by Weike Wang
·
There were times when I told my father, All you want me to do is study, all you want me to do is achieve. I am tired of learning everything.
What use is all this knowledge when in school they are still calling you a freak?
I could not tell that in his questions, the many times he motioned me over to teach me one of the three things, was his desire for me to be fearless.
Is being fearless better than being pretty?
My mother, for all her looks, marries my father, who is not handsome. When they meet, she must see something different in him. He is serious, often too serious, and she finds this intriguing or maybe endearing. If he is going to make it abroad, he tells her, he is going to get a PhD. At the time, my mother thinks, A PhD, what is that? No one around her is getting one, much less thinking of doing it abroad.
The face, the body, my mother refers to these things as hardware. You cannot change them. But you can change what you know and the mind, she refers to as software.
Though is that true? There is makeup, surgery, weight loss. Hardware is easily changeable nowadays.
Beauty is weakness, I remember a model saying during an interview. She is referring to when people see how gorgeous she is; they immediately think that she is not strong.
But I think my mother would have had a harder time here if she were not beautiful. When she arrives, she begins using beauty as a shield. She does not enjoy being poor (who does?), but she manages, adopts a saying: If you are beautiful, you will look good in anything, even this shabby little number from Kmart. Also, what does she have now if not beauty? There is her wit, but how to get across wit in a language she does not speak?
My mother is not dumb. She knows beauty is not everlasting. So she tells me often, You are not beautiful, do not think yourself beautiful, and I am angry at her for a long time.
It is a double-edged sword.
To be smart and beautiful, says the best friend, and this is probably very close to what every woman wants. I too had high hopes of growing up into both a genius and a bombshell.
To be Marie Curie but then to also look like Grace Kelly.
···
Born Maria Salomea Skłodowska, she is the first to win two Nobels. She is the first to win it in two different sciences. In 1902, she isolates one-tenth of a gram of a new chemical and discovers radioactivity. Pierre, her husband, calls the new chemical radium, from the Latin word radius, meaning ray.
Once, Eric and I debated who was the best chemist of all time. He said these things were hard to quantify, what metric do you use?
How about just the sheer number of metals? I said.
How about just the sheer number of discoveries?
But why does there have to a best? he asked. Why does there have to a worst?
Chemistry, while powerful, is sometimes unpredictable. In 1902, radium’s glow is mistaken for spontaneous energy and Marie is celebrated. But then in 1928, the lip-pointing girls, the going straight to your bones.
···
Do you have a very smart dog? asks other owners after I tell them that he prefers socks.
I think so. Then they tell me of a test to see if you truly have a smart dog. Put a blanket over the dog and see how long it takes him to get out of it.
I do this and start the timer.
But the dog is so immobilized by the darkness—Oh my god, the darkness, the world has disappeared before my eyes—that at the four-minute mark, he lies down.
Another test is to put a treat under a plastic cup and see how long it takes him to get the treat out.
A week later, the cup is still there.
I give him the treat anyway. It’s okay. You don’t have to be a very smart dog. I actually prefer that you’re not. If you were a very smart dog, I wouldn’t find you as funny.
·
At the end of a recent session, the math student asks if I have somewhere to be after this (not really), if we are saying good-bye now (I don’t know), let’s go somewhere else (sure, okay). We stroll through a park. We play a game. How many cars are buried under that snow pile? Two or a billion? I tell him that proverb, then I tell him this joke: If you start digging it is cars all the way down.
Likes? Dislikes? We sit in a café and talk about how we both hate to bowl and then go bowling the day after, thinking that the other person is terrible, but then, at the bowling alley, find out that the other person is not terrible at all and was in fact putting up a ruse.
He is quite competitive.
I am a terrible loser.
He puts an arm around my shoulders anyway. I notice that his arm span is much longer than Eric’s and thicker, so more insulating against the wind. But I do not feel much safer. I feel about the same.
···
Ping goes my computer when a new e-mail comes in. Actually the computer is silent. The ping is in my head. It is an e-mail from Eric.
But I’m not going to open it, I say. At least not until tomorrow.
Then tomorrow comes and I decide not to open it until the day after.
Open it right now, says the best friend, whom I page at work again, asking what I should do.
It could be important, she says. What if he is trying to tell you something? What if someone in his family died? Open it right now.
I can’t.
Accidentally or not, I hit delete. Then I panic. Where did it go? In the time that I search through my phone, it feels as if my eyes have fallen out of my head and rolled elsewhere.
You have to write him back, she says, or else he will think that you don’t care.
But he already thinks that. And maybe I should let him continue to think that and move on and find someone else. Maybe this is all for the best because he deserves someone equally good, if not gooder.
Gooder?
I mean goodest.
The best friend says, At the very least, write him an e-mail to say that you are alive.
·
I place bets with myself while biking.
