by Fan Wu
Inside the café, three teenage girls, each with multiple shopping bags, at least one printed with “Macy’s,” at her feet, occupy a window table. A girl with shiny purple eye shadow takes a halter-topped, silver satin evening dress from a bag to show her friends, saying that it cost $150 after a 60 percent discount. “But it’s a BCBG!” A girl with a wide copper-studded, red belt remarks and shrugs. The other girl agrees, assuring the owner of the dress that her money was well spent, especially because she is in college now and needs something a little “classy.” “And you got the money from your parents anyway,” the girl adds. The girl with the red belt now extracts a jewelry box from her purse and displays a glistening silver bracelet.
“Gosh! So beautiful!” the other two girls exclaim simultaneously, startling a middle-aged woman next to them who was reading a Harry Potter book and also has a Macy’s shopping bag at her feet. At first she gives the girls a stern look for interrupting her reading, then she beams a forgiving smile when hearing the bracelet’s proud owner announce that it’s a gift from her mother, celebrating her first year at college.
The sight of the girls reminds Ingrid of her gift from her father when she went to college in China: a notebook with a cover picture of Zhang Haidi, a highly accomplished disabled young woman promoted by the Party as the model for youth since the early eighties. Under her picture were inscriptions from a Party leader: “Learn from Zhang Haidi. Be a Communist with revolutionary ideals, sound morals, good education, and strong discipline!” Ingrid had used the notebook as a diary but burned it after her college boyfriend died. She glances at the three cheerful American girls, thinking how different her life was at their age.
Ingrid is waiting for Matthew Stein, an editor from a San Francisco-based small press. Last week, Matthew e-mailed her, saying that he had received her contact information from Bing’er, whom he had encountered in Toronto not long ago. “She sent me your travel blog, and I enjoyed reading it. I heard you live in San Francisco right now. Why don’t we meet?” he’d said. Not having heard of the press, Ingrid first thought it might be one of those vanity publishing houses, but after research she discovered that it had been in business for more than thirty years and had published quite a few critically claimed books. So she replied and made an appointment with him.
Ingrid had started the travel blog the day after she moved to San Francisco, on a whim. Since then she has made a dozen postings, each about a city she has visited. They’re supposed to be a writing exercise, and she isn’t serious with them, though she tries to write her best. Bing’er loves them and has been begging her to write more. When Ingrid received Matthew’s e-mail, she thought it was odd that her travel blog interested him.
Along with the blog, she began a novel, about which she hasn’t talked with anyone, not with Bing’er, not with Angelina, not even with Molly Holiday. Three weeks ago, she enrolled in a private writing workshop in Palo Alto, an effort to discipline herself to write. The teacher, Susan Frazier, a former Stanford Stegner fellow, is a sixtyish woman with a wide range of publications, including novels, short stories, poems, and essays. Ingrid wouldn’t go so far as to say that she loves her writing, but there are certain things about the teacher she admires, especially her warmth toward her students and her sincerity about writing, not as an occupation but as her indulgence, something essential in her life. There are ten students in the class, with whom Ingrid’s begun to be friends more or less—at the least, they are all quite committed to the workshop. Last week, Ingrid submitted a short story for critique but not her novel excerpt; she wasn’t ready for that yet.
Now, sitting in the café, hearing all the light talk about shopping and bargains (the café is getting crowded), she ruminates on her characters, a family of three separated by wars and other turbulence. She has modeled the wife on her aunt; though her aunt died long before she was born, the first moment she saw her pictures, Ingrid was drawn to her—her beauty, her liveliness as a child, her melancholy and defiance as an adolescent and a young adult.
