Across a Green Ocean

by Wendy Lee

  Gao nodded without much conviction. Emily figured he’d be feeling differently enough once some visible progress was being made on his case, and it was her job to make sure that happened.

  As Emily drove away from the detention center, her mind was filled with what she needed to do. She hadn’t been successful in arguing for Gao to be moved to a lower bunk, and getting an independent doctor in to evaluate him was going to be an uphill battle. She thought about what Gao had said, about her inability to imagine herself in his place. Perhaps that was true, but she could imagine it for her father. She had never known exactly how he had come to the States. Her mother had said he had told her once that he had been sponsored by a distant relative, but that probably meant false papers. She wondered if he had walked the streets of New York City, even their New Jersey suburb, worried that he would be picked out. Perhaps that was why he had stayed in the background of his life, even after so much time had passed. This fear would become a natural reflex, a second nature. You could never feel at home in such a place.

  But maybe her father had never felt at home anywhere. Aside from the time when she was seven and Michael had been in the hospital, she had never heard him talk about where he had come from or his family with any warmth. As she grew older, she learned not to ask about these subjects at all, instead getting any information she needed from her mother. But sometimes even her mother didn’t know. Once, for a sixth-grade history class assignment on genealogy, she’d pulled out the encyclopedia set at home, which was among the only English books her parents owned. She’d written about the Tang dynasty and how it was a period when arts and culture flourished, especially poets like Du Fu and Li Bai. Her teacher had written on her paper, “Well researched, but what does this have to do with you?”

  While China was no longer his home either, perhaps it wasn’t so far-fetched to think that Gao might be able to forge a decent life there, with his knowledge of English and technology. But for Jean and Sam? He might as well be dead. Just knowing that Gao had considered leaving them would change the way Jean felt about him. So, Emily determined that she was never going to speak of Gao’s decision to accept deportation to Jean, or to anyone else. She hadn’t counted on what would happen two weeks later, when Gao was no longer alive, and she was to face Jean for the first time.

  By the time Emily reached the diner where she was supposed to meet Jean, she was winded. She’d just run down ten blocks in the heat, after finally finding a parking space. She looked past a couple of elderly ladies splitting a dessert and an off-duty cop to see Jean sitting in a booth in the back. Jean looked better today, her hair combed and drawn back in a knot at the nape of her neck. Her face was freshly made up, its expression preternaturally calm. Her nails, resting against her coffee cup, looked as if they had just been done. You could not tell from looking at her that this was a woman whose husband had died two days ago.

  “I’m sorry I’m late, the traffic was terrible,” Emily said as she slid into the booth. The waiter arrived, and she ordered an iced coffee, then dabbed at the perspiration trickling down her neck with a paper napkin. “How is Sam?”

  “He’s okay. My sister’s looking after him.”

  “Does he know?”

  Jean sighed. “He doesn’t know the whole story. I don’t know how to tell him in a way that he’ll understand. So for now he just knows that there was an accident and his father isn’t coming back.”

  The almost dispassionate way in which Jean was talking about her husband’s death was unnerving.

  “How are you holding up?” Emily asked.

  “They gave me something to help me sleep last night. Loraza, loraze something.”

  “Lorazepam.” Emily remembered that this was what the doctor had given her mother too. Her mother had ended up sitting on the sofa with a dazed expression on her face, as though a disaster were unfolding in front of her on a television screen.

  “I don’t like it. I didn’t want to take it, but they made me. It takes away all feeling, the good and the bad. I look at Sam, and I can’t feel anything, not even love. But if I don’t take it, I’ll fall into pieces.” Jean turned her coffee cup in a slow circle. “I appreciate your coming to see me today. I want to thank you for what you’ve done.”

  “There’s no need.” Her clients never blamed Emily outright for failing to win a case, but nevertheless she felt that she had let them down. After what had happened to her husband, it almost seemed like Jean was mocking her.

  “There is. You tried. You did the best you could.”

  “I didn’t do enough. I could have found a way to get those medical reports a little faster. Maybe we could have gotten doctors to Gao quicker, transferred him to somewhere closer. It’s my fault.”

  “No,” Jean said. “It’s mine.”

  Emily stared at her. “How?”

  “The green card that started all of this trouble—Gao didn’t want to apply for it. I made him do it. I told him that he needed to become a citizen, for our son’s sake, so that our son could hold his head high. I shamed him into doing it.”

  “But you didn’t know what it would lead to.”

  “Maybe not, but Gao kept saying that he felt something bad was going to happen if we put in the application. He kept reminding me of the expired visa. I told him that it had happened so long ago that it couldn’t be on the records anymore. But I didn’t know what I was talking about. I should have trusted him. Our life was fine. Sam was fine. That is, most of the time. He told me that he was being picked on in school, for the way he looked, for being shorter than the other boys. I told him that his father was short too, and he turned away from me. So I wanted him to be able to be proud of himself and his father. I remembered how I was picked on when I came to America, for not being able to speak English. I didn’t want him to feel different.”

  “Kids feel different for all kinds of reasons,” Emily murmured. Jean didn’t seem to hear her.

