Deceit and Other Possibilities

by Vanessa Hua

  Ma was here. She was everywhere in this house, in the musty herbs she boiled for medicine, in the mud-spattered rubber shoes by the front door, as if she’d stepped inside a moment ago.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Old Wu’s hands curled into fists.

  “You’d had such a long trip,” his cousin said. “You needed something to eat first. Bad news on an empty stomach, it’s too much of a shock.”

  “You don’t know what I need!”

  “Don’t I?”

  Out by the car, Little Treasure was unloading Old Wu’s luggage, heavy with gifts. Children swarmed around her. Old Wu staggered to his feet, knocking over the chair. Without Ma, he had no connection to this village. To China, his homeland alien as the moon. Dizzy, he hung his head, trying to get his bearings. His cousin tied something around Old Wu’s arm—a strip of black cloth, to be worn for forty-nine days of mourning. Unfilial son. If only—if only he’d booked an earlier ticket, if only he’d come back last year, or five years ago. “Take me there.”

  His cousin ushered him down the crooked path to the cemetery and to the burial mound, heaped with wilting flowers and the ashes of incense and hell money, burnt offerings so she could enjoy the wealth she never had in life. The smells coated his tongue like a vile pudding. His brother and sister had passed away years ago, and their children hadn’t attended the funeral. They had grandchildren of their own, and lived in distant cities after Old Wu’s remittances had afforded them opportunities to leave. His father’s grave was beside her, the grass clipped short and the stone marker wiped clean of mud. Other mounds were unkempt, overgrown with weeds, abandoned by forgetful, ungrateful descendants like Old Wu.

  More villagers were coming up the path now, curious to meet their long lost cousin who lived in America. The crowd parted for a man whose body coiled with the power of a withheld punch, the headman who must have conspired to bring Old Wu here. A few young women—teenagers—had brushed on lip gloss, rouged their cheeks, and tied off their braids with satin bows. After he paid his respects to his mother, they probably would parade before him, like contestants in the Miss Chinatown pageant.

  Did Ma have any say in the candidates? Were they kind to her, these potential daughters-in-law, to the poor granny who lived alone? He knew little of his mother’s daily life. She must have relied on neighbors to fetch straw to light the stove, to boil water for her bath, and to weed the toughest patches. He couldn’t have failed her more, no different from if he’d forced her to live in a pigsty. He couldn’t stay here for a week. He couldn’t bear to stay here overnight.

  “Big Brother,” his cousin said. Old Wu bristled. “You’ll never have to worry sweeping her tomb. We’re family, and we take care of each other.”

  Family? He had little in common with his cousin other than the vaunted ancestor from ten generations ago, who’d settled and spawned in this damp patch of valley.

  “I can’t,” Old Wu said. “I can’t stay.”

  “But you’ve just arrived!” His cousin put an arm around Old Wu’s shoulders, and lowered his voice. “The conditions at revered Granny’s aren’t up to your standards, but you can stay with me. I have a generator. A television. You’ll have my bed. I’ll sleep on the ground, Big Brother.”

  Old Wu jerked away. The air was hazy and overcast, and the heat so intense, he felt like an ant beneath a magnifying glass. “Cousin, take me to the airport.”

  “I promised revered Granny that I’d look after you.” His cousin wore muddy loafers, with no socks, never able to escape his peasant habits, his peasant stink despite his boxy suit with the sales-tag dangling from the sleeve —purchased for the funeral?—and his sickening cologne.

  “I’ll make a ghost out of you!” Old Wu said. His cousin backed off.

  “Stay.” Little Treasure clutched an empty sack of the foil-wrapped premium chocolates he’d purchased at a Chinatown drug store. She must have opened his suitcase, dug through his belongings and distributed his gifts to the children, whose mouths were streaked brown. She must have tossed aside his yellowing undershirts and underpants stippled with holes, in front of dozens of onlookers. He wanted to clap his hands over his crotch.

  “A good daughter,” his cousin said. “She massaged revered Granny’s legs every day, and read her stories from newspapers.” He lowered his voice. “It was Granny’s last wish. For you to marry. To marry Little Treasure.”

