by Lisa Ko
After he decided to leave, he told his mother that it wasn’t about Peter and Kay, that he wasn’t choosing them over her. She had cried. The visa form had already been submitted. “But we’ll see each other again,” he said. Leon came with them to the airport, and when Daniel turned at the ticket counter he saw them from a distance, his mother in her suit and heels, Leon in his sneakers and windbreaker, talking and laughing like old friends. He wasn’t sure if he was making the right decision, didn’t know how long he’d stay. Maybe he would come back to Fuzhou after New Year’s. Either way, it was incredible to decide something. He had never allowed himself to fully trust his choices before.
Three stops and more than twenty-four hours of travel later, he arrived at the Syracuse airport the morning of Christmas Day. English clanged out around him in fraught copper lines, and nobody looked Chinese. Outside, waiting for Peter and Kay, it was freezing, and he didn’t have a jacket.
They parked and got out of the car. “You must be tired,” Kay said, hugging him tightly. “All that flying!” Peter hugged him, too, thumping him on the back.
On the drive to Ridgeborough, fighting jet lag, he’d entertained them with light observations about the differences between Fuzhou and New York, talking about traffic and smog, the menu at Pizza Hut, his Speak English Now students. How it didn’t snow there, it was that far south. He felt bad, offering Eddie and Tammy and Boss Cheng up for amusement, but it seemed easier than having the spotlight on Mama or himself.
Back in the house, he skipped out on church and took a nap, and when he woke up he took his guitar out of the closet. After months of not being played, the strings were still in tune. Moving between chords, his fingers and wrists loosening, he elicited color shifts he’d forgotten about: brown and aqua, ranges of mauve and pink, the squeakiest of greens. Shit, it felt great. Though he could have sworn there used to be these tiny cracks in the fingerboard that he had wanted to fix but never got around to. Or had he fixed them before he left and forgotten?
Peter knocked on the doorframe. “Reunited at last,” he said.
Daniel looked up. “Yeah, it’s been a while. Still works, though.”
“Do you notice anything different?” Peter pointed to the fingerboard. “I took it to the Music Department at Carlough and one of the professors recommended someone he knew, a guitar repairman. I thought it could use a little TLC.”
He helped Kay chop vegetables and peel potatoes for dinner. “I haven’t had potatoes in ages,” he said, as she poured canned pumpkin mix into a pie shell. She was wearing a lavender sweater he hadn’t seen before; Peter had a matching one in green. “We had rice, though. Lots and lots of rice.” Hearing himself in English still felt strange.
How easy it would be to say it: I learned so much when I was there—let me tell you about her. She had wanted me. But every time he started to say something, he stopped.
Kay passed him the pie shell and told him to put it in the oven. He set it down on the rack and closed the door. When he stood up, she was watching him, and he was afraid she would start talking about him going back to Carlough, or GA meetings.
“Was it hard?” she asked. “Being in China?”
He removed the oven mitt. “It took a while for my Chinese to come back, but once it did, it got a lot easier.”
“But still, it must have been pretty foreign for you.”
He didn’t know why, but he didn’t want to tell Kay about how he had always felt a little different there, even if he could speak the language. “Fuzhou’s a big city, though, real modern.”
“Your father and I were reading an article about how women in China are still second-class citizens. It makes sense, I suppose, with the cultural bias against girls.” Kay shook her head. “Polly, your birth mother? She must be very brave to have the kind of career she does.”
“It’s not really like that,” he said. Though she was brave, and in ways Kay didn’t know about. And sure, it could be hard for women in China, harder than it might be for women here. But it bothered him, talking about Mama like this, when she wasn’t here.
“It’s a shame, really, when you think of the ways these women might have flourished if they’d had access to the right opportunities and education. They could be doing so much better, so much more.”
“She’s doing great. A lot of women in China have college degrees.”
“Oh, I just had an idea. Maybe I’ll talk to someone at Carlough about starting a scholarship for a female Chinese student.”
She wasn’t listening to him. He recalled how she and Peter had insisted on English, his new name, the right education. How better and more hinged on their ideas of success, their plans. Mama, Chinese, the Bronx, Deming: they had never been enough. He shivered, and for a brief, horrible moment, he could see himself the way he realized they saw him—as someone who needed to be saved.
