What We Were Promised

by Lucy Tan

  “A child born in the fields should be raised in the fields.”

  “He is not your charge,” Fang said. “It’s too much to ask.”

  “A boy is always a useful hand. Plus, we’ve got one already. It’s not much more work to raise two than it is to raise one, and he’ll have a brother to keep him company.”

  “It’s another mouth to feed,” Fang said.

  “Think about what’s best for the boy. Menghua is still making milk. We could provide more than you could. What will your wife say when you come home with another woman’s son? How will she believe it isn’t yours?”

  Fang Lijian did not have an answer to this. He wanted badly to take the offer. He felt as though he were finally waking from a dream that had kept him captive these six months. The more lucidly he saw his old life as he’d left it, the more he feared.

  “Why are you doing this?” he asked, desperate with hope.

  “Because I love you,” Zhen Hong said. “You are like a brother, and I will not see you fall.”

  Fang Lijian looked into Zhen Hong’s crescent eyes. It was the first time anyone had ever expressed love for him so plainly and unexpectedly. At that moment, Fang Lijian understood how liberal and forward-thinking Zhen Hong truly was. He felt humbled to be standing in front of this man whose frame of mind was so clear, whose actions were driven directly by his ideals and desires, whose life was simple because he refused to complicate it. Was that what liberalism was really about?

  “I have a daughter,” Fang said. “She is almost your son’s age exactly. I will do this if we match her with him.”

  Zhen Hong laughed. “A farm boy and the daughter of a scholar? It wouldn’t be right.”

  “Brother,” Fang Lijian said with a smile. “I thought you were all about progress. If we are meant to be family, let’s be a true family.”

  Zhen Hong thought about this for a moment, and then he nodded, a smile forming at the corners of his lips. “That would make me very happy.”

  “Let’s shake on it.” Fang Lijian extracted his arm from beneath the boy’s bottom and held out his hand. Zhen Hong took it and squeezed, noting how callused Fang’s skin had become since the first months that he knew him. And then Zhen Hong reached for the boy.

  The child made no sound when being transferred from one man to another. Already, he had acquired the detached expression of an orphan. It was a look that in his teenage years would be interpreted by his teachers to mean mischief. By the time the two men rejoined the crowd and the boy witnessed his mother being lowered into the ground, he had changed families twice. He would change once more before he reached the age of eighteen.

  23

  “You,” Lina whispered. “You’re the boy.”

  She half expected Qiang to tell her she’d understood the story wrong, but he only took a deep breath and leaned forward, steeling himself against her reaction.

  “This is—this is all impossible. My father would never cheat on my mother.”

  But even as she said the words, she doubted them. Her mind backtracked, trying to fit everything into place: the veiled arguments between her parents about a debt, her mother’s refusal to speak to Qiang each time he came to their house.

  But how could her father have been capable of it? Those summer nights when the three of them slept outside on bamboo mats, she’d woken to find him wrapped around her mother, as close as a wisteria vine. Lina had always thought of her parents’ relationship as a paragon of marriage, and to this day she could remember her father’s voice in her head: Love is not some mysterious force that comes from nowhere…Don’t you know the simplest things can be the most magical? Remember: Time and commitment. If you have these two things, you can have any manner of love. She had lived her entire life by his ideas of what it meant to love.

  “I know you were close with your father,” Qiang said. “That’s part of why I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want it to change your memory of him.”

  Between where they stood at opposite ends of the bar were uncapped bottles of liquor. Qiang had taken a swig from each one as he neared the conclusion of his story. He seemed to want to punish himself as much as he wanted to get drunk. Lina stared at him now, his expression stoic but unnerved.

  “How could it not?” she asked. “He always spoke of marriage as a sacrament. If what you’re saying is true, then that was all a lie.”

  Qiang shook his head. “He made a mistake.”

  She remembered the look on her father’s face when she admitted her feelings for Qiang—it was as though his spirit had broken. And no wonder. Choosing Qiang over Wei would have meant undoing years of his own penance.

