Across a Green Ocean

by Wendy Lee

  The first thing the Tangs discovered about their house was that it was plagued with mice, due to the new houses constantly springing up around them. The mice left what Ling liked to think of as little presents behind the toaster, and at night when she padded awkwardly downstairs to the kitchen, she would find half a dozen of them scurrying away into the corners when she flipped on the light. Determined to get rid of them, Han bought traps baited with peanut butter, because he said it had been scientifically proven that mice preferred peanut butter to cheese. One night when Ling had gone to the kitchen to get a glass of water, she discovered a mouse caught in a trap, its eyes bulging like grains of black rice. It had managed to pull itself a few inches across the linoleum, and its right hind leg paddled uselessly. I know how you feel, she wanted to tell it. Then she decided to let her husband deal with it in the morning, turned off the light, and went back to bed.

  Ling knew no one in this town, if it could be called a town; the houses were situated so far apart from the shops. While her husband was at work, she learned how to drive the maroon Buick that Han had purchased for her. She was terrible at it. When she pulled out of the driveway, she often ran over their mailbox, flattening it as if it were a pin and her car, a bowling ball. She practiced in empty parking lots, worrying about jolting the baby as she awkwardly shifted gears. She was also concerned that she and Han were arguing too much and that this would also hurt the baby, that the emotions that surged through her would make the baby anxious. She could feel the baby restlessly turning somersaults in her stomach, giving fretful little kicks. The sensitivity with which it seemed to pick up on all her moods indicated to her that it would be a girl.

  Ling and Han seemed to argue about everything and nothing: the mice that continued to wreak havoc in the kitchen; the cost of gasoline since Ling practiced driving so much; the fact that even though she practiced she could still not drive on the highway, so that she was limited to buying groceries from the local stores and could not easily make a trip into the city to get the Chinese vegetables to make the dishes that he wanted. They also argued about church. Han had grown up considering religion to be a liability, something that could cause you to be thrown into jail if so much as a Bible, given to you years before by a well-meaning missionary, was discovered in your house. So Ling often ended up going to church alone, especially after arguments with her husband.

  Then one evening they had a particularly bad fight, something that had started innocently enough, with Han faulting her for buying an old piece of meat, slimy and inedible, from the butcher’s. Ling had known this from the moment the butcher had placed it on the scale, but she had not trusted her English enough to demand something different. She had meant it to be a funny story, and an explanation why they were having eggs-and-tomato for dinner again instead of a dish with meat. But Han turned it into an accusation: Don’t you know you have to stand up for yourself in this country? Can’t you even learn that?

  Ling spun around and left the house. She didn’t trust herself to drive, so instead she walked down the street, turned the corner, and continued to walk without being aware of where she was going. She knew she must look odd, an eight-months’ pregnant woman on foot. Gradually, the houses on either side, with their trim front yards and neatly cornered gables, thinned out. The street sign she came to was unfamiliar, and when she looked behind her, it was as if the landscape she had passed through had magically rearranged itself. To her dismay, the sidewalk ended altogether, and beyond it stretched fields that she had never seen before. Then a strange sense of calm spread through her body at the sight, the unending greenness in the waning light. Even on all her drives around town, she had never known she’d been so close to escape.

  She stood on the concrete that made up the edge of the sidewalk and let the warm summer wind ruffle her hair. If she closed her eyes, it was almost as if she were floating in an amniotic sac, not unlike what her own baby must be experiencing. By now her stomach was so big that she carried it like a basket of laundry in front of her. Ling wondered what would happen if she went into labor at that very moment. Would she give birth in the fields like a cow? The baby kicked gently, as if to reassure her that everything was going to be okay. Then it kicked harder, against her bladder.

  Ling looked around her to make sure no cars were approaching. Usually, the idea of urinating in public would be enough to make her face heat up with shame, but now she stepped a few feet into the grass, squatted, and relieved herself without even hiding behind a tree. When she was done, she smoothed down her maternity smock and turned around. She must have been gone at least a half hour by now, and Han would be worried. But finding her way back was more difficult than she’d thought. When she got to an unfamiliar intersection, she hesitated. She could knock on someone’s door, but she didn’t know how to ask for directions. So, for the first time in her life, she decided to let a higher power—God, or whatever you wanted to call it—take over. She continued to walk, and within ten minutes saw a street sign that she recognized. Along with her relief was a slight tinge of disappointment. She couldn’t have gotten lost even if she’d wanted to.

  It was dark by the time she got back, and the dinner she’d prepared earlier lay cold and congealed on the table, even more unappetizing. Ling sank into a chair, suddenly aware of how tired she was.

  I was just about to go look for you, Han said. Where did you go?

  Nowhere, Ling replied.

  I knew you couldn’t have gone very far. Han’s words made him appear unconcerned, but Ling caught the tone in his voice. This was the closest he would come to apologizing for what he’d said.

  The only other person who knew where Ling had gone that night was the baby, who did turn out to be a girl. When Ling discovered she hadn’t given birth to a boy, she turned away from her husband. She was afraid he would once again find fault with her. But Han held her and said not to worry, there was plenty of time, all the time in the world.

