The Love Wife

by Gish Jen

  — But how can you want nothing, I say. I mean, how can you just decide?

  — Of course you can decide, says Lanlan.

  She tucks her hair behind her ear. We are sitting outside under the apple trees, me and Lizzy in the sun, and Lanlan in the shade. She has to wear a sweater because the ground is cold, and in the shade the air is cold too. It’s not like being in the sun, where the air is warm.

  Lanlan is in the shade but she stretches her neck up at the sky anyway, and closes her eyes. Her neck is long and beautiful, Lizzy says it’s nice to be kissed on the neck, so probably if I were a man I’d kiss her there. But would she want to be kissed? Or would she decide to want nothing?

  — Do you miss Shandong? I say.

  — I miss Suzhou, she says.

  Her eyes are still closed but not like she’s sleeping, more like she’s channeling some kind of message from the sky. Like she’s reaching up to it and it’s reaching down to her through the branches of the apple tree.

  She says: —Suzhou is my lao jia—my hometown.

  — But when you go back to China, won’t you go back to Shandong? says Lizzy.

  — Hard to say, she says. It all depend.

  — Does that mean you’ll go to Suzhou?

  — Move to Suzhou very difficult.

  She opens her eyes then, and I’m sorry we made her do that. Not that she acts bothered, but it’s like we interrupted the sky, and now her neck is normal. I pull my own neck up to see if I can do that. Close my own eyes so my eyelids turn red, and straighten up my back.

  — But why? says Lizzy. I think you should just go.

  — Cannot just go, says Lanlan.

  — But why not?

  Lanlan tickles me under the chin, which is how it is that I open my eyes and see that the sky has gone away for her, and that there’s this sadness coming down.

  — First of all, I would need a job, she says. Not to say a hukou—sort of like a residency permit.

  — So get one, says Lizzy.

  — You have to know somebody, says Lanlan. Not just somebody. Somebody—how do you say?—have influence.

  — To get a job?

  Lanlan nods.

  — You can’t just apply?

  Lanlan shakes her head.

  — Do you know somebody with influence?

  — I know no one, she says.

  — So where will you go back to?

  — It all depend, she says.

  Her voice is all quiet like then, and wanting to want nothing.

  BLONDIE / I loved Lan’s simplicity, but some things drove me crazy.

  The umbrella was one thing.

  The other was that she hardly ate. She would not set a place for herself at the table—we had to do it every night.

  WENDY / — Which is fine, Mom says.

  But the way she says it we know Dad’s going to have to say something soon.

  — No wonder she is so thin, Mom says. I hope she eats at school. Or perhaps she eats at night?

  And that’s right, I’ve seen her. She eats putting the food near her mouth, then taking it away, then bringing it close to her mouth again and maybe finally beginning to chew. Sometimes she cries. Eating makes her cry, but very quietly, so you almost can’t hear her, you can only see her cry and when she’s finally chewed something, put her head in her arms. One day I ask her why she cries. But she says she doesn’t cry.

  — I saw you cry, I say. You were crying when I came in.

  — How can you trust what you see, she says. You only have two eyes.

  And I say: — Aren’t two eyes enough?

  But she says no, not enough, not nearly.

  — Do you understand? she asks me.

  And when she asks that her eyes fly away to the door as if she’s making sure there’s no one there, or as if that’s where the other world is, in the hall, where it can hear us talking.

  — I saw you, I say. I know I did. I did.

  — All right, she says then. I cried. What does it matter?

  — It does, I say. Because it means you’re sad sometimes.

  She looks at me.

  — I think you are Chinese, she says. Very care about other people.

  Then she tells me a story she says her ayi told her a long time ago, about this baby who got killed by accident by the servants.

  — One day, you know, they are feeding her, and what happens? The ayi put the chopstick too far inside the baby’s mouth, and poke a hole here.

  She shows me by putting a finger inside her own mouth and poking in the way back.

  — Of course, since all the way in back, nobody can see. And so the baby cry cry, but nobody know what is make the baby cry until one day the baby die.

