Nick sits at the rolltop, flipping once more through the book. Last year he won the Stern Prize for Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute. This year, he’s a stock boy for a famous Chicago department store that has been dying a slow death for a quarter of a century. Granted, he has earned a degree that licenses him to make peculiar artifacts capable of embarrassing his friends and angering strangers. There’s a U-Stor-It in Oak Park crammed with papier-mâché costumes for street masques and surreal sets for a show that ran in a little theater near Andersonville and closed three nights later. But at twenty-five, the scion of a long line of farmers wants to believe that his best work might still be ahead of him.
It’s the day before Christmas Eve. Hoels will descend en masse tomorrow, but his grandmother is already in hog heaven. She lives for these days when the old, drafty house fills up with descendants. There’s no farm anymore, just the house on its island rise. All the Hoel land is long-term leased to outfits run from offices hundreds of miles away. The Iowa earth has been brought to its rationalized end. But for a while, for this holiday, the place will be all miracle births and saviors in mangers, as it was at Hoel Christmases for a hundred and twenty years running.
Nick heads downstairs. It’s midmorning, and his grandmother, father, and mother huddle around the kitchen table where the pecan rolls flow and the dominoes are already getting worn down to little Chiclets. Outside, the cold dips well below bitter. To counter the polar north winds pouring through the cedar-sided walls, Eric Hoel has cranked up the old propane space heater. There’s a fire blazing in the fireplace, food enough to feed the five thousand, and a new TV as big as Wyoming tuned to a football game no one cares about.
Nicholas says, “Who’s up for Omaha?” There’s an American Landscapes exhibit at the Joslyn Museum, only an hour away. When he pitched the idea the night before, the old folks seemed interested. Now they look away.
His mother smiles, embarrassed for him. “I’m feeling a little fluish, honey.”
Hs father adds, “We’re all pretty cozy, Nick.” His grandmother nods in woozy agreement.
“’Kay,” Nicholas says. “Heck with you all! I’ll be back for dinner.”
Snow blows across the interstate, while more is falling. But he’s a midwesterner, and his father wouldn’t be his father without putting virgin snow tires on the car. The American Landscapes show is spectacular. The Sheelers alone send Nick into fits of jealous gratitude. He stays until the museum kicks him out. When he leaves, it’s dark and the drifts swirl up above his boots.
He finds his way back onto the interstate and creeps east. The road is whited out. All the drivers foolish enough to attempt travel cling to one another’s taillights in slow procession through the white. The rut Nick plows has only the most abstract relation to the lane beneath. The shoulder’s rumble strip is so muffled by snow he can’t hear it.
Under a viaduct, he hits a sheet of frictionless ice. The car slaloms sideways. He surrenders to the freestyle slide, coaxing the car like a kite until it straightens. He flips his high beams on and off, trying to decide which is less blinding against the snowy curtain. After an hour, he has gone almost twenty miles.
A scene unfolds in the snow-black tunnel like a night-vision clip from a cop documentary. An oncoming eighteen-wheeler jackknifes into the median and swings around like a wounded animal, popping up on Nick’s side a hundred yards in front of him. He swerves past the wreck and slides off onto the right shoulder. The right rear of the car bounces off the guardrail. His front left bumper kisses the truck’s rear tire. He skids to a stop and starts shaking, so hard he can’t steer. The car edges itself into a rest area crawling with stranded motorists.
There’s a pay phone in front of the toilets. He calls the house, but the call won’t go through. Night before Christmas Eve, and phone lines are down all over the state. He’s sure his parents must be worried sick. But the only sane thing to do is curl up in the car and sleep for a couple of hours until everything blows over and the plows catch up with God’s shit fit.
He’s back on the road a little before dawn. The snow has mostly stopped, and cars creep by in both directions. He crawls home. The hardest part of the drive is climbing the little rise at the end of the interstate exit. He fishtails up the ramp and turns onto the road back to the farm. The way is drifted over. The Hoel Chestnut appears from a long way off, piled up in white, the only spire all the way to the horizon. Two small lights shine from the house’s upstairs windows. He can’t imagine what anyone is doing up so early. Someone has waited up all night for word of him.