If I catch three green lights in a row, I will write him back today.
If I catch no green lights, I will write him back sometime later.
A universal law of traffic: once you hit one red light, you will hit them all.
If I’m not going to write that e-mail I might as well exercise. At midnight, I do jumping jacks. The online fitness guru has a new move. It is called the mountain climber froggy hop.
The what? I say, while trying to do it.
Afterward, I make myself a health smoothie. I put in blueberries, a plum. Looking at the purple blender, I turn on some music: Jimi Hendrix. I turn the volume up high.
He said, You look pretty in a qipao. You are prettier than manganese. But the challenge is to be both smart and pretty, so I push his compliments away because I think believing them will mean that I have compromised.
My singing is terrible. Purple haze, all in my brain.
Soon the people downstairs complain. They call the landlord who then calls me. What is that terrible ruckus?
I remember something else he said. The song’s intro, weirdly discordant. A tritone. A flat five. Sometimes called the devil’s interval. It is the guitar and bass, playing the same octave pattern but with different notes. The guitar plays a B flat; the bass plays an E.
···
The baby has become sentient. When we walk, she screams across the street at other babies, baby expletives, we think. Something along the line of Goddamn it, other baby, don’t try to out-cute me. To make matters worse, she is very cute, so we have a hard time correcting her.
In another life, the baby might have been a spider monkey or a possum. She likes to be held upside down and up high. She likes to be able to touch her feet to the ceiling.
·
A recent development: at the end of each workday, the husband calls and leaves a long-winded voice message. The best friend plays me these messages. They are truly long-winded.
I’m sorry. I miss you. I’m sorry. I miss
you. Would you ever consider coming back and visiting for a little while, just as a friend?
He says our daughter, I don’t know how many times.
What do we think? she asks. Isn’t he being redundant? Why is he being so redundant? What do we think?
We think this is okay? We think life is so ambiguous.
Light interacting with itself is called interference. Colorful spots appear when light builds on itself, one wave adding to another, like five plus five equals ten. The dark spots appear when light destroys itself, one wave negating the other, like negative five plus five equals zero.
To students I say, Observe the surface of an oil slick or a bubble. See how an entire fluorescent rainbow lives there, see how the colors change, fan out, the red violets and golds. You could not get such patterns if light didn’t struggle internally as well.
And if they don’t believe me, I will take them to the nearest gas station and show them an oil slick.
During one of our strolls, I take the math student to see the oil slick as well.
It is not really a test.
But it is sort of a test. My wondering if he would appreciate it. He is quiet for a moment but then points to a spot of orange and calls it tangerine.
···
My mother’s mother was one of the best architects in Shanghai.
In the late 1970s, she helps reconstruct the Bund. During this time, she tells my mother, still a teenager, that if she were ever to settle down and have children, she need only have daughters. Daughters have more chu xi and xiao shun, she says. Chu xi is the ability to succeed. Xiao shun is filial piety. My grandmother believes this because she was one of those daughters—having accomplished a great deal, having married well, raised two kids, and taken care of her parents in the last years of their lives.
But to follow my father to America, my mother inevitably gives up both.
And for this reason, I think she believes herself to have failed.
Then the moment of shock set in. A daughter? You must be mistaken. I do not have a daughter. And if I did, how would I raise her if I cannot set for her an example?
Upon putting that car in reverse and leaving, she thinks, Finally, a chance to start anew. But then she realizes that she cannot get very far without my father. There are many things she cannot read or say. And money, she doesn’t have her own money.
Maybe she also comes back because of you, the shrink says. The maternal instinct kicking in.
If she does, she never shows it. I am home from school and see her shoes at the door. I don’t need to look very far. She is back in the bedroom calling China.
·
During the fight after the French restaurant, I try to explain to Eric why I didn’t want to get married. I say, I don’t want to be congratulated for being married.
He says getting married is a normal thing to do. Also, what’s so wrong about being congratulated?
Nothing, theoretically.
I should have explained it another way. Chu xi, do you know that word? I don’t want to be someone without any.
But how could he have understood? His parents have a happy marriage. He grows up in a happy home.
For a moment, I let myself imagine it. Us in a big house in Ohio, a yard for the dog to run in. I can’t quite imagine it. It is too happy.
At some point my mother, probably to comfort me, tells me that there is no good marriage without constant fighting. Fighting is how a husband and wife talk.
One time, my father accuses her of running off to be with another man. She laughs at this.
Who would I go with? she says. Who would want to be with me in the long run?
The shrink says that whenever I go back into the past, I see only the bad.
But isn’t that obvious? There is so much bad.
That cannot be entirely true.
·
What is the scientific method? A physics teacher. High school. He speaks theatrically. It is a method that leads us to truth. Then in college, another professor. Science is not a panacea; activities such as human interactions are difficult to answer with this method.
