“What means affair?” Xiao Wang asked. She was translating for Nai Nai, who I feared would be horrified by the tale of my father’s infidelity. But when I looked over again, she was asleep. Apparently for a seventy-eight-year-old woman, there was nothing new about this story. Who could blame her for sleeping through it? Xiao Wang stopped translating and covered Nai Nai with a blanket.
“You know,” I said, “having an affair—being unfaithful, having another lover—someone other than your wife or husband.”
Xiao Wang nodded, as if she knew a lot about such matters. “I’m married,” she said, perhaps sensing my doubt that she could understand.
I looked around the room, and she laughed.
“My husband is in China. He start a tourism business in Jinhong. Now he is travel often in Beijing. Anyway, maybe we do not consider marriage how you do in America.”
“How do you consider it in China?”
“It’s not simple like here,” she said, marking the beginning of more than a decade of responding to every question I ever asked with some variation on “It’s not simple like you think.”
“Maybe we have to get married for various reasons of the family or the society,” she said. “But those are also involving love, I think. Not the television love of America, but a kind of marriage love.”
“People in the West get married for all sorts of complicated reasons, too,” I suggested. “Not just TV love.” I smiled, thinking of the kind of love Xiao Wang might mean. Roseanne was America’s most popular TV show, along with The Cosby Show and Cheers. I can see why, if Xiao Wang got her information from American TV (which even now she admits she did), she would find our ideas of romance simple. Of course, as I often tell Xiao Wang, if I defined Chinese love by Chinese television, it would be a drab, state-run affair.
“And maybe it is,” she says, laughing.
Back then, I just said that people left each other for complicated reasons, that nothing like that was ever simple.
She said, “Why do your father leave?”
I told her the story. It was the first time I had ever told anyone other than Julia. I didn’t know why I felt safe with Xiao Wang. Maybe it was Nai Nai’s soft snoring in the corner. Or the comfortable, if incorrect, notion that someone who didn’t speak fluent English wasn’t a real listener in the same way as someone who did. Or wasn’t a critic, anyway.
I said my father’s name, John Mitchell, disliking the taste of it in my mouth. Then I said he had grown up on a farm in Iowa, the fourth son in a family of Roberts, Jameses, Williams, and Johns, that two of his brothers had died in a car accident as teenagers, and the other took over the farm. My father, in a surprise move unlike any other the family had ever imagined, broke away to go to college and then graduate school, where he wrote a dissertation on Gatsby that was apparently shimmering with brilliance and promise. So he and one of his best chapters got to fly to a conference in New York, where he yapped away without irony or experience about Daisy and the predicament of the modern American marriage. And met my mother, Naomi Silvermintz. It was his first trip to the East Coast, and she was in a dance recital some professor took my father to see. I imagine my mother was all of New York to him, sharp-tongued and mysteriously sleek. Even her name sounded like jewelry: shining and minty music to a farm boy. My father, to hear the pre-divorce version, loved my mother the instant he saw her barefoot in that black leotard. “It wasn’t ballet bullshit where the women are weightless and floating,” he used to tell my older brother Benj and me before he abandoned my mother and me. “It was the stomping, barefoot, modern dance that suited your mother.” He relished this story, loved casting himself as the lover of a strong girl more than he actually loved her, I think.
Xiao Wang said, “He must love her sometime though.”
“Of course,” I said. “I think he even loved her later, after—I mean, I don’t think it was so much about her. He was just disappointed in his life.”
“Why? It must be he has an okay life, right?”
I had a hard time explaining without making him sound luxuriously self-indulgent. I mean, all that happened was that his stardom never materialized. The Gatsby dissertation was published as a book six years after he finished it, but he never wrote anything else. He married my mother, and they had Benj and me, and she danced and taught dance while he cobbled together a collage of adjunct positions until he eventually got a job teaching history at a private high school. If my mother found this as disappointing or unsexy as he did, she hid it. She came from enough money to be unconcerned with whether he made any, and found my dad unorthodox and bohemian hot. So she watched for years as he threw himself into projects and hobbies, to the compulsive exclusion of sleeping or eating. He made shelves, beds, paintings, pottery, business plans. She complimented his intensity, loved whatever he built, tried, dreamt up. She said he was unusual, a genius, and at their dinner parties, she helped him hide or glorify his Iowa farm past, depending on his mood.
