by Gish Jen
No answer.
— Perhaps we may agree that the earth agrees to the principle of private ownership in capitalist countries, said Jiabao. Or at least has no way to object. Do you agree?
No answer.
— And one more thing, said Jiabao.
— Aw, shut up already, said someone. Will you just shut up!
Some people turned their radios up.
— I am not a foreigner, said Jiabao.
— How now? said the tattoo man.
— I am a U.S. citizen.
— You’re a citizen? How could you be a citizen? said somebody.
— Idiot, said somebody else. He’s whaddyacallit. Neutralized. Naturalized.
— I passed the test, said Jiabao.
— You passed the test, said the tattoo man.
— The citizenship test.
— The citizenship test! People laughed.
— My uncle took that test, said someone.
But still people laughed and laughed.
— Let me ask you, said Jiabao. How about if you tell me how many branches of government there are.
No one said anything.
— Three, said Jiabao. The executive, the judicial, and the legislative.
— Yeah, and how about you tell us how many ways you can be fucked, said somebody.
Everyone laughed.
— In any case, the fact that you’re a citizen doesn’t make you an American, said the tattoo man.
— Oh, really, said Jiabao. And how is that?
— A citizen thinks this country is about law. But an American knows it is about who is really American.
— Please leave this beach, said Jiabao.
— This land does not belong to you and, trust me, never will.
— You’re right, said Jiabao. It belongs to the Baileys. Please leave.
— Please leave, people echoed. Please leave.
— Why should we listen to you? said the tattoo man. You piece of shit.
— Because in China I was a professor, said Jiabao.
— A professor! Professor of what? Professor of Shit? With a B.S. degree?
I went out onto the steps.
— Come in, I told Jiabao, in English. Time to eat. Come in. Food is getting cold.
He looked up. People were still laughing.
— Please come. Please.
He hesitated but did come in, finally, shouting: — You people are crazy!
— You are crazy too, to talk to those people, I said. Those people will kill you.
— Let them kill me, said Jiabao. You know, I look at the beach and I see it is beautiful. And the pond, look how beautiful it is. Like something in a painting, a place for scholars to go fishing. And this house is beautiful too, and my wife—look—you are the most beautiful of all. If I had not left China, I would never know how much happiness could never be mine.
— It will, it will be yours, I said. Our shop is doing very well. Probably we will start making money again soon.
But he kept saying: — I wish I did not know. I wish I did not know. We can buy the Baileys’ house, but we cannot own it.
He laughed and laughed.
— Sue’s beach can never become Mr. Su’s beach, he said. You cannot add one word, no matter how much money you have. A joke! It is truly a joke!
And later: — Someday I will go back to China and help our country rise again. You watch. I will help the Chinese people stand up to these ignorant American bullies.
— Maybe I’ll come with you, I said.
— You! he said. Who can depend on a woman like you? I know your type all too well. In the morning you say three, in the afternoon you say four.
— I would definitely come with you, I said. If you invited me.
— You mean, so long as Mr. Shang did not invite you to be his cofounder, right? No more dumplings for you then. Mrs. Cofounder!
I tried to tell him that I had always wanted to go back to China, that Shang would have helped me go back to China. But he would not hear me.
He loved me but did not hear me.
Later he was more himself.
— Nao xiu cheng nu, he said—constant shame becomes rage.
He said: — I understand the townspeople. What their life is.
He said: — Maybe I should not have become a U.S. citizen. I should have just taken a green card like you. Forget about citizenship. Then I could go back and forth freely. Make a living in America, retire in Shandong. Though of course, you would never come with me to Shandong.
I could not say that I would. I could say it with my mouth but not with my heart. And so I said nothing. Which he understood.
— Anyway, he said, it is too cold here.
He went to sleep early, with a headache. I stayed up much later. Yet, having a doctor’s appointment, I got up earlier than he all the same.
Of course, even then it was quite windy. It had been a calm evening, but the morning was windy.
