by Lisa Ko
I sat across from him and said, “But they can’t even get into state schools.”
“Exactly. And they should stay out.”
“They have schools in the countryside they can go to,” Lujin said.
“You just said they’re taking over the public schools in the city, and then you said they can’t get into these schools. What are you saying? You can’t have it both ways.”
Zhao scoffed. “Public, private, what’s the difference. The bottom line is, they don’t belong here.”
Yong shifted in his chair. “But you hire them,” I said. “To do your renovations, paint your apartment, work in your factory. You’re contradicting yourself.”
When I saw Yong’s smile fade, I kept talking, trying to drown out Zhao and Lujin, until Ning came back and changed the subject. I hadn’t given you up to agree with such hateful things. I was a good person. I am a good person.
“THAT’S WHY YOU CAN’T see anything. It’s because of those damn sunglasses.”
Getting into our apartment, Yong banged his knee against the door. Sometimes his dark lenses made him look sleek, even a little dangerous, but at other times, like tonight, they seemed desperate.
“I’m glad it’s over,” he said. “The speech, the dinner, the whole thing.”
He looked tired. I decided to be kind. “People loved your speech.”
“See, I told you it was what they wanted to hear.”
Tomorrow was Saturday, and Yong didn’t have to go to work until after lunch. We could sleep in, have sex. I washed my face and brushed my teeth, checked to make sure the door was locked and the lights were off in the living room. We’d skip watching TV tonight.
I thought Yong had fallen asleep, but as I got into bed, he spoke up. “So, who’s Deming?”
I shut the light off so he wouldn’t see the alarm on my face. “Who?”
“Your phone rang when you were in the bathroom. It said Deming.”
My phone was lying face up on the night table. The screen displayed a missed call from you, a new voice mail message. I would listen to it later, when Yong was asleep.
I spoke at the ceiling. “Deming is one of Boss Cheng’s Xiamen clients. He’s traveling abroad right now, calling at odd hours. He must have forgot the time difference.”
“Okay,” Yong said. He didn’t sound convinced.
I pulled the sheets over my shoulders. “Good night.”
A minute later, Yong spoke again. His voice sounded far away, even if he was next to me. “When I came home earlier tonight, you were out on the balcony, on the phone. As soon as you saw me you ended the call. You were acting strange.”
I was glad he couldn’t see my flushed cheeks or hear my rapidly beating heart. “Are you accusing me of something?”
“No.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong. You have nothing to worry about.”
“I’m not worried. But you seemed upset with Zhao.”
“I can’t stand it when he talks about migrant workers that way. Why don’t you ever say anything? Yongtex has your name. You got the award tonight. Tell him to shut up, once and for all.”
“I just don’t let it bother me.”
“Could we go to Hong Kong instead of talking about it?”
“After the holiday season. There’s a lot going on at work.”
“That’s more than six months away.”
“Not so long, right?”
“I’m tired of these parties. Don’t you get tired of it, too?”
“I don’t mind.”
Yong didn’t fight me. He wasn’t angry. Again, I felt let down.
I imagined leaving him, or being left. Losing this companionship, the comfort of being with someone you knew so well. I thought of the nights I had lain awake at Ardsleyville and in the workers’ dormitory, even in the bunk on Rutgers Street, and how long they’d been, how endless the days. All I’d wanted then was to not feel alone. Last year, when Yong had been away for three weeks on business, I’d been glad to have the apartment to myself, didn’t pick up my clothes or clean the dishes or take out the trash. But when I came home from work the apartment felt empty, and when I finally slept I would dream about you, a ten-year-old reciting New York City subway lines, then wake up unsure of where I was, expecting to see you across the room.
Yong touched my arm. “I did good tonight, didn’t I?”
“You did great.”
I knew that I should wait, hold off on telling Yong the truth and on calling you until I was stronger. I didn’t want to upset you more. Yi Ba believed that to give in to your cravings was a sign of weakness. Be strong, I told myself, though I wasn’t sure what that meant anymore. Think it over before you say anything.
