What We Were Promised

by Lucy Tan

  “Lina,” Qiang said. “Come on. You should eat.”

  She had mashed most of her honeydew into a pulpy mess.

  “To tell you the truth, I can’t remember which year we went to Copenhagen. In fact, I’m only pretty sure that it was me who went and not some other woman who lives in this building. We all go to the same places anyway, you know, share the same pictures. It’s my favorite spot and I don’t remember if we got there by plane or cruise ship, and like I said, if you want to get really technical about it, I can’t be entirely sure it was me at all.”

  Qiang had stopped chewing. If he was concerned about her before, he was downright alarmed now. The lines in his forehead twitched like an EKG.

  Wasted opportunity. That’s what her life had become—a series of wasted opportunities. And here she was, complaining about her own poor choices to a person who had barely left the country. Rein it in, Lina told herself.

  “When I was in college, I picked up this book by a Frenchwoman, Simone de Beauvoir. At a funny old bookshop by the university. The book was called The Second Sex.”

  “I remember,” Qiang said. “You wrote about it in a letter once.”

  Had she written to him about it? That moment in the bookshop felt so vivid that at times she thought it must have happened in a recurring dream.

  “It was a whole volume of essays about being a woman and I didn’t understand any of it. So I translated it from English to Chinese, hoping that would help. I spent months working on that book, and afterward, I reread it in Chinese and still didn’t understand most of what was said. But I do remember one line from the text. ‘A person is not born a woman, but rather becomes one…’ Something like that. It was eye-opening to me at the time, the idea that gender is not something you’re born with but a set of social rules you’re born into. You can choose to follow them or not. Knowing that there was a difference made the whole world seem more difficult and interesting and full of possibility.”

  Qiang nodded for her to go on, but Lina did not trust where this train of thought was leading.

  “I think I forgot that feeling. And that’s why I feel so old. I feel as though anyone could have lived my life; it’s just me that happens to be here. Or in Copenhagen. Or in America.”

  She laughed now, blinking away tears. “You’re not like me,” she said to Qiang. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “No,” he said softly. “You’re not like anyone else.”

  “I didn’t mean to get sad and grumpy. Finding that book…I brought up that story because it’s a very nice memory for me. It makes me remember what it feels like to be young.”

  “To want to learn?” Qiang asked.

  “Not only to learn but to be astounded. To read about the world and want to be a part of it. To work to understand someone else’s ideas with the help of two languages and to feel as though you have nothing to lose but time.” She remembered the back cover of that book and how the author had looked out from a photo, unsmiling, with a stare so sharp it gave Lina chills. Lina had bought the book on that stare alone.

  “And to fall in love with something because of the mystery of it.”

  “It’s true,” Qiang said. “That is exactly how it feels to be young.” He took her hand again and squeezed it. This time she didn’t pull away.

  She had been talking about the book but saw that he had heard it differently. He thought she was talking about the two of them and what they had shared when they were young.

  “But it isn’t just the mystery of it,” Qiang said. “There’s a reason you’re drawn to whatever it is, or whoever it is, you’re falling for. They have something you’re missing. So you’re drawn not only to them but to the part of yourself that is incomplete. It’s like…feeling more whole around them. Even if feeling more whole means that everyone else thinks it’s wrong.” His focus had shifted from Lina; he looked as if he were watching a scene play out that she could not see.

  So he was here for her. He was tired of feeling incomplete, and that’s why he had come to find her again. Lina’s mind flashed forward to a life with Qiang in it, the one she’d been imagining when she hired Sunny for the summer. He would live in Shanghai and she could see him during the day while Wei was at work. He would be part of the family again; she would have a best friend. Without the eyes of their parents and Wei monitoring them, the time they had together would be theirs alone. Tian a, it could never happen. And yet, wasn’t there a way to make it work?

  Qiang smiled at her and reached over to pick up the mantou. He dipped it in the condensed milk and held it out to her. Lina didn’t normally eat the stuff, but she took it from him now. Her throat was still tight and the bread was dry going down, but she barely noticed.

