by Wendy Lee
As she was pondering this, Julian appeared in the doorway. He looked even more disheveled than when he had arrived, his shirt untucked, his face grim.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Tang,” he said. “I tried my best.”
Tried what? she wanted to ask him, but sensed by the look on his face that she should pose this question to her daughter. Instead, she just nodded, and Julian left through the front door. She heard a car start and pull out of the driveway, and it was quiet. Then the pipes above her started to thrum as Emily turned on the water to take a shower. Ling wondered just what her daughter was trying to wash away from her life.
The stillness enveloped Ling again as soon as Emily’s car turned the street corner and she could no longer hear its familiar sputter. She had thought she’d gotten used to being by herself, but Emily’s unexpected visit was like a splotch of color on a black-and-white canvas. Afternoons were especially hard for Ling, and she had taken to watching talk shows on television, marveling in the ways that people managed to mess up their lives without half trying. Ling thought of how whenever her children visited after they had left home, it had seemed like part of herself was being wrenched away, no matter how much she convinced herself that they would come again. Han hadn’t seemed to feel like this, reminding her of how close both of them lived, a mere train or car ride away, and that she could go visit them if she wanted to. But Michael had never invited her to see his various lodgings—for a good reason, she now knew—and Emily’s house had always struck her as peculiar, filled with furniture that was old and worn down on purpose.
Then, in a time that should be one of crisis, near the anniversary of their father’s death, Emily had suddenly come to her, only to leave just as abruptly, and Michael had done the opposite by going away as far as he possibly could by himself. If he had to go to China, why not take along his poor old mother, who could certainly help him with the language and the customs, even though she herself had never been to the mainland. Maybe they could have all gone—herself, Emily, and Michael—as a sort of family vacation, although it would have been different without Han.
She wondered what Han would think about his son being gay, and Ling was secretly glad he wasn’t around to know. Han had always been hard on Michael for the slightest things—for leaving his bike on the lawn, or getting poor grades in math, or spending too much time next door with the Bradley girl. Then, when Michael was a teenager, this attitude intensified, until Ling thought it might be something more than just regular fatherly disapproval and teenage sullenness. After he left home, Michael rarely came back to visit, and his reasons seemed less like Emily’s—that she was too busy—and more that he couldn’t stand to be around his mother and father. Maybe it had something to do with his sexual orientation. Ling had to admit to herself that she secretly welcomed this explanation, as it had less to do with her own shortcomings as a mother. But still, she should have seen it, she should have found a way to help her son. Because she knew that his father would not have. She knew that above all, Han wouldn’t have been able to hide his disappointment that his son was not who he had wanted him to be.
When Ling learned she was going to have a second child, she knew that it would be a boy. She craved meat—steaks so rare that they dripped blood—and the baby sat low and round above her pelvis. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her little girl, who was already more serious than a six-year-old had any right to be. Emily held hands with her mother when they walked down the street, helped her wash the dishes at night, announced she wanted to go to bed early so that the next school day would come faster. There was nothing Ling enjoyed more than combing tangles out of her daughter’s long hair and tying the sashes of her dresses.
After Han came home from work each night, Ling would watch as her daughter immediately stopped what she was doing to run to her father. Emily craved his approval so desperately, as if she knew that she would soon be displaced by her brother. Ling knew how much having a boy meant to Han. It would be a validation of his passage to America, of the days he had spent working as a dishwasher, of his decision to move to a suburb where not many families looked like theirs. It would help with the fact that no matter how tidy he kept his lawn, waved to the neighbors, and subscribed to the right local paper so that it was delivered in the center of their doormat every morning, he would never quite be viewed with the same easygoing acceptance as, say, their neighbor Mr. Bradley, whom everyone knew was a closet alcoholic.
Indeed, after Michael was born, her husband showed a tenderness unfamiliar to Ling, even in the early days of their marriage and when Emily was born. He came home from work early to be present for the baby’s evening feeding, allowed him to fall asleep in the crook of his arm. He insisted that Ling follow the Chinese traditions of not washing her hair or going outside for the month after she had given birth, in order to rebuild her strength. He bought a black-skinned chicken to make soup, since it was considered to be more nutritious, and red-dyed eggs to symbolize good luck when the baby turned a month old. Ling had renounced these kinds of superstitions when she had joined the church, but she went along with them for her husband’s sake.
Michael turned out to be a difficult baby. He had colic, when he’d cry so long and hard that it sounded like he was choking on his own discomfort. Ling tried everything, feeding him, holding a heating pad to his back, walking circles around the room. They took him to the doctor, who only said that Michael would grow out of it. Until then, the entire family had to endure sleepless nights, and Ling felt at times that her child’s sobbing would kill her.
Then there was the time Michael cried so hard that he stopped breathing. When that happened, Ling could literally feel his dead weight in her arms. She shook him, and his head flopped as if the string that had been holding it up had been cut. For a moment she felt as if her own heart had stopped. Then she screamed for Han to call an ambulance.
