Land of Big Numbers

by Te-Ping Chen

  “One hundred fifty thousand yuan.”

  Boyang looked genuinely astonished, then laughed without mirth. “Where would I have that much money?” Zhu Feng waited for him to say something further, but that was all.

  Junling had dropped her chopsticks with a clatter. “One hundred fifty thousand yuan,” she said, and then repeated the sum out loud. She looked at him, and Zhu Feng was struck by the fear on her face. “I don’t understand,” she said. “How could you owe so much?”

  The silence expanded and filled the table. Zhu Feng waited for them to say something else, to offer something, anything, but there was nothing. A hollow feeling was stealing over him: panic, he suspected, was not far behind. “Forget it,” he mumbled.

  He served himself some more cabbage, trying to camouflage the shaking in his hands. He shouldn’t have bothered asking them, he thought resentfully. It was useless to expect anything of them.

  After a few more bites, he pushed back his chair and left the table. He went to his room and lay down, trying not to think about what had just occurred. Instead he thought about what his mother had said about Boyang, a story nearly impossible to square with the man who had raised him. He tried to picture his father getting struck in the thigh with a bullet. What had he been thinking? What kind of man had he been then? Angrier, surely, more full of life. He pictured the scene again, only now, like Time Clock, the bullets moving backward, out of his father’s thigh, his thigh sealing up, the hole in his pants healing, the bullet reversing its trajectory through the sky, back into the barrel that fired it. His father probably still wouldn’t be rich. But maybe he’d be strong.

  Outside, his mother was clearing dishes with a clatter. He heard the television being silenced, water sounding in the bathroom, and the click of his parents’ door as it shut. He turned on his side and pulled the sheet up.

  Give it a few more days, he told himself. Just a few more days and you will be fine. All that anxious refreshing, all that marking of time—what was the point? He had days to work with, which were made up of hours, made of minutes, made of seconds—​he was young, he had time. This was the way the world worked: you couldn’t buckle over, couldn’t be afraid. Something would step into the breach, he told himself. The market would straighten itself out, the government was going to intervene. The world was a profusion of opportunities waiting to be unfolded, he thought as he drifted off to sleep. He had only to stretch out his hand.

  Beautiful Country

  We are riding in the car when he spots a set of ramshackle stalls with hand-painted signs and pulls over. Eric can’t resist the sight of handwriting trying to sell him things, whether it’s a kid’s lemonade stand or swirly script on a bistro chalkboard, or in this case, a highway sign saying NATIVE CRAFTS.

  I try to avoid looking too long at any one bracelet but Eric picks one up anyway. “It’s genuine turquoise,” the woman says, and helps him slide it over my unwilling wrist.

  The beads are too bulky, the silver too bright. “I’m okay,” I tell him.

  “It’s beautiful,” he says. “Besides, we’re supporting the local economy.” He hands her a twenty over my protests.

  I thank him reluctantly, and he nods. “You like turquoise,” he says, so proud of himself for remembering that I briefly forgive him his generosity.

  Farther down, a woman is selling dream catchers made from rawhide and feathers. He asks for tips on good local food, and seems disappointed when she recommends a fast-food joint nearby. He asks whether she uses dream catchers herself, and she hesitates before saying yes.

  He buys two, one for his mother and one for his sister. And because I feel guilty about my lack of enthusiasm for the bracelet, for this trip, I buy a cheap, postcard-size sand painting I see him eyeing, a crude geometric figure made from pink and beige sand. I don’t admire it myself, but I pay the woman and carefully count and fold the bills she hands me into my wallet.

  When we get back in the car, he turns to me. “Just so you know, you shouldn’t count the change like that in front of someone,” he says.

  “Why not?” I ask, mystified.

  “It’s rude,” he tells me. My cheeks get hot. Even after more than a decade in this country, I’m still getting caught out.

  “It’s okay,” he says kindly. “You didn’t know.”

  The sky is lined with furrows of long, heavy clouds as we drive into the park. It’s late in the day, yellow panels of light in the trees. I tell him we’re probably going to miss the sunset. “There’ll be another one tomorrow,” I say.

