by Wendy Lee
Tired, hungry, unsure of himself, Michael then encounters the most miraculous sight he has seen thus far on his trip: a fast-food restaurant.
Huge plate-glass windows frame an interior bright with fluorescent lights and molded plastic tables and chairs. Clusters of red and white balloons flank the doorway, along with two girls in striped uniforms and caps. The sole purpose of the girls appears to be to open the door and welcome people. “Huanying guanglin!” they chorus, and Michael finds himself drawn through the entrance as if hypnotized by their cheeriness. Inside, more uniformed girls are standing around aimlessly, save for one girl who sits in a corner, blowing up balloons while her boyfriend in a People’s Liberation Army uniform holds them for her.
The menu, a colorful board of meal combinations, needs no translation. A hamburger costs twenty kuai, and Michael suspects that you could get about five bowls of noodles for that and be more full, but he orders one. He can’t remember the last time he ate a hamburger—probably not since living in the city or in college, where it was considered seriously uncool—so it must have been when he was a teenager. When his burger comes, he notices that it contains shredded cabbage instead of lettuce. The French fries appear normal, although when he looks around he notices that people are dipping them not into ketchup squeezed out onto their placemats but one by one into the ketchup packet itself.
As he bites into his hamburger, ignoring the odd crunch of shredded cabbage, the familiar combination of bread and gristle and grease is comforting. So is the general atmosphere of the place, although it’s a little like looking through a fun-house mirror. Most of the customers appear to be couples or families with single children and, unlike what might be expected back home, they appear to be solidly middle class. Then Michael notices he’s the only person who’s eating by himself. Everyone else has someone with whom they are sharing their meal, and that, he realizes, is what marks him as a foreigner and an outsider, not the way he’s dressed or the way he’s eating his fries.
He watches a mother encourage the wobbling steps of a toddler, who has a French fry clasped in each chubby hand, as the father records the occasion on camera. Strange this Chinese child is growing up with fast food so readily available. It wasn’t until he was a teenager and had wheels of his own that Michael was able to eat fast food like all the other kids. His parents did not believe in eating out; his father said it was a waste of money and his mother said it was unhealthy, although now he wonders if it was really an unconscious act of cultural preservation rather than stinginess or a fear of the unknown. Whatever it was, he feels a little grateful now that he didn’t grow up stuffing his face with fries like this kid.
Farther down from the family sit a boy and girl whose affected slouches in front of their fast food make them look like any young couple in the world. Something about their body language makes Michael think that maybe they aren’t together, but friends in the way he and Amy Bradley were in high school. He wonders what Amy would think if she knew he was in China. Out of all the places they talked about escaping to when they were teenagers, they never considered going this far.
When he turned sixteen in the spring of his junior year and had gotten his permit, Michael was allowed to drive his mother’s old car, which Emily had left behind when she’d gone to college. Compared to his better-off classmates’ vehicles, the ancient Buick was so unhip that it might possibly come full circle and be hip; Michael wasn’t sure. But in any case, it allowed him and Amy to go off campus for lunch, where they’d pick up greasy sacks of burgers and fries at the drive-thru and then park in the farthest corner of a strip mall’s empty lot.
Their main topic of conversation was how to escape their hometown. It wasn’t enough that the city was about an hour away, that sometimes they would go in for an afternoon to browse thrift stores for clothes that Amy could cut up for her designs. They both had strict curfews, and Michael’s parents wouldn’t let him drive that far, so they were bound by the train schedules. Also, Emily lived in the city, and even though he and his sister didn’t talk much, just the fact that she was there made the place less exciting for Michael. So, as he plotted with Amy about which far-flung colleges to apply to, he pictured a green-lawned campus in California where he would have intellectual conversations while throwing a Frisbee and smoking pot, simultaneously. Funny that he ended up going to a small college in the middle of Massachusetts, and Amy to Boston, and although they promised to visit, they only saw each other during the holidays when they were back home.
Although outwardly it seemed like their relationship was the same, Michael sensed that things had changed ever since that night Amy had kissed him. They remained a duo at school, but he could see that his rejection continued to smart. Not that he didn’t think she suspected he was gay. But he knew that she wanted him to tell her himself, that this was the only way he could make up for what he had done to her, and he wasn’t sure he was ready to do that yet.
Amy did her best to try to extract a confession from him, usually by baiting him with Peter Lawrence, on whom Michael still had an unrequited crush. By this time, Peter no longer sat in front of him in math class, but as one of the school’s preeminent jocks, he was everywhere: the center of pep rallies, the star of basketball games and swim meets. Michael would drag Amy with him to the sporting events, especially the swim meets—Why the sudden interest in swimming? Amy would ask with a sly smile. But she went along with him. Sitting in the stands, angling his head to catch a glimpse of Peter’s smooth body breaking the surface of the water in the 200-meter butterfly, Michael was reminded of the time he had watched Amy’s brother, Scott, swim in the pool next door and twisted his ankle.
