by Gus Lee
“His name is Alejandro. First-generation Spanish. He’s going to be a doctor.” She was wringing her hands together. “It’s great,” she said. “He and I are so alike. Both of us have only had ourselves. I think his parents hate me.”
“Because you argue with them?” I asked.
“Because I’m Chinese,” she said.
She worked in a biology lab. She had a master’s in biology from Cal Tech. “You got my letters and birthday cards?”
I shook my head. Edna read my mail. She had said, “There are evil influences, and much of it comes through the mail.” “Janie. Edna read my mail. She even read my outgoing mail.”
“But you could’ve mailed a letter on your own. You could’ve written to me at school and mailed it on the way home.”
“How could I mail you a letter? I didn’t know where you were.”
She tasted the wine. I had meant to toast but had forgotten. I was going to say, “To lost comrades.”
She sat up straighter. “How’s K.F.?” she asked.
“Fine,” I said. Do not say the name of your father.
She took a deep breath. She swirled the wine in the goblet.
“Does he know that you’re seeing me?” she asked.
I shook my head. I hadn’t even thought of him.
She looked to the side. Large tears filled her eyes and ran down her cheeks. I patted her arm, but she jerked away from me, spilling her glass. I tried to be composed, and began drinking my wine as if it were soda pop. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Really sorry.”
The soup arrived, but neither of us was hungry.
She let out a big breath of air. “Did he ever ask about me, or talk about me?”
I wanted to say yes, to manufacture conversations or create comments; but there had been none, not to me. I remembered my oath and the Honor Code. It influenced all I did, in my private life and in my military duties. Minimalist social lies were okay: “Mrs. Westmoreland, that is an exceptional hat.” I embraced the comfort of knowing what to do but shuddered at its cost. For a moment, I hated the Honor Code and its iron-backed inflexibility. It shackled me, weighed me down, caused me to hurt others. “The Harder Right,” said the Cadet Prayer.
“No,” I said, and I looked away as she began to weep again. I played with my lobster bisque. I watched crackers drown in the soup. She was still shaking. I looked down, awkward, out of place, utterly unsure of what to do. “Please don’t cry,” I said.
“Oh, thank you,” she said, crying. “Don’t cry! Why, does this make you uncomfortable?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I don’t care!” she sobbed, weeping freely. “I’m not very good at accommodating people! I wish I never cried! Wish I hadn’t been thrown out like garbage! I wish Daddy remembered me!”
Daddy. When she was a girl, had she called him “Daddy”? Him? “Crying doesn’t solve anything,” I said.
“Right,” she said. “You’re a man. Men don’t cry. Well, I’m not a man. I’m a worthless Chinese daughter.” She wept. I cried inside. I worried about anyone seeing her as she wept.
She stopped. “You cry for Mah-mee,” she said.
“No,” I said.
“Men are terrible,” she said. “You’re so—cold.”
“It’s important to be in control,” I said. “A platoon leader can’t weep in front of his troops if his feelings got hurt. Cry in the ring and you lose.”
I waited until she finished.
“Feeling better?” I asked.
“I’m the pits,” she said. “This is a trip, seeing my little baby brother. You’re a giant—a bald giant in a suit.” She shook her head, which still produced a veil of tears.
She looked up. “So where were you?” she asked bitterly, her small, delicate mouth turned horribly upside down, her face without color. “Where were you when I left? Why didn’t you stop her?” she shrilled, making my eardrums hum as if Edna were talking to me.
“Are you nuts? I couldn’t stop her. Stop Edna? I was nine!”
“You were the only son! You had power and status!” she cried. Patrons were split between open gawking and savoir faire.
“You’re demented,” I said. “I had no power or status. That woman told me when to go potty, how to go potty, how to fold the toilet paper, and how many minutes I had. She told me when to sleep and in what position, gave me no medicine, ordered me to stop having asthma, and sent me to the Christian Scientists. I only got glasses because Mr. Lew, my teacher, wouldn’t let me back in the classroom without them and confronted Edna with my eyesight. She made me Baptist until I liked it, then made me Catholic. Up until my last night at home I couldn’t watch TV, have a radio, use the phone, see a girl, or stay up past eight-thirty. She set out my underwear for my flight to West Point. Listen, Janie—I had no power. The only person I could influence was you. I used to beg you not to fight her. But you’d run straight at her. Edna wasn’t going to compromise with you. You were a kid, and she was a grown-up. You were going to lose. You lost and left me alone with her.”
