And that was the truth. She really did just want to help people with their immigration problems. She did not want one of those fancy paneled offices with the in-house cappuccino and the million-dollar view. She wanted the kind of office you saw in forties movies, with worn wood floors and frosted glass doors. She wanted to tilt her head and give a kindly look to clueless people sitting on the edge of their chairs and ask, “What brings you here?” People like her parents and mine. She wanted to teach immigrants how to become citizens. She wanted to teach them how to stick up for themselves.
Other people, though, wanted her to be a judge. In fact, in my heart of hearts, I wanted to see her on the Supreme Court. The first Asian American on the Supreme Court! Or didn’t she want to work for the ACLU? I asked her once. Talk about making a difference! Not just for one family at a time, but for lots of families, for all time. Of course, to even begin to think about it, you had to have a minimum of six years of litigation experience—that’s what it said on their website. And to get litigation experience you had to get a public defender or prosecutor job. Or, if you had loans and needed to make more money—as she did, perhaps?—she nodded—you needed to do the litigation track at a top-notch firm, from which spot you could then go to a U.S. Attorney’s Office or DOJ, the whole sleep-no-more slog.
“Sell my soul, you mean,” she said, but I could tell she was thinking about it. The ACLU.
“No, no,” I said. “You wouldn’t have to sell your soul.” Never mind that all I knew about a life in law came from Scott Turow novels; still, I sagaciously went on. “You’d just have to talk enough in class for Professor Radin to stop describing you as quiet. You’d have to channel your inner Gunner and, you know. Gun a little.”
She looked at me and crossed her eyes.
“Have you always fastened on the utterly quixotic?” she asked. Then she uncrossed her eyes and smiled and said, “Actually, Eric says the same thing. About talking more, I mean.”
As Eric was her boyfriend, this was and wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
But the next day, she began to try, and that was what I wanted to see.
• • •
Not being a big-name law school, we were not exactly overrun with visits by Am Law 100 firms. It was mostly regional firms that came to recruit. A smattering of powerhouses did come through, though—typically because someone had some connection to the university—and every once in a while, a student subsequently landed a big-deal summer associate job. Once in the known history of the school, too, it had happened that, after the big-deal summer associate job, a person from our school had gone on to land a permanent position at the firm—to become an honest-to-God big-deal associate. That was a decade ago, but still. Why shouldn’t the second person be Arabella?
She scoffed. But when the class rankings came out, and there she and Gunner were—number 1 and number 2—she did wonder if maybe, when the time came, she should interview?
“Yes!” I all but yelled at her. “Yes! You have to do it! You do! You have to do it for all of us!”
“Whoever ‘us’ is, I think you should do it for yourselves,” she said. “Starting with you.”
In the end, though, she agreed that I was no lawyer. As for why, then, I was in law school? I didn’t really have to tell her. For while she herself wasn’t in law school because of her parents, she was here at Podunk Law because they wanted her nearby; she knew how Chinese parents could be. But never mind. When an on-campus interview sign-up sheet was posted, she held her nose and did it. She signed up.
It started out that three Biglaw firms were coming. But first there was a hurricane and Westfall & Howe canceled. Then Berger, Berkman and Leebron canceled, too, also because of the storm. That left Goodman, Thompson and Pierce, who were scheduled to come a week later than the other firms. I helped Arabella prepare, combing the internet for advice, and found that most of it fell into three categories. The first was existential—Be positive! Be assertive! Be confident! The second was gnomic: Show that you are agreeable but show that you are no pushover. Show that you are unique but show that you fit in. Show that you are well informed but show that you would like to be informed. And so on.
The third, toughest category was spatial. Take up room with your arms, went this advice, especially if you are a woman. Take up room with your voice. Take up room with your manner. Take up room in your chair.
Take up room in your chair? Arabella tried mansplaying her legs; it hurt her hips, she said. As for thrusting her chin out and squaring her chest, she simply could not do these things with a straight face. But she could, she figured, wear her roommate’s size 4 jacket and, under it, a vest for bulk. And after a few tries, she found that pretending she was Gunner helped with her manner. Suddenly she could respond at length to what we agreed were lamer-than-lame prompts like Tell us about yourself, and Do you have any weaknesses?
She answered, answered, answered, answered. I nodded.
“Anything else we should know about you?” I asked finally.
“I broke up with Eric,” she said.
“Ah.” I jotted that down on my clipboard.
“Also,” she said, “since I know we don’t have a lot of time, I’d just like to make sure you realize I’m available for dinner after the interview.”
“Six o’clock?” I said.
“If that’s how business is done in your firm.”
“It is,” I said. “I mean, I hope it isn’t. But it is. It is.”
“Good,” she said.
As for what she was supposed to do if the interviewer threw his clipboard up into the air for joy, I decided not to test her.
Instead I just said, “You’re going to be great, Arabella.”
“Thank you for your time,” she said. And, “You are most generous person I have ever known.”