One day when they were sitting in the car at lunch, Amy tossed a copy of the school newspaper into his lap. On the front page was a picture of Peter Lawrence with his arms raised high, exposing the perfect triangle of his torso, from the wide straight line of his shoulders to the point of his tight swim trunks.
“So?” Michael said, reading the headline. “The swim team won the regional meet.”
“I heard he has a girlfriend now,” Amy said.
Despite himself, Michael asked, “Who?”
“Lindsey Jensen.”
Michael made a face.
“God, I know. It’s disgusting.”
Lindsey Jensen was not a peppy blond cheerleader, as might be expected, but a pretty Asian girl who had been adopted by white parents and was the head of the student council. Somehow, that made it even worse.
Michael looked up to see Amy grinning at him. “What? I don’t care who he dates.”
“Like hell you don’t.” Amy threw a French fry at him but missed, and it got lodged somewhere in the backseat.
When he got home that night, Michael tore out the picture. He wasn’t quite sure what he was going to do with it, since he could hardly pin it up on his wall, so he put it under his mattress. It was, he thought, possibly the most contraband thing in the house.
Then one night his parents had done something they’d never done before, at least in Michael’s memory: They’d gotten dressed up to go to a dinner hosted by his father’s boss. There was something pathetic about the way they had prepared for this event, the care with which his father had ironed his navy-blue suit jacket, how his mother had tied a sad little bow onto a box of oranges. After they’d left, Michael finished his homework, and then with the rest of the evening stretching before him, called Amy.
“I’m painting my nails red,” Amy informed him.
“Red?” Michael was puzzled, as Amy usually painted her nails the darkest color she could find.
“Yeah. Everyone expects me to have black fingernails so I’m doing the opposite.”
Michael wondered who “everyone” was, besides himself, but he didn’t comment further.
“You want to come over?” Amy asked. “I can make some popcorn. We can watch some stupid movie on TV.”
“I thought your parents didn’t let you watch movies on a school night.”
Michael declined, so they talked about their trigonometry homework, which neither of them understood; and the horrible outfit that poor Courtney Snell had been wearing that day (a long-sleeved blouse paired with a very short skirt, so that she looked like an Amish hooker); and then they said good night.
Bored, Michael took out the picture of Peter Lawrence and began to masturbate to it. He had masturbated to magazines before but never the picture of someone he knew, which made it doubly exciting. After a while, the thrill started to wear off, and his room began to feel stuffy and closed in, so he decided to go downstairs. The best position was to put the picture on the coffee table while he stood in front of it. From the back it almost looked like he was watching television, except that the screen was blank.
This was how his father found him.
Michael had been concentrating so much that he hadn’t heard the car pull into the driveway or the back door open. He was at the point where he was trying to orgasm, a white fog filling his head. It cleared when he heard his father enter the room, and then it was too late to hide the picture on the table or the fact that his pants were down. What his father said next, Michael would never forget.
You are my punishment. You are what I deserve.
What scared Michael most of all, even more than the words, was the look on his father’s face, as if he’d seen a ghost, as if the very life were being sucked out of him. It was as if his father couldn’t bear to look at him.
Michael yanked up his pants, turned, and ran down the hall, out the front door. Fueled by adrenaline, he climbed up the gutter of the neighboring house and knocked on Amy’s window. She let him in and held him as he told her what had happened, and she didn’t let go. He couldn’t tell her the exact words his father had said—they were still too painful—but what he could get out was enough.
“How typical,” Amy spat out.
He was surprised, touched even, that she was crying.
“Your father’s a monster,” she said.
“He isn’t.”
“Are you defending him?” She stared at him, her face shining with outrage and tears, reflecting everything that he should be feeling but couldn’t. The only thing he could feel was guilt, that it was his fault for what had happened that night, for having the picture, for going downstairs, for even cutting it out of the paper in the first place. Although Amy had given him the paper, so maybe it was her fault too.
“No, but there has to be an explanation.”
“Yeah, that he’s a terrible person.”
Later, Michael would remember this conversation and wish it were that simple, that his father was just that kind of person who would react in that way to his son’s being gay. But, much later, when he took the time to recall what his father had said, it seemed to him that it was almost as if his father meant the words as much for himself as for Michael. It didn’t lessen the hurt any, but it did offer a sliver of hope, that maybe what happened wasn’t Michael’s fault, that someday he might be able to ask his father what he meant and receive an answer that would absolve him of everything he had done wrong in his life. Of course, he thought he had years ahead of him to ask that question.
Amy was the one who convinced Michael that he had to go home that night, so that his mother wouldn’t worry about him. She has nothing to do with it, Amy said, and Michael agreed, although he didn’t think his mother had guessed the truth about him, or that his father would tell her. He never thought about asking his mother for help. As far as he could see, his mother backed up his father on all family matters; he wasn’t even sure she had her own opinions on anything, except for going to church, maybe. He had never heard them fight before, not unlike Amy’s parents, who, according to Amy, quarreled at least once a week about her father’s drinking, the way their daughter dressed, how poorly their son was doing in college. Michael didn’t know whether this was a good sign or not about his parents’ marriage; you just didn’t think about that with parents like his.
