by Lucy Tan
“You did?”
“Yes. I finished my history requirements in the first two years at university. So in my third and fourth years, I studied English.”
“Oh,” Wei said. “I didn’t know that.” And he was surprised that Qiang did. He knew that Lina and Qiang had been friends when they were younger, but he’d never quite been able to imagine it. The two had nothing in common.
“I was never going to be able to use the history degree. Learning English was what mattered at the time. But anyway, to answer your question, I became a Chinese-language teacher at a private elementary school.”
Qiang was quiet, as if trying to conjure the image of Lina in front of a classroom. “You were always good with the neighborhood children,” he said. “Do you still teach here?”
“No.”
Something had happened to the balance in the room. Wei felt somehow that he and his wife were being shamed. He was suddenly defensive, and for what? Because he and Lina weren’t the same people they had been when Qiang had seen them last? Qiang acted as though he were there to hold them accountable for not becoming the people he’d expected them to become, but it wasn’t right. He no longer had any claim over their lives.
“Do you travel at all for work?” Qiang asked his brother.
“I used to travel through China a lot when we first set up the office here. Now I just move between Shanghai and New York. But mostly I stay here.”
“New York,” Qiang said. “What’s that like?”
“It’s busier than here, less space. Kind of like Tokyo, but dirtier.”
“What about you?” Lina asked. “You said earlier that you travel. Where do you go?”
“Nowhere fancy,” Qiang said. “Mostly just within China. Macao for work. I went back to Suzhou a few months ago. Have you two been, since moving back?”
“No,” Wei said. “We haven’t been since—”
Since the funeral. Wei stopped himself before he finished the sentence, but Qiang knew what he was about to say. Wei couldn’t help but feel pleased at his brother’s discomfort. He could sense Lina trying to catch his attention across the table, ready to give a warning.
“You said Auntie Pei was the one who tracked down my number,” Wei said, changing the subject. “Who else are you still in touch with from the village?”
“Oh, not many people. They’re all gone. They left when the silk factory closed down.”
“The silk factory is gone?” Lina asked this in what was almost a whisper. She stared at Qiang now as though he’d announced the death of a close relative. Wei hadn’t thought about that silk factory in a decade. Both his and Lina’s fathers had labored for years inside it, but it had never meant as much to him as it had to Lina. She had spent much of her childhood passing time in the surrounding woods and lake, and from Qiang’s expression, it seemed he’d been attached to it as well.
“They closed it down last year,” Qiang said. “There was talk of putting up a solar plant on top of it. The building is still there, but they’re going to level it soon. This summer for sure.”
“Shi ba,” Wei said. “Well, maybe we’ll plan a trip. Karen’s never been to the village. Karen, want to see where Mom and Dad grew up?”
“Not really,” she said, and the bluntness of this response made the rest of the family’s efforts at politeness seem futile. A moment of silence later, Karen asked, in English, “Is he ever going to stop eating?”
It wasn’t until then that Wei noticed Qiang’s saucer had become so full of shrimp shells that stray pieces had spilled onto the table. At some point during the meal, Sunny had brought the rice cooker from the kitchen and placed it within Qiang’s reach. He now spooned what remained in the pot onto his plate, poured in the last of the fish sauce, and dug into that too.
“Careful of bones in the sauce,” Lina said, pleased. Wei was glad that at least in this one aspect, his wife could consider this meal a success.
After dinner, Qiang went out to the balcony for a smoke. Seeing him go, Lina filled two glasses with scotch, handed them to Wei, and pushed him in Qiang’s direction. Wei had no choice but to follow him.
Outside, he took the chair closer to the door. Next to the pool below, light quivered against the trunks of the decorative trees. He had a vision of Qiang as a child climbing the young camphor trees that grew near their home and had branches low enough for him to mount.
Qiang pulled out his box of cigarettes, offered one to Wei, and raised his eyebrows in surprise when he accepted.
“You smoke now?”
“On occasion.”
