by Anchee Min
My insecurity about money bothered Qigu. He asked me to quit bugging him, because he would never be interested in becoming a waiter. “Tips will never get you rich,” he said. He was looking into other ways of finding success.
Qigu talked to a Chinatown real estate broker named Kim Lau, a friendly fellow originally from Hong Kong. Upon returning, Qigu couldn’t stop talking about the term “down payment.” I thought he had gone crazy.
I had saved $9,000 from working multiple jobs over the years. Qigu had about $2,000. “Kim Lau said that we could put our money together and make a down payment for a fixer-upper investment property!” Qigu said excitedly. He pulled up his sleeves and flexed his skinny muscles. “I made an appointment with Mr. Kim Lau so that you can listen to what he has to say.”
Kim Lau’s real estate sign was the biggest in Chinatown. His new office was on Halstead and Thirty-first Street. Mrs. Lau was the receptionist and secretary. Mr. Lau had a lovely smile that disarmed. His hair was neatly trimmed, and he wore a gray suit with a tie. His small eyes darted excitedly behind his glasses as he spoke. After Qigu described our situation and asked for his thoughts, he said, “I’m glad you decided to come to me.”
Signaling his wife to pass him a calculator, Mr. Lau performed a finger dance.
Qigu and I watched with fascination. I thought, Mr. Lau doesn’t look like a crook, but he could be.
I remembered the time I had fallen for a scam and lost $300. I was determined not to trust blindly again.
Mr. Lau said that we could make the down payment with the cash we had: However, the difficulty was getting a loan.
“You will be considered ‘high risk’ by any bank because you don’t have regular jobs,” Mr. Lau said. “You probably won’t even be qualified for the ten-percent high-interest loan. The bank will simply reject your application.”
“Do you mean there is nothing you can do?” Qigu asked.
Mr. Lau smiled as he put away the calculator. “There are always ways.” He told us that he was thinking of a private lender, a Taiwanese woman named Mrs. Mei. “What American banks don’t know is that Chinese honor their debts, in most cases. Mrs. Mei will charge higher than an American bank, thirteen percent interest, but you will have the loan!”
Smiling, Mr. Lau inquired about our backgrounds. He wanted to know what kind of relationship Qigu and I had. “Boyfriend-girlfriend, going steady, engaged?”
Qigu told him we were living together.
“That sounds like a steady relationship,” Mr. Lau said. “Mrs. Mei would not loan her money otherwise, I am sure. You have to be a couple. Would you like me to convince Mrs. Mei on the loan?”
Qigu and I could hardly believe that we were actually “house hunting” in America. Mr. Lau showed us his listings. It felt thrilling and scary at the same time.
A few days later, Mr. Lau showed us a half-vacant apartment property located on South Union street. It had five units, three in the front and two in the back. “The price reflects its condition,” Mr. Lau said. “It is selling as a fixer-upper, fifty-six thousand dollars, which is reasonable. The owner is eager.”
Qigu and I walked out of Mr. Kim’s office with our heads buzzing. We figured that if we would fix up the building and rent out all the units, we not only would be able to cover Mrs. Mei’s mortgage payments, but we could also live in one of the units free.
“It would be like serving in a labor camp once again,” I said. “The difference is that we would be working for ourselves.”
“It’d be an American dream come true!” Qigu agreed.
The next day, Mr. Lau arrived with good news. Mrs. Mei had agreed to give us the high-interest mortgage. We went to Mr. Lau’s office to complete the real estate transaction process. It felt surreal. We met with Mrs. Mei, a well-dressed and smart-looking lady with permed hair, and went to the title company together. Mr. Lau guided us step by step. We signed paper after paper. We waived inspections and insurance coverage because we had no money left. We figured that since we already knew that the building was in need of repair, it would be wise to save so that we could pay for the materials and tools.
