The Leavers

  Then he was cold. When Vivian pressed the envelope into Daniel’s hands she had also said this: “I paid your mother’s debt. When Leon left there was still money owed. Who do you think paid? If I hadn’t paid, you’d be dead by now.”

  Unable to decide whether to hate Vivian or be grateful to her, Daniel had only been able to take the envelope and say, “Thank you.”

  He dug his heels into the dirt and walked downhill, down the park’s curved side, slow at first, getting faster, a grace note as his legs bounced upwards.

  He would go home. He would call Leon. Propelled, he was almost in flight.

  The Leavers |

  PART TWO

  Jackpot

  Six

  The night you came back into my life I was walking down the same old street in Fuzhou, from World Top English to the seafood restaurant where Yong always had his client dinners. He offered to pick me up but I said no, wanted those twenty precious minutes to myself. In my gray suit and leather shoes, I could pass for a city person. My life felt like a confection, something I had once yearned for, but sometimes I still wanted to torch it all over again, change my name again, move to another city again, rent a room in a building where nobody knew me. When I thought of all the seafood dinners I’d gone to and all the ones I had yet to attend, I felt an empty, endless DOOM.

  Walking in Fuzhou: bicyclists, mopeds, trash bags, busted furniture, city people, migrants, all fighting for not enough sidewalk space. I walked to lose track of the life that had solidified around me when I hadn’t been paying attention. I liked how close the past felt, how possible it might be to make up a new history. All the different routes I might have taken, all the seemingly insignificant turns that could change your entire existence. I could’ve become anyone, living anywhere. But let’s be real, I was forty years old and most of my choices had already been made. Made for me. Not so easy to veer off course now.

  Yong didn’t see the need to walk when he had a perfectly good car, had no curiosity for exploring the city he’d lived in all his life. If he wanted an adventure, he said, he wouldn’t walk around a couple of office buildings; he’d take a trip to Hong Kong or Bangkok or Shanghai, though he never did those things either.

  Lately, Boss Cheng had been assigning my co-worker Boqing to do market research on expanding World Top to other cities, and I’d experienced envy so sharp I could smell it. Last week that chump Boqing had gone to Taizhou, and next week, he was off to Zhangzhou. I wanted to travel. But Boss Cheng hadn’t asked me because traveling like that was supposed to be an inconvenience, a responsibility given to a more junior employee. Yong hated traveling for work but I would’ve jumped at the chance to even take the three-hour bullet train to Xiamen. I could sit by the window and watch the cranes and backhoe diggers, cement spreading like a cracked egg across Fujian Province. Fields flattening into housing foundations, villages shaped into towns, all of it whizzing by at two-hundred-fifty kilometers an hour.

  There was a thick crowd outside Pizza Hut, waiting to get in. Yong and I had our first dinner there, seven years ago. We went after the last English for Executives class—he’d been one of my worst students—and he told me his wife had died young, of leukemia, and they hadn’t had children, which was okay by him. He said he’d bought his apartment new, paid in full, in cash. “I’m a self-made businessman,” he said, trying to play it cool. But I knew he wouldn’t have been able to get the permits and licenses to start a business without urban hukou. It reminded me of those rich young people Didi and I used to see in New York, with their beat-up jeans and uncombed hair. I told Yong I had lived in America and he said, “You must have studied English in university.” I didn’t correct him; I neither confirmed nor denied.

  He called me brilliant, hardworking, and kind, and we both fell in love with this version of Polly. My office job and my English, that one suit I’d saved up for months to buy, that was enough for this city man to believe in my authenticity. So I wasn’t about to let him down. And here we were, seven years later, the illusion and the reality one and the same. Polly: the woman who lived near West Lake and who had gone to university, decided to not have children. Yet it always felt temporary, like one day I’d be exposed, plucked out of the twelfth-floor apartment and deposited right back into Ardsleyville.