  “You feel better?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she replied. “I feel just fine.”

  14

  The Zhens’ driver was a large man with no visible neck. Sunny had seen him in the parking lot before, smoking with the other drivers while they waited for their charges. On her first day as an ayi, she had recognized him by the bright red T-shirt he often wore, which made him look even bigger thitean he was. We need a new driver, she’d heard Taitai joke. The one we’ve got makes our car look small. Each time Little Cao pulled the Mercedes up outside the lobby, a muted, dull thumping of C-pop could be heard coming from the vehicle. As soon as the car came to a stop, he would turn it off and get out to greet them.

  The expression on his face was the same as the one on the Buddha charm Little Cao kept hanging from the rearview mirror. They both had oversize earlobes and jolly, loose jowls. Taitai sent Sunny and Karen on daily excursions to the movies or the shops, and Sunny sat directly behind the driver, so she spent a lot of time watching the Buddha swing back and forth as if it were moving to the rhythm of Little Cao’s rambling. Little Cao wasn’t young, despite his insistence on being called “Little.” But his energy was youthful and curious; it was as if everything he set his gaze on, he was seeing and appreciating for the first time.

  “You don’t say much,” he told Sunny the afternoon they circled Yu Gardens, waiting for Taitai and Qiang to finish buying dumplings. The rush-hour traffic had clogged the tourist site, making it hard not only to find parking but also for the car to move more than a meter a minute. It had been hot out, but now the sun was just an orange throb in the antique pavilions that made up the bazaar. Karen was asleep, her head in Sunny’s lap.

  “What is there to say?” Sunny asked, surprised. Little Cao was a circular conversationalist. He talked aloud about the same few topics—his brother, who owned a factory in Tianjin that made German products; the superiority of German craftsmanship and ingenuity; and the difficulty he had learning to use his new cell phone. He hadn’t made it clear until this moment that he expected her to participate in the conversation.

  “I’ve never met an ayi with nothing to say. Where are you from?”

  “Anhui.” She didn’t need to ask where he was from; she had heard him banter with parking attendants in Shanghainese. After living in the city for years, its dialect still fascinated her more than any Western language. Like all Chinese dialects, it had Mandarin roots, the precisely shaped words gutted and flattened to make room for lower tones and looser tongues. Shanghainese sounded lewd to Sunny’s ear. Its words for “thank you” resembled the Mandarin for “go wild.”

  “Did you come out here alone?” he asked.

  This was a way of finding out if a person was married. Sunny met Little Cao’s eyes in the rearview mirror and scanned his face for that kind of interest. All she got back was the same ready smile. If she went by that smile, she’d have to assume he would be happy to marry anyone—Taitai, the traffic guard, a Pekingese pup they’d seen on the street.

  “Yes,” she said. “I came out years ago. Now I’m out over in Hongkou District.”

  “Group living?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is a good gig, I bet. How much do you make?”

  “Five thousand a month
for the summer.”

  Little Cao made a noise through his teeth. “That much and you’re still living with the rest of the ant tribe? I know people like you. You break your back sending money home and meanwhile you can’t get a good night’s sleep because a bunch of college graduates are fucking in the bed next to you. Am I right?” He cackled and winked at her. “You’ve got to take care of you. If your body starts breaking down, who is going to provide for Mom and Dad? Who’s going to upgrade their TV to a sixty-four-inch, right?”

  “I just started,” she said. “This is better than anything I’ve ever had. I’m still getting used to it.”

  “All right, all right. What do you do for fun?”

  She almost laughed. “I don’t have time for fun.”

  “I mean, what do you do with your friends?”

  She hadn’t heard from Rose in days. It was all she could do not to go down to the service hall and ask after her. “I don’t have any friends.”