  For much of Ling’s married life, her husband had been an enigma to her. Aside from the first outpouring of his family history, she didn’t know much about where he had come from, aside that his parents and siblings—two sisters and a brother—were city folks. He did not seem to have kept any connections from his previous life in China, unlike Ling, who received any number of letters from her friends and relatives. She remembered only one personal letter received by her husband in recent years, about a month before his death. It was on similar airmail paper as the letters that normally arrived for Ling, but it had been postmarked from mainland China, not Taiwan. That was all she could discern of it before Han whisked it away, the expression on his face preventing her from asking any questions.

  Sure, she knew many things about her husband: how delicate his stomach was; how loud his snores at night; how his discarded socks looked like cow dung, not unlike the ones in the fields she drove past in the daytime, down that road she’d fled before Emily was born. She adjusted her habits accordingly over the years, making sure the dishes she cooked weren’t too spicy, waking him up when the snores got too loud, picking up after him. If knowing the most intimate details of someone’s life wasn’t really knowing that person, then what was?

  Still, Ling couldn’t help feeling that a person’s family was their history. Certainly that was the way it had been thought of where her family originally came from, when people lived in their ancestral villages and you could look up the names of anyone’s great-grandparents on the tablets that hung next to the shrine at the center of every compound. The fact that you were expected to visit this shrine regularly, to burn incense and bow before your ancestors, guaranteed that you never forgot them. But war, famine, revolution, persecution, and other random elements did much to divide families from one another. Ling’s own family in Taiwan was far removed from its ancestral village near Shanghai, having been displaced by the Communists in 1949, but so many of their nationalist compatriots had also come over, and much of their former ways were able to be re-created. Han, she supposed,
had not been so lucky. The ultimate break, she thought, must be moving to another country. The new language, the new customs, drove a wedge between the old life and the new that could never be removed.

  Another mystery about her husband, Ling felt, was his lack of friends. He never associated with the husbands in the church congregation as she did with the wives. Sometimes a coworker would invite them to dinner, and on those rare occasions they would leave the children with a babysitter, later entrusting Emily to watch over Michael, until Michael was old enough to be left home by himself. Ling found these dinners to be awkward affairs, although she preferred it when the coworkers were Asian, as they often were. In the Indian or Malaysian households, she could taste something familiar in the foods, empathize with mothers’ concerns over their children’s schoolwork, recognize the way people displayed English magazines like Time and Newsweek on the coffee table, while the newspapers in the kitchen were in their native languages. She understood what it meant to try too hard.

  One of the most awkward dinners she attended had been thrown by Han’s boss. This was when Han had been working in a nearby town, when Emily was in college and Michael was sixteen, before his most recent job in Trenton which, Ling was convinced, had contributed to his heart disease with its hour-long commute. Han had worked at this particular company for over twenty years; it was why he and Ling had moved to New Jersey, and he considered this boss a friend; the man had even attended Han’s funeral nine years later.

  Ling had agonized over this event for days, whether she should get a new dress, what she should bring as a gift. She did not know how to choose wine, and it all seemed costly, so in the end she settled on what would traditionally be brought to a Chinese house, a box of clementines, tied with a bow. But the wife of Han’s boss had not known how to react, taking the box from Ling with a bemused smile. Look at what a thoughtful gift Han’s wife has brought us, she called out to her husband. She then made some comment on how you could never get enough vitamin C.

  Indeed, Ling had felt drab next to this woman, who wore a bright floral dress that suggested a hothouse gone awry. Ling wore a black silk dress she had ended up buying specially for the occasion, thinking that black was sophisticated even though it was a color she did not usually wear. Since she did not drink, she sipped from a glass of water while the other wives spoke over and around her. They were all white, taller than her, and seemed to already know one another, and, as if they did not think she could speak English, they did not bother to include her in their conversations. During dinner, she kept her words to a minimum, praising the massive roast, which to her was too salty. She and Han ended up leaving early, the first out of all the guests. Thank you for the oranges, the boss’s wife had added when they left, reminding Ling again of her dreadful mistake.

  She thought this was why Han was so quiet on the drive home. As each mile passed, she could feel something simmering just beneath the surface, and she steeled herself for the inevitable confrontation as soon as they pulled into the driveway. She only hoped that he would confine it to the car, so that their son couldn’t hear. But after he turned off the engine, he just got out of the car and went inside. Ling sat in the car for around ten minutes, glad for the reprieve. She collected herself and decided the evening hadn’t been so bad after all.

  After waiting a good amount of time, she unbuckled her seat belt and went into the house. The air in the hallway felt disturbed, as if someone had just rushed through it. But the kitchen and living room were empty, the lights blazing. Upstairs, Michael wasn’t in his room, and in their room, Han was getting ready to go to bed. He went out, was all he said to Ling’s question about where their son had gone. Ling watched him for a moment. Something about the way he removed his shoes and lined them up inside the closet made her heart ache.