Until then she and Han had done their best to make their house look just like any other on the block. Han fixed loose shingles on the roof and mowed the lawn regularly; Ling tended flower beds and refrained from cooking anything that might result in strange smells wafting out the kitchen window and over fences. But after that night, it was apparent that something was not right with the Tangs. First, there had been that ambulance roaring down the street in the early morning, waking up everyone on the block. And then there was the day about a month later, when a strange car parked outside their house. From it emerged a no-nonsense-looking woman with a briefcase.
Ling went to answer the doorbell.
“Hello, Mrs. Tang?” the woman said, offering a large, capable hand. “My name is Gretchen Davis. May I come in?”
She went on to say something about herself that Ling couldn’t quite understand but allowed the woman to pass through, wondering if she was selling something, like the rouged ladies who tried to get into the living room to set up their cases of makeup, or the ones who wore no makeup at all but carried pamphlets about how to achieve eternal life.
Gretchen Davis walked into the Tangs’ living room, looking around in a manner that indicated more than idle curiosity. “I suppose your husband must be at work,” she said to Ling. “Where are your children?”
Ling explained that Emily was at a friend’s house for the afternoon, and that Michael was upstairs, napping.
“How is your daughter doing in school?” was the next question.
“She is doing okay,” Ling replied. “Not the best in the class. She needs to work harder.”
This was not true. Mrs. Mayer had told Ling at a parent-teacher conference that Emily was the brightest student she’d had in years, although she was concerned about the way Emily peered at the chalkboard and thought she might need glasses. But Ling did not want to say this to Gretchen Davis. She felt that it would be safer to be modest and pretend her child was ordinary, if not downright delinquent like the Bradley boy next door.
Judging by her visitor’s raised eyebrows, Ling didn’t think that her intentions had come across
clearly enough. She noticed that the woman began to scribble some notes on a pad that she had extracted from her briefcase.
“Mrs. Tang, when does your daughter get up in the morning? What does she eat for breakfast?”
Ling replied eight o’clock and rice porridge. Sensing that her mothering skills were being evaluated, she wondered if she should have changed that last answer to something more appropriate and American-sounding—eggs, for example. Gretchen asked for permission to go into the kitchen, where she opened the refrigerator door and exposed the unruly heads of bok choy and napa cabbage. Gretchen glanced into the cupboards at the dishes Ling had bought to set up house with. She didn’t run a finger along the counter to check for grime, but she might as well have.
Now Gretchen wanted to see their bedrooms. Ling tried to imagine the rooms through a stranger’s eyes. Emily’s room with its four-poster bed and white quilted coverlet was tidy. As far as Ling could tell, there were no unwholesome books or dangerous toys sticking out anywhere. In the other bedroom, Michael was awake and lying quietly in his crib. Ling picked him up and unwillingly handed him over to Gretchen, who examined his reflexes and unbuttoned his onesie to check his body.
“How did he get this?” she asked Ling, pointing to a bruise on his thigh, where the joint of his plump little leg met his body.
Ling stammered that maybe she had held him a bit too roughly when she tried to pin his diaper. Or perhaps she had been holding him when she turned and accidentally bumped into the edge of a door. She had no idea. Finally, Gretchen Davis made her way to the front door, handed Ling a business card, and said she would be in touch. Ling locked the door after her, feeling that she had just taken a test in which she had gotten every answer wrong.
That night in the kitchen, after Emily and Michael had been put to bed, Ling handed Han the card, which said Social Services on it. Maybe it was something routine, she suggested in a hesitant voice. Maybe they were doing this to all the families with school-age children in the area, and it just happened to be the Tangs’ turn. Han said in a low, terrible voice, how could she not realize that Gretchen Davis thought that Michael had had to go to the hospital because the Tangs were abusing their children? How could she have let that woman into the house? Had the neighbors seen anything? Didn’t she know what a huge shame this was to the family?
He stopped, veins bulging from his forehead as if they were strings to be plucked. He didn’t say it, but Ling knew that he also blamed her for being the one who was holding Michael when he had stopped breathing. For being a bad mother. But wasn’t it Han’s fault, she said aloud, for leaving her alone with the children all the time? Why couldn’t he admit that he was wrong to have left New York City, to have married her, to have come to America in the first place?
Please, Han said, keep your voice down, even though she was speaking in Mandarin Chinese and Emily probably wouldn’t be able to understand. I am tired of keeping my voice down, Ling said, and went upstairs. She didn’t care if Emily had heard. Actually, she hoped she had, so that someday when she had a husband of her own, she would know what to do when you were pushed so hard against the door that you couldn’t just lean against it, you had to open it and go out into the dark night.
The next morning, Ling came downstairs at eight o’clock to find Emily already seated at the kitchen table. Ling asked her if she had slept all right, and Emily nodded with no indication of having heard her parents’ fight the night before. While she fed Michael, Ling made a phone call to Mrs. Bradley next door. She said that she had to go to the city at the last minute, and would Mrs. Bradley be able to look after the children for a few hours? Mrs. Bradley hesitated, and in the background Ling could hear the Bradley boy acting up. Ling had never asked her neighbor anything like this before, but finally Mrs. Bradley agreed.
