The Love Wife

by Gish Jen

  — Not even the Communists? Then how can they be Communist?

  — Still Communist, she explained. They are Party members.

  — You mean they’re phonies? said Russell.

  Phonies were a big thing for Russell, because his mother died when he was little, and then he had three stepmothers, all phonies.

  WENDY / So that’s like the thing he and Lizzy agree about most, that mothers come and mothers go.

  LIZZY / If you asked Russell, he’d say the problem is that no one’s honest, no one can say things like, This is just not my child. Or, I can’t love this child as if he were my own because he isn’t.

  As for my not feeling like I belonged to this family, he’d say probably I never would, but who would admit it?

  Which was, like, so true.

  My old boyfriend Derek was really smart, but he never got stuff like that. On the other hand, there was stuff Derek got that Russell didn’t.

  I hated having a special problem that other people didn’t get.

  WENDY / — But we know like so many people who are adopted, I say.

  — You know all these people, says Lizzy. But I don’t. I’m not like you, adopted from China. I’m plain adopted from nowhere, I’m soup du jour, it’s completely different. Everybody wants to talk about where you’re from. It’s different to possibly be the grandchild of a Japanese soldier, which nobody wants to talk about.

  — Japanese soldier? I say. What Japanese soldier?

  — Some Japanese soldier.

  — Are you sure? Says who?

  — Says Lanlan, she says.

  BLONDIE / How to explain about Mama Wong? The way she talked? The way she looked at Lizzy?

  — We did wonder such things, I said. And we did indeed decide not to mention them. Because who knew what the truth was? How would we ever know? And what good would come of such talk?

  Carnegie, strolling into the kitchen, tossed a cherry tomato up in the air and caught it in his mouth.

  — We thought it would only hurt your self-esteem, I went on, glowering at Carnegie. — Please act your age.

  — This is worse, sobbed Lizzy. This is way worse. To have people thinking things all along and not saying them.

  — We’re talking about whether Lizzy might have some Japanese blood, I told Carnegie. We’re talking about whether she might be the grandchild of, say, a Japanese soldier.

  He gulped down his tomato.

  — And who says this? he asked. Pray tell?

  — Lan, I said. But you know how Mama Wong always . . .

  — Your not saying it all this time makes it seem like it must be true! cried Lizzy.

  — That may be, said Carnegie. But the fact is, we don’t know, and can’t know, barring a fact-finding mission.

  — We were just trying to protect you, I said.

  — And so what if it is true, anyway? said Carnegie. What does it matter? Aren’t you still our Lizzy? Growing up here, where, let’s face it, most people can’t tell Chinese from Japanese anyway.

  — You lied to me! she cried.

  — You know, mixed kids are going to be in the majority before you know it, said Carnegie. It’s going to be such an asset. You’re going to be able to move in all kinds of worlds. And it’s going to be cool; in fact, I was reading about that just the other day. How cool it’s getting to be already.

  — It is not cool, she said. Maybe in the city it is, but here, in our town, it is not cool.

  — Well, from the city to the suburbs, said Carnegie. Believe you me, ambiguity is in.

  — But why did you lie to me? she cried. You lied. You lied.

  Wrote Gabriela:

  i would definitely say something to lan if i were you. talk about inappropriate! to be telling lizzy stuff like that!

  But how to explain what was inappropriate about it?

  CARNEGIE / How was Lan supposed to know we’d carefully never discussed this? Thanks to the boundless love and exquisite tact with which dear Mama Wong broached the subject.

  BLONDIE / In the end, we didn’t say anything. In the end, I chose to focus on improving my relationship with Lan. For while Lan talked to the girls more and more all the time, she barely talked to me. It was strange. And always in English—she always spoke to me in English, though I’d tried, a few times, to speak Chinese.

  Wasn’t I a person people talked to?

  it’s her inner child, wrote Gabriela. it has nothing to do with you. you’re a good egg to try to connect with her, given the situation.

  It wasn’t a matter of being good, though. I would have wanted to be friends with anyone living in my house. And I felt sorry for her—fellow pawn of Mama Wong’s that she was.

  what a great idea, to try and make common cause!

