“It’s nice,” I said.
His bed was in the far corner, propped with two pillows and an army green sleeping bag. Facing that were a television and a shelf so full of books that half were stacked horizontally. A bare bulb hung from the middle of the room. He had a wooden table with one chair. I felt sick.
“Do you want to sit?” he asked.
“Can I look around first?”
“Nothing to look around, really.”
I was hoping to find photographs, but there weren’t any. Four scrolls hung in a row on the far wall next to the bed. Each had a different kind of flower growing up it, and a block of characters. I was relieved to see them hanging so neatly; the thought that he had measured before putting nails in place pleased me. H-e-’s u-n-h-a-p-p-y, I spelled out. He saw me looking at the scrolls. “Seasons,” he said, “Tang poems for them.”
“Tang poems?”
“Poems from the Tang dynasty.”
“Will you read me one?” I asked.
He looked at the scrolls. “This one is a poem by poet named Wang Wei,” he said. “He’s quite famous in China. It says, ‘I get off my horse, ask where you are going. You say you have trouble. And go to be alone in the hills of the South. Go then. I will ask you nothing else. White clouds forever.’”
“White clouds forever?”
“Eternal-ity, is this the right word?”
“Yes.”
“China look like this,” he said, pointing to an ink smudge behind one of the flowers. “There is more in the air and the ground there, even for the cities.”
“More what?”
He thought. “Fog,” he said. “That hide the buildings.”
He slipped the movie out of its plastic case and into a VCR.
“Sit down with me,” he said.
He turned the TV on and reclined backward onto the bed. I lay down next to him, and he put his arm under my neck. On the screen, rural China fanned out, dusty and expansive, and an old man kept a stunning woman from her true love. I turned toward Da Ge and rested my hand on his chest, felt his pulse. I turned to ask what town the movie was in, but he was asleep. I watched him for a long time—the way I now watch Julia Too.
My mother has arrived for the summer, equipped with gas masks, six best-selling books for me (even though I dislike bestsellers and can now get books easily in Beijing), and unacceptably fashionable clothes for Julia Too. Nothing about her ever changes, and neither does our chemistry. Her husband, Jack, loves her summer trips, although he doesn’t come with her; he delights in what he considers her “international” lifestyle. Naomi still thinks of our lives here as hardship posts. Until Julia Too and I moved to Beijing, my mother was a quintessential New Yorker, worldly in the freakishly agoraphobic way you can be if you read the Times and the New Yorker and know every art gallery in New York but can’t bear to leave the city. She could hardly tolerate traveling as far as Connecticut or New Jersey. But now she has all sorts of accessories and frequent-flier miles banked with every airline that flies to China. Jack travels on business, and she brags charmingly that she jets about with him, using her own miles to buy tickets.
Julia Too and I went to pick her up at Capital Airport, where she came down the ramp in a suit cut so precisely she looked like an origami version of herself. Her pearls weighed her collarbones down. She had almost no makeup on, and skin so thin her veins showed through. She smothered Julia Too with kisses, and then she did the same to me.
“Your hair is short.”
“You love it, right?”
“It’s cute,” she said. “It’s fine.”
I had put lipstick on for the occasion, and was wearing a simple sundress and sandals. My mother held me out for a moment and continued to look at me. I tried to imagine what it will feel like when Julia Too isn’t my little baby-faced girl anymore. How I’ll feel about her neck once it loses the still recognizable creases I once plumbed for stray rice cereal, her silky feet that kicked my stomach while I nursed her. Julia Too is still little enough to belong to me, to live in my house. I still pack her pink lunch box with pretzels and sandwiches, and make her favorite dinners: hot pot, tacos, yu xiang spicy eggplant, and lasagna. Maybe looking at me that way made my mother want to see her baby. Or herself. What could she see and not see about me, who had I become to her once I wasn’t hers anymore? She sighed. “You’re really quite skinny,” she concluded.
I smiled. “So are you, Mom.”