Qiang took a drag, then let his arm fall to the side. His fingers curled around the cigarette, and his thumb rested lightly on the filter tip. The remembered sight of his brother’s hand in this exact position made Wei’s chest seize up; he was filled with the sadness of growing old and the feeling of loss of their younger selves.
“I didn’t mean anything by what I said earlier about your job,” Qiang said. “I was just surprised by what you do.”
“Really.” He couldn’t manage to keep the sarcasm completely out of his voice.
“I guess all this time, I’d imagined you building rockets or something. I remember you and Ba would talk about it after dinner, the two of you looking out that single square window like it was the frame of your future.”
The mention of their father only made Wei feel more on edge. “We were just dreaming,” he said.
“You had the brains for it.”
“So did you.” They locked eyes. Qiang looked away first, took a sip of his drink, and shook his head. “I was too restless for a lot of things.”
Even though Wei had thought the same thing about Qiang only a week before—he was built this way, he was too restless—it sounded far too easy coming out of his brother’s mouth.
“He looked at you like you were a better version of him,” Qiang continued. “Same good heart, but the brains too. I remember how he used to talk about the future of China like it was something he was handing off to you.”
Now it was impossible to miss the bitterness in Qiang’s voice. It was true; their father treated the two of them differently. Wei had always felt that his father required more of him and took it personally when Wei did not measure up. Qiang’s upbringing, however, was conducted in the manner of an amateur chemistry experiment. He was coddled at times and overly disciplined at others, as if his parents were blindly guessing at the right combination to produce the right kind of reaction. While he did seem to care for his sons equally, Zhen Hong never held Qiang to the same standard as he did Wei.
“I never got involved in that political stuff,” Wei said.
At the peak of his career, their father had been a low-ranking party branch secretary. But soon after the Tiananmen Square shootings, Zhen Hong’s faith in the revolution broke completely. Wei was in America by then, and when he called his father after the shooting, he was near tears. “That was us,” Zhen Hong had said. “We shot those kids.”
“That wasn’t you, that was them,” Wei had said, but his father wasn’t listening. Wei should have told him what he really thought: that if the party leadership had been in the hands of men like Zhen Hong, whose compassion for fellow human beings never outweighed his idealism, history might have taken a different turn.
“I always felt like he saw himself as part of the generation that would unify the country and make social progress,” Qiang said. “And he saw you as part of the generation that would put China on the map in terms of—well, the rest of the world. Economics. Science. All of that.”
There it was again, that tone. As though Qiang were enumerating the ways in which Wei’s life had gone offtrack.
“You had something extra,” Qiang went on. “This…energy that none of us understood. What a thing it was to watch you, year after year, doing well in school. Forget building rockets. You were the rocket. To us, anyway. They named you well. Wei. ‘Greatness.’ You were destined for it.”
Qiang peered up at h
im, his face shining from the heat or the drink.
“What are you trying to get at with all this remember-when stuff?” Wei asked.
Qiang looked surprised to be taken out of his reverie. “I don’t know, I’m just talking. I don’t mean anything by it.”
“You’re talking like no time has passed. It’s been twenty years.”
“I know,” Qiang said.
“Why are you here? I won’t be angry. Just tell me why.”
A look of confusion spread across Qiang’s face. “To see you.”
“You’re not here for business contacts?”
Qiang’s mouth fell open. “That’s not—”
“Isn’t it?”
Wei tried to read his brother more closely, but there was some brighter emotion in the way—fear, or pure wonder at how quickly their conversation was once again going to shit.
“We’ve spent all night talking about me. What about you? I want to hear about why things went offtrack for you. Why you left and never came back.”
“Hao,” Qiang said, shifting in his seat. “That’s fair.”
“You have no right to make any kind of judgment on my life’s work.”
“I’m not making any judgments,” Qiang said, his voice low. “I’m just trying to get to know the person you’ve become after twenty years. And don’t forget, you left town first.”
“I went to America,” Wei shot back. “I went to school.”