  Lan, though, was not interested in making common cause. Indeed, I could not even get her to talk to me in a regular way. If I asked, Are you hot? Lan would answer, Not too hot. If I asked, Do you have something you need to do? Lan would answer, I can do it now or do it later. If I asked, Would you like to go shopping? Lan would answer, If you are go out shopping, I am happy to accompany you.

  — She treats you like her superior, in other words, said Carnegie. Which, dearest, you are. And think how the Chinese write, traditionally: top to bottom. Think how they talk about time, even time runs top to bottom, with events above or below each other. Lan has that ladder-like outlook.

  — You’re defending her, I said.

  WENDY / Lanlan knows her way to the video store. She’s surprised we don’t have a DVD player, not that she and her great-aunt did, they didn’t have anything. But in China even their neighbor had one. First he had a VCR, and then he got a DVD player he let her use.

  LIZZY / Never mind that the neighbor was this old geezer who used to paw at her while she watched. I was, like, how could you put up with that? But she said she used to just ignore him. She said probably she should have married him. Probably she shouldn’t have cared he was so short. Of course I asked, like, how short? Which is how we found out that he came up to her shoulder.

  WENDY / She says that in China people have these things called VCDs of every single movie we have here. And not like months later, they get them right away, and for really cheap. But anyway, the VCR is okay, and it is okay it is not Sony.

  LAN / In China, people buy Sony. Of course, Panasonic is okay too.

  WENDY / Because she hates America, but she loves American movies, and on the VCR she can watch all the same stuff she used to watch in China. Stuff like Mulan and Titanic and The Matrix. And this old stuff too, anything really famous. Like Gone With the Wind, she watches that a million times, even though she doesn’t like it when Clark Gable says, Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.

  — That is one hundred percent rude, she says.

  And how terrible that Scarlett O’Hara! Talk about spiritual pollution!

  But then she rewinds the tape and watches it again. She loves the remote control, when she first got it she spent hours just playing with it. Practicing, sort of. It’s like the one thing she won’t let Bailey touch.

  LAN / In China, I used to see people with calculators, with mobile phones, with electronic dictionaries. I loved to watch their thumbs fly. I always wanted my thumbs to fly like that too.

  WENDY / Sometimes she watches this guy Charlie Chaplin, she really likes Charlie Chaplin. And if she could get them, she would watch these movies her father used to talk about, stuff like Waterloo Bridge and An Affair to Remember. She tells us how much she’d like to see them as if everybody wants to see stuff their father used to see, while Lizzy and me are like, wow. Who knows if Dad even ever watched movies when he was young.

  Some of the movies aren’t even in color.

  Russell tells her what to see, but she doesn’t like what he likes, like she doesn’t get this movie Dirty Harry at all.

  LAN / I thought that Harry very strange. What kind of hero was that? So rude. But sexy, it was true. I thought that Clint Eastwood almost as handsome as
Gregory Peck.

  WENDY / She’s more interested when Russell gets hold of some Hong Kong kung fu movies, and then some new movies from the Mainland. Some of them she saw in China, but some of them she didn’t. A lot of them she says don’t have anything to do with any Chinese she knows. Why do they have to make movies about such strange places, places nobody ever even heard of? But of course she watches them anyway, even though she says she would rather watch James Bond. She likes James Bond even though the British are the good guys.

  — Of all things! she says.

  And the way she says it we know it’s like a practice phrase from school.

  LIZZY / She hated the British because of the Opium War and gunships, which her father used to talk about all the time. Apparently he used to talk about this humiliation and that humiliation, so that ‘humiliation’ became, like, this big word for her.

  WENDY / I’m not even sure what it means exactly, but when she says, They humiliated us, I can feel how us doesn’t mean her and me and Lizzy. Us means her and people in China, which makes me sad. She says the American government is different than the American people, but when she says they, I still hear you. Very soft, it’s like when you stare at something red for a long time and then look up and see green. You humiliated us.

  But she still loves James Bond one hundred percent.