No. He felt queasy, terrified. He balled his hands into fists, pushed them into his pockets.
Kay leaned over the oven, checking the timer on the pie. “Do you want to make the whipped cream? You always loved doing that. Licking the bowl and all.” She took down the mixing bowl from the cabinet. “It’s good to have you back. I mean, I’m glad you had the opportunity to explore your roots, but I’m also glad you’ve come home. The house felt lonely without you here.”
The oven warmed the kitchen, filling it with the scent of baking, sugar and butter and cinnamon. In the living room Peter had lit a fire, and Daniel could hear the crackling flames, classical music on the stereo. His guitar was upstairs, restrung and repaired, his bed piled with favorite quilts. “It’s good to be here,” he said, and got the cream from the refrigerator.
He slept: for twelve hours, waking up at four in the morning, taking long naps in the late afternoon. At dawn he lay awake in bed, the room slowly sharpening, and remembered walking around Fuzhou with his mother, biking in the park with Yimei, his bumbling first days in the Min Hotel. All of it so peculiar and distant, like someone else’s life.
He spent the week watching television, barely changing out of his sweatpants or bothering to go outside. On New Year’s Eve, Kay and Peter were asleep by eleven, and Daniel fell asleep in front of the TV after watching the ball drop in Times Square, pop stars singing to crowds of drunken tourists. He woke up to an infomercial for acne medication.
His footsteps muffled by wool socks, he walked around the house in the dark. Even with his eyes closed, he knew he could put a hand out on a wall in any room and have it land exactly on the light switch, that he had to veer to the right of the bookshelf in the living room in order to not bump into the corner of the end table where Kay kept her magazines, that there were fourteen steps up to the second floor. Every floorboard, every square inch of the house remained with him. Yet there was so much that this house, that Peter and Kay, would never know. He stood against the kitchen wall, listening to the hum of the refrigerator, the sound of his own breathing. If he couldn’t feel at home in China, if he didn’t belong in Ridgeborough, then where did that leave him?
Three steps to the dining room, left turn, wall. His growth chart was still here, sketched against the doorjamb. There was a dent near the floorboard, made from a basketball he’d once bounced. Five steps to the china cabinet, its top drawer stuffed with envelopes and postage stamps, old checkbooks, a desiccated rubber band ball. He reached out a hand and closed his eyes. It was home, a home, but he knew he would have to leave here, too.
IT WAS A LONG ride to Harlem from where he had played the show in Brooklyn. Daniel and Michael lived uptown, not only because the rent was more affordable, but because it was closer to Columbia, where Michael stayed late, after his classes, to work in the lab. With the grant money he received, he’d been able to move out of Sunset Park.
Daniel trudged up the stairs of the subway station, down the four blocks to his building, and up the five flights to the apartment. When he unlocked the door, he was glad to see the lights on, and that the place was warm and smelled like food. He un
laced his boots, took off his coat, and put his guitar on his bed.
There was no couch, TV, dining room, or kitchen table. They ate on the floor, using a blanket as a tablecloth. Each of the bedrooms was large enough for a twin bed and nothing else, with space on only one side of the bed to squeeze in and out, and there were no closets, so Daniel had put his box spring up on concrete blocks and stored his clothes in plastic bins underneath. Over the past three months he had replayed his memories of Fuzhou until they lost their potency, leaving only a sense of awe: I went there. I did that.
Michael’s door was open. Daniel knocked on the wall and said, “What’s up, brother?” in Fuzhounese.
Michael was sitting against his bed, eating out of a large bowl. “Long day at the lab. I’m beat. How was work?”
Daniel switched to English. “I didn’t work tonight. I had a show. I mean, I played a show.”
“You did? Where?”
“At this bar in Brooklyn.”
“How’d it go?”
“Actually, it was really good.”
“Why didn’t you let me know? I would’ve come.”
“I’ll let you know about the next one.”
Michael held up his bowl. “I made food. It’s on the stove.”
“Thanks, I’m starving.”