  We got married six months after that first dinner. The marriage, the sex — they weren’t as boring as I had feared. I got on the pill and figured I’d tell Yong about you eventually, say you were staying with relatives in America, but the months passed and then it seemed too late and too significant to reveal. A person could turn angry at any time. Telling him now? It would be worse than not telling him at all.

  I WAS TEN MINUTES late. When I walked into the banquet room, Yong said to the table, “My wife was working.”

  “Walking, not working,” I said.

  Fu, a balding man Yong introduced to me as the Walmart buyer, sat between him and Zhao, Yong’s partner at the textile factory. I took the empty seat next to Zhao’s wife, Lujin.

  Yong was wearing the silver cufflinks I bought him for our sixth wedding anniversary. Crevices bookended his eyes and mouth. He was handsome in a semi-ruined way; his beauty was that his beauty was behind him, his appeal reflecting what he had already survived, though he’d laugh at this because he was not into nostalgia. “I can barely remember anything before the age of thirty,” he liked to say. Maybe he was lying. To his colleagues, he played like his success had been effortless, though before each big meeting he practiced what he was going to say in front of a mirror, wrote his lines down and memorized them. I helped.

  The food came fast. A plate piled with prawns, another with scallops and vegetables. Jellyfish, conch, abalone. Lujin poured tea. “How’s business?” A smear of lipstick desecrated one of her front teeth. I didn’t bring this to her attention.

  “Our enrollment is at a record high.” I speared a prawn and tore off its head, laying it to rest on my plate. An eye looked up at me. “Everyone wants to learn English.”

  “I don’t need English.” Lujin chomped on a large scallop. “We’re doing business in Shanghai.” Lujin was a northerner who’d never forgiven her husband for returning to his home province to run a factory, and Zhao liked to brag about her fluent Mandarin and Shanghainese, those pristine, elegant tones. Dinner parties at Zhao and Lujin’s house in Jiangbin involved Lujin cooking complicated, flavorless meals as Zhao drank beer after beer and his belly got so bloated he’d have to loosen his belt one notch, then another. At these parties the men would complain about the Sichuanese who used to work for nearly nothing but were no longer migrating to Fuzhou in such large amounts, working instead at new factories in Shenzhen. Yong was the kind of boss who loved to complain about being a boss. His complaints were not actual complaints but well-crafted brags; Yongtex was doing well enough that he had things to worry about.

  At these parties, the women’s conversations were worse, because I was expected to participate. Ha! Which private schools were the best? Which housecleaners were cheap but honest? There’d be the circulation of a home renovation catalog, pictures of one disembodied kitchen cabinet after another, laid out and shot in flattering poses like swimsuit models. Pictures of empty pots on sparkling stoves and smiling mothers, fathers, and children, all of them black-haired and dark-eyed with improbably pale skin and long legs (where could such specimens be found in Fuzhou?). I’d flip through the pages and remember the plasticky couch in our Bronx apartment, those nights when hotdogs and instant noodles for dinner were more than enough. Or other nights, having left everything I’d known for a new city, thrilled and frightened at what I had done.

  Yong was on his second beer, Zhao and Fu on their third. “We have six million dollars in exports per fiscal year,” Zhao said. “We delivered our Christmas orders early last year. The production cost for Walmart was one-fourth the retail price.”

  Yong turned to me. “My wife worked in New York City for a long time. She’s an English teacher now, does interna
tional translation for Yongtex.”

  Fu looked over. I channeled my teacher voice. “I’ve seen the factories in America and they can’t compete with Yongtex.”

  “What are the buildings like in New York?” Fu asked.

  “Tall. Beautiful. Majestic.”

  Lujin looked down at her plate and scratched her thigh.

  “And the weather?”

  “Hot and sunny in the summertime, and snow in the winter.”

  “Fuzhou could be a top-rate city, but it’s being taken over by bad influences,” Fu said. “Too many outsiders.”

