Back Seat with Fish

by Henry Hughes

  We spent several days touring Kunming, including Lake Dian, more than two hundred miles of rippling water hung with fishing nets pulled by thin men on wooden junks reefing bamboo-battened sails. We walked through colorful markets, ate spicy noodles, and sipped tea. Jin Lei bought mentholated plasters for my stiff neck, and I purchased a couple dried lizards designed for baijiu infusions. “Good for man strength,” the apothecary said and grinned, while a tomcat on the shelf behind him licked its furry balls. It was cool and sunny in Kunming, and we lingered around monuments, smelled flowers and fresh fruit, and chatted with a family whose tin and plastic shack abutted a twelve-hundred-year-old pagoda. The grandfather had driven a few spikes into the Tang dynasty stone to string wire from the pagoda to his pantry for hanging and curing bacon—the dusty, sacred past tied to the profane and delicious present.

  I watched Mr. Lu and Jin Lei talk together—sometimes in laughter and smiles, other times in obvious tension. I could catch words and phrases but could not understand what they were discussing. I asked Robyn, and her face squinched. “You should talk to Jin Lei. She’s going through a rough time.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “You’re both my friends. I don’t want to be a spy.”

  “You can help me a little, can’t you?”

  “Well, Jin Lei’s courses are over next term. Lu wants her to come back to the travel agency. She doesn’t want to.”

  “Okay. I figured that.”

  “Lu’s in the Party. And I guess the travel agency is run by the State. I’m not sure. There’s something about Jin Lei getting money to study, and now she must go back to work. I guess it’s the law. Then there’s family stuff. You better talk to her.”

  One night Jin Lei and her girlfriends wanted to go dancing. With the right amount of alcohol, I loved club dancing, and we had a couple hours of fun at a hotel disco. Just as things were winding down, Mr. Lu showed up in a polyester suit. I could see Jin Lei’s smile change. I wanted Jin Lei to come home with me. We’d hadn’t been alone together since the trip began.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “Why not?” I asked. We had agreed to keep our relationship discreet in Yunnan, but I was feeling strange about her connection to Lu.

  I went outside, where one of Jin Lei’s friends was smoking, and asked her for a cigarette. She spoke a little English, and with my limited Chinese we could talk.

  “Mr. Lu is a strange boss,” I said.

  “He is a good man,” she said. “Very confused.”

  “About what?”

  “He is Jin Lei’s husband, but maybe changing,” she said. A sickening wave washed through my chest, and I started walking, though I wasn’t sure where. I heard Jin Lei’s voice calling my name. She ran to catch me. I stopped.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Forget it. I’m going home.” I rubbed my sore neck, turned, and walked on.

  “No. Henry. Listen.”

  I turned again to face Jin Lei. “So, Lu is your husband?”

  “Yes, but not like you think. For apartment. It’s hard for young peoples to get place to live. You sometimes must do this. We grew up together. He is like brother. He took care of me. You don’t know.”

  “I know you’re married.”

  “I don’t love him the way I love you. I want to be with you at Bei Wai, and read books, and study English.”

  It took a couple days for me to understand and accept what was going on. But the sting of betrayal faded, and I believed Jin Lei when she said she wanted a new life with me.

  As planned, Nancy, Robyn, and I flew back to Beijing. Jin Lei would return later by train. After we got in the air, Nancy dozed off, and Robyn and I sipped beer, talked about Yunnan, and played a game of gin, the creationist and the evolutionist leaving victory to chance and attention. Robyn never had more than one beer; I drained three and took a sip of baijiu from a bottle in my carry-on. White clouds reflected sun through the little curved window, and Robyn began to win in proportion to my rising elevation. When turbulence suddenly shook the plane, I touched her arm and assured her, “It’s okay.” Then I won a hand with a run of hearts.

  “You devil,” she said.

  “Robyn, maybe God and the Devil, like you and me, have coevolved to get along.”

  She smiled and shook her head. “God likes you, Henry. You should figure out why.”

  Nancy woke, and we all talked about the journey, sharing some of our photos. I studied a picture of Lake Dian. “You know, I didn’t do any fishing on this trip,” I said with regret.