The road to the house is piled high in snow. His grandfather’s old truck-plow is still in the shed. His father should have run it down and back at least a couple of times by now. Nick fights the drifts, but they’re too much. He leaves the car halfway up the drive and walks the last stretch to the house. Pushing through the front door, he bursts out singing. “Oh, the weather outside is frightful!” But there’s no one downstairs to laugh.
Later, he’ll wonder whether he knew already, there in the front doorway. But no: He must walk around to the foot of the stairs where his father is lying, head downward and arms bent at impossible angles, praising the floor. Nick shouts and drops to help his father, but there’s nothing left to help. He stands and takes the stairs, two at a time. But by now everything is as clear as Christmas, everything anyone needs to know. Upstairs, the two women curl up in their bedrooms and can’t be wakened—a late-morning sleep-in on Christmas Eve.
Blur rises up his legs and torso. He’s drowning in pitch. He runs back downstairs, where the old propane heater still cranks away, venting gas that rises and pools invisibly underneath the ceiling that Nick’s father has so recently snugged up with extra insulation. Nick blunders through the front door, trips down the porch steps, and falls into the snow. He rolls over in the freezing white, gasping and reviving. When he looks up, it’s into the branches of the sentinel tree, lone, huge, fractal, and bare against the drifts, lifting its lower limbs and shrugging its ample globe. All its profligate twigs click in the breeze as if this moment, too, so insignificant, so transitory, will be written into its rings and prayed over by branches that wave their semaphores against the bluest of midwestern winter skies.
MIMI MA
THE DAY IN 1948 when Ma Sih Hsuin gets his third-class ticket for a crossing to San Francisco, his father starts addressing him in English. Forced practice, for his own good. His father’s magisterial British colonial speech runs rings around Sih Hsuin’s own electrical engineer’s functional approximations. “My son. Listen to me. We’re doomed.”
They sit in the upstairs office of the Shanghai complex, half company trading house, half family compound. The enterprise of Nanjing Road percolates up to the window, and doom is nowhere to be seen. But then, Ma Sih Hsuin is not political, and his eyesight is that of a man who has worked too many math problems by candlelight. His father—scholar of art, master calligrapher, patriarch with one major and two minor wives—can’t help lapsing into metaphor. Metaphor embarrasses Sih Hsuin.
“This family has come so far. From Persia to the Athens of China, you might say.”
Sih Hsuin nods, although he would never say any such thing.
“We Hui Moslems have taken everything this country threw at us, and packaged it for resale. This building, our mansion in Hangzhou . . . Think of what we have outlasted. Ma resilience!”
Ma Shouying gazes out into the August sky, staring at all the calamities the Ma Trading Company has survived. Colonial exploitation. The Taiping uprising. The destruction of the family’s silk plantations by typhoon. The 1911 revolution and the ’27 massacre. His face turns toward the room’s dark corner. Ghosts are everywhere, victims of violations that not even the philosopher magnate who hired a pilgrim to go to Mecca for him dares to name out loud. He spreads one palm on the paper-stacked desk. “Even the Japanese couldn’t break us.”
HISTORY GIVES SIH HSUIN a rash, the random ebb and flow. He’ll travel
to the States in four days, one of a handful of Chinese students in all of 1948 to be granted visas. For weeks he has studied the maps, gone over the letters of acceptance, practiced all the inscrutable names: USS General Meigs. Greyhound Supercoach. Carnegie Institute of Technology. For a year and a half, he’s attended matinees of movies with Gable Clark and Astaire Fred, practicing his new tongue.
He plows on in English, out of pride. “If you want, I stay here.”
“Want you to stay? You have no idea what I’m saying.”
His father’s stare is like a poem:
Why do you linger
at this fork in the road
rubbing your eyes?
You don’t get me,
do you, boy?