  This entire trip might have grown out of this man’s plotting. Old Wu’s mother could have been ailing for awhile. If his cousin had feared the end of the remittances, he might have written the letter ordering Old Wu to come home and marry. He couldn’t trust this man with sly eyes and oily lips, couldn’t trust anyone here not to tear the clothes off his back and the shoes off his feet.

  The neighboring village wasn’t far, a cluster of homes on the other side of the patchwork of tilled plots, and from there, he’d find a ride to the airport. He’d sleep in the departures hall if necessary until he could get a flight to San Francisco.

  He lurched away from his cousin and Little Treasure, and into a pack of children who clapped and spun and hugged him, all the descendants he’d never had and never would. The faces offered glimpses of Old Wu’s lost siblings, his lost father and lost mother. Their common blood, their vitality that he might draw upon, as if from a well.

  Though their welcome was a show, a shakedown, though he knew the children flocked to him out of survival and not out of love, he would never be received like an emperor again. For most of his life, he lived a lowly existence. For tonight, he deserved VIP treatment. Tomorrow he’d walk out of the trap they laid. Their warm, grubby hands reached for his, and he followed.

  ~~~

  The crescent moon hung heavy and low in the sky, ripe enough to pluck on a warm night, of the sort that San Francisco never had, that kept people up and outdoors, that he hadn’t realized he missed. Every table, chair, bowl, and plate in the village had been carried into the plaza and set for a feast grand as a wedding—grander. The villagers greeted him with claps and cheers, and he fought the urge to duck his head, feeling unexpectedly embarrassed.

  He wanted to impress them. Not for his sake, but for Ma and her legacy. The headman served him first, the most tender fish, succulent beef, and broccoli green as jade. Everyone watched, perhaps worried that he might have returned with tastes too refined for the likes of their country cuisine. When he swallowed and took another bite, relief swept over their faces. Old Wu was still like them, despite the years and the distance between them.

  The headman poured the first of many cups of rice wine. Old Wu spat silvery pin-bones into his bowl. With a chopstick in each hand, the headman raised the fish aloft and Old Wu picked off the filet underneath. The taste was sweet and faintly muddy as the pond where it had been raised. If you were Chinese, flipping a fish was back luck—akin to capsizing a boat—no matter where you lived, no matter how long ago you left the village.

  The lion dancers cavorted in thread-bare, ill-fitting costumes, followed by a brass band with braying, out-of-tune trumpets and arrhythmic drums, and a children’s chorus that sang a tune about a wise old man of the forest. Afterwards, the performers marched by. He clapped until his hands throbbed, but the soloist’s eyes glittered with tears, a girl no more than eight. She trembled and he wondered if her parents had threatened to beat her, to deny her food if she failed to stir the heart of Old Wu.

  Little Treasure caught his eye and raised her hands, hinting he should stand. Only when he jumped to his feet did the soloist straighten. To his surprise, everyone else rose too, imitating him. He wasn’t used to people watching him so closely and the attention unnerved him. He smoothed his hands down his shirt and over his rumpled hair. All his life, he’d worked in the background, in the kitchen, the customers focused on the dish before them and never the man who chopped, sauced, steamed, and stir-fried—even if his hands at the gas stove were fluid as a calligrapher’s.

  If he hopped on one leg, clapped his arms over h
is head, would they copy him? He took his seat. The breeze rattled the bare branches of the sycamore trees and carried the scent of burning straw from the stoves of the communal kitchen, where grannies emerged with the next course. A crone set a platter before him and pinched his cheek. “Little Wu!”

  He pulled away. “You don’t remember me?” she asked.