But I couldn’t stop myself. “I have a son and I lost him.”
The words hung in the air for an awful, extended moment. “A son?”
I couldn’t answer.
“What do you mean, lost?”
“I had him when I was nineteen. Got pregnant by my neighbor in the village. I left him in America, because I couldn’t take him back to China with me, and then he was adopted by an American family. He recently got in touch with me. That’s who Deming is. That’s his name. Deming Guo.” I wanted to say it again, so I did. “Deming Guo.”
Your name echoed in the bedroom. Yong took his hand off my arm.
“He lives in New York, now, and he just found me. We spoke on the phone twice.”
Yong shook his head, as if he was trying to clear water out of his ears.
I looked at my husband and tried to will him to look back at me. Years ago, as a student in my class, his English had been clumsy, halting. In Chinese he could talk and talk, but in English he was nearly mute, and I had felt like I was somehow responsible.
“You left your son?”
“It’s not like that.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I was deported, okay? That’s why I left America.”
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“I didn’t want you to worry.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me before.”
“I can explain.” He didn’t respond. “Are you mad at me?”
He wasn’t mad. He didn’t yell, or leave the room, or ask me to leave. Instead, he let me rest against him. He leaned into me. He took my hand and held it close.
But hadn’t I always known he would do this? He had never been the yelling type.
In the moment before I told him about you, I had imagined I was ready to be left, to hear the slamming door, feel my anticipated punishment. That was the reason I’d kept you a secret for so long; why I had given up looking. But Yong was staying, and I would stay, too. In the end, what surprised me the most was my relief.
Twelve
Roland’s roommate Adrian had been home for days. Dumped by his girlfriend, he was no longer moving in with her at the end of May, and now Daniel had to wait for Adrian to finish taking a shower before he could get to the bathroom, which was two hundred percent hairier, the guy being both bearded and longhaired, a shag carpet of a man. Adrian was as silent as Roland was talkative, lumbering out of his room each day with a towel wrapped around his waist and greeting Daniel on the couch with a single “Hey.”
On the morning of May 13, two days before the big show, Roland couldn’t stop talking about who had RSVP’d and who hadn’t, changing the set list for the twentieth time. Later tonight, they would run through the songs again.
As Adrian entered minute fifteen of a marathon shower, Daniel brushed his teeth in the kitchen sink. “Thirty percent chance of rain today,” Roland said, pacing the living room. “Think it’ll make a difference in the turnout? People don’t want to go out in the rain, though what’s wrong with them, are they allergic to life? But there’s also the humidity factor, since it’s a new space to us, and that could affect the sound.”
Daniel rinsed his mouth and spat. If he didn’t leave the apartment in the next five minutes, he was going to b
e very late for work. He heard his phone ringing and dashed across the room to find it, knowing it wouldn’t be his mother, yet hoping it would be. A week had passed since they had last spoken, and yesterday, tired of waiting for her to get in touch with him, he had called and left a message telling her to not bother calling him again. And she hadn’t. He’d beat her to it.
It was Kay. He let it go to voice mail, and as he searched for a matching pair of socks he listened to her message, reminding him about the meeting with the Carlough dean, the day after tomorrow.
“Bad news?” Roland said.
Daniel found the missing sock. “I might have to go upstate the day after tomorrow. For a meeting.”
“You’re fucking with me, right? We have a show on Friday.”
Daniel poked through a lump of T-shirts and towels and found his right shoe, but not his left. “A meeting with the dean of Carlough College.”
“You don’t want to go to Carlough College.”
He pulled on the right shoe and laced it, hobbled around with his left foot in a sock. “Maybe I do.”
“Who’s going to play the show with me, then?”
“Get Javi to do it. I don’t know. The guitar parts are easy.”
“Easy?” Roland mimed tearing his hair out. “Make up your mind for once! You’ve been here for what, five months, and you haven’t gotten a better job so you still can’t afford to rent your own room.”
