by Anchee Min
I was given an IV needle. After a few hours, I felt nauseated. Fearing medical expenses, I endured the discomfort. I wished that someone would explain to me what was going on.
My nausea worsened the next morning. I could barely think, but I tried my best not to bother the doctors. I began to hallucinate. I heard the phone ring and my aunt on the other end. I knew it was impossible, but I could hear her voice: “Do you know the cost of medical expenses in America?”
I struggled to overcome the nausea, but I felt sicker as the hours went by. I had no memory of passing out, but when I opened my eyes, a group of doctors stood around me. They talked among themselves. I couldn’t understand anything. In fact I could barely hear them. They sounded like faraway mosquitoes. When one of them spoke to me, I responded, “I can’t hear you.”
It didn’t occur to me that it might have been the drugs that were knocking the senses out of me.
I was determined not to cause any trouble. In China I was taught to endure pain. The next morning I woke up to face a different group of doctors. I realized that I couldn’t hear their voices at all—not even the mosquito sound.
I endured as much as I could and didn’t report how I really felt. I passed out in the end. When I woke, I was lying on the floor between the bed and the bathroom. I was no longer connected to the IV needle, as it had snapped out of my vein in my fall. I felt much better. I now knew for sure that it was the drug. I got myself up and moved toward the door. The black lady outside said to me, “Please get back into your room, now!”
After ten days of hospitalization, I was told that the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with me. The blood I had coughed up was not from my lungs. It was from a vessel between my neck and right shoulder. I asked the doctor to write down my trouble, but my Chinese-English dictionary didn’t have any translations for medical terms. I asked the doctor to give me a general idea of what was wrong with me. The doctor said that it might be genetic, and that it could happen again when my immune system was down.
The doctors concluded that “depression” was part of my illness. I looked up the word depression in my dictionary, but it didn’t make sense. How could I suffer a depression when I didn’t feel depressed?
I was instructed to see Dr. Kelly, a psychiatrist who ran an office in the basement of the school. I had neither the desire nor the time to visit her. I had enough trouble on my hands. My roommates suspected that I carried a contagious disease and were kicking me out. I was looking for a new place to live.
After more thought, I decided to see Dr. Kelly. At least I could use her to practice my English. If my English had been good enough to tell the doctors about my reaction to the drugs, I wouldn’t have suffered as long or as badly while in the hospital.
Dr. Kelly turned out not to be what I had expected. She was a white woman who spoke in a soft and concerned voice. My problem with her was that she wanted me to do the talking. She gave the shortest answers when I asked her questions about herself.
Why would I want to waste time listening to my own poor English? I tried to steer the conversation back to her. But Dr. Kelly refused to talk. She asked questions and expected me to give her lengthy answers. I became unhappy. It was a waste of time for both of us. Dr. Kelly kept telling me that I ought to “let go” by speaking. She believed that I’d get rid of my depression if I could just “release” my trouble.
“I don’t see how this is working,” I said.
She insisted that I needed to talk.
“What do I talk about?”
“Anything,” she said. “It’s my job to listen. You can discuss anything with me, for example, your deepest fear. It would be confidential.”
“What does confidential mean?”
“It means that your secret will rest safe with me.”
Why would she want to know my fears and secrets? She couldn’t and wouldn’t be able to help me even if she wanted to. She said it was her job. Did she mean that her service was part of my tuition?
I told Dr. Kelly that I didn’t feel like troubling her with my fears and secrets. She said, “That’s what I am here for.”
“You mean it?”
“Of course.”
“Okay, here it is: I fear the coming of my visa expiration date, and I fear not being able to pay off my debt.”
She listened, took notes, and looked at me intently.
I waited for her response, but she remained quiet.
Disappointed, I shut up.
She suggested that I keep talking.
“I have let myself go,” I said. “I have done the ‘releasing.’ I don’t feel any less troubled. Talking doesn’t help me.”
