"Ah, yes. That’s… that’s me?”
"Good,” he says. I wait for him to speak some more but all I hear is background noise and anxiety. Fast, heavy breathing. Fingernails tapping against a desk. Somewhere, someone sneezes, a brazen sneeze that ricochets through the twenty-eight floors of my building. I imagine a phlegmy old man in apartment 1901, wearing a white singlet, perched on a stool in front of his TV, a poodle panting beside him. But the man on the other end of the line—him, I can’t picture at all.
"Hello? Are you there?” I say this softly, tentatively. I sense that his confidence is gone, as if he had prepped himself for only one moment, and now that it’s over—I’ve answered the phone, and it is me indeed—he’s not quite sure how to proceed.
"Do you remember me?” he finally asks, and there’s a desperation that makes him repeat the question. "Do you remember me?”
Am I supposed to remember you? I wonder. What have you done, what have we done, that would oblige me to remember this voice calling from a number that hasn’t been important enough for me to save? I’m silent, and he says it again: "Remember me?”
"I’m sorry, I don’t.”
"I am David.” He murmurs something in Mandarin: I thought you would remember me. My mind starts to drift the way it does, musing about how this Chinese man with an English name is seeking a foreigner out with her Chinese name. He forces a laugh but can’t mask a sigh, and I suddenly understand that there must be romantic intent here, something to do with love and hope and dates and possibilities for holding hands or sex or marriage—that is the only reason for this call and his nervous laugh.
I panic at this realization. Did we hook up somewhere? Did I meet him in a French Concession bar, did he buy me a drink, did we sidle up to each other and put our hands on each other, did I do something I should regret? But I’m shaking my head as soon as I think this, rolling my eyes at my inner drama queen who secretly wishes for a juicy past. Instead, I was practical, unadventurous, a proper Chinese Malaysian daughter who embraced the role. No nights out, no dancing, no drunken fumbles in corners with strange men. Just one Mr. Right and a diamond ring two years later, a different kind of adventure.
"I met you two years ago,” he says, snapping me out of my thoughts, prodding me to remember our history. "At Wujiaochang. You lived near there. I work in a language school, do you remember?”
There it is, his "do you remember” again, as if the more he repeats it, the sooner I will recall who he is. Give me more clues, I say, and he repeats Wujiaochang, language school, two years ago. But his repetition appears to work because the memory does come, though it is vague at first, like many memories of my first year in Shanghai, that time of uncertainty and hesitation and change.
*
In my mind’s eye I see myself in a black coat on the corner of Zhengtong Lu and Songhu Lu, waiting for the light to change. It is April 2010 and I am standing with a guy I am very attracted to. We’ve just had Thai food for lunch, the green curry still burning my tongue. This is date number—ten? eleven? I can’t remember—and I haven’t slept with him, and I wonder if I ever will. I’ve never slept with anybody in the modern sense, declining romance for a path that included global travel and two master’s degrees. But then I came to shiny, otherworldly Shanghai, and felt something I hadn’t experienced living in Kuala Lumpur, Toronto, or London: the complete freedom of being in the majority, just another dark-haired speck in the crowd as long as I didn’t open my mouth. The city moved at such a fast pace and heaved with such a seemingly endless flow of humanity that, for the first time in my life, I was certain I couldn’t avoid meeting The One. Those first two months here, I daydreamed about my tall, tan, brown-eyed future partner-in-crime.
This guy beside me is short, pasty, and blue-eyed; this is irony’s jest. This can’t be him, I thought, initially fighting the attraction. He’s not Chinese. But I’ve read enough to know that good things rarely come in predictable packages, especially in a peripatetic life. I like spending time with him and he makes me laugh, so here we are, slowly taking a chance, standing together, but also apart: I’m still careful to keep my distance, not wanting to force an intimacy just yet, no brushing of arm against arm or my breasts against his back. I’m sneaking looks at this man who will become my husband when I feel a strong grip on my shoulder.
I whirl around, ready to snarl, but a pleasant face smiles at me. Wavy black hair, bright round eyes, nose and lips like mine. He has flyers in his hand, and he asks me in Mandarin whether I want to enroll at an English school. It is early enough in my China life that I’m still excessively proud of my English, and I tell him I speak it fluently, thank you very much, and turn away.