As for the father, she has borrowed from a middle school classmate’s father, a silent janitor with ashen hair and a prominent mole at the right corner of his mouth, who swept the campus every morning, meticulous about his work. Her classmate was ashamed of his father, and the only thing he had said to her about his father was that he was a lunatic. She had thought the father illiterate and dull until one day she saw him against a wall behind bushes, his broom beside him, when she was on her way to fetch hot water in the canteen. He was sobbing, a thick book open in the middle on his knees. She walked over, half out of kindness, half out of curiosity. “Uncle Luo,” she called out to him. Startled, he closed the book. She saw the cover: Doctor Zhivago. Her sister had read it the summer before, so she knew it was by a Russian writer, a Nobel Prize winner. Later, she made fun of this incident to a few of her friends, unaware of her cruelty until much later, when she went to college and read the book herself.
Before she started her novel, her plan was ambitious, to cover nearly a century, from the end of the Qing Dynasty to the present. Her major in history in China had helped her lay out the historical terrain. Research was challenging but not too difficult; she had gotten a stack of books from the San Francisco Public Library and some university libraries.
She was well into the third chapter. Until a week ago: since then she hasn’t been able to write one more word. She is at a loss about how to continue. And she’s begun to have a strange feeling that part of the book demands to be written in Chinese. For certain scenes and characters to sound authentic, she believes that they will have to be in her mother tongue. Furthermore, she is afraid that her having lived outside China for a decade has made her thinking and her writing too Western, has made her subconsciously absorb Western stereotypes about China and Chinese people. Moreover, she needs more Chinese books for reference, books she has to buy in China because they are unavailable in the United States.
Now, I have two second languages, and no first language to claim, Ingrid thinks, laughing at herself. She finishes her espresso and walks to the counter to order a double latte. She’d like to forget her writing for a while. She walks back to her table and picks up the newspaper her neighbor left behind: only the real-estate pages. She reads them anyway, knowing that she will never be able to afford to buy in San Francisco. She takes a look at her watch: fifteen minutes past the scheduled meeting time. But she is not in a hurry, so she doesn’t mind. Then she takes out two books from her purse and flips through them. A translation agency gave them to her just this morning to translate from English to Chinese, both with decent advances.
One is by an author whose investment books are always New York Times best-sellers. Under the large-print title You Can Become a Millionaire Too! is the author’s triumphantly smiling face, her eyes glittering like those of a leopard. The other book, also a best-seller, is about how to enrich one’s sex life, with explicit descriptions of lovemaking positions, sex tools, and fantasies, including group sex, outdoor sex, anal sex, bondage, and other curious activities. “Imagine the unimaginable!” the author invites on the cover.
Are these the books Chinese people like to read nowadays? she wonders and meanwhile makes fun of herself: she’ll be an expert in sex and investment after translating them. She signed the contract because she needed the money, but she knows she is lucky to have the work—she cannot complain about the payment. However, how long she can make a living doing translations remains unknown. She faces competition from China, where translation agencies have grown rapidly in the past few years and charge much less than their American counterparts. She read in a Chinese newspaper that more and more English books are translated into Chinese by college students, who get the assignments from their professors, commissioned by a translation agency or a publisher; sometimes, translation agencies give the work to students directly. Each student gets a chapter and a dictionary, and at the end the translations are compiled and edited—at this speed, a book of 250 pages can be transla
ted in weeks or even days. Ingrid’s agency once showed her a novel translated thus from English to Chinese. The translation was awful—poor word choices, grammatical errors, no difference in sentence structure between English and Chinese. If she hadn’t read the novel in English and known how beautiful it was, she would have thought it unworthy based on the Chinese translation. She feels fortunate to have read many well-translated books when she grew up, such as Tagore’s poetry by Bing Xin, Hemingway’s novels by Feng Daiyi, Byron’s poetry by Cha Liangzheng, and several French writers by Fu Lei. Those translators were either writers themselves or scholars who were experts on the writers they translated. Ironically, Ingrid is aware, some of these writers had chosen to do translation in Mao’s era because they feared persecution for writing something Mao disliked.
Ingrid has been considering going to China with her mother at the end of June—granted a visa extension, her mother won’t return to China until then, one and a half months longer than planned—and living there for a while, to keep her mother company and extend her savings. It has been more than a month since her birthday, when Mary criticized her for being reckless with her life and not caring for their mother. Mary apologized the next day.