Dr. Kelly insisted that we continue. We made another appointment. We met every Tuesday from noon to 12:45 P.M. It was economical to use my lunch break. Since Dr. Kelly would charge as a doctor, I imagined the bill would be high. And this bothered me a great deal.
Dr. Kelly phoned me. She said that it was rude to stop showing up without calling to cancel first. I just wanted to avoid her. Would I like to see her again? Of course not. Why? Because I hated the sound of my own voice in her little office. I could have painted a dozen roses on ladies’ underwear and made three dollars.
Dr. Kelly reminded me that it was part of my medical treatment. “Your health is my priority,” she insisted. I promised that I’d go and see her again. She wanted to focus on the root of my depression. She wanted to discuss my loneliness. Should I tell her that I had been using my Sex Education videotape? That I dreamed of making love with a real man? That I wept when I was pleasing myself? Should I let her know that the Sex Education videotape was a better psychiatrist?
I came up with a one-stone, two-bird plan. I told Dr. Kelly that if I continued to see her, she had to promise to correct my English. I’d get treated while improving my English. Dr. Kelly smiled, and I took it as a promise. When I showed up, I answered all her questions. But she didn’t correct my English. She didn’t fix even one English grammar error. Through the entire session I had to listen to my own voice until I caught a mistake on my own.
“You didn’t fix me,” I complained. “So I can’t come again.”
I kept dreaming of my mother dressed in black clothes. It had been three years since I had left China. My homesickness chewed at my heart. I had saved enough money for airfare, but the fear of applying for a new visa stopped me. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to reenter America.
Through letters I learned that my mother had survived a stroke. My father was still recovering from his stomach cancer. So many times I thought of taking the chance to return home. I had heard stories of students who took that risk and were never granted a visa back to America.
In my memory, my mother always wore a cotton blouse she had dyed blue herself. In my sleep, I could feel her hand touching my forehead. I was a little girl once again having nightmares of her dying. Mother was oddly cheerful in my dreams. In Dr. Kelly’s words, it was her “disguise that served to hide her deepest fears.”
I remembered my mother taught me how to hand-wash the sheets. When the last bit of soap was gone and she couldn’t afford to buy more, she used alkaline cleansers. We cleaned everything with alkaline and even used it to wash our hair. Once I soaked my head in it for too long and damaged my scalp.
The day I heard the music of “Silent Night” outside the Marshall Field’s store in Chicago during Christmas, I wept. It was my mother’s song. I remembered Mother sang the tune when she felt that her tuberculosis was bringing her closer to an end. She never told me that it was a Western song, a Christmas song, and that she was a Christian.
I fell in love with “Silent Night” as a child because it was different from songs composed of Mao quotations. I hummed it with Mother even though I had no idea what it was about. In retrospect, Mother was wise not to reveal her Christian identity. I would have reported her if she had shared her faith with me. I had been conditioned to place my loyalty toward Mao before my mother.
“Si
lent Night” helped my mother get through hard times. We hummed the tune together during hunger, during steaming-hot summers when we lay soaked in our own sweat and were unable to sleep, and during frozen winters when we shivered under thin blankets.
It was in America, in Chicago, at Union Station, while I waited for the next train to go to work, that I heard “Silent Night” filling the air. This time I understood, for the first time, the lyrics! And they made great sense to me. My eyes filled with tears because I was unable to share my joy with my mother. I wondered how she was doing. I wished that I could afford to call her. I wanted to tell her that I had made progress in English, so much that I understood her song.
{ Chapter 14 }
The rent was the first thing that caught my eye. “$80 a month heat included,” the ad read. I had been paying $150. My schoolmates paid three times as much. After I finished translating the ad, I understood why the rent was so cheap. The location was undesirable; it was in a rough area on the south side of Chicago near Twenty-sixth Avenue and Wallace Street.
