Good Chinese Wife

by Susan Blumberg-Kason

  Outside the apartment, Cai happily tagged along wherever I wanted to go. His sullen mood from inside the apartment seemed a fleeting digression. Once we started to explore New York, he perked up. Besides visiting Chinatown, we strolled through streets around Wall Street and the calm trails in Central Park, places I thought a first-time visitor would enjoy. On our third day, as we prepared to leave for the Guggenheim on the Upper East Side, Cai made a request.

  “Times Square is very famous in China.”

  I guessed the bright lights and heavy crowds resonated with people in China. “Do you want to go there?”

  “Yes.” Cai smiled.

  We arrived in Times Square that afternoon.

  “Let’s look over there.” Cai pointed to a theater sign reading “Peep Shows $1.00.”

  Did he know about peep shows? I couldn’t imagine such a thing in China. So I followed him to the theater, figuring that he thought it was a feature film at the bargain price of a dollar. Under the marquee, I saw him eye a large photo taped to the inside of the window that showed a buxom blond in a tight, white halter top and matching hot pants, squatting on platform stiletto fuck-me boots. Cai understood the genre.

  “Do you want something hot to drink?” he asked, looking away from the theater.

  “Sure. There’s a coffee shop over there.” I pointed across the street.

  We crossed the wide avenue, ducking our heads to escape the chill of the wintry wind. Entering the café, I noticed that most of the tables were occupied by men who appeared to be wearing their entire wardrobe. Cai and I found an empty one in front of a window. “What do you want?” he asked.

  “Just a small tea, thanks.”

  Minutes later, he returned with my tea and a coffee for himself. I wrapped my hands around my teacup to regain some warmth. Although I expected him to take the seat next to mine, he placed his steaming cup on the table in front of me and remained standing.

  “I want to see the show across the street.” He sounded like he was excusing himself to go to the bathroom.

  I pictured sleazy old men and even older bodily fluids smeared into the worn, red velvet theater seats. Though I didn’t think there was anything wrong with having an interest in sex, I was caught off guard by his request in this seedy area, unfamiliar to us both. Times Square in 1996 still wasn’t quite the family-friendly destination it is today.

  And when I thought back to the Shanghai Railway Station and how Cai had thwarted the one thing I’d asked for on that trip, I knew I couldn’t say no to him now or else I’d be guilty of the same unfairness. For a moment, I even wondered if I should offer to go with him. No, I couldn’t imagine feeling comfortable in a peep show. It would be best to wait for him in the warm coffee shop.

  Thank goodness I’d taken a book to read on the subway that morning. Besides the women working the cash register, most people in the café were men. I felt safe enough, as it was the middle of the day, but I exhaled in relief when a tourist family entered. I delved into my book, stopping only to reach for my paper teacup. When I looked at my watch, twenty minutes had passed.

  Scanning the café, I expected to see Cai approaching my table at any moment. But there was no sign of him. I looked through the hazy window to the crowds outside, hoping I’d spot a tall man with dark straight hair, wearing a navy down jacket and an unofficial Yankees baseball cap bought from a Chinatown hawker. Still no Cai. How long could a peep show take? It’s a peep, after all.

  Angry with myself for not warning him to watch his wallet, I hoped Cai hadn’t been accosted by someone in the theater, someone who caught on that he was a foreigner and unfamiliar with New York. What if he had been robbed and was knocked out cold, sprawled on the floor in the empty, dark theater or in its men’s room?

  If I left the coffee shop to search for him and we didn’t cross paths, he would panic if he returned to the café and couldn’t find me. But if he were really in danger, how could I just stay put? As I deliberated what to do, I kept reading the same paragraph of my book over and over. I stared through the front window at the pedestrians crossing the street and couldn’t imagine getting up to buy another cup of tea or going to the bathroom lest I lose my seat with its premier view.

  Ten, then twenty more minutes passed. Cai and I didn’t own cell phones in Hong Kong, and we certainly hadn’t bought them for a two-week trip to the United States. Maybe I should head to the theater. If Cai wasn’t there, I could ask about him at similar venues. And if those turned up empty, I’d go to the police. I would have to shamefully explain how Cai went off to the peep shows and didn’t return. But this was no time for decorum.

