by Leslie Li
His wife said: “In life we are told that we must bear the bitter and the sweet. The sweet is easy to bear. We don’t question it. The bitter we say we cannot bear, yet when it comes, we bear it.” She looked down at the infant dozing on her breast “We will call her Bittersweet.”
I had the appropriate nickname and the humble beginnings of my heroine — generous parting gifts from my centering rock — when Mr. Karjalainen arrived, accompanied by his ten-year-old daughter, Hannele. Since it was too early to take me to the bus in town, Hannele stripped to her birthday suit, clambered to the top of a high boulder not far from my centering rock, and hurled herself headlong into the sea.
“But what about the sea snakes?” I asked her father.
He looked at me, a baffled expression on his weather-beaten face. No snakes. Years ago, but not now. No tanukis or vipers either.
With more than a little envy, as well as humility gendered by having lived with the sea close at hand, I watched Hannele turn somersault after rapturous somersault in the Prussian-blue, serpentless sea.
JUK SING
The soggy square of cardboard wedged between the two crates read: 5 for $2 (45 ¢ each). Tangelos are my favorite fruit. Half tangerine, half pomelo. Half sweet, half sour. The grizzled vendor noticed, actually anticipated, where my wandering eyes settled, peeled a pink plastic bag, thin as a membrane, from the thick stack hanging from the meat hook overhead, and with a practiced snap of his wrist ballooned it full of air right over the hybrid globes.
I pointed to the buckling cardboard sign. “That’s the price for the tangelos, right? Not for the mandarin oranges.”
There it was. Again. The slight, turtle-like retraction of the head, the momentary hardening of the irises, the truculent grunt rather than a comprehensible reply to my question. A grunt that said perhaps yes, perhaps no, depends on who’s asking. Just as I was about to turn away and find a more civil greengrocer, or one who spoke some English, or at least admitted to understanding it, he nodded, just perceptibly I held up one hand, five fingers outspread.
Next stop, a curio shop. I chose the one — of many, all indistinguishable in merchandise and decor — right across the street. The cramped space was presided over by a chain-smoking elder. I wandered the narrow aisles and stopped in front of a pile of bamboo flutes. I was in the throes of redecorating my apartment feng shui-style: moving my furniture around for maximum harmony with the natural order and maximum energy and profit in the New Year, which was about to begin. The Chinese, or Lunar, New Year, that is. A good time to institute change. The bamboo flutes cost me 99¢ apiece. Within my redecorating budget and worth every penny I decided, since a beam bisected the living room of my Greenwich Village apartment. According to feng shui, the beam produced “psychic compression” in the resident unfortunate enough to be living under it, thwarting both business acumen and personal development. Placed on the oppressive beam, the flutes pumped chi, or vital energy, around the room, obviating the beam’s ill effect.
“Juk sing.”
I looked up into the bemused face of the chain-smoker to whom I had just handed two dollars.
“I beg your pardon?” What I meant was: Are you speaking to me? Not: What is juk sing?
“You juk sing,” he replied. “Same as them.” He looked at the two flutes. “Bamboo with nothing inside. Chinese who no speak Chinese. Chinese who look Chinese no act Chinese. No culture inside. You like them.” He took the two bamboo flutes in his nicotine-stained hands and dropped them into a paper bag.
I thought of asking for my money back. Instead I threw the flutes in with the tangelos and, aware that the man’s derogatory eyes were still upon me, stood in the open doorway fingering a pair of crimson tassels shimmying in the breeze. As I crossed the threshold out onto Mott Street, I gave them a final, dismissive flick of my fingers, in answer to his disparaging comment.