  “Cheap labor,” Lujin said.

  “Twelve people crammed into one room,” Zhao said. “You live like that, don’t be expected to be treated any better than vermin.”

  I hated hearing shit like this, but I held back. Yong had asked me here so I could make a good impression on the Walmart buyer. The one time I’d talked back to a client about Sichuanese workers, Yong hadn’t gotten the deal. For weeks he fretted about losing the apartment, never being able to afford to move to Jiangbin like he wanted to, the potential collapse of Yongtex. “I don’t know why you’re not worried,” he said, and I was about to tell him he was overreacting, that none of that would happen, when I saw how afraid he actually was, heard the tremble in his voice. Yong’s worst fear was being exposed as a fraud, committing some fatal mistake that would result in a plunge in status. The city was full of people like this. It was easy to make money and easier to lose it. But because Yong had never gone without, he couldn’t imagine surviving on less.

  I took my phone out of my bag. The screen announced a new message from an unknown number; I hadn’t heard it ring. I excused myself and walked out to the restaurant foyer, dialed the code to get my voice mail. Hello? said a man’s voice. It was slow, almost hesitant, Fuzhounese laced with a weird, unplaceable accent. This is a message for Polly Guo.

  At first I thought it was a client calling to complain about World Top, or another development in Yong’s never-ending kitchen renovations.

  This is your son, Deming.

  My heart sped up. I listened to the message again. Your voice was a deep man’s voice, but there was something recognizable in it, though your Chinese sucked: I am good. New York is where I live. Leon your number gave me. Leon I found, Michael found me. You are good? I would like to talk to you.

  You left me a phone number and said I could call you anytime. I put my fingers in my mouth and bit. Pain darted down my arms. Were you okay? How did you find me? I hadn’t spoken to Leon in years. When the hostess looked over, I took my fingers out and tried to smile. “Business call,” I said.

  For so long I had wanted to find you. Leon had told me you’d been adopted by Americans, that they were taking care of you, he insisted you were in good hands, and I tried so hard to believe him, because the only way to keep going was to act as if you were totally gone, that we were both better off staying put in the lives we had. But if I’d had a choice in it, and I hadn’t, I would never have let you go, never! I played the message again, saved the number in my phone. If I ignored the accent and shitty grammar, you sounded okay, and there were no signs that you were sick or unhappy.

  When I returned, the big plates of food seemed grotesque, indulgent. Zhao and Fu raised their glasses. “To success,” Yong said. I repeated the toast, but my hand was shaking.

  “FU WAS IMPRESSED BY your time in New York,” Yong said as he steered the minivan up the hill.

  I checked my phone: no new calls. “I hope the deal is signed.”

  “I hope so, too.”

  We parked in our building’s garage, took the elevator up to the twelfth floor. The tiles, so nice and cool during the humid summers, felt chilly under my feet. I raised the heat on the digital thermostat. Cold was scratchy brown blankets, a chill that wrapped around my bones. I took a plastic bottle of water from a box in the kitchen and tried to ignore the drywall dust and construction tarp draped across the counters. A memory twitched, the Bronx kitchen. Mama? you said, standing there with your underpants over your face, you were six or seven years old and you laughed as you walked toward me with your arms sticking out like a monster’s. Youyouyou—I clawed at the image but it bounded away. How swiftly it tumbled out of control, from your hand to Leon’s mouth to nail polish to Star Hill and Ardsleyville.

  I took off my makeup. We changed into our pajamas and sat on the couch, leaning against each other, and watched an episode of a Korean historical drama that took place in medieval times. Yong played with my hair; I rubbed his hands. This was my favorite time of day, when we were home together, didn’t have to worry about how we looked or what we said.

  In New York it was morning. Did you still look like me? How tall were you? We used to play peek-a-boo in the boardinghouse on Rutgers Street and you’d hide as I walked around, asking my roommates, “Did you see Deming? Where is he?” until you giggled and I’d go, “I think I hear something!” Then you—chubby, accusing, mine—would emerge from your hiding space and point at me and shout: “You lost me!”

