Beautiful as Yesterday

by Fan Wu

  “Where are you going to perform?” Molly asks. Molly is a short, energetic, red-haired woman, a New York native. She has been writing poetry and fiction since high school; now forty, she has received more than three hundred rejection letters. She has saved them and filed them in different folders: domestic literary magazines, international literary magazines, agents, small presses, trade publishers. Most of her rejection letters are typed form letters, unsigned, but some are handwritten notes from editors with encouraging comments. These rejections represent only a small proportion of the submissions and proposals she had sent out. She has speculated to Ingrid often about what happened to all the other hundreds of stamped, self-addressed envelopes she included. Did the recipients steam off and reuse the stamps?

  “Well, I don’t need an audience. I dance for myself,” Zonta says matter-of-factly, her dark-skinned face slightly arrogant. When she isn’t on tour, she teaches yoga at a YMCA gym. No matter whether she’s dancing or practicing yoga, she is completely engaged in the process, and her mind and body seem to be filled with pleasure and purity. Ingrid likes Zonta and likes to see her dance; she is impressed every time by her fluid movements, expressive eyes, and creative choreography. If she were a few inches taller, Ingrid believes, Zonta would have gotten more important roles in the shows she has appeared in. On the other hand, Ingrid is aware how competitive the entertainment business is. Isn’t Angelina good? Still, she has to wait patiently for her turn.

  “That’s nice. I wish I could say the same thing. I’d certainly love to be published. Even just a poem in a small magazine,” Molly says, sipping the margarita she is holding. “So I could convince my children that their mother isn’t locking herself in her study for nothing.” She turns to Ingrid. “Any good news with your writing?”

  “My writing? I got another rejection letter, if that interests you. From Tin House. For a manuscript I submitted half a year ago. The letter was handwritten by the editor, so I guess it wasn’t all that bad. He didn’t say much, just that he thought it was a good read but one of the characters was a little weak.”

  “There’s always something wrong for each individual reader, isn’t there?” Martin Freeman, a thin-faced, curly-haired black young man, Zonta’s boyfriend, chimes in. He’s a primary school teacher, writing screenplays in his spare time. “You could rewrite forever without pleasing them. Have you thought about applying for a writing program? Getting an MFA in writing might help. At least you can teach after graduation. A good way to make a living. I’m applying for a writing program at George Mason University.”

  “No, no, Ingrid, you aren’t going to do that.” Molly shakes her head. “This MFA, that MFA, can you nowadays find a university that doesn’t offer some sort of writing degree? I bet most of the students write without any individuality, trying to become the next Faulkner, Hemingway, or Steinbeck. Yes, they write well, their stories are perfectly structured, their language is superb, but so what? There’s no life in them! They haven’t lived. They have nothing to say. You don’t call that art, do you? Let me ask you: Did Victor Hugo have an MFA? Did Dostoevsky have an MFA? How about Mark Twain or Dickens? The best way to learn how to write is through reading and living.”

  Divorced twice, mother of three children, ages thirteen, seven, and four, Molly has been a sports journalist, bartender, dental assistant, gardener, and truck driver, and has worked in many other professions that don’t require a master’s degree in anthropology and biology, which she has already earned from Princeton University. Now, she runs a flower shop. For her, these are just day jobs. In her heart she is a writer, and the rest of the time is just waiting to write. Ingrid met her when she had one of her wisdom teeth extracted. While waiting for the dentist, who was late because of traffic, they chatted, about traveling, anthropology, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and Sun Tzu’s Art of War, and afterward they met for lunch or coffee regularly.

  Martin and Molly start to argue about the worthiness of getting an MFA, each with convincing examples. Zonta joins in, supporting Martin, as she always does in an argument. Ingrid sides with Molly, doing it more for fun—having started to write creatively only one year ago, she doesn’t have a strong opinion about writing programs. Two other guests join in, and the debate soon turns into a passionate discussion of the creative process of writing, music, dancing, and art making.