I can’t find my date. I stand on tiptoes and scan the crowd that’s suddenly appeared before me, looking for a curly brown head amongst a sea of black. The man with the flyers is still watching me from two arms’ length away; he reaches for my shoulder once more to get my attention, and peppers with me questions in English: where are you from, what do you do? His eyes are earnest, his smile sincere; he is good-looking, I think, too good-looking to be working this corner. His attention seems harmless and friendly and when he thrusts his business card in my face, I reluctantly accept it with both hands, not wanting to be rude. Overly mindful of Chinese etiquette, I quickly hand him mine in return, a simple scrap of off-white cardboard with my cell phone number, my Chinese name, and an email address I rarely use. "Let’s keep in touch,” he calls out when I finally spot the one I’m looking for and walk away.
David called me three days later. I was at my new boyfriend’s apartment. We were a couple now; we’d settled on that. Back then I immediately recognized the man on the phone, his face and that hand on my shoulder still fresh in my mind. "Let’s go out,” he said, "let’s meet again.” Clear, direct, a little too commanding for my liking. I might have agreed if I hadn’t been sitting on the same couch that I’m sitting on now as I write this. I might have said why not? if I hadn’t been cuddled up against the same man I said "I do” to seven months ago. But if I’d been single, I might also have said the same thing: "No, thank you. I don’t think so. But thanks for calling, have a good weekend.” Because he was too eager, too persistent, too unnerving. "But I think we should meet now, soon,” he’d repeated before I firmly said goodbye.
He kept calling that week. After the first few calls—Let’s go out, let’s meet again—I stopped answering. Why should I? I’d said no. I’d been polite. We’d had nothing more than a three-minute conversation on a busy street corner, honking cars and yelling children punctuating that brief exchange. Surely I hadn’t led him on in three minutes. Surely he knew that handing him my business card was a mere act of politeness, not a foreign harlot’s come-on. Had I made a cultural mistake? I fumed, and my boyfriend told me to calm down. David finally stopped calling, and that was that.
*
Now, two and a half years later, he is back. "Are you in Shanghai?” he asks. "Maybe we can hang out and have dinner. Where are you? What are you doing now?”
"Yes, I’m in Shanghai,” I hear myself say.
"I can cook for you, would you like that?” he asks.
"Um, well,” I say.
"You are very free these days, aren’t you?” he says, pressing on. How does he know this? Can he tell I’m in bed at noon? He’s starting to scare me when he says, "Surely you’re not busy now, let’s see each other.” He speaks quickly and seems to gain confidence as he says these things to me, these things that really make no sense since we’re strangers. We’ve never known each other. He can’t know how I feel.
My bedside lamp flickers and I’m distracted again, slowly turning my head to the right. The copy of The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Memoir of Early Motherhood by Louise Erdrich is still sitting on the narrow table, the little blue bird on the cover solemnly staring back at me. My husband gave me that book the night he returned from a work trip to his native Minneapolis. "I got it from the bookstore owned by Louise
herself,” he said. "Her sister sold it to me, offered her congratulations, and laughed at the surprise on my face. ‘You’re not the first father-to-be who’s come looking for this book,’ she explained. And that’s when it hit me, how real this is.” He stroked my back as I happily flipped through the pages, planning to read it before my early motherhood began.
I never finished the book.
David is waiting for a reply.
"I can’t meet you. I’m very busy,” I say, staring at my pajama bottoms. My head pounds from last night’s marathon. "I have a lot of work.”
"Really?” He doesn’t believe me. "What do you do?”
Only one thing, one lie, comes to mind. "I’m a writer.” I think of my abandoned blog, which I ran from in panic after an anonymous hate-filled message about the eventual rape and murder of traitorous Asian women like me and our filthy mixed-blood monsters escaped my blog filters and left me sobbing for days, images of bloody, bleeding children haunting my dreams and exacerbating my depression in the months when my empty body felt most raw. I think of my incomplete manuscript, the sixty thousand words that need so many more. "I write now,” I hear myself saying, wishing it were true.