  Cai had been gone for more than an hour, but it seemed like a whole afternoon. My teacup was completely empty and dry inside. The tourists were long gone. By that time, I didn’t even care that I was the only female customer in the café. I just didn’t want to lose my husband.

  And then I saw him. Crossing the street in a crowd, Cai came into view, black Yankees cap and all. He seemed to be his normal self—walking tall, as if he had traversed this street dozens of times. He didn’t appear lost in the slightest. Cai looked at the ground when I met him at the front door. “Sorry.”

  “I was so worried about you.”

  “Sorry,” he repeated. “I’ve never seen that before. It was actually very interesting. But some ladies were as fat as a cow.”

  I tuned him out, not knowing if I should make a big deal about him being gone for so long. That I had worried so much for his safety, that I had felt trapped in my seat. That I had thought about going to the police.

  “…and then I went to a bookstore and video store,” he continued.

  “You know, there are some dangerous people in this area. It’s not always safe, even in daylight with many people about.”

  “It was fine. No one bothered me. I even saw other mainland people in the store.”

  When we flew back to Hong Kong later that week, Cai seemed to have enjoyed his first visit to the United States, but he never expressed the desire to rush back.

  Chapter 18

  Another Chinese New Year in Hidden River

  I walked ten steps behind Cai, like an ancient Chinese woman hobbling on bound feet. My one-size-too-small black hiking boots had fit better when I tried them on in Hong Kong a week earlier. Cai and I were back in Hidden River to visit his family for Chinese New Year, and my feet hurt so much that even my gentle pace brought pain to my squashed toes. We were on our way to Cai’s middle sister’s house. Bing-Bing and her husband, Lin, had invited both us and their sister, Fan-Fan, and her husband, Zhao, over for the afternoon, between lunch and dinner. On our way there, we passed a middle-aged man and two younger women at a carnivalesque stall just as the man took aim at a pyramid of rusty tin cans with a pellet gun.

  “Haowán.” That’s so fun. Cai smiled his signature wide grin. I didn’t respond. I could only think about taking off my boots, resting my feet, and regaining whatever warmth was possible in a city without indoor heat. If I were lucky, the blisters wouldn’t have popped yet.

  Suddenly Cai’s smile disappeared. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I’m so cold and my feet hurt.”

  “Why you always so cold?”

  “Because no one here has heat in their homes and I can never warm up. That’s why.” I’d never snapped like that at Cai, but now I felt relieved that I finally had. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so compelled to hide my feelings from now on.

  “What? What did you just say?” He straightened up before me, his height suddenly menacing.

  I guess I shouldn’t have blown my cool. “Never mind.”

  A small group of people gathered around us. Seeing an American woman arguing with a Chinese man in English was probably the most entertainment they’d had since the latest karaoke bar opened over the summer.

  “No, not ‘Never mind.’ You married a Chin
ese. What did you think China was like? America?” he retorted, spitting out the last part in disgust.

  “Forget it,” I murmured. This was turning into a repeat of the Shanghai Railway Station, only now we were gaining an audience.

  “No, I’m not going to forget it. If you’re cold, that’s your problem. There’s nothing I can do.” He turned away from me.

  “Well, there is.” I didn’t expect Cai to hear me as the crowds grew denser.

  “What?” He faced me again, eyes glassy with rage.

  “You could give me some emotional support. You are my husband.”

  With a swift, sweeping motion, Cai stormed off toward his sister’s apartment. I didn’t know my way back to Mama and Baba’s, and wouldn’t have left Cai in any case. I would have been afraid to tell Mama and Baba that Cai and I had argued. I didn’t doubt their empathy, but they would agonize over it well after Cai and I returned to Hong Kong. I couldn’t imagine bringing that on them.

  Mama and Baba had spent months of their salaries on our wedding banquet and had gone to great lengths to make sure my family received the best accommodations Hidden River had to offer. So I kept a steady pace behind Cai until we reached his sister Bing-Bing’s home. When her husband, Lin, answered the door, Cai put his arm around me and smiled as if we hadn’t just entertained dozens with an argument worthy of any Chinese soap opera.