“There’s no need to. You were telling the truth anyway,” Ingrid said to Mary.
“You’re my sister. I only have one sister. I only wish you well,” Mary said affectionately, even a little too seriously. Though Ingrid always knew that Mary cared about her, she feels her sister has been a bit too much lately: she calls often, sometimes daily, when there is nothing specific to talk about. Ingrid wants to tell her to stop calling her so frequently but doesn’t have the heart.
“I wish we had another sister,” Ingrid once joked to Mary. “So she could share your calls with me.”
“Well, I think she’d just get the same amount of calls,” Mary responded and smiled good-humoredly.
“I’d better escape somewhere for a while. Somewhere with no cell-phone towers,” Ingrid joked.
“Why don’t you visit China?” Mary suddenly said. “It’s very different from before. Even if it hadn’t changed, you should go back. After all, it’s where you came from, where you spent your first twenty years.”
Mary was right, Ingrid admits. The thought of visiting China makes her restless, bringing back her suppressed memories, but she knows that it is the right thing to do, for her mother, for her writing, and most important, for her to make peace with herself—she cannot live in self-exile forever. She needs time to think about what to do next, and she feels that being in China might inspire her.
After her years at San Jose State, she began to travel. At first, they were domestic trips, mostly driving since she had little money. She slept in youth hostels or camped. Sometimes she went with friends, other times alone. After graduation, when she had a full-time job, she traveled internationally whenever she had time off. But it was not until she quit her day job and became a freelance translator and tour guide that she began to travel widely: some business trips but most for leisure. Traveling had given her excitement and inspiration, but six months ago she began to feel lost and anxious, like tumbleweed blowing in the wind, without purpose or direction. Sometimes, the moment her plane landed at another country’s airport, she agonized about being a tourist, a temporary resident, a shallow foreigner in the locals’ eyes.
For instance, four months ago, she spent two days in Florence after interpreting at a furniture trade show in Milan. She had been to Florence before and had always liked the city. She visited the Duomo one morning. Such a formidable piece of architecture in the center of a boisterous downtown! The grandness and antiquity filled her with awe. Climbing the stairs inside, she realized that she knew little about it beyond what was said in those beautifully printed pamphlets and travel books. She was no different from those despicable tourists who rush to each point of interest and, after taking photos of themselves against popular backgrounds, leave contentedly for the next destination on their itinerary. Every minute she spent in the Duomo she felt more ignorant about it.
Then, one week ago, another business trip took her to Tokyo—in her opinion, a place too futuristic to be real. Again, it wasn’t her first time there. Though she used to be fascinated by its congested concrete jungle and tremendous energy, this time she felt only its foreignness, a feeling strengthened by what she saw as she lunched on pasta at a restaurant in Shibuya. The waitresses were all young girls in white aprons with fancy hairstyles and cute jewelry, who bowed often and whispered amiably as they spoke to the customers.
A woman in a ridiculously big red hat had walked in and sat in a corner, four or five tables from Ingrid. She ordered a glass of Asahi, nothing else. Then she extracted seven or eight makeup boxes of various sizes from her handbag—also ridiculously big. She opened all the boxes and began to put on makeup, without removing her hat. She applied layer after layer, slowly and meticulously. During this beautification, a line had formed outside the restaurant, and the waitresses had quickened their steps to serve the customers, sweating visibly; a traffic accident had occurred, and an ambulance had arrived with lights flashing and sirens blasting. But nothing seemed to matter to the woman other than her makeup. She examined herself intently in a silver costume mirror, adding new dabs of eye shadow or applying more mascara. Ingrid couldn’t guess her age: the lighting was dim and the shade from the brim of her hat concealed half her face. She could have been in her twenties, thirties, forties, or even older. Ingrid was too fascinated to leave and ordered a dessert that she did not even want.