Then we went home, where she and Julia Too sneaked off to gossip and try on whatever illegal outfits Naomi had brought.
For dinner, we met Shannon and Xiao Wang and their girls at Yu Xiang Ren Jia, Xiao Wang’s favorite Sichuan restaurant. As soon as we arrived and she and Naomi had hugged their American hugs, Xiao Wang directed the waiter to bring a fish out because she wanted shui zhuyu, a giant cauldron of boiling oil with fish and bean sprouts and hot peppers bubbling to the surface. Julia Too and I love shui zhuyu, but I saw Naomi’s eyes widen at the words. The first time she ever had it, also out with Xiao Wang, Xiao Wang took my mother into the kitchen to help pick the fish, and then they watched the waiter put it in a plastic bag and beat it to death with a bat. Maybe that’s why shui zhuyu was the first Chinese expression Naomi ever effortlessly committed to memory. Now whenever we order it, Xiao Wang has the waiter bring the fish out to the table so we can judge that it’s big enough and fresh with life, but the execution takes place in the kitchen.
“Naomi, you would also like some tofu dish?” Xiao Wang asked thoughtfully.
“Whatever you all are eating is fine,” my mother said.
“Don’t be a martyr, Mom,” I said. I asked the waiter for some shriveled green beans, the dish Da Ge had prepared for me so long ago, his mom’s favorite. And noodles and spicy eggplant. He nodded and rushed off toward the kitchen.
“And a bottle of fire liquor!” Shannon called out after him.
“Which kind?” he asked.
Shannon grinned at me. “Erguotou!” She called out, the cheapest, most throat-burning of the white fire liquors. Shannon loved my mother, and considered this a welcoming banquet, which meant she wanted Naomi drunk by the end of the night. And drunk on something “authentic,” nothing too bourg-y. It worked. After the first thimble-full of erguotou, you can’t feel it scalding you anymore, and I guess Naomi figured if she was going to have to eat eyeballs out of a pot of oil all night, she might as well Novocain her senses first. She was in a celebratory mood anyway, raucous about the men being absent—Jack in New York, Jin in Yunnan, and Zhang Sun at a meeting. She kept joking that it was a women’s league dinner, finding it increasingly hilarious as she drank more fire—that we were all women, all had daughters.
Shannon’s media consulting company had picked up a new client, so she was also boisterous, asking Xiao Wang boring questions about the insurance industry in China.
“You’re representing an insurance company?” I asked.
“Liberty Mutual,” she said, gleefully. “Gan bei!” Bottoms up!
“I think it will be strongly regulated for China, this industry,” Xiao Wang warned. “China do not like to give up local business for foreign company like Liberty Manual.”
“Liberty Mutual, Mom,” Lili said, dropping out of the girls’ conversation briefly.
“Their CEO is coming. I’m going to take them down the Yangtze,” said Shannon.
Xiao Wang was laughing. “Maybe you can sing ‘Unchained Melody’ on karaoke night like Julia and Naomi did,” she said to Shannon.
“You bet your ass I will!” Shannon said, and Xiao Wang shot her a look.
“You bet your ass!” Sophie parroted.
“Sophie!” Shannon said.
“What, Mom?”
Shannon laughed. “Good point. Nothing, I guess.”
The girls’ basi pineapple arrived, deep-fried fruit coated in a sugar sauce that’s soft until dunked in ice water and then becomes a hard candy shell. They gobbled it up, trailing sugar silk across the table with their chopsticks. And onc
e they were giddy with sweets, they began playing a Chinese drinking game, using juhua tea as reward and punishment. Xiao Wang and my mother made a long, involved plan to take a tai-chi class together at dawn on Friday, Shannon blabbed to my mother that I had a new boyfriend, and Xiao Wang scolded her for gossiping.
“Shannon is okay person,” Xiao Wang reassured my mother (and herself). “She have mouth of a dagger, heart of tofu.” I looked over, my heart skipping at the idiom.
