by Aimee Liu
“I know what it’s like to be his daughter. He’s not a stranger to me.”
The tears started to rise again. She squeezed her eyes shut and stepped into the entryway to hide them. I heard the clasp of her purse snap open. She blew her nose. Her back straightened and she spoke over her shoulder.
“The current issue of Interiors is devoted to small apartments. I’ll send it to you.”
She was gone.
The next day I asked my father down. I called and made it official because I knew he’d never drop by on his own. Beyond that, I’d been bluffing. My father was as much a stranger to me as to anyone. But when I’d said those words to my mother, something seemed to flip inside me, and I decided he couldn’t stay that way.
“Mum wanted me to give you this,” were his first words on arrival. The festive magazine cover illuminated the dim hallway, but it seemed to weigh on him. He was breathing hard from the climb up the stairs.
I took the Interiors and his umbrella. “Come on in. Sit down.”
He lit a cigarette, but did not sit. He stood before my orange crate shelves and picked up one object after another, turning them between his square-tipped fingers, measured their quality with the care of an Italian matron testing plum tomatoes. I could almost hear his thoughts turning as well, methodical and focused sternly on the assortment of plastic and metal and Velcro components each item represented. Stainless-steel stovetop burner covers: Came up with this three years ago, tossed it in the trash. Automatic hands-free cheese grater: Looks good, won’t work. “Instant” wine opener: Cheap copy of the one I sold to Hammacher Schlemmer ten years ago. He lifted a sheet of peel-and-stick safety reflectors, shook his head, and put it down. How could I have missed this one?
But the compact toolbox with slots for “101 household necessaries” held his interest. He’s been working toward the world’s most user-friendly toolbox for as long as I can remember, and though this one clearly didn’t have him beat, it contained possibilities for theft. “Borrowing,” he prefers to call it.
Once, when I was about eight, I went uptown with my father on one of his supply expeditions—shopping for discounted wire, metal, batteries, sheet plastic at warehouses and jobbers—and we passed a bookstore with a hardcover edition of Mary Norton’s The Borrowers in its window. I made him stop, dragged him inside, and told him about the story’s thumb-sized characters who live under floorboards and “borrow” for their own innovative uses all the odd bits of food, pen caps, matchboxes, paper clips, earrings, and handkerchiefs that humans assume they’ve misplaced.
“It’s my favorite,” I pleaded. He lifted the volume, weighed it in his palm just as he was now doing with that collapsible cutting board stand. As he checked the price I held my breath, wanting that book more than any candy, any toy, any trip.
“Too expensive.”
I cried as he set the book back on its shelf. I begged as he turned to the sale rack. I vowed I would never even open the paperback Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm he decisively handed to the cashier. And I never did.
But I read The Borrowers—all five books in the series. After I reported my father’s unfairness my mother bought the paperback versions, and presented them to me on unlikely holidays such as St. Patrick’s Day or May Day or Halloween.
The Borrowers were scavengers. They spent their lives in hiding. And whenever anyone—even a friend—got a fix on where they were living or how, they tended to duck and run. Now, as I watched my father scavenging for ideas others wouldn’t realize he’d taken, I wondered if his refusing me that book had to do with more than money. Maybe he knew the same terror as that miniature tribe of outlaws. Maybe he, too, was afraid of being found out.
I was stalling.
Dad finished his inventory. I told him he could borrow anything he thought he might use, Pensacola was in no hurry for my returns.
“What’s this?” He plucked an advance copy of Noble’s fall catalog off the floor. “Cover credit!”
“Mm.”
“You’re not pleased?”
“Sure, I guess.” I sat beside him on the couch. Now that he was here I couldn’t think where to begin.
He hunched forward abruptly and broke into a cough. His smoker’s hack. Like exploding rocks. He’d had it for years.
I clapped him on the back. “Hey, that’s a good one, Dad.”
He wiped his mouth with the leathered back of his hand and shook the catalog as if it were a volume of poetry, a political manifesto, the Great American Novel.