Shouying pushes up from the chair and crosses to the window. He looks down the Nanjing Road, a place as eager as ever to profit from that bedlam, the future. “You’re this family’s salvation. The Communists will be here in six months. Then all of us . . . Son, face facts. You’re not cut out for business. You should go to engineer’s school forever. But your sisters and brothers? Your cousins and aunts and uncles? Hui traders with lots of money. We won’t last three weeks, once the end comes.”
“But the Americans. They promise.”
Ma Shouying crosses back to the desk and takes his boy’s chin in his fingers. “My son. My naïve son with his pet crickets and homing pigeons and shortwave radio. The Gold Mountain is going to eat you alive.”
He releases his son’s face and leads the way down the hall into the bookkeeper’s cage, where he unlocks the grate and shoves aside a filing cabinet to reveal a wall safe whose existence Sih Hsuin never suspected. Shouying extracts three wooden flats wrapped in satin rags. Even Sih Hsuin can tell what they contain: generations of Ma family profit, from the Silk Road to the Bund, sunk into movable form.
Ma Shouying rakes through handfuls of sparkling things, considering each for a moment, then chucking them back into their trays. At last he hits on what he’s after: three rings, like small birds’ eggs. Three jade landscapes that he lifts to the light.
Sih Hsuin gasps. “Look the color!” The color of greed, envy, freshness, growth, innocence. Green, green, green, green, and green. From a pouch around his neck, Shouying produces a jeweler’s loupe. He sets the jade rings in the light and peers at them for what will be his last look. He hands the first ring to Sih Hsuin, who stares at it as at a rock from Mars. It’s a sinuous mass of jade trunk and branches several layers deep.
“You live between three trees. One is behind you. The Lote—the tree of life for your Persian ancestors. The tree at the boundary of the seventh heaven, that none may pass. Ah, but engineers have no use for the past, do they?”
The words confuse Sih Hsuin. He can’t read his father’s sarcasm. He tries to hand the first ring back, but his father is busy with the second.
“Another tree stands in front of you—Fusang. A magical mulberry tree far to the east, where they keep the elixir of life.” He palms the loupe and looks up. “Well, you’re off to Fusang now.”
He hands the jade over. It’s detailed beyond belief. A bird flies above the topmost tangle of foliage. From the crooked branches hangs a row of silkworm cocoons. The carver must have used a diamond-tipped microscopic needle.
Shouying presses his magnified eye up close to the last ring. “The third tree is all around you: Now. And like Now itself, it will follow wherever you go.”
He gives the third ring to his son, who asks, “What kind of tree?”
The father unwraps another box. Dark lacquered wood unfolds on two sets of hinges to reveal a scroll. He undoes the scroll’s ribbon, which hasn’t been loosened for a long time. The scroll unrolls into a series of portraits, wizened men whose skin droops more than the folds in their robes. One leans on a staff in a forest opening. One peers through the narrow window in a wall. Another sits underneath a twisted pine. Sih Hsuin’s father taps the air above it. “This kind.”
“Who these men are? What they do?”
His father regards the script, so old Sih Hsuin can’t read it. “Luóhàn. Arhats. Adepts who have passed through the four stages of Enlightenment and now live in pure, knowing joy.”
Sih Hsuin doesn’t dare touch the radiant thing. His family is rich, of course—so rich that many of them do nothing anymore. But rich enough to own this? It angers him that his father has kept these treasures secret, and Sih Hsuin isn’t a man who knows how to get angry. “Why I don’t know about this?”
“You know now.”
“What you want I do?”
“My word, your grammar is atrocious. I assume your instructors in electricity and magnetism were more competent than your English teachers?”
“How old, this? One thousand years? More?”
One cupped palm calms the young man. “Son: listen. You can only store a family fortune so many ways. This was my way. I thought we would gather these things and protect them. When the world returned to sanity, we’d find them a home—a museum somewhere, where every visitor would connect our name with . . .” He nods at the Luóhàns playing on the threshold of Nirvana. “Do what you like with them. They’re yours. Perhaps you’ll discover what they want from you. The main thing is to keep them out of the hands of the Communists. The Communists will wipe their asses with them.”