  He wanted to be generous, as the others must have been to his mother and other abandoned grannies in the village. He squinted at her. “I might.”

  “My brother shared a desk with you at school. We all played together.”

  Played together? She seemed ancient as Ma. “That songbird, that’s my granddaughter. Some say she looks just like me, when I was her age.”

  “Very talented.” Old Wu reached for his chopsticks.

  “She’d earn her keep.”

  He hovered his chopsticks over his bowl.

  “She could help with chores, washing and cleaning and cooking. And she could bring in money singing, too. If you adopt,” she whispered. It seemed she didn’t want anyone else to hear her scheme.

  “Little Wu.” Her gaze frank, and her smile suggestive, missing most of her teeth, leaving brown nubs. She leaned in again, her voice throaty and her scent musty. She placed her hand on his forearm. “Remember those afternoons in the apple orchard?”

  The headman took her by the arm and all but shoved her towards the kitchen. Apparently, Old Wu had passed into legend. Everyone had stories about him, even those born decades after he’d left, stories that he himself didn’t remember. Like the time he’d gotten lost and the village had fanned out with lanterns at sundown, calling his name. He’d been a handsome toddler, with a head round and hard as an iron bowl. Never still, headlong toward the horizon. His mother had feared he’d been carried off, sold to a childless couple who wanted a son, or captured by bandits who ate the flesh of the young to give them the strength of ten men. A miracle, when the headman found him asleep, curled in a haystack. Later, he fell ill with a high fever, and might have died but for his mother, who begged a market customer for help, a doctor’s wife, and procured a vial of an expensive medicine new to the country—penicillin. He could have, should have died a hundred times before he turned ten. In his mother’s telling, he’d been fated to leave the village, and fated to remain abroad, the only way she could accept his long absence.

  Dark blots whizzed across the sky, flapping their wings. Bats. He hadn’t seen one in decades, not in Chinatown. To Ma, bats symbolized prosperity and good luck, and she had embroidered a flock onto the hem of the shirt, those knots and nubs he rubbed in the dark on his voyage to America. All at once, he remembered that she was gone.

  He hung his head until dancers jostled before him, dropping any pretense of cooperation and coordination. Many of these teenagers might be candidates, faced with a choice of marrying him or leaving for the cities to find work. He knocked over his empty cup. Tipsy after too much rice wine, he tilted the cup towards the dancers, toasting their efforts, and a handful giggled.

  They tried to jump higher than each other, as if the strength in their calves and the spring in their thighs might nudge them ahead in the competition. The scratchy strings ended on the cassette tape, and the dancers skipped off. Throwing backward glances at Old Wu, a few crashed into each other like bowling pins.

  He burped. His stomach swollen on his skinny frame, like a snake who has swallowed a chicken whole. He drummed his fingers on his belly, his shirt untucked, pants unzipped. He had no intention of taking a wife whose youth would only age him. He knew that now.

  At the children’s table, Little Treasure passed out steamed buns. She filled their bowls and wiped their faces with brisk yet loving ease. A maiden aunt who must long for her own brood. She noticed him watching and smiled.

  After a night of performing for him, didn’t the villagers deserve a show of their own? He tossed up a spongy bun and caught it with a flick of his hand, and added two more. He pushed through his intoxication, his hands remembering how to keep the buns in the air. Two up, one down. One on one on one. Something he’d picked up along the way, in his years alone. Juggling, another marvel from the village benefactor, and this time, when everyone clapped, he’d earned their applause.

  Little Treasure brought him a cup of tea. His mouth puckered from the brew, steeped for too long, and though it was bitter, he swallowed.