Why did I not wake Jiabao?
I let him sleep. It was so early. I had to start out early because I did not know how to drive the car, and was planning to walk. Not that it was so far, a couple of miles.
Jiabao needed sleep.
How windy it was! Like Shandong in the spring.
BLONDIE / I knew that wind—how it roused the water, making the whitecaps rise. We used to shut the windows when the wind came up like that. My mother would tell us kids to quick go make sure the boats were tied up. If the boats weren’t tied up, we would be sure to hear about it from my father.
CARNEGIE / I remembered that wind too. How could I forget? How suddenly it came up. How it turned the pond against me.
LAN / Some people said the fire was malicious, an answer to Jiabao’s insults. Others said the fire was the result of carelessness—a smoldering beach fire that would have normally gone out. Yet others said Sue set the fire. They said Sue thought that it was winter and that she was shut out of the house again, her house. They said she made the fire to keep her child warm.
We had never shut Sue out, but that’s what people said. Perhaps she had come other winters, and found herself locked out. That was possible.
In any case, a tree caught fire, and then others. The willows. Then the big pine nearest the main house fell over as if someone had pushed it. It fell over, burning, onto the roof. Which needed work badly—Jiabao had noticed that when we put in the insulation.
One day, he said, the rain would pour right in.
CARNEGIE / The roof beam had apparently snapped when the burning tree fell on it. Even if Jeb had woken up, he probably could not have escaped, people said. The whole island was burning. The smoke reached the sky.
LAN / There was so much smoke that even from town I smelled something. As I came out of the doctor’s office, I stopped in front of his flower bed, thinking about what to do. Then I looked up. At first I did not realize what the smell was. Or why the sky was so dark. All I could think then was what a surprise it was—at my age!—to have gotten pregnant. I was old enough to be a grandmother; and indeed the doctor had said that I should not get my hopes up. That I might well miscarry. But still, he said, I could try. And who knew? Look at Blondie, after all. I was older, even, than Blondie had been, when Blondie had Bailey. But hadn’t she thought herself too old too? And I was already three months along—past the most dangerous time. The doctor asked me why I didn’t come in right away, but I had just thought my period was stopping. That I was in menopause.
I was going to tell Jiabao, of course. I knew how surprised and excited he would be. How nervous I was! But how happy.
How I wished, in a way, that I were in China, where I could take herbs for the pregnancy, and eat all the special foods that made a baby strong. If I were in China, though, who knew if I would be allowed to keep the pregnancy? Who knew what my unit leader would say? Or what the quotas were for the year. I could have begged him, Please. At my age, my only chance. I’ll do anything. Pay anything. And maybe it would have worked. But maybe
he would have just laughed.
How lucky to be pregnant here! And with Jiabao, who loved me.
So I was thinking—so many things, that I did not realize right away that the sky was black with smoke, and that the smoke was from a fire. That the smell was from a fire.
It was all my fault, I see that now. Jiabao always believed I had married him to get a green card, and that ate at him. That made him do crazy things.
BLONDIE / It was my fault. How could I have allowed Lan to be introduced to that Shang? What kind of a person did such things?
CARNEGIE / How could I have sent them to Maine? How could I not have seen how unwelcome they would be?
The cinders rained and rained into the lake, people said. It was apparently quite a show, better even than the town groundworks on the Fourth of July.
The funeral home had discreetly covered the more fragmentary parts of Jeb’s body with a sheet, but we were allowed to view his less disturbing parts, including his charred but mostly intact upper body and neck and face. We were not long in our viewing, thanks to the smell. A sickening barbecue-like stench; we fought our stomachs every moment of our visit.