  Cai’s eldest sister, Fan-Fan, and her husband, Zhao, had already arrived and were seated with Bing-Bing on a tattered sofa in the living room. Even though his sisters were always very pleasant to me, smiling and speaking slowly in Mandarin or with what little English they knew, I still felt like an outsider in their presence. They always seemed to be in the middle of an intense conversation with one another that I felt awkward butting into.

  The inside temperature was colder than outside, so we didn’t remove our jackets. I nodded shyly to Fan-Fan and Bing-Bing, but before I could join them, Cai spoke up.

  “You méiyou dàizi?” Cai asked Zhao and Lin if they had the videotape.

  “You.” In unison, they confirmed they had it.

  From his man purse, Zhao pulled an unmarked videotape as the three men walked into a bedroom.

  “Wo bùhao yisi,” Cai’s middle sister, Bing-Bing, said.

  Fan-Fan claimed she, too, was embarrassed.

  “Wèishéme?” I asked, still standing. Why?

  “Huángsè—”

  All I had to hear was the word “yellow”—analogous to blue movies in the United States—and I knew they had porn. I suddenly felt determined to prove to myself that these movies didn’t bother me, even if it meant abandoning my resolve to show Cai’s family I wasn’t a stereotypically slutty American. I wasn’t going to shy away from the movie Cai and his brothers-in-law were about to watch in the bedroom.

  “Wo bùyào kàn.” Fan-Fan said she wasn’t going to watch the film. Bing-Bing nodded in agreement.

  “Méi wèntí.” I replied it wasn’t a problem for me, and I followed the guys into the room.

  Before the beginning credits stopped rolling, three burly men with long mullets and scraggly facial hair sat in the living room of a Victorian mansion, watching television as they lounged on 1980s dark floral-patterned sofas. A bikini-clad buxom brunette rode up on a motorcycle, peered into the living room window, and motioned them outside with her forefinger.

  “You guys are so good,” she crooned as they walked out, and then proceeded to unzip the shaggiest guy’s pants. Soon all four were outside on the lawn, the bikini thrown aside on the grass like litter. The four of them contorted and groaned like the Japanese woman on Cai’s honeymoon pay-per-view movie. The brothers-in-law squatted on the floor, silent and smoking, their eyes glued to the TV as Cai and I sat on the bed, an arm’s distance between us.

  Suddenly I felt exposed by this woman performing all sorts of acrobatics on the three hairy men. Were the brothers-in-law comparing me to the actress? I felt more uncomfortable than before Zhao had popped the tape into the VCR.

  “I’m going back outside,” I told Cai in English. He didn’t move his eyes from the TV or respond.

  Cai and his brothers-in-law emerged thirty minutes later, looking exhausted, as though they’d just finished a grueling all-nighter of mah-jongg. I sat alone on a leather sofa, holding a steaming cup of green tea to keep warm, while Cai’s sisters discussed something in the kitchen. Cai carried the tape in a flimsy orange plastic bag.

  “Zou ba.” He patted my shoulder. Since he wanted to leave, I stood up to put my teacup in the kitchen. Bing-Bing broke from her conversation with her sister and, placing a gentle hand on my shoulder, took it from me.

  Once we reached the outside, I felt warmer. Walking as quickly as I could in my tight boots and absorbing the pittance of sunlight peeking through the gray clouds above, I regained feeling in my feet, although now my blistery toes smarted against the inside of my boots.

  “Why do you have the tape?” I asked.

  “I might watch it later.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “They can’t work the VCR. Lin or Zhao has to come over and turn it on every time my parents want to watch a movie. The tapes all look the same to them.”

  I couldn’t picture Cai watching the tape, which was more explicit than what he’d watched in Hong Kong, outside his parents’ bedroom, even if they were asleep. I found it ironic that as an American, I was supposed to be loose and without morals, yet I seemed more concerned than Cai about Mama and Baba catching him with porn. It also crossed my mind that if Mama and Baba found the tape or caught Cai watching it, they might think it was mine.