Once we joined in the girls’ drinking game, the level of chaos at our table rose until we were yelling so much that the loudest tables of men in the place looked over, dismayed. We spent an hour on drunken finger guessing, a complicated rock-paper-scissors game in which two people hold up their fingers at the same time while shouting out a random number. If your number ends up being equal to all the extended fingers, you win. If you don’t win, which you almost never do, and Naomi literally never does, you drink. And since most cultures agree that words are more fun than numbers, instead of just shouting the number itself, the Chinese have “number phrases” like “two kind brothers,” “three stars shining,” and “making a fortune in four seasons.” We were shrieking these, drinking everything in sight, and then, with the exception of my mother, faint with exhaustion by the time we left for home.
“Shannon and Xiao Wang seem so great,” my mother chattered happily in the cab home. “I mean, everyone seems great—Sophie, and Lili, and—Julia! When do I get to meet the famous Phoebe!?”
“Soon, maybe tomorrow?” Julia Too looked at me, amazed to see Naomi in such a wild mood.
Late that night, after Julia Too was asleep, my mother came and sat on the edge of my bed, sober but lit with jet lag. I thought of the millions of times I’d sat on her bed. I was thumbing through a book of Chinese poems Yang Tao had given me. Eavan Boland’s new book, Against Love Poetry, was on the nightstand. My mother picked it up.
“What are you reading, sweetie?”
“Some obscure Chinese poems a friend gave me. That book is for him.”
“The friend Shannon mentioned? Is he—?”
I laughed. “He’s my boyfriend, I guess.” I gave in. In high school, I would have stayed for as long as possible on the subject of the poems, knowing she wasn’t interested. But I wanted to reward her for having waited all night to bring it up.
“Will I get to meet him?”
“First you have to memorize these,” I said, handing her the book.
“It’s worth it! I’ll start right now. Um. By the way. I brought you something.”
She set the book down and handed me a box, which I opened unceremoniously. I can’t tolerate melodramatic moments with my mother. There were two rings in it, one simple band and one diamond, too large and overstated for my taste. “Are these yours?”
“Of course,” she said. “I’m surprised you don’t remember them.”
“This was your engagement ring from Dad?”
“Right. I know it’s got bad energy in some ways, but it’s a diamond, and I thought I’d give it you. You can decide what to do with it—maybe you want to give it to Julia Too eventually. Or maybe you can have a necklace made out of it. Anyway, it’s yours.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“He loved you tremendously, you know,” she said. I sat electrocuted to the bed.
“You do know that, right?” she asked.
“Are you still drunk?”
She smiled. “No. But that was fun. I love your friends.”
“I love them, too,” I said. “And they love you,” I added, feeling ridiculous.
“Anyway, your father loved you. That’s all I wanted to say. He behaved terribly, but it wasn’t because he didn’t love you.” She stood up. “Do you know what I mean?”
“I’m not sure, Mom,” I said. I didn’t want her to go. “What do you mean?”
She sat down again, and I was relieved.
“It’s not that he couldn’t forgive you. It’s that he couldn’t forgive himself, and didn’t think you could ever forgive him.”
“Are you an apologist for him now?”
“Absolutely not,” she said, “But—”
“Did he tell you that? About thinking I couldn’t forgive him?”
“Yes,” she said. I thought this over.
“You can sleep in here with me if you want,” I said.
She ran her hand through my hair. “Do you want me to?” she asked. I shrugged. “I will,” she said. “I’ll be right back. I’m going to get my book and put a nightgown on.”
She went to change into something long and white while I put the rings in my jewelry box, next to the ones Da Ge and I had worn that day at City Hall.
July 1990, New York, NY
Dear Aysha,
In the morning when I am not still sleeping but also not awake, I thought how Beijing is cruel city. So many boys and girls were attracted by her and flooding in with their youth. On this exciting stage they perform and enjoy, splurge their success until time passed and their youth was used up. Then they woke up and realized that they want something human, maybe natural or simple. Then Beijing has not much to offer! The city cannot be your mother. At this point, Beijing finished playing her role. Like the love that go away suddenly.