• • •
The day of the interview, I did one more thing. I greased the seat of Gunner’s bicycle with Vaseline, and for good measure greased his handlebar grips, too. Not so much that he would be in an accident, but enough that he’d have to spend twenty minutes in the men’s room trying to get the grease off before he could shake anyone’s hand. And then, of course, there would still be the issue of his crotch. Were anyone’s interview chances ever dashed because he had grease in his crotch? Of course not. Still, I hoped that it would disconcert and distract him. As for whether this was my finest moment as a human being? Well, no. Still I did it. Then I waited.
• • •
Arabella’s interview, she reported, went well enough. No surprises—for which she had to thank me, she said. I really had prepared her beautifully. But she did think the interviewer a bit inscrutable.
“Or maybe I should say guarded,” she said. “He looked like he had the nuclear codes and thought I might ask for them.”
“Hmm.”
“He did smile at the end, at least.”
“That’s good.”
“Then he asked me how tall I was.”
“Oh no. Did you tell him?”
“Yes. And then I said that if he was wondering, I weigh ninety-one pounds.”
“You didn’t.”
“You’re right, I didn’t. But I almost did.”
We laughed. I had picked a hippie restaurant nearby with every variation of tofu and brown rice possible, and with four kinds of kale smoothies. We tried all four, and then three of the Buddha bowls, and then an udon-miso thing, and all the world glowed with warmth and happiness and antioxidants until I told her about the grease.
• • •
Gunner did not get a summer associate position even though his great-uncle, it turned out, was the “Goodman” in Goodman, Thompson. Gunner was so crushed he missed a week of classes; people said he was thinking about transferring to business school. Was that true? Who knew. What was clearer was that classes were not the same without him. We missed having someone to irritate us, and the professors—the poor professors—were suffering. Indeed, they were getting so discouraged, having to cold-ca
ll people for every single question, that after a day or two we started to put our hands up more, just to help out. They were nice people who already wished they had better jobs, after all. We felt sorry for them. And so a bunch of us tried gunning—even me—until we were all gunning and gunning and gunning. It wasted a lot of time, to be honest. But it was fun, and did make the professors perk up.
As for Arabella, she, too, got a thumbs-down from Goodman, Thompson. Still, she was glad she had interviewed, she said, because it helped her figure a few things out. For example, it helped her figure out that she should try and transfer to a higher-ranked school. She was going to apply and see what happened, she said, and if she got in, bring it up with her parents.
“I am also going to start lifting weights,” she said. “I am too small.”
“Isn’t that selling your soul?” I said.
“No,” she said. “It’s strength training.”
Meanwhile, I got thrown out of school altogether. Arabella had called me a reprobate and a miscreant for the Vaseline business but she hadn’t reported me. It was Gunner who eventually figured out who’d smeared him, so to speak, and, though I apologized and had his suit cleaned twice, he nonetheless filed an official complaint.
Of course, my parents were apoplectic.
“I don’t think you’re even sorry,” observed Arabella, however.
“About Gunner?” I said. “Because I am sorry about Gunner.”
“About school,” she said.
“Well, about school let’s just say I’d rather be punished than rehabilitated,” I said. “I’m not about law.”
“No, you are about crime and punishment and war and peace,” she agreed.
“And justice for the people I love,” I added—which was kind of an overly venturesome thing to say, really. I didn’t think before I said it; in fact, you could say I was just gunning. But she turned and gave me a kiss, and when I plunged on and said I was going to try to find a job near whatever school she ended up at, she looked serious.
“Rich Lee,” she said thoughtfully. “Mr. Crime and Punishment and War and Peace.” And then, deft as ever, she didn’t tell me not to.
GISH JEN’s stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories four times, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. Featured in a PBS TV American Masters series, Jen is the author of four novels and a collection of stories. She has received support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute, and the Lannan Foundation, as well as a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She delivered the Massey Lectures in American Studies at Harvard University in 2012.
Her most recent book, a work of nonfiction, is titled The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap.
HA JIN
* * *
Finally I Am American at Heart
I have often been asked two questions. One is: What was the most surprising incident when you served in the Chinese People’s Army? The other: What surprised you most in America?
To both questions my answers are rather personal and internal. I served in the Chinese army for five years and saw terrible accidents. Soldiers got killed in military exercises and in collapsed constructions, but what surprised me most is something that none of my comrades might remember. A fellow soldier in our company was a wonderful basketball player, handsome and agile and six feet two inches tall. His parents were both senior officials in Beijing, in the Ministry of Railways. By contrast, most of us were from remote provinces, and many were sons of peasants. Toward the end of my third year in the army, word came that the basketball player’s mother was dying in Beijing and left him her final words. We all knew she was a revolutionary, and thought her last words must be wise and edifying, so we were eager to learn about them too. Then her final words for her son came: “Don’t ever give up your Beijing residence certificate.”
Without a residence certificate, one couldn’t live in Beijing permanently. But if you were not born in the capital, the only chance for you to get such a certificate was to find a permanent job in an official department or company that could help you get it. I was shocked by the mother’s last words, because they suddenly revealed to me that people in China were not born equal. Her words stayed with me and went deeper and deeper in my consciousness. For decades afterward I carried the bitterness, not just for myself but also for tens of millions of people who could never have such a privilege of living in the capital and who, by birth, were citizens of lower class, although China’s constitution guarantees equality to all its citizens. This inequality in residential status among the citizens actually contravenes China’s constitution, which has become meaningless in the eyes of the public.
