by Vanessa Hua
A good kid, the kind Sam liked to teach at the dojong. When he opened his studio, he wanted to help his students conquer their fear. About a dozen remained. Debbie, a freckled college girl, who wanted to protect herself against rapists. Josh and Jack, red-headed eight-year-old twins who loved Japanese anime, fortune cookies, and all things Oriental. Leroy, a financial planner. Sometimes he thought his students could be enough, stand-ins for the children Ani didn’t want.
The economy tanked, people lost their jobs, their homes and cut back on their visits to hair salons, to restaurants, to dentists, and to the dojong. When the adjacent donut shop and the Chinese takeout joint went out of business, Sam knew that he would too. He should have begged the landlord for a break on the rent, found more students from church, so many ideas that came to him too late. That was when he pressured Ani to have kids. When he swapped out her birth control pills.
Sam stretched, raising his arms above his head and bending at the waist to touch his toes. The Koreans paused on the green, passing around bags of snacks. The men didn’t nuzzle their wives, no kisses or hugs, but Sam could tell who belonged with whom. The elegant woman in tan plaid passed a napkin to her husband, a stout sausage of a man. The shorter couple had flashy clothing, orange and pink like a tropical drink. Both couples had been married for years, Sam suspected, and would be for many more.
On the seventeenth hole, he hit a high, arching shot that landed six feet from the hole. He was playing better now than he had all day. Getting the better of Not-Garrett and his pals had improved his game. When he drove up in his cart, Juan clapped him on the back and Tony asked for pointers.
He would survive without Ani. He would have to. Maybe he would ask Juan for his phone number after the round, and arrange to play weekday mornings or at twilight, when the rates were cheaper. He decided he would offer Tony free lessons, among the last he would teach before he shut the dojong.
A careening ball clocked Tony in the head, and the teenager tumbled to the ground. He made a strange, strangled sound and went still. The wind picked up again, the palm fronds thrashing and glistening in the harsh white light.
Juan rushed over to his grandson. “Call 911! Call the police! Please!” He hooked his hands under Tony’s armpits and dragged him across the green. He staggered, his knees buckling under the weight. Sam grabbed Tony’s splayed legs, trying to keep them together. His legs were damp and unwieldy. His fingers slipped and he tightened his grip around the ankles. Together they carried Tony, his backside sagging against the grass, and with a one-two-three, heaved the teenager onto the passenger seat. Sam held Tony up. Juan leapt into the driver’s seat and put an arm around his grandson to hold him up. Sam whipped off his windbreaker and laid it across Tony, whose breathing was fast, faint, and shallow.
“I’m sorry,” Sam said, the words familiar and choking.
Juan floored the cart toward the clubhouse and disappeared when the path dipped down the hill.
Tony.
The dojong.
Ani.
Sam clenched his hands, blood roaring in his ears, his chest close to bursting. He didn’t know how many minutes had passed when Not-Garrett arrived in his cart.
“Things got out of hand,” Not-Garrett said.
Things got out of hand when Not-Garrett hit into them on purpose. When Sam did not stop him.
“We didn’t mean any harm.” Not-Garrett stepped out of the cart. He was shorter than Sam imagined him, a garden gnome in tasseled golf shoes. “Let’s go back to the clubhouse.”
“You’re under arrest.” Sam flashed his sheriff ’s badge. He almost dropped it, his fingers fumbling with the leather case.
“We’re both at fault.” Not-Garrett pulled out his wallet. “It’s the poor kid who got in the way. We can settle this right now.” He held out a wad of one-hundred dollar bills to Sam. His nails were buffed to a high gloss and his fingers fleshy and pink as piglets crowding their mother’s teat.
As if money would solve everything. It did most things. Sam tried to draw his gun. The gesture was awkward, as though someone had pinned his arm behind his back. He trained the gun on Not-Garrett. Sam had hit the bull’s-eye many times on practice ranges, but he had never aimed a gun at someone. How strange and alien the gun seemed in his hand. How tender and exposed the sunburned flesh of Not-Garrett’s neck.
