by Kathy Wang
“Well, it’s his money, isn’t it?”
“Most of it I earned for him, remember that! I was married to your father for thirty-four years. How long has he been married to Mary? Eight? Nine? You think that is enough to deserve half of everything?”
Half? That was news. Fred registered a quick bolt of alarm, before swallowing it. Stanley was at the front of the line now, looking back at them with a hopeful expression.
“He wants to spend time with you,” Fred said. “You could just hang out. So what if Mary makes a fuss? He has all the power in that relationship, anyway. Remember how she wanted to move her sister in with them, and he wouldn’t let her? And remember how when they got married, he went and got that PO box at the post office? So that all his bills and financial statements would go there and she couldn’t snoop or find out anything.”
Linda stood up. “This coffee is very bad,” she announced. “The milk is old. I’m going to McDonald’s for their senior cup. Only twenty-five cents.”
“Don’t you think Dad can handle Mary?” Suddenly Fred desperately wanted to hear his mother’s confirmation. “He’s not like those other old cowering Chinese men whose wives call all the shots. You know that underneath it all, he’s a coldhearted bully. Remember how he was growing up? He can manage her.”
The look Linda eventually gave him was a mixture of impatience and pity. “Your father’s a fool,” she said, and left.
Chapter 6
Linda
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* * *
Linda made the call on impulse, after yet another failed match—this one with Andy Yu, a retired widower whose much-touted Ivy League education turned out to be an associate degree from community college and a few audited courses in Asian studies at Columbia. On the phone, Linda declined most of the services the Concierge representative attempted to push (no way was she was giving out her Social Security number to a stranger), but she did submit to an in-person meeting the following week, at a local café. The consultant—or at least her name, Angela Lee—was Asian, which was a relief. Whenever Linda considered the divulgence of the personal details of her romantic life to a stranger, pangs of mortification began to creep and she was struck by an overwhelming desire to cancel; she knew the required disclosures would be nearly impossible, were the consultant Caucasian. White people operated by an entirely foreign set of standards. They thought love and happiness were an individual birthright, regardless of how unrealistic one’s expectations might be. They believed that they all deserved secure retirements with luxury vacations and the best medical care, no matter how many financially stupid decisions they’d made earlier in their lives. And when they were Linda’s age and got divorced and then remarried, they invited everyone over for Christmas and pretended it was one big happy family, referring to their new spouse’s adult children and grandchildren as their very own, which was simply delusional.
The meeting with Angela Lee began with the usual icebreakers: Linda’s past, what she did every day, what she felt hadn’t worked in her marriage, what she was now looking to find. She dispensed with the questions easily, having perfected the answers long ago, for deployment with nosy friends and neighbors. Big family, lots of siblings, little attention from her parents growing up, which is why she chose to have only two children herself. Her idea of a perfect morning was gardening, a quick check of her investments, and a leisurely visit to the farmers’ market, in that order. Her marriage had collapsed because her husband didn’t have the intelligence to understand how dense he truly was; she now sought a partner who at least knew his own limitations, with a healthy enough ego that he would ask for assistance when necessary.
Angela typed her notes on a laptop, which she then tucked into an oversize Louis Vuitton tote. “Very good,” she said.
“Are we done?” Linda asked. She rather liked the girl, whom she figured to be Malaysian or Indonesian-Chinese. She had a friendly, asexual vibe, like someone who often attended church. If there was extra time, Linda wanted to learn more details, like her age and college and marital status. She could then compare those statistics against Kate’s.
“Almost. Linda—I meant to ask, have you ever considered a more remote relationship? With someone located farther from you?”
“You mean he would live far away?” That sounded suspect. Had she really already exhausted the entire supply of available Chinese men in the area? Who on earth was Shirley Chang gallivanting with all the time then? Koreans? “I don’t understand how that would work.”
“Well, we do live in a connected world. And hopefully any good prospect wouldn’t stay distant forever.” Angela leaned forward and smiled. “The idea is, by widening up your geographical preferences, we could find an even greater range of potential partners.”
“Aren’t there already enough nearby? I want someone with a similar background.” Everyone knew that the best Chinese immigrants of their generation were settled in California, and mostly the Bay Area. There were some in Los Angeles, but then you ran the risk of ending up with some sleazy import/exporter. And Linda had no intention of being matched with some grocery store operator in, say, Reno.