  “But if Gao didn’t think it was a problem that he wasn’t a citizen, I shouldn’t have either. If there was one more thing I could say to my husband, it would be that I’m sorry for not believing in him. For not believing that he was enough for our family.” After a moment, Jean asked, “Did Gao ever tell you how we met?”

  Emily shook her head.

  “It was at a party for a mutual friend at a restaurant on Mott Street in Chinatown. Everyone was from the north of China except the two of us. We were the only ones who could speak Cantonese. Gao had grown up near Chaozhou. That’s a little more than two hundred miles from Hong Kong, where I was born. But, you know, back then it would be almost impossible to go from one place to the other. They might as well have been two separate countries, divided by a huge sea. We never could have met each other except here in America.”

  Emily was reminded of how her mother had once said that she and her father had met at a Chinatown dance. They would also never have met had they stayed in their respective hometowns.

  “Gao told me right away that his visa had expired. That’s why he moved so often. He was afraid that he would be tracked down. He never left a forwarding address or told his landlord where he was going. But once he met me, he said he was ready to stop running.”

  Emily thought of the many couples she had encountered in her job; almost always one person was seeking citizenship through the other. She suspected more than one of them were false marriages, especially when the husband or wife had hastily been brought over from another country. But how was that different from any other marriage of necessity, a union forged from loneliness, unrealistic expectations, lack of choice? Emily sometimes wondered if that was true of her own parents. Hearing Jean speak, she knew that Jean and Gao’s relationship had not been like that.

  “What did you think when he told you about the visa?” she asked Jean.

  “It didn’t bother me. Almost everyone I knew back then had some kind of problem like this. You just didn’t talk about it. I was one of the lucky ones. I had come to the States when I was te
n and became a naturalized citizen. I never thought for one minute that Gao was interested in me for a green card. He even promised me, when we decided to get married, that he would never ask me to help him get one. It would be enough that our children would be full citizens. He always felt this way. If only I could have felt the same.”

  Tears were spilling down Jean’s cheeks now, although her face was still impassive. It was eerie to behold, as if a waxen doll were crying. Silently, Emily handed her a napkin from the metal dispenser on the table.

  “I just wish I had some sign that he had forgiven me, something he said.” Jean blotted her face; the bow on her blouse was askew. “You saw him recently, didn’t you? At the detention center?”

  Reluctantly, Emily nodded.

  “Did he say anything to you?”

  Emily hesitated. Was there any point in telling Jean that Gao had talked about accepting deportation, about leaving her and Sam because he did not feel he could live in a country that no longer wanted him there? She wished she could say that he had talked about how much he loved his wife and son, but that would be disingenuous. “We mostly talked about his health. That’s all.”

  “Oh.” Jean looked down into her coffee cup, disappointed.

  “Jean,” Emily said softly, “you don’t need Gao’s forgiveness. You need to forgive yourself, for Sam’s sake, if not your own. If you don’t, he’ll associate your guilt with his father’s death for the rest of his life. Besides, blaming yourself doesn’t make any sense. There’s no way you could have known what would happen.”

  “If it’s not my fault, then whose is it?”

  “The immigration system’s,” Emily said firmly. “And we’ll find a way to prove it. Well, Rick will.” She stopped for a second. “I hate to tell you this, but I’m not going to be working on the case anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s too close to me, and I—well, I’ve been having a lot of problems, too. Personal problems.”

  “Like what?” For the first time that afternoon, Jean sounded intrigued.

  “Well, my mother is starting to date again, my little brother’s run away to China, and I’ve just left my husband.”

  “Those are a lot of problems,” Jean observed.

  “Yes,” Emily said. “But even though I won’t be on the case anymore, I’ll be here for you, if you want to talk. I understand what you’re going through.”

  A wrinkle appeared across Jean’s smooth brow. “How so?”

  Emily took a deep breath. “My father died a year ago of a heart attack.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “It wouldn’t have helped.” At least back then, Emily thought.

  “Can I ask about your mother? Is she doing better now?”

  “I think so. Of course, I haven’t visited her as much as I should. But I was just home over the weekend, and she seemed to be doing okay. Maybe even better than I thought.”

  “I hope,” Jean said, “that I will be strong like your mother.”

  Emily hadn’t thought that her mother might be strong, or that she or Michael could be considered strong in the aftermath of their father’s death. Certainly she didn’t feel particularly strong at the moment, having just admitted to Jean everything that was currently going wrong with her life.

  “I’ll tell you what,” she said to Jean. “Why don’t we meet here in a year, at this very diner, and we’ll see how you feel?”

  Jean managed a faint smile. “I hope I’ll feel differently.”

  “You will.” Emily hoped this would be true of herself too.

  The waiter stopped by to see if they wanted anything else, but they asked for the check. Jean had to return home soon, because she’d left her sister for too long with Sam, while Emily had another appointment to get to. At the street corner they said good-bye, Jean to take the subway back to Queens and Emily to head uptown. The next time they’d see each other would be at Gao’s funeral, which was to take place next week. Emily promised she’d attend. No matter where she ended up living, no matter what state her career and marriage were in, she would be there.

