“Ming doesn’t eat apples,” Jeff said.
“I like it here much better than the Hamptons,” Ming told her new husband that night. Grimy Brooklyn heat sneered through the skylights. She was sitting atop her pile of quilts. “I am quite sure Danny doesn’t like me.”
Jeff was silent, which seemed to be his way of agreeing. That night Ming massaged his shoulders, then let him massage hers, and pulled him on the bed. He didn’t even let her touch his hard-on; he kissed her, down to her toes. He asked, too often, too tentatively, “Do you like that?” A true love, she thought, would know what she liked just by the way their bodies melded. Still, it was nice to sit up in bed with Jeff after they made love, laughing as he read aloud to from a paperback copy of On the Road. He spread a map of the United States on the floor and showed her a thin line called Route 66. It was an open road where dreamers drove and kept going until they ran out of luck or out of gas, he told her. Ming and Jeff decided they’d take the trip someday.
They let the rest of that long summer grow prickly with dreams; they went to art galleries and visited an agent who liked Jeff’s portfolio; they ventured into Tiffany’s and Bergdorf and Jimmy Choo, and Jeff watched as Ming fondled silver high-heeled sandals that cost $725. It would take five slimy hotel encounters to buy shoes like that, she calculated in her mind, and going without food for two weeks.
Jeff was always finding things in the streets. He’d carry wicker chairs home on the subway, and broken plates and old computers, but only Macs. He kept his computers on a long table in his makeshift room. On one computer he composed his own weird poetry into voice-activated software; on another, he made digital pictures of pretty faces look like gorilla masks. A week into their marriage he discovered a photo on the Internet from the Hamptons party of Liesel Morgan, the vanilla-haired, financial analyst ex who was, Jeff said, after Danny. “Clichéd party shot.…” Jeff railed. “Awful lighting.” Ming laughed as she watched him Photoshop Liesel Morgan into a cavewoman. At moments like that, they were vengeance warriors in an army of two.
Ming still worked some nights for Li Nan. She told Jeff she was helping her parents sell to the American market and sometimes had to go to dinner with prospective clients.
On other nights, to tease her, Jeff would read Ming’s blog aloud. “He had a regatta tan on every part, and Mimi rubbed him below deck…are you kidding me? This is so bad it’ll probably make you rich. Too bad you’re not really a hooker. Sick twisted reality sells.”
Ming told her family that she’d found a husband in New York. If she’d tried to tell them she needed money, they’d say come back here and work for us. It was a pyrrhic victory, to have officially become a poor artist. A victory that extended even beyond the Cheng household to her entire pragmatic homeland. “I feel like the family I should have been born to is right here,” she told Jeff and the roommates one night while they lounged on Salvation Army chairs and hashed out the world’s problems.
“Yeah, we’re a nuclear family. Looks like fusion but it’s really all fission,” said Jeff.
The ideal kingdom, where Ming really longed to live, however, was the illegal sublet on the Upper West Side that Billie Austin inhabited with Zoe. The Austin’s apartment had mismatched shelves that overflowed with books, antique furniture, and flowery porcelain that was chipped around the edges.
“We live on a theatre set, don’t you see?” Zoe mourned. “And someday the show is gonna close and it’ll all come crashing down.”
But you’re the performers, the whole city is a stage set for you, Ming thought. New York. If she said it aloud Zoe would counter-attack; Ming knew better than to contradict her friend when she had that all-is-drama look about her.
One sultry evening in July, Billie invited Ming to stay for dinner. “We have our terrace garden,” Billie said. “Screw the Hamptons, though to be in Manhattan in July is an admission of failure.” Even so, Ming detected a thread of hope in her voice—it was only Tuesday and there was still plenty of time for a weekend invitation to materialize, for love to appear, or an agent to call.
Though it was evening Billie wore a straw hat on the terrace, going on about how a few rays of sun could age her by ten years. She told Ming about an audition she’d had yesterday. She’d worn a pound of makeup to hide the circles under her eyes, she claimed, because it was nine in the morning. “Can you imagine, me, who just doesn’t do mornings, poor Zoe always had to make her own breakfast. So you’re a writer, Ming?”
