by Lucy Tan
Lina turned to follow them, but as she did she walked right into Zhen Zhiwei.
“Hello,” she said. She was so startled that she managed this greeting quite casually. This was as close as they’d ever been to each other. He was very good-looking, she decided. He had a straight, strong nose that gave way to sharp, determined eyes. Unlike the other boys at the party in their cotton shirts and pants, he was dressed in a khaki-colored Mao suit, which was why earlier she had mistaken him for an adult.
“Hello,” he replied, wiping a sheen of moisture off his forehead with the back of his hand. His skin was tanned and rosy, as though he’d spent every sunlit hour since the end of the exams outside. The jacket fit him well. Its double pockets accentuated the breadth of his shoulders, and the clean lines of the tunic made him look dignified.
The next few seconds passed in silence as they studied each other.
Finally, she said, meekly, “Congratulations on Fudan.”
“Thank you.” His voice was deeper than Qiang’s.
“So. Where’s your brother?” She didn’t know what else to say.
“He’s not home yet. I don’t know where he is.”
Lina remembered that as far as Wei knew, she wasn’t acquainted with his brother at all. She nodded, doing her best to act as though she had only been asking to be polite.
“I bet your parents are really happy—”
“We’re going to play basketball later”—a pause before he continued—“over by the school. It’s very close to our house. You can come play if you want.”
“Oh,” she said. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll watch.”
“Okay.”
“Okay,” she said. She broke eye contact and gestured toward the food. “I’m going to get something to eat first.”
“Right. It’s late. You should eat.”
Lina turned toward the dinner spread, and Wei walked back to his friends.
It was dark when Qiang finally showed up to the party. No one acknowledged him and he acknowledged no one except for a nod at his brother. He took up a bowl and began filling it with what was left of the food. If he knew that Lina was there, he didn’t let on. After a while, Wei walked over and whispered in his ear, and they both looked over at her.
“Ba,” she said to her father. “The Zhen brothers are going to play basketball at school. It’s just down the road. They’ve invited me.”
“It’s dark out,” he said, but Lina’s mother put her hand on his arm.
“There are lights on the court. We passed it on the way here, remember? Let her go.”
He shared a long look with his wife. “All right. As long as you stay with Wei. Don’t wander away.”
There were nine boys who started off toward the school. Lina was the only girl. She hung back, falling naturally in step with Qiang. From time to time, a few of the other boys turned their heads in their direction.
“They’re all looking at me,” she whispered to Qiang. “Like they’re trying to see if I’m good enough for your brother.”
“You’re good enough,” Qiang said. “And besides, they’re not looking at you. They’re looking at me.”
“Why would they be looking at you?”
“I don’t know. They don’t like me.”
She waited for him to go on, but she also knew him well enough by now to realize that he hated talking about himself. The rumors she heard about him had gotten more serious. One day, Lina and Qiang had been playing outside the silk factory when one of her father’s colleagues waved her over for a private word. You stay away from that kid, Wang Shushu said. Zhen Zhiqiang is wild. It might be hard to believe because the other brother is such a success, but make no mistake. One of my friend’s boys was part of Qiang’s group last year. He said they got mixed up with a band of criminals who had them doing all kinds of things to initiate them into their gang. Stealing crops, livestock, money, you name it. They had them fight each other for entertainment. Most of the boys got scared off quick. All except that one.
Lina didn’t know whether to believe the rumors about Qiang, but if she had heard them, then surely Wei’s friends had too. Their fathers had probably warned him the same way Wang Shushu had warned her. Rumors are just rumors, she told herself. Qiang would never hurt me.
The road was wide and the voices of the boys up ahead echoed so that their whispers seemed to come from the trees. Lina inhaled the summer-green Suzhou smell, a scent so intoxicating that every year she begged her parents to let her sleep outside even after the air had picked up a chill. Ahead, the paved court next to the school glowed a dull yellow. Once they all could see where they were going, the boy holding the ball began dribbling it, and Lina became nervous again.
When they got to the court, she sat a few steps from the road. The game was three-on-three, with Qiang and Wei guarding each other. They were well matched but had different styles of playing. Qiang was quick, unpredictable, and better on defense; he managed to steal the ball more often than anyone else. Wei was not as light on his feet as his brother, but he had better aim. Lina didn’t know much about basketball, but she could tell that Wei was in tune with the game in a way that the others weren’t. The ball didn’t stay long in his hands before he passed it off to a team member, and his feet never wasted a step.
After about an hour, they took a break. Qiang came over and sat next to Lina while the other boys kept to the far side of the court. Wei alone remained in front of the basket, sending the ball through the net again and again.
“Look at him show off,” Qiang said. “Are you impressed?”
“No,” Lina said, and Qiang laughed.
