The agent’s face wrinkles at the sight of the arhats. “Who are they?”
“Holy people.”
“What’s wrong with them?”
“Happiness. They see the True Thing.”
“And what is that?”
Sih Hsuin knows nothing about Chinese Buddhism. He has only a rough estimate of English. Now he’s supposed to explain Enlightenment to this American woman official.
“The True Thing mean: human beings, so small. And life, so very big.”
The agent snorts. “They’ve just worked this out?”
Sih Hsuin nods.
“And this makes them happy?” She shakes her head and waves him through. “Lotsa luck in Pittsburgh.”
SIH HSUIN BECOMES WINSTON MA: a simple engineering fix. In myths, people turn into all kinds of things. Birds, animals, trees, flowers, rivers. Why not an American named Winston? And Fusang—his father’s mythic land to the east—turns, over the years after Pittsburgh, into Wheaton, Illinois. Winston Ma and his new wife plant a substantial mulberry in their bare backyard. It’s a single tree with two sexes, older than the separation of yin and yang, the Tree of Renewal, the tree at the universe’s center, the hollow tree housing the sacred Tao. It’s the silk tree on which the Ma family fortune was made, a tree to honor his father, who’ll never be allowed to see it.
He stands near the planting, its black ring of soil like a promise at his feet. He won’t wipe his muddy hands even on his dungarees. His wife Charlotte, scion of a fallen southern planting family that once sent missionaries to China, tells him, “There’s a Chinese saying. ‘When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago.’ ”
The Chinese engineer smiles. “Good one.”
“ ‘When is the next best time? Now.’ ”
“Ah! Okay!” The smile turns real. Until today, he has never planted anything. But Now, that next best of times, is long, and rewrites everything.
COUNTLESS NOWS PASS. In yet one more, three little girls eat corn flakes underneath their breakfast tree. It’s summer. The mulberry puts forth its messy clusters of achenes. Mimi, the firstborn, nine years old, sits among the fruit spatters with her little sisters, her clothes stained red, bemoaning their family’s fate. “It’s all Mao’s fault.” A Sunday morning, midsummer, 1967, with Verdi blasting out of their parents’ locked bedroom, as it has every Sunday of Mimi’s childhood. “That pig Mao. We’d be millionaires if it wasn’t for him.”
Amelia, the youngest, stops stirring her cereal into a paste. “Who’s Mao?”
“World’s biggest crook. He stole everything Grandpa owned.”
“Somebody stole Grandpa’s stuff?”
“Not Grandpa Tarleton. Grandpa Ma.”
“Who’s Grandpa Ma?”
“Chinese Grandpa,” middle Carmen says.
“I’ve never seen him.”
“Nobody’s ever seen him. Not even Mom.”
“Dad never saw him?”
“He’s in a work camp. Where they put rich people.”
Carmen says, “How come he won’t ever talk Chinese? It’s suspicious.” One of the many mysteries their father is so generous with.
“Dad stole my poker chips, when I was beating him.” Amelia pours milk from her bowl to feed the tree.
“Stop talking,” Mimi orders. “Wipe your chin. Don’t do that. You’ll poison the roots.”
“What does Dad even do?”
“Engineer. Dope.”
“I know that. ‘I drive the train. Toot, toot!’ He wants me to laugh, every time.”
Mimi tolerates no stupidity. “You know what he does.” Their father is inventing a phone no bigger than a briefcase that runs off a car battery and can travel anywhere. The whole family helps test it. They must go out to the garage and sit in the Chevy—phone booth, he calls it—every time they make a long-distance call.
“Don’t you think the labs are creepy?” Carmen asks. “How you have to sign in, like it’s a big prison?”
Mimi holds still and listens. Verdi pours out of her parents’ upstairs window. They’re allowed to eat under their breakfast tree, but only on Sunday. On a Sunday morning they could walk to Chicago, and no one would even know.
Carmen follows Mimi’s gaze. “What do you think they do in there, all morning?”
Mimi shudders. “Will you get off my wavelength? I hate when you do that!”
“Do you think they touch each other, naked?”
“Don’t be gross.” Mimi sets down her bowl. She needs clarity and a place to think, and that means getting altitude. She steps up into the low vee of the mulberry, heart pumping. My silk farm, her father always says. Only no silkworm.