  “Qie! No time for friends, no time for fun. Let me tell you what happens to people like you. Either you get burned out and go back to where you came from or you hang on here, miserable from day to day, thinking it’s all for the greater good of the family. Can’t last like that. If you ask me, the best thing a person can do is live for himself. Work for your family, live for you. Send some of that money home, but spend some too.”

  With these last words, he lifted his palm and let it drop on the steering wheel. The car horn released a loud blare, and Karen lifted her head from Sunny’s lap.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” Sunny said. “We’re here. We just have to find parking.”

  Karen sat up, squinted out the window. “I want to get out now.”

  “Your mom and uncle are coming out soon.”

  “No. I’m bored, I want to get out.”

  Sunny hesitated. Her instinct told her that she and Karen should not get out of the car. It was clear from that first dinner that there was awkwardness within the Zhen family. Boss Zhen and his brother were not close—and it wasn’t just because many years had passed since they’d seen each other. On the night of Qiang’s arrival, when Sunny stood at the kitchen counter eating her dinner, she hadn’t been able to concentrate on the meal. The stop-and-go cadence of conversation in the next room set her on edge. When she had at last peeked in to check on them, Karen was leaning forward in her seat, for once paying attention to the adult conversation. Taitai’s jaw was set, her eyes locked on her husband, who had grown so red in the face, Sunny thought he might have had too much to drink. Qiang was the only one she hadn’t been able to read. He’d been sitting with his back to her and he’d kept his voice low throughout the meal. But since then, she’d noticed that he and Taitai had warmed up to each other. While Wei was at work, the two of them spent hours drinking tea on the balcony, their postures secretive. Whatever was going on between them, Sunny would rather not know.

  “Come on!”

  “You’ve been awake five seconds,” Sunny said, stalling.

  “I want to find my mom.” Karen’s voice tightened into a whine. Sunny finally relented and cut a glance at Little Cao in the rearview mirror. You’re responsible for this, her look said, and she followed Karen out of the car.

  Little Cao had dropped them at the entrance closest to the pearl market. Sunny knew the outskirts of the bazaar well but hadn’t entered the main thoroughfare in some time. She let Karen lead the way through the crowd, past shops selling women’s stockings, household items, seasonal decor, and more. At the craft bazaar, vendors held their mouths too close to bullhorns, shouting advertising deals in rhyming couplets. Some had recorded their own voices and played their ads on staticky sound systems. A few artisans carried handmade pieces, but most other wares were mass-produced and shipped in from neighboring factory towns.

  The main attraction in Yu Gardens, other than the gardens themselves, was the dumpling house. It was located down a narrow alleyway among stores that sold novelty items like silk-embroidered wall hangings, framed portraits of Mao, and signature stamps engraved on imitation jade. Sunny had never seen the line for soup dumplings less than ten meters long and today was no different. Foreigners shifted from one foot to the other, weighed down by their long-lens cameras and shopping bags full of pearl jewelry. Near the pickup window was a trash bin in which an old Chinese lady rummaged for discarded dumplings. Every time she found one, she bit open the doughy skin, freed the meatball, and popped it urgently into her mouth. Sunny watched a white man lift his camera to his face, think better of it, and recap the lens.

  “There they are,” Karen said. She pointed to the front of the line. It took a while for Sunny to realize that the woman standing with her feet together, her hands in the back pockets of her trousers, and her head thrown back in childish glee was Zhen Taitai. Qiang, his body angled away from hers, was giving her a grin and a sideways look. Sunny had glanced at them twice without recognizing them, and that was because she had seen something she wasn’t expecting—something she shouldn’t have seen. But it was too late to turn away. Karen was already running toward them.

  “Mom!”

  Taitai turned, startled. When she saw Karen, a flicker of fear crossed her face. Then she narrowed her eyes and scanned the crowd for Sunny.

  “Karen woke up and wanted to join you,” Sunny said as she approached.

  “But we’re almost done here. If you had called, I could have told you that.”