  Nancy looked over her glasses and smiled. “Oh, I think you did plenty, sir. I hope you can handle what you’ve caught. Don’t you dare mislead that girl. Her world’s been turned upside down.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ll help her.”

  “Well, you remember it’s easy for you to go home and forget all this. But this is her home, and she needs her friends and family. I’m sure they’re questioning her right now.”

  Robyn gave me a sympathetic look and set down her cards.

  “I know,” I nodded respectfully. Older, wiser, and genuinely concerned, Nancy could speak to me like this. She was right. I now had a great responsibility to Jin Lei.

  Beijing was cold. Ice thawed off the lakes and canals, but the water was still too chilly to angle. I taught my classes and thought about Jin Lei. I wrote long letters to Eugene and tried to work out my feelings. Did I love Jin Lei? Yes. Did I want to be married to her? To anyone? I wasn’t sure.

  I didn’t trust the institution of marriage. Like the sanctioning of churches and state, the marriage bond itself seemed to entail as much unnatural dogma and expectation and bring as much suffocation and misery as it ensured trust and the promise of lifelong joy. I saw few benefits and many risks. I knew tortured couples and happy couples and every sort in between. But my contract in China ended in July. What then? Jin Lei’s dreams were limited by Mr. Lu, the travel agency, Chinese law, and the Party. Would she get a divorce and free herself of those restraints? Then what? She might end up persona non grata in Kunming. Maybe like the heron in the fish compound we could fly over the wall. In the States, I thought, she could start fresh and pursue a new life. We could go back to school together, develop careers. But we’d need to get married. It would be an act of friendship, I finally reasoned.

  “That’s a green-card marriage,” old Art told me as we sipped beers in the faculty dining room. “I think it’s fine,” he said. “But it’s against the law. If they find it’s a sham, you could go to jail.”

  “It’s no sham, Art. I’m not getting paid. I love Jin Lei and feel she has a right to this chance. Governments be damned.”

  “Okay. Go for it,” he looked away, wary of my cause.

  After a few humiliating state counseling sessions, Jin Lei got a divorce. She returned to Beijing, and we completed interviews, medical examinations, and extensive paperwork toward a Chinese marriage license, which we received from the Ministry of Civil Affairs in a plush red case bearing the golden phoenix and dragon. The next step required me to interview with an official at the American Embassy. The embassy was located in a posh neighborhood along with other diplomatic missions and foreign-owned mansions shadowed behind high iron gates among armed guards and flagpoles. One wonders what peasants pedaling by with rice and bloody pig snouts thought about the world outside. After checking my papers and passport, the Marine on duty smiled and said, “Hey. We’re having a party here on Friday. You should come.”

  “Sounds great,” I said.

  “You’re at the university, right? Bring some chicks.”

  “Okay,” I answered and laughed.

  “But no Chinese.”

  “Really?”

  “Chinese nationals can’t come in. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to fuck a couple, but it’s a security risk.”

  “Right,” I said.

  My name was called. I nodded to the Marine, crossed the lobby, and entered the emigration office. The A
merican official looked over my papers, asked basic questions about how long Jin Lei and I had been together, if we had any children, and the nature of our plans. “To study together in the States,” I said.

  “So she’ll be applying for a visa and green card?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  There was a pause. Then he asked, “She has mole on her face. Where?”

  “Uhh.” It took me a second to register the question, and I had to visualize Jin Lei’s face. I pointed to a spot on my own chin, but the mirroring transfer put me on the wrong side. “Oh,” I corrected myself and moved my hand to the right. “On the right side of her mouth. It’s very cute,” I smiled. The man squinted and studied me. I smiled some more. A few tense seconds ticked away, then he stamped and signed the form.

  I left China in July of 1996, arriving home to find my father watching the Mets and my brother, David, oiling a pair of Penn reels over newspapers on the kitchen table. I had been living in Asia for five years, had $375 in my bank account, no job, no car, two suitcases, and some worn-out fishing gear. “Well,” my father said and smiled. “Start splitting wood and cutting the grass, and we might feed you.” My brother hugged me with his greasy hands.

