by Gus Lee
Her questions revealed everything; she wasn’t interested in me. She wanted to marry a Caucasian. She was angry at her bigoted Chinese father. I didn’t remind her of the great Guan Yu; I reminded her of the stonehearted father who disapproved of her white boyfriend. She had been toying with me. I, a stupid boy who knew nothing about girls. I felt old pains, regretting these moments. Forget her, fast; retrograde your military butt out of here, now. I tried to bring my heart back from her face and voice, her touching me, her laugh, her closeness, her connection to hidden parts of me.
A thought that seemed to come from below knifed through me and turned the grand lobby of the Waldorf into a dim and underlit place, and I wondered what I could say so I could leave.
Her lower lip trembled. She was on the verge of crying. “Who made you the way you are?” she asked.
I cleared my throat. “What do you mean? I don’t know.… Are you okay? Was it something I said?”
“Yes. It’s all your doing,” she whispered, turning to me, leaning her head against my shoulder. I jumped. “Does this bother you?” she asked.
“A little,” I said, and she lifted her head from me, looking both surprised and sad. No one like me had ever rejected her. Perhaps, no one had rejected her ever.
“You have a fiancé. You shouldn’t be with me.”
She looked puzzled. “Oh, Ding Kai, you took me literally.” She nodded, narrowing her eyes.
“My father has engaged me to a man I’ve never met. Family arrangement. A man in Macao. So I told my father about an imaginary white man I was in love with, hoping the shock, the outrageousness of it would end the arrangement. It didn’t work; now my father detests this imaginary, nonexistent person because he is not Han Chinese.”
“But you’re still engaged,” I said.
“You are so sad! I won’t marry him. Tonight, I met you—and we may be friends for all our days. I like you more than this man from Macao and all the fiancés in my life. Why are you sad?”
I shook my head.
Pearl grabbed my arm. “Admit it!” she urged. “Don’t hold back! Not tonight. Not you. You came to me tonight from my childhood storybooks. Please, Ding Kai, tell me what’s in your heart. I want to know. I want to know everything about you. How you came to be so different. I want to know why you are sad.”
I shook my head. I could never tell anyone this thought, even though she had nearly shaken it from me like an acorn from a tree.
“Guan Yu would tell me,” she whispered, and I looked at her. She came closer. “Tell me softly, in my ear. I will tell no one, ever,” she said in a voice that soothed me and disturbed me with equal persuasion. She leaned against me on tiptoe, her smooth, cool cheek against my neck, her face in my shoulder, her ear against my lips. I smelled her. Not her perfume, but her—gentle, evanescent, distantly sweet, scented in old mystery, spiced with tristeza and melancolía, calling to me. Gently, I held her and she fitted her lean body against me.
I tried to speak and couldn’t, all my blood rushing everywhere but to my brain. I cleared my throat, making her recoil with the volume of the sound, and I almost laughed with spastic nervousness.
I would tell this girl, this woman, anything. I moved my lips. At first nothing came. I took a deep breath, my chest moving her away as I inhaled, coming closer as I exhaled.
I spoke and no sound came out.
“Say it,” she breathed. “Please, try again, Ding Kai.”
“No one loves me,” I whispered. I closed my eyes and ground my molars. “Shouldn’t matter. Means nothing. So hard to say.”
“Yes, I know,” she whispered back, and she breathed heavily against me, standing taller on ballerina toes to press her cheek against mine so I could feel her tears. I kept my eyes closed as I began to cry, holding her close to me. She felt me tremble.
“Thank you, Ding Kai. You give me t’ung-hsin t’ung te. You make me happy. You are a Chinese man, owned by your parents, ruled by your father, who has let me touch your heart. If you cry for me, I will be happy, and I will try to bring happiness to you.”
“What’s t’ung-hsin t’ung te?” I asked thickly, breathing hard.
“ ‘One heart, one virtue,’ perfect Chinese love,” she whispered. “No sourness, no untruths. No bitter love, like what you have with the girl who has turned you away for six years. One heart, one virtue.”
Her perfume, her touch, her closeness, her mind, almost too much for me to negotiate. I was in a panic of happiness.