  In the week that Sunny had worked for Taitai, she’d come to realize that her authoritative attitude was a front. In practice, she was eager to turn most of the daily decision-making over to Sunny. Aside from the feast Taitai had made on the night Qiang arrived, she had shown no interest in planning meals or making grocery lists and had nothing to say about what Sunny and Karen did with their days. This didn’t mean that Sunny was any less intimidated by Taitai. There was always the fear that at any moment she could snap out of her distraction and say something cutting and critical. Now she had.

  But something had changed for Sunny, seeing Taitai with her head thrown back like that. It was suddenly clear that she was just as vulnerable as everyone else. Human enough to be flirting with her husband’s brother. Sunny wasn’t exactly surprised—she’d suspected romantic feelings between them, and yet she hadn’t wanted to believe it. It seemed too sordid and banal an affair for the Zhen family, who had a reputation at Lanson for being classy. Now that her suspicions were confirmed, she couldn’t help but see other things too, like the way Taitai took every opportunity to put Karen’s body between hers and Qiang’s.

  “Zhi dao le,” she replied. “Next time I will call.”

  But Taitai was no longer paying attention to her. She was fussing over Karen, smoothing back her hair and tucking away a tag that was poking out of her shirt. The line had moved forward and now they found themselves at the takeaway window.

  “Four boxes—half pork, half chicken,” Lina said, reaching into her pocketbook for her wallet. Sunny heard her phone chime and opened her purse too.

  Message (1) from Rose: I should probably tell you that I was let go.

  There wasn’t anything more—just that single sentence.

  “I’ll be back,” Sunny said to Taitai and Qiang. “I need to find a bathroom.”

  Without waiting for a response, she walked off toward the center of the gardens, her hand still in her pocketbook, closed around the phone. As soon as she was out of view of the dumpling line, she placed a call to Rose.

  “I’m fine,” Rose said, picking up on the first ring.

  “When did this happen?”

  “Two days ago.”

  The closer Sunny got to the middle of Yu Gardens, the louder it became; she turned and headed east instead. “Two days ago? Why didn’t you tell me sooner? What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Rose said. “I’ve started to look around. But it’s kind of nice waking up late—I’m already used to not having anywhere to go.” A dry laugh es
caped her throat.

  Sunny had been trying not to think about the foolish thing she’d done to try to save Rose’s job. Each morning when walking across the lobby on the way to the elevators, Sunny had stopped to peer out the glass back door of the reception area, toward the infinity pool. Each morning, it appeared the same as always, black and white marble glistening beneath flowing water. When she’d asked at the front desk if it had been drained and refilled, the lobby attendant on duty recognized her as a former employee of the hotel and had been frank with her. Did Sunny know how often children peed in pools? All the time. They had a filtration system in place for that, and chlorination. They drained the pool water once in midsummer and once in early September. Whatever Sunny had been told on the phone the day she’d requested the cleaning was probably one of the false promises they often made to keep residents happy. So Sunny had stopped hoping for that bright yellow plastic sign that announced closure for cleaning and looked every morning only out of habit. Once, she had even gone out into the courtyard to get closer to the pool, trying to see into its depths. Was the bracelet lying on the stone floor of the deep end, invisible to the eye? Had someone found it and taken it instead of turning it in? Why hadn’t she considered these outcomes?

  “Jian gui,” she said to Rose now. “I can’t believe it really happened.”

  Rose’s silence was long enough to make Sunny worry she had lost her signal.

  “Listen. I shouldn’t have asked you to take the bracelet back,” Rose finally said. “That was my burden, not yours.”

  A paper-kite vendor came down the alley, ringing a bell as he passed, drowning out many of Rose’s words. Sunny ducked into another alley, pressing the phone harder to her ear. “Suan le,” she said. “Don’t worry about it. I don’t want you to ever think you can’t ask me for help. I’ll keep my ears open to see if there are any opportunities. There are new hotels every day, seems like. I’m sure you’ll find something.”

  It was difficult to imagine Rose in a uniform different from Lanson Suites’ black and khaki.