  “I always thought my parents’ love was the strongest of anyone’s in our town. I was proud of it. I wanted what they had.”

  “This doesn’t mean it wasn’t. Maybe it was as strong as it was because of it.”

  “Because he cheated on her?”

  The sight of her mother’s back, one shoulder tensed as she worked the kitchen knife.

  “No, because she forgave him.”

  Poor woman. To continue to love her husband as much as she had after all that must have been the work of a lifetime. And there she had been, thinking Jiajia’s dislike of the Zhens was political.

  So Qiang had done the right thing after all. It would have been impossible for him to marry Lina. As selfish as Lina was capable of being, she could never have allowed her mother to look into the face of her son-in-law and see the face of her husband’s mistress.

  Qiang abandoned the liquor bottles and came to stand beside her. “Your ba loved you,” he said. “And he did his best by you and your mother.” He lifted his hands as though he meant to lay them on her shoulders, but then thought better of it. “I did a lot of growing up in the years after you left for America. I used to think that being orphaned meant I was short of the kind of love a person deserved. I would deliver fruit to your family, and your father would look at me in this particular way—with a certain kind of love, yes, but mixed with other things: longing, regret, and shame.”

  Lina had always thought that Qiang was sent to her house because the Zhens didn’t want to upset her mother by sending Wei. Now she saw an ulterior motive. Her father must have wanted to see Qiang. He must have still cared, despite the reminder of shame Qiang brought with him.

  “In my mind, I somehow convinced myself that if your father had taken me in, things would have turned out differently. He loved my mother, and I thought that meant I’d have a chance of him loving me. Really, though, I’d known pure love all along. I’d known it from Zhen Hong, my true father, and Menghua, my second mother. To take in a child and give love so willingly like that, with no obligation—isn’t that the most generous love of all? I didn’t see that at the time. All I saw was the love that was withheld from me. Love I thought I was entitled to. Your father’s love. And, later, your love. There is so much love that we throw away so easily for not understanding it. So don’t do that. Don’t find a way to doubt him.”

  He was close to her now, and she could smell the alcohol on his breath.

  “Why do we do that?” he asked, his voice climbing. “Why do our minds fixate on the kinds of love we’re not getting instead of the kinds of love we are? We expect it to be the thing we want it to be. And we’re blind to every other form of it.” His collar was wet with perspiration.

  “I don’t know,” Lina said. Forty-three years old and her entire life now seemed a mystery. How could she have idealized her parents’ love? How could she not have sensed her father’s betrayal beneath it all, his contrition?

  “You know, I spent a lot of time when I was growing up wishing I was Wei. Hating him for being what I wasn’t.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I don’t. I don’t know why. I guess I’ve been me for too long. I wouldn’t know what to do with…all that.”

  He rolled his shoulders as though shrugging off whatever it was about his brother that threatened to make them the same.


  “Wouldn’t know what to do with what?” Lina asked. “A career? A family? To you these things probably mean nothing.”

  “No, I didn’t mean—” He rubbed his face and shook his head. “I’m not the kind of man Wei is.”

  “No. You’re not.” Her voice was low and full of contempt. “You’ve told the story as though you were there,” she said. “Those details—how do you know these things? Did you talk about them with my dad?”

  Qiang shook his head. “Zhen Hong told me. Once I knew the truth, I wanted the particulars of the story. I wanted to know who my real ma was, and I guess he didn’t feel right withholding that from me. The parts of the story I don’t know, I’ve filled in with my own imagination. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. Can you imagine? I spent that whole summer we were together thinking about that story. But even before that, it was never far from my mind.”

  “When did you find out? That you were…that you weren’t biologically…”

  “Young. Maybe eleven or twelve years old. I came home one day after doing something against my father’s wishes—I can’t remember what it was, but it was something that made him decide to tell me. It was the only way he felt he could get my attention, I think. To say that I wasn’t his real son. I think he regretted it afterward, because it had the opposite effect. I started to use it as an excuse to misbehave. I guess I was sure that a day would come when he’d kick me out of the house, and I wanted it to happen sooner rather than later. I wanted to get it over with.”