I phoned the number. A male voice answered. He said his name was Peng Xu. I detected his accent and asked if he was from China. He said he was from Beijing. I was glad. Peng Xu told me that he got his graduate degree in philosophy in China and was pursuing a Ph.D. in political science. I was impressed. I told him that it was too bad that we couldn’t be roommates since we were a man and a woman.
Peng Xu said there was no reason to behave as if we were still in China, a modern yet still feudalistic society. “In America a man and a woman in college share an apartment with separate rooms all the time. There are two bedrooms here. We would share only the living room, kitchen, and bathroom.”
I hesitated. I liked the price but was uncertain if it was the right thing to do—living with a male stranger. On the other hand, he sounded nice and was a few years older than me. His background wouldn’t be that different than mine. The fact that he was a Ph.D. candidate meant that he must be a highly educated man.
“By Chinese standards this is a mansion,” Peng Xu continued over the phone. “This apartment could have housed three families in China. You have complete privacy in your own bedroom.”
We set up an appointment to meet at the apartment. Peng Xu greeted me. He was in his early thirties. The apartment was half below street level, a basement unit. I was not bothered because the place was clean and the surroundings seemed safe. My room was more spacious than I had expected. I was pleased that it had a window.
Peng Xu told me that he was his parents’ youngest son and the only one who made it to college. He was proud that he had brought honor to his family. His father had been a high-ranking Communist Party official who was tortured to death during the Cultural Revolution. Peng Xu was close to his mother, who was ill with terminal cancer.
I put down a deposit and was happy about the money I was going to save. The next day I moved in. The moment I put my things in my room, I discovered that my room didn’t have a door. The bedroom door had been removed from its hinges. Peng Xu explained that the Italian landlord who lived upstairs had removed all bedroom doors. It was to ensure that renters didn’t play the role of a “second landlord.” “The landlord only wanted to rent to a couple,” Peng Xu said. “I hope you don’t mind that I told him that we were a couple.”
“But we are not!” I said.
“It’s just formality, no big deal,” Peng Xu said.
Standing between the living room and the bedroom, I felt uncomfortable.
Peng Xu suggested that I hang a blanket as a curtain.
After hanging the blanket, I still didn’t feel right. “I can’t do this,” I said. “I can’t pretend that we are a couple.”
“I only said it to fool the landlord,” Peng Xu said. “We survived the Cultural Revolution. What else can’t we survive? Besides, I have already told the landlord that you’re my wife.”
My instincts told me not to go ahead, but my mind convinced me that I had no choice—living below my means was a necessity.
I hung an extra blanket over my door frame. I thought to myself that I would settle for now and move as soon as I could find someplace better.
Peng Xu made a person-to-person call to his mother in Beijing every Friday night. When the international operator connected the line and asked his mother, “Is this Mrs. Xu?” she would respond, as her son had instructed, “No, Mrs. Xu is not here.”
Peng Xu said this was how he avoided paying the expensive international long distance telephone fees and still find out if his mother was alive. Peng Xu was happy when he heard it more than once: “No, Mrs. Xu is not here.” His mother repeated the phrase until the operator disconnected them.
I avoided being close to Peng Xu because his clothes were unwashed and he rarely bathed. To help pay his bills, he worked as a laborer at a railway construction site on weekends. Trying to save money, he rarely visited the coin laundry. His overgrown hair stuck out from his head. Luckily he didn’t need to shave. He was naturally beardless and smooth-skinned. He had a pair of sheep eyes, a flat nose, and a crooked mouth that pulled toward the right when he talked. He insisted that drinking beer was not a waste of time while doing laundry was.
Peng Xu ate while working on his research papers. He didn’t care that he scattered bread crumbs on the floor, attracting ants and cockroaches. He used an old–fashioned ink pen and wrote English in a Chinese calligraphic style. He labored on his research papers until he fell asleep. His socks were covered with ink stains.
There was no furniture in the apartment. Peng Xu picked up a few chairs from the trash dump in the back lane. “America, the land of treasure,” Peng Xu would sing as he collected mattresses, blankets, clothes, lamps, and cookware from Dumpsters.