I realized that this was no small matter. What bothered me was that my relationship with Qigu had no name. Qigu said that it was a joint investment. We were in business together. He promised that if we separated in the future for any reason, he would take back only his initial $2,000. “We would split the profit fifty-fifty, if there is any.”
Qigu gave me a pat on the shoulder and said, “Stop worrying, Anchee. We are Chinese, and the American way doesn’t suit us. Material things should never be a deciding element in our relationship.”
I felt that I had no reason not to trust Qigu. After all, he was the man I had been sleeping with. I wanted to believe that we were building a home together. I convinced myself that Qigu was set in his Chinese ways and was too shy to say “I love you.” I preferred to think that he demonstrated his love with his actions. We were $50,000 in debt together! There could be no tighter bond.
Yet the uncertainty lingered like a ghost. At the end of the day, my self-confidence fell apart. I started to question myself. Why couldn’t I look Qigu in the eye and say, “Do you love me?” I tried it once, with feeling, and Qigu told me that I sounded ridiculous. “It’s better that you don’t say it,” he said.
The word love sounded ironic, superficial, and mocking to the mainland Chinese, I agreed.
“You know how I feel about you,” Qigu said, “and I know how you feel about me. Isn’t that enough?”
Yet I wished that I had the courage to ask him to clarify what he meant. I didn’t ask, because I was afraid to kill the “poetry.” Both Qigu and I came from a place where we had our memories buried. I loved the song “The Way We Were.” When memories became too painful to remember, the best way to deal with them was to simply forget they ever existed.
One day after dinner I asked Qigu to share with me his memory of first love. I had never heard the story before. They met each other at college in China. She was nineteen, and he twenty-two. She was from Sichuan province, the daughter of a peasant family. The couple had to break off their relationship because he wanted to leave the country for America. He told her that he didn’t want to hurt her. Yet the relationship went on. Love held on until the moment he obtained an American visa. She took the news badly. She tried to congratulate him, but she broke down instead.
In the shadows of the lamplight, Qigu spoke softly. It was as if he was telling someone else’s story. The pauses between the syllables gave away his emotion. The pain was in his controlled voice. He insisted that he didn’t suffer, for he had long warned himself that there would be a price to pay for going to America.
There was a definitive moment in their doomed love affair. It happened two weeks after their separation, when the girl showed up in his apartment. She told him that she was engaged to be married and was going back to her province. She asked to be with him for one last time, to say good-bye. That night she offered him her gift—they slept together for the first time. She believed that the act would allow them both to find closure. “She then said something I will never forget,” Qigu recalled. “She said ‘I wish that I had never loved you.’ ”
“What about you?” I asked. “Did you regret loving her?”
“Zen and Taoism have teachings that speak to this,” Qigu said. “There is a way to bear the burden. Let life happen to you. Let it. Don’t try to resist it. You would win by doing nothing as an individual. Only when doing nothing, you are doing everything. To do nothing is wisdom. It is the best way to cope with tragedy. Only by doing nothing can you survive.”
“So you just let her happen to you?” I asked.
“Yes. She insisted.”
“But what did you mean by doing nothing? My question is, Did you love her?”
“I don’t know, to tell the truth. I had been afraid to love. I had to train my mind.”
Qigu reached toward the lamp and turned the light away from him. “I
am not the only one who sacrificed,” he continued in a calm voice. “So many I knew either gave up their relationships or stayed single for their entire four years in college. All to pursue the dream of coming to America.”
Would I have done the same if I had been that girl? I wondered.
“It is less difficult when such sacrifice is expected and shared,” Qigu concluded. “As in war, there will be casualties. You can’t take it personally.”
“But it is personal.”
“That’s the irony of life.”
“The situation was similar at the labor camp.” I sighed. “In order to get back to the city, many sacrificed their relationships. People were afraid to fall in love because parting was unbearable.”
“Tragedy, precisely.” Qigu’s voice trailed off in the dark. “Yet life goes on. It always does.”