  He doesn’t answer, but pushes down on the gas. Beneath his happy-go-lucky air, there’s a hardness in Eric that doesn’t tolerate failure, not in the people he loves, anyway. The night before last, when he got home from work, I greeted him on the couch, still in pajamas, as I’d been all day. It had been a week of extra shifts at the hospital, and I was drained. “You’re so crisp,” I said, trying to sound cheerful, feeling the starch in his shirt crinkle. “Like a potato chip.”

  “And you’re like a potato,” he said, ruffling my hair harder than necessary. “Come on, let’s get you out of the house.”

  The trees at the Grand Canyon are scraggly and shake in the wind. The sun is low and waiting to fall. We park at an outlook and walk toward the edge, hand in hand. The canyon stretches before us, all shadow and orange cliffs and a white finger of river. Eric makes a hoop with his arm and pretends to catch me in it, like a butterfly net, and I pretend to laugh.

  Around us are retirees in hats, families with squirming children, and tourists speaking different tongues. I catch a few snips of Mandarin: an SUV of young Chinese travelers has just parked, and I stifle the urge to immediately rush over and say hi. After a day’s drive across empty landscapes, the crowds are a relief. What’s the opposite of claustrophobia, I wonder. What’s the word for feeling you can relax only in a crowd?

  Farther down, a man with a goatee takes out a guitar and plunks away. The instrument is halting, the man’s voice rich and creamy and beautiful. I look up to smile at Eric, but he’s turned away. “Let’s find someplace quieter,” he says.

  He heads to the side of the lot, where the guardrail ends, and I follow. The earth is burnt orange and craggy. I can see what’s caught his eye—​a cluster of flat rocks jutting out from a ledge that’s fifty feet away and a steep scramble down—​and roll my eyes.

  “Let’s just watch it from here,” I say.

  “This is better,” he says, already four paces ahead.

  Not long after we first met, when I was right out of nursing school, he insisted on taking me backpacking. “You’ll love it,” he told me. He took me to hike a glacier, where I was terrified every few feet it would crack and send me into freezing water. We hiked a forest trail with gnats so thick they got in your eyes. I sent dutiful photos to my parents, like: “Look! Trees! Your daughter in America, enjoying nature’s splendors!” Since we moved to Tucson, though, Eric’s love of the great outdoors has been mostly a solo affair. Every year or so, he and his buddies will go camp somewhere, Utah or Colorado. “You should come,” he’ll say. “It’ll be good for you.” I tell him I’ve seen trees before.

  I follow him now, feeling my legs start to wobble. There’s a new chill in the air as the sun retreats, and I wish that I’d brought a jacket.

  “The colors are so great,” he calls back exuberantly. “They remind me of when we visited this petrified forest as kids.” Eric’s parents drove a VW Bug cross-country after college, before becoming stockbrokers who occasionally smoked joints with their teenage kids. They were those kinds of parents.

  “Did the trees look scared?” I say.

  He laughs, and waits for me as I clamber down, gingerly moving sideways.

  “See, you’re fine,” he says.

  The sun is a tiny dot of egg yolk, pulling all the brightness in the sky with it as it sinks. We find a shelf of chalky rock to sit on, several feet back from the edge. I take a few deliberate breaths and try not to look down. T
he wind doesn’t reach us here.

  He puts his arm around me. “Beautiful, isn’t it, pickle?” he whispers with a proprietary glow, and I nod.

  From this angle, the canyon is in shadow, nothing like the gas station postcards I bought earlier showing a molten gold vista at sunset, three for a dollar. I tell myself to relax and enjoy the moment. I tell myself this will be the year that Eric gets his promotion, that I will find a better job, and we will get married at last. I tell myself not to be too concerned that I found a lipstick case on the floor of his car last week, one that wasn’t mine. In our eight years of dating, Eric has been unfaithful just once, and since then, we’ve been happy. There are nurses at the hospital who tell me that I’m lucky, they’ve been in relationships with worse.

