The Leavers

  At the tables were men and women in matching green shirts. Daniel took a seat next to a guy with a stringy goatee, across from a couple talking in Mandarin. A hotel employee came over and asked what room he was staying in, checked a notepad and deposited a tray with a bowl of watery congee, small plates of salted peanuts and pickled vegetables, and a box of soymilk with a tiny straw. Daniel peeled away the plastic wrap on top of the congee and ate a spoonful. It tasted like boiled cardboard.

  Nobody else at the table had finished their food. “Are you part of a school?” he asked.

  “We’re on tour,” said the woman across the table. “We’re doing ten cities in fifteen days.”

  The guy with the goatee looked at Daniel’s congee. “Don’t eat that bowl of hemorrhoids. There’s a bakery down the road. We’re going there after this.”

  Daniel laughed. “This congee tastes like ass.” He loved cursing in Chinese, the breadth of options unavailable in English. He had trouble remembering the words for map and computer, but curses, those he knew by heart.

  He pushed his tray away and got up. In his preoccupation with finding his mother, he’d forgotten to call someone. “Have a good tour,” he said. He went upstairs and called the second most foul-mouthed person he knew, second to only his mother.

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING in that crap hotel?” Leon shouted on the phone.

  Following Leon’s directions, he took a bus to a neighborhood on the other side of the highway, walking through streets less populated than the ones in Wuyi Square. Leon lived in a block-shaped building with concrete siding, five doors across each of the four stories, metal railings along the edge of the walkways, one big rectangular grid. Daniel walked through the gravel lot and up the stairs. The walkways were crowded with bicycles, plastic coolers, beach balls, and flowerpots. In front of one apartment was a giant stuffed teddy bear with bright blue fur, crammed into a child-sized lawn chair.

  He rang the bell for apartment number nine. A pink tricycle was locked to the railing opposite the door, decorated with stickers of cartoon characters. He heard footsteps, the sound of a latch lifting.

  “You’re here!” Leon’s hair was choppy and grayer, his chest and shoulders thinner, but his grin was the same.

  “Hi, Leon,” Daniel said, unable to suppress his own smile.

  Houseplants hung from the ceilings, on shelves and tables and windowsills, their long green tresses stretching lines down the walls. Daniel followed Leon through the main room to the kitchen, where a woman was reading a newspaper at the kitchen table.

  “This is my wife, Shuang,” Leon said.

  “Hello, Deming,” Shuang said. “I’m glad to finally meet you.”

  A little girl was at the table, too, with Leon’s wide mouth and Shuang’s narrow face. Her legs swung in opposite directions, alternately tapping the metal chair legs in two-four time. She was bent over a coloring book, ponytail swinging as she gripped her blue crayon with concentration.

  “Yimei,” Leon said to the girl. “Say hello to your cousin, Deming.”

  She looked up. “You’re my cousin?”

  “Hi, Yimei,” Daniel said. “What are you drawing?”

  “A princess.” She took a sip from a box of apple juice. “She’s eating a sandwich.”

  “You had no trouble on the bus?” Shuang motioned to the chair next to her.

  “It was easy, no problem.”

  “I told Leon to go pick you up in a taxi. I said, he’s come all the way here and you’re making him take a bus? He could get lost.”

  “Deming’s good with buses.” Leon leaned against the doorframe. “He lives in New York City. Why take a cab when it’ll be faster and cheaper with a bus?”

  Shuang shook her head, but Daniel could see her laughing. “You’ll stay for dinner and sleep in Yimei’s room. She can sleep in our bed.”

  “I can?” Yimei said.

  “Yes, you can sleep with Yi Ma and Yi Ba.”

  “It’s a treat for her,” Leon said.

  “I don’t mean to be trouble. I’ve already paid for the hotel room.”

  “Are you kidding me? It’s not every day Number One Son comes to visit from America,” Leon said. “You stay as long as you want.”

  Daniel’s face flushed. “Don’t be such a bad host,” Shuang said. “Offer our guest something to drink.”

