by Ling Ma
Finally, Balthasar spoke. Gesturing to the other man, he said in Mandarin, This is Chengwen. At Balthasar’s behest, the worker held out his hand, and so we shook hands. Ni hao. Ni hao.
Chengwen is from Fujian province too, Balthasar added.
My family is from Fuzhou, I told him.
Really? he asked, which in Mandarin sounds more like a request for veracity than a benign comment.
Are you from Fuzhou too? I asked, trying to make polite conversation.
Most of us are from villages, he answered. He named the Fujian village he was from, but I didn’t quite catch it.
It’s a village very close to Fuzhou, Balthasar interjected, adding jovially, Maybe your families even know each other!
Ridiculous as it sounded, I thought to ask Chengwen whether he knew my aunts or uncles. But I realized I didn’t actually know the full names of any of my relatives. I always called them by their designation in the family, the first uncle, the second aunt, my grandma. My mother had written their legal names on a list somewhere, though this was in a box in a storage facility in Salt Lake City.
Chengwen smiled at me, politely, then turned back to attend to his work.
Okay. That’s the end of the tour, Balthasar announced. Now you’ve seen all of Phoenix.
*
That evening, we returned to the Grand Shenzhen Moon Palace Hotel. I swam a few laps in the pool. Then Blythe and I ate dinner in the hotel, at the trattoria that modeled itself after Little Italy, with red tablecloths. On the walls were photos of Italian mobsters, real and fictitious, from Al Capone to Tony Soprano.
Blythe raised her glass and made a little toast. To your first time in Shenzhen, she said. May there be many more returns.
We clinked glasses.
I ordered squid ink spaghetti, the most exotic thing on the menu. It was the first time I’d ever had it. My tongue blackened.
After dinner, we retreated to our rooms. It was pretty late. I had a hard time going to sleep. The events of the day churned in my mind, the blur of whirring web presses, the Claire Danes photo, Chengwen.
After tossing and turning, I gave up on sleeping and checked my work email. There was a new message sent by Balthasar from his Phoenix email earlier that day. The subject line was Your Name.
I clicked on it, and the software asked me to download a Chinese translation program that would allow the characters to encrypt properly. I declined, because it was late and I didn’t have time to download a whole program.
The email that opened showed gibberish in place of Chinese characters. And yet, when I scrolled down, I found a PDF attachment he had sent. It was a scan of a page from an unidentified book that featured a short poem. It was the English translation of “Thoughts in Night Quiet” by Li Bai. He must’ve been trying to send me both versions of the poem, in Chinese and English. I read it aloud to myself.
Seeing moonlight here at my bed
and thinking it’s frost on the ground,
I look up, gaze at the mountain moon,
then back, dreaming of my old home.
7
I have four uncles.
The first uncle I used to know better than all the others, though we’re not related by blood. He lives in Fuzhou, a southern coastal city of Fujian province, aka the armpit of China, aka the Jersey of Asia, where I spent the first six years of my life. He has a slender frame and raffish profile; his upper lip sprouts a ratlike movie-villain mustache. That’s the way I remember him, when I was a kid and he let me stay in the wedding suite with him and my aunt, his face lit by the glare of the TV screen.
Fuzhou is so hot and humid all year round; the kind of place, my grandma says, that breeds indolence. Things rot more quickly, everything melts, the local cuisine, rooted in sea and land meats, makes no comestible sense. Crime proliferates, mostly petty thievery; when there is violence, it is of the most astonishing, unimaginable kind. The streets are cleared for weeks, and the hose they use for cleaning is anvil-heavy. It’s the kind of climate, my grandma says, in which it’s difficult to maintain your character. Not only during the day, but at night too. So you see, she concluded, fanning herself with a dried palm leaf, this oppression is truly inescapable.
A long time passes between our move to the U.S. and when I go back. When I finally do return, in high school, it is to lacquered, air-conditioned rooms of relatives uncrinkling wrappers from hard candy, shelling peanuts and gossiping. Days and days of rooms of relatives.