  — Bond, she says, in that James Bond voice. — James Bond.

  The way she does it, even Bailey thinks it’s funny.

  — Bon! he says, with like this little bounce up and down. He does that without holding on to anything, like he’s dancing.

  — Bon! Bon! he yells, and then falls down bump on his bottom. His diaper makes this crinkly sound when he does that, and his cheeks jiggle up and down. Because he is like really really fat, Mom says he has the most chipmunk cheeks of all the kids.

  LIZZY / Lanlan went around humming the tune to Goldfinger. And talking about who was sexier, Sean Connery or Roger Moore. She was fascinated by their chest hair.

  LAN / In China, we feel foreign men are very sexy. People say they can make love ten times a night, but I don’t know if that’s true.

  LIZZY / Also we talked about whether the later movies were as good as the old ones. I said they weren’t, there being too much of a formula. But Lanlan said she loved the formula.

  WENDY / Why does she still watch sad movies by herself when we’re not there? Outside it snows and snows, it’s so beautiful, but she doesn’t go out, she just stays at home and watches those movies.

  She likes us to visit her. Like she never shoos us out if we go bother her, even if she’s off duty and not supposed to be taking care of us. Her studying is important, but if we knock on her door, she always opens it up with a big surprised noise, as if no one has ever visited her before.

  — Hello! she says. Come in, come in! Then she says: — What’s this?

  And from behind her back come all kinds of treats.

  Some of the stuff we’ve had before, Mom’s always made us eat rice cakes and melon cakes and noodle cakes and red bean everything. But it tastes better when Lanlan gives it to us, who knows why, maybe we like it more because we eat it all the time now, maybe we’ve xiguan le, gotten used to it. Or maybe we like it because liking it is liking Lanlan. Also she gives it to us right out of her hand with a napkin, and maybe breaks it in half for us to share, and lets us walk around with it. She’s not like Mom, who takes it out of the refrigerator and then checks it to make sure there’s no mold or anything on it, and then puts it on a plate. One lump for me and one for Lizzy and none for her because they use lard. And then she watches to see our reaction, smiling like she smiles at assemblies even if we’ve totally messed up. Encouraging like. Lanlan is completely different, she brightens up as if she has this whole net of lights in her skin. Also she makes treats herself, after a while, using stuff we can get right in our grocery store, or from this Japanese market. Suzhou specialties like qing tuanzi, meaning green rice balls, or these itty bitty zhongzi tang, which are these candies you can pop into your mouth, and that have pine nuts in them, or mint.

  In the beginning she gives us different things to choose from, in the beginning she asks, Do you like try this one or this one? But after a while she says she knows what we will like. And we do like it, she’s right, she knows our mind.

  — You are become like Chinese, she says, and her face is so happy her smile isn’t even lopsided.

  And when one day Lizzy says Mom never cared about us enough to bake brownies, these are our first brownies, that’s what it means to have a mother who works, Lanlan says: — I am like you, have no real mother. Have no real family.

  Sometimes she lets Bailey cruise around by himself in his play area while she tells us stories. Or play with the vacuum, he’s like in love with the vacuum. She tells us famous stories about things we never heard of but that she thinks we should if we’re not going to be one hundred percent American. Like filial piety. What’s filial piety? we say. We have no idea, she’s right, we’re like xiao ba wang, the little emperors you see all over China these days, completely spoiled, which is why she tells us this story about some sixty-year-old man who played on the floor pretending to be a baby so his parents wouldn’t feel old.

  — That is filial child, children are supposed to do anything for their parents, she says.

  — For our parents? says Lizzy. Our parents?

  — To make them worry less, to make them feel better, anything, says Lanlan. Children are supposed to sacrifice themselves.

  — But what if they aren’t even our parents? says Lizzy.

  — Yeah, and like what does that mean, sacrifice? I say.

  LAN / Of course, I am amazed. What kind of human doesn’t know what sacrifice means?

  LIZZY / We tried to picture this old guy, like our dad’s age, but crawling on the floor like Bailey. Would he drool? Would he put stuff in his mouth and get his food all over?