  Leon opened the refrigerator, took out two bottles of Tsingtao, and gave one to Daniel. “Come on, I’ll show you the rest of the apartment.”

  It felt strange, drinking around Leon, but Daniel was grateful for the beer. Leon led him out of the kitchen and into a hallway with three doors. “The bathroom’s here.” He pointed to the left. The other two rooms were the bedrooms, the smaller one Yimei’s, decals of cartoon animals on the wall, bedsheets printed with yellow ducklings. The back bedroom, where Leon and Shuang slept, had a window that opened up onto a small balcony the size of a fire escape. Leon lifted the screen and Daniel stepped out after him. The balcony’s view looked onto a Dumpster surrounded by empty plastic bottles and bloated trash bags, a whiff of garbage in the air. In the distance you could see the outlines of mountains.

  A planter with fuchsia flowers hung from a hook on the railing. “Shuang’s good with plants,” Leon said. “She works in the new Walmart. Gardening section. You like the apartment?”

  Pastel sounds drifted from the windows of other apartments. A running faucet, clanging pots and pans, a baby crying, a radio announcer.

  “It’s nice,” Daniel said. “How long have you lived here?”

  “Two years. The construction isn’t flimsy, we’re on solid ground. I researched the foundation. My cousin knew a guy who worked for the landlord. My cousin owns the company I work for. We do import-export, I work in shipping. Better than cutting meat.” Leon put his bottle down. “Now tell me. You didn’t come all the way to Fuzhou to pay me a visit?”

  “I was planning to see you.”

  Leon laughed and Daniel blinked fast, tried to focus on the outlines of the mountains.

  THAT NIGHT, HE FELL asleep in Yimei’s room in the shadows of the animal decals—a donkey, elephant, cow, and lion—and when he woke up he heard the sound of the television. He looked at his phone. It was ten in the morning. If his mother called him at the hotel, he wouldn’t be there to get her call.

  In the front room of the apartment, Leon was eating toast.

  “I need to get to the hotel,” Daniel said. “My mother might’ve called me there, and I should check my messages.” He had paid for his room through tonight, hadn’t officially checked out.

  “You want toast?” Leon held up his slice of bread.

  “You don’t work today?”

  “Taking today off.”

  Daniel put his shoes on. “I’m going back to the hotel.”

  “No, we’re going to West Lake.”

  Daniel walked to the window and lifted the blinds. He could hear birds outside. “Why?”

  “We’re going to find your mother. What, you want to sit on your ass all day waiting for her to call you?”

  “I should go to the hotel,” Daniel said.

  “We can call the hotel from here and ask if you have a message. After that, we’ll go to West Lake.”

  “But we don’t know where she lives.”

  “You said she told you she lived there. That’s enough for me.”

  “We’re going to walk around and call her name until she comes running out of a building?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  Daniel played with the leaf of one of Shuang’s plants. “We could find her and she could slam the door in my face.” Imagining it, having the final, definitive answer to so many years of not knowing, made him slump.

  “Come on, if you show up at her door she’s not going to do that. You’re her son.”

  THERE WERE NO POTHOLES on the streets near West Lake Park, and fewer pedestrians, and with its large trees and single-story storefronts, the neighborhood resembled a wealthy American suburb. The bu
s passed the entrance to a park and a row of high-rise apartment buildings, and Leon signaled for the driver to stop. “You said she told you she lives in an apartment with a balcony,” Leon said. “These are all the apartment buildings. They overlook the park.”

  “There must be hundreds of apartments.”

  “They have directories. We’ll go up and read them and see if your mother’s name is there. Or we can ask the guards. These rich people, they always have guards.”

  It felt treacherous, referring to his mother as rich people. The first building they saw with balconies had a security guard outside the gate. When Leon asked if a Polly or Peilan lived there, the guard said he couldn’t give out private information about tenants.

  They walked around a bend in the road. A bus whizzed past, honking. The second building with a balcony had two guards and no gate. “There’s no one named Polly or Peilan here,” the younger one said.

