by Lucy Tan
“Excuse me. What are these for?” Lina placed the box of cards on the table, and the three of them leaned in to look. When they saw what it was, one of the women smiled—or was it a smirk?—and looked up at the others. Lina felt herself begin to blush.
“For you to make friends,” another one of the women said cheerfully. “For all the foreign wives. You will find the Chinese address on the back. If you get lost, you can ask a local.” She took a card out of the box and flipped it over. Sure enough, on the back was the same address printed in Chinese. There was also a small square map of the streets surrounding her new home, the apartment complex marked with a red star.
When Wei came home that night, Lina showed him the cards, described her confusion earlier that day in the lobby, and they shared a good laugh.
“It looks like I’m not the only one with a promotion,” he said.
To go from a full-time job to unemployed with benefits—in other words, to adopt the lifestyle of a taitai—was no small upgrade. Wei pulled out one of his own business cards so they could compare. GENERAL MANAGER, SHANGHAI; VICE PRESIDENT OF STRATEGY, GLOBAL, read Lina’s husband’s double title. His cards were plainly printed and functional, unlike the raised ink on Lina’s cards and their thick, cotton-bond construction.
“The girl downstairs didn’t think I could speak Chinese,” she told him. But as soon as she said it, she remembered that it hadn’t been the girl at the front desk who’d started the conversation in English—it had been her. Why had she done that? Had being away from China for all these years made her nervous about speaking Mandarin? No, not even a lifetime in America could make a person forget her mother tongue. Lina had spoken English because she associated speaking English with the act of pretending she was someone she was not. Down there in the lobby, she had already felt that way—as though she were putting on.
After five years in Shanghai, Lina had come to terms with being neither American nor Chinese but an in-between: an expat. There were other families here like hers, other spouses who had quit their jobs and relocated so that their partners could claim Chinese business for foreign companies. And Lina was relieved to find that the expat community did not require its members to hold a common set of cultural values, as American families had seemed to do. Instead, it assumed a feeling of foreignness. There was no expectation for someone to understand, only to accept. One did this with a lot of smiling and nodding and polite questions. Meeting people from all over the world had made Lina aware of physical demeanors as she never had been before, and she’d become skilled at controlling her facial expressions, conveying joy or pain or exasperation in the Continental way or the Oriental way, depending on her audience. It was tiring, but it had also made Lina agile in how she presented herself. And that kind of agility was what saved her on the day that her husband received Qiang’s phone call.
When she had walked past Wei’s study that evening, there was something about the way his voice sounded on the phone that made her stop to listen. Though she could see only Wei’s back, she could tell that every part of his body was under strain. He had the cord of his keyboard wrapped around his thumb, something he did only when he was nervous.
“Hao,” he said finally. “Na, ni dao le women zai tan. Zaijian.” He hung up the phone.
Lina gave him a few moments before stepping into the room. “Who was that?” she asked.
When Wei turned around, his face was flushed. “Ah,” he said. “That was Qiang.”
“Qiang,” she repeated. The two of them stared at each other. His name sounded strange said out loud. For years, Lina had said it only in her head. “So he’s alive, then.”
“Of course he’s alive.”
“Is he all right?”
“He’s fine. He’s in Kunming. He says he wants to visit us in a week. He wants to see the World Expo.”
Lina laughed. “The Expo? He wants to see the Expo?”
They hadn’t heard from Qiang in twenty-two years. And now he was calling to say that he wanted to go to the World’s Fair. Lina tried to meet her husband’s gaze but he just sat blinking at a spot above her shoulder. Wei opened his mouth and closed it again. “It will be strange,” he finally murmured, “to see him again.”
Qiang had disappeared from Lina and Wei’s hometown in Suzhou shortly after the couple had married. At first, the word disappeared had seemed dramatic. It wasn’t as though Qiang hadn’t left home before. He had already been involved for some time with hei shehui, or “black society.” In their small town, local criminals banded together to gamble and fight other gangs in neighboring communities. Sometimes they would travel to larger cities where operations were more lucrative and dangerous. Qiang would leave for months at a time, driving his parents and Wei into fits of panic. When he got back, he would claim that he’d been chasing “business opportunities,” which, if legal, seemed unlikely for a boy his age with no university degree. But even in those instances, he had told them where he was going. On the day of Lina and Wei’s wedding, Qiang had left without a word to anyone, and he had been missing ever since.
Wei told Lina about Qiang’s disappearance as he shivered next to her in their new American bed. It had been a few weeks since their marriage, two since they’d moved to the States, and she still hadn’t let him touch her at night. Good, generous, patient Wei was also a little clueless. He’d taken her silence for shyness and filled those first nights with conversation, hoping to bring her closer to him. I know you were friends with Qiang, he said. But he had a life you never knew about. He sighed and placed his hand on her stomach, where it lay cold as a starfish. Staring up at the ceiling she thought, I knew more about his life than you ever did. How little consequences had mattered to her in that moment. She might have told Wei everything then—that she was the reason his brother had disappeared, that her marriage to Wei had been a mistake—if forming the words had not felt so difficult.