“I completely understand, and we can definitely keep your matches limited to a twenty-five-mile radius. I just had the impression from our short conversation that you might find the traditional model of courtship, of going out for a series of dates in public . . . a little outdated. You appear to be a woman who hates to waste time.”
Linda nodded. This was true.
“And I also thought that you might prefer a more private scenario, one where you could speak with a match several times before meeting in person. Some of our more discreet clients prefer this route.”
&n
bsp; “So . . . we talk on the phone?”
“Or your computer. Video chat. So you could see as well as hear each other.”
“I don’t like those. My daughter uses it, and the video is always fuzzy. Sometimes the picture is upside down and I can’t turn it back over.”
“My goodness, of course that would be frustrating. I do believe our app would be much easier to use. We specifically developed it with our senior clients in mind. Would you like me to help you through the install? We can do it now.”
Linda hesitated. She’d heard variations of this exact promise before over the years, in regards to a myriad of technology-related matters. They always ended the same way, with Fred or Kate wringing his or her hands and drawing deep breaths, while Linda doggedly attempted to replicate the steps for connecting to the wireless network. She had secretly liked it when society’s technological progress had outpaced her own mother’s capabilities; she took satisfaction in the old woman’s furious helplessness when confronted with fast-moving escalators and bleeping credit card machines. But Linda’s mother had been a terrible parent, a cruel matriarch who pitted her children against one another in a never-ceasing campaign for control. Linda wasn’t like that. Why, then, did her children treat her so much in the same way?
Across from her, the nice Asian girl with the face of a Mormon was handing back her phone. “Try it out,” Angela said. “I’ve already populated it with the matches I identified for you. Tell me that isn’t simple to use.”
Linda made a tentative selection, and then another. Amazingly, the right screens appeared to be cropping forward, the correct results. She began to go faster, with confidence.
Until finally a photo of a man appeared, and she thought: easy.
* * *
Out of all of Angela’s selections, Linda’s favorite was Winston Chu. Like her he was Chinese-American, having immigrated to the United States in the early ’60s. They were each the oldest sibling of families that had produced far too many children, and both had endured decades of martyred suffering in their marriages before ultimately seeking divorce. When they spoke, it seemed as if they could start on any topic, immediately find common ground, and leap to the next.
To her surprise, Linda found she didn’t miss the lack of in-person interaction. Wasn’t video chat close enough to face-to-face—in fact, the very definition of it? She saw how Kate and Fred spoke with their partners, their eyes glued in the direction of their phones. At least she and Winston looked at each other when they talked, made eye contact as they relayed the details of their lives. It felt good to share all that she’d accomplished with someone who was actually interested, and Winston was gratifyingly impressed by each unfurled achievement—the triumphs that her own children considered so ordinary. That he was currently overseas, working on temporary assignment, only served to lend their relationship an air of safe convention—they would of course be together in person, if not for the distance.
After a few weeks, they were speaking twice a day: his evening and her morning, and then his morning and her night. It was a routine they both enjoyed and never broke, and when there was nothing at the moment for either to discuss, they were content to exist in companionable silence. Linda brought the phone with her to the garden, where she set it on top of a stool and on speaker; she cut ripe persimmons from her tree to the occasional sound of Winston’s typing. Each night she carried her laptop to bed and at the end of their video conference simply rolled over and fell asleep. She discovered she no longer feared the sounds of the evening.
Winston and Linda had enjoyed sublime conversations for nearly two months—talks that she considered the most satisfying and fulfilling of her life’s recent memory—before he asked her for money.
The request embarrassed him terribly, Winston said. As Linda knew from their conversations, he’d been entirely self-sufficient since the age of fourteen, when he’d been shipped off by his parents to Hong Kong to live with relatives he’d never before met. It had been his one chance to escape Communism, a doom of otherwise wasting away his teenage years working in the steel mills, melting down pots and pans for the manufacture of low-quality construction supports for structures that, luckily for most of the planned inhabitants, were never occupied. Once Winston was in Hong Kong, the plan was for him to study and gain acceptance to a top school in the United States and piece together the funds to cross over. He could then send for the rest of the family.
Winston’s aunt—his father’s sister—had greeted him at the door with a glassy-eyed stare he’d only decades later been able to identify as indication of an opioid addiction; the two adult cousins his parents espoused as wells of career guidance turned out to be unemployed and addicted to gambling. As it turned out, the entire family didn’t work, subsisting on small handouts from their grandparents; the day Winston arrived from Guangzhou, his grandfather shakily informed him there was just enough in the budget to support an additional mouth for one meal per day. For everything else, he’d have to fend for himself.