  ~~~

  Before going to sleep, he barricaded the front door with the kitchen table and two chairs. He didn’t want to wake up to the midnight gropes of Little Treasure, or any of the wretched young beauties. He collapsed onto his mother’s narrow bed, trying to find a comfortable position, too tired to change into his pajamas. His cheeks numb from the wine, and his belly bloated as carrion. Soon someone scratched at the front door. “Uncle.”

  “Go away,” Old Wu said. “It’s late.” Little Treasure’s breathing was labored, and he pictured her slumped on the ground, pressed against the door.

  “It’s awful,” she said. “You didn’t get to say goodbye.”

  The first and only time that anyone had acknowledged his loss. His pulse was racing now, and he thought he might vomit. He tore off his sweater.

  “Granny told me you never stopped sending money, not like most everyone else who leaves and forgets,” she said.

  Some months more, some months less, enough to build a house for his parents that didn’t dissolve in the rain, to pay for medicine, the school fees of his niece and nephew, and a dignified funeral for his father. And for his mother, too.

  “Uncle, I have something you want.”

  “Go to sleep, Little Treasure.”

  She laughed a madwoman’s laugh. “Let’s go for a dip. The moon—it’s bright as day.”

  She’d drown in the pond, her body bloated and her hair floating like weeds. He pushed aside the table and chairs, sweating from his exertions, his pulse frantic as oil on a hot wok. He opened the door.

  Little Treasure set down an insulated bottle on the kitchen table. She sat him on his mother’s lumpy bed, put a cool hand against his forehead and he leaned against her until his breathing steadied. She reeked of liquor, of regret, sour and sharp.

  “Too much,” she murmured to herself. Too much food, too much drink at the feast?

  She poured tea into two cups from her bottle. Hot and bitter, but he was thirsty.

  “Granny said you had your own place, and that you ate all your meals in restaurants,” she said. He nodded, but couldn’t find the words to explain that by American standards, he was poor, and that the more you earned, the more you wanted.

  “And that you had a mansion. Like this.” She picked up a rumpled magazine that fell open to a picture of a grand estate with the white columns and ornate trim of the White House. What he’d achieved in America hadn’t been enough for his mother, not compared to the other stories of riches from Gold Mountain. She had to invent the son she wanted, the son she deserved, and these lies explained the desperate interest on these families marrying off their daughters. Enough wealth to support a wife, to support them all.

  “A new car, every other year.” She scooted beside Old Wu, her thigh pressing against his. She poured him another cup of the bitter brew. “I like the BMW X5, or the Audi A4.”

  “I prefer Ferrari.” He couldn’t stop the lies from tumbling out, the lies that would raise his mother higher in the village’s esteem. Little Treasure touched his chest and heat stirred in him.

  Who didn’t want a rich American uncle, who filled you with a sense of possibility, of prosperity close enough to touch? In your dreams, you escaped the prison of your circumstances and danced on the streets paved with gold. Little Treasure put her hand on his, her fingers stroking, circling until he felt pooled in sunshine. She’d left her tea untouched. Tainted, sprinkled with powdered rhino horn or another sexual tonic to raise him from the dead? Her lips brushed against his, and he fell into her.

  HARTE LAKE

  The last step was to unload the unnecessary w
eight. Anna Murata looked at the brilliant blue, not a cloud in the fall sky. She set down her backpack, removed the heavy rain pants, waterproof jacket and wool socks, and tossed them into the backseat of her car. She strapped herself into the lightened load and set out on the trailhead at nine o’clock in the morning. Her destination was Harte Lake, elevation 9,500, latitude 36 North, longitude 118 West. The date: October 10, the first anniversary of her husband Ken’s death.

  A year ago, as they pored over a map for their upcoming trip, Ken stopped talking mid-sentence and tumbled to the floor. She shook him, screamed his name, and crawled to the phone to call 911. While waiting for the paramedics, she put his head in her lap and straightened his glasses. She could not save him. She did not remember driving to the hospital, following the ambulance, parking their car, or filling out forms—only the moment when the petite Indian doctor told her that they were unable to revive him. An artery in his brain had burst. He was dead by the time the ambulance arrived, maybe by the time he hit the floor, and she was left alone after thirty years.

  On this trip, Anna wanted to remember Ken as he was, on the last trek they were meant to take together. Out backpacking, they had depended on each other the most. She would spend three days on the 24-mile loop, Friday through Sunday.

  They met at UC Berkeley in 1969, squares among the hippies. Both their families had been interned in the camps during the war. She and Ken met in one of the first classes in Asian American Studies, and they were married the following year. They had stayed together for decades, despite—or because of—the losses and betrayals they had inflicted upon each other.

  She was more attractive at fifty-four than when she had been in her twenties—strong and sturdy while others her age sagged. If she had once been beautiful, she might have mourned the loss of her youth, but her plainness had sustained her. She kept a garden behind her lemon-yellow Berkeley bungalow, walked every day before work, and ate cruciferous vegetables and whole grains, redeeming herself with these small virtues.