Months later, they still hadn’t heard from Qiang, and Wei’s parents were becoming more and more worried. Wei dealt with it in the same straightforward manner he dealt with all business: he made it into a project. By then, he had started graduate school in engineering at Penn, so he was occupied during the days. But on weeknights, when the rates were cheaper, he placed calls back to China looking for information. He sat in a chair facing the window of their small Philadelphia studio apartment, a notebook balanced on the ledge, looking out at the iced-over gray and brown city streets. Surely you remember somebody, Auntie. Surely you can give me the name of a province, at the very least. He’d assigned Lina the job of drawing up a map of contacts and a chronology of the dates that people claimed to have heard from Qiang. They’d collected a list of phone numbers, twelve digits as opposed to the American ten, just past the limits of Lina’s short-term memory. And Qiang had felt that way to Lina then too: a figure that existed just beyond her immediate grasp.
She talked through details of the investigation with Wei and helped keep notes, careful to be no more involved in the matter than one would expect a good sister-in-law to be. Amid all this activity, she had stayed in the background, showing no greater personal investment in Qiang’s disappearance. Because it was too late to undo what had been done. Qiang was gone, and she and Wei were in America, and Lina was determined to forget about Qiang so she could make the best of her situation.
But during Lina’s early years in America, his presence would come to her without warning. Not only reminders of their time together but memories of his physicality. The smell of him carried on a wind as she came out of a supermarket or a gesture of his made by a man on a bus. As the struggle and excitement and forward momentum of her time in the States with Wei finally forged into familiarity and, eventually, love, Lina’s mental encounters with Qiang became less visceral. Until one day, she thought of him less as someone she had once loved and more as one of many figures in her youth. It reached the point where she wasn’t sure if it was Qiang she missed; perhaps it was just China, or the home that it had once been.
Because she couldn’t speak truthfully about her feelings for Wei during the early years of their marriage—or, rather, the ways in which those feelings were complicated—she’d done her best to tell him everything else: her expectations and fears for their new life in America, what she delighted in and what made her curious, what she missed about home. She encouraged him to do the same and watched him struggle to answer. Despite being thoughtful and introverted, Wei was more interested in the workings of the world than he was in the workings of his own mind, which made it difficult for him to give Lina satisfactory answers.
But she came to know him deeply anyway, and to love him. The newness of their experience in America was a bonding force. Beginning in the late eighties and up through the aughts, they learned together how to thrive as immigrants in the U.S. Together, they had been duped by a landlord, assisted by neighbors, and baffled by the Internet. After finally getting work visas and citizenship, they turned their attention to buying a home. They researched mortgage rates and tax brackets and once, in a fit of panic, identity theft. When they had Karen, the final piece of the puzzle fell into place. Lina’s life and love became inextricable from his and she finally knew what that word union meant. How wonderful it was to discover that happiness could exist in the everyday like that, so overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time.
And then ten, twenty years had passed. She had kept her secret about Qiang and never given Wei any reason to suspect that his brother had been more than a friend to her. And yet, after Wei told her about the phone call, there was a part of her that blamed him for not being able to see past the mask of control she’d put on to hide her true reaction. He should know her well enough by now, but comfort and habit had blinded him. Lina exchanged a few more words about it with Wei. She couldn’t remember what was said. But this much she knew: Qiang wasn’t coming to see the Expo. After all this time, he was coming to see her.
* * *
Lina’s life in Shanghai had never been what her husband might call “productive.” Often, it wasn’t until the maid rang her doorbell that she would get out of bed and position herself at a desk or in front of a closet to appear busy. She would slip into a daze going through the motions of her day and begin moving around the apartment, unaware of where her feet were taking her. More often than not, she found herself leaning against the doorway of whichever room the maid was in. Maybe her body was guiding her there in the hopes that watching someone else work would break her out of her own slothfulness. Or maybe it was just because she was lonely.
There was a period in the beginning when she’d joined clubs and engaged in charity work. She’d spent an entire month knitting hundreds of tiny sweaters for stuffed bears to be donated to a children’s hospital. Another time, she’d helped arrange a gardening project in Century Park. Shanghai Dolls, the Shanghai Women’s Club, the Shanghai Expatriate Association—the names of these organizations had been difficult to tell apart. They hosted invitation-only dinner clubs, book clubs, and parties at museums. These events were flashy and fast-paced, full of well-groomed ladies from all over the world: Indian women with their chandelier earrings and jewel-colored saris, Continental women in their tweed Chanel jackets, Korean women with their sleek haircuts and perfect skin. Whether walking through carpeted banquet halls or on the dust-covered streets of Dongtai Road bargaining for antiques, these women seemed more at home in China than Lina ever could be.