She began to cry again. Great; I’ve won an argument with my sister, convincing her she was immature when she was fifteen.
“I’m sorry. I wish I could’ve stopped it. I couldn’t.”
“That’s Chinese man bullshit,” she said harshly. “You sound like Edna when you yell at me!”
“Oh, God—DON’T SAY THAT!” I cried.
“Don’t say what—‘Chinese man bullshit,’ or that you sound like Edna?” she asked. “And do not yell at me,” she hissed.
“Edna,” I said. “I am not like her. No way.… What do you mean, about Chinese men?”
“Not taking responsibility. Kowtowing to status and money, spitting on daughters. You don’t know. You weren’t born in China. I was little, but I knew girls weren’t important. Only sons! It’s living for surface manners and face! Telling women they can’t cry—it might make a male lose face! I had one protector—Mah-mee. No man in China ever helped us. It was always the women who gave up food and shed space for us during the Run.” She sighed. “How many girls were left behind! How they cried! God, then Mah-mee died.
“You could’ve gone to him. After she died, you were the only one. He would’ve listened to you, the son! We didn’t count.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Did you even try?” she cried.
I shook my head. “I couldn’t have even imagined doing that.”
“I would’ve if they had done this to you” she said.
“But I was a kid! You were a teenager.”
“You’re making Chinese man excuses! It doesn’t matter. You were the son. If you really cared, you would’ve done it. You would’ve just tried. Why did you tell me the truth? Why didn’t you lie and tell me you tried even if you didn’t? I used to pray to God that you had done this for me—that you had gotten Dad to help. But you didn’t even try.
“Don’t ever say you were too young.… Mah-mee prepared you to do everything before she died. She tutored and taught you to read, told you stories of smart boys. About K’an Tse, who borrowed books and never forgot what he read, the boy who turned the pages without stopping. Mah-mee took Uncle Shim from me to teach you calligraphy and the tsung cheh, the old ways. He lived for you. She loved you more than she loved me.… She loved you more than anyone.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “That’s crazy talk.”
She blew her nose, drying her eyes. “I hate this,” she said.
“God, I hate this. I knew it would be like this, seeing you.”
A great physical weight pressed on my chest. A sudden headache lanced from temple to temple. Breathing was labored. I wanted to run away. I felt like dying. I imagined suicide: pulling a grenade pin and bending my head over it in a prayer for relief. I couldn’t stand this, drowning, suffocating in my sister’s misery. I pulled out my wallet and began extracting bills.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m leaving,” I asked.
“Jus
t like men,” she said.
“Jesus!” I hissed. “Ch’a lu t’ung ku!”
“Fork pain? What’s that?” she asked.
“Chinese chess. Being caught in a dilemma. Stuck if I stay, wrong if I leave.”
“Shwa jungwo hwa?” she asked.
I hated that question. I shook my head. “Bu shr,” I said.
Don’t speak. “I’ve forgotten everything.”
We were quiet for a while.
“I must look awful,” she said.
“You look great,” I said.
She looked at me, thinking of something. “Remember tseuh?”
I frowned into my memory. “Yes,” I said. “The porridge. Tseu’h. With the shredded pork and pickled somethings—vegetables,”
“Remember,” she said, “the three of us at the old yellow table in the middle of that old kitchen, eating tseuh, next to the large black stove where Mah-mee used to burn toast?”
I nodded. I remembered the table where I had gone mad. “She used to burn toast?” I asked.
“She thought charcoal was healthy. Alejandro thinks it might have induced her cancer.”
Mah-mee. Cancer. “The cancer god has taken your mother,” Father had said. I was breathing fast and no air was in my lungs, and I was wheezing audibly, coughing unsuccesfully to clear it.
