by Lucy Tan
When they’d moved to Collegeville, Wei had bought a second car for Lina, and that was the moment she finally began to feel at home: when she was ferrying herself around in a vehicle customized just for her, a copper-colored Honda with air-conditioning and a radio, which she listened to while sitting at drive-through windows or waiting for the traffic lights to change from red to green. During her drive home from work, she passed a storage facility backlit by the sunset, the pink and tangerine teasing out shades of cobalt blue from the whitewashed building. She would never be able to explain to anyone the beauty of suburban Pennsylvania. Nor could she explain how sad it made her one day when she caught herself thinking in English, feeling her very mind switch nationalities. But how powerful it felt, too, to become fluent in another language, her mind opening fold by fold like a paper fan to reveal a fuller picture of the world around her. And that knowledge of its fullness was what Lina didn’t want to give up.
As much as she didn’t want to admit it, Wei was right. They had worked hard to be assimilated into American culture. What a waste it would be to relegate themselves to a social group that had never left China.
* * *
Lina watched her daughter step out of the closet with a scarf knotted once around her neck and once around her waist, a makeshift halter top that left her back bare. The words Hermès Paris were pulled taut across her chest in gold silk.
“Can I wear this to breakfast?” Karen asked.
On the floor between them were eight orange boxes of scarves, their lids discarded and their contents strewn across the floor.
“What about the dress we bought yesterday?”
“I can wear that whenever. I can wear it at school.”
Karen collected her hair on one side of her neck, considered her image in the mirror, and then turned back to Lina. “Do you have any new jewelry?”
Going through Lina’s jewelry box had become a ritual for the two of them every summer Karen was back from school. Each time Lina made a purchase of or received jewelry from Wei, she looked forward to showing it to her daughter.
“Nothing for little bones,” Lina said slyly.
“That means you have something good. Show me.”
It never took less than thirty minutes for Karen to go through all the items in her jewelry box. Lina checked her watch and saw that it was only eight o’clock. “All right,” she said. “Come sit.”
Lina kept the jewelry box in a safe and its key hidden above the door frame of the closet. She retrieved them both and joined Karen, who sat cross-legged on the bed. Together, they opened the lid and watched dust particles scatter as sunlight moved across the top tray. Here was mostly pearl jewelry; black, white, and peach-colored pearls made into drop earrings, long strands knotted together in a necklace, pearls on silver or platinum chains, and pearls strung on clear illusion cords, designed to float on collarbones. Scattered among them were also jade bracelets, brooches, and a small garnet ring. These were the items Karen was allowed to borrow.
Beneath those were the ones forbidden to her, and therefore more exciting. The ruby earrings Lina wore often around Christmas, a cushion-cut emerald ring wreathed in smaller diamonds, a string of sapphires on a choker, a watch that featured free-floating diamond stones trapped between the watch dial and its smooth crystal face, and Karen’s favorite: a chrome-tourmaline pendant set in gold filigree. The yellow tones of the metal made the jewel shine like a tiny lime in the palm of her hand. She fastened the chain around her neck and lowered her head to examine the pendant better, sticking out her lower lip to aid the process.
“Are my bones big enough for this one yet?”
Lina laughed. “Not yet.”
But she always let Karen wear the pendant while looking at the rest of her jewelry. Among the old boxes, Karen picked up the new addition. When she opened it, a violent blue flashed up at them, warmed by tones of red.
“Whoa. What is it?”
“It’s called tanzanite. It comes from Tanzania.”
“Where’s that?”
“Africa.”
Karen reached out to brush the face of the gemstone with her thumb. “When did you go to Tanzania?”
“I got it on a cruise with Daddy. I’ve never actually been there. Do you like it?”
She nodded and held it closer to her face.
Lina had spotted the necklace in one of the cruise ship’s jewelry stores and Wei had seen her looking. That would look beautiful on you, he’d said encouragingly. It had been the weekend of their wedding anniversary, which happened to coincide with Medora’s biannual management retreat. That was how they had ended up touring the Cayman Islands rather than lounging in a riad in Morocco, where Lina had wanted to go. She accepted the bribe and let him think that the piece of jewelry could buy her happiness for the weekend.