Ling got the children dressed and ready to go. She told Emily that she needed to run an errand and would be leaving her and Michael with the neighbors. Would Emily please look after her little brother? Emily looked back at her and nodded once, the solemn look on her face almost enough to change Ling’s mind and take Emily with her. She couldn’t manage two children, but she might be able to handle Emily, who was self-sufficient for her age. But where would that leave Michael? No, it was best if they stayed together.
Ling delivered both children to Mrs. Bradley. Then she drove to the nearest rail station, parked the car, and boarded the train that would take her into the city. As the landscape passed by her window, she thought about where she would go. She hadn’t spoken to her old friends, like Felicia Lam, in years, and guessed they had all moved on by now. She just knew that she had to get out of her house, which still bore the taint of the social worker and her fight with her husband.
Inevitably, her steps led her to Chinatown. The intervening years in the suburbs had softened her, so that all she noticed now about it was the dirt, the odd smells, the uncouth people who spoke in a different dialect—already the neighborhood had started changing from Cantonese-speaking immigrants to Fujianese-speaking ones. Having heard that the crime rate was up in the city, she kept her purse hugged tightly to her. She found a dingy restaurant to have lunch in and lingered there over her tea until the bitterness was just a ghost on her tongue.
How easy it would be to disappear into the crowds here. She could change her name, get a job as a waitress or a garment worker, rent a room in a boardinghouse. No one would ask any questions. Hundreds of new people came to Chinatown every year under false names and with false papers, to start their lives over. In a way, she had done it nine years before when she had come to America from Taiwan, then again when she left her college town in Connecticut for the city; she could certainly do it again. She thought about the time she and Han had first moved to the suburbs, when she was pregnant with Emily and she had walked until she could go no farther. She had thought she was running away then, but there had been nowhere to run to. It would be much easier to run away in the city, where no one would recognize her.
Just then someone entered the restaurant, a tall man with a measured gait and a way of holding his head that she knew very well, having looked upon him almost every Sunday morning for the past eight years. Ling quickly looked down, hoping that Pastor Liu wouldn’t see her, but there were few other people in the room, and he made his way straight to her table.
“Mrs. Tang,” he said. “A pleasant surprise. What brings you to the city?”
“Just some shopping,” she stammered. “And you?”
“I’m here to see some recent immigrants from the mainland. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell any of the other parishioners about it. I’m afraid that some of them don’t like it when I spend my time outside of the regular congregation, but these people need guidance and direction too.”
“I won’t,” Ling promised. “Actually, I was just about to—” Leave, she meant to say, but Pastor Liu was already sitting down across from her.
“How is your family doing?” he asked.
“They are fine,” Ling replied. To be polite, she added, “And yours?”
“Not too well, I’m afraid,” she was surprised to hear him say. “You see, my wife was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. It’s early yet, so we’re hopeful.”
“I’m sorry,” Ling said, although she wasn’t sure whether she meant she was sorry about his wife or for not thinking that her pastor was someone who could have a life outside of church. Certainly, she had met Mrs. Liu, a tiny woman a full two heads shorter than her husband, but had never thought very much about her, or about their life together. She knew that they did not have any children, and that while Pastor Liu had been born in the States, his wife was from Taiwan, like herself. “Is there anything we can do?” she asked.
“It helps to be needed by my congregation. You know, to feel like you’re being useful to someone else, to have a purpose.”
“That must be a wonderful feeling.”
Pastor Liu looked at her keenly. “I’m guessing it’s similar to how a wife f
eels with her husband and children?”
“My husband . . .” Ling hesitated, not knowing how much to reveal, but figured Pastor Liu had already taken her into his confidence. “He doesn’t understand me.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Recently, we have had some trouble. But I think that maybe he has never understood me.”
“I think,” Pastor Liu said slowly, “your husband might not understand you all of the time. But he will always care for you and the children.” He paused. “I’m guessing that he is not a man given to showing his emotions?”
Ling shook her head.
“So you will have to do it for the both of you. Maybe he had a difficult time in his childhood. You will need to provide him with the family that he’s never had. Are you able to do that?”
“Yes,” Ling said. “Yes, I can.”
“Good.” Pastor Liu placed his hand on hers, lightly, but she drew more warmth from it than her cup of tea. Then he glanced at his watch. “Well, I must be going.”
“Thank you,” Ling said as he got up from the table.
After a while, Ling paid her bill and left the restaurant as well. Outside, on the street, the day was quickly winding down. Vendors were hauling in produce from the sidewalks; at the market, the fish had been removed so that only watery pink impressions were left on the ice. Ling wondered if she should buy something to bring back, to make it seem like she had indeed come to Chinatown to shop, but suddenly her urge to get back home was so strong that she almost broke into a run for the subway station.
From there, to the train, to retrieving her car from the parking lot, she couldn’t help feeling that when she got home, the windows would be dark, that Social Services had come to collect her children, or that her family had left her instead of her leaving them. Or maybe she was in one of those fairy tales where years had passed while she was gone and another family was living in their house now.