  WENDY / Would he say, Da! like Bailey, for door and Daddy and dog and some other stuff too?

  LIZZY / It was weird, but we listened anyway, if only because we knew how much Mom especially would hate these stories. Even if the crawling around was for the benefit of her and Dad, she would hate the crawling part. And what about the stories about taking care of your mother-in-law? Like the one about a woman who breastfed her sick mother-in-law, to give her strength. Could you imagine Mom breastfeeding Mama Wong? Even I hated that one.

  — I can tell you one thing, I said. I am never ever going to breast-feed my husband’s mother. I mean, if I even get married. And I am never going to China again if that’s what you’re supposed to do. And I am so glad that if I have any Chinese in me, at least it’s not one hundred percent.

  — Even in China nobody do that anymore, said Lanlan then. That is just old story.

  — Whew, we said.

  — China is very nice place, she said. But in China, that is the kind of story people all know. If you do not know that kind of story, you are not real Chinese.

  — Hmm, we said.

  — Or Japanese either, she added. Because Japanese way of thinking is very like Chinese way. Everything they have is come from China.

  WENDY / And the way she looks at us you get the feeling that she doesn’t think we are real anything except American.

  She tells us stories about relatives of hers, which I guess makes them relatives of ours, sort of. So that we’re interested in them even though they make us sad in a way, Lizzy says she just wishes she knew one single person who was related to her by blood, and as soon as she says that I wish it too.

  Some of the stories are normal, but a lot of them are weird. Like one day during Bailey’s nap, Lanlan tells us this story about a baby girl.

  LAN / — So the baby is born, a girl, and when the mother found out, she know the father would be very mad at her for give birth to another girl. So she tell the servant to take that baby away. Throw out. So the servant leave the baby to cry cry cry. Nobody wash the baby, nobody wrap the ba
by in blanket, nobody give the baby milk. But still the baby cry. Even after all the blood become dry and brown all over, that baby is still cry cry cry until finally the ayi feel sorry for the baby. So she wash the baby, take the brown off. She wrap the baby in some newspaper, even find somebody to nurse the baby. And the baby grow up big and strong, and so beautiful the father mother are so surprise, they just love that baby. The way she smile and sing, everybody love her so much.

  LIZZY / — Wow, we said. But that’s an old story too, right? Like from a long long time ago?

  — That story is—how do you say? My great-aunt, she said. My father’s mother’s sister.

  — You know her? You know that baby?

  — Not when she was a baby. When she was grow up.

  — Wow, we said.

  CARNEGIE / The video watching segued into, what else, stock watching. That all-American activity that, sad to say, felt far more immediately Chinese than studying Chinese characters or reading Chinese poetry. Every time I brought a stock site up on my screen I could hear Mama Wong’s approval. That’s how family go up.

  Yet let me say here, for all time: I in no way instigated this new interest of Lan’s. It’s true that I had thought to ask her to tutor me in Chinese, my self-study program having predictably petered out. Why not a conversation class? In fact Blondie had entertained the self-same idea. With a certain wistfulness; how hard, after all, to imagine that Lan, who barely spoke to her, would agree to any such thing.

  Post–kitchen incident, though—no. Post–kitchen incident I too regarded the idea with more wistfulness than hope. Was it not better to avoid Lan as best I could? Seeing as how sharp-eyed Blondie noticed even that.

  — You have feelings for her, she said.

  — Do I?

  — If you didn’t have feelings you wouldn’t have to avoid her.

  — Is that so.

  So I said. Yet could I really deny that Lan had appeared in my dreams? That in my dreams I did kiss her, once—just once—but over and over, saying all the time, It’s impossible. As she understood; that being the tenderest part of the dream, that she understood. Of course, it’s impossible, she said; her blouse grazing her pubic hair. Of course. And this, is this impossible too? And this? And how do you call this? Ah, this also—such a big big impossible. Having never had children, she was tighter than Blondie, also easier. It was natural. She was 24/7. She never had a meeting in the morning; I was her morning meeting. There we were, our coffee all made. Ah, PowerPoint! Better, yes, to close the conference-room door.