During the first uncle’s bouts of depression, he stops eating, stops speaking, and spends his days online. When he does go out, late at night, creeping past wife and daughter asleep in other rooms, it is to frequent karaoke bars solo and sing Taiwanese pop songs whose lyrics, everyone is surprised to learn, he knows word for word by heart: I am a nightingale that croons for a love that doesn’t exist. Into the mountains and valley swells my love flees. Against the northern winds I chase, not far behind. How ardent my love, how worthless my lover. Fuck my bitchy bitch bitch.
Every weekday, when his wife and daughter go out, my grandma walks to his house and cooks him lunch. When she peeks into the bedroom, he is in his usual stance: his back to the door, kneeling in front of the nightstand, clutching the beige phone receiver in one hand as he speaks to someone he declines, has declined over and over again, to identify, this person for whom his voice unfurls slow, drowsy murmurings, like a comb through wet hair.
*
The second uncle also lives in Fuzhou. I know even less about him than I do about the first. He has a bespectacled, gentlemanly appearance, and carries himself with a demeanor so mild-mannered that it borders on disinterest. Once the tallest of all the uncles, he is now known primarily for his bad health, a spine that, in recent years, has grown so knotted and crooked that he’s unable to work, the exertion of sitting at a desk being too great. He spends his days in the apartment, lying on the hard surfaces of the fake wooden floors, fanning himself in the heat.
Only in the evenings during my visit does the second uncle force himself to sit upright, at the dining table, when his wife and daughter come home from their jobs at the bank. The women cook a simple dinner, which they lay out in front of him: cockleshell soup, sautéed bok choy, dumplings slathered in Chinese ketchup. The conversation is light, jovial, laughter ringing out in swells. After dinner, there is more tea. For a time, it seems like the second uncle may stay upright for the rest of the night. Maybe he’ll join in playing mah-jongg with the next-door neighbors, who come proffering snacks: pistachios, sliced oranges, dried squid, sweet rice candies. The TV is switched on, blaring music videos and commercials. The room fills with chatter and jokes, cigarette smoke. A window in the corner is opened.
Quietly, so as not to be caught in the act of crawling, he lowers himself again to the floor.
*
My grandma maintains that of all her daughters, only my mother has married wisely. Of the first and second uncles, she once said: One is weak in the mind, the other is weak in the body. She turned to me meaningfully: But not your father.
*
The third uncle is the only uncle I’m related to by blood. He is my father’s brother. He works as a driver for local government officials. In the concrete courtyard of his apartment complex sits a black Lexus with tinted windows that he washes and shines daily, in the mornings before work. The Lexus is to Chinese communism what the Lincoln Town Car is to American democracy, he would say. Both look nice, but not too nice.
He wears aviator glasses, a polo shirt, and chinos, and misleadingly he affects a stoic expression. When I see him for the first time in ten years at a train station, he sizes me up. The trains get slower every year, he says.
The third uncle doesn’t resemble my father in stature or personality. My father is thin and lanky, whereas the third uncle is muscular and heavy. My father is reserved and contemplative, whereas the third uncle is brash and emotional, prone to jagged, drunken bouts, punching through tables, chairs, mirrors, the plastic chandelier that sw
ings above our heads, throwing shadows everywhere. He lunges at my father, yelling so fast and crazy that all his grievances blend together, rendered indecipherable. Everyone rushes to hold him back, their cries drowning out his yells, his own son trying to pry the tiny blade, a paring knife, out of his hands. He is so angry, it is so clear that he is so angry, and if it’s not about one thing, then it’s about everything. The words come so fast, so accusingly, in a scrambled Fujianese that only the smallest, most childlike part of me understands: You can’t just come back. You can’t just come back. You can’t just come back.
He says, You’ve been gone for so many years, and now we’re supposed to invite you to our homes? More than a decade, the capitalist comes back and he’s welcomed like some prodigal son?
My father stands there, as close as he can, daring his brother to come closer, his hands balling into fists at his sides. The low, mechanical hum of the ceiling fan descends over the room.
Think of all your similarities! my grandma interjects. You’re brothers—think of everything you share!