  Whenever there’s a gathering in their apartment, Ingrid can expect a fun conversation. Though she isn’t an artist herself and has never thought she’d be one, she is becoming more enthusiastic about art and writing day by day; sometimes she considers writing seriously.

  Angelina is in the kitchen, making more salsa. She shouts out her ideas. “Art is about letting go of yourself. Reaching deep into your subconscious to find your voice. The deeper, the better. The louder you holler, the more exciting it is. You cannot be afraid, cannot hold back. Babe, it’s just like having wild sex.”

  “Well said.” Zonta stands and belly-dances, her arms swimming in the air like snakes. She holds out her hands, so Ingrid gets up and dances with her. Someone whistles, another person applauds.

  Martin and Molly are still debating heatedly. Irritated by a comment Molly just made, Martin exclaims, “Molly, those artists you mentioned are geniuses! They aren’t like us. They were born with exceptional talents!”

  “Geniuses start from humble beginnings,” says the man leaning against a sofa leg. It’s Diego Lopez, who’s been drinking silently. He always looks sad and vulnerable, especially when he’s a little drunk. Ever since he made the announcement two years ago, that he was writing a historical novel about the Alamo, he hasn’t been talkative. None of his friends knows about the book’s progress. If they ask him, all he offers is that he’s “working on it.” He doesn’t have a job and depends on his parents’ and friends’ financial support. Last winter his landlord evicted him for being delinquent with his rent, and he has since been living in the kitchen of a friend’s restaurant.

  “Let’s toast our Diego, the upcoming genius.” Angelina, walking out from the kitchen, holds up her wineglass.

  Everyone clinks glasses and says “Cheers!”

  After a few sips of her margarita, Angelina begins to sing in Spanish, which she always does at parties. When she sings, her voice becomes deep, a little raspy, perfect for sad songs. Diego and two other Spanish speakers soon join Angelina, their eyes closed and heads shaking gently. Ingrid knows some Spanish and understands that they are singing about a heartbroken girl wishing the man who has abandoned her a happy marriage with his new lover. She’ll survive, the girl says in the song, for she has the beautiful mountains and forests and her dear family to be with her. Ingrid loves Mexican songs, is often moved by the passion in them, whether they are sad or cheerful. She likes the sad songs better, and whenever she hears them, she feels that Mexico has gone through many tragedies and much suffering and the songs themselves are a tribute to the country’s history. She cannot say why, but these songs remind her of China, of the passing of time.

  Angelina asks Ingrid to sing a Chinese song. Ingrid is shy when it comes to singing: she doesn’t think she has a good voice, but today, influenced by the margaritas, she sings “In That Place Far Away,” a folk song everyone knows in China. She starts an octave too high but manages to go through the high-pitched sections by humming. She hasn’t sung this song for a long time, and it surprises her that she remembers most of the lyrics. Angelina and her friends hum along. “So beautiful!” they say, though they don’t understand a word.

  Ingrid has to fly to Boston to interpret at a conference early the next morning, so after singing, she excuses herself and retreats to her room. She takes a bath, then sits at her desk to sort her mail.

  In addition to the credit-card bills and junk mail, there are two letters.

  She picks up the thinner one. The handwriting on the envelope is her own—it is the self-addressed, stamped envelope she put into a manila envelope with a short story and sent to a literary magazine several mon
ths ago. She opens the letter. A tiny piece of yellow paper drops to the desk. A typed rejection letter from “The Editors” thanking her for her submission but regretting not being able to use it because it “does not meet our present editorial needs.”

  It must be the eighth or ninth rejection letter she has received since she began to write, encouraged by Molly. At first, she wrote merely to prove to Molly that writing fiction wasn’t as difficult as Molly had claimed; she wasn’t serious—she was considering getting a law degree at that time. But Ingrid soon discovered that she liked writing fiction, which allowed her to retreat to her mind after a busy day. To her, the process is like solving a puzzle with endless layers, twists, and turns. She remembers the story she sent to this magazine: a country-born girl goes to the city to work in a factory, but unable to resist materialistic temptations, she ends up becoming a prostitute. It was Ingrid’s first attempt to write about China and Chinese people, based on an interview she conducted during a brief internship when she was studying in Beijing.