“Wah, America,” Qiang said. “In that case.”
“Don’t act like it was the same thing. Everyone knew where I was going. I didn’t just take off.”
“Of course everyone knew where you were going,” Qiang said. “It was only a matter of time before you left town. We all knew it. For me, it was the opposite. There would have been no reason for me to leave. That was a frightening thought, hao ma?”
Wei let out a gasp that was almost a laugh. “That’s your excuse?”
He could see the tendons on Qiang’s neck raised, betraying his effort to keep his voice calm. “No,” he said. “It’s not an excuse. Just an explanation.”
“Let me see if I understand your explanation. You were frightened of living out your days with loving parents in a town that would have supported you had you, for one moment, applied yourself?”
Wei cringed at the word applied, felt he was channeling his father. “For years after you left, I thought, He’s confused. He’s just a kid. And then enough years passed that it wasn’t possible to give you the benefit of the doubt anymore. After that, I thought you were dead. For some time, I really thought you were dead, because how else could a person—not a kid anymore, an adult—treat his own blood the way you treated yours? Running off with your criminal friends because we mattered so little to you. I always thought you were trying to prove something. When you didn’t come back, I thought you must be either dead or heartless. And now I know.”
Qiang stared dumbly ahead at the water as though determined not to let Wei’s words affect him. “It’s more complicated than that.”
“Why are you here?” Wei asked again. He realized he was standing now. Looking down at his brother was making him dizzy.
“I missed you,” Qiang said without an ounce of feeling in his voice. “I wanted to see you, and I wanted to explain.”
“Twenty years is how long you miss someone before you show up at their door, ah? What about Ma and Ba? You miss them yet?”
He could feel that he was on the verge of tears. A shadow passed within the apartment; there was someone in the living room. Wei sat down again.
“Fine,” he said more softly, jerking the deck chair forward so that he was positioned across from Qiang. “I’m listening. Explain.”
A movement in his brother’s eyes, like an animal dodging back into the trees. He hated how easy it was for Qiang to present himself as the prey even if he had been the one to hurt others. Wei’s instincts told him that the way to get his brother to talk was to seem uninterested and unaggressive, exactly the opposite of how he was now, hunched over with his hands on his knees. But they were both men; he wouldn’t baby him anymore. It was time for Qiang to own up to his mistakes, his turn to step up and speak. He’d give him five more seconds. Four. Three.
Qiang stood abruptly and tossed his lit cigarette over the edge of the balcony. Then he returned to the apartment, shutting the door softly behind him.
12
At the beginning of August, a few weeks after their Gaokao scores came in, the graduating seniors were matched with universities. Lina was accepted by her second-choice school, Chujiao University, in Hubei Province. To get to Hubei, her father said, she would have to take a train west through parts of China that even he had never seen. Look out the window, he told her. It will be a long ride. Sketch the sights for me and send it home in a letter.
A month before her departure date, Lina was consumed by thoughts of what it would mean to leave behind everything she had ever known. During those summer nights, she and her parents would return to the table after the dishes were washed and put away. Her father would read, her mother would recite a list of the things they still needed to buy for Lina’s trip north, and Lina would study the angles of their faces, trying to commit them to memory. Her mother had had a picture of them taken for Lina to bring with her, but neither of her parents photographed well. Jiajia’s posture was too stiff, and Fang Lijian’s face looked sullen in the grainy shot. Lina didn’t want to remember either of them that way; she wanted to remember them just like this—one rambling and the other silent, each member of their little family with nothing much to say to the others because they had spent every day of the past eighteen years in one another’s company. When it was time to sleep, they pulled their bed mats from their rooms and arranged them outside on the grass in front of their house. Jiajia brought out a pail of water and poured it in a circle around them to cool the earth and keep out the heat as they slept.
After dark one night, Lina and her family were outdoors laying down their mats when a man came running up the road from the opposite direction of town. Lina thought she recognized the person’s figure, and when he got close, she saw that it was Zhen Hong. Her father met his friend at the gate.