Then the laughing woman became his new project. And my mother had nothing to say about his genius anymore. The woman was of course like my mother, just significantly younger, less wealthy, and more freshly impressed. I felt awkward telling Xiao Wang this, as if the cliché were my fault. But I held on to the naïve hope that she wouldn’t recognize the hackneyed trope of it all.
That didn’t pan out.
“It’s so common story,” she said when I’d finished. I couldn’t help laughing.
“It feels personal nonetheless,” I joked.
“Of course it’s difficult. I didn’t mean it’s not difficult!” She apologized. “Why you don’t have family name?” I was surprised she had noticed this.
“I changed my name when I turned eighteen,” I said. “I wanted my mom’s.”
“Maybe your parents’ bad decision will make you good to choose more true thing for yourself,” she said. “They don’t keep in unhappy love. It can make you—liberation.”
“Free,” I said. I looked over at her sleeping Nai Nai.
“My grandfather die many years ago,” Xiao Wang said. “She come to America many years after he do, when he is sick, to help him. Then I come to help her because maybe now she will be too old.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s nothing for sorry. He was more than eighty.”
“Still,” I said.
“I’m sorry about your bad family story,” she said.
“Thank you.”
Then Xiao Wang walked me all to the subway, and right before I descended into the tunnel, I hugged her impulsively, and she leapt backwards like I had pulled a knife.
“I’m sorry!” I said, horrified.
“No, no, of course,” she said. “It’s fine, this embrace. Maybe I am not so casual to embrace, but no problem. It’s the American habit. I will, how do you say—used to this.”
She patted me on the arm.
I love studying Chinese. There’s something satisfying for an obsessive-compulsive in the compressed logic of it, the ability of each sound to have dozens of meanings, often including conflicting ones. There are the stroke marks coming together to form characters that look like the nouns they describe. Da Ge was proud that Chinese was both more sensible than English and more expressive. I like a language somewhere in between, a Chinglish hybrid that allows for importing the most expressive components of each language into the other.
Julia Too, who has grown up in Beijing and is stunningly bilingual, shares my love of Chinglish, especially of the effortful translation variety. When she and I rode down from our apartment on the twenty-seventh floor of Luscious Gardens this morning, our building management had posted the following notice on a bulletin board facing the elevators: “Comply with Public Morality; Strictly prohibit casting articles from high. On October 15, a flaming dog-end was flung from upstairs and burned a fabric chair. It happened that the resident of the chair did not sit in the chair when the dog-end fell so a more hated outcome was avoided. But that heinous activity r
eminds the danger of casting fireous dog-ends from high. Really, we have warned this many times already. Kindly hope those individuals take others’ safety into account. Stop bad bombarding behavior.”
Bad bombarding behavior! Someone had thrown a cigarette butt out the window. Julia Too immediately tore down the notice and tucked it into her Chinglish notebook. I have helped her be balanced by providing terrible Chinese for the collection, including Julia Too’s most beloved of my gaffes, when I said, Wo ye yao, or “My leaves are shaking,” instead of “I’d also like one,” in reference to a bottle of mineral water. My personal favorite was thanking a Chinese colleague for inviting me to ta ma de birthday, his “mother fucking birthday party” instead of his “mother’s birthday party.” Who knew that pairing up a possessive with a mother equals “mother fucking”?
I recently heard Julia Too say innocently to the mother of one of her Chinese friends, “My mom speaks a little Chinese.” Julia Too is so fluent that to her, I am the kind of person who uses expressions like “casting fireous dog-ends from high” in Chinese.
Da Ge tried teaching me to speak the year we knew each other, but I didn’t actually learn anything until I arrived in Beijing in 1994 and hired Teacher Hao, a gray-plumed, retired professor who tutors me. Gray hair is unusual here, and Teacher Hao wears his shiny mop like a peacock’s tail. He’s shy about everything except his fabulous do and my unacceptable pronunciation. In these two areas, he’s on fire.