“I told myself that’s when you could talk to Daddy. It would just be the two of you, eating tseuh, while he read the business section and Herb Caen, and you sat there, silently, next to him.
“You would say to him, in that clear, high, musical boy’s voice that Mah-mee taught you: ‘Ba-ba, can’t live without Janie Ming-li. You must bring her home.’ Eleven words.” She repeated them very slowly, with clear pronunciation.
I felt in Janie’s voice the music of someone else: an older woman with a high, slow, musical, intense voice, so many things inside it that my small brain could not hold all the nuances, all the emotion of a woman who had loved me and died. I felt a deep, abiding pain inside my chest, my eyes straining to cry for the hole that was inside me, ever growing.
It was the kind voice of Momma LaRue; the soft, gentle voice of Harper Lee; the song of mothers speaking to sons. Janie’s voice was hers, and also someone else’s: Mah-mee’s. I knew that. My whole body was coming apart, against my muscles. Doesn’t matter, I said. Means nothing, I said. Through all my childhood inadequacies, I had never been dunced as a momma’s boy. I hadn’t had a momma to run to. I was vulnerable to a new set of feelings, and I hated it.
“You know,” Janie said, more to herself than to me, “I picked the words you’d use, like helping you learn to write. These words are the best. Words you could’ve used. Should’ve used.” She put her head down again, her shoulders gently shaking. She wiped her face with the napkin. Her cosmetics were smeared around her eyes. She looked at herself in a small mirror, dried her eyes, and reapplied the makeup. I was trembling in a fit of isometric tension, trying to stop the impulse to cry. I focused on her makeup procedure. I watched her. When she applied the makeup to her eyes, she opened her mouth. She glanced at me. For a split second, she smiled.
Through the decade that had separated us and made us strangers to each other, I saw the face of a sister who consistently had set aside her youth to mother her baby brother, quashing her own needs to smile at the questioning little lost boy at her hip.
“So, Kai. You never said that, to him, to Daddy. Did you ever think about saying it to him?”
“Janie, does your voice sound like your mother’s? Mah-mee’s?”
“Do this for me,” she said, very intently. “If you had said it, how would you put it?”
“I don’t talk to him very well.”
“You don’t?” she asked. “But you’re his son.”
“That makes it tougher on both of us,” I said. “We mostly have long silences with each other. Lately, he talks to me about politics. Communism.” I ground my teeth and the pain subsided.
“Really!” she said, blinking. “He used to talk to you all the time. Ah … until Mah-mee died. Then,” she said, “then, all he did was read and smoke a pipe.”
“You have our mother’s voice, don’t you?” I wanted her to say yes so I could remember Mah-mee, and to say no, so I couldn’t.
“I don’t know,” she said reflectively. “Maybe.”
“I know I missed you. I didn’t miss her. I missed you.”
“That’s impossible,” she said. “How could you not remember—and miss—Mah-mee?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just didn’t.”
“You have a very bad memory,” said Janie. “Incredibly bad.”
“I remember your Bible lessons. On a felt board, with felt Bible figures. Jesus, and the man who wasn’t Jesus … the disciple who turned in Christians to the Romans … Jesus washing the feet of a bad lady.” I laughed. “Wonder who they were. I remember singing. ’Yasu tiahng nu, wah see ching.…’ Was I always a lousy singer?”
She shook her head, her hair swaying. She showed her fine teeth for a moment. I thought she was going to smile, so I smiled, imitating her face as if it were Toussaint’s.
“God abandoned me,” she said. “God made us run from China, and our home, away from our whole family and my amah and my wet nurse and our kitchen, to run on the road like dogs. God killed the Chinese people, using the Japanese Army as His instrument. God littered little Chinese girls in old wells and in bushes and made them cry to me in my sleep. God destroyed our family, ruined China, made us lose everybody. God brought us to this land poor, and He killed Mah-mee and brought Edna into our home. God made my father give me up and made my brother forget my name. Daddy stopped laughing and your voice became hoarse and ugly, and you could never sing again.”
“Jesus,” I breathed.
