by Lisa Ko
I would finish this lady’s nails, and if nobody else came in, take my break. Didi was off today, at her English class, and I thought again about Star Hill, the house you and I and Leon could live in.
My customer’s hand twitched. I’d painted her skin by mistake.
“Sorry,” I said.
She met my gaze at last, sucking her teeth in one long intake. I wiped the blob of polish off. The second coat was glossy and dark.
I finished the left hand, picked up the woman’s right, concentrating so hard on applying the polish that I didn’t notice the men who had come in, not until the customer had yanked her hand away and the girl at the next station had jumped up and there was a clatter, voices shouting in English and Vietnamese.
Men were yelling. “Down! Down!” They were policemen, uniformed.
Customers grabbed their purses and ran out with their nails still wet. One woman left with a stripe of wax above her lip. My customer fled without paying. “Stop her!” I yelled, and then I was shoved into a mass of bodies.
The new girl with the ponytail spat out words that sounded like curses. “What is going on?” I shouted.
Static voices buzzed over the men’s walkie-talkies. “Stay down,” one of them said, and pointed at me.
The door was closed now, guarded by another uniformed man. A third man had handcuffed Michelle, who was cursing in English.
The first man turned to me. Years ago, riding in the truck from Toronto to New York, bumping over potholes, stiff with fear, I had thought, This is what it’s like to be dead. Now, as I felt my arms pulled back in a decisive motion, like trussing a hog, I thought of you. It was you that I thought of. Always, it’s been you.
Eleven
Yong was practicing his speech again. “I come from humble beginnings.” He looked at his notepad. “Like so many of you.” His gaze traveled to a point over me, landing on the wall behind the couch. “Many, uh, obstacles were met.”
“Wait.” I leaned forward. He stood before me in a pair of boxer shorts and a white undershirt. “It sounds a little braggy.”
“But how can it be bragging if I say I grew up poor?”
“That’s the thing. You didn’t.”
“Sure I did. We lived in an apartment. One bedroom for three people.”
“But you always had enough to eat. You were a city person and you could go to school wherever you wanted.”
“This is the Fuzhou Business Leaders Forum awards. Everyone makes speeches about being from humble beginnings.”
Seeing him there in his underpants made me want to shower him with clothes. “I guess it just seems dishonest.”
“I don’t even want to give this speech. I’m no good at speeches.”
“Take a deep breath before you talk. I do that when I’m teaching a class. Or you can pretend you’re speaking to your friends, like you’re telling me and Zhao a story.”
He tried again. “I come from humble beginnings.”
“You have to project, talk louder.”
He took it from the top, louder this time, his words forced and exaggerated. “I come.” He swept his arm in front of him. “From humble. Beginnings!”
My cell phone buzzed and I grabbed it, saw a string of numbers, the kind I’d been hoping to see every time it had rung over the past month. Five weeks had passed since you called me and I hadn’t called you back. I was scared of what you would say to me, that you’d be angry. I was scared of a lot of things I hadn’t been scared of before.
“Hold on,” I told Yong. “I have to take this. It’s a business call. Keep practicing, I’ll be back in a bit.”
I took the phone and walked down the hall to our guest room, which we used as an office. Shut the door, locked it, and sat on the floor by the window, against the one wall that wasn’t shared with the living room.
“Hello?” I tried to even out the nervousness in my voice.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Deming. I’m glad you called again.”
“Hello, Mama,” you said.
“It’s you,” I whispered, delighted and anxious.
From the living room I could hear Yong repeating the first lines of his speech, varying the intonations of the words. I-come-from-humble-beginnings. I come, from humble . . . beginnings. I come from humble beginnings?
You told me you were in school, that you had a job and played guitar. Your adoptive parents had insisted on changing your name, not only your first name, but also your last, so there was no longer any trace of me. What the hell kind of name was Daniel Wilkinson? I could never call you that. You told me Vivian had gone to court so that you could get taken in by a white family, but I already knew.