  The third building they found had no guards, but a tall gate and no directory in sight. The fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh buildings had neither guards nor directories.

  When Daniel was Deming, he had thought his mother was invincible. She was louder, funnier, faster, and smarter than other adults, and he could never keep secrets from her, about his grades or if he’d been having regular dumps or if those were his crumbs that had spilled on the floor. She wasn’t particularly strict, or cruel, but she was sharp, one step ahead. She was competent, she worked hard, and no matter how tired she was, there was always concern or vigilance left over for him. Yet at some point, this had changed.

  To their left was a railing, and below was the park. Daniel stopped. “She doesn’t want to talk to me.”

  Leon stopped, too. “Your mother, she’s complicated.”

  Daniel wished he knew how to say understatement in Chinese.

  “You meant more to her than anything. Whatever’s making her scared to talk to you, it doesn’t erase that.”

  “She never even told her husband about me.”

  “Is that so.”

  They stood against the railing, watching cars pass. It was past noon. The sun was searing and Daniel wished he had sunglasses. He’d left his in Ridgeborough.

  They began to walk again, more slowly. “When I saw her, after she got back,” Leon said, “there was something broken in her. She didn’t want anyone to know.”

  “You saw her? You said you only spoke to her on the phone.”

  “We did see each other. It was when Yimei was a baby.”

  “But you told me—”

  “Don’t blame Vivian or your mother. Blame me. I left on my own. If only we could do it over again, Deming, we could still be there, on that ugly couch your mother hated.”

  “We’d have bought a new one by now.” A black SUV with tinted windows barreled down the hill. “Did you know I went back to the apartment about a year after you left? A new family was living there.”

  “Sometimes,” Leon said, “when Shuang and I are tucking Yimei into bed, I think, this is the way it turned out. This is my life, the woman who wanted to marry me, the child we had. How could I give this up now?”

  Daniel thought of playing a show, coming to and hearing the cheers of the crowd. “I think the same thing sometimes.”

  “So maybe she thinks the same thing, too,” Leon said.

  Daniel saw two apartment buildings across the street, half hidden by a clump of bushes. His mother, with her new life—it wasn’t the same thing. He needed to tell her she couldn’t just walk out on him, pretend he didn’t exist. “I still want to find her.”

  HOURS LATER, THEY HAD gone to all the visible buildings in the neighborhood with balconies and the heat had become sweltering. They chugged bottles of water they’d bought at a convenience store, where Daniel had seen a woman his mother’s age and had a flash of hope it would be her, though the woman looked nothing like her. They reminisced about New York, and Daniel told Leon about Ridgeborough, how he was taking a break from school.

  He was getting more comfortable speaking in Chinese, no longer caring so much. Even if each sentence took effort, and even if he felt more like himself in English, hearing and speaking Chinese was like replaying an album he hadn’t listened to in years, appreciating how solid the sound was.

  “Should we go back to the buildings without guards, see if there’s a way we could get in?” At Leon’s apartment, there would be beers waiting. He could come back here another day, but doubted he would.

  “Maybe,” Leon said.

  “You want to go back?”

  “Soon.”

  They turned up another street, steeper than the last, the park only slightly visible below. “Let’s go back.”

  “Here, let’s try this building.” Ahead of them was a six-story structure with a silver gate, balconies protruding from the sides. There was a list of names on the outside. “There’s a Gao, but no Guo.”

  “Let’s go back,” Daniel said. “I’ll try the Internet café tomorrow, find English schools.” But he had lost steam for the search. It had been enough to spend the afternoon with Leon. He could always tell himself that he had looked, that he’d tried.

  “Wait.” Leon pointed. “Over there.”

  Daniel followed Leon’s finger and saw a speck of water, so far down he could barely tell what it was. “Yeah, you can see the ocean. We must be pretty high up.”

  “Deming. Where did your mother like to go when she was a little girl? Where did she like to go in New York City?”

  “To the river. But we’re in the middle of the city. There’s no river nearby.”