I was early, and it was cold. I ducked inside the bank at the corner of Mott and Canal with its glass front and warm vestibule, a perfect waiting room and vantage point. People entered and exited, their sights set directly and unswervingly — like the straight line Chinese evil spirits are restricted to travel — on their purpose and therefore oblivious of me, while I shifted back and forth to accommodate their comings and goings. Despite the freezing temperature, the sun was out in full force and flashed its reflection off the frequently opening and closing outer doors directly into my eyes. I squinted and moved out of the way of a depositor- or borrower-to-be. Was I seeing correctly? I glanced at my watch. There they were, at precisely the appointed hour. He, holding her elbow as he chivalrously guided her across the busy street. She, in her black Persian lamb toque tilted saucily to one side. If they were younger, they could have been the proverbial young lovers; if they were older, the proverbial old partners, a “whole” couple to whom destiny had been kind, blessing them with many sons. As it was, they were separated, the parents of four daughters.
I waved. They didn’t acknowledge me. I waved again, with the same results. I set my shoulder to the thick glass door and pushed. As it swung closed, I swiveled my head, in case a person might be right behind me, and saw that the bright sun striking its transparent surface turned it into a mirror: my parents were not able to see me wave, only their own reflection.
My father slipped a long mailing tube into my pink plastic bag. What’s this? my eyes asked. The corners of his mouth turned down, his shoulders rose up, and he shook his head, all just minimally — a triumvirate of gestures that signified, Nothing important. The three of us walked along Mott Street. My bag of tangelos, flutes, and now, a mailing tube thumped clumsily against my shin and occupied so much space on the narrow sidewalk that I was constrained to fall a few steps behind my parents. The proverbial dutiful daughter.
My father looked over his shoulder. “I have so many I thought I should get rid of one.”
Inside the doorway of the restaurant he’d chosen — always a flight down or a flight up, never on street level — stood a man with his hands clasped behind his back, rocking on the balls of his feet as though he’d been waiting quite some time. I estimated he was about my father’s age. His face was oval, the color of old ivory and just as smooth, until it crinkled in recognition and pleasure.
“This is my friend. A high school classmate from China,” my father informed my mother and me in English. “And this is my wife and my daughter,” he said, this time in Chinese, to his obviously non-English-speaking friend, who looked at my mother and me with solicitous interest, bobbed his head, and smiled in acknowledgment.
I looked at my mother, the wan smile of first introduction still on my lips. No names. Merely our relationship to the speaker. Friend. Wife. Daughter. Typical. As was my father’s inviting someone else to lunch without telling us. What was atypical was the fact that my parents were eating dim sum together in Chinatown for the first time since their separation almost twenty years prior.
My paternal grandmother had no name either — merely a number denoting her rank in the family hierarchy, thus her duties and responsibilities to her immediate and extended family — until she married my grandfather. It was he who gave her her name. It was marriage which bestowed upon her personhood, along with a fresh set of duties and responsibilities to a second set of people, her husband’s immediate and extended family
All the banquettes and chairs in the restaurant were occupied. We’d have to wait. I rummaged in my shoulder bag and pulled out the travel section of the Sunday Times, an advance copy There smack-dab on the front page and on three pages within was my very first published article. It concerned Guilin. I’d brought the entire travel section. I wanted my parents to see the place of honor and the number of pages my article occupied.
My father, however, was otherwise engaged. He was saying, now in Mandarin (some of which I understood), now in jangling, jarring Cantonese (all of which was incomprehensible), something to his friend, who responded in the same Mandarin-Cantonese mix, then, with a quick nod to my mother and me, f
led down the flight of stairs. Astonished, my mother and I looked at each other, then at my father.
“He went to find an emptier restaurant,” my father explained.
Just then, four Occidentals stood up, the legs of their chairs groaning against the floor in tandem with their moans of overindulgence and sighs of satiation. A harried young woman clutching a teapot screeched at us and held up four fingers of her free hand. My mother and I cast each other a weary, knowing glance. Musical dim sum, our eyes said simultaneously. We should have expected this. Missing our fourth and resigned to mishap and mayhem, my mother and I hung back, but my father darted forward toward the waitress. After they exchanged a few words and nods and glanced at my mother and me, my father gestured us toward the liberated table before any potential usurpers, a number of whom stood behind us, could wrest it away. Once my mother and I were seated, my father yelled over the cacophony of voices, the clatter of dishes, “I’ll go find him and bring him back.” Then he leaned toward me, as though he had a secret for my ears alone. “Do you know? My friend has a daughter who’s a professor at MIT, in biochemistry”.