“Holy shit!” Not-Garrett dove into his cart and hit the accelerator, hunching his body and tucking his head. The cart veered off the path and into the green.
Sam released the safety, wheeled around, and aimed at Not-Garrett’s ball, flecked with blood. In the distance, he heard sirens and people shouting. He was overcome with the same feeling of possibility, of perfection as when he watched his golf ball arcing across the sky. If he made this shot, then Ani would take him back, his dojong would be saved, and Tony healed. He realized his folly in the next instant—before the turf erupted, before the ball bounced, before the course marshals tackled him—and wished in that split-second he could take back the mistakes that led to this moment.
Like the bullet, some things just couldn’t be stopped.
THE OLDER THE GINGER
Sometime after lunch, Old Wu realized he’d been kidnapped. On the way from the airport, his cousin had taken a detour. If he’d driven in circles, or gone the wrong direction, Old Wu wouldn’t have known the difference. In the countryside west of Hong Kong on the Pearl River Delta, the rutted roads looked alike and the flash of return, of welcome, hadn’t yet arrived. More than a half century ago, he left the hills green with pine and bamboo for San Francisco, and hadn’t returned since.
His cousin wasn’t the son of an aunt or an uncle, but a relative of some kind from the village, who possessed a wreck of a car, and had volunteered to fetch Old Wu. The cousin was a former construction worker whose time perched on skyscrapers had inflated his self-importance. Less than an hour into the drive, his cousin parked in front of a concrete building, a restaurant famous for the local specialty: gay long, rice flour dumplings pleated into the shape of ingots and deep fried. The air was muggy, swollen as a bruise. They were the only customers at the only table, and the only staff his cousin’s daughter, Little Treasure. She brought out platter after platter, refilled pots of jasmine tea, and a bottle of rice wine that Old Wu declined. She hovered, simpering and smiling like a courtesan.
Startling to find himself in high demand after his years among the bachelors of Chinatown. When Chinese first left for America to tunnel through mountains for the railroads and snatch gold from rivers, most were men. Though few fortune-seekers intended to settle, laws also barred most Chinese women, to prevent families from taking root.
During World War I , not long before Old Wu’s parents sent him to America, the laws changed. Finding a wife had remained a competitive endeavor, and Old Wu hadn’t much to differentiate himself as a suitor, just another waiter-turned-cook. Others had gone on to run restaurants, laundries, farms, and factories and move to the suburbs, but Old Wu never left. By the time families crammed into Chinatown’s tenements, it was too late to start his own. The ancients had decreed a man should not marry after thirty years of age, and should not have children after fifty, because the proper time for those things had passed.
Then his mother had written, insisting Old Wu marry. She was ninety-three, he was seventy-six. Come back, she told him. Come back and find a wife.
Little Treasure dropped off toothpicks and a bowl of lychees, and poured another cup of tea, but he refrained from drinking. He had a long ride ahead to the village, his leaky bladder didn’t need more pressure, and the strong brew made him jittery. A few minutes ago, his cousin had excused himself to urinate and Old Wu should too. He didn’t want to run to the latrines in the first moments of his homecoming, but when he tried to turn the handle of the restaurant’s front door, it didn’t budge. It must be stuck, the wooden frame warped and swollen. “Hey, hey,” he shouted.
Little Treasure tugged on his elbow. “Uncle, eat.” She looked at him
coyly from beneath her lashes. “Does it taste like how you remember?”
“We filled ours with air.” During his childhood, his family ate meat only once a year, during the Spring Festival, but this young girl had never known such want, only China on the rise and none of its turmoil. Turmoil that he had largely escaped by moving to America: the stunted crops and starvation of the Great Leap Forward, the book burnings and beatings of the Cultural Revolution, decades of strife and deprivation that his parents had spared him.
He knocked again and leaned his weight against the door. Locked. He searched for another exit, but didn’t see another door, and the sole window was too small to squeeze through. He’d heard of brides abducted by grooms, but never a kidnapped groom! His cousin must want to present his daughter to Old Wu, to make her the first and most memorable candidate for marriage and the green card that came along with the deal. In time, she could sponsor her parents, her siblings, their spouses, and their children to immigrate. A prize her father wouldn’t let slip out of his fingers.