“You should be proud of yourself,” he croaked.
“It’s a picture of plastic pumpkins. Cardboard witches on a picnic table with a bunch of candied apples. Big deal.”
His eyes roamed the corner where I store my lights and strobe, bolts of colored backdrop paper, a stack of reflectors, and an open trunk of props—scarves, soaps, costume jewels, fake fruit, flowers, and vegetables. He took a deep, shaky breath.
“I’m proud of you, Maibelle.”
I didn’t say anything, so he awkwardly grabbed me around the shoulders and squeezed. I closed my eyes.
After a long minute he released me, moved to the window, and lit a cigarette. When he started to tap the ash into his palm, I handed him a glass plate to use instead. The smoke curled out over the fire escape and dissolved in liquid air.
“What happened to you in China, Dad?”
He frowned.
“I don’t mean at the end,” I said quickly. “But when you were little.”
It was too general. I expected him to say he didn’t remember and let it go. But he shook his head and ground his stub into the plate.
“Why do you think something happened?”
“Because you always say you don’t remember. There’s a huge hole in your life that you never talk about. Something must have happened to make you clam up like that.”
He slid a thumbnail between his teeth. “I’m getting old, you know. That was a long time ago. I think Anna’s right, what’s the point?”
“The point is to remember and talk about it.”
“And pass it on?” He made that clucking sound with his throat and turned his back to me.
“I can sort of guess. Living in Chinatown, things happened that made me feel like an outcast.”
“Chinatown was nothing.”
The annoyance in his voice warned me not to try that again. But it also promised answers, if I just asked the right questions.
I squatted in front of the prop trunk, rearranging the contents until I could close the lid. “Your sisters. What were their names? Annabel and Clara Mae?”
“You know they were. You and Anna were named for them.”
I stared at him. “I thought Mum named me. It’s French.”
“It was her idea, but they were my sisters’ names.”
I’d never even seen a picture of my aunts, and yet I bore their names. That seemed to make them a part of me, or vice versa. A fact of my life almost since I was born, yet no one had ever bothered to tell me. It was a minor thing, but it gave me a sense of what an amnesia victim must experience on being told he has a name he doesn’t recognize, that total strangers are his dear friends and family. A sense of existing on two planes at once, with no connection between them.
“What were your sisters like?”
“Maibelle, why go into all this?”
“Why not? I have a right to know about them, Dad. They were my family, too!”
His eyes changed almost imperceptibly, like a widening lens. For all his sagging flesh and gray hair, he resembled a boy who’s just discovered an intruder in his favorite hiding place.
He sat on the couch and leaned forward kneading his hands. “Beautiful.” He spoke to the floor. “They were fair like my mother, though of course they had dark hair and eyes.”
He lit another cigarette and blew the smoke away from me.
“Was she beautiful, too?”
“Who?”
“Your mother.”
“Very.”
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“What did the Chinese think of her?”
“Surely you can imagine.”
“I can imagine all sorts of things. Tell me.”
But he didn’t. I put some water on for coffee. The water boiled before he spoke.
“The children. The little ones. They’d follow us in the streets whenever we left the Settlement—especially when we went to Soochow to visit my father’s mother. They called Mama bai xiangul!”
“Which means?”
“White sorceress.”
White sorceress. I juggled the words. White witch.
I poured the water slowly, wetting the sides of the filter first, moving in toward the center. The grounds bubbled up. The pot filled. White witch. I once saw the Yellow Butterflies point at our building. “The White Witch lives there!” They shaped their hands into signs to ward off the evil spirits cascading from my balcony.
My father got up from the couch and leaned on the windowsill. Colorful umbrellas scurried down Greenwich Avenue like blossoms on the backs of ants. The rain formed a soft blur around them.
“Were there people in Chinatown who knew your family back in China?”
“No one knew our family.”
I brought him some coffee. “But your father was important, wasn’t he? A scholar? The son of some big official?”