“I wish I’d gotten to see the bracelet,” Karen said, slipping the tanzanite ring all the way up to her first knuckle. “Now you only have one thing from Africa.”
Lina felt a blush coming on. When she thought of the bracelet, she remembered a version of herself she’d rather forget. Lying in bed that first year in Philly, rolling the beads between her fingers as if the bracelet were a rosary. Following it down neural pathways to emotional exhaustion, putting it away upon the arrival of Wei, drifting through the rest of the day insensate.
“It wasn’t much to look at. It was only special because I got it from my mother a long time ago. Sentimental.”
Karen nodded gravely. “And then you could have given it to me. And it would have been like I’d known her.”
Now she’d lied about her dead mother on top of everything else.
“Let’s put everything back. It’s time for breakfast.”
“But I haven’t even looked through it all yet.”
Lina had experienced enough of her daughter’s fake pouts to know when she was truly upset. Karen avoided eye contact by twisting the cocktail ring around her finger.
Usually, when school was out, Lina felt a spurt of energy. She would rise early, see Wei off to work, devise a mental list of activities to keep Karen entertained. While her daughter usually complained when taken to the zoo (“Mom, I’m pretty sure the animals are balding”) and the cafés (“Why are there so many people everywhere?”), she loved visiting Xintiandi, watching the old women and men who ballroom-danced in People’s Square, and seeing Chinese movies, where she learned colorful language that she would later use to upset her father. But Qiang’s phone call had changed things. Instead of planning activities for Karen, Lina was distracted. Again and again she found herself thinking of how it had felt to be young. Her hometown came back to her more clearly than it had since she’d visited after her parents’ death. She could see the wind dancing across the lake, the swaying trees, the road filled with dust and the rocks that could be skipped into the water. And then, of course, there was Qiang. What was she doing, exactly? The word pining occurred to her. How embarrassing, how irrational—but she couldn’t deny it. She was existing simultaneously in the imaginary past and in the actual present, an effort so all-consuming that every other action seemed a chore. Funny how the theft of the bracelet had come just before Qiang’s phone call. As if the loss of the first was meant to remind her of how it felt to lose the second.
Meanwhile, Karen had grown impatient. Often, Lina would look up from a daydream to see her daughter staring at her with an eyebrow raised—a facial expression likely picked up from one of her sassier classmates at Black Tree Academy. “Mom,” she would say in a high, cartoonish voice. “Stop being weird.” Now she was staring at Lina, waiting for her attention to wander back to the present.
“Hey,” Lina said. “What if we hired an ayi?”
Karen frowned. “Why?”
“To help with the cooking. And grocery shopping.” A half-truth was better than a lie. “If we had an ayi, I wouldn’t have to make you come with me. You hate grocery shopping.”
Karen narrowed her eyes. “Is this because the other Lanso
n ladies all have ayis?”
Lina had always known her daughter was smart, but these days she was becoming shrewd too. “Xiao shagua, ni yiwei you know everything. Well, fine, I guess we won’t ask Sunny to come work for us, then.”
“Sunny?” The jewelry box slid off Karen’s lap. “You’re going to ask Sunny?”
Lina nodded. “Daddy suggested her, actually.”
“But Daddy never likes anyone.”
“He likes her. He thinks she takes initiative.”
As Karen digested this, a look of wonder crossed her face. Lina knew that her daughter had always liked the younger maid who cleaned their rooms, but this summer she seemed more attached to her than ever. At first, their relationship had made Lina uncomfortable—partly because she didn’t know much about the woman; partly because it made her jealous—but then Lina resolved to make the situation work in her favor. If she hired Sunny as an ayi, at least she would feel less guilty about neglecting Karen while Qiang was in town.
“That’s what I thought,” Lina said. “So it’s settled. Let’s go to breakfast.”