I had done many wrongs. “I’m not virtuous,” I said.
“Oh, yes, you are,” she whispered. “I speak truth.” She looked into my eyes and I felt a vulnerability that weakened my legs. “I know the secrets that allow men and women to be happy. They have nothing to do with what men want, and everything to do with what women want. Do you understand?”
I shook my head.
“I have to go. I loathe goodbyes.” She pressed a Waldorf-Astoria matchbook into my hand; her fingertips were warm. On the book she had written “Manhattan” and “Southampton,” with phone numbers for each.
She kissed me lightly on my cheek, moist with her tears. I closed my eyes, again, to stem the feelings.
“Thank you, Ding Kai,” she said in that clear, musical, memorable, radio voice.
When I opened them, she was gone.
24
LUN
West Point, November 5, 1966
In the week before the huge spirit bonfire and the deranged, apocalyptic, table-stacking, drumbeating, bare-chested mess hall rallies for the Navy game, Zoo Keeper Clint decided to branch into botany and aeronautical engineering.
It was between classes, and Arch Torres, Big Bus Lorbus, Moon Shine, and I were playing hearts while musing about writs. We were sophisticated time managers—studying while card playing, reading while weightlifting, bleeding during sports, fretting during sleep, and sleeping while in class.
“Say hello to Para-rat-trooper and Venus,” said Clint. He unveiled a small brown rat and a vicious-looking, insect-eating plant that instantly reminded me of Major Szeden, the meanest Tac in the Academy. “Going to train the little guy to jump from the top bunk with a parachute.”
“Gonna train the plant to eat him?” asked Moon.
I hated rats. In the ’hood they had a good chance at being the dominant species. Further, I hated heights so much that there was no pleasure in having even the rat jump.
“Can’t have a rat in here,” I said. “Put him in the sinks.”
“You mean that?” asked Clint, his handsome features pained.
The comparative sizes of Clint and the rat made me think of Tony; I probably looked like a rodent the day he adopted me into the Y program. I sighed with the burden of transferred generosity. “Just kidding, Clint,” I said. “Put him on the sill. Let him have a good riverview.”
“Mr. Ting, sir, long distance. I think it’s family, sir,” whispered Mr. Haas, the Plebe runner. The light from the hall flooded the room in a bright, luminous parallelogram.
“Thanks, Mr. Haas.” I grabbed my B-robe, silently closed the door to protect my roommates’ sleep, and ran down the stairs, preparing myself for bad news. I entered the orderly room and waved hello to Denny Haydon, Yearling CQ, in charge of quarters, the Mickey Mantle of the Army Nine. It was his job to take phone calls and evacuate the company if fires began. He looked sympathetic.
I picked up the phone. “Cadet Ting speaking, sir.”
“Haushusheng, is that you?” The voice was tinny, distant. It was Uncle Shim, probably speaking from the phone kiosk in the lobby of the Beverly Plaza Hotel at the foot of Chinatown, blowing nonexistent lint from his impeccably clean spectacles.
“Why must you take such time to come to the telephone?” he asked. “I only have so many coins.” He sounded cranky.
“No excuse, Uncle Shim,” I said. “Dababa, there’s one phone for the company and I’m four floors away. What’s wrong? Is it—is something wrong with my father? Or mother?”
; “No, no. It is tremendous news. Tremendous. I must tell you.”
“Tell me what, Dababa?” I asked.
“Hausheng. What do you remember of your family.”
This was the tremendous news—a family exam? I struggled with his meaning, enjoying a sensation altogether too familiar: the swamping anxiety of not knowing the correct answer.
“Did you hear me?” he asked, concerned.
“I’m sorry, Uncle,” I said. “Why ask me? I’m the one person in the whole family who knows the least.”
I could feel Uncle Shim smiling, pleased that he was about to improve my shallow grasp of my Chinese family. “I will fortify you with the old riddle. What is more important than your family name?”
“My relationship to principal family members,” I said.
“And what is the importance of your lun to your sisters?”
“It’s secondary,” I said. The Master K’ung Fu-tzu did not name mothers or sisters in the gahng, the primary bonds.
