by Wendy Lee
She began to drive without really knowing where she was going. All she could think of was how much she detested Julian’s car, this innocent hunk of lustrous chrome, how it moved so effortlessly that you could barely sense the road beneath you. You’d need to get in a crash in order to feel anything.
Then she had an idea of where she could go. When she reached the Belt Parkway she took it west, toward the Verrazano Bridge and New Jersey. She took out her phone and pressed her mother’s number.
“Emily, where are you?” her mother asked. “It sounds like you’re in a wind channel.”
“Wind tunnel,” Emily corrected.
“Are you in a car? You know it’s not safe to talk and drive at the same time.”
“I’ll make it quick. I just wanted to tell you that I’m coming over to stay the night.” She would think up a suitable explanation for her lack of an overnight bag later.
“Is Julian with you?” was her mother’s immediate response. It occurred to Emily that her mother might actually enjoy her son-in-law’s company.
“No,” Emily said. “He’s, um, going into the city tonight.”
“You should go with him,” her mother said. “Have some fun together. I heard all about it on television. It’s called date night. I think it is very important.”
That was laughable, the closest her parents had ever gotten to a date night was sitting next to each other on the sofa, watching television. “I don’t mind, Mom,” Emily said. “I think it’ll be nice for you and me to spend some time alone together.”
“You think so?”
“I know it’s been almost a year since Dad died.”
“Yes,” her mother said finally. “A visit would be good. Even better if Michael were there too.”
“About Michael . . .” Emily conveniently left out Edison Ng and just told her mother that Michael’s roommate had remembered him saying something about going to China. “Dad didn’t know anyone from Qinghai Province, did he?”
“No,” her mother replied. “Your father never mentioned that place before.”
Next, Emily called her home number. The answering machine came on, and she imagined her voice filling the silent, empty kitchen. “Hey,” she said, “it’s me. I’m staying at my mother’s house tonight. I think that after last night, it might be the best for both of us to take some time to think. Also”—she inhaled a breath—“you know that coworker of mine, Rick? Well, I just kissed him.”
She threw the phone on the seat next to her. Then she thought better of it and retrieved it, about to call again. But there was nothing she could do to change what she had just said, or what she had done back in the bar. From the moment she had woken up this morning, something had been driving her to act in direct opposition to who she thought herself to be, and she was powerless to stop its smooth, irrevocable trajectory.
CHAPTER 5
Ling didn’t know what the real reason was behind her daughter’s coming home—she hoped she and Julian hadn’t had a fight—but she was glad nonetheless. Emily hadn’t been back all summer due to some case that was too big for her to talk about, and before that not since Christmas. There had been something in her voice just now that Ling had distrusted, although maybe it was due to the poor connection. She suspected her daughter was talking on the phone while driving, which was very dangerous, not to mention illegal where they lived. There were all those stories in the news about people who had gotten into accidents because they couldn’t take the time to stop and make a phone call. Maybe Ling should mention it, but she knew her daughter would probably take offense at being told what to do.
Over Christmas, the last time she had seen her children together, both Emily and Michael had been listless. Ling had attributed it to its being their first holiday without their father, although Han had never been one for celebrations. He refused to put up decorations of any kind, so that theirs was the only house on the block without a blow-up reindeer on the front lawn or even a wreath on the door. Instead, they’d gone to the mall, where the idea of Christmas, represented by a twenty-foot-tall tree and fake pine-scented spray and free candy canes, was as aggressively pushed as any other item on sale.
On Christmas Eve, Ling had tried to entice her children with hot chocolate and board games, but even Scrabble, which used to be a surefire method of invoking Emily’s competitiveness, had no effect. Usually, Emily would be racking up the triple-scores and fifty-pointers, but now she didn’t even blink an eye when Michael put down the word Kleenex, which even Ling knew was a proper noun.
Then they’d opened their presents the next morning. Emily and Julian had given Ling a red cashmere sweater so soft that she knew her son-in-law must have picked it out; Emily didn’t have the time nor the taste. Michael, bizarrely, had given everyone souvenirs—clear crystal paperweights with the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty laser-cut into them—that looked like he had picked them out from a street corner vendor in about five minutes.
Not knowing what her children wanted or needed, Ling had been convinced by a saleslady at a home goods store to get a lemon zester that was actually in the shape of a lemon. Emily had turned it over in her hands, as if she expected it to transform into some other gadget, but Julian had thanked her and said it would be very useful. Ling had gotten Michael some gloves, having noticed on a previous visit that there was a hole in his old pair. He’d seemed pleased by them, and she’d congratulated herself on her good sense, until she noticed later that he was already wearing new gloves and that these were made of expensive-looking leather. She doubted he could afford to spend money on such things, and wondered if they had been a present, and if so, from whom.