Carmen shouts, “No climbing. Nobody in the tree. I’ll tell!”
“I’ll squash you like a bug.”
This makes Amelia laugh. Mimi pauses in the stirrup. The fruits dangle down around her. She eats one. It’s sweet, like a raisin, but she’s sick of them, she’s had so many already in her short life. The branches zigzag. It bothers her, so many different shapes of leaves. Hearts, mittens, crazy Boy Scout hands. Some are furry underneath, which creeps her out. Why would a tree need hair? All the leaves are notched, with three main veins, like the three of them. She reaches up and snaps one off, knowing the horror that will follow. Thick, milky tree blood oozes from the wound. This, she thinks, is what the worms must somehow turn into silk.
Amelia starts to cry. “Stop! You’re hurting it. I can hear it scream!”
Carmen looks up at the window that Mimi is trying to reach. “Is he even Christian? Whenever he goes to church with us, he never says the Jesus stuff.”
Their father, Mimi knows, is some other, distant thing. He’s a small, cute, smiling, warm, Muslim Chinese guy who loves math, American cars, elections, and camping. A long-term planner who stocks up sale items in the basement, works late every night, and falls asleep in the recliner to the ten o’clock news. Everyone loves him, especially kids. But he never speaks Chinese, not even in Chinatown. Now and then he’ll say something about life before America, after butterscotch ice cream or on a cool night around the campfire in a national park. How he kept pet crickets and pigeons in Shanghai. How he once shaved a peach and put the fuzz down the blouse of a servant to make her itch. Don’t laugh. I still feel bad, one thousand year later.
But Mimi knew nothing much about the man until yesterday, an awful Saturday, when she came home from the playground in tears.
“What happen? What you do?”
She squared off in front of the man. “Are Chinese all Communists who eat rats and love Mao?”
At last he talked to her, a story from another world. Much was lost on Mimi. But as he spoke, her father turned into a character from a late-night black-and-white thriller full of dark corners, eerie music, and a cast of thousands. He told her of the Stranded Scholars, changed into Americans by the Displaced Persons Act. He described other Chinese who’d come with him, including one who went on to win the greatest prize in science. It stunned Mimi: the U.S. and the Communists were fighting over her father’s brain.
“This man Mao. He owe me lot of money. He pay me back, I take this family to very fancy dinner. Best rat you ever eat!”
She cried again, until he assured her that he’d never even seen a rat up close until Murray Hill, New Jersey. He hushed and cooed. “Chinese eat many strange thing. But rat not so popular.”
He took her into his study. There, he showed her things she still couldn’t grasp, a day later. He unlocked the filing cabinet and removed a wooden box. Inside it were three green rings. “Mao, he never know about this. Three magic ring. Three tree—past, present, future. Lucky, I have three magic daughter.” He tapped his finger on his temple. “Your father, always thinking.”
He took the ring he called the past and tried it on Mimi’s finger. The twisting green foliage mesmerized her. The carving was deep—branches beyond branches. Impossible that anyone could carve a thing so small.
“This all jade.”
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br /> She jerked her hand, and the ring flipped to the floor. Her father knelt down and swept it back into the box. “Too big. We wait for later.” The box went back into the file cabinet, which he locked again. Then he crouched in his closet and removed a lacquered case. He placed the case on his drafting table and undid the ritual of latches and ribbons. Two flicks of the scroll rollers, and there, spread in front of her, was China, the half of her no more real than a fable. Chinese words tumbled down in columns, swirling like tiny flames. Each ink stroke shone as if she had just made it herself. It didn’t seem possible that anyone could write like that. But her father could, if he wanted.
After the flowing words came a parade of men, each a chubby skeleton. Their faces laughed but their skin sagged. They seemed to have lived for hundreds of years. Their eyes smiled at the best joke in creation, while their shoulders bowed under the weight of a thing too heavy to bear.
“Who are they?”
Her father studied the figures. “These men?” His lips tightened like the smiling figures. “Luóhàn. Arhat. Little Buddha. They solve life. They pass the final exam.” He turned her chin toward him. When he smiled, the thin gold edge of his front tooth flashed. “Chinese superhero!”