No one had ever called Ming a writer before.
“I’m writing erotic stories.”
“MMmmmmm.” Zoe ‘s “mmmmming” was over an ear of corn.
“You better try this corn before she devours it all,” Billie said.
Ming shook her head.
“In her country it’s for hogs,” Billie said.
“You’ve never even been to China,” Zoe chastised.
“I saw something about farming in China on TV and how many farms did my daughter see in Beijing? That CNN correspondent, what’s her name, Rhonda Rogers, she did a special on the un-booming parts of China.”
“Jeff says she looks like a mummy with her Botox,” Ming parroted.
“I think she had a lip job, too,” said Billie. “Crazy, you wouldn’t catch me risking ruin with Botox even if I could afford it. But when you get rich—erotica sells, so I know you’ll be a best-selling author someday—don’t do that thing Asian actresses do, you know, getting eye jobs to look more Caucasian. Ming is lovely, don’t you think Zoe honey?”
“I need cosmetic surgery,” Ming pointed out.
“Only on your teeth, otherwise you’re perfect. Exotic and strong. You could be an actress but don’t, it’s a thankless life.”
“I need a job. But I think people won’t hire me because my teeth. And…” she hung her head with more humiliation than was strictly necessary. “I cannot eat hard things. Like corn. Or apples.”
“Oh my god.” Zoe shoved her plate aside as if she didn’t deserve it.
“Good god girl,” Billie said. “You’ve got to get your teeth fixed. I wish I had all the bucks in the world to give you.”
They sat waiting for a set of perfect teeth to drop from the sky.
Finally Billie spoke up, “We didn’t have such great teeth in Mississippi either. Mine were dingy once upon a time. Zoe doesn’t know how lucky she is, look at those incisors that nature filed to perfection.”
“People get their teeth done in Thailand cheaply,” Zoe offered.
“Oh, please, this little mouth needs the best in the business, and she’s going to have to go back so many times she’d have to spend the whole year in Asia. You can’t do that when you’re trying to get a green card, can you darling? When I needed help I went to this guy, Doctor Richard Perlmutter. He’ll be expensive. But I say go into debt for it, then write your best-seller with your pretty teeth to help you sell it.”
Dr. Perlmutter wasn’t taking new patients before his August vacation, a self-important female voice informed her. “You sound like you wanna do it soon. I have something the first week in September.” The woman on the phone pronounced it “Septembah.” Jeff had told Ming about those old-style Brooklyn accents.
The initial consultation would cost two hundred dollars.
“Do you have pain?”
“Yes.”
“It’s considered cosmetic, but if you have pain your insurance might pay some. Bonding teeth, if the doctah says that’s what you need, is about $1500,” the woman on the phone said. “No, that’s per tooth.”
Afterward, Ming held up a hand mirror and counted her teeth. There were twenty-eight of them since a dentist in China had yanked out her wisdom teeth. Forty-two thousand dollars.
“Do you have health insurance?” she asked her spouse.
“Health insurance? Ha, ha. Health insurance, she asks. This
is my health insurance.” He held up two crossed fingers. “Do you know how much health insurance costs?”
Ming called Han. “Forty-two thousand dollars.” She said it twice before he reacted.
Her brother told her that if she’d go back to business school she could get a job that would pay for all the perfect teeth she wanted. Besides, his money was tied up, he said. “When are we going to meet Jeff? You know there’s plenty of opportunity for you both in China. And if he doesn’t make enough money to help you, why did you marry him?”
The wonderful, wonderful Billie Austin came forward with the two hundred dollars for the first office visit. “I call my father and tell him I’m doing missionary work sometimes,” she said. “If your mouth isn’t a mission I don’t know what is.”
So the gods sent Ming to Dr. Richard Perlmutter.