Had he succeeded in moving on? Had he forgotten the girl? I didn’t need to hear the answers. I could tell that he was still stuck with his memories. So was I. I wished that I could fool myself. We were like twice-dyed T-shirts. New bleach was not helping to wash off the old patterns. The deeply ingrained images kept resurfacing.
Qigu said that in his book of values, love was hope, and dreams were fortune itself.
I asked him to elaborate.
He said, “A fifty-percent divorce rate in America means half the population is disappointed with their love lives. People go on regardless, eating, drinking, sleeping, farting, et cetera. Let life be, I say! That’s why artists are the happiest bunch. Artists choose not to deal with life’s ABCs. Artists refuse to behave according to society’s XYZ rules. An artist lives within his own realm of imagination. Art is the best religion. It is opium without side effects.”
I felt myself falling off Qigu’s wagon. I wanted my life to be a love story. I wanted to be able to say “I love you” to Qigu and have him say the same words back.
The doubt was there. The doubt couldn’t be chased away. The doubt continued to trouble me. It made me feel dishonest. I shouldn’t be gliding on a watermelon skin. It would be better if I put a stop to it myself. I needed to deal with my cowardliness. The proper thing to do was to celebrate the truth, however ugly and hurtful. Truth would lead to real beauty. It would be the best gift to both myself and to Qigu.
“Art is about ambiguity,” Qigu said.
But I could see no beauty in the ambiguity of our relationship.
Yet I continued my watermelon-skin ride, shamelessly and irresponsibly. The truth was I didn’t have the guts to face the truth. I didn’t have the confidence that I would be able to survive living in America on my own. I let myself be penetrated by fear.
It had been five years, and a green card remained a dream. I no longer saw the light at the end of my tunnel. I had been willing to crawl on all fours. I had done what my parents told me never to do. I now lived with a man who was not my husband and I was in debt beyond my parents’ wildest imagination.
Qigu had been decent compared to other suitors. I seemed to attract men with problems: social outcasts, alcoholics, married men. A few acres plus a farming cow, husband, and children makes a happy woman, went a Chinese folk song I loved. I prayed that Qigu would find me worthy. Besides being his bedmate, I tried to prove that I could also be a breadwinner and a homemaker.
I didn’t excite Qigu, even when I walked out of the shower naked. I wished that I knew what I was doing wrong. My mother had taught me, “If you are nice to your man, he will be nice to you.” I couldn’t help but think sometimes that it was because Qigu still hadn’t gotten over his loss. He loved the girl he left behind; in time I would find out that there was more than one girl. We lived like an old couple. Qigu would discuss whatever was on his mind as he sat on the toilet while I cleaned my purse and counted the coins on the floor.
“I choose giving birth to art” came Qigu’s reply when I asked if he would ever consider having children.
How did I not only choose not to hear him, but also to take it as a joke?
“You’ll make a good father,” I remembered saying to him. “You’ll change your mind in time.”
When Mr. Lau congratulated us on the closing of the property, I started to panic. All I could think about was that we would not be able to make the mortgage payment. It would take only one tenant to miss his rent. We had no money in reserve. To save expenses, Qigu and I lived on cup noodles, which cost a dollar for seven packs. Qigu believed that good things would happen if only I relaxed. He pointed out that we had just bought a used Chevrolet for the bargain price of sixty-five dollars. Well, it was not a real purchase. A Christian friend whom Qigu met at a church donated the car to help us in the name of his Lord. But I couldn’t get my mind off the mortgage debt and property tax and utility bills.
The day after we bought the property, we discovered that two fat homeless men had been living in the vacant units. There were shopping carts stolen from grocery stores parked in the yard. We found the men drunk in a room filled with leftover pizzas, empty liquor bottles, soda cans, and cigarette butts littering the floor. The homeless men complained about water not being available to them. The toilet was filled with waste. Because the building had not been properly heated during the winter, the water pipes had burst.