Despite their physical differences, there is one feature my father and his brother do share. It is the face, a face so eerily similar they could’ve been identical twins. They have the same furrowed brow, the same dimples below the mouth, and the same deep, sunken eyes. Beneath the stilled chandelier, as my uncle finally sits down to break into heavy, chafing sobs, I think: So that’s what my father looks like when he cries.
*
There is a fourth uncle, but I don’t know much about him. Married to the sole aunt on my father’s side, the man has barely said a word to me all my life. Not that I’ve said anything to him either. He is balding, with bulbous features and a paunch. He owns a gourmet olive oil store that doubles as a bootleg shop; in the back room he sells American movies and porn.
The important thing about the fourth uncle is his son, Bing Bing, who’s my favorite cousin, the only cousin I get along with, though it’s generally agreed that he’s the failure of the younger generation. No one faults him for it, though. Only my grandma says what everyone else has avoided saying: that Bing Bing is the most intelligent and most sensitive of any of us, but the fourth uncle and the entire family have breathed down his neck his entire life, casting doubts on every decision, disparaging every move, and now what the family has on its hands is a stunted, unmarried thirty-five-year-old man.
A failed doctor, a failed lawyer, a failed entrepreneur, my cousin has a plain face that is neither handsome nor ugly. It’s innocuous, forgettable. At times, when neither of his parents is looking, a mischievous grin steals over his face, mouselike, as if he lives with an almost unbearably pleasurable secret, unknowable to anyone. My cousin, my first friend.
We walk the streets of Fuzhou at night, in the one summer when I come back. Streetlights send our elongated shadows tumbling ahead of us, across the neon-tinged storefronts and buzzing lamps. Everyone comes out, the old men in wife-beaters and plastic sandals, the teenagers in fake American Eagle. Senior citizen ladies roll out before bedtime in pajama pants printed with SpongeBob or fake Chanel logos. There is a Mickey D’s and a KFC, street dumpling stands, bootleg shops, karaoke bars. Everything is open late, midnight or even later. There are places to get a full-body massage, an eight ball, a happy ending. If you stay on these streets long enough, it’s possible you could get everything you want, have ever wanted. Because I misremember everything, because I watch a lot of China travel shows when I am alone at night in New York, because TV mixes with my dreams mixes with my memories, we walk along the concourse that runs alongside the river even though there is no river, we turn down boulevards punctuated by palm-tree clusters even though those belong in Singapore, we smoke cigarettes openly even though it’s unseemly for women, especially in my family, to smoke in public. But the feeling, the feeling of being in Fuzhou at night, remains the same.
When I was a kid, I named this feeling Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling. It is not a cohesive thing, this feeling, it reaches out and bludgeons everything. It is excitement tinged by despair. It is despair heightened by glee. It is partly sexual in nature, though it precedes sexual knowledge. If Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling were a sound, it would be early/mid-nineties R&B. If it were a flavor, it would be the ice-cold Pepsi we drink as we turn down tiny alleyways where little kids defecate wildly. It is the feeling of drowning in a big hot open gutter, of crawling inside an undressed, unstanched wound that has never been cauterized.
Bing Bing, his face half-submerged in shadow, tells me, One day you’ll want to return permanently.
That would be terrible, I say, laughing. I would be henpecked to death by all of my uncles. I begin imagining it:
The first uncle would say, When are you getting married?
The second uncle would say, What are you looking for in a man?
The third uncle would say, Work on your appearance. He hesitates. Especially the chin and calves.
The fourth uncle wouldn’t say anything; he would just think it.
In my imagining, I return from New York. I do whatever my uncles say. I relearn Mandarin. I relearn Fujianese. I get married to another Fujianese. I live here, in beautiful, sunny, tropical Fuzhou, Fujian, fenced in by towering mountains and bounded by a boundless sea through which everyone leaves, where the palm trees sway and the nights run so late. I am so happy.
8
The Shenzhen factory trips were typically two-pronged: work in Shenzhen, then leisure in Hong Kong. After days of supplier visits and factory checks, we traveled south across the border, before returning to New York. This was the itinerary I would follow on all subsequent Shenzhen trips, whether with Blythe or alone.