  David had struggled through his freshmen year of college in Massachusetts after Aunt Lil died, but he transferred to Long Island’s Dowling College, lived at home with our father, and had a decent sophomore year. “I’m starting to like school,” he said. “Especially the history classes.” Dowling also led David to the nearby Connetquot River State Park, sheltering a beautiful six-mile spring-fed trout run flowing into the Great South Bay. David described the park’s history as the South Side Sportsmen’s Club, founded in the 1860s, with members including Teddy Roosevelt, J. P. Morgan, and the Vanderbilts. In addition to native brook trout, the club introduced rainbows and browns and constructed a fish hatchery. David took me to the Connetquot, and at first I was put off by the sign-in and payment process, the strict rules and restrictions: fly fishing only, barbless hooks, no alcohol, stay on your beat.

  “You’re at number fifteen. Stay on your beat,” the man in the booth repeated.

  “What if there’s no one at the next beat?” I asked.

  “You can’t leave your beat. Those are the rules.” He handed me a receipt and yelled, “Next.”

  Fishing should free us, but I understand that in heavily populated areas like Long Island somebody had to manage rivers, or they’d soon be trampled and empty. This model has worked well in Great Britain, and I imagined myself walking to a famous beat on the River Test, though at an affordable stateside rate of only fifteen dollars. We fish-walked a half mile down the wooded road, saw deer and wild turkeys, heard a rattling kingfisher and the music of moving water, and I felt even better. I told David about China’s bleaker waters—the fishing parks and dirty canals—and it helped us both appreciate this clean refuge in suburban New York.

  The river ran clear under bushes and through swaying mats of starwort. I could see trout nosing the current. A couple mayflies dipped and danced, and I tied on a small Ephemera pattern that I smeared with floatant squeezed from a small vial. I made an easy cast up and across the river and watched the fly drift down. A trout rocketed up and struck. It was a feisty ten-inch brook trout, and I marveled over its bright red spots haloed in pale blue. I caught a few more, let them go, and wandered off my beat to check on David.

  My brother, an intractable lure and bait angler, tied on the meatiest imposter in his foam-filled box, a black spider. The spider threw a frightening shadow over the brown stones, but the fish loved it. I watched a big rainbow open his pink mouth and gulp the spongy spider. David played the fish with a smile and brought it to the net, its speckled olive back and silvery sides burning magenta. The park allowed anglers to retain two fish. “Keep that one,” I said.

  “Dad’s gonna love this,” David said, beaming.

  I explored upriver past the hatchery, found an unattended beat, and made a cast beside a promising patch of wild celery. A small rainbow took the fly, and I slowly brought it in, admiring its silver flashes. David walked up behind me and shouted, “Holy shit.” I turned to look at him and then felt a tremendous pull on my line. A monster brown trout swallowed my struggling little rainbow and powered downstream. What a run! The rod bowed and the reel pawl buzzed as I palmed the handle and reel’s rim. David ran down the bank, whooping and pointing as the huge trout turned, flashing a golden, dark spotted flank that thrilled my heart.

  “Hey, what’s your beat number?” I heard a man’s voice behind me, looked over, and saw the khaki-shirted official from the check-in both.

  “Down there,” I said. “But this brown ran me outta town.”

  My brother laughed. “Check out this fish.”

  “You’re back at fifteen,” he said. “Break it off.”

  “No way,” I cried.

  “You can talk to the ranger then.”

  “What? Give us a fucking break,” my brother looked at him in shock. “The ranger? You gotta be kidding me. We’re just fishing!”

  The official walked off, yelling back over his shoulder, “Well, you won’t be fishing here ever again.”

  “Some fucking place,” I shook my head.

  “Sorry,” David said. I knew he wanted this to be a great day for us. Then the great brown trout made a great run and broke my tippet. “Great,” I dropped my head. Perhaps in the stress of the moment I squeezed my reel too tightly, or maybe the brown—which wasn’t really hooked at all—sawed the fragile line with his teeth. In any case, it was free. And I was free to turn the hassle and loss into a tale of suburban adventure. I slapped my brother on the back. “Oh man, wait’ta we tell Dad.” We told the story many times over the years, animating the feisty dialogue and perhaps adding a couple pounds to the cannibal brown. My brother, Eugene, and I warily returned to Connetquot River State Park the following summer. A young woman was working the booth, and when I gave her my name, she smiled. “There’s a note here about you,” she said. But she let us in, and we angled as law abiding gentlemen with the exception of a nip of bourbon and puff of chowder.