She wriggled free from his hand and studied the holy men. One sat in a small cave. One had a red sash and earrings. Another paused on the edge of a high cliff, with crags and fog trailing off behind him. One leaned against a tree, as Mimi would lean against her mulberry the next day, telling her sisters.
Her father pointed at the dream landscape. “This China. Very old.” Mimi touched the man under the tree. Her father lifted her hand and kissed her fingertips. “Too old for touch.”
She stared at the man, whose eyes knew everything. “Superheroes?”
“They see every answer. Nothing hurt them anymore. Emperor come and go. Qing, Ming, Yuan. Communism, too. Little insect on a giant dog. But these guy?” He clicked his tongue and held up his thumb, as if these little Buddhas were the ones to put money on, in the run of time.
At that click, a teenage Mimi lifted from her own nine-year-old shoulders to gaze at the arhats from high up and years away. Out of the gazing teen rose another, even older woman. Time was not a line unrolling in front of her. It was a column of concentric circles with herself at the core and the present floating outward along the outermost rim. Future selves stacked up above and behind her, all returning to this room for another look at the handful of men who had solved life.
“Look the color,” Winston said, and all her later selves collapsed around Mimi. “China surely a funny place.” He rolled up the scroll and put it, in its case, back on the closet floor.
In the mulberry, Mimi thinks that if she could ascend another few feet above the Earth, she might look into her parents’ window and see what Verdi is doing to them. But down on Earth, revolution erupts. “No climbing!” Amelia yells. “Get down!”
“Shut your trap,” Mimi suggests.
“Dad! Mimi’s in the silk farm!”
Mimi drops to the ground, a foot from crushing her little sister. She grabs the kid’s mouth and gags her. “Shut up, and I’ll show you something.”
With the perfect hearing of childhood, both sisters know: the something is worth seeing. In another moment, under cover of the swelling Verdi chorus, they creep together, commando-style, into their father’s office. The filing cabinet is locked, but Mimi opens the lacquered box. The scroll unrolls on Winston’s drafting table to the image of a figure seated underneath a gnarled, patient tree.
“Don’t touch! They’re our ancestors. And they’re gods.”
AS MUCH AS HE LOVES ANYTHING in life, the Chinese electrical engineer who brings his family into the garage to make long-distance calls to their Virginia grandparents on a car phone bigger than a yule log loves his national parks. Winston Ma spends half a year planning the annual June ritual, marking up maps, underlining guidebooks, taking neat notes into scores of pocket notebooks, and tying strange trout flies that look like tiny Chinese New Year dragons. By November the dining room table is so full of preparation that the family must eat their Thanksgiving meal—clams and rice—in the breakfast nook. Then vacation comes and they’re off again, the five of them crammed into the sky-blue Chevy Biscayne with roof rack and back seat as wide as a continental shelf, no air-conditioning and a cooler full of juice on ice, logging thousands of miles on trips to Yosemite, Zion, Olympic, and beyond.
This year they return to his beloved Yellowstone. Every campground along the way gets an entry in Winston’s notebooks. He writes down the campsite number and evaluates it according to a dozen different criteria. He’ll use the data over the winter to perfect next year’s route. He makes the girls practice their musical instruments in the back seat. This is easier for Mimi, on trumpet, and Carmen, on clarinet, than for little Amelia and her violin. They forget to pack books. Two thousand miles with nothing to read. The two older girls stare at their little sister for dozens of Nebraska miles until Amelia breaks down and cries. It passes the time.
Charlotte gives up trying to control them. No one suspects yet, but she has already begun to slip into the long private place that each passing year will deepen. She sits in the front seat, navigating maps for her husband and humming Chopin nocturnes under her breath. Dementia starts here, in these days of quiet, automotive sainthood.
They camp near Slough Creek for three days. The younger girls spend hours playing Old Maid. Mimi joins her father in the stream. The shared lassitude of casting, the C of the line as it lengthens in the air, that four-stroke swelling rhythm with the stiff hand stopping at ten and two, the ripple of the dry fly as it alights on the water, her small dread that something might actually strike, the startle of the fish’s mouth when it breaks the surface: these are charmed to her and will stay so forever.