  An orphan. Lina recalled Qiang at the Zhen family dinner table after he’d come back from Beijing. How clearly he had seemed set apart from the rest of them. He had surprised everyone by serving his parents, and filling their teacups every few minutes. Had he been mocking them by playing the part of the good son? Oh, Qiang. It was one thing to grow up feeling like a foreigner in your family, another to have that foreignness confirmed. Zhen Hong had likely told him that story to threaten disownment, not realizing that simply by telling him, he had already done it.

  “After I left home and ran off with Brother Gao, I thought about that year in the countryside even more. Maybe I’ve filled in some places with my own imagination, but the important facts are there. Trust me, if I could reimagine that story in a way—” He interrupted himself with a laugh that ended in a sigh.

  “Is that why you left home when Wei and I went to university? Because you wanted to distance yourself?”

  “That was why I left the first time.”

  “And the second time? After our wedding?”

  “The second time it was because I was in love with you.”

  Ai shang ni le. In Chinese, the verb associated with romantic love was “to rise.” It was proof that Americans had a better understanding of its true nature, or else that romance existed only for the young and naive.

  “And Wei never knew?”

  “No,” Qiang said. “Did he ever know about—you know—us?”

  “No.”

  He nodded; she could see he was relieved.

  “I asked my father about you,” Lina said. “On the day of the wedding, I asked him if it could be you instead. I said I’d still be marrying into the Zhen family. He would still be repaying his friend’s kindness—”

  She understood suddenly, just as the words were coming from his mouth.

  “And of course it wasn’t true,” Qiang said, “because…aiya, because I was the debt. And you were the repayment.”

  He paused, giving the words the gravity they deserved. One look at his face told her that he expected them to effect some change in her, that understanding the situation fully would convince her to forgive him. But as the truth became clear, she only grew angrier. He had known all along that they could never be together and still he had let her fall in love with him. He had allowed her to hope. Finally, she was able to see what her husband saw: that Qiang was selfish by nature. How had she overlooked this essential part of who he was?

  “If you had explained things to me years ago, maybe I wouldn’t have spent so long wondering what happened between us.”

  Qiang lowered his eyes. She could see disappointment take over his body, could feel his instinct to pull away. “You’re right. I should have said it then.”

  “And now?” she asked before it was too late. “Why did you get in touch now?”

  Qiang shook his head. “For years, I tried to forget about you, and Wei, and my parents. I thought if I never saw you again, I could start over. Go my own way. When I lived at home I felt caged. After I left, for the first few years, that feeling went away. But slowly, I felt the cage drop down on me again. It only got worse when my parents died. I realized that it wasn’t good enough to have physically escaped our village—that you and Wei and my parents were a part of me, and I couldn’t escape from myself.

  “A few years ago, I decided I wanted to see you and Wei again, but I was afraid. Afraid you’d be angry, afraid my own jealousies for my brother would rear up again. I looked you up when you were in America. I had Wei’s e-mail address through his company’s website but I never used it. Then one day, I saw Wei on TV, and that’s how I knew you were back. I took it as a sign that it was time.”

  So he was selfish and a coward too.

  “Lina, I’m sorry—”

  She shook her head. “I know. It’s over now. Thank you for telling me.”

  The muscles in her back pulled at the base of her spine. She had been standing all day and her shoes bit at the heels of her feet. The desire to be home and in her own bed came over her so swiftly that she almost lost her balance. Lina took off her shoes and walked barefoot to where Qiang was already sitting on the couch, his head in his hands. The leather of the couch tugged at the skin on her thighs, then gave as she scooted back. The charge between them was gone—he was just a man sitting next to her on a couch. She wasn’t angry anymore. She felt pity for him, but only distantly.

  “Does Wei know you’re adopted?” she asked after a while.