  “If she was going to live in an apartment with a balcony, what would she want to see from there? Water! This is the street she lives on,” Leon said. “It has to be.”

  They continued up the hill. The next two buildings had no balconies, so they skipped them. At the end of the block was one last building. It had balconies.

  “This is where she lives,” Leon said, and Daniel wished he could match Leon’s conviction.

  The security guard was an older man with a jowly face, reading a paperback inside a narrow booth. “Can I help you?”

  “We’re looking for a Peilan or Polly that lives in your building,” Leon said. “Would it be possible to ring her apartment?”

  “There isn’t anyone by that name here.”

  “Are you sure?” Daniel said. “She’s about average height and weight, with a loud voice and a mole on her neck.” She could have lost weight or gained it, gotten plastic surgery for all he knew. But this was the last building, their final chance. “Her last name might not be Guo, but her first name is Polly, or Peilan?”

  “Nope.”

  “She’s married to a man that owns a textile factory? She works in an English school?”

  The guard returned his book. “Told you. Nope.”

  “Okay,” Leon said. “Thank you.”

  They walked down the sidewalk. “Well, we tried,” Daniel said.

  “We tried.”

  “Let’s go home now.”

  “You hungry? I know a restaurant we can stop at. Not in this neighborhood, the food is too fussy here. But this place, they have soup with lamb, and the noodles are handmade.”

  “Can’t wait,” Daniel said. “I’m getting hungry now.” He hadn’t booked a return plane ticket, but he could find one that left in a few days. Leon and Shuang were nice to him, but he didn’t want to push it. You couldn’t show up out of nowhere and expect to be treated like a real son.

  Compared to downtown, the sidewalks by West Lake were spotless. There was no gum or litter marring their path, no mysterious orange puddles or booby traps of dog poop like in New York. A pebble rolled down the sidewalk, its trail unobstructed, and Daniel kicked it, watching as it veered to the right.

  “Stop,” Leon said.

  Daniel saw a gap in a hedge and a short path that led to a wider lot. Beyond that was a building. When he craned his neck up, he saw a beige high-rise. Rows and rows of balconies.


  “We must have missed that one,” Leon said.

  They turned onto the path. In front was a security guard, dressed in black pants and a dark gray shirt. He was putting a cigarette out into a metal ashtray.

  They asked the same questions they’d been asking all afternoon. The guard shook his head. No Polly Guo in the building. No Peilan.

  “No Peilan?” Leon repeated, like he couldn’t believe it.

  “She’s an English teacher. Director of an English school.”

  “Oh! You should have said that. I know the teacher lady you’re talking about.”

  “Polly,” Leon said.

  “Polly Lin.”

  “You said there’s no Polly in the building,” Daniel said.

  The guard lifted a telephone receiver and pressed numbers on a hidden keypad. “I’ll ring the apartment for you.”

  Leon paced along the path. The back of his T-shirt was covered in sweat. The guard put the receiver down and said, “He’s coming down to meet you.”

  “He?” Daniel asked.

  “Yong. Polly’s husband. She’s not home right now.”

  Leon raised his eyebrows. The guard lit another cigarette. Daniel needed a drink of water, but they had run out, their bottles empty. He didn’t know what he was going to say to his mother’s husband.

  Five minutes later, the front door of the building opened and a man emerged, dressed like a gangster, black suit jacket over black button-down shirt, dark sunglasses. As he came closer, Daniel noticed his silver cufflinks and jade ring.

  The man nodded at Leon and Daniel. “I’m Yong.” His voice was gravelly yet soft, his hair a shade of jet black that only occurred out of a dye bottle. The wrinkles on his face put his age a little north of Leon’s. “Can I help you?”

  “My name is Deming. I know your wife—from New York. This is Leon.” He was unsure of what to say next. Yong wasn’t big, but looked like he could be a scary guy, if you insulted him or said the wrong thing. If Mama had never told her husband about him, he might be putting her in danger, putting himself in danger, by revealing who he was.