Still I am envy those friends in China. The independent life, but also their family. I am float through the world like a bubble that will disappear any moment. No city. No family. No home.
I want to say to you how much I care you and the way your mind work and look. I hope you know what I mean. For me you are important and beautiful person in my American life.
Da Ge
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Julys
I WAS MARINATING CHICKEN THE LAST TIME DA GE CAME OVER. I had never had chicken in the house until I met Da Ge. But after we were married, I lived in fear that he would starve while at my place and I would be excommunicated from the Jewish faith. Jewish mothers are not supposed to let their guests or their husbands wither from hunger.
I was almost a real Jewish mother by then, but no one seemed to notice, including Da Ge. Of course I was barely pregnant, but at the time his obliviousness surprised me, made me think maybe it’s true when guys say they can’t tell the difference between our skinniest and fattest selves. I felt like a huge round bouncing fruit, broadcasting baby! Of course, off drugs in honor of the baby, I was rocketing up a bit. Now, when I look at pictures I can see how my pregnancy would have been imperceptible to Da Ge. And if that, the mania, and other certainties were invisible to Da Ge, then I wonder what qualities in himself Da Ge considered obvious. Perhaps the very fact of his ongoing internal meltdown seemed to him to be embarrassingly public.
The bumpy bird on the counter turned my stomach, so I returned to the hallway and sorted the day’s unopened mail. There was a letter from the city, and I tore it open. We had passed our interview. A current went through me, one tough to identify as fear or joy. Now, all he had to do was pass his American history test and he would be an American citizen. The dramatic part would end and—what? We would start our life together? Would he move in with me on 115th and be my husband? It seemed unlikely, even to me. Would he think it was okay to have a baby? Another ripple, definitely fear this time, moved outward from my body to my skin and lifted the hair in a stadium wave. Reluctant to return to the chicken, I shed my clothes and filled a bath.
I don’t know how long I sat in the water before I heard him at the lock, keys to my apartment, his bike, 5-I in Chinatown, and whatever other places he unlocked knocking against each other like chimes.
“Da Ge,” I said. In his name was an echo of the first time I’d said it.
He opened the bathroom door, and I could feel the blocks he’d walked, the outside on him. I turned the faucet with my right foot, added heat.
“Where’ve you been?” I asked, trying to sound casual.
“I had some business.” His voice was blank, but he looked at me with interest.
“Do you want to get in with me?
It’s still hot.”
“No, it’s okay for me,” he said. “Maybe you come to the living room?” His eyes had the bruised look I both liked and dreaded, one that suggested his life took place somewhere else, without me.
I walked down the hall in my towel and found him on the futon, flipping channels before he could see what was on any. The TV screen was a colorful mess.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“We passed our interview,” I said.
“I know,” he said.
“How did you know?”
“Zhen Ming already know. He find out last week and schedule my test.”
“So, all you have to do is take the American history test, right?”
His eyes clouded over.
“Yes,” he said, his voice low.
“That’s all. Then wait.”
“That’s good news, right?”
“Yes,” he said, faking a smile. “Sometime I’ll be American.”
“When is the test?” I asked him.
It was Wednesday, he would take it in a large group, was lucky, usually there was a long wait, something about Zhen Ming.
“What does Zhen Ming do, exactly?” I asked him.
“He is businessman with connection.”
“Like your father?”
“No,” he said angrily, “not like my father.”
I slipped away to make a dinner reservation on Wednesday night in the park. We would celebrate, I thought, and I would tell Da Ge about the baby. Wednesday. His citizenship exam would be done; I would be almost four months pregnant. Horse-drawn carriages would be pulling up, the city around us like a velvet curtain.
When I returned to the living room, Da Ge was sitting on the couch, watching local news, all the latest sordid deaths, tallied by plastic anchors. His eyes were spiraling.
“Maybe we should turn that off and study for Wednesday?” I asked him.
He shrugged again.
“Did you bring the test book?”
“No.”
The phone rang, and I picked it up distractedly.
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