  CHAPTER 11

  After leaving Qinghai Lake, Michael, Liao, and Ben head back to Xining through the late-afternoon sunshine. Liao falls asleep in the car, his head lolling back against the headrest. With his mouth slightly open and the tendons ropy in his outstretched neck, he looks like a baby bird.

  “There is a rug factory outside of town,” Ben says to Michael. “We will pass by it soon. Should we go there?”

  “Rug factory?” Michael repeats.

  “Yes, they weave rugs out of yak wool. They’re very warm. Maybe you can buy a rug for your family in America?”

  Michael wonders who in his family would want a yak wool rug, which he guesses wouldn’t smell much better than the yak butter. His mother would put it in the basement, while Emily would say that it didn’t fit the décor in her house. Then he remembers something else he read on the travel website.

  “Aren’t the rugs made by prisoners?” Michael glances at Liao, who is still asleep; in fact, he is snoring a little.

  “Yes,” Ben replies pleasantly. “Do you want to go?”

  “Um, no, thank you,” Michael says. Then, feeling bold since Liao is clearly unable to hear him, adds, “Did your father ever talk about when he was in the labor camp? Like why he was sent there?”

  “No,” says Ben. “All I know is that he was in prison when he was a young man.”

  “You never asked him? I mean, you were never curious?”

  Ben shrugs, keeping his eyes on the road. “Back then, you can accuse people of anything. It doesn’t mean it isn’t true or you are a bad person. Plenty of people were sent to the labor camps for doing nothing.”

  They probably still are, Michael thinks but doesn’t say aloud. “So your father doesn’t like to talk about the past?”

  Another shrug. “There’s nothing to talk about. But, no, he does not like to talk about it.”

  Michael sits back in his seat. “Neither did my father. Did your father ever mention mine before?”

  “I don’t remember him talking about your father, no. Only last night, when he says that you are here in Xining and wants to see us. He thought your father was with you, too. He was very sad that your father was not.”

  Michael considers and then dares to ask, “Do you feel you and your father are close?”

  Ben glances briefly at his sleeping father, as if approximating physical distance. “What do you mean, close?”

  Michael realizes that it isn’t a language barrier, but maybe a cultural one that he’s come up against. “I mean, do you feel you can tell him anything?”

  “Of course I can tell him anything. He is my father. Also,” Ben adds, “we live in the same house. He will hear anything I say.”

  Michael wonders at the nonchalance of Ben’s statement, whether it’s really true or Ben is just saying what he thinks Michael wants to hear. Or maybe he’s misinterpreted the question, although Ben’s English is good enough that Michael thinks otherwise. He has to admit that he’s a little jealous of how Ben is able to speak so easily of his father.

  The streets of the city flash by, and soon they are stopping at the familiar gate of the normal university with its statue of Mao. Ben drives onto the grounds and parks the car in front of one of the departmental buildings. As they’re sitting there, Liao still asleep, Ben’s cell phone rings. He takes out a device that looks much newer and more complicated than Michael’s own from his tracksuit pocket.

  “It is my mother,” he explains to Michael after ending the call. “She wants to know when we will be home. There is a little time before dinner, though, to show you around.”

  Ben gently prods his father awake, and the three of them get out of the car and walk onto the college campus, which looks busier than when Michael was there two days ago. Students in their blue-and-white gym uniforms stroll about arm in arm, not couples, but girls with girls and boys with boys. Michael knows thi
s doesn’t mean anything, just that they’re close friends. He saw two PLA soldiers walking around that way in the Muslim market the day before.

  “They look very happy,” Michael says of the students.

  Liao makes a disapproving sound. “There are some problems. There are many things the students want to change.”

  “What kinds of things?” Michael asks, thinking about his own college experience and some of the most popular issues brought up then: protesting against anti-affirmative action bills, banning the Greek system, legalizing marijuana.

  “They say there is bad service in the library. Also, the water they drink makes them sick if they do not boil it long enough. And they do not like how the lights go off at ten thirty every night.”

  “The lights go off at ten thirty?” Michael echoes.

  “Yes, in the dormitories. The electricity is cut off. That way the students are sure to go to bed and get enough rest. Sometimes, though, they light candles to study, and then it is dangerous because they can burn down the dormitory.”

  Michael shakes his head behind Liao’s back.

  They pass by a clearing where strains of ballroom music issue from a boom box, and same-sex pairs of students and opposite-sex pairs of older couples dance together. They stop to watch as the dance pattern changes from a waltz to a foxtrot. A student switches disks on the boom box, and a synthesizer beat blares forth. The older couples move to the side, but the students break apart and began to sway to the music. They don’t bop around in the way Michael expects, but move in perfect coordination, arms swinging together, hips swiveling in unison, like line dancing.

  “What is this music called in English?” Liao asks.

  “Disco?” Michael guesses. There is something very seventies about it.

  “See,” Liao observes. “Even when they dance disco, the Chinese like to be unified.”