“And what is the health of your lun to them?” he asked.
“Uh … okay. I don’t see them, but I—uh—know where they are, and we get along and everything.”
“Where are they?” he asked.
He knew where they were; there was little mystery in this. They were eighteen and sixteen years older than I. “Megan Wai-la’s in Berkeley, with her husband and two kids. Jennifer Sung-ah’s in Minneapolis, with her husband and son. Their kids are real neat.”
“Oh,” he said flatly. “Is there not another sister?”
The air in the orderly room seemed unnaturally still. I had another sister. Janie Ming-li. Little Tail. I frowned as a headache pulsed deep in the base of my brain, and my chest tightened.
“Janie Ming-li,” I said. I closed my eyes. She was my sister, my own sister, and I had forgotten her. Like forgetting my head.
“Good, Hausheng,” said Uncle Shim. “I recall her in Shanghai. The Little Tail of the Tings. So precious. But born sickly and small. Ting taitai smothered her in every kind of medicine, closing off her room from all family, all well-wishers. She called to every Taoist spirit, to the gods of health from every religion, to the Episcopalians and the Catholics and the Presbyterians and to the American cereals, even to the Buddhist gods. She lit joss for foo chi, called for yuing chi, good fortune, committed yeh, good karma, and all her willpower. She made peace with the people in her life. Particularly the women.
“I remember your mother’s laughter when she knew Ming-li would live.” He laughed gaily, a wonderful sound that for a moment cleared the tension from my innards and allowed my heart to beat again. I saw, through hazy memory, my sister’s face. A ponytail.
“I was dababa to her before I was uncle to you. Your mother asked me to be her tutor. You know, Master Tang Sulin had been tutor to your mother’s brother, but first was your mother’s secret teacher, giving her the gift of male scholarship.”
I shook my head into the phone. I hadn’t known that he had tutored Janie.
“Oh, Hausheng, it was indeed one of the good things of my life, seeing Ming-li at the Embarcadero. It was cold and drizzly. I had been exceptionally sick for an entire week, bouncing on the tall, angry ship, wanting to die from stomach pains. I thought of this little girl, who was to be my student. These women had run through the enemy and lived. My own family had died. I hoped she would remember me.
“There was your mother, tall, with her serious features guarding her face. I was to learn that this had become her permanent face. I was to learn that this was to be my face as well—the face of Chinese who have left their homes.
“Next to her was your sister. She waved at me with a small handkerchief, waving at the uncle who had cared for her so much. It meant, for me, that I could be an uncle, a relative. After all those days and nights of sickness, to see China again in the faces of the women of your family—ah, it was ding hao, a fantastically wonderful thing! As good as a later day, when your mother delivered her only son.
“But the flight through war and from China, which Dai-li called the boh-la, the Run, had affected them all. Of course, it would. It was a journey for an immortal who can take wings, not for men, much less a woman and her daughters.
“But I became little Ming-li’s chia t’ing chiaoshur, her tutor. She was more diligent, much more talented, than you. She has an inner brightness which you have most successfully hidden, no offense intended.” His voice shrank. I imagined him adjusting his white handkerchief or his jade bow tie, inside the phone booth.
“Your mother, wanting sons and having four girls, losing one girl to death in China, said the best thing in her life was the birth of her only son. Surely, she was correct; this is the duty of women. I will tell you your youngest sister loved you, even though you displaced her as the favored child. She later became your mother, when your mother died.
“So. I ask you. What do you owe Little Tail? I will tell you. You owe her the duty, dzeren, the relationship, the lun, of her only brother. A younger brother, and almost, of a son.”
It was so confusing—the cascading confluence of these powerful words. Sister. Brother. Son. Mother, as in true mother. All presented by the great aesthete, Uncle Shim, on a platter steaming with Chinese gan-ch’ing, emotion.
He was not arguing about Ming poets or Eight-Legged Essays, the transcendent confusions of Lao-tzu, or the preeminence of ritual. He was talking about the fundamentals of Chinese life: human relationships, as prescribed by the Master K’ung. My uncle had loved my sister. It seemed that he had loved my mother—my first mother. I coughed, and needles of pain shot through my head, the pressure growing in my aching, straining chest. I felt panic in my inability to draw a deep breath. I remembered my childhood asthma; now it had come back, from so far away.