“I take these to America?”
His father rolls up the scroll again, wrapping the frayed ribbon around the cylinder with great care. “A Moslem from the land of Confucius, going to the Christian stronghold of Pittsburgh with a handful of priceless Buddhist paintings. Who are we missing?”
He places the scroll back into its box, then hands it to his son. Taking the box, Sih Hsuin drops one of the rings. His father sighs and stoops to retrieve the treasure from the dusty floor. He takes the other two rings from Sih Hsuin’s hands.
“These we can bake into moon cakes. The scroll . . . We’ll have to think.”
They put the trays of jewels into the safe and push the file cabinet back in front of it. Then they lock up the bookkeeper’s cage, seal the office, and go downstairs. They pause outside in the Nanjing Road, thronged with people doing business, despite the looming end of the world.
“I bring them back,” Sih Hsuin says, “when my school is done, and everything safe here again.”
His father gazes down the road and shakes his head. In Chinese, as if to himself, he says, “You can’t come back to something that is gone.”
WITH TWO STEAMER TRUNKS and a cardboard suitcase, Ma Sih Hsuin takes the train from Shanghai to Hong Kong. There he learns that his health certificate, acquired at the American consulate in Shanghai, isn’t good enough for the ship’s medical officer, who must be paid another fifty dollars to examine Sih Hsuin again.
The General Meigs has just been decommissioned and transferred to the American President Lines for use as a Pacific passenger liner. It’s a little world fifteen hundred people wide. Sih Hsuin bunks on one of the Asian decks, three stories beneath daylight. The Europeans are above, in the sun, with their deck chairs and liveried waiters serving cold drinks. Sih Hsuin must shower with dozens of other men, under buckets, bare naked. The food is vile and hard to keep down—waterlogged sausages, pasty potato, and salted ground cow. Sih Hsuin doesn’t care. He’s going to America, to the great Carnegie Institute, to get a graduate degree in electrical engineering. Even the squalid Asian quarters are a luxury—no falling bombs, no rape or torture. He sits in his berth for hours, sucking on mango stones, feeling like the king of creation.
They dock in Manila, then Guam, then Hawaii. After twenty-one days, they reach San Francisco, port of entry for the lucky land of Fusang. Sih Hsuin stands in the Immigration line with his two trunks and flimsy suitcase, each stenciled with his English name. He’s Sih Hsuin Ma now—his old self turned inside out, like a jaunty, reversible jacket. Colorful patches cover the suitcase—stickers from the ship, a pink University of Nanking pennant, an orange one from the Carnegie Institute. He feels carefre
e, American, filled with affection for people of all nations except the Japanese.
The customs official is a woman. She looks over his papers. “Is Ma your Christian or family name?”
“No Christian name. Only Moslem name. Hui.”
“Is that some kind of cult?”
He smiles and nods many times. She narrows her eyes. For a panicked moment, he thinks he’s been caught. He lied about his date of birth, putting down November 7, 1925. In fact, he was born on the seventh day of the eleventh month—the lunar calendar. The conversion is beyond him.
She asks him the length, purpose, and location of stay, all detailed in his paperwork. The whole conversation, Sih Hsuin decides, is a crude test of his ability to remember what he’s written down. She points at his steamer trunks. “Could you open that, please? No—the other one.”
She inspects the contents of the food box: three moon cakes surrounded by thousand-year eggs. She gags as the tomb is opened. “Jesus. Close it.”
She picks through the clothes and engineering texts, stopping to examine the soles of a pair of shoes he has repaired himself. She lights upon the scroll box, which Sih Hsuin and his father decided to leave hidden in the open. “What’s in here?”
“Souvenir. Chinese painting.”
“Open, please.”
Sih Hsuin blanks his mind. He thinks about his homing pigeons, about Planck’s constant, anything except this suspect masterpiece that will, at very least, bring down customs duty far in excess of his stipend for the next four years, or, at worst, get him arrested for smuggling.
The Overstory Page 3