  Before, she had tried to write about Americans’ lives, about the middle-class families or blue-collar workers who populate John Cheever’s or Raymond Carver’s stories. She thought she could write about them well because she had lived in the United States for a number of years and seen people from different walks of life. But somehow she couldn’t seem to grasp the face and voice of that Mr. Smith or Ms. White; on the other hand, Old Aunt Zhang or Grandpa Wang loomed in as if from nowhere, demanding to be written about. But Ingrid didn’t think she knew those Chinese people well enough, either, to write good stories about them.

  She sometimes wonders whether, if she had lived in the United States since she was little instead of coming here as an adult, she would still have so much attachment to China. It seems to her writers always identify more closely with the cultures where they were born and raised. Jewish writers write the best about Jews, and Asian-American writers tend to focus on Asian Americans’ lives, while black writers such as Toni Morrison and James Baldwin are masters in depicting the black experience. A famous writer whose name she has forgotten once said that literature is the extension of a keen nostalgia about one’s ancestors. Maybe it is true.

  Or is her problem the language? Which language to choose, Chinese or English? She remembers a story from Autumn Flows, written by Zhuangzi, the most renowned Chinese Taoist philosopher. In the story, a person from the Yan Country admires how the people in the Zhao Country walk, so he travels there to imitate their walking. By the time he needs to return to his own country, he has forgotten how to walk like a Yan person; meanwhile, he cannot walk like a Zhao person, either. So he ends up crawling back to Yan. In the back of her mind, Ingrid fears she no longer has a first language: she has lost intimacy with Chinese, yet she’s still learning English despite the fact that she speaks with only a slight accent and has begun to build her name in the business translation world. When she writes in English, especially creatively, she sees her limits; the words seem to be floating on the surface of the water, instead of being part of the water.

  She glances at the folder on her desk where she has collected her rejection slips, which amount to nothing compared with what Molly has received. Ingrid resolves to stop writing for a while, until she knows what she wants to write about.

  The second letter is from her mother, enclosing a wedding photo of herself and Ingrid’s father. Since Ingrid began to write, she has become interested in old photos and visits antiques stores to look for them. To her, each photo contains a story about the past.

  The wedding photo, with serrated edges, is black and white. Her father is wearing a Mao-style jacket, the neck button tightly fastened, and looks serious, his lips locked tight. Her mother is not smiling, either, but she seems relaxed, her head leaning toward her husband’s shoulder. Ingrid remembers that her mother once told her that her life was easier after she met her father.

  Ingrid always feels that she owes her father. Whenever she thinks of him, she thinks of 1989.

  Then a sophomore at People’s University in Beijing, like many other college students, she was involved in the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square led by students, intellectuals, and labor activists. They marched, they sat in, they undertook hunger strikes, condemning corruption and demanding a democratic government.

  The night of June 3, Ingrid left her tent in the square with her boyfriend to fetch pamphlets from her dorm. When she arrived, she saw her father squatting outside her room. He was scrawny, his eyes red, as if infected, his lips dry and flaky. At the sight of her, he leapt up, his legs quivering. He gripped her arm and said that he had been looking for her all around Tiananmen Square. “Go home with me,” he demanded. “No,” she replied, shaking off his grip, and after getting the pamphlets, she told him to go home right away.

  Her father knelt, holding her right leg with both hands, saying she and her friends were putting themselves on the road to death. “Do you have guns? Do you have tanks? Do you have an army?” he asked. “You’re just a bunch of unarmed students. You think you can stop the guns with your chests? You’re too young, too naïve. It’s not worthwhile to kill yourself this way. Listen to me this time. Just go home with me.” He leaned his head against her leg, sobbing. It was the first time that Ingrid had seen her father cry.