After he threaded his way through the tables and disappeared down the stairs, I turned to my mother. “It’s amazing how proud Daddy is of the accomplishments of other people’s children, as if it underscores the failures of his own.”
My mother responded by smiling benignly and asking a passing waiter to bring a pot of jasmine tea.
When I was a junior at Bronx Science, my father decided that I would be a physicist. At the end of my sophomore year at the University of Michigan, also my father’s choice for me (based on the fact that it was that American icon, a Big Ten college, and that many Chinese were enrolled there), I decided, by attrition more than anything else, to major in that very nebulous area of study, American and English literature, which was bad enough. But when in my junior year, after taking a single art course, I decided to transfer from Liberal Arts to Art and Design, my father put his foot down. He told me that if I carried out my insidious plan (he assumed it would be behind his back), I could pay for my schooling as well as for my living expenses. A physicist made good money and was respected. A teacher of English, which is what I would be if I majored in English, wouldn’t make much money but at least I wouldn’t be disparaged. But an artist! An artist led a dissolute life and was hounded by the CIA. After a few tearful and angry scenes — the tears were mine, the anger my father’s — I renounced my intention to switch schools and resigned myself to remaining where I was. I’m sure it cost my father considerable face to surrender his dream for me, as well as to stop boasting to his friends in that effusively modest, self-abnegating way unique to proud Chinese parents, that I was going to be a physicist, an astrophysicist no less, to conceal the fact that I was fated to become an English teacher, perhaps a librarian (what else did one do with a degree of that sort?), something safe if dull and therefore consonant with women’s work.
“I found him!”
My father and his long-lost schoolmate settled themselves into the two other chairs while my mother, expressionless, poured them some tea.
I ruffled the travel section of the Sunday Times. “Look how nicely—”
My father’s incipient interest was distracted by the approaching trolley, whose conductor droned in indifferent nasal syllables: “Har gow. Lo bak go. Siu mai. Char siu bao.”
It’s said that Chinese food ranks as the world’s most refined cuisine and that among Chinese the act of eating is also one of intense yet subtle nonverbal communication. But the eloquence of such a language escapes me. I slid the newspaper back into my shoulder bag and consumed my dim sum in a silence punctuated every so often by a discreet burp or two, or a wild burst of rapid-fire Cantonese or more mellifluous Mandarin exchanged between my father and his friend. My mother, understanding neither, and I, understanding some, retreated into a wordless world of spearing dumplings with our chopsticks and balancing the lid of the teapot between spout and rim, a signal to whichever waiter happened to be passing by that a fresh brew was needed.
My father pointed at his friend with his chopsticks, an impropriety which caused my mother to purse her lips. “Did you know? My friend’s four daughters support him and his wife.”
As if on cue, my mother and I raised our eyebrows, signifying that we were favorably impressed, and nodded, once, twice, proof that we appreciated the information, that it met with our approval. My mother was one of five daughters, four of whom were working by the time they were four years old, singing in four-part harmony and tap-dancing in kiddie revues. Of the quartet my mother was the sole acrobat, performer of backbends and splits, de-former of her body parts into curlicues and pretzel shapes. With what they earned — and as children, no less — they supported not only their two parents but their baby brother and sister as well. Dutiful daughters if ever dutiful daughters existed. And they weren’t even wholly Chinese. But did my mother say anything? Did I?