But he did think it was unnecessary to make his mother worry about where he had been, even if his father obviously wouldn’t care. So, in the middle of the night, he snuck back into his own house. He glanced briefly into the living room. The picture was gone from the coffee table; it had probably been torn up and thrown out. There was no indication of the words that had been spoken there a few hours earlier.
When Michael went downstairs the next morning, his mother was the only one in the kitchen. She looked worse than he did, as if she hadn’t slept all night. But since she didn’t ask where he had been, he figured she knew where he had gone.
“Where’s Dad?” he asked.
“He went to work early.”
“Did he say anything to you?”
“What kind of thing?”
Michael hesitated. For a second, he honestly considered telling his mother. Sure, he couldn’t trust that she wouldn’t react in the way his father had or that she would understand, and even if she did, there wasn’t anything she could do to change his father’s mind. But he needed someone other than Amy to know, someone in his family.
“About last night,” he finally said.
“Oh, yes,” his mother replied. For a moment his breath caught, only to be expelled when she continued, “He told me you had gone out.” Then she turned to the sink and started to wash the dishes, destroying his resolve.
In the following days, Michael didn’t see much of his father, and the next time they were together, at the dinner table, neither of them alluded to what had taken place. Michael almost wondered if he’d imagined what had happened, if he’d dreamed up that night. But if his father wasn’t going to bring it up, then he wouldn’t. He wondered if that was his father’s way of apologizing, to pretend nothing had happened. Or perhaps that was generous thinking, and the truth was that his father preferred that that night had not occurred at all. Whatever it was, Michael was fine with letting things be. From that moment on he did his best to avoid his father, who felt that having the kind of son he had was his punishment in life.
Michael is dreaming that he’s chasing after the teenage pickpocket at the bus stop. But instead of yelling and shaking the boy when he catches him, he pours the bottle of soda over his head. It streams down the boy’s face, soaking his clothes, pooling at his feet. It’s the most humiliating thing Michael can think of doing to him.
The telephone’s ringing jerks him awake. He glances at the bedside clock and sees that it is almost midnight. It rings again and, mindful of who was on the other end the night before, he answers cautiously, “Wei?”
“Hello?” returns a voice in English that is tinged, weirdly enough, with a British accent. “Is this Michael?”
“Yes, this is he. I mean, that’s me.” Michael feels like he’s the one speaking a foreign language.
“This is Liao Weishu. My former student said that you are looking for me?”
Michael doesn’t know what to say. It’s as if at the moment his wish has been granted, all thoughts have gone out of his head. He grasps at his manners. “Thank you for calling me back. You . . . you were a friend of my father’s?”
“Is your father here with you?”
“No, he’s . . . he’s passed away.”
There is such a long pause that Michael wonders if he has been understood.
“When did he pass away?” For the first time, Michael hears a hitch in Liao’s flawless English; he can’t tell whether it’s a reaction to an unfamiliar phrase or something more.
“Last August.”
“I am sorry to hear that. The rest of your family is here with you?”
“My sister and mother aren’t here; I came alone. Because of your letter.” Michael cringes at this last part, thinking how strange that must sound.
“Ah, that is how you know where I live.”
“Yes.” Michael gladly latches on to that explanation. He doesn’t feel comf
ortable getting into the details of the letter over the phone, not when he hasn’t met Liao in person yet.
“And you came all the way here, to Xining City?”
“Well, I wanted to visit China. . . . I didn’t know where else to go.”
“It is true that this city does not have as much to offer as Beijing or Shanghai or even Xi’an, but it is a good place to visit.” Liao continues briskly, “Now that you are here, you must be my guest. I invite you to come over tomorrow and have dinner with my family.”
This is more than Michael could have hoped for. “I’d really like that, thank you.”
“But first, since you have come from so far away, my son and I will take you sightseeing. There is much to see here.”
Michael thinks he has already seen most of what the city has to offer over the past two days, but he agrees and arranges with Liao to meet in the lobby of the hotel the following morning. Then he hangs up, alternately ecstatic that Liao has called him and also a little disappointed at their businesslike exchange. He supposes there will be time to get to know each other tomorrow.
Before he goes back to bed, Michael takes the two pages of Liao’s letter and its translation from an inner pocket of his backpack and spreads them out before him. He rereads the translation, even though now he feels like he knows what it says by heart.
My dear friend Han,
I am sure that you are surprised to hear from me. After all, it’s been forty-five years since we were Red Guards together in Beijing. As you can imagine, not all of those years have treated me well, especially the first fifteen. But once I was released from the labor camp, after it had been determined that I had been sufficiently reeducated, I was allowed to stay on in Xining and become what I always wanted to be, a professor. I taught English at the normal university here. My learning English did have some use after all.