  “No,” he said. “I think I would have known if he knew. My greatest fear used to be that he would find out. It was so clear to me back then that he was their real son and that I wasn’t. Sometimes I thought he must have been incredibly oblivious not to have known. But why would he have reason to suspect if our parents hadn’t said anything? Every time I messed up I thought Ba was on the verge of kicking me out. If Wei had known too, I think that would have been too much for me. But now I want him to know. I have been trying to find a time to tell him. Our parents are gone now and I’m all he has left besides you and Karen, and I want to be a good brother to him even if I wasn’t before. I will never have the chance to be a good son to my parents. That I will always regret.”

  He was crying freely now. She wanted to say something to comfort him but there seemed to be nothing left to say. Instead, she placed her hand on his back and waited for him to regain control. Finally, he wiped his face with the palm of one hand, swallowed, and sighed softly. He lifted his arm around her and pressed her to his chest. It was warm and unfamiliar, and her body could not help responding with a light tingle. But then the feeling passed; she closed her eyes. In time, their breathing slowed, became almost one.

  * * *

  And then morning. Beneath closed lids was a dawning of color—a bright light being waved in front of her. Suddenly, Little Cao’s face came into view. He extinguished the flashlight function on his cell phone and smiled. Beside him were three Expo guards, backlit by the red glow of the bar. One held a broom, another a clipboard, and the last a walkie-talkie. Beyond were four policemen, their expressions ranging from awe to annoyance. Lina followed their gaze to the uncapped bottles of liquor still sitting on the bar, the drained glasses on the countertop, and Qiang snoring lightly beside her. She shook him by the wrist. When he opened his eyes and saw the policemen before them, he bolted upright. A sheepish smile crossed his face.

  “What is this?” One of the policemen took a step toward the bar and lifted an empty bottle. Wh
en he looked up, his upper lip was pulled into an expression of disgust. With his other hand, he pointed a finger at Little Cao and shook it emphatically. “This,” he said, “this is too much.”

  “Now, wait a minute—”

  “This is destruction of property!” He switched his flashlight on and waved it in the direction of Lina and Qiang. “This is a breach of security!”

  “It’s a breach of their security,” Little Cao countered. “Two Expo attendees try to visit one of the most popular attractions at the Expo and they get stuck in there.”

  “They’re drunk,” the officer said wildly.

  “We’re not.” Lina stood and slipped on her shoes as discreetly as possible. “We were just looking at the Seed Cathedral and the lights went out. We didn’t mean to get trapped. And then we got bored waiting so we came down here…”

  She smoothed her blouse and watched the officer recalibrate his opinion of her as he took in her outfit, her perfect Mandarin accent.

  “This is Zhen Taitai,” Little Cao said. “She lives in Lujiazui. In Lanson Suites.”

  “Ni hao.” Lina extended her hand palm-down toward the officer. He let it hang there a fraction of a second before he shook it. Then he craned his neck to look behind her.

  “And who is that?”

  “That’s my brother-in-law,” Lina said. “He came from Kunming to see the Expo.” She wished Qiang would wipe that stupid smile off his face. “Thank you for coming to rescue us. We’ll pay for all the liquor. We’ve been here for hours. All we want to do is go home.”

  The officer drummed the flashlight on his thigh, deliberating. “Jian gui,” he finally said. “Get their information and let them go. Then we can all go back to bed.”

  Lina and Qiang gave their names and addresses to the policemen, and they all climbed up the winding stairs into the Seed Cathedral. Though it was still early, each of the cathedral’s fibers had caught its share of sun and sent pinpoints of light pulsing along the curved walls. The door to the site was propped open, and out stretched the Expo grounds, draped in the shadows of early morning. It had been a long time since she’d been awake this early. Aside from those first jetlagged days in China, she’d never seen a sunrise from the windows of their apartment in Lanson Suites. Not like she had every day in Collegeville, when she got ready for school just as the sun’s first rays were pricking through the dense tree leaves in their backyard. Summer mornings in Collegeville were wet, dewy. Nothing like the dry heat moving across the Expo grounds.