Peng Xu was upset on New Year’s Eve. It would be 1987. His mother hadn’t answered the operator. “She didn’t sound right the last time I spoke to her,” Peng Xu told me. “Her illness must have worsened! She could even be dead!” He shook the phone set and punched the wall holding the receiver. “I could have comforted her. I should have had the operator connect us! To hell with phone bills!”
Peng Xu called China direct to friends and relatives and asked about his mother. “My mother is waiting to hear from me on her deathbed,” he yelled as he dialed. “Her last wish must be fulfilled even if it means that I have to rob!”
I wouldn’t have minded helping with the phone bill if I could make my own ends meet. I wanted desperately to call home myself. Besides her lung condition, my mother suffered from diabetes, stroke, and heart disease, and my father had developed a skin condition as a result of his chemotherapy.
Peng Xu kicked the TV set. He said that it was the only way to keep it working. The images were blurred and the figures distorted. Peng Xu had found the TV set in the same trash Dumpster out back. He kept the volume high as if he needed to drown out everything else. Sometimes Peng Xu fell asleep and left the TV on all night.
The noise kept me awake. I found myself lying in bed waiting for Peng Xu to turn the TV off so that I could sleep. At three A.M., I’d decided I’d had enough. I’d walk into the living room and find Peng Xu sound asleep with the TV still on.
The phone bill came and it was $450. Peng Xu insisted that I share 50 percent of the payment.
“You called China, not me,” I protested.
Although his demand angered me, I paid. In the meantime, I announced that I would be moving out. I let him know that he still owed me twenty dollars that he’d borrowed for his share of the rent.
Peng Xu lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “As I said, I told the landlord that you were my wife when I signed the lease. How would I explain your departure?”
“It’s not my business that you lied to the landlord,” I said.
“My mother is dead,” Peng Xu spoke, staring at the television screen. “I’ll never call China again.”
“She died? When?” I asked.
“Last night.”
Although this was expected, I was
still stunned. I imagined the sadness he was going through.
“I am so sorry, Peng Xu. I feel terrible about your loss—”
He interrupted. “I wouldn’t do what you are doing to me if I knew your mother was dead.”
If I had the money, I thought.
“You are not moving out.” Peng Xu pinched the cigarette butt between the cracks of a broken floor tile. “I can’t afford this place alone.”
I was jolted from deep sleep. Peng Xu was on top of me.
Holding tight to my blanket, I asked, “What are you doing?”
He didn’t answer but wrapped his arms around me.
“I dreamed of my mother.” He was crying. “She asked for me! She kept asking for me!”
The room was as cold as an icebox. The wall was black. The more I tried to push him away, the tighter he held on to me. He sobbed like a helpless child. I let his arms stay around my shoulders.
I told myself that I was moving out in a week, that I would no longer have to put up with him. I would be nice to him for one last time. There would be no more fighting. No more arguing over phone bills, or his leaving the television on all night. I’d soon be able to sleep. He had lost his mother. He didn’t get to say good-bye to her. “This is not Mrs. Xu” were her last words to him.
His hands began to move over me. He tried to kiss me.
“No, please, Peng Xu.”
He refused and forced his way. He grabbed my breasts and said, “Shush! Nobody will know.”
I pushed him. “Please stop!”
He apologized but continued what he was doing.
I tried to reach the light, but he pinned my arms down. The weight of him was crushing me.
“I need you.” He buried his face in my chest. “I beg you.”
“Please get off me!”
“My mother sent me baby clothes she made herself,” he said in a strange voice. “She was an accomplished knitter. She quoted Confucius to me: ‘On all counts of bad piety, not to provide offspring counts as number one.’ … I’d love to give her a grandchild, but you and your type won’t even look at a man like me. No woman desires a man who is poor—not in a capitalistic society—no matter how rich I am intellectually.”