Blythe liked to say the only things you can really do in Hong Kong are shop and eat. It is a city that distills life down to its bare essentials.
She took me around Causeway Bay, Harbor City, Kowloon East and West. We went to boutiques and malls, which were just like the malls in the States, except more expensive and grandiose. She liked to shop, I kind of liked to shop, and we shopped so much that I thought I was losing my mind. I bought Banana Yoshimoto novels at Page One. Blythe bought an Issey Miyake makeup bag. I bought two Arnold Palmer satchels, the licensed accessories brand of the American golfer inexplicably popular with Asian teens. Blythe bought a silk blouse and a T-shirt at A.P.C. I bought a winter coat lined with fake shearling at Izzue. We both bought scarves at Uniqlo. There was an insatiable frenzy to shopping in Hong Kong, to using a foreign currency that felt like play money. There was no guilt. I couldn’t calculate the exchange rate fast enough.
The shopping wasn’t all that different from shopping in New York. I probably could have found the same merchandise back home or ordered it all online. What surprised me in Hong Kong, however, was how many iterations of the same thing were available. Take a Louis Vuitton bag, for example. You could buy the actual bag, a prototype of the actual bag from the factory that produced it, or an imitation. And if an imitation, what kind of imitation? An expensive, detailed, hand-worked imitation, a cheap imitation made of polyurethane, or something in between? Nowhere else was there such an elaborate gradient between the real and the fake. Nowhere else did the boundaries of real and fake seem so porous.
We were standing on a crowded street, waiting to cross, when a middle-aged woman, in a visor and a fanny pack, came up and shoved a flyer in my hands. You like? she asked.
I looked down. The flyer, color printed on quality paper, showed dozens of various designer bags: Fendi clutches, Louis Vuitton satchels, and Coach tote bags. They weren’t just logo-heavy generic knockoffs you always found in Chinatown, but looked like the latest, of-the-season models I had seen in magazines.
Are these real? Blythe asked.
She nodded vigorously. Real! Prototype.
Blythe turned to me. A lot of the designer brands contract the factories out here. Often the factories produce an overrun of prototypes and sell them illicitly. So it is basically the real thing. She gestured to the flyer. See anything you like?
I thought designer handbags were all made in Italy or something, I said.
She smirked. Maybe Hermès is still made in Europe. Turning back to the woman, she returned the flyer. Thank you. Maybe next time.
At the beauty counter of another mall, I bought Shu Uemura Cleansing Beauty Oil, which the saleslady informed me was calibrated specifically for dry skin. She was in her late forties, with beautiful skin and sparing use of makeup. She spoke English perfectly.
Now pay attention. She demonstrated the product by applying it on the back of my hand and rubbing it off with cleansing wipes.
Now, she said, feel your right hand compared to your left hand. Do you feel how soft and supple the skin is?
I nodded, seduced. I’ve always been told my skin is too dry.
In a sudden, intimate gesture, she leaned over the counter, took my face in her hands, and spoke with care. You have beautiful skin, it is just uncomfortable right now. Her hands were thin and cool. Her perfume was powdery and floral.
And I remembered, in a sudden jolt of recall, that my mother had traveled to Hong Kong alone, one winter, when I was a teenager. The city was renowned among the Chinese-American communities for expert, cheap cosmetic procedures, and she was there to get the moles and beauty marks removed from her face. Her sisters used to call her a spotted leopard. When she returned, however, there were white spots on her face where the moles had been. She was still marked in the places she desired to be unmarked.
I took out my credit card and paid for the cleanser, along with other products that completed the regimen, Phyto-Black Lift Radiance Boosting Lotion and the Phyto-Black Lift Smoothing Anti-Wrinkle Emulsion. I didn’t have wrinkles, the saleslady clarified, but it was a preventative regimen.
Ringing up my purchases, she asked: Do you come to Hong Kong often?
It’s my first time here.
She raised her eyebrows. Business or pleasure?