“Deming,” I said, and each time I said your name I felt a tiny thrill, “remember the times we used to ride the subway together? That was fun.”
“We went to Queens and met the other mother and son and pretended they looked like us.”
“They did look like us, didn’t they?”
“Sure.” You paused. “Do you remember what you told me that day?”
My little Deming, freshly returned from China, both of us still without English. Your stubby legs and fat cheeks and oversized winter jacket. Gripping my hand as we crossed the street, afraid of all those fast cars.
“No.” I couldn’t remember; it was so long ago.
There was a knock. The doorknob jiggled, and I heard Yong say, “Polly?”
“I have to go,” I whispered, then said, loudly, “Thank you for your phone call. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
I opened the door. Yong was in the hallway. “Can I run the speech by you again? I think I’ve got it now.”
I nodded, wiping my sweaty palms on my thighs. My smile was taped onto my face.
“Why’d you lock the door?”
Yong was so unsuspecting, it pained me. “A phone call from a client. Aren’t you cold? Let me get you some clothes.” I took a pair of his pants out of the closet, tucking a note into the pocket. On it, I had written: The award for best speech goes to you.
IN CLASS THE NEXT morning, I wished I’d followed my own advice to take a deep breath before speaking when I stopped in the middle of a sentence and couldn’t remember what I wanted to say next. My students stared as I glanced at the screen behind me. The word toward glowed in English. My mind churned; the word meant nothing to me.
On my way to work, I had noticed boys your age, young men scurrying with briefcases to office buildings, or dressed in jeans, balanced on construction scaffolding. You could be one of my students. Instead, you had been raised by strangers. You called an American woman Mom, someone who had never had any indecision about motherhood, who wanted it so badly she had taken another woman’s son as her own. When I thought about this I wanted to scream; I wanted to kill someone. I was afraid that if I let myself cry, I would never stop.
A student in the front row raised her hand. “Teacher, you were talking about prepositions.”
“Toward is a preposition,” I said, in hope that it would spark the next sentence. “Can anyone tell me what a preposition is?”
The same student raised her hand. “Prepositions work in phrases to give additional information.” She flipped through her notes. “Common English prepositions include under and after and to.”
“Thank you, Mindy.” I pressed a button on the projector and advanced to the next slide. “Let’s review more vocabulary words.”
According to the clock on the wall, it was ten thirty in the morning. In New York, it was nine thirty the night before. New York, and all of America, was taking place in the past.
As the vocabulary words flashed on the screen, I took my phone out and scrolled down to the number I had saved in my contacts list, under your name: DEMING. Your Chinese name, your real name, not this Daniel Wilkinson. The name I gave you. My chest squeezed. I stepped into the hallway, called you, and left a message.
That evening, I bought a pack of cigarettes for the first time in years and chain-smoked on a benc
h in the park until I was dizzy. I thought of your new voice, your new name, and wanted to talk to you more. A lump remained in my chest, a raw, welling feeling that I needed to kill. I smoked more; then hurried home to shower, brush my teeth, and wash the smell of cigarettes out of my hair before Yong got there.
Later that week we arranged a time to talk, an early evening when I was home alone, and I took the phone out to the balcony to wait for your call. When I had first moved in, Yong and I would sit here on humid nights and make up nicknames for the towers busting up across the city. Silvertop. Boxyred. Uglygray. Week after week, these buildings grew upwards until their construction scaffolding was removed like post-surgery bandages, followed by a buffing and a filing and a final layer of paint. These days, I could no longer recognize Silvertop and Uglygray from the balcony, as they’d long been absorbed into a mass of other buildings, the skyline so cluttered I couldn’t tell which buildings were new and which were less new. But it was comforting to know that nothing stayed the same for too long, that each day was a new opportunity for reinvention. A person could be transformed by a fresh wardrobe or a different nickname, like the ones I gave my Speed English Now students—Kang, a sour-faced boy with orange-streaked hair, became Ken; Mei, the girl with glitter eyeliner, was Mindy.