Afterward, Ling had announced she was going to the late-morning service at the church, and did anyone want to come along? Emily and Michael had declined, but to her surprise, Julian said he would go with her. Ling had been both touched and slightly appalled by this prospect. She hadn’t wanted to go alone, but she knew everyone’s eyes would be drawn to her when she walked along the pews with her non-Asian son-in-law. That had indeed happened, but as they passed those rows of intact families, Ling holding her head high, she felt a confidence that she didn’t think she had felt since she’d last entered this building with her husband.
Pastor Liu delivered a lovely service, and then she and Julian had taken a walk around the chilly grounds of the church. Then Julian had said, “Ling, I need to talk to you about something.” Her son-in-law saying her name still startled Ling after so many years. She almost wished that he would call her Mom. When the children had been little, her husband had even called her that when he was speaking in front of them. It was as if it were her given name in English.
“What is it, Julian?” she asked.
“I think it’s important for a family to have some kind of spiritual anchor, no matter what kind of religion it involves. I hope this will be true for my kids someday.”
Ling felt hope bloom in her chest. “Yours and Emily’s?”
“That’s what I wanted to speak to you about.” Julian took a deep breath. “Emily doesn’t want to have kids.”
“Emily,” Ling said after a while, trying to explain her daughter’s lack of a maternal instinct, “does not like children. She does not even like dolls. I know, from when she was little. But it’s not her fault, it’s mine.”
Julian stared at her, confused, then continued. “The thing is, she doesn’t want to talk about it with me. She won’t even try. I can’t say that I understand why she feels the way she does about having a family, but I certainly can’t try to understand if she doesn’t talk to me.”
Again, Ling thought to mention that it was her fault, hers and Han’s, why Emily was the way she was; that Emily was her father’s daughter through and through when it came to someone trying to understand her, but she didn’t think it would help.
“I know there’s nothing you can do,” Julian said, “but I wanted to let you know what was going on. Just in case she mentioned it to you.”
She realized that neither she nor Julian, supposedly the people who were closest to Emily, had any idea what was going on with her anymore. But Ling was sure her daughter’s lack of a desire for children was her fault.
Up until the age of five, Emily had at least tolerated dolls, although she never had more than one or two at one time, and in comparison to her increasing stuffed-animal collection, they were second-class citizens. They were always served last at tea parties, left at home during car trips, and remained uncuddled at night. Worst of all, they were simply forgotten, lying for days under the bed, limbs splayed and hair tangled. But one incident, Ling felt, had forever turned Emily against them. Emily must have just started kindergarten, and it appeared as if she might never have a sibling. Ling had conscientiously prayed as Pastor Liu had instructed her, eaten all the right foods, even turned to Chinese medicine in the hopes of conceiving. But every time she had been given reason to hope, allowed herself to retrieve Emily’s old baby clothes from the basement, it had ended in a miscarriage. She’d take a deep breath, fold up the clothes with quiet hands, and put them away.
The push and pull of expectations, the rise and fall of desires, had taken its toll on Ling. She argued with Han almost every night, downstairs and with Emily’s bedroom door shut, so that their daughter couldn’t hear. But sometimes she grew careless and forgot to completely close Emily’s door, let her voice rise higher than was prudent. What intensified her anger was that Han did not respond to her. Looking back, she realized he probably didn’t know what to say. But back then she interpreted his silence as stubbornness, as a refusal to take some of the blame. They hadn’t quarreled like this since they had first moved to the suburbs.
One night, Ling had gotten so angry that she grabbed the first thing she could lay her hands on—unfortunately, Emily’s doll, abandoned on the sofa—and thrown it across the room. It had been, she reflected later, an incredibly childish thing to do. The doll hit the wall and landed on the floor, its head separated from the body, and the dress torn down the front. But it had done the trick; Ling’s breathing slowed and the color receded from her face. Then she looked up and saw her daughter watching her from the landing. Her face not betraying anything, Emily went back to her room. Ling turned to Han for his reaction, but he did exactly the same thing. At the time, Ling had not recognized that both her husband’s and daughter’s faces bore the same expression, a blankness upon which nothing could be written.
Ling almost wished Emily had cried and Han had shouted at her. Rather, their lack of reaction to her behavior was confounding and disturbing. The next morning, she presented Emily with the mended doll as an apology. She had worried the head back on and spent the night fixing the dress, but she was a bad sewer, so the stitches were puckered, like an ugly scar. Emily took back the doll, but Ling noticed that the corners of her mouth only curved up for a second, hardly a smile. She never saw Emily play with a doll again.
As for her fights with Han, these too decreased in number, and then Ling discovered that she was pregnant, and this time it took. It seemed as if their periods of strife were behind them, but Ling couldn’t help wondering when the next time would be and what effect it would have on their children. All parents argued, she knew, but it was as if she had to fill the void of Han’s silence, to provoke him into revealing something about himself. She almost wished he would strike her, so that she would know how he really felt. Sometimes she wondered if it had to do with the way they had met, both recent transplants to New York City, although they had both emigrated a few years before that. They hadn’t known each other very long before they’d gotten married. But that was the way it was back then. If a woman wasn’t married by the age of twenty-five, there was something seriously wrong with her.