“My father was gone most of the time. Teaching.” There was a little sneer in his voice. “You felt sorry for yourself growing up in Chinatown, Maibelle. You have no idea.”
“I never said I felt sorry for myself! I loved it there.” I gritted my teeth against the tears my father had prompted. He was absolutely right. I had no idea. But that’s why I was asking these questions.
He started to pace the wedge of floor between the shelves of gadgets and the edge of backdrop paper where I sat. He held his cigarette impatiently, with the pads of his fingers. He was telling me something important, something I’d thought I needed. About his school in Shanghai, someone he called a head boy. Classmates—sons of wealthy industrialists with long histories of collusion with the Manchus. Brits and Krauts, with a handful of weaker, more malleable French or Italians as support troops.
I’d asked for this. Come back from exile to demand it. I was not going to chicken out now. But I was catching only every third or fourth word, as if a subconscious censor had plugged into my hearing.
I stood up, nearly colliding with my father at the end of his pace. He kept going. I stepped into the kitchen closet, pulled up the table, and turned on the water over a pile of dishes. The bubbles of Joy puffed up to the lip of the sink.
He was talking about his exclusion—his being excluded. I tried to listen, but the water roared even after I turned off the faucet. Rain was pouring through the open window into the glass plate with all those stubs. I retrieved it and knocked the contents into a garbage bag. The metallic stench of ashes overtook the smell of detergent.
“I did quite well in my classwork. Was passably good at games, later on rode well enough to compete at polo, but…”
I scrubbed and rinsed.
“It was Halliday who first insulted me to my face. The others followed suit, but he was the one who coined the phrase.”
“What phrase?” I stopped washing and turned toward him.
“He had his arm round my shoulder. I’d just ended first in a fifty-meter swim, and he’d led the group in a rousing chorus of ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.’ He waited for the singing to die down. Then he had two of his buddies grab my arms. He punched me in the stomach so hard my feet lifted off the ground. There was blood in my mouth. They dropped me and held me as Halliday yanked off my swimsuit, used it to tie my wrists to my ankles. Then they dumped me back in the water and watched me nearly drown. Through it all he kept laughing. ‘I say, Joseph’s not half-bad for a chink bastard!’”
My father coughed. He set down his coffee and cigarette and grabbed for a handkerchief in his back pocket. He spat into it and wiped his mouth. I started to fill a glass from the tap but wasn’t quick enough.
“Don’t bbther,” he said.
I couldn’t bear to hear more of the physical damage. Had they broken his ribs? How long had he been forced to thrash, injured and bound, in the water? The answers hardly mattered; his body had mended. I wanted revenge.
“You fought back, didn’t you, Dad? You reported them?”
“All I could think about was my name. Joseph is not my name. It’s Chou. Joe is the anglicized version. My mother enrolled me at school as Joseph. I couldn’t even correct Halliday, insist that he call me by my real name, because Mama had made that impossible.”
My father crushed his empty cigarette package and stepped briefly into the kitchen to put it in the trash. In that split second I imagined the door folding, pushing us together and binding us into the narrow space, like a time capsule that someone centuries ahead would open, and there would be our bones all mixed up together with the half-washed dishes and smoker’s ash. But even that close, we didn’t meet. There had been no revenge.
He stepped back. “They were cruel to her face, too. But she never turned. All our linen had to be bleached and starched, clothes patterned after the latest styles from home—her home. She even ordered our underwear from Sears, Roebuck.” The downpour was easing. Dad picked up a sponge I’d dropped on the floor and carefully wiped off the windowsill.
“We had tea at four o’clock with white toast and marmalade. Boiled eggs and kippers for breakfast, roast beef or ham for tiffin. Chipped beef or rarebit for supper.” He wrung out the sponge in the bathroom sink and handed it to me.
Our fingers pointed at each other, two nearly identical sets of torn, bitten stubs. I kept staring until he released the sponge. He tucked the user-friendly toolbox under his arm and reached for his umbrella.