“Zenme le? Are you all right?”
As soon as Zhen Hong caught his breath, he lost it again because he broke out in laughter. “I can’t believe it,” he finally said. “My son. Full marks. Fudan accepted him.”
Lina saw the two men stare at one another in disbelief. Fudan University was one of the best schools in the country, and it had accepted Wei.
Fang Lijian pulled his friend into a hug and, though Zhen Hong was much larger, lifted him off his feet. They stumbled and danced together, one pale scholarly frame pressed up against his bulkier best friend, each clapping the other on the back. When they parted, Lina could see that there were tears in Zhen Hong’s eyes.
Jiajia rose from where she sat on the mat and walked over to them. When Zhen Hong saw her, he stepped back from her husband, as if he’d been caught stealing.
“Is it true?” Jiajia asked. “Fudan? Everyone says Wei is smart, but…”
She placed her hand over her mouth and let out a little cry of disbelief. “My sincerest congratulations.”
Soon, all three of them were talking with excitement. After the Fangs said good-bye to Zhen Hong, Lina’s parents exchanged a look, and Lina understood that something momentous had taken place—not only for the Zhen family, but for their own.
Two days later, Lina and her mother were preparing lunch when Jiajia made a declaration. “I think it’s maybe time you officially met Wei.”
Lina finished rinsing her knife, shook the excess water into a metal bin. “I thought you didn’t want me marrying him,” she said. But even she knew things had changed. An acceptance from Fudan University meant that Wei was the most eligible prospective son-in-law in the surrounding towns. It would be stupid, Jiajia knew, for Lina to wait for someone better to come along.
Jiajia sighe
d, handed her daughter a skinned zucchini. “It’s clear that boy is going somewhere. Plus, Fudan is in Shanghai. If you marry and settle there, it won’t be so far from home.”
Lina sliced the vegetable lengthwise and turned the two halves on their sides. “What if I don’t want to leave home?”
“Of course you want to leave home,” Jiajia said. “What are you going to do in a small town like this? You’ll be bored the rest of your life, that’s what.”
Jiajia often told Lina about the house she used to live in when her father was still in business, how she’d had embroidered jackets to wear and a growing collection of books and records by overseas authors and composers. Even after these items were confiscated by the Red Guard, she’d never stopped thinking of Shanghai as a place that represented freedom and comfort. She’d never admitted it to her husband, but she hadn’t wanted Lina to build her life in Suzhou. She’d always wanted her daughter to go to Shanghai, and in the past twelve hours, Wei had become a part of this dream rather than a hindrance.
“When would we marry?” Lina asked.
“Oh, not for some time. Right after college. That’s always best.”
Lina did not respond. Everything was coming at her too quickly. The thought of Wei as her future husband was one thing, but she was not ready for courtship. These past weeks with Qiang had shown her that what she really wanted was more time to herself—time to discover the world.
A few days later, the Zhen family threw a celebration. Lina and her parents walked the two and a half miles over to the Zhens’ home carrying a bag of peanuts and a whole melon. By the time they got there, the three of them were sweaty and breathless. Zhen Hong saw them and ran over, took the food from their hands, and yelled for his wife to bring over slices of fresh-cut watermelon. “Here,” he said, pushing a wedge into each person’s hands. “You must be thirsty.”
As Lina bit into her slice, she surveyed the yard. Neighbors had brought their own kitchen tables to place out on the lawn, and all the tables were covered with food. Wei’s mother must have saved her ration coupons for weeks, or else the neighbors had chipped in; it was the most decadent spread Lina had ever seen. There was red-braised pork belly, lion’s-head meatballs in cabbage soup, mapo tofu, and deep-fried spring rolls. Music was coming from inside their house as well as from a portable radio that had been set out in the yard, so there were two songs playing at once. Lina saw teenagers wandering in and out of the house, but none that she knew—they were all from the school Wei attended. Her parents might have felt similarly out of place, because after eating their watermelon slices, they strayed back to the edges of the group.