"Ah, okay,” he says.
I wonder why I am still talking to him, prolonging this awkward, pointless thing.
"Well, where are you?” he asks again as if he has a right to know, and I don’t want to do this anymore.
"I’m at home with my husband. I got married.” There’s another long silence before a bright Congratulations! rings out. Maybe I’m imagining that it’s tinged with hurt. David says my husband and I can both come over and we’ll all cook together like one happy, mixed-up family. I don’t think he even knows what he’s saying. I gently tell him that I’m sorry. "Take care and goodbye, okay?” And though he still asks me, begs me to keep in touch and call him, I hang up. I hold my breath, waiting for another call, a follow-up text, but there’s nothing.
*
I crawl out of bed and jam my feet into my furry slippers, walking through the home that hasn’t felt like a home since the day Dr. Fu, a middle-aged Chinese woman with stilted English and a stern expression, smeared jelly on my belly then coolly informed me that my baby had no heartbeat and had stopped developing an estimated three weeks prior. Her sentences had combined into a sad haiku:
Baby far too small
No movement in the belly
Definitely gone
To miscarry at any time is difficult. Miscarrying in China in the Year of the Dragon, however, seems especially cruel. Baby fever is high. People long for a child that belongs to the Chinese zodiac’s most powerful, dramatic, auspicious sign. I was probably one of a handful who hadn’t purposely set out to conceive a lucky baby, but nonetheless I felt proud and blessed. I tapped on my stomach nearly every morning, imagining that I was communicating with my daughter through an infant Morse code. Tap tap, how are you this morning, kiddo? Tap tap, thanks for not making mommy throw up.
My final ultrasound was in a hospital so packed with radiant dragon mamas-to-be that I waited three hours to confirm my empty uterus. For months I felt like I couldn’t escape the countless articles reminding couples to conceive by a certain date to ensure their babies will be born before the Year of the Snake takes over, because who wants a snake if they can have a lucky little dragon? Lucky, dragon babies are lucky. I hear this so often that I’m becoming superstitious, suspecting that my dragon baby’s demise means I am cursed. If dragon children are bringers of good fortune, surely the loss of mine is a bad omen, all my good luck wrenched away.
*
I wonder about David’s luck. Two and a half years since that day on the corner. Something must have happened to him in that time, the kind of life event that compels someone to dig through a collection of old business cards, looking for a connection from a three-minute conversation on a crowded sidewalk years back in Yangpu district. I imagine a recent broken love affair, and a deep loneliness as he lies in bed each night, thinking that all you need to be happy is someone beside you. I can’t help David, and I’m sorry. I hope he finds the connection he’s looking for, but we both know it’s not going to be from a married woman with a different kind of hurting heart.
Christine Tan has lived in Canada, Malaysia, Singapore, and England. A graduate of the London School of Economics-Fudan University program in Global Media and Communications, she has written for CNN Travel, Matador Network, chinaSMACK, and The Atlantic. She and her husband currently divide their time between Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, and Minneapolis. www.shanghaishiok.com.
HOW TO MARRY A MOONIE
By Catherine Rose Torres
Once, at a wedding party, I joined a table where people were talking about how expensive it had gotten to get married. "Of course, you could always go for a Moonie wedding,” a friend quipped. Everyone laughed except me, and I saw my friend throw an anxious glance my way. Afterwards, she came up to me while I was getting some sweets from the dessert table and apologized for the joke. I looked at the wedding cake and imagined how nice the chocolate frosting would look on her lilac dress. I was not offended by her joke, or at least, not as much as I was by her apparent expectation that I should be. As if being Korean like Reverend Moon, the founder of the Unification Church, which is notorious for its mass weddings, automatically made my husband a Moonie.
Jay and I met in 1999, a few years after news reports began circulating about Filipino women being lured to South Korea to marry Moonie husbands, and the term moonie came to mean all Korean men seeking mail-order brides from poor countries like the Philippines. But I expected my friends to know the difference—to know I wasn’t mail-order bride material. My husband didn’t find my name and photograph among hundreds of other women in a catalogue or a website. We met in Japan when we were both still in college and had earned places in a month-long cultural exchange program with thirty-four other students from ten different countries by writing essays on "Asian coexistence.” Looking back, it’s suspiciously like one of those reality shows that are a dime a dozen these days. The organizers were probably thinking, great essays, kids, now let’s see if you can walk the talk and coexist. And we did. We coexisted so well, the three dozen of us, that by summer’s end, there were several international couples in the group.