  But the tape sat wrapped in its orange plastic bag on a bookshelf in Mama and Baba’s living room, along with a few Chinese opera tapes, collecting dust until Cai returned it to Zhao a couple weeks later before we left for Hong Kong.

  Chapter 19

  The Mysterious Yoshimoto

  The Kai Tak Airport greeting area buzzed with clatter, the singsong staccato of Cantonese a pleasant melody now that I held a better comprehension of the language. A ramp parted the arrivals hall, each side flanked with greeters waiting for loved ones, business associates, or the next fare. When my mom and Budgie appeared at the top of the ramp, scanning the crowds for a familiar face, I waved my hands back and forth. My wild curls stood out amid a field of straight hair.

  “Where’s Cai?” my mom asked once we stepped off to the side of the arrivals area.

  I rolled my eyes. “You’ll never guess.”

  Budgie’s eyes narrowed. “In China?”

  “No. You won’t believe this, but a few days ago he received a letter from Yoshimoto.”

  Budgie’s eyes grew large. He tilted his head to the right, mimicking how Yoshimoto had rested his head on Cai’s shoulder at the Wuhan airport the previous summer.

  I sighed. “He didn’t just ask Cai if he could come for a visit. He announced it.”

  My mom’s shoulders dropped. “Yoshimoto is in Hong Kong now?”

  “He arrived last night…for the whole week.”

  Budgie tilted his head once more. “The timing that man has. Is he here for vacation?”

  “Pretty much. Cai says he wants them to write a book together about Buddhist and Taoist music, so they’re working on that right now.”

  A look of concern washed over my mom’s face. “Will we see Cai at all?”

  “Oh, yes. But that means we’ll have to see Yoshimoto, too, although I haven’t had that honor yet.”

  “He must have radar to tell when we’re coming to visit you,” my mom said as we headed out toward the taxi stand.

  • • •

  That night, Cai arrived back at our dorm room close to midnight, startling me when he turned on the overhead—and only—light in the room. My mom and Budgie had returned hours earlier to the university guesthouse next door, where C
ai had also booked Yoshimoto a room.

  “Ay yo.” Cai sighed and crouched down onto his side of our futonlike bed.

  I sat up. “Are you okay?”

  “It’s this book,” he sighed. “Japanese Father always wakes up so early. He wants me to be there so we can work on it early in the morning.”

  “You should sleep now.”

  “But Japanese Father wants me to sleep in his room so we don’t waste time. We just finished the introduction and will start chapter one tomorrow.”

  I didn’t move as Cai pulled out a couple pairs of men’s bikini underwear from his dresser, along with a T-shirt and a pair of long, brown corduroys. Could Cai not see that Yoshimoto was manipulating him? The guesthouse was all of one hundred yards down the road from our dorm.

  I wanted to trust Cai that nothing was going on with Yoshimoto except this scholarly collaboration, but I had a hard time picturing their sleeping arrangements. Budgie and my mom were staying in a double room with two cotlike beds, but as far I knew, Cai had booked Yoshimoto into a single room with one small bed. Was Cai sleeping on the floor? I started to think about the other option, of Cai sharing a bed with Yoshimoto, but I quickly pushed that idea out of my mind. I couldn’t let myself go there.

  Instead I recalled Cai’s warning back in Suzhou when I voiced displeasure with Professor Xiang from Wuhan. I already knew what Cai’s reaction would be if I suggested he spend less time with a professor or questioned Yoshimoto’s motives. I also remembered the night the prostitute phoned our hotel room in Wuhan, and how I tried to keep up appearances the next day so I wouldn’t ruin my family’s visit. With my mom and Budgie now in Hong Kong for a week, I wanted to be able to focus on them, not on a fight or another bizarre development with Cai. So I did what I did best: I kept the peace in my marriage.

  Cai stopped packing for a moment. “Japanese Father is very unhappy. Rui was very rude to him in Japan and now they’re not speaking.”

  “What do you mean? Why aren’t they speaking?” Rui was the friend from Wuhan who went to Japan to study with Yoshimoto the previous fall.