  “There it goes,” he says. It takes me a moment to realize he’s talking about the sun.

  Back at the outlook, a tour bus has parked and a couple dozen Chinese tourists have descended. They’re the kind of tourists I never used to see in the U.S.: older, faces dark and wrinkled like those of migrant workers in large Chinese cities, wearing matching red-and-white hats, flush with newly disposable cash. Farther down, a group of Russians are milling around with big cameras, and a slim-hipped couple with identical platinum hair is kissing by the railing.

  We get back in the car and Eric rolls down the windows, letting the scent of sagebrush rush in.

  “All the national parks are so crowded now,” he says as we drive on. “When we were kids, it was never like this.”

  I don’t say anything.

  During a road trip last spring, he says, he and his buddies hit an hour-long traffic jam in Yellowstone, after too many cars stopped to look at bear cubs gamboling in a meadow. “It was ridiculous,” he says, shaking his head. “I mean, come on, people, leave them alone.”

  I think to myself, I would have been one of the people photographing the bears. Then, as Eric starts talking about slacklining and free climbs, I look out the window and think about hibernation: how wonderful, to fall asleep and wake up to a new season.

  * * *

  We eat at a crowded diner that serves ice water in glasses as big as boxing gloves and something called a Shark-o-Rama, which the table beside us orders, an electric-blue drink with shark gummies and whipped cream on top.

  The waitress doesn’t take our orders for so long that I grow impatient and march them over myself, rather than resort to the delicate ballet of eye contact that Eric prefers. “We’re in a hurry,” I tell her, even though we’re not, because I assume otherwise it’ll take another hour to get served. I am patient about most things, but not food.

  As we eat, Eric tells me about a director at his firm who recently returned from a business trip to China. “His girlfriend wanted a vase from China, but he didn’t have time to shop,” he said. “So he just bought her one from Pier One when he got back.”

  “Ha ha,” I say.

  For our anniversary last year, Eric came with me to visit China for the first time. He charmed my parents with his bad ni haos and brought them gifts of Hershey bars, which no one had the heart to tell him local supermarkets had sold for years. He snapped photos of Chinglish at restaurants and of old men playing chess in the streets. He liked the food but confessed himself disappointed in the Great Wall, which was so crowded with people, he said, that it would’ve been easier to crowd-surf than climb. “Sorry, I just wanted to be honest,” he told me, and I thought to myself, Sometimes it’s okay to lie.

  Like the nurses at my hospital, everyone thought he was so handsome, even as I could sense my parents’ skepticism that he had been with their daughter for so long and somehow not proposed. “I hate that you’re so good-looking,” I once told him after we’d started dating, only partly in jest. “It means you can get away with anything.” He didn’t argue.

  * * *

  The next morning, we stop at the visitors’ center before heading out for a hike. I fill our water bottles and study a sign explaining the differences between sedimentary and metamorphic rocks. Eric gets a map and we drive another mile before parking at a trailhead and setting out. He is whistling as we walk, and the sound of it grates on me.

  “Please stop,” I say, and he does.

  Seen in the thin morning light, the Grand Canyon is a vision of fairy-tale orange and rust and misty blue. The trail we’re on follows its rim. It’s paved and turns out to be popular with women with strollers and retirees with slow-moving, pendulous rears, which we keep passing. I can sense Eric’s determination to overtake them all, and also that it’s not going to happen. The trailhead parking lot was packed. I don’t know why he’s always so fixated on getting Mother Nature by herself, anyway, like he’s a guy at a party trying to corner a pretty girl.

  For a moment I flash back to my childhood in Dalian, northeast China. On weekends, families would visit the nearby park, with its cheerful stands selling kites and snacks, its shrieking children and litter of peanut shells, and elderly men who would stroll solemnly, equipped with handheld radios blasting high-pitched Chinese opera. Everyone grumbled over the 10-yuan ticket price, but it paid for the park to bring in hundreds of tulips, which they planted every spring. It wasn’t natural, but it was nice.

  “Maybe we could go back to China this summer,” he says, as though reading my mind.