Unlike my mother’s, my own formative years were parochial to the extreme. College summers I worked at my father’s office on Broad Street or at Saks Fifth Avenue, where my mother was lingerie buyer. After college I moved to Boston to attend graduate school I walked in the door of Boston University only to walk out (I didn’t even make it into the lobby), and soon landed a job in public relations at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. After nine months I was bored, restless, and frustrated. Not knowing a soul or what I would do there and caring even less, I absconded to Paris. Four weeks, I told my parents and believed myself. Four weeks in Paris became four years in Europe. My father blamed my mother for my decision to forgo further education and instead live like a gypsy in a foreign land: “That (meaning the willingness to exhibit oneself) comes from your side of the family”. After all, he continued, hadn’t I displayed myself by modeling at the Mademoiselle fall fashion show? And again at her store where I’d been selected for the Saks Fifth Avenue College Board fashion show? After all, he had never been a Kim Loo Sister. He had never been paraded onstage before an anonymous, ogling public.
A telling remark, since my father’s initial attraction to my mother was not because she had brains (which he would soon discover, and in generous supply) but because she was — and still is — beautiful and, even more, suffused with that elusive, unquantifiable virtue, charm. He was fresh off the boat, a foreign student at the University of Chicago, when he first saw my mother performing in George White’s Scandals. There she was, up onstage singing, dancing, and turning cartwheels. And there he was, ogling her from the first row, literally at her feet. His marrying her — a guailou, and a performer to boot — had enraged his rigid Confucianist patriarch of a father to the point of relegating his firstborn son to the land beyond Dog Mountain. Not until my mother gave him his first grandchild did my grandfather forgive my father’s dereliction of duty by recalling him to the land of the living, by no longer considering him dead. “Yon don’t know your father well enough to speak that way You don’t know what it cost your father, a Chinese man, to defy his father by marrying me.” This my mother told me once, when I was complaining about him, castigating him, certain that she would see my point of view and side with me. “You just don’t know.”
But then my mother had always served as go-between for my father and me: the interpreter of my father’s feelings and my own, the smoother of ruffled feathers, the blunter of sharp words. It was she who had arranged my first encounter with him after my four “wasted” years in France and Italy — a meeting which took place over an assortment of pastries and a starvation diet of meaningful dialogue. She had been present on that occasion as she was on this: arbitrator and referee. Both times, we ate snacks from Chinatown, drank tea, spoke in platitudes, and, when we weren’t speaking or eating, maintained a strained silence.
The ways my father and I saw life, the ways we lived our lives, were as different as our mother tongues. Between us lay a chasm of miscommunication and incomprehension that my mother tried valiantly to bridge with the language
of wisdom, compassion, and mostly well-timed silences. When I first told him, proudly, that I was a freelance writer, yoked to no company, he insinuated that freelancing was tantamount to being unemployed and asked why I didn’t find work at a reputable firm where work was regular and whose name everyone knew. He couldn’t understand how I could live the way I did, how I managed to support both myself and Anton. As for my pleasures, he scoffed at the dancing and ice-skating lessons I delighted in. Sheer frivolousness! Again, to my mother: “That’s from your side of the family” And just before I took refuge in Finland, he teased me mercilessly: “Why not go back to Langtoucun, our ancestral village? There’s no plumbing or electricity there, either.” (As it so happened, I would, and in his company.) When his sardonic laughter subsided, I failed to see, until this writing, the real impetus behind his raillery. I failed to see that the shake of his head at my strange views and ways and his mocking eyes, ready to dart away from me, concealed anxiety. When I thought of my father, it was this expression — of uncomprehending concern — and these feelings — of shame for his failure to have taught me what I should know; of helpless love for an almost and therefore failed son, a hapless if not wayward child — that most often came to mind. When I tried to summon an image of my father’s father, whom I barely knew, it was the same vision: Grampa shaking his head sadly and brooding over his firstborn son who had failed to follow in his overwhelming footsteps.
What the Chinese fear most is to be alone in life. They love their families and friends. They want them around for the renao they bring, the heat and noise of human relationships. Second to the lack of human warmth, they fear physical cold. My father must have thought: What kind of woman is this daughter of mine who longs for solitude and life in a log cabin in freezing Finland? She should stay put, get married, give me a son-in-law and her son a father. She should get a real job. She should think of her happiness in the present and her security in her old age. A woman needs to have her family and her people around her. It is the proper way to live. Each generation is a link in the great chain of life. No one can drop out without breaking it.