I waited. At 6:35, the phone rang, and I answered before the first ring was finished.
“I called a little late,” you said.
“I’m always a little late, too.”
“Is this a good time?”
I looked through the sliding glass door, into the apartment. Yong wouldn’t be home for another hour, but I’d have to dress quickly for the awards banquet.
“Yes, my husband is out. I’m on our balcony right now.”
It wasn’t hard, talking to you. I told you how I had come to New York. You told me about Ridgeborough, the town where you had gone after the Bronx, and your American parents, whom you called Peter and Kay. I didn’t want to know their names. It should have been me who had gone to your high school graduation, who called you on your birthday, whose house you returned to at Christmas. I should have been the one to take credit for raising you. But all you could remember was me leaving and not finding you again.
You were angry. I couldn’t blame you. I was angry, too. I wanted to find a way to fix it, but didn’t know how, not without telling you about Ardsleyville. I didn’t want to think about Ardsleyville. Instead, I said all the wrong things.
Leon was the only person I had ever told, and though enough time had passed that it probably didn’t matter—no one would fine me now or give me prison time for how I left America—it wasn’t information I wanted to share. Telling Yong would ruin everything. There were still nights I would wake up thinking of the concrete floor, the Styrofoam bowls of lukewarm oatmeal—I couldn’t look at oatmeal now; I’d never eat it again—and the din of hundreds of women talking in different languages. I hated that Leon knew this, how fully I’d exposed myself to him. Because if he knew, then it had been real, not a nightmare I could just write off as my imagination. Like how talking to you reminded me of the nightmare of losing you.
Leon was the one who had left on purpose, not me. I didn’t leave on purpose. I loved you more than anyone. You could call another lady “Mama,” but I was your mama, not her. I knew I had forfeited the right to say that, but it was never going to change.
There was a knock on the window, and I jumped in my chair, saw Yong pointing at his watch. I told you I had to go.
THE FUZHOU BUSINESS LEADERS Forum awards dinner was in a conference hall with small windows near the ceiling. It was May, warm outside, but inside I was shivering as Yong fidgeted next to me. Onstage, a real estate tycoon was rambling about his childhood in a village north of Fuzhou, running ten minutes past the five-minute time limit. “I learned the lessons of hunger as a child during the famine years,” the tycoon said in an oddly cheerful lilt, “when my mother would feed us a thin paste of rice and water. Our stomachs growled, but we never complained.”
Chopsticks clinked against the insides of bowls. Metal spoons scraped against serving plates. Yi Ba had said his family had been so poor that he and his brother had shared a single grain of rice, and I felt annoyed listening to the tycoon claim the same. He was rumored to never eat leftovers or use a towel more than once, his servants whisking away his bath linens immediately after he used them, the excess food disappearing as if it had never existed. I wanted to duck into the bathroom and call you, share the absurdity.
Between speakers, I tried to pay attention to the conversations around me. Lujin and Zhao wanted to buy a small country home in the mountains, while Zailang said he’d prefer one by the sea. I said I preferred ocean to mountains. I told the couple next to me about our kitchen renovations, gave them the names of the workers Yong and I had used. “Good craftsmanship,” I said, comforted by my city accent, the confident way I talked. These were characteristics of Fuzhou’s Polly, not the Polly who had lived in New York and wore five-dollar jeans and used the same soap to wash her face and body, who let her son watch TV all day.
“Hong Kong will be our next vacation destination,” Yong told Ning and Zailang. “And after that, Singapore and Tokyo.”
“Tokyo?” Zailang said. “Have you booked the tickets yet?”
“I haven’t gotten around to it,” Yong said. “Work is so busy. But perhaps a winter trip to Hong Kong. It’s so easy to get there. What do you think, Polly?”
“Sure.” I took a second helping of broccoli, but could barely taste the food. “Wonderful.”