  I worked as a substitute teacher at my old high school and taught freshmen writing and literature classes at Dowling College and Hofstra University. I liked the university work. At Hofstra I became friends with Professors Dana Brand and John Bryant. “You should think about getting your Ph.D.,” Brand told me after observing my class. He was a huge Mets fan, and I brought him a couple old Daily News “Go Mets” buttons my father had kept from the 1969 World Series. John Bryant and I had long talks about early American mariners, such as Amasa Delano, who went to China at the turn of the nineteenth century, and writers including Richard Henry Dana and the great Herman Melville. “You’ve got something in common with these guys,” Bryant smiled. “I’ll write you a recommendation.” I brought him fluke fillets and a couple dozen oysters packed in ice. “Good guanxi,” Jin Lei assured me when we talked over the crackly phone line. She liked the idea of going back to school while I worked on a doctorate. I contacted former teachers at Purdue, and they encouraged me to return.

  It took nearly a year before Jin Lei’s passport and visa were approved and she could immigrate to the States. This gave me time to think. I loved Jin Lei, but over time that love felt more brotherly and less romantic. It no longer felt erotic. Sometimes there are no obvious reasons for a change of feelings between two people. Jin Lei was wonderful. Nonetheless, something in the chemistry between us had dimmed my sexual passion. I was disappointed, even disgusted with myself for feeling this way—but it’s how I felt. When she arrived in July of 1997, a month after my thirty-second birthday, I was happy to see her but anxious about our relationship. We embraced a bit clumsily, and I loaded her duct-taped luggage into my father’s new pickup and drove her to our house in Port Jefferson. My father and brother hugged Jin Lei, Twain the cat jumped on her lap, and we sat and talked for hours. In bed at midnight, I kissed her cheek and said, “You must be tired.”r />
  “Not too tired,” she whispered.

  I kissed her forehead and rolled over on my back. “Goodnight, Jin Lei.”

  That Friday we threw a big welcome party. My brother and I picked a bushel of oysters, and my father splurged on two dozen lobsters. We took Jin Lei fishing for porgies—which were making a great comeback in Long Island Sound—and she loved it, reeling in fish after fish as the sun poured down on the calm water. I showed Jin Lei how to carefully handle the spiky porgy, holding it up to admire its pearly luster. She traced a finger over the scaled crosshatching. “Like a church window,” she said. “Wow, yes,” I smiled, seeing for the first time the porgy’s skin and scales as stained glass. Later she helped me clean, butter, salt, and foil-wrap the fish for the grill. Jin Lei planned grand noodle dishes and several vegetable delights using local zucchini, tomato, and eggplant ignited with pickled peppers smuggled in from Yunnan. Eugene and his wife, Susan, delivered striped bass fillets from their trip off the Jersey coast. The kitchen filled with sizzling sounds, garlic aromas, and smoke from a Long Island duck we forgot in the oven.

  As the band—three guys from down the street—warmed up with the Grateful Dead’s “Brown Eyed Women,” my brother wheeled in a keg of Coors and neighbors presented bottles of wine. With more and more guests gathered on the back patio, I unveiled a two-gallon jar of baijiu infused with the dried lizard I purchased in Kunming. The spotted creature had steeped for six months, turning the clear liquor a fossilly amber. I ladled up the first draft.

  “Who wants to try? It’s good for man power, if you know what I mean.” People laughed, stared, and considered. But even among this group of intrepid drinkers, there were no volunteers. My father finally stepped forward. “At my age, I need some man power.” He quaffed a jigger, tightened his mouth, and pronounced, “Not bad. A little brackish. But not bad.” The lizard baijiu did, indeed, taste of the sea, perhaps redolent of our primal origins and storied past splashing around with dragons and leviathans. Jin Lei later explained that I should have rinsed the lizard of its preserving salts before bathing it in spirits. But by the end of the night half the jar was gone, the sea monster transubstantiated into early hour antics of howling, lewd dancing, and a tree climbing contest that ended with my brother falling into a mucky mulch pile of lobster shells and fish bones. He slept on a lawn chair, awakened by the highly aroused pawing and licking of a couple neighborhood cats.