We talk almost exclusively about Tang poetry and Julia Too, conversations that require me to use the word “daughter,” which, after eight years of trying, I apparently still can’t pronounce properly.
“My daughter has a—” I said yesterday.
“Nu’er,” he said. “Daughter.”
“Nu’er.”
“No! Nu’er.” He peered into my mouth, as if he’d find some kind of mechanical problem in there, which I hoped he would. Finding nothing in the physiology of a foreigner that should excuse such pronunciation, he sighed. “Xing,” he said, okay, go on.
“My daughter has a new friend, whose main interests are boys and U.S. culture.”
“Is your nu’er also interested in such things?”
“Well, she’s at a disadvantage.”
“Why?”
“Phoebe lived in the U.S. more recently.”
As I explained to Teacher Hao, Phoebe has a superior grasp of hip and all-important American cultural touch-stones, and for some reason, knowing about American culture and knowing about boys are related. She who knows the most about one is guaranteed to know the most about the other.
“Maybe your daughter should spend more of her time with the daughter of Xiao Wang, your Chinese friend?” I thought of Teacher Hao’s daughter, a sixteen-year-old who has been forbidden to do anything but study since the moment she was born. The one time I met her, at a dinner so socially awkward I had to sneak beta blockers in the bathroom, she was practically wearing a burlap sack. I don’t like designer jeans or pointy shoes on little girls—too much fashion screams creepy pageant, but there’s a delicate balance somewhere. Teacher Hao’s daughter wants to study abroad and will have to compete with hundreds of thousands of other applicants. What time does that leave for lip gloss, or for dating?
“Julia Too and Lili do spend a lot of time together,” I said, defensively. “But she needs to have more than one friend.” I was annoyed by the implication, even though I had provoked it and agreed that it was probably true, that a Chinese friend would be a better influence than an American one. “Kids need spare time, hobbies, leisure. Or it stunts their creative growth.”
“Maybe American friends are just heavier influences than Chinese ones,” he said.
“Not in my life,” I said. I laughed, but Teacher Hao gave me a stern look.
“Maybe she should go to a Chinese school.”
I rolled my eyes, and he cracked a smile. “Then, as you like to say about my daughter, she’ll have no time for friends,” he said. I took the joke as a gesture of camaraderie, since Teacher Hao does not find my sense of humor funny. Perhaps embarrassed, he promptly changed the subject to a poem about sailing a river of yellow flowers and retreated into the details of its lines.
After my lesson, Julia Too and I rode up Changan Jie, the Avenue of Eternal Peace, its sidewalk tiles clattering beneath our wheels, light rising up from Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. The city smelled like urban autumn, its usual curtain of coal and restaurant smoke hanging above us, garlic and meat cooking, always the faint scent of fresh-poured pavement underneath. At night, I can’t imagine ever leaving Beijing. But sometimes during the day I wonder whether Julia Too will grow up lost.
She seems to be doing okay. Phoebe came over last night, and they made spy notebooks, which they mysteriously call “goggies.” They’re fourteen pages each, with pouches for erasers, pencils, and extra note cards. Julia Too has been fascinated with spying since 9/11 happened last year, deciding that she could make herself useful by collecting information. When I asked, “Useful to whom?” she rolled her eyes. I don’t think her intentions are patriotic, but I’m not certain. She’s going to New York to stay with my mother and her husband, Jack, over Christmas. Maybe this is her way of preparing.
By this morning, she and Phoebe complained to me that I was too boring a subject for their spying, so we rode to the China World Hotel to ice-skate. Phoebe sat on the back of Julia Too’s bike, and they giggled while I wondered if this was something Phoebe’s mother, Anne, would allow. There was more giggling in the locker room, while they tried to figure out how they would glide around the rink, overhear juicy conversations, and then record them in their “goggies” without falling or drawing attention to themselves. Right before they went out on the ice, they put on lipstick (which Phoebe had brought). Lipstick. I don’t even know what to think of this development for Julia Too. I sat on a bench and graded Grapes of Wrath papers while they twirled and slipped across the rink. I was more than halfway through the set when Anne arrived. “How are they?” she asked.