“Uncle, can I call you back? I’m on the official company phone. I’ll call you from a pay phone in ten minutes.” I had to get a lot of change. I had to think about the past.
“You know,” I said to him, ten minutes later, “Janie and my mother didn’t get along. I mean, they hated each other. Janie left, left the house. Christmas Eve—a long time ago.…”
“Ming-li ran away in 1954,” said Uncle Shim.
“She was sent away, Uncle Shim,” I said. “She did not run away. Did my mother tell you that?”
“Your honorable second mother has said little to me since we were introduced, but she did express her lament that—ah—,” and he hesitated, calling upon his magnificent memory—“ ‘Jane, sick from grief over the death of her mother, has run away, without a note. It is so much like her, to make people worry about her needlessly.’ That is, of course, only approximate.”
I looked at my right hand, as Lady Macbeth had looked at hers. I was going to break jing ji, taboo, leaving an old country to cross a river from which return might never be possible. Break the rule, cross the border, serve your people.
“Uncle. To cross the Rubicon? What’s the Chinese equivalent?”
“Ah,” he said. “Jacta alea est, the die is cast. I learned this in classical languages at Princeton. There is no Rubicon in China, although Hideyoshi crossed the Yalu, with an effect similar to Julius Caesar’s. The expression you seek is p’o fu ch’en chou. Break the pot and sink the boat No going back.”
I took a deep breath. “Here goes the pot, and the boat.
“I must honor my father and my mother. You said my chimu was my mother. You were right. But I have to tell you the truth. This means criticizing my chimu” I licked my lips. He was silent. “My mother ordered Janie to never argue with her.”
“An exceptionally wise rule,” said Uncle Shim.
“Janie knew better, but she refused to kowtow to Edna. She wanted to fight her, as if she could win. That was so stupid. I was the dumbest kid in the world, but I could see Edna would beat her, and the harder that Janie fought, the worse the losing would be.”
I hadn’t thought of this for a decade. It was a child’s story, unfit for children.
Father had set
the stage by leaving the table to take a phone call from General Bledsoe, a war buddy. Bledsoe had been Joseph Stilwell’s artillery commander in China. Here I was at West Point, where Stilwell and Bledsoe had been cadets. Bledsoe always called on Christmas Eve, on the anniversary of the fall of Hong Kong.
I began to tell Uncle Shim a story told many times, but only to myself in early youth. It was my story, once told with the constancy of a spinning Tibetan prayer wheel, sustained by its own momentum and made acceptable through familiarity. Now, recalling it, I felt as if the ceiling of the Cadet Hilton might collapse, allowing familial wrath and chimu fury to crush me for my infidelity. Deep, unspoken fears raged unseen before my eyes. Ji hui, jing ji. Forget the past, and its losses.
I began to describe to Uncle Shim the images as they unraveled from the creaky spool of suppressed memory. Edna had been criticizing our mother. Janie had cried in protest, the quality of her voice still undefined in my recollection.
Then Edna screamed, “ENOUGH!” She reached into a pocket and withdrew an expensive-looking necklace. I was nine when this happened. I later described the jewelry to Toos as a “pretty.”
“I found this,” Edna said, holding it up. “You stole it.” I thought she was talking to me, but Janie answered.
“I did not! I wouldn’t steal anything! I’m a good girl!” I think she also said, “I’m a Christian girl.”
“This cost over a hundred dollars,” said Edna, her eyes bright. “You stole this from Gumps. It still has the tags. It doesn’t matter that you’re a cute little Chinese girl, or whatever. You’re not an American citizen, and the police will believe me.”
Edna passed Janie an envelope. “Inside, you’ll find money and bus fare. I found you a new home, at great expense to myself. I had to borrow the money to find a woman insane enough to take you. I can’t wait until you drive her blood pressure up!
“You have one week to get there. If you start tomorrow, on Christmas Eve, you can make it. If you do not make it, the deal is off, and I’ll turn you over to the police and the Immigration people.”