The kitchen, on the opposite end of the apartment, consisted of a two-burner stove, a sink, and a small refrigerator. The dish rack sat on top of the microwave, the cutting board sat on top of the stove, and the rice cooker was on top of the cutting board. Daniel lifted the lid. Steam floated out, along with the sweet, garlicky odor of pork sausage, which Michael had cooked so that it would flavor the rice below. A fried egg awaited him as well.
He took out the other bowl, filled it with egg and rice and sausage, and topped it with a spoonful of hot sauce. Sunday nights, he and Michael went to Sunset Park, where they did their laundry in the basement and left the house armed with condiments. When Daniel helped Vivian make dinner, he would think of his mother, in her new apartment, looking at the harbor in the distance. “I’ll visit you in New York,” she had said in last week’s video chat, and he told her he would like that, though he wasn’t sure if she could get into the country after being deported.
For now, this was where his life would be. This apartment with Michael. This city. His best home. The heater clanked, a siren ripped up the block. He placed the lid back on the rice cooker and took his bowl into the bedroom so he and Michael could eat together.
Acknowledgments
WHEN YOU WORK ON a novel for years and years, you don’t do it alone. My gratitude is immense.
Thank you, Barbara Kingsolver. Thank you, PEN. Huge thanks to my agent, Ayesha Pande; my editor, Kathy Pories; my publicist, Michael McKenzie; and the fantastic team at Algonquin Books for their hard work in putting this book out into the world. I couldn’t be more grateful.
Big love to the VONA/Voices diaspora. I’m especially grateful for the wisdom of Elmaz Abinader, David Mura, and Junot Díaz. Thanks to Emily Raboteau, Linsey Abrams, Judy Sternlight, and my novel workshop-mates for seeing the possibility in the early days, and to the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, where I first found community.
This novel wouldn’t be what it is without Sunita Dhurandhar, Serena Lin, and Melissa Rivero, who read drafts, wrote with me, and shared their generosity and brilliance. Thank you to Lorelei Russ, Amelia Blanquera, Zohra Saed, Melissa Hung, Glendaliz Camacho, Grace Lee, and all my friends who encouraged, listened, and laughed with me while I was writing this book, as well as everyone who tolerated my many questions in the name of research, including Vin Ferraro, Howard Myint, Brendan Crosby, Michael Maffei, Retha Powers, and Linlin Liang.
To my parents, Alfonso and Lilian Ko, my original entourage: thank you for so many things, including your grind, heart, exuberance, love of music and dancing, and teaching me how to see life as narrative and the importance of asking tough questions.
To Julman Tolentino, whose love and understanding changed everything: thank you for a building a home with me, and for long talks about Daniel and Polly.
I never could have written this book without the support of and the fellow artists I’ve met through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency (which finally saw me over the finish line), Hawthornden Castle, the MacDowell Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, Writers Omi at Ledig House, the I-Park Foundation, the Anderson Center, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Paden Institute, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, the Van Lier Fund, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Xiu Ping Jiang, Cirila Baltazar Cruz, Encarnación Bail Romero: I am in your debt. Nina Bernstein’s 2009 New York Times article “Mentally Ill and in Immigration Limbo” provided the spark. Numerous other sources offered guidance in shaping this novel, including Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, edited by Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Shin; Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang; Smuggled Chinese by Ko-lin Chin; Golden Venture, directed by Peter Cohn; Last Train Home, directed by Lixin Fan; Wo Ai Ni Mommy, directed by Stephanie Wang-Breal; the Transracial Abductees website; and articles by Patrick Radden Keefe, Ginger Thompson, and Kai Chang. I’ve taken fictional liberties with the material, and any inaccuracies in the novel are purely mine.
LISA KO’s fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2016, Narrative, Copper Nickel, the Asian Pacific American Journal, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Writers OMI at Ledig House, the Jerome Foundation, and Blue Mountain Center, among others. A founding coeditor of Hyphen and a fiction editor at Drunken Boat, Ko was born in Queens and lives in Brooklyn.
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Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
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Workman Publishing
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© 2017 by Lisa Ko.
All rights reserved.
Li-Young Lee, excerpt from “The City in Which I Love You” from The City in Which I Love You. Copyright © 1990 by Li-Young Lee. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
eISBN 978-1-61620-713-7