It had done the trick; Karen was smiling once again. “You go first,” she said. “I have to finish getting dressed.”
Lina was one of four women who met at eight thirty every morning at the back of the clubhouse breakfast room. The unstated agreement was that they—Maggie, Susan, Peng, and Lina—were not friends in the usual sense of the word. Aside from an occasional lunch in Puxi or trip to the fabric market, they did not see one another outside of the clubhouse restaurant. They did not phone one another at home to gossip. What information they came upon was shared when they met at breakfast each morning. It was the ritual of it that Lina liked. They sat in a booth near the windows so they could be the first to see who was coming in and going out. They noted which husbands were late to work and which might not have spent the night at home at all, which residents were feuding and which had just moved in. In truth, these three other women were solidly middle class. They had come to Shanghai via Wilmington, North Carolina (Maggie); St. Louis, Missouri (Susan); and a suburb of Holland (Peng). But in Shanghai, they could forget about the fact that their company sponsors supported a standard of living three or four times beyond their personal means. In Shanghai, they were expats; with no rent to pay, they could become the kind of frivolous women they’d always associated with wealth. They developed vivid recall for wardrobes and for where other people went on vacation. When certain loose-lipped ayis came downstairs with kids, they were not above apprehending them on their way to the yogurt station to ask for the latest news. Sometimes the women stayed so long in the clubhouse that the waitstaff had to sweep the floor around their feet.
Wei had once described these other women as “ridiculous,” and as Lina slipped year by year through middle age, she could feel herself becoming ridiculous too. The “putting on” she’d felt when she’d arrived in Shanghai no longer seemed like putting on. And yet—so what if she enjoyed being a taitai? Wei had been the one to throw her into the expat life, after all, and couldn’t expect her just to disengage from the community around her. Plus, she suspected that a part of him liked having a wife with the right kind of taste to build a nice home, to buy fashionable clothes and come down to breakfast looking put together.
No—looking good. Thirty-five rather than forty-three. Better, at least, than Maggie, who practically carried her entire home down with her to breakfast: PG Tips in a clay mug, the newspaper (which she never touched), a scarf in case she got cold, and the latest gadget or knickknack she’d picked up at a market and wanted to show the girls. Better than Susan, who, for all her worldliness, couldn’t escape certain food phobias, and stuck to her heavy Midwestern diet. Lately, Lina had even turned it up a notch. No more tees or athletic wear, only silk blouses and dresses that fit her frame. She was more Western now than she’d ever been in the West. Some mornings, she put on Italian heels just to walk the few steps to the elevator, then the twenty-five meters from the lower-level lobby across the parking lot, and finally to the center of the complex, where the clubhouse sat. It was a solarium, glass-domed and sparkling. She knew that behind the glimmering windows, the Lanson ladies were watching her approach just as they watched the others, and so she made sure to do it well. And then they’d talk and eat. And then she’d walk the thirty meters back to her apartment, take off the heels, and get into bed.
But not today; today was a rare clear day in Shanghai. Late-May warmth turned the jasmine bushes encircling the clubhouse extra-fragrant. The Lanson ladies arrived at their usual booth within moments of one another, which meant that no one had to wait long for her caffeine to be brought out: green tea for Peng, lattes for Lina and Susan, and hot water for Maggie, which she promptly poured into her mug of PG Tips. Lina hadn’t placed a drink order in years. As old staff left and new staff came on, their morning beverage preferences had been communicated from server to server. By now, she could tell which barista was behind the espresso bar by the way her latte tasted. It was just how she liked it today: heavy on the steamed milk and light on the foam.
Maggie leaned in to take a sip from her mug. “So, did she come clean?” she asked Lina in a hushed voice.
“What?”
“The maid who took your bracelet.”
“Oh,” Lina said. “No.” For one nonsensical, panicked moment, Lina had taken she to mean herself. She smiled as neutrally as she could. If anyone could pick up the scent of imagined adultery, it was Maggie.