He lay on a metal table, a heavyset man, built a little like myself, with a knob of some sort on his collarbone. His hair was burnt off, as were most of his eyebrows and eyelashes. You could see he had not woken; that he was asleep when he died. There was that relief, to see peace on his face, and his eyes closed. It seemed the smoke had gotten to him before the flames. But how gaunt he was; and with his face gone dead, you could no longer see the kindliness of his expression, the intelligence of his eyes. His gumption. I envisioned him helping Lan, as he had so many times. I envisioned him at the front of a classroom, his sweater powdered with chalk dust. I envisioned him pondering a book, having a laugh with friends, burping after a good meal. What if he had never left China? What if he had never met Shang?
How much he had loved Lan! Had he minded that she didn’t love him as much as he loved her? Did he hope she would someday?
What a wonderful father he would have made.
That smell.
LAN / I told him in his next life, he can live on a pond. In his next life, he can have a hundred ponds, and fish there like the scholars in olden days. In his next life, he can fish and write poetry all day, he can live in the land of peach blossoms and have so, so many wives, if he wants, every one of them more beautiful and capable and loving than I.
In his next life, he can blow up the trailer park too. I told him in his next life, he can blow up the tattoo man, or Shang, or me, if he wants. In his next life, he can blow up America.
BLONDIE / How black he looked under the fluorescent lights—a flat black, like Lizzy’s dyed hair. What sorrow to think he would never again see daylight. That he would never again feel the sun. That he would never again close his eyes to see how his eyelids glowed red. And what was the sky, or the water, or the summer lupine to him now? Had he ever even had the time to go see the lupine, over there on the far side of the island?
CARNEGIE / I made myself touch him. I made myself place my hand on his cold, black, stiff chest. He was not as baggy as my mother, being younger, but even so—how sunken.
I could not bring myself to look at the rest of him, but could see how the sheet lay, in places, oddly. That there were strange suspensions in the cloth, sudden hanging valleys.
— I do beg your forgiveness, I said.
— Please, if you can, forgive us all, I said.
BLONDIE / My family came to Maine for the funeral. Not my brothers-in-law; they stayed home with the kids. But my siblings all came. The service was simple and beautiful. We bought Jeb a grave plot in an evergreen grove, with a view of the water. We took pictures—hoping to send these to his relatives in China, someday. This was not going to be simple, as all his papers had burned. Lan knew only that like her great-aunt he came from Shandong, where he was the fourth or fifth child of a coal miner. He would never have gotten an education except for the Communists, she said. But he joined the army, and was sent to school. He was grateful for this until he discovered, during the Cultural Revolution, that he had become intelligentsia—a social element to be struggled against.
LAN / A drowning dog, he was. There were many hard years. But in the end he was lucky. By writing propaganda, he was able to rehabilitate himself. Though there were people who said he wasn’t a real rebel, his chief accuser was himself shot in the head before he could complete the procedures against Jiabao.
He liked mantou—those steamed buns Northerners ate instead of rice. And he spoke that awful Mandarin that hurt your ears, the way people in Shandong did.
BLONDIE / Somehow he ended up Shang’s interpreter, when Shang visited China. And Shang liked him—sponsored him, later, to come to the U.S.
Jeb came hoping to someday teach again. He hoped not to have to write propaganda forever. Shang promised him that he would drive for a while, translate for a while, but eventually go back to school. And then teach.
CARNEGIE / I did try giving Shang a ring, to see if he knew anything about Jeb’s family. His secretary blocked my call.
The INS was similarly forthcoming and friendly.
BLONDIE / We buried him.
CARNEGIE / The mayor did not attend the service. He did, however, send a midsized floral wreath.
Doc Bailey beheld this in silence. A squirrel scampered up to the edge of the grave, looked in, and scampered away; Doc Bailey did not notice. His large body, which, like Blondie’s, normally boasted a certain lightness, was today immobile and hulk-like. He clenched his jaw.
— Couldn’t have said it better myself, I said.
— No doubt he’s tied up having drinks with that landlord, said Doc Bailey.
— Renegotiating the kickback, I said.
— The question is, What was this man doing here? That’s what I want to know. And in our house.
— I suppose, I said, that it was my idea. Lan being a relative from China, as you know. Who lived with us.