“He’s like that with everything. Obsessive.” He’d probably meant for it to sound dismissive, but he couldn’t hide the awe in his voice. “My parents think he’s naturally good at everything he does, but he’s not. He just can’t let go of anything until it’s perfect. It’s not about winning. Winning isn’t enough for him. It’s like he isn’t even playing against other people. He’s playing against the game.”
“That’s how you are too,” Lina said.
“What do you mean?”
“When you’re playing cards—it’s like I’m not there. It’s like you’re playing against the game.”
Qiang’s expression softened as he registered the compliment, but he shook his head.
“If I told you that of the two of us, I was the normal one, would you believe me?”
After every shot, Wei retrieved the ball and returned to the same place on the court, his head bowed, each dribble a decision. When he released the ball, his knees bent at the same angle, his arms true as the needle of a compass. Years later, at a public recreation center in Collegeville, Wei would show Lina how to distribute her weight evenly on her feet and arc the ball through the air so that it became an extension of her body. “Again,” he said after she made her first basket. “You want it to go in like a whisper, not a shout.” By that time, she often knew him better than he knew himself; she admired him but could also see his limitations. Wei was a man for whom there would always be a ball, a basket, a court. His self-worth was defined by his ability to figure out the best way to play a game. But ask him why basketball, why that recreational center in America and not China, why he was with Lina and not another woman—one he had chosen for himself instead of one assigned to him by his parents—and his answers were vague. Because I love you. Because it feels right. For most of her life, Lina liked being with a man who answered her own uncertainty with stubbornness and simplicity. For Wei, Because I love you was reason enough not to question the life they had together and the one they had left behind. And because he treated their relationship as something solid, she had been able to have faith in it too. The aunties from back home had been right: dependability was the best trait a husband could have. It wasn’t until she grew older that Lina began to wonder if Wei’s focus on the concrete questions—How much money should we set aside for Karen’s education? At what age should we aim to retire?—wasn’t a
way to avoid thinking about the questions he didn’t know how to answer.
But on the night of Wei’s celebration party, Wei’s focus and perfectionism were still alien to Lina, and to a teenager, alien was attractive. She had lied to Qiang. She was impressed.
“So are you saying that he’s not as smart as everyone thinks he is?” she asked him.
Qiang considered this. “No,” he decided. “He is.”
Wei called to his brother, indicating that the game was about to resume. When Qiang stepped onto the court, Wei made as if to pass the ball to him but withheld it for a moment—just long enough for Qiang to understand the question Wei didn’t want to ask out loud: What are you doing over there with her? Qiang received the ball and took his place on the court, ignoring his brother’s glare. Shortly afterward, Lina’s parents came up the road to retrieve her. She dusted herself off, called good-bye to the boys, and retreated to the darkness and comfort of her parents’ company. On the way home, she walked between the two of them, holding their hands in her own, hoping for silence—boys gave a person a lot to think about.
Lina didn’t see Wei again for the rest of the summer. He’d been admitted to an honors program at Fudan University that started in June, and within a few weeks, he’d packed up and left for Shanghai. But Qiang still showed up at her house each day with playing cards and promises of fun to be had at the lake.
They kept clear of the roadside and the silk factory, and weeks passed without the two of them running into anyone they knew. The closer they grew, the harder it was for Lina to ignore her friends’ warnings about Qiang. She was frightened by the way he dodged her questions. She was scared, too, of the scar tissue on his abdomen and back that were visible every time they went swimming. One day, when Qiang took off his shoes and socks and stripped down to his shorts to wade into the water, a small knife fell out of his shoe. It wasn’t a kitchen knife. It wasn’t like any knife Lina had ever seen. This one had a small, curved blade with a marbled handle. A leather case fell out with it.
Qiang kicked the knife and its case beneath his pile of clothes before Lina could get a closer look. “Why do you have that?” she asked. He paused so long before answering that Lina thought he wasn’t going to.
“I steal chickens,” he said. “It’s better to cut the wire than climb the coop.”
“Where did you get it?” she asked, but by then he had already jumped into the lake.
She had learned that if she wanted answers from him, she had to surprise him into giving them. An hour later, when they were lying on the ground, drying off in the sun, she asked him, “So, where is it that you go to fight?”
Qiang didn’t say anything for a long time. When a fly landed on his chin, he let it crawl over to the left side of his face.
“Do you think I’m going to tell your parents?” she asked. “Or is it that you think I’m too delicate to hear about it?”
“I don’t get in fights,” he said quietly. “I haven’t for about a year now.”
“Then why do you have those scars?”
“Those are old scars from when I was initiated. Now they don’t want me fighting anymore—I only gamble.”
“You gamble?” Lina sat up. Water dripped from the ends of her hair and patterned the dirt between them.
“I play cards. Like the games I play with you, except I play with older people for money. The brothers set it up.” Qiang finally looked at Lina. “We don’t even really have to steal now, because I make so much money.”
“I don’t understand,” Lina said. “Who are you gambling with?”