·
The Shanghainese word for maternal grandmother is ah bu. She teaches me this. I do not know it is a Shanghainese word until I say it to the Chinese roommate—My ah bu was once an architect, my ah bu lives in Shanghai—and she says, What is an ah bu? You mean that monkey from Aladdin?
···
The city has made the record books. February sees the most snowfall in a century. On every news channel, there is a montage of miserable people shoveling snow but happy kids because school has been canceled for weeks.
Some people have taken to bottling the snow and sending it to California residents who are in desperate need of water. When asked how much of the snow removal budget we have gone through, the mayor just says, Thank god it is March.
·
Over the phone, I hear the baby cry and cry. Teething. The best friend has locked herself in the bathroom temporarily and slid down into the tub.
What am I doing? she says.
We talk about something else—Your student, okay not that, Eric, not that either, then what are we going to talk about?
Let’s talk about you, you warrior mom you.
A minute later, she is ready to go back out there.
This piece of advice from the Internet: At the end of the day have any of your children been eaten by wolves? No? Then you’re a good mother.
···
But March is also frigid.
At T.J. Maxx, I find a face mask. The kind that covers the entire face except for the eyes, the mouth, and could allow me to rob banks. I say aloud, These things exist? And for $3.99?
I purchase it and wear it home. My face no longer feels like an ice sheet. I can feel that I still have a nose. Soon, I start to notice other people with face masks, mostly fellow bikers, trudging up the same hills that I am. I wave to one. I give another a thumbs-up.
Maybe I could go back to lab this way, with a face mask, and start again.
During our walks, the dog thinks he is also walking me. Must exercise human, he thinks, must get human out of the house, and then he happily leads me around the park. He does not go up to everyone, but everyone he has gone up to has been offering goods. During a spontaneous hailstorm, a woman gives us her umbrella.
I don’t live that far from here, she says. But save the dog. That beautiful coat must not get ruined.
Then she dashes home and so do we, with me holding the umbrella over the dog.
But on the dash home, the hailstorm stops. The sun appears. And the dog put on the brakes to look for the sunniest spot to lie down. He picks the puddle at the intersection of two roads while I stand there and direct cars to go around us.
A proverb: My barn having burned down, I can now see the moon.
To progress in life, I still feel as if I must colonize the moon.
The shrink sighs. Why the moon? That’s just setting yourself up for failure. I mean, yes, you should at least try, but don’t kill yourself over it. There are other things out there.
·
Eric’s childhood: long hours filled with chemistry sets and mercury thermometers and building the world’s most advanced paper planes. A precocious child, a highly thoughtful yet meticulous one, and his parents wonder if this is normal. They try to get him to go outside and play ball, play catch, play with the other kids, and he does this sometimes but usually he is inside testing a fleet of paper planes, until one can finally bank properly and fly the length of his room.
Did your father teach you how to make them? I asked.
And he looked at me oddly. No. He had made them himself.
I now see the sense of discovery he must have had when doing anything in lab. He was a fast and proficient chemist and so was I. The shrink says she doesn’t question that.
But what every scientist knows—you can’t just be proficient; you have to have insight.
···
Ins
tead of cheese and crackers and a weather report, today the math student brings me breaking news. The Antarctica girl is no more.
What? I say, concerned. Did she perish into the ice?
Nothing like that, he says.
But there will be no more pictures in the wallet. There will be no more secret yearning. They will be friends, period.
Should I be feeling more at this moment? A sudden sense of levitation?
He says he can no longer be my student and I ask why.
···
We go bowling since it is clear we still cannot spend much time outside. But soon we get tired of bowling. Or I do, because he is hands down the better bowler.
How about this, I suggest, come over and we will shovel some snow. In the middle of March there is a tiny blizzard. The weather experts say tiny so that the city will be less alarmed but everyone is thinking it—I would rather live in tornado country than this place.
Also, the driveway needs salting. And the laundry room door needs thawing. It has been frozen shut from the outside.
I didn’t think he would actually agree.
And arrive so punctually, with snow pants and goggles and gear.
Two shovels.
A bag of blue salt for the driveway.
A hair dryer for the door.
We are saved by that hair dryer. What would you have done instead? the math student asks. Not wash anything until spring?
I suppose? Or climbed in through the window. Somehow both those options seemed more reasonable than trying to melt the door.
But the dog is eternally grateful.
He quickly falls asleep with his head on the math student’s foot and the foot goes numb and we are stuck in this position on the couch.
Hands not touching, but shoulders, yes.
···
It is as if we had not shoveled. The next day, the city says, Here, have some more snow.
···
The baby has picked up some choice phrases. She can now point to the dog’s butthole and say, Boo-boo. When we present her with a Band-Aid, she will try to put it over the hole and, if the dog runs, crawl after him until he submits.