— Of course. And the man—her boyfriend?
— Her husband. They got married up here. Opened a shop together.
— As you encouraged them to do.
— I did.
— Thinking?
— Thinking that there was something wonderful about their having that chance. You know, to do the immigrant thing. Work hard, get ahead. It gave one faith in America to see them do well.
— Does one need faith in America?
— Faith in something.
— And why is that?
— There must have been some evolutionary advantage to it at some point.
— To being oriented to something out there, you mean?
— I’m only guessing.
Doc Bailey nodded. Only slightly; still, the motion made him seem a bit more himself.
— Your parents did that, he went on. The immigrant thing.
— My mother did.
— So why shouldn’t these people. Was that your thinking? Keep the tradition.
— I was glad to see someone have a shore to swim for. That wasn’t, you know, a joke.
We eyed the mayor’s carnations, so nicely wired together.
— Well, said Doc Bailey finally, stretching his hands. — I suppose there’s no point in blaming yourself.
Gregory peered into the grave.
— A masterpiece of excavation, he said.
BLONDIE / — A professor, said Peter later. Of what?
He looked at me.
— I’m embarrassed to say I don’t even know, I said.
LAN / — Of Russian history, I said. He specialized in Russian history.
BLONDIE / Gregory was going to ask something too, but Renata stopped him.
— This is not a time for fact finding, she said.
— Did I say something? said Gregory.
— She’s a sad woman, that Sue, said Renata. I vote we give the island back to her. Unless Lan would like to stay here.
Lan shook h
er head no.
— If only it hadn’t gotten burned down first, said Ariela.
— Sue may not even want it, in its present condition, said Peter.
— I’d sooner die than give her anything, I said.
— You don’t think she had anything to do with the fire, do you? said Peter.
LAN / I wanted to kill myself.
Still Doc Bailey talked to me.
— What are your plans? Are you going to keep the baby?
He told me that it might be healthy, who knew. It could be healthy.
— Do you understand?
I nodded.
— I’m sure you realize you might not have another chance.
I nodded again.
— I’d like to say that we’ll support you in every way we can. If you decide to go ahead. I don’t mean to pressure you.
— Thank you. I’ll think about it, I said finally. In just a few days I give you an answer.
— Take your time, he said then. It’s your life.
— What do you mean? I said.
— I mean that it’s yours, he said, giving me a funny look. Not to make me feel uncomfortable; he didn’t mean to embarrass me. But I was embarrassed. — Has no one ever said that to you before?
— Chinese people don’t talk that way, I said.
CARNEGIE / The next day the Baileys and I walked Independence Island one last time. It was surprisingly gray for July—the sort of Maine day when the sky and water and land all seem ingeniously derived from one bargain-basement material. How much smaller the island seemed, leveled! Not all the cabins were burnt flat to the ground. Here and there parts of walls still poked up. The Jeep was still recognizable, and the bicycle ferry. Yet like an unfurnished apartment, the peninsula seemed too small to have held everything we remembered it to have held. The footprints of the buildings, likewise, seemed unexpectedly miniscule.
What grew was the sky. Legrandin’s patch of blue, said Peter, is much enlarged; and how newly enormous it did seem, its grand belly stretching on and on. The peninsula sat unmistakably high relative to its surroundings, but how infinitesimally so compared to the sky to which it aspired. And how much closer it seemed now to the trailer park—so short a stone’s throw that the peninsula almost seemed an extension of the park, awaiting trailers. Trailer residents watched us as we circumambulated on our plane, slightly above them, hands in our pockets. They were trying not to bother us. Still we could hear the more projective of their voices providing avid commentary on our progress, against a background murmur: Such a shame, such a shame. Every comment was, to our surprise, compassionate. We’d noticed on the way in that several people had tucked flowers into our gate. Now we beheld, on a large rock, a heart drawn in charcoal. In its center was scrawled, Mr. Su.