Winston eventually found a line job hand assembling artificial flowers at a factory not significantly less hazardous than the steel mill he’d fled, though at least the odds were lower for cadmium poisoning. The glue used to attach the silk rose heads to their stems did turn out to be mildly toxic: within a few months the coughing fits started, and in a year he had his first eye infection. He was given a half day off and a referral to the company doctor, but even at the tender age of sixteen Winston knew better than to relinquish his earnings back to the very parties who’d maimed him to begin with. He visited a local herbalist instead, who charged one-fifth of the doctor’s quote and prepared a small sachet with foul-smelling leaves to steep and place over his eyes, with strict instructions not to move for at least an hour after application.
“You need to find another job,” the medicine man advised. “You can only do this for another year. Maybe two, because you’re young.”
Nearly nine more would pass before Winston made it to the United States, and what followed was a cloudier version of the immigration saga shared by Linda and her peers. He earned a degree from Baylor, not Berkeley as originally planned, and bought a home in Houston instead of moving to San Francisco. His job as a systems engineer at Exxon provided a steady salary, but it was barely enough to counter a stay-at-home wife and two daughters whose private high school tuition ate through savings like a ravenous weed.
When his youngest daughter started at Yale, Winston took a job in Lebanon as the on-site technical administrator for Black Sun, the military contractor. The gig paid 40 percent more than Exxon, and housing was free—a welcome bonus, as he was now divorced and had relinquished the house to his ex. Even meals were paid for, since the company didn’t want employees wandering off campus.
Now there was an issue with Black Sun—some uncovered violation dating years back in relation to Iranian trade embargoes—and sanctions had been imposed. Winston didn’t particularly understand what that meant or its significance for the company’s bottom line; all he really knew, or cared, was that his accounts were now frozen. Tuition for the next semester at Yale was due in a few days, and after cobbling together the money he was able to access, he was still thousands short. Winston was fairly certain the school would grant him an extension—surely a top-tier academic institution like Yale wouldn’t be so cruel as to throw out a hard-working young woman and blight her future irrevocably for something as minute as a few late payments—but it was also a risk that, as a responsible father, he couldn’t bear to place onto his own blood.
“But I understand,” he said, “if you cannot provide assistance.”
And the silence had hung, stinking like a dead fish.
The morning after his request, Linda wired the money. She didn’t give the full amount but merely a third, figuring her generosity should spur Winston’s family and friends for the other portions. Earlier in her life $9,000 would have felt crippling, though parting with the sum was still painful. As it left her account it
was as if she had discovered a hole in herself, one of those vestigial organs she never used but which until then had always been there, holding its place in the layers of her body.
She forced herself to recall how much more Winston had endured compared with her. Linda’s struggles in the United States seemed so significant compared to the cushioned lives she had provided her children, but with Winston she was reminded of the fact that there were many layers of poverty and poor fortune beneath her own, stratas that in Asia seemed to have no bottom. She felt fortunate she could part with the money without serious consequence, and it really wouldn’t be missed in any significant fashion before Winston paid it back. Linda sent a note when it had been transferred, and the phone rang minutes later.
“Thank you so much,” Winston said. “I cannot begin to describe how this event shames me. My whole life I worked hard for everyone else, but does anyone care or remember? Why didn’t someone tell me that raising a family in a rich country could bring such agony? My ex-wife, whom I supported her entire life, to whom I gave nearly everything when we divorced, all because I didn’t want her to suffer for refusing to work all those years . . . you know what she says to me now, when bills come? Winston, I will not pay a cent, she says. Because she thinks I should pay for everything, even though we’re no longer married! She thinks I should pay for her clothes, her car, her insurance, and of course the girls think so too! You know that when they were younger, they wanted to play tennis? All my life I thought I might one day want to learn, but I told myself I would wait until retirement, I didn’t want to spend the money in case my family needed it. But when Tina and Cindy asked, I said yes, of course! And I went with them to every lesson and ran around the courts picking up all the balls, so the coach didn’t waste any of my money. I wanted him to spend his time teaching! By the end of each lesson, I was panting, sweating so much, I was already past fifty, after all. My doctor told me, Winston, please stop! But still I did it, every week, for all of their high school. But what for? Nobody remembers. Now the only bright light in my life is that I finally met my soul mate, the woman I should have spent all my years with.”