“I loved congee, but the only way I could eat it was to sneak a fifth meal with the servants.”
That was this afternoon.
Tonight Betty and Sandra are dancing above my head. Their footsteps pad across my darkroom ceiling to the low strains of “Moon River.” I tip my developing tank to their rhythm and time out the phases of development.
First, the evolution of shadow and light into image. Then the sudden arrest of process to freeze the moment and, finally, the careful inoculation of the “finished” picture against change. The developing tank reminds me of a martini shaker, except that it is filled not with the elixir of forgetfulness but of memory.
When I first started working in the darkroom, I imagined the metal cylinder pulsing with all those ghosts I was about to bring back to life. I really believed I had the power to pull the past forward into the present. I dared to believe time is flexible, and what’s gone can be reconstructed, remolded, touched up, and fixed just by dodging in a bit of light or burning the shadows darker. I still cling to that wish, but it’s getting as shriveled and tasteless as an old ginger root. In practice, I know that the snapshots in my mind are always more vibrant, more heartbreaking, more terrifyingly permanent than anything I can print in the dark.
How, for example, can you photograph a dream?
If I could capture my nightmares, stop them, get them down, I might destroy them. Yet in all Dad’s pictures he never succeeded in stopping his schoolmates’ blows, never killed the hatred in their voices.
My father accused me of feeling sorry for myself, and in the next breath shamed me because I lacked the same anguish that he’d known in China. I never before realized the strain in our family arose from a contest of sorrows.
6
Tommy called today. He promised not to mention his project if I’d see him again.
I asked why.
“For old times’ sake.”
“In old times you had no interest in me.”
“New times, then. I feel bad about the other day.”
I felt bad, too. I had stopped imagining him all over town, but I thought about Tommy—or Tai. What my brother had said. The Emperor State Building. His Buddha’s bulge and th
ose even, moon-shaped fingernails. It was not his fault that I was afraid of heights, or that I wasn’t yet ready for Chinatown. He didn’t need to know about my nightmares.
“I still think you should look for another photographer.”
“Whatever you say, boss.”
“No tall buildings.”
“A walk, then. Solid ground.”
It was warm out, clear and not too muggy. I had no pressing assignments, no excuses. Moreover, I wasn’t looking for any.
“A walk would be good.”
* * *
We decided to pick up where we’d left off: the corner of Thirty-fourth and Fifth. I arrived ten minutes late, and there was no sign of him. I waited five and then another five minutes and was just turning to escape the whole enterprise when I spotted him weaving hurriedly through the crowd.
Square, professorial sunglasses and a yellow short-sleeve button-down shirt. His body struck me, in a word, as spare. Not skinny or slender. Many Chinese men are so thin they look positively concave. Tommy is simply straight, up and down. No extraneous curves or bulges. No hiding places. No wonder he wears down his shoes flat across the back.
I imagined what we would look like together, the clean, straight Chinese man in his squared-off clothes and the redhead with flyaway hair. The picture made me wince.
As he reached me he started to apologize.
“I know.” I turned uptown. “Fire in the tunnel.”
“No, I was doing an interview that took longer than expected. I tried to call, but you’d already left.”
My immediate thought was that this was a setup. Courtesy dictated a follow-up question: Oh? And what was your interview about? Right back to the forbidden subject.
I walked faster, said nothing. He kept up and didn’t try to stop me, but I could feel his eyes pinching the back of my head, through that darkened glass. When we stopped for a light, I shifted from foot to foot, automatically idling as I do when jogging, grateful for the press of bodies and other people’s conversation. He squeezed in beside me.
“How have you been?”
“Fine.” I pulled forward before the green without looking. I wasn’t really annoyed. I could let myself feel manipulated if I wanted to, but my real problem was I didn’t have the faintest idea what to say. If it wasn’t about work or, by extension, Chinatown, then what did we have to discuss?