  Your adoptive family probably lived near Central Park in one of those big-ass brick buildings with a gold-plated name on the outside and a doorman in a uniform.

  When the episode ended, the heroine and her lover hiding from the king’s army, Yong and I went to bed. We had a large, firm mattress. Thick, soft sheets. “Long day,” he said, laying next to me. As soon as he fell asleep, I’d go out to the balcony and call you.

  “Yes, it’ll be nice to get a good night’s rest.”

  There was very little sound in our apartment, only the refrigerator hum and other vague whirrings that powered the constant pleasantry of the place, keeping our life steady and moderate. I looked at our high ceilings and clean walls, on which I’d hung framed prints of paintings, abstract shapes in vivid blues and greens. I loved the home we’d made together, the way we left secret notes for each other—this morning I found one that said Potatoes for dinner tonight inside my bag, an inside joke referring to the shape of Zhao’s head. I loved our wooden floors, the large windows that overlooked the city. On a clear day, you could even see a wedge of ocean. The first time I saw the water from Yong’s balcony I knew I had to live here.

  What a relief it had been to find him, to have someone to come home to, letting the everyday concerns take over: lesson planning at World Top English and where to go to dinner, filling myself up with tasks and conversation and possessions until there was no longer space to think about you. This was what could happen in a city like this. A woman could come from nowhere and become a new person. A woman could be arranged like a bouquet of fake flowers, bent this way and that, scrutinized from a distance, rearranged.

  It was too much of a lie to reveal to Yong now, that I had a twenty-one-year-old son I’d somehow never mentioned before. You couldn’t omit your own child from the story of your life, like it was no big deal. Yong disapproved of Lujin and Zhao putting their daughter in boarding school, and compared to that, what I’d done was unforgivable. I didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to remember. If I called you, and if Yong found out I had lied about having a child, he would be so angry, and then he would leave me, and I would have to give up being myself.

  I was tired. I took out my pill bottle, removed a pill. Without it I’d be dreaming of brown blankets and dogs, you waving to me from inside a subway train that leaves the station as soon as I get to the platform. But the pill would push me down and swiftly under, to safety, and every morning I woke up dreamless, the hours between getting into bed and hearing the alarm clock—an urgent beeping from the shore as I struggled to swim to the surface—a dense void, eleven at night and six thirty in the morning only seconds apart.

  Yong wrapped his arms and legs around mine. We lay there together, like we had every night for the past seven years. I put my head on his chest. You and Michael would be laughing, Vivian and I talking at the table.

  “I know it’s a mess, but it’ll be done soon,” he said.

&
nbsp; “What are you talking about?”

  “The kitchen.” His eyes perked. “I spoke to the contractors about the cabinets. They’re going to special order them.”

  “Okay. Wonderful. Thank you.”

  He kissed me. “Good night.”

  I tugged my sleep mask down. Yong could fall asleep in broad daylight, but I insisted on heavy curtains in the bedroom. Sometimes his ability to sleep soundly felt like a personal offense.

  I listened to his breathing, deep and regular, as the pill began to take me under. I was too tired to talk now; I’d wait and call you another day. “Good night,” I said. But Yong didn’t say anything, he was already asleep, and it was only my own voice I heard, talking to myself in that dark, quiet room.

  Seven

  The house on 3 Alley had been as silent as our bedroom by West Lake. My father used to say women yapped too much, that some women would be better off not talking at all. So I’d grown up eating my words, and it wasn’t until later that I realized how many had gotten backed up inside me. In the factory dorm, sentences spilled out of me like a broken faucet, and when I moved even farther away and saw children splashing into rivers spurting from fire hydrants, water pouring into the streets like it was endless, I would see my younger self in that hydrant, but tugged open, a hungry stream.