Jay and I were not among the "official” love teams, although there was a strong undercurrent of attraction between us from the start. I was drawn to his quiet and reserve—he’d be engrossed in a book or magazine while the other guys clowned around. Later, I would learn that he’d just finished his mandatory military service, which I think might account for his seeming seriousness and maturity. In fact, he and the other male delegate from Korea were the oldest in the group (Jay was twenty-four and Jun twenty-five, while most of us were between nineteen and twenty-two) since they had to serve twenty-six months in the military between their college years. I myself am the bookish, introverted type, so I guess you could say Jay and I were compatible. This shared aspect of our personality was probably the thing that kept us from coming out as a couple, although we were the only one that would eventually get married among the love teams in the group.
Our marriage took place seven years later in Changwon, Jay’s hometown, in spring. The winter before, I had finally met Jay’s parents. Before leaving our hotel in Busan, Jay taught me how to do the ceremonial kowtow, which is traditionally done before your elders. You begin by standing with your legs together, then place your right leg forward, get down on your left knee as if genuflecting, place the other knee alongside it on the floor, and bow down with your hands in front of you, your forehead brushing the back of your hand. Jay and I practiced together, he reflexively, having had thirty years of practice, and I with the dead seriousness of a klutz practicing a dance routine for PE class. Thankfully, the whole thing consisted of no more than five steps so I soon got the hang of it, though I still had to count under my breath to keep time.
A friend of Jay’s, together with
his pretty wife and their adorable baby girl, offered to drive us up to Changwon from Busan, and the animated conversation they kept up during the ride, with an occasional English phrase thrown in for my benefit, helped keep my mind off my impending meeting with my future in-laws. An hour later, Jay announced that we were in Changwon. I felt my stomach churning as he pointed out the local sights. I was white as a radish being salted for kimchi by the time we pulled up in front of a two-story brick house on a street of lookalike dwellings. A small middle-aged woman with a short perm stepped out of the gate. The wife of Jay’s friend, probably sensing my nervousness, led me to Jay’s mother, who guided me up the stairs to the living room, where his unsmiling father waited to receive our bows. At Jay’s cue, we went through the synchronized movements that I’d carefully rehearsed, and as I touched my forehead to my hand on the floor, I wished I could stay in that pose forever so I wouldn’t have to look up and face his grave-looking father. Fortunately, I escaped his scrutiny because Jay’s mother hurried off to the kitchen to prepare our food and I followed, offering, in sign language, to help her. Jay’s parents didn’t speak English, nor I Korean, so this was how we would communicate for the rest of our visit.
That same day, we all went to a fortune-teller to have our wedding date chosen. I was surprised when we reached the place to see an electronic signboard hanging from a wall. Red LED lights flashed the number of the client whose turn it was to be told about his marriage prospects or the odds of hitting the lotto jackpot. I wondered if it was a ploy to make people think that the guy was much sought after—after all, we were the only ones there when we visited. There was no queue of fidgeting customers, much less a jostling crowd that would necessitate an automated queue system. Instead, we were ushered right into the fortune-teller’s inner sanctum. Jay and I were asked to sit on the floor across from him as he drew figures on a piece of paper with a calligraphy brush, all the while shooting questions to my fiancé and future in-laws. Not understanding a word of what was being said, I stole glances around me, taking in the dark wooden chests inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the offerings of oranges and other fruits on top of what looked like an altar, the wisps of smoke wafting up from the incense sticks. The guy didn’t measure up to my notion of a seer. I had expected a wizened old man with wild white hair garbed in roughly spun robes, whose eyes, peering from behind a curtain of wrinkles, would pierce your very soul. You would have dismissed this guy for a salaryman if you had seen him on the street dressed in a suit and tie.
How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit? True Stories of Expat Women in Asia Page 16