“People from other towns, people just passing through…” He twisted at the waist and propped his head up on his elbow. “If you really want to know, I can show you. Come with me tonight.”
She’d never seen his eyes so wide. “No way,” Lina said. “My parents don’t even like it when I go to someone else’s house for dinner.”
“That’s okay, because they won’t know. On weekdays we play when everyone else is asleep.”
“You want me to sneak out?”
“Your parents both work long hours. They’ll be snoring. No one’s going to know the difference.”
She thought about running around in the dark and felt her cheeks begin to flush. “No.”
Qiang lay back down and they both stared up at the sky. “Look, think about it. If not tomorrow, another night. What about the night before you leave for school? Staying up all night is the best way to make sure you can sleep soundly on the train up to Hubei. And if your parents find out—which they won’t—there’s not much they can do to punish you, is there?”
Of course, Qiang would think only in terms of getting in trouble. Lina was more concerned about how anxious her parents would feel if they found out. They would spend the next four years wondering if she was in Hubei making bad choices. How awful it would be to discover, on the last night of your daughter’s childhood, that she wasn’t the type of person you’d raised her to be at all.
Then again, she was just a few weeks away from being free from her parents’ protection; soon she would need to make every choice on her own. She had only a few more years before she would be married and, after that, a mother herself. If she was ever going to break rules, now was the time. How would it feel to see the town from Qiang’s perspective, a world that was invisible to everyone else? She thought of that day at the silk factory, how it had felt to fly down the unlit steps as they escaped the room with the worms. It had been frightening but also exhilarating to risk being chased and think that she might be found out.
“Hao ba,” Lina agreed. “On the last night. I’ll come with you.”
* * *
The next two weeks passed quickly. Lina’s train ticket was purchased and tucked into the inner pocket of her luggage; rolls of cash were zipped into the lining of her jacket. Plastic bags of watermelon seeds were packed along with mantou, dried sausages, and tea eggs, all to eat on the train. The single trunk Lina planned to bring with her sat near the front door, filled to its corners with clothing, books, and miscellaneous items added by her parents. One would remove something the other had put in, thinking it not important enough to take up precious space, and later, when Lina arrived at school, she would find that she had her grandmother’s silk shawl but only one sweater for the winter, and a lonely volume three of Eastern Life Sciences.
On the night before her departure, Lina was so filled with emotion that she could barely swallow her rice at dinner, let alone appreciate the taste of the fish her mother had cooked for the occasion. She acknowledged her parents’ chatter without looking them in the eye because she knew if she did, she would cry. And then, halfway through her meal, when it was impossible for her to field any more questions with mumbled utterances, she cried anyway.
At first, her parents looked at each other helplessly. Then Fang Lijian turned in his seat so that he was directly facing his daughter. He grabbed the two front legs of her chair and pulled her closer to him, as he used to do when she was little. She was surprised to find he was still strong enough to move her weight like this. With his left hand, he picked up her right one, which was still holding on to the chopsticks she’d been using. “Look at the position of your fingers on these kuaizi,” he said. “Remember what this means?”
She was holding them as she always did, fingers high up, near the thick end of the bamboo. She remembered the old saying her parents had taught her, about how the distance between the tips of the chopsticks and the beginning of one’s grip indicated how far a person would travel in life. She started sobbing harder. “It means I’m going to end up far away from home,” she wailed.
Lina’s mother hit her husband lightly on the arm, a rebuke, but he ignored it.
“Right. It means that to do what you were put here to do, you will need to travel far. But look at this, Lina.” He picked up his own chopsticks and motioned for his wife to do the same. Both sets of fingers had natural positions close to the middle.
“Your m
a and I aren’t going anywhere,” he said. He lifted his free hand up to her face and stroked her cheek with his walnut-shell fingers. “You’ll always know where to find us. We’ll be right here waiting for you to come back.” And right then, Lina believed it—that her parents would always be the center of her world, that she would do whatever it took to come back to them. This was yet another way in which marrying Wei would pay off—if he could find a job in Shanghai that made decent money, maybe one day they could afford to move her parents there too.
Later, Lina lay on her mat, her face dry and stiff from crying. The evening had worn her out. She felt numb, which was lucky, considering that what she was about to do required her nerves to be as dulled as possible. It must have been nearing one a.m. by the time her parents’ breathing slowed to a dreamlike cadence. Lina opened her eyes and looked around. A stroke of luck; both had turned away from her in their sleep. I’m just going to the bathroom, she planned to say if they woke. Lina slipped into her shoes, stepped down the path to the gate, and crossed the road.
She found Qiang waiting between the two trees that they had played cards beneath that first summer day. She couldn’t see his face but recognized him by the shape of his hair, the way the back of it stood up and waved in the breeze. They walked soundlessly along the shore of the lake away from town, keeping to the dark swath of space between the water and the wan light coming from the roadside.