  — The baby died? I say.

  — The baby die, and then the doctor look inside and find hole.

  — Those chopsticks must have been pretty sharp, I say.

  — Sharp, she agrees.

  — I can’t believe they didn’t find the hole until the baby was dead.

  — Hole is hard to see, says Lan.

  — Are you going to die? I ask. Suddenly I think of that, I don’t know how.

  — No no, says Lanlan, and kind of half shakes her head.

  — But you have a hole no one can see?

  Lanlan smiles her smile.

  — You are a real Chinese girl, she says. See not only with your eyes but with your heart.

  Sometimes when it gets dark out we catch crickets. We hold a candle outside a cricket hole, and when the cricket comes out to see the light, we nab it quick. Lan hums. Nothing is baggy on her, her clothes looks like they’re on a Barbie doll. Nothing wrinkles and she never has bare feet. Mom is the opposite, she loves bare feet and clothes she could sleep in. She would never in a million years wear Peds like Lanlan does, the beige kind that are like little stretchy stockings just for your feet. But that’s what Lanlan wears, she’s not the same as us. Just like the crickets all look the same to us but not to her, Lanlan sees things that we don’t.

  — See the legs, she says. How strong. See the lines on the head, how straight they are.

  Or: — Look how beautiful this head here, that little gold in the middle.

  She says every fall people used to travel from all over to Shandong where her great-aunt lived to buy fighting crickets, but that there are also beauty crickets and singing crickets. She looks over the crickets from our yard.

  — This kind of cricket creep like a tiger, fight like a snake, she says. This kind charge like the wind.

  Her favorite kind is the kind that listens for sound, looks for the enemy.

  — That is smart cricket, she says. Ambush enemy instead of using brute force. That cricket is real Chinese.

  We put the crickets in the cages and tickle them with those skinny paintbrushes you use for crafts and stuff. But we can’t get them to fight.

  — Beep! Lanlan tells them. Beep!

  I tell them too: — Beep!

  But nothing happens.

  — Typical American crickets, she says. Too much automatic make them lazy.

  She teaches Bailey stuff too. Like she’s trying to teach Bailey to walk by standing him up and clapping her hands and opening her arms to get him to walk to her. He mostly waves his arms and maybe takes a step but then falls down plop. She tries again anyway.

  — You watch, she says. He will learn.

  Some days we make kites, beautiful kites, with bamboo frames you can fold up, or that you can attach to each other. Flying them is like flying a pile of plates, except that they go up even when there’s hardly any wind at all. Or else we do cat’s cradle, which Lanlan says her ayi used to say brings rain. Lanlan knows how to do all kinds of things with string, like she loops it around her five fingers in a special way and says that’s a snake, then pulls so that it comes off and says that’s the snake’s skin coming off. And we do paper play too, that’s fun. Lanlan can make lanterns and all kinds of other things, like swans and goldfish and seals and flowers, she
can even make balls out of paper, Bailey loves those. She blows them up and he shmushes them. If you give her scissors she can make your silhouette, or flowers, or a lantern, or a boat with a fisherman, or a house with animals and people playing instruments.

  — Beep! she says when she’s done. — Automatic! Wow.

  Mom wants to get special paper for her to use, but Lanlan says she cannot use special paper. She likes scraps, wrappers we were going to throw away, pictures from magazines.

  — It’s part of her art, says Dad.

  — Survivor art, says Mom. It has to be one part scrappiness.

  — She doesn’t pick and choose, says Dad. She makes.

  — She makes you realize making do is a kind of making, says Mom.

  — She needs nothing, says Dad.

  Dad says he is going to make a movie of her hands, making these things.

  — Her hands are amazing, he says. The way they move is so beautiful.

  And that’s true. Her fingers fly around, all except her pinkies, which she holds a little ways away—up in the air like, so you never forget how pretty her nails are.

  Mom wants Lanlan to teach her something. Like how about embroidery, she says, Suzhou embroidery is so famous.

  But Lanlan says embroidery is one thing she cannot do.