“What reason would she have to come clean?” Susan put in. “I wouldn’t if I were her. That bracelet is as good as gone. You might as well go ahead and nudge Rose out so that this sort of thing doesn’t happen again. To you or to the rest of us, you see what I mean? Especially if you’re sure it was her, like you say you are.”
Susan had a habit of fluttering her near-invisible eyelashes when she wanted to soften the tone of her opinions. She had so many opinions it was sometimes hard for her to keep them from becoming bodily reactions. Often while someone was talking and Susan was trying to stop herself from interrupting, she would shift her weight or touch her face in a way that Lina found extremely distracting.
“I’m positive,” Lina said, even though positive was too strong a word. She hadn’t seen the older maid take it, but Rose and Sunny were the only ones with regular access to the apartment besides the family, and Lina’s gut told her that Sunny wasn’t the type to steal.
Lina probably should have been storing the bracelet in the safe along with her other jewelry all these years, but she hadn’t wanted to risk Karen seeing it and asking questions. Instead, she had kept it in her sock drawer, where she could see it every morning when she got dressed. That’s how she knew that the bracelet was there one day and gone the next. She had told management that she thought one of the maids had taken the bracelet from her room, but she hadn’t accused Rose outright. Doing so would almost definitely get her fired, and she didn’t need that on her conscience. But to her friends, Lina nodded, indicating that she would do as they suggested. There was other news she needed to get to, news that wouldn’t be smart to put off announcing. Better to tell them now instead of waiting for them to find out some other way.
“I’m going to ask the other maid who works in our unit, Sunny, to be our ayi,” Lina began.
“Really?” Susan put down her fork. “I didn’t know you were looking for one.”
Lina resented the way these women felt entitled to the details of her life, as if her daily decisions were up for discussion.
“Just for the summer. We have a guest coming to town. Wei’s brother.”
She paused here, expecting someone to sense her guardedness. No one did.
“That’s wonderful!” Peng said. “When is he coming?”
“Next week.”
“That soon.”
“It happened pretty suddenly.” Lina made a face to suggest that it was all very annoying, and a couple of the others began to commiserate. To the extent that taitai could
be said to have duties, their main one was to serve as tour guide and hostess to friends, family, and their husbands’ business contacts from abroad. Between them, these women had enough experience to write two or three guidebooks on Shanghai.
“How long will he be here for?” Susan asked.
“A week. He’s here for the Expo.”
“A week, and you’re hiring an ayi for the whole summer?”
There it was. Leave it to Susan to push Lina where she didn’t want to be pushed. The truth, of course, was that Lina wasn’t sure what Qiang had in mind for his visit, what kind of disturbance it would cause their family, and how long such a disturbance would last. And as much as she feared what his coming might mean, she also hoped that after so many years apart from them, he would stay for more than just a week.
“I thought Wei and I could take some time off and travel too. Later in the summer. I don’t know, I just wanted to keep our options open.”
“You want to travel without Karen?” Susan leaned back against the booth and respread the napkin on her lap.
Lina pictured droplets of milk sliding down around each one of her chins. She imagined stapling those blinking eyelids shut. Accuse me of something, then, she wanted to say. Instead, she shrugged and stirred her congee. “That’s not the only reason. We have too much junk in the house. I need someone to help me pack for the move.” There was no better way to distract these women from gossip than by reminding them of their own jealousy. At the end of summer, Lina and Wei were moving to the penthouse of Tower Eight, a suite of even larger apartments that had recently come on the market.
Just then, Lina looked up to see a flash of color—Karen, wearing double strands of pearls over the gold-and-black scarf/top, carrying a cereal bowl and scanning the room.
“Karen!” Lina called.
Karen turned at the sound of her mother’s voice, and the center of her forehead relaxed. This was a reflex she had inherited from Wei, and in both the expression was so touching that it opened what felt like a fifth valve in Lina’s heart. That expression said so clearly: Oh, I’ve found you, and now all is well. Karen walked over, the milk sloshing at the edges of her bowl. Lina motioned for the other women to scoot over.