“Yes, Jesus. Where was he, with all his talk about helping the broken people? I was broken! Why didn’t he come back? I loved him so much! I believed in him! Why didn’t he save us? I prayed to him for you to save me with Daddy. That’s when I realized Jesus was just another Chinese man. He should’ve come back, but didn’t, and apologizes for nothing! You missed the bombing of Shanghai. The enemy soldiers. The Run out of China. I was only five but I already knew what soldiers did to women and girls. The little dead girls on the road, flies on their eyes … America and Canada, they have no problems compared to what we had. We had awful trouble. And we didn’t leave it behind. We escaped, but it followed us here. Satan sent Edna for the sins of our great-grandfather.”
Sins of our great-grandfather? The magistrate with his own army? What had he done? It didn’t matter; I was a soldier so the horror of Nanjing could never happen again. I would protect Asian women. But Janie had followed Edna; neither trusted God, and both saw Satan. I feared wupo, witches, and Ts’ao Ts’ao, the evil one.
She pulled on a diamond ring on her hand.
“I don’t remember much,” I said. “I remember when I started making Dad’s lunch, and mine, that I missed you.”
“Oh, you just missed my woman k’u-li, labor. That’s awful!”
“I missed you at dinner. After school, getting my gym bag, looking up the stairs to the attic, knowing you were gone. When I came home from the Y or Chinese school at night, and the place was so empty without you. At bedtime, when we used to brush our teeth together and you always checked mine to make sure I did it right. Remember? Edna’s liver and onions would stick between my teeth.… I missed your prayers. Couldn’t say them without you. Missed you when I got up in the morning and I didn’t hear you singing songs to God, it was just me.
“Janie,” I breathed. “You used to sing ‘Amazing Grace.’ ” I remembered Marco Fideli asking me to sing it in hard times.
She nodded. “Mah-mee’s favorite hymn,” she said.
I lurched up and stumbled to the bathroom on feet that were not mine. The pressure behind my eyes, in my head, swelled against the walls. I entered a stall that was too small and pressed my forehead against the cold metal door, gritti
ng my teeth, trying to stop from crying, panting like a lost patrol member racing on a thrashing, branch-snapping run through thick woods with a pack of aggressors in pursuit. Muscles convulsing, I groaned, crushed my mouth with my right hand, knocking my glasses off onto the hard floor of the lavatory as the tears rushed out and noises that were foreign to me escaped from my throat and my ears. I began hitting the door walls until I was weak and wet, quivering on the wall.
When I finished and opened the stall door, three waiters and a cook with a knife were facing me. “C’est bien?” asked the cook.
“Fine, great,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Are you okay?” Janie asked.
I took a deep breath and sat down. “I would have talked to Dad at breakfast.” I flexed my face, opening my eyes very wide to not allow any more tears out. I felt bad, and weak, and drained, and immoral, having cried. “I would’ve said: ‘Where Janie? When she come back? You miss her, too, right?’ ” My voice cracked. I put my head down and began to cry, trying to swallow the sobs and failing, using all my strength to stop the tears, unable to stop, the crystal tinkling against itself as I wept. I hated this, hating myself, my weakness, my incredible bullshit weakness. What was wrong with me? I felt broken. Why was this happening? I no longer felt like a man. I had become a child.
“I did say that,” I whispered. “I really did. They didn’t answer. They never answered. I forgot. I forgot I said it.”
After a bit, I looked at her. Janie looked stricken.
“You really don’t cry, do you?” she asked. “It sounded like you were dying. I mean, you don’t even know how to cry.”
“No,” I said, “I don’t cry,” my face wet as I swabbed at it with both coat sleeves. “I try not to cry.”
“When did you stop asking about me?” she asked. She awkwardly reached across the table and touched my arm. Pat, pat.
“I was easily defeated then,” I said. “Maybe I still am.”
“By whom?” she asked.
“Dad,” I said. “Edna,” I said. “Math.”
“Why should you be afraid? You’re the son! He loves you—more than you can ever know. And you’re huge.”
“You keep saying that. It doesn’t matter. It’s only good for boxing and fighting. Sports. It didn’t help with Dad.”