  We teach Lanlan stuff too, like how to pick apples, and how to make apple crisp. Lanlan doesn’t eat a lot of the crisp but she does eat some, and says that she likes it, forget that she spits out all the apple peels.

  Mom says this is what cultural exchange is about, when we’re older and don’t have a baby in the house we’re going to host some exchange students like her family did for sure.

  BLONDIE / — I am happy anywhere, said Lan. I am not picky.

  — I got plenty of noth-ing, she sang.

  She seemed to have picked the singing business up from Carnegie, although she didn’t make up words the way he did. Instead she learned them from tapes she played on her tape player; we had supplied her with a voltage converter. She sang Chinese songs, too, sometimes—so quietly you could barely hear her. And yet the girls were humming them now. For instance, this song about moli hua— jasmine.

  CARNEGIE / The words were something like, How beautiful, how fragrant, I’d pick you except that I’d be pricked.

  Also she sang this little number about road-building, and another called ‘Rely on the Helmsman While Sailing the Seas.’

  BLONDIE / Mostly she listened to tapes for school. She was taking English as a Second Language and studying very hard.

  CARNEGIE / Ah, but her independent study: Broadway 101.

  Not that she would ever go so far as to ask to borrow a cassette. But anything we left on her doorstep would disappear immediately and reappear a few days later. We thuswise introduced to her The Sound of Music, South Pacific, Guys and Dolls. Porgy and Bess, Fiddler on the Roof. We begged her to tell us if we could get her something special, and one day, finally, she relented.

  — Tchaikovsky, she said. Swan Lake.

  She listened. We asked again.

  — La Traviata, she said. Aida.

  I unearthed my old opera-class tapes for her.

  BLONDIE / — A good sign, he said.

  He thought this even though Wendy said the sad songs made Lan cry so hard, it was scary.

  — A sign of life, he said.

  Sometimes he would hum a little of one thing or another. She would nod and look down.

  CARNEGIE / Such was the sign of life.

  BLONDIE / Eight weeks after moving in, she still had done nothing to decorate her room. She did use the refrigerator, but only for two or three items; they seemed to huddle together on the main shelf, as if in need of one another’s company. She seemed reluctant too to take anything out of the family refrigerator.

  — Thank you, she said when we told her yet once again to help herself. —You are too kind.

  But when asked why she never did take anything, she sang softly, Noth-ing’s plenty for me.

  Her ESL course at the local community college was a full-time, intensive program, five nights a week. We had hoped she would make friends there.

  But so far, nothing.

  LAN / All the jokes were in Spanish.

  BLONDIE / The Chinese community center was reopening after a renovation. We hoped that might be a source of friends for her too.

  CARNEGIE / The center did picnics, newsletters, dragon-boat races. Calligraphy clinics. Karaoke fund-raisers. T-shirts, mugs, mouse pads. You could tell the echt Chinese from the not-so-echt by how much they talked about self-esteem. Also by their piety level.

  — You know what my mother used to say about customs inspectors in Hawaii? I said one day to one of the parents, who had just returned from Hong Kong. — She used to say, Chinese inspectors are the worst. Only an idiot go through customs in Hawaii. Anybody with sense stop in Chicago or Denver.

  The parent clutched her flash cards for dear life.

  BLONDIE / Still I loved belonging to the center, especially since the two couples who had traveled with us to China had both moved away—the Clarks to Maine after they inherited a house on the coast, and the Fonarovs to Ohio, to escape the East Coast rat race.

  CARNEGIE / Owners, now, of a yoga franchise, the Fonarovs reported that their inner balance had come back.

  BLONDIE / It didn’t seem to matter, at the center, that we had two adopted children, and one half half—hapa, they tended to say there, thanks to the Hawaiian director. It didn’t seem to matter that I was a haole. Some families had no Chinese connection at all. Some were only there because early language training was hard to find.

  How excited they were to meet Lan. A native speaker! They begged her to teach a class. She politely refused, though. When she wasn’t working, she wanted to study, she said.

  Later it came out that she felt uncomfortable being the only one from the Mainland.