It wasn’t like when Emily got married. Nowadays, twenty-five was considered young, and an early marriage led to divorce. Ling remembered Emily announcing her engagement to her parents, how almost apologetic she seemed, nervously twisting the monstrous carbuncle of a ring on her finger. She had not consulted her parents beforehand, nor had Julian asked Han and Ling for their permission. But sometimes Ling caught a look on her daughter’s face that weekend, an expression of doubt that never tipped over the edge into a question. She wondered what Emily was feeling. Did she think she was making a mistake? She wished she was close enough to her daughter that Emily would confide in her, so much like the American mothers and daughters she saw on television, who spilled secrets the moment they stepped together into a coffee shop or nail salon.
Han’s reaction to Emily’s engagement was simply to say that he did not think they could pay for the wedding if she insisted on marrying this laowai. Emily shot back that they didn’t need his money; Julian had plenty from his parents, even though he didn’t talk to them. And besides, they planned to go to city hall, so there. She had been so young, her quivering lower lip contradicting the certainty of her words.
Ling had wanted to tell her daughter that her own misgivings weren’t because Julian wasn’t Chinese. For her, it was more whether Emily really felt she could be happy with this man. There was nothing she wanted more than for her daughter to learn from her own mistakes.
Ling Chu had met Han Tang at a dance in Chinatown, not long after she had moved to New York. Before that, she had been a graduate student at a small Christian college in Connecticut, sponsored by her church in Taiwan. Her first year there had been spent in a bewilderment of unfamiliar food, cold weather, and spoken English, which none of the classic British novels she had read could have prepared her for. Also, there were few Chinese people at her school, making the possibility of her finding a husband that much less likely. Back home, her older sister had married a banker who had lost his first wife, while her younger sister had married a college classmate. To be the only unmarried daughter, and living overseas no less, was a burden she couldn’t possibly place on her family. So, not long after she turned twenty-four, Ling abandoned her pursuit of a degree and decided to move to the city with her friend Felicia Lam.
At the dance, Felicia was partnered with a slim young man in a closely cut gray suit. Ling had seen him arrive late, wearing a dove-gray fedora that matched the shade of his suit, as if he were a Chinese mobster. As the couple turned in the sway of the music, she willed him to look at her, and to her amazement he did, with eyes as dark as wells, over Felicia’s unsuspecting shoulder. After a few moments, he left Felicia and introduced himself to her with a formal bow. He was not that much taller than Ling and had floppy black hair that had been slicked back, but strands still fell forward to frame his wide but handsome face. He danced a bit stiffly, as if following an internal metronome. He told her his name was Han Tang. He was a chemistry student, but in his spare time he enjoyed reading the classical poets: Du Fu, Wang Wei, and Li Bai; the last he thought was too sentimental. To her astonishment, he also considered Mao Zedong a poet.
How can you call Mao a poet? she had asked, incredulous.
“Let a hundred flowers bloom,” he replied. How can you not consider that poetry?
This young man astonished her. She was convinced he was the one who had the heart of a poet.
Han had also told her, over the course of the night, that he had emigrated from mainland China the previous year through the sponsorship of a distant relative in San Francisco. He had worked as a dishwasher when he first arrived and, wishing for something better out of life, had recently come to the East Coast to start over. His immediate family back home had all passed on, so in effect he was the last of his line. Ling was not intimidated by this grand statement. Rather, she was impressed by this revelation; it gave height to his slight stature and, perhaps most significantly, it told her that he was ready to start a family soon. She was even willing to overlook the fact that he was from the mainland, which to a girl from Taiwan was tantamount to being Japanese.
Ling Chu and Han Tang went ice-skating at Rockefeller Center. They sl
urped noodles in Chinatown restaurants and watched movies uptown at the Thalia. Six months after they had met at the dance, he proposed, and they moved into an apartment on the Upper West Side. When she got married, Ling quit her job selling gloves at a department store downtown and furnished the place, purchasing green and gold dinnerware, persuading her husband to buy a television, although all they could afford was black-and-white. Sometimes she sat alone in the apartment during the day, on their recently acquired brown sleeper sofa, and marveled that she had managed to get married at all.
She wanted to start having children immediately, but Han had just received his biochemistry degree and was looking for a job. Ling understood the need for the delay, but by the time he announced that he had been offered a job in New Jersey, she had an announcement of her own—she was pregnant with their first child. Although she had been upset to leave her friends, Ling looked forward to a new life in which she could live in a house and drive a car as large as a boat, and in which she and her husband would have no one else but each other to depend on.
The house they had moved into, located in a recently developed suburb, was nothing like their apartment. Everything they did here was like taking the first steps in a foreign country. The lawn, which had been transported piece by piece and patched together like a quilt, was so fresh that their shoes left dimples on the surface. The bushes barely made indentations against the walls, and there were paint flecks on the windows that looked next door and onto the raw beams of another house in early stages of construction. Inside, the water gushing from the faucets unexpectedly turned reddish brown and an earthy smell would fill the bathroom.