“Uncle, eat.” Little Treasure had a broad, plain face, placid as a cow, her beauty residing in the cascade of inky black hair that fell to her waist. In a tight t-shirt and flared jeans, she was as tall as him, and twice as strong, with the muscular arms of a model revolutionary. She could level weeds and enemies alike. She could pin him to the narrow bed that he now noticed beneath a calendar of beer models. “Uncle, he’ll be back soon. Sit, sit. You’ve had a long flight.”
He settled into his chair. Even if he escaped, he didn’t know where he was or how far he’d have to walk to his village. Soon enough, his cousin would understand that love at first sight hadn’t transpired. Little Treasure would have to wait her turn to be ranked and compared to the other women whom the village elders had selected for his consideration.
He ate another dumpling, the crust crispy yet chewy, filled with sausage, peanuts, chives and water chestnuts. Little Treasure dug her fingers into his shoulders. Every bit of him clenched, his jaw, his gut, his toes.
“Uncle, let me.” She kneaded the knots in his neck. She might be one of those girls who sold themselves in the cities. On occasion, he had visited those languorous, heavy-lidded women who charged by the hour, by the procedure, in the red-lit massage parlors a few blocks from Chinatown. He hadn’t visited in years, not with the dried shrimp between his legs that hardly had the strength to take a piss.
Her hand crept to his thigh and he pushed it away. “Let me help you,” she whispered. Her face burned.
He’d been mistaken. She wasn’t a professional. He shuffled away, wondering if his cousin was spying through a crack, trying to catch Old Wu in an indelicate position. And who could blame him? China was becoming a superpower that launched astronauts into space, put on an Olympics breathtaking in its scale and magnificence, and might soon become the Middle Kingdom around which the world revolved. But for now, his cousin and Little Treasure remained mired in this backwater where Old Wu presented the best and only prospects.
Little Treasure wept, burying her face into her hands.
“Young maiden,” he began.
“Young?” Her cheeks glittered with tears. “You should see who they have picked out for you, girls pried from their dolls. I’m a leftover woman.”
Old Wu guessed that she was approaching thirty and still single. She told him after she returned from working in the city as a waitress she’d had a few marriage proposals, but her father held out, convinced she could make a better match.
“You don’t want an old ginger root like me,” Old Wu said.
“The older the ginger, the hotter the spice.”
“When is he coming back?”
“As long as it takes.” She sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “You’re my last chance.”
“You’re not old enough to be thinking about the end.”
“No one wants meat that’s gone off.” Her bluntness surprised him.
“Call your father.”
She pushed the bowl of lychees towards him, which he ate to cleanse his greasy mouth. Juicy and sweet, its flesh snowy-white. He spit the shiny pit into his cupped palm, and he had another, savoring the sweetness of sultry summer nights. His mother used to peel lychees for him, digging in her thumbnail to break the flesh. Long ago, the emperor’s concubine had pined for the taste in winter. With lychees crammed into saddlebags, imperial soldiers galloped north, handing off the precious cargo to the next rider each time the horse tired, completing the journey of two weeks in two days.
Old Wu had been his mother’s firstborn and her favorite, the heap of rice in his bowl second only to his father’s. The most tender greens, and the plumpest dumpling always piled before him. When he was very young, he followed her to the river, where she beat laundry against the rocks. How mighty she’d seemed! Warm mud squishing between his toes, sunshine heavy on his cheek, and the smell of the river, of wind on water and churned earth.
Little Treasure cleared the table, and he smelled the dank musk of her, straw and loamy soil and all at once he remembered his boyhood, the life he’d left behind and he was overcome with longing for this lost world. He closed his eyes, inhaling.
She tugged at the zipper of his pants, and he pushed her away, harder than he intended. She stumbled, crying out, and his cousin burst in, ready to catch Old Wu deflowering her. Old Wu pushed past him and found the car unlocked, the radio playing and keys in the ignition. He buckled himself into the passenger seat. He’d never learned how to drive.