Wei had been working a lot, so Lina had attended many of these events alone. It was pleasant enough, making conversation with acquaintances and going glassy-eyed from staring at the other women’s jewelry. But one day, for no reason that she could remember, she had simply stopped going. For months after that, her focus had turned to exercise—badminton, swimming, and long, solitary strolls through luxury malls, bargain-hunting for haute couture. Her favorite pastime became buying discounted dresses for Karen at Miu Miu and Dolce and Gabbana. What a pleasure it was to watch the collection grow in her daughter’s closet while Karen was away at school, each little bundle of tulle and silk still lightly perfumed from the shops, hanging there like a bouquet out to dry.
Nine months of the year, Lina was waiting for her daughter to come home for the summer. She and Wei had discussed whether to have Karen educated in Shanghai, and Lina had eventually yielded to her husband’s logic. She should be culturally adapted to America and have an American education in the States. What had been the point of their immigrating if not to enjoy American privilege? Mostly, though, Lina had given in because she feared that selfishness was the real reason she wanted to keep Karen in Shanghai. It had taken years of trying before Karen came along. When she was born, Lina was thirty-one years old, and Karen had seemed like a miracle. She still seemed this way to Lina every time she saw her daughter moving and talking and forming her own ideas about the world—ideas that Lina had helped shape. The more time that Karen spent at Black Tree Academy and that Lina spent half a world away, missing her, the less sound Wei’s logic seemed. Shanghai was not right back where they had started. Some of the international schools had reputations that rivaled the best private schools in the States. Why shouldn’t they have kept Karen with them if the Americans themselves were sending their kids to school in Shanghai?
It was one of many disagreements she’d had with Wei lately that never truly manifested itself as an argument. Since moving to China, she and Wei had become careful with each other, avoiding small conflicts for fear of unearthing bigger, more complicated ones. It was hard to face the fact that they had turned into clichés—he, a husband who worked too much; she, a restless woman at home. In America, they had been equals, each helping the other understand how to work and live in a country that wasn’t their home. Here, she was useless. There was little need for Chinese-language teachers when there were plenty of younger, cheaper Chinese locals with English degrees who were eager to tutor expats. All the time Lina spent by herself made her aware of her loneliness as something that had always been with her but that she had been able to distract herself from when they lived in America. She sought comfort in beautiful places—the tearoom at the Peace Hotel, the little cafés in Xuhui District, and the ground floor of the Waldorf Astoria. Once, because she had liked the look of rose-flavored macarons against the Waldorf’s blue china, she’d convinced the manager to let her buy a set of plates to take home with her along with the desserts she’d ordered.
Sure, the spending was excessive, but it wasn’t all for frivolity’s sake. The members of the expat community in Shanghai were transient but well connected, and she had to keep up with the news. To hear the news, she needed to attend certain events. To attend these events, she needed the requisite attire. In the end, a Chinese-American had to work much harder at social upkeep in China than she did in the States. It would probably have been easier for her to make friends with some local Chinese women; at least they would have had their childhoods in common. Everyone who grew up in the sixties and seventies in China knew the same card games and revolutionary music, had drunk from the same tin mugs. And though times had changed, there were things that hadn’t. Recipes, for instance. Her mother had a special one for jiaozi that she made on the eve of each Lunar New Year. Lina thought of dumpling-making as a communal activity. When she was younger, the village women gathered in teams under different roofs. Some aunties made the meat filling, others rolled dough for the skins, and still others molded the dumplings into the shape of gold ingots, which symbolized wealth for the new year. There hadn’t been very many Chinese aunties in Pennsylvania, and she had never attempted the project alone.
That wasn’t the
case here, and yet Lina couldn’t bring herself to strike up friendships with any of the local women. She knew that their company would only make her feel lonelier in the end. After all, how could she explain to them what fifteen years of her life in America had been like? At first, it had meant learning rule after rule after rule. Garbage goes out between this hour at night and this hour in the morning. It’s acceptable to take home leftovers from a restaurant but not the bread they give you at the start of the meal. You can’t hang your laundry out of the window for others to see, but you also can’t leave it in the apartment building’s dryer for longer than a half an hour after the cycle ends unless you want it to wind up on the floor of the basement. The main problem, of course, was the language. Although Lina had studied English in college, those first few years she still jumbled up nouns and adjectives, leaving off the nuisance endings of words, like -ing and -ily. And those pesky articles—a and the—whose presence in sentences seemed completely arbitrary. On afternoons when Wei was at the university, Lina would sometimes lie on their little twin bed with a pillow to her face and scream in Chinese.
But things had gotten easier. In America, you could buy your own house on its own piece of land and disappear inside it forever. That neat little yard that Wei trimmed every other weekend, before he’d gotten too busy with work. The screen door that rattled in the wind. America was where she had fallen in love with the idea of ownership. Nowadays, she could spend tens of thousands of yuan a month on housewares, but nothing would ever compare to the way she felt when she and Wei had found a shiny red enamel kettle on sale at the Golden Eagle on Falcon Street. The neighbors might stare at them and her colleagues might talk about her behind her back, but paying money for American belongings made her feel that the space she occupied was really hers.