Two hours elapsed before the woman completed her makeup, then, after putting some money on the table, she left suddenly, her Asahi untouched, her head bowed low. It seemed to Ingrid that only in Tokyo could one encounter a woman who would have done something like that. The loneliness she saw in that woman spoke of her own loneliness in a strange city. It was at that moment, when the woman with the perfectly made-up face disappeared from view, that Ingrid decided she would go back to China with her mother and live there for a while.
As she ponders, a finger taps on her table. She looks up and sees a man wearing a green-and-white checkered shirt under a denim jacket a bit too tight for his broad shoulders. He face is red and he is breathing heavily, presumably from running. Only slightly taller than she, he has disproportionately long arms and an extremely wide forehead. With a round face, big brown eyes, and a dark complexion, he would have looked childlike if not for his black-rimmed glasses. His stomach has begun to bulge, though not too noticeably. He must have had a haircut recently—his soft, straight hair looks tidy, the part significantly to the left.
The mix of a cowboy and Truman Capote. A thought flashes in Ingrid’s mind.
“Hi, Ingrid. I’m Matthew Stein. Call me Matthew.” He offers a hand.
Ingrid rises and takes his hand. She wonders how Matthew recognized her amid the crowd, which includes quite a few Asian women, then remembers that there are a few pictures of her on her blog. Matthew says that he will order a drink and be back.
As he takes his wallet from his jeans pocket at the counter, the coins slip out and fall on the floor. He squats to gather the coins and thanks the people in line for helping him. On his way back with his Thai iced tea, he bumps into an empty chair and almost trips. He apologizes profoundly to the young couple at the table.
Ingrid is amused but slightly disappointed—Matthew does not resemble in the slightest what she has imagined an editor should look like: composed, witty, with skeptical eyes. She guesses his age at between twenty-nine and thirty-five.
They introduce themselves—the usual stuff two strangers typically exchange when first meeting. Matthew says he grew up in Glendive, Montana, and his parents are farmers, raising horses and Texas longhorns.
Ingrid asks him how he met Bing’er.
“She worked in the restaurant I happened to dine in. I was in Toronto for business,” Matthew says. “It was cold that night, and I was the only customer. I asked her to recommen
d a dish, Szechuan flavor, a little spicy but not too greasy. She said, ‘Ants on the Tree.’ I laughed and said I didn’t know Chinese eat ants. She looked dead serious. ‘We do. It’s time consuming to make this dish. Better to have big and juicy ants or the dish would be too dry.’”
Ingrid laughs. “You believed her?”
“She was a good actor. Chinese eat snakes, rats, chicken feet anyway, why not ants? I decided to try it. I asked her where to buy ants, those big and juicy ones. She said there was an ant-raising factory near Chinatown. The workers there fed the ants a little wine in the winter to keep them warm and make their meat more tender. She then asked me if I added wine to my pasta sauce sometimes. It all made sense to me. It was not until the dish was served that she confessed that, despite the real name, it is just minced pork mixed with thin bean noodles. She was a funny girl.”
“I hope you liked the dish.”
“I loved it! I just ate it again yesterday at a restaurant on Clement Street. So anyway, we started to talk, and after she learned I am an editor, she told me about you. She adores you.”
“She did?” Ingrid chuckles. “Did she tell you about her traveling plan?”
“Not just that, she even showed me her ’88 Jeep Cherokee. Other than a bowl-size dent on the rear bumper, it looked pretty okay. I asked her if she was sure about her bold adventure. She said she was from Hubei.”
“Yeah, people from Hubei are called jiu tou niao, nine-headed birds. They’re famous for being smart and fearless.”
“That’s something, spending a month driving in a strange country alone. Since I was five, I have been dreaming of something like this, but it’s still a dream to this day. Oh, well, I guess I have time. Steinbeck did it when he was almost sixty. Have you read his Travels with Charley? An excellent book.” As Matthew continues to speak, the earlier shyness on his face turns into a relaxed expression, as if talking has helped calm him. He then summarizes his background: unqualified math teacher, mediocre keyboard player, terrible actor, unsuccessful small-business owner, inexperienced editor, and baffled writer.