We gave the homeless men three days to remove themselves from our property. We explained that we needed to fix the house. The homeless men said, “Sure, sure.”
The condition of the front three units was worse than it had first appeared. The basement unit was occupied by a retired couple, Bruno and Helen, who were drunk all the time. Helen told Qigu that she and Bruno got their alcoholic blood from their Irish ancestors. “Bruno has to drink a dozen beers a day mixed with liquor, or he can’t function.”
Bruno shot back and said that it was because he had to deal with a bitch like Helen. “She’s an alcoholic since birth.”
The unit smelled. Bruno and Helen never walked their dog, whose name was Washa. Washa was mean, wild, and aggressive. He would attack anyone and ran laps in the weed-covered lot next to our building. On our first encounter, Washa bit through my pants and left teeth marks on my thigh.
With liquor on her breath, Helen told us that she and Bruno had been living here since the day they were married. They had an unmarried daughter, who was twenty-five years old and pregnant, living with them. The father of the child was a Mexican truck driver whom they disapproved of as a son-in-law. We didn’t know that this was a warning that we would be in charge of paying for window replacements. The son-in-law would shoot bullets through the windows.
An old Italian woman named Maria and her brother John, both in their late sixties, occupied the unit above Bruno and Helen. We stood in their clean kitchen but couldn’t understand a word they said. It wasn’t until Maria got down on the floor and began to imitate a bug crawling that we understood they were complaining about cockroaches.
Qigu and I didn’t know what to do besides offer to buy the cockroach poison. Maria shook her head violently. With the help of her brother, she got on a chair and reached toward the cupboard. She pulled out a plastic bag full of cockroach poison. John showed us that he wanted to open his windows, but was unable to because the window frames had rotted. Qigu said we’d fix their problems as soon as possible.
On the third floor lived two Mexican men, Alfonso and José, who spoke only a few words of English. They told us that a rent increase was not fair because they didn’t have families living with them, and that they used the unit only for sleeping after work.
Qigu and I told them that they were welcome to move if they thought our rent was unreasonable. We pointed out that even with the increase, our rent was still the cheapest on the block. Alfonso said he already knew that, and it was why they would not move. Alfonso told us that the building’s electric system was shot. “It makes popping sounds,” he said.
After the homeless men were gone, we began to move the trash they left behind out of the back building. As we cleared the closets and drawers, we discovered a st
ack of photo albums featuring generations of a white family. It was someone’s entire life story. There were over twenty albums meticulously framed, marked, and dated. I couldn’t understand why anyone would leave the albums behind when they moved.
Qigu and I took the albums and set them up as a display on boxes next to the trash cans. We hoped that the neighbors would see them and contact whoever had lived here. Days passed, and no one came to claim the albums. The city’s garbage truck came and went, leaving the boxes untouched. I felt awful when it started to rain. I couldn’t stand the idea that the albums would be ruined. Qigu and I put them back into the boxes and carried them inside. We took the boxes out again after the rain. It took us a while to realize that no one was interested in picking them up. It bothered me that we had to be the ones to make the decision to throw away these precious memories.
Qigu and I sat down on the floor and went through the albums one by one as if they were our own. I heard Qigu sigh as he flipped the pages. “Looks like the family was originally from Poland. Here is the great-grandpa and -grandma. They must have been the first-generation immigrants, just like us.”
“The way they dressed got better as the family grew.” I pointed out. “I can almost imagine how they built their lives in America.”
“Too bad a museum wouldn’t take the albums,” Qigu said. “It is real American history.”
Qigu and I notified our landlord on Parnell Street that we would move out the next month. The landlord asked us if we knew any other Chinese students who would rent the apartment. The landlord said that we had been excellent tenants, and he would miss us.
Qigu and I returned to our property after dinner. We had been discussing the cost of hiring a licensed electrician. We decided that we would have no choice but to spend the money. I said to Qigu, “Fire would be a serious hazard if we tried to fix the electrical problems ourselves …”