  She waited downstairs in the kitchen for Michael to come home, watching the second hand of the clock make its slow, quiet revolution. Maybe he had gone to the Bradleys’ next door, to see that girl who wore what looked like safety pins in her ears. Finally, Ling went to bed, allowing herself to drift into an exhausted, restless sleep only after she heard the back door shut and footsteps come up the stairs. The next morning, after Han had left for work, and she was sitting across from her son at the kitchen table as he ate his breakfast, she did not ask Michael where he had gone. She didn’t want to know; for now she was simply glad that he was safe, that he hadn’t gotten into a car accident, or run away, or any of the number of things that could happen to a teenager these days.

  As the spring wore on, Ling detected a rift between Han and Michael. She supposed it was a consequence of Michael being a teenager. He started going next door to the Bradley girl’s more often, or stayed late after school, so that they barely saw him. Ling wasn’t surprised when he announced that all of the colleges he had applied to were out of state, as if he couldn’t get away from his parents fast enough. After he went away to school in Massachusetts—it could have been worse, Ling thought, he could have gone to California, but he hadn’t gotten into that one—he rarely came back, refusing to let his parents pay for his plane or train fare or saying that he was spending the holidays with a roommate’s family. Then he moved to the city, and Ling had been overjoyed to have both her children so close to her again, but the proximity did not mean that either of them visited any more often. There was little more that she could do other than drop hints, since she was too proud to go to them herself. Besides, it was their responsibility. This was what you had children for, so that they could visit you in your old age.

  After Han passed away, Ling wondered if Michael regretted not having spent more time with him. Did a son ever get over his father’s death? She wished she knew how to provide the kind of comfort that she could when he was a child, over a scraped knee or a harsh word from his father. But somehow she had lost her way with him, and now he was on the other side of the world, in China.

  Qinghai Province. What in the world could Michael be doing there? Ling thought of the two characters that made up the ideogram for Qinghai: the character qing, which meant “clear” or “green,” and hai, which was the word for ocean. Supposedly, it came from the province’s vast grasslands. Wasn’t there a folk song about a girl from Qinghai? Or had she been from Mongolia? She wasn’t sure. Anyway, some place with a lot of grass.

  Then Ling remembered something else—the letter that had come for Han the month before his death. She could picture the pale blue flash of it, the address from Xining, Qinghai Province, before Han had turned away from her with it. The letter must have ended up in his papers, and Michael must have discovered it after the funeral, when he was looking through his father’s things. If only Ling had asked Han about it earlier when he’d received it, had not been deterred by the shield that had come down over his face. She was beginning to think that had been a mistake. Perhaps she should have been nosier with her children as well. Maybe she should have asked more questions, probed more deeply into things that they didn’t want to talk about, or else she wouldn’t be learning about their lives after the fact, as if they were strangers.

  When Emily’s car pulled into the driveway, Ling gave the silver Bimmer a double take. “Did you get a new car?” she asked as Emily came up the front walk. She’d always wondered why Emily continued to drive the old Buick.

  “No,” Emily said. “It’s Julian’s.”

  She didn’t bother to explain further, and Ling followed her daughter into the house, where she told Emily about the letter from Qinghai Province.

  “Do you know what it said?” Emily asked.

  “I never asked your father,” Ling admitted.

  “How did Dad come to know someone way out there?”

  “I don’t know. Your father was originally from Beijing, but a lot of people from the cities were sent west in the sixties and seventies.”

  “That was during the Cultural Revolution, right?”

  “Yes, but your father wasn’t one of them,” Ling assured her. “His family was always
safe.”

  “Then why don’t we know anything about them?”

  Ling considered for a moment. “Well, they had all passed away before he came to the States.” But she hadn’t asked about this either, hadn’t doubted her husband’s word that he knew no one back in China. Obviously, this letter proved him wrong.

  “It still doesn’t explain why Michael went there,” Emily said.

  “Maybe his roommate has heard from him by now?” Ling ventured.

  “Who?”

  “The roommate you told me about on the phone.”

  “Oh, right.” Emily looked shamefaced. “I should check in with him.”

  It was almost dinnertime, but Ling had not thought about what they would eat. Emily told her to order some takeout—Just not Chinese, she’d said—while she called Michael’s roommate. Ling overheard her asking the roommate if he had gone back to his own apartment, which was confusing. Was he a roommate only some of the time? She really didn’t understand the way young people lived now.

  They ended up getting sushi from a Japanese restaurant Ling had never been to before, but whose circular was often, annoyingly, stuck in her mailbox. She didn’t trust raw fish, let alone anything Japanese, but after Emily had urged her to try the cooked, less-frightening items, she had to admit it wasn’t so bad.

  She waited for her daughter to bring up what had caused her to pay an unexpected visit home, but Emily didn’t say a word. So Ling prattled on about how Michael could get by in China without knowing the language, whether he knew to only drink water after it had been boiled, if he was being scammed by unscrupulous tour guides. She preferred to think Michael was just on a trip to the motherland rather than for whatever reason he had truly gone.

  Finally, at a break in their conversation, Emily asked, “Did you and Dad fight a lot when we were kids?”