His cousin told him to go back inside, with a smile that slid into a snarl. “We’re not finished.”
“We’re late,” Old Wu said. “You don’t want to keep Ma waiting.”
Ma, the final arbiter of any marriage. His cousin called for Little Treasure, who climbed into the backseat and they drove in silence for an hour in the land of the red earth laced with rivers, passing between centuries from one bend in the road to another. Farmers in straw hats and rubber boots tilled the fields with wooden plows and oxen, and at the next curve, squat factories interrupted. The pitted road was so narrow they had to drive into the oncoming lane to pass men pedaling carts loaded with sugarcane or sheet metal, before turning onto a dirt track that led to an arched gate marking the village entrance.
Money from relatives abroad and teenagers working in the cities, in factories and construction sites, as maids, security guards, and waitresses, had transformed the village. Crumbling mud bricks made way for concrete homes, a new schoolhouse, and a fish pond beneath a willow tree in the central plaza. But the village still lacked electricity, still lacked running water, still lacked opportunity.
Strangers, all. No one he remembered.
In his mother’s house, Old Wu discovered a photo in a dusty plastic frame in the family’s shrine, beside a pot of incense and a bunch of lychees. In the overexposed snapshot, tinged in orange and brown, he appeared miraculously young. His hair bushy as a fox’s tail and his back straight as an iron rod, a man who should have had his pick of a wife. Shocking, to discover a piece of him had been here all along, in a village which had become abstract in his memories. He didn’t remember who had snapped his photo in Chinatown, sometime in the 1970s, nor did he remember sending it to his mother, slipped into the translucent sheets of airmail, in which he never could reveal much of himself. She never learned to read or write, and her brief, sporadic replies came under a different stranger’s handwriting each time.
For decades, she’d been a widow. If his mother expected him in his prime, she—and all the prospective brides-to-be—would be grievously disappointed. Only the brightness of his eyes remained, and a full set of teeth, of which he was exceedingly proud. If he’d stayed in the village, he might have become stooped, his hands shaky and his breath labored. He might have died. He was hardiest of the three siblings in his family and the sole survivor. He didn’t remember Ma’s face, only how she squeezed him so tightly he couldn’t breathe the day he left the village. He’d been ten years
old.
From the deck, he watched his father, standing still as a pillar on the waterfront, until the ship slipped out of sight. His parents had borrowed to pay for his passage in San Francisco, resting their hopes upon his wiry frame. He entered under a false identity, becoming a Kwan, the alleged son of an American citizen. A name he repeated over and over to himself, a name that never felt right, that he never wanted to pass onto a wife or children. A name that prevented him from sponsoring visas for his true mother and father because in the eyes of the U.S. government, his parents-on-paper had already immigrated.
If he never saw Ma again, she could remain as vital and strong in his memories. Any minute, she would shuffle in here, her arms wide in greeting. She slept in here, beside the kitchen. She must be preparing his bed in the second room he’d paid for but had never seen. He’d bow to her, and present her the supplements she’d requested to help lower her blood pressure. “Ma?” he asked. She didn’t answer.
His cousin eased Old Wu into a chair, telling him that she’d died a week ago in her sleep. A heart attack, the doctor declared, and there had been no way to get a message to him before he arrived.
Ma—dead? In San Francisco, she rarely crossed his mind. Now he reeled, as much as if he’d witnessed a car plowing her down. Because Old Wu didn’t have a phone or an e-mail address, it had been decided he should be told after his arrival. Who decided—his cousin? His cousin, who’d dined with him, offered a cigarette, pimped his daughter, but said nothing this afternoon. Old Wu wanted to flip the table and shove him to the ground. Watch his cousin’s ugly face twist in panic, in fear, a fraction of what roiled in Old Wu.
No expense had been spared, his cousin was saying, and he scrolled through photos on his mobile phone, displaying wreathes and banners, and top-quality, slow burning incense and the loudest firecrackers. “Three layers of silk garments and a pearl in her hand,” he said. To light her way into the next world.