  — Didn’t you like Kelly? we asked. Didn’t you like Michelle?

  — I don’t think they are real Chinese, said Lan.

  There might have been more community in the city, but she didn’t drive, and the T didn’t make it out to our town.

  CARNEGIE / Lan’s primary attachment remained to her tape machine.

  BLONDIE / She showed no interest in shopping, but was careful with the few clothes she had, most of which she had apparently bought on a shopping trip in Jinan, the capital of her province. Blue jean bellbottoms with a bleached-out stripe down the middle, for example. T-shirts, some of them with messages.

  CARNEGIE / Our number one all-time favorite: ROCKS NEVER DIE.

  BLONDIE / Yet no matter how casual the outfit, she did not treat it casually. She was reluctant to do anything that might get her clothes dirty, and she folded them as beautifully as she folded paper.

  Our wash, too. She folded the shirts to exactly the size of a shirt cardboard.

  I loved this.

  CARNEGIE / Our recycling became an art form. Mitch and the minx made a point of routing their Sunday-evening walk by our curb, that they might behold it.

  — What does it say? Mitchell would ask, stroking his new facial growth. — What does it mean?

  BLONDIE / Her English was improving by leaps and bounds now.

  CARNEGIE / We were unsurprised to learn, eventually, that she was a language teacher’s daughter.

  LAN / My father was, before Liberation, an English and French and Russian teacher, as well as the principal of a small high school his parents had bought for him to run. My mother was a Communist who left him for an officer in the People’s Army. After all, she was beautiful and young. Why should she stay with trouble? She left me then, too—like Lizzy’s mother, and Wendy’s. That’s why I understand those girls. She left sorrowfully, my father always said, though she did not leave so much as a picture of herself. I never asked her name. There were so many stories like this, back then. It was not unusual at all, people breaking up because of their backgrounds, and prospects. Later she died, my father said,
of a brain tumor.

  After she left, my father and I were forced to move from our beautiful Suzhou compound to a much smaller rental house we owned, in a town nearby. Then we moved to just one room of that house. He raised me with the help of an older woman who was not a servant—there were no servants anymore—but whose family had worked for our family for many years. Not that he even needed that much help from ayi. He was good with children, as Suzhou men often were. He was a gentle man, like a woman, not abrupt like men in the North. I can still hear his voice. How he loved to quote from the ancient philosophers in his beautiful Chinese! His Suzhouhua was like music. When people said they’d rather listen to Suzhou people call each other names than to a Ningbonese singing, they were thinking of people like my father.

  It was not an altogether unhappy time. My father rode me around town on his bicycle. He taught me badminton. We watched the long lines of boats in the canals; we watched the fishermen on Lake Tai. We bought tang zhou—a kind of sweet porridge—from the local peddlers; their stoves looked like camels. In the summer, we cooled watermelons in a well. There were thousands of wells in and around Suzhou, more than anywhere else. We lowered the melons in a net bag by day, hauling them up in the evening. How delicious they were after supper!

  — The Communists will never be able to take everything away, my father used to say. Always you will have nothing.

  He liked to say that kind of thing and then laugh. He loved many Chinese things—crickets, for example. He would travel every fall to Shandong, where his maternal aunt lived, to get first-class fighters. Always he came back laughing at the way people talked up there, though in one way he liked them. So unpretentious, he said. So natural. Also he loved Chinese gardens, especially his own family garden, which was neglected but not physically destroyed during the Cultural Revolution; even the Red Guards stopped short of wrecking Suzhou. Seven families did move into our family house, though, destroying its serenity. What sort of painting could go on by a pond in which peasants washed their laundry? What kind of calligraphy? Our family garden had been a marvel, with all of nature—hills and water and trees—brought together within its walls. There were many viewing points and hiding places. My earliest memory was of climbing in and around the rock grottoes, with their endless twisting corridors and damp secret rooms. I remember the ancient trees too, planted long long ago, so full of beauty and spirit—so removed from everything petty and common. And, of course, there was a greenhouse. That’s where the orchids grew.