“I thought Adrian was moving out. I was going to take his room.” Daniel turned to face Roland. “Do you want me to leave?”
“That’s not the point. The point is that you’re never going to get anywhere if you keep on doing what your parents want. You don’t even know what you want. You don’t think you deserve better.”
“Don’t psychoanalyze me and don’t tell me what to do.” Daniel found his left shoe under the couch. In the bathroom, the shower shut off, Adrian crooning Christmas carols.
Roland looked disgusted. “You know what? Don’t bother coming to rehearsal tonight.”
“Come on. I’ve got to go to work.” Daniel opened the door, still holding the shoe. He’d put it on in the hallway. Right now, he needed to get out of the apartment.
EIGHT HOURS OF BURRITO-MAKING produced little relief. “I’m going to your show Friday,” Evan said, as they sliced bell peppers. “We used to have raves in Gowanus back in the day, these warehouse ragers. Now it’s all gentrified and ruined.” His co-workers Purvi and Kevin were going, too. All afternoon, Daniel’s phone buzzed with messages. Of course he’d play the show. Of course he wasn’t going to Carlough.
When he left Tres Locos, it was after seven. He went back to the apartment to get his Strat, rode the train out to Bushwick, ran up the block to the building and took the rickety service elevator to the seventh floor. Outside the metal door, he heard a Psychic Hearts song playing, thought Javi might be at the rehearsal, too, but when he pushed the door open he saw Nate, strumming a guitar as Roland sang and pressed buttons on a sequencer. Nate’s floppy hair bounced as he bobbed to the beat. He was hitting the right chords, but the song sounded even flatter than it already was.
Nate and Roland saw Daniel and exchanged a look. The song stopped.
“What’s going on?” Daniel said. “We’re getting a second guitarist?”
“You’re out and I’m in,” Nate said. “That’s what’s going on.”
Roland walked over and said, his voice lowered, “I can’t have a band with someone who isn’t reliable.”
“I’m going to play the show tomorrow.”
Roland shook his head. “You’ll change your mind again.”
“I won’t, I swear. I’m not going to Carlough.”
“Too late,” Nate sang in a falsetto.
Roland glared at Nate, then walked Daniel out the door and started to close it. “Sorry.”
IT TOOK LESS THAN ten minutes to scoop up his things from Roland’s living room and shove them into his backpack. He left the Strat behind and grabbed his acoustic, walked up Lafayette, past the poker club, and turned onto Broadway. He put on his headphones and inched the volume up, let the music make the world louder, a glorious reverb of lights popping on like candy-coated solar flares as he listened to Bowie and Freddie Mercury’s voices bursting out in “Under Pressure”:
why can’t we give love
givelovegivelovegivelove
Without music, the world was flattened, washed out, too obvious. Daniel cranked the volume up even more, until he was awash in colors and sound and there were only lights and possibility and flying, the way it was when the guitar was translating his brain. He walked through Union Square, through the Flatiron, past people eating outside restaurants, a group of skateboarding teenagers, tourists clutching subway maps, laughing couples. Herald Square, chain stores; Times Square, more tourists. At Columbus Circle he sank onto a bench and put his guitar case down. He’d blown it.
He spent the night sipping watery coffee in a diner booth, typing angry texts to Roland and deleting them before sending. He sent a text to Angel, saying hi, hope you’re well—he texted her every few days, but she never wrote back. Port Authority wasn’t far away; he could buy a bus ticket and be in Ridgeborough in a couple hours. But Roland’s accusations had stuck with him. He didn’t know what he wanted, and he didn’t know how to figure it out.
In the morning, he took the N train out to Sunset Park, had a bowl of pho at a Vietnamese spot, killed a few more hours in a café, then headed to the only people he knew in the city who might let him stay with them.
Vivian was on her porch, watering a planter of yellow and red flowers. “Deming?” She eyed his bag and guitar case.
