered in food. “I’m ravenous. Let’s eat,” she says, picking up her chopsticks. Soon, piles of food tower on her plate, kung pao chicken spills off an overflowing mound of fried rice, a heap of mapo doufu seeps its chili-flecked sauce into a neighboring mass of fried noodles. She shoves half a spring roll in her mouth while pouring vinegar over a row of pork dumplings.
“Claire…” I venture. “Is everything…okay?” I’ve only seen her eat like this once before—when she and Tom divorced. She dragged me to her local diner and proceeded to eat her way through the entire menu, from milk shakes to meat loaf, all in one three-hour orgy.
She delicately picks up a green bean from the plate of gan bian siji dou. “Why do you ask?” she says blandly.
“No reason.” I lower my eyes. “It’s just when you were going through your divorce…”
She pauses from popping another green bean into
her mouth, chopsticks in midair. Her cheeks have gone dead white and I notice with shock that her hand is shaking. Damn it. I should have known better than to bring up her divorce.
“I’m sorry…I didn’t mean to upset you. But if something is wrong, if you need someone to talk to…” I hear the echo of Charlie in my words, and put my hand on her arm to steady myself. “After all, I’m your sister. Not to mention your roommate,” I joke weakly.
In one swift movement she shakes my hand from her arm, scrapes her chair back, and runs from the room. Seconds later I hear the bathroom door slam, and then the muffled sounds of Claire being spectacularly sick.
I follow her to the bathroom and knock gently on the door. “Claire?” I turn the knob, and when the door swings open I see my sister kneeling by the toilet. Our eyes meet in the mirror. “Are you okay?” I ask.
“No.” Her voice is small.
“Do you want to go the emergency room?”
She takes a shaky breath. “I’m pregnant.” Her eyes fill with tears and then she is sobbing, her thin shoulders heaving.
I kneel down and put my arm around her, feeling each shuddering breath. I try to pull her to her feet, to get her to sit down on the sofa, drink a cup of tea, or at least a swig of Pepto-Bismol. For the first time in my life I need to comfort my sister, and I have no idea what to say.
PART III
The West
Xinjiang
“…The vast deserts of Sinkiang, Chinese Central Asia…[are] inhabited mostly by people of Turkic stock, primarily the Uighurs…Food in these areas is not related to Chinese at all, except for recent superficial borrowings…The staple is wheat bread…cooked in large, flat, boat-shaped or oblong loaves that puff up on baking. Grilled meats, especially small shish kebabs, are traditional accompaniments. Vegetables except for onions and garlic are few, but this is made up for by the incomparable fruit; apricots, grapes, and melons…”
—E. N. ANDERSON, THE FOOD OF CHINA