As for what surprised me most in America, it was also a personal moment that turned out to be charged with meaning, but mainly for myself. When I came to the States to do graduate work in 1985, my family couldn’t come with me, both my wife and son having to remain in China, because at the time the Chinese government didn’t allow families to go abroad together. Like my compatriots, I accepted this rule without questioning it because it was made by the country. Among my fellow graduate students at Brandeis, some were from other countries. They knew I was married but was here without my family. Sangeeta and her boyfriend, Chuck, were from India, living one floor below me. At a party one evening, she asked me why I’d left my wife and child behind. I told her because the Chinese government did not allow them to come with me. I couldn’t explain further, since nobody could see the logic of such a rule. Out of the blue Sangeeta asked me, “Why don’t you sue your country?”
Her question stunned me, and I turned tongue-tied, unable to get my head around it. Could she sue India? I wondered. She must be able to if she had a legitimate case and also the means. But never had I heard of any Chinese citizen suing the country. Sangeeta’s question remained on my mind for many years and affected my view of the world. Gradually I came to realize that her question pointed to the core of democracy, namely that in the eyes of the law, the individual and the country are equal. If a country is wrong, a citizen is entitled to confront it.
It took one and a half years for my wife to join me here, but she couldn’t bring our son with her. So he couldn’t come to live with us until another two and a half years. By then, having stayed in American already for four years, I realized that all the forced separations among my compatriots and their families had been gratuitous, serving no purpose, as if the role of the powers that be was to make people suffer. Of course I couldn’t sue China. For citizens to be able to sue their country, there has to be a legal system that can guarantee their civil rights, both on paper and in practice. Because there has been no such practice in China, people tend to just cower to the state. Many even worship the country like a deity, willing to serve it unconditionally. Owing to China’s long ban on religions, people’s religious feelings have been diverted to the deification of the country. God is amoral, and so is your country, and all you can do is obey.
When the Tiananmen massacre broke out in June 1989, I was traumatized and remained in shock for weeks. I was so outraged that I became very outspoken, publicly condemning the killing of the unarmed civilians. As a result, the next spring when I sent in my passport for renewal, the Chinese consulate in New York confiscated it. Afterward, for seven years I had no passport. I couldn’t travel outside the States and became a man without a country. I had always planned on returning to China to teach, but that was out of the question now.
Finally in the fall of 1997 I was naturalized. At the ceremony, the new citizens were formally asked to renounce our loyalty to our former countries. Like the other new citizens, I swore my oath of allegiance to the US Constitution. A new citizen must be willing to perform noncombatant service in the armed forces to defend the Constitution. I assumed that this was equal to pledging loyalty to America, the country. I didn’t feel completely comfortable about the oath, but this was a necessary
step for me and my family if we wanted to become US citizens. In essence, it was a move for survival. Prior to the naturalization ceremony, I had read the Constitution, which struck me as something like a contract between the country and the people. It specifies repeatedly what rights the people keep or give to the government.
Nevertheless, unfamiliar with how this was enforced in practice, I didn’t think much of the Constitution, which seemed to be just words few people could abide by. That was my misconception, partly due to the despondency that sank deep in my heart. What disappointed me most were American double standards. To put this simply, the US government’s words and deeds didn’t match. During the Tiananmen massacre, President George H. W. Bush spoke a great deal about supporting the democratic movement in China and condemned the Communist regime roundly, but in no time he dispatched his secret emissary to Beijing to pacify the Chinese government. The White House’s double-dealing reflected crude American pragmatism. Americans tend to calculate everything in dollars. For the sake of business opportunities, the United States grew reluctant to defend human rights and even willing to relinquish our principles. On President Obama’s first visit to China in 2009, Hillary Clinton, secretary of state then, said on NPR that human rights were no longer an issue on the negotiation table because we owed China a huge debt and our economy was struggling to recover from the previous year’s recession. She said, “How can you talk about human rights to your creditor?” Hearing those words, I felt betrayed, my belief in American idealism shattered. Later I learned that Bill Clinton, after leaving the White House, had collected hefty fees when he gave speeches in China.
Besides pragmatism as a distinct trait of the American character, there is another aspect of the American character that I have always admired and cherished. That is American idealism. One can argue that because of having a black-and-white mind-set, Americans can become destructive, shaping the world according to our ideas or ideals. Such a tendency is dramatized vividly in Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American, specifically in the main character Alden Pyle, who turns blind to the human cost and suffering in carrying out the American plan for combating Communism and establishing a democratic force in Vietnam. Greene’s novel is a condemnation of US imperialism and might have its legitimacy, considering the violence the United States has unleashed in the world. However, he addresses only one aspect of the American character, which to me also embodies strength and integrity and even nobility, inseparable from idealism. In fact, we often talked about honesty, justice, equality, all of which show the other aspect of the American character, rooted in the belief in universal values.
It Occurs to Me That I Am America Page 20