“Not a good batch,” I said. “But some had thesis statements, so that was encouraging.”
“I meant the girls.” She glanced nervously at the rink.
“Oh, of course.”
“Was Phoebe well behaved?” I followed her gaze to Phoebe and Julia Too, who were holding hands and skating in a straight, white line. Ice shaved into curls around the sides of their blades.
“Phoebe’s always lovely, Anne. She’s welcome anytime.”
“Thank you. GB is such a good environment for them, don’t you think?”
I sighed. Anne and I have had this conversation before. Whenever we talk, I’m re-disappointed that Americans are not effortlessly accessible to one another. “Especially your math program,” she was saying. “Phoebe wasn’t learning anything like algebra at her school in Michigan, and that was a private school too!”
“Yeah. International private school math programs are good compared to their domestic counterparts,” I said. I considered gnawing my leg off to escape the rest of the conversation. “Julia, sweetie!” I shouted across the rink. “Put your shoes on—we have to meet Old Chen!” She nodded, gliding toward the exit.
Xiao Wang loves to remind me that the Chinese government recognizes Jews as an official Chinese ethnic group. So maybe I’m more Jewish or Chinese than American, because American strangers now seem especially strange. Although I was never much of a friend maker, even in New York. Julia Too takes after my mother in this regard, thankfully. She and Phoebe came dancing out of the locker room, their faces flushed from the cold rink and an interaction they’d had with some hockey-playing boys. Fodder for the goggies, I hoped. We waved Anne and Phoebe into their car-with-driver, and they headed for a gated neighborhood out in the suburb of Tong Xian, probably in a villa with at least one of the words “Jade,” “Legend,” or “Dragon” in its name. Anne and Phoebe are bona fide expatriates. Phoebe has seen recent movie releases that were not taped in the the
ater and full of people leaping up to get more popcorn in the middle of the show. She does not ride her bike everywhere in Beijing or snack on chicken feet at the beach, like Julia Too and I do.
Julia Too and I are fake expats, somewhere between imports and locals. We eat two-dollar bowls of noodles from street stands, have no maid, and wear knockoff clothes from the silk market. At the same time, we live in a temperate apartment with HBO, so I don’t know how much authenticity we can actually claim; these things are all relative.
Old Chen was waiting in the Luscious Garden parking lot for our Saturday afternoon dumpling date. We knew him even through the tinted windows of his black sedan. As soon as Julia Too pedaled into sight, the old man burst out of his car, and she leapt off her bike, tossed it into the rack, and ran to greet him. I watched her, my lovely, gangly string bean of a girl, throw her arms around his formal neck. They greeted each other in Chinese, and he scooped her up and then nodded in a shy way in my direction. I blew him a kiss. The driver opened the trunk, and Old Chen and Julia Too went digging in there together. He had brought a kite for her, a string of red butterflies they spent the rest of the day teaching to fly.
November 1989, New York, NY
Dear Teacher,
You say we should write about our “family history.” Mine are like this. My father is man who prefer to be the head of chicken than tail of ox. But maybe that because he know if you are first head of chicken then you can become head of ox. My father speak precision English. He study himself every morning maybe for hours. He say China will open some day. We will need to speak it. He try to teach me and even I try not to learn I can’t help learn some of his perfect English.
My father became rich. He have big black car with black window and big hands and big house and big plan I will be the management of a company. My mother will hate this if she know. She already hate my father before, even hate the way the world became. So she self-kills in 1982. Mao is dead. She know my father will never do the thing they promise each other to do. Because my father is cynic but my mother not. And he is right. The revolution fail. And many people regret later, especially my mother who believe in it so much. Because even she would realize what she do is not good, that it don’t work out so the country sinking. This become impossible situation for her. My mother is kind of person who care about the truth. She want to find the truth no matter it’s good news for her or not. But she cannot even do that. She is pretty and extravagant when she swallow many medication. When I find her, she was already dead in the bedroom. Before that happen, she cleaned up and made some food for me.
Repeat After Me Page 4