The dentist to the stars was a man who exuded conscientious contentment. He had pictures of his wife and three children around the office, and one of himself running in a marathon. He gave Ming a brochure with pictures showing how, with his etching tools, he would scrape on a paste of acrylic resins combined with tiny crystals of quartz and silicon dioxide, all of which he’d measured and mixed to just the right shade of white. He had some sample colors, and he showed Ming a white of fine bone teacups that he said would go beautifully with her skin tone.
Dr. Perlmutter told her, that first week in September, that he could fit her with a temporary façade. “That won’t cost much. But your teeth need permanent bonding. Probably will need root canal work. They’ll be a lot healthier.”
“I don’t have much money.” Ming let her voice rise several octaves and her eyes push out plump tears.
“Don’t sweat the small stuff.”
In the street outside of Doctor Perlmutter’s office, Ming made a phone call, then wandered in the direction of Chinatown. She felt her teeth pinching. All her life they’d hurt.
Li Nan moved often and he’d given her a cryptic address. “Baxter below Grand, above fish. Four.” That meant fourth floor.
“I need more money, but I can’t keep doing, y’know, my husband would kill me if he found out I was entertaining your friends,” she pleaded.
Li Nan’s grownup body was like a balloon stuffed with dumplings. He wore a crisp polo shirt and Italian loafers without socks. His teeth were crooked and yellow, but not nearly as bad as Ming’s. They’d all woken up on fire with stomach cramps as children, had all spat vile pus into their bedpans, yet Ming could trace the putrid colors of every childhood disease in her teeth while Li Nan had only a wispy ghost of jaundice.
“My husband lost his job.” Jeff had been on call with a magazine to shoot parties but they hadn’t called lately, so it wasn’t exactly a lie. Ming let tears flow down her cheeks. Li Nan had moved into a new office with a mahogany desk, but the walls were empty. An air conditioner whirred and dripped into a plastic bucket.
“Anyway,” she said, “I could make more money with better teeth. I need to get my teeth done. It’s my dream.”
“It is true, you would be so pretty with new teeth.” Li Nan held up his wrist to show her his watch, decorated with small diamonds around the bezel. “You see this? Here is a very beautiful face, I think. It tells me the time in Asia and Europe and the phase of the moon. This beautiful watch cost five thousand dollars. I understand now, having the best makes you a better person. You cannot, of course, give people handouts. But you could come to work for me here in the office.”
Li Nan picked up a wad of black velvet. Inside was a gemstone with myriad surfaces casting blue, green, and violet fire. It felt like getting close to a star.
“These come from a mine not too far from the old salt mines in our village,” Li Nan said. “We call them Sichuan opals. Guess how much they cost?”
“A lot.”
He looked pleased, “There is nothing else like these available in America, not yet….”
Ming went to work in a room where twenty or so young men and women sat at small metal desks and talked on phones. “This is so-and-so from Shearson Barnett….” they’d say in English, Mandarin, and a babel of other tongues. They used different names for themselves every day, and they varied the name of the company, too. Sometimes they’d say “Zurich Partners Exchange” or “Merrill Logan.”
Li Nan trained the brokers to start from a script: “Do you like beautiful jewels? I have a great investment opportunity, but there’s a very limited supply. No risk, it will never lose value. Before people used credit cards they kept valuable objects that could be liquidated in times of need. We are a cutting-edge investment house, and we got into partnerships with these mines before anyone else did. That’s how we get to offer these to special clients at special prices.”
They got names of people to call from lists that Li Nan had “obtained,” as he put it, from various brokerage firms. His requirement was that each broker make a sale to at least one out of every seven prospects, and you got fired if you missed your quota of twenty sales a week.
Ming sold nothing her first two weeks. Li Nan stood behind her listening, and he yelled at her in front of everyone, saying she didn’t sound confident. But he gave her a second chance. In the third week, she learned to sound like every prospect’s best friend. “I wish you could see the beautiful colors in this stone,” she would say.