  Other students were in the hallway. Some threw paper balls at her father, saying that China was so conservative and backward because there were so many cowards like him. She felt ashamed of her father’s presence. She tried to loosen his grasp on her leg, but though he looked weak and sick, his grip was strong. In her fury and frustration, she kicked him and slapped his back, yelling, “Leave me alone!” He wouldn’t budge, his fingers seemingly sinking into her flesh. Eventually, helped by her boyfriend and a few other students, she broke free, and they locked her father in her dorm room. As she darted down the stairs with her boyfriend, she heard a heavy pounding on the door, followed by a long howl.

  She would never forget that howl. It sounded like a wolf mourning its dead cub.

  It was after midnight, but the streets were seething with people as if it were a carnival—it had been like this since April. There were uniformed, fully armed soldiers on some roads, stopping people from passing through. They took a taxi, a free ride when the driver learned they were students. They got out when the taxi was stopped by armed soldiers. They walked toward Tiananmen Square. Then they heard gunshots, not one or two but many, tearing the night as if right in their ears. They soon saw people falling to the ground covered in blood. For a few seconds, Ingrid thought that she had imagined all this, or that they had accidentally stepped onto a movie set and she was just seeing special effects. But her instinct told her to run, as fast and as far as she could: in fact, her boyfriend was already running, dragging her behind him. People kept falling around them, and then her boyfriend fell, blood spurting from his head, spilling onto the roadside flower bed. She pulled him, by the arm, hearing a man alongside shouting at her. “He’s dead! Run for your own life!” She didn’t listen and kept pulling the body. It was not until she collapsed against a tree that she realized the gunshots had stopped.

  In the following days, she sometimes dreamed of herself running from guns she couldn’t see. When she woke up, suddenly, and sat up in bed, panting and weeping, she touched her chest to see if there was blood there. And she thought of her boyfriend, whose death she had witnessed near Tiananmen Square; and of her father, howling his rage and fear behind that locked door.

  Her father had come to her dorm to save her life, yet she hated him. Though what happened on the early morning of June 4, 1989, had proved him right, she still hated him for a long time afterward, because he had shown himself to be a coward in front of her friends and didn’t manage to stop her and her boyfriend after all. For a long time, her temper was volatile and her grief made her irrational and unreasonable.

  This was not the first time that she had hated her father. Her first year in high school, Ingrid fell in love with a boy in
her class. Though they only wrote love letters to each other and held hands when no one was around, when her father found out, he went to the boy’s parents, asking them to promise that their son would never speak with his daughter again. Not long after, the boy moved to a different city. Then, during her last year in high school, her father insisted that she study science, as her sister had. If she hadn’t run away for a few days, staying with friends and making no contact with the family, he wouldn’t have given in.

  One year after the Tiananmen protest—referred to by the authorities as the Political Turmoil Between Spring and Summer of 1989—was put down, her sister helped her move to the United States. Because the U.S. embassy officials sympathized with students, it was easy to get a visa. Ingrid didn’t know at the time that she would never see her father again.

  The singing in the living room has faded into intermittent humming—Angelina and her guests must be a little drunk. Ingrid imagines them lying on the carpet or leaning against the sofa, sleepy and relaxed, half-empty glasses in their hands. It’s a little chilly now, so they probably have covered themselves with blankets, bath towels, the tablecloth, or one of Angelina’s coats. Sometimes, at earlier parties, they would fall asleep on the floor, and after they woke, with hangovers, they would drink more, till there would not be a drop of alcohol left in the apartment. It will be the same this time, Ingrid is sure.

  She hears Angelina’s tremulous laugh. Whenever she and Diego are kissing, Angelina laughs like this. They kiss like brother and sister, rather than lovers, kisses more for consolation than for passion.

  The night has turned the window into a mirror, and Ingrid gazes at her reflection. She thinks of Bing’er and recalls her fascination with Chinese characters. She also thinks of some places in Chinese books she used to like: Lao She’s old Beijing, Zhang Ailing’s war-stricken Shanghai, and Xiao Hong’s snow-clad northeastern provinces. She feels something awakening inside her.