“Let me know when you go, and I’ll send you a list of my favorite restaurants,” Ning said.
“That sounds great. Tell me more about what it’s like there.” But as I watched Ning’s mouth move, I was unable to concentrate on the words. Tomorrow, I would call and let you know I hadn’t meant to end our call so abruptly.
Our table was full of our friends, Zhao and Lujin, Ning and Zailang, and Yong’s other colleagues and their wives. I looked around the room and saw the same table duplicated, over and over: fat men in dark suits, lipsticked women in tight dresses, plates and plates of food, empty beer bottles. I didn’t look out of place. My purple dress had been tailored to fit, and I wore a pair of diamond earrings and a matching ring, a gold bracelet with oval loops that resembled a chain. My hair had been dyed and highlighted. Earlier tonight, after I got off the phone with you and changed into my dress, Yong and I had admired our reflections in the bedroom mirror. “Look how we match,” I said. I couldn’t tell him about you or Ardsleyville, destroy the illusion we built for ourselves.
Another round of dishes arrived, and the Forum’s president, a man in a pinstripe suit, introduced Yong, who made his way to the stage. He tapped the microphone to make sure it was on, even though it had been working fine when the president had spoken.
“I come from humble beginnings,” he said, “like so many of you. I met many obstacles and challenges along the way, but overcame them through perseverance. And now, I am proud to lead Yongtex. We are truly the future of business, because we’re not only a factory, but we work for the social good. First, by providing job opportunities to the needy.” He looked down at his notes and up at the crowd. I silently pleaded for him to keep talking. “And—second, we promote trade. Third, we are spurring economic development in the region and elevating the status of Fuzhou business.”
His words petered out, but he finished strong. Our table clapped, followed by the rest of the room. “Thank you,” Yong said. When he returned to the table, I could see how relieved he was. I placed a hand on his knee. We needed each other. I belonged here.
“You did good,” I said.
AFTER THE DINNER, WE had coffee at Ning and Zailang’s apartment. The women sat along the end of an L-shaped sectional couch, the men at the long dining table. Ning and Zailang had blocked off part of the living room and constructed a new wall to create a bedroom for their son, Phillip.
Lujin and Zhao’s daughter was ta
king grade nine English, even though she was only in grade eight. “She was falling behind, so we decided to push the teacher to place her in a higher class,” Lujin said. “That’s what you have to do, force them to do better.”
“Children don’t function that way,” I said. “They also need encouragement.”
Ning smiled. “You have to encourage, but you also have to be firm. They need to learn on their own.”
“But what are we telling our children if we set them up for failure?” I saw Ning exchange a look with Lujin. “We could be harming them, affecting them later in life.”
“On those TV shows the parents are always giving their children empty praise,” Lujin said. “But real life is different.”
“I am talking about real life,” I said.
“Real-life children aren’t like the ones you see on television.”
“I’m not talking about television. What, I can’t have an opinion about raising children, too?”
Lujin raised her eyebrows. Ning stood up and pulled down the front of her dress. “Excuse me, I need to check on Phillip. It’s his bedtime and I bet he’s still up.”
The room felt airless. “The weather has been so warm lately,” I said to Lujin.
“I hear it will rain tomorrow,” she said. “What a relief that will be.”
I went to the kitchen and rinsed out my coffee cup. I wanted you to call again, but you were right: I had messed up. I had given up on finding you so that I could sit at parties with people like this. Keeping you a secret, as if you were the thing that was wrong. I dried my hands on a towel that hung from a hook on the side of the refrigerator, and the cloth snagged on the bracelet Yong bought me last year. When I pulled the towel away the bracelet seemed too large and gaudy for my wrist, like the chain was mocking me.
In the living room, Zhao was talking about Sichuanese migrant workers, his favorite topic. “That’s why we pay tuition to send our daughter to a private international school. The public schools are overrun with outsiders.”