  “I’d like that,” I say. “My parents are getting older, you know.” At night sometimes I lie awake and worry that they’ll slip and fall or get into an accident while I am here, so many thousands of miles away. Each time I see them, they are more gray and brittle than the last.

  “They’re only in their sixties,” he says. “Same as mine.”

  But his parents are the kind of sixty-year-olds who plan hikes on Machu Picchu with other energetic retirees, and dance the rumba at their friends’ vow-renewal ceremonies. Mine are the kind who worked in the fields the first thirty years of their lives, and then in a semiconductor factory, fitting tiny parts inside of other tiny parts, until their fingers and backs were crooked. If it weren’t for my uncle, who worked for the government, I never would’ve had the chance to study abroad.

  I’m about to tell him that when a trim woman jogs by in tight blue leggings and a magenta top. She has piercing blue eyes and ash-blond hair, and only her skin gives her age away, so finely crinkled it looks like that of a desert turtle. She gives us a quick, accusing stare as we move out of her way, also so turtle-like that we look at each other and stifle a laugh.

  “Age is just a number,” Eric says.

  * * *

  That night, I call my old friend Jessica, who, even in scrubs, was so statuesque and beautiful that the sound of her voice, deep and throaty like a man’s, always caught everyone by surprise. She moved away years ago, and I can hear the sound of Maine in her tone: the warm sweater she’s wearing, the fuzzy boots, and the ease that comes with the fact that both her children are asleep, like the two angels they are. My goddaughters. I tell her about the colors here, the way the clouds cast ever-shifting shapes on the landscape, a slow-drifting blue chimera.

  “So you’re forgiving him,” she says.

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” I tell her. “It was just one tube of lipstick.”

  She says, “The Grand Canyon is beautiful. That doesn’t mean he isn’t a jerk.”

  “Relationships are about trust,” I say, and wonder at the preachy tone in my voice. It sounds familiar, and then I realize it’s borrowed from all the daytime talk shows that I’ve been watching lately.

  We are both quiet. I can picture her frown, the way she’s probably tucking the phone against her shoulder as she knits or maybe does a crossword, always busy, getting things done. Eric always liked her. Back when we’d first arrived in Tucson and she was still single, after a rough day we would go out with the other girls on our floor and she would slam down shots and toss her long hair and outdrink everyone in the bar.

  “You’ve been together eight years,” she says. “What is he waiting for?”

&nbs
p; I think back to the early days after Eric and I first moved in together, the exhilaration of seeing our books lined up on the same shelves, of a shared bag of groceries. Once, during a rainstorm in Tucson, after a new carpet had been delivered to our apartment—​the first big thing we’d bought together—​we lay on it and talked about our hopes for the future. I told him I pictured children running on grass wearing candy-colored clothes, days spent playing in sandboxes and kindergarten teachers gentle as bunny rabbits. He said that sounded nice.

  “He could have given someone a ride home from work,” I say.

  After lunch, on our way back south, I tell Eric that the name “America” in Chinese, Meiguo, means “beautiful country.” When I was very young, I confess to him, I pictured a pastel-tinted land of flowers. On TV shows, I say, the sight of so many Americans who worked ordinary jobs—​teachers and handymen—​and still lived in enormous houses, with lawns like green moats, astounded me.

  “In China, we would’ve called them villas,” I say.

  “I know,” he says. “You’ve told me.”

  He is distracted, scanning the horizon for signs of rain. The air has been getting heavy, the way it does before a storm. Part of me hopes it will pour, flood the roads, a real “weather event,” like they say on the news. In Tucson, the flash floods are nearly biblical. One moment, the land is dry as a bone, the saguaros parched and skinny. The next, the rain is lashing down, the sound of an angry god pummeling the city with a thousand tiny stones, and the streets course like rivers. It’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to an apocalypse, and it’s always a wonder, a relief.

  Afterward, the waters recede and the saguaros’ pleats grow full and disappear. The sun beats down and the land turns orange once more. America is indeed very mei—​very beautiful—​but Arizona, I sometimes tell my friends back home, is like living on Mars.