Twenty sales a week, four a day, five percent commission, paid in cash. Ming made a little over five thousand dollars her fourth week, minus what she still owed Li Nan for his initial loan, and, as he told her when he gave her the money, he had to take out two percent of her first six months’ earnings for the training. Few people lasted more than three months. Still, she kept twenty-five hundred dollars and got two teeth done.
After two months Li Nan promoted her, so that she made follow-up calls instead of cold calls. She called people who had already bought, saying, “The gems have appreciated, and we have a one-time opportunity for you to buy more.” Three months into the new sales pitch, she choked. “You know there’s no such thing as a bad week here. You either sell or you’re out the door,” said Li Nan. “I’m sorry. But you are an old friend. Maybe you’d like to try something different for a while?” He brought in Brian, who gave Ming the social security number, address, and date of birth for someone named Wing Yu Guan. All Ming had to do was get a home equity line of credit in Wing Yu Guan’s name, then transfer the money to another account.
Over the next six months little white jewels sprouted in her mouth.
“Fourteen to go,” Dr. Perlmutter told her, and held up a mirror so she could admire his work. That was on a Monday. That Wednesday she went to the newest office in Chinatown—they’d moved a couple of times by then, and this space was over a gift shop—and saw a security guard sitting outside the door that led upstairs. She kept walking.
“I got laid off,” she told Jeff that night. Ming’s husband of convenience knew only that she’d been working for some kind of brokerage firm in Chinatown.
“Aw….and with your nice teeth too. Don’t worry, we’ll find you something.”
Jeff was experimenting with sculptures of found objects that he turned into extraterrestrial creatures, and they had half a dozen inanimate roommates. There was the dog he was still putting together that had a cracked hand mirror for a head. Ming picked up the dog and held it close, so that all she could see was Dr. Perlmutter’s beautiful construction, the only part of her that could truly claim it knew nothing of what she’d done before. She let Jeff see that she was stifling tears.
Two days later he held his hand out and said, “Take this.” In his hand was a credit card.
“Eight thousand dollar limit. Some bank that would like to fuck me over just sent it. You’re in charge of paying it off. In return for this I’m calling Zoe’s friend who has that catering gig. I think they pay about fifteen an hour. I’m not so good at math but if you stick with catering, I fig
ure you can pay off your Doctor Pearly Teeth in approximately three hundred years.”
Dear, sweet, foolish Jeff. His credit card wasn’t quite enough to finish the job but Dr. Perlmutter’s receptionist waved an arm, jingling her diamond bangles and said, “We’ll bill you.”
By mid-summer, a year after Billie first told her about Dr. Perlmutter, Ming was able to look in a mirror and see a young writer/caterer who could walk up to people with an appetizer tray and an appetizing smile. In her white shirt and black bow tie—she’d had to spend five hours’ income after taxes on the uniform—she was just like the others, looking out for the party guest who might be a famous writer or a handsome man who really wasn’t married, as opposed to those who’d slipped their rings off.
In November of that year, another man appeared on the Mimi blog. She called him The Professor. An older man. Married but not happy. With him, Mimi spent hours talking about literature and the state of the world and why nothing was ever enough for most people, and Mimi called it an intellectual infatuation. They weren’t sleeping together. He was a professor of comparative literature at NYU. That part Ming completely invented.
In reality, she had met a certain older professor. In late October, Zoe had called Ming and said, “I got you a speaking gig. No money but it’s a worthy cause. I’ll coach you if you’d like. You know how the rich always want to have edifying experiences? So, Danny’s mom said to me a couple of nights ago, ‘Darling, it would be a coup, an utter coup, to have your Chinese friend whose father was imprisoned talk about her life at a benefit I’m giving.’”
The benefit, Zoe said, was for a Chinese human rights group. Suzanne Hirsch, her potential mother-in-law, had asked her to line up a few experts who could tell horror stories between the main course and dessert. Professor Charles Engelhorn was going to be there, along with a young man who had recently been released from a lao gai.
“Just talk about how your parents got assigned to the village and then they got out only to be the victims of a corrupt official.” Zoe didn’t leave room in the conversation for Ming to say no.
Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization Page 7