“Hi, Vivian.” Her eyes were shadowed by a lime green visor with VIRGINIA BEACH printed across the top, and Daniel couldn’t read her expression. “Is Michael here?”
“He’s at school right now,” Vivian said in Fuzhounese. “He’ll be back later. You want to come in?”
“I need somewhere to stay. For today, tonight.”
“Okay. Put your bag in the living room.”
This was how he ended up cooking with Vivian. Timothy and Michael would both be home by dinner, she said. Daniel looked at the clock on the wall. It was just past two. Dinner was a long time away.
He chopped garlic and ginger on a cutting board, seated at a wooden table, as Vivian browned chunks of beef. On the table was a stack of mail, fliers for local businesses, printed in English and Chinese, the one on top advertising an immigration lawyer with an office on Eighth Avenue, the accompanying photo of a woman with aggressively airbrushed teeth. This was what his life would’ve been if he had remained Deming Guo, if his mother and Leon had stayed together. They would all be having regular family dinners with Vivian and Timothy.
“Leon said he spoke to you,” Vivian said, as the meat sizzled. “He said he was happy to hear from you.”
“He gave me my mother’s phone number.” When Vivian didn’t say anything discouraging about his Chinese, he decided to press on, taking the time to remember and choose the right words. “I called her. I spoke to her.”
He told Vivian about how his mother had remarried but hadn’t told her husband about him. “I still don’t know where she went after she left New York, if she went to Florida.”
Vivian flipped the pieces of meat with a pair of metal tongs, then removed them onto a plate lined with a paper towel. “I don’t think so. Here, give me those.”
Daniel gave her the cutting board and she slid the garlic and ginger into the pot with the edge of the knife and stirred them with a wooden spoon. The room grew fragrant. “But why did she end up in China, then?”
“I don’t know, but she wouldn’t have left without you. You were all she could talk about, all the time.” She returned the cutting board to him, now piled with carrots. “Chop these into small pieces.” She put the beef back into the pot, filled it with water, clapped a lid on top. “We would talk about the plans we had for you and Michael. She’d be smoking—” Vivi
an mimed taking a cigarette from her lips and holding it out with her elbow, gaze to the side, like his mother used to do. “Always smoking, and she had that big old voice. And we’d have these giant mugs of tea in front of us in that little kitchen. We’d say Michael was going to become a doctor and you were going to work on TV.”
“TV?”
“She saw you working with the sound on TV or movies. Because you liked music. And TV. We weren’t so wrong, were we?”
“You were pretty close.” Daniel sawed away at the carrots. An orange disc flew off the cutting board. He got up, hunted for it at the other end of the table.
“Here,” Vivian said, taking the knife from him. “Cut like this.”
He angled it the way she showed him, slicing the carrots more loosely. She checked on the soup, adding salt and pepper. “There was that nail salon. You remember the name?”
“Hello Gorgeous.” He’d looked it up, too, but it was no longer there.
“You remember your mother’s friend there? Woman with a high baby voice.”
“Didi.”
“Right, Didi. So after your mother disappeared Didi called Leon. Turned out someone ratted their boss out to ICE. Immigration. They came and arrested a lot of people at the salon. Your mother was supposed to be at work that day.”
He could remember overhearing Vivian and Leon talking about Didi, a lawyer. But not this. “Nobody ever told me anything.”
“It happened to a woman I knew who worked in a restaurant. Someone crosses the wrong person, makes a call to ICE and they come take the workers away.”
“Take them where?”
“Deport them. Or they have these camps, these jails, for immigrants. We always heard rumors about them. I knew a lady whose husband had been sent to one, though. He went out driving to the grocery store and never came home. She found out he was in a jail in Arizona or someplace like that, and then he was on a plane back to their country, somewhere in Central America.” Vivian shook her head. “So your mother’s friend Didi figured out the restaurant in Florida where that job was and called them. They said your mother was buying a ticket for Florida, but never showed up. But Didi and Leon called ICE and they said she wasn’t there either.”