Knee-deep in the cold current, her father is free. He maps the sandbars, measures the speed of the water, reads the bottom, watches for hatch—those simultaneous equations in multiple unknowns that one must solve to think like a fish—all the while conscious of nothing but the sheer luck of being on the water. “Why these fish hiding?” he asks his daughter. “What they do?”
This is how she’ll remember him, wading in his heaven. Fishing, he has solved life. Fishing, he passes the final exam, the next arhat, joining the ones in the mysterious scroll at the bottom of his closet that Mimi has continued to visit in secret, over the years. She’s old enough now to know that the men in the scroll are not her ancestors. But seeing her father like this, on the river, complete and at peace, she cannot help but think: He’s their descendant.
Charlotte sits in a camping chair by the side of the river. Her only job is to unsnag the lines of the two fishermen, untying Byzantine, microscopic knots, hour after hour. Winston watches the sun set over the river, the reeds going from gold to dun. “Look the color!” And again, a few minutes later, a whisper to himself under the sky’s collapsing cobalt: Look the color! There are colors in his spectrum that no one else can see.
They picnic on the shores of a small lake not far off the road toward Tower Junction. Mimi and Carmen look for stones to make into jewelry. Charlotte and Amelia begin their seventeenth consecutive game of Chinese checkers. Winston sits in a foldable camping chair, updating his notebooks. There’s a funny motion near the table. Amelia shouts, “Bear!”
Charlotte leaps up, sending the game board flying. She lifts her youngest daughter into the air and dashes into the lake. The bear ambles toward the jewelry gatherers. Mimi checks for high shoulders or a sloping face. She must do one thing for grizzlies, the opposite for black bears. One climbs trees, the other doesn’t. She can’t remember which. “Climb,” she shouts to Carmen, and they each scramble up their own lodgepole.
The bear, which could reach either of them in two easy scooches, loses interest. It stands on the lakeshore, wondering if today might be a good day for a swim. It regards the chest-deep woman in the water holding her tiny daughter on high like she’s abou
t to baptize the girl. It waits to see what the always insane species will do next. It wanders over to Winston, who has been sitting stock-still at the camping table, taking pictures with the Nikon. The camera—the only Japanese item the man allows himself to own—goes click, snick, whir.
Winston rises to his feet as the animal approaches. Then he starts to chatter to the bear. In Chinese. A primitive toilet stands near the site, door open. Winston talks to the bear, cajoling it while edging toward the door. This baffles the bear, who reconsiders his whole approach to the situation. Sadness percolates up in him. He sits and claws at the air.
Winston keeps talking. It astounds Mimi, this alien language coming from her father’s mouth. Winston draws a handful of pistachios from his pocket and tosses them into the latrine. The bear ambles after them, grateful for the diversion. “Get in car,” Winston shout-whispers. “Fast!” They do, and the bear doesn’t even lift its head. But Winston stops to retrieve the camping table and stools. He’s paid good money for them, and he’s not about to leave them behind.
That night, at the campsite near Norris, Mimi asks him, awed. Her father has changed before her eyes. “Weren’t you afraid?”
He laughs, embarrassed. “Not my time yet. Not my story.”
The words chill her. How can he know his story, ahead of time? But she doesn’t ask him that. Instead, she says, “What did you say to it?”
His brow crumples. He shrugs. What else is there to say, to a bear? “Apologize! I tell him, people very stupid. They forget everything—where they come from, where they go. I say: Don’t worry. Human being leaving this world, very soon. Then the bear get top bunk to himself again.”
AT HOLYOKE, Mimi is a LUG: lesbian until graduation. It’s the same at half of the other Seven Sisters colleges, rounded up. Scissors and paste, they call it. Fun, sinning, healthy, shameful, sweet—great practice for something. Life, say. Whatever happens after school.
She reads nineteenth-century American poetry and drinks afternoon tea in South Hadley for three semesters. It beats Wheaton. But one April day she’s reading Abbott’s Flatland for a sophomore survey called Transcendence, when she reaches the part where the narrator, A. Square, gets lifted out of his plane into the expanses of Spaceland. Truth comes over her like a revelation: The only thing worth believing in is measurement. She must become an engineer, like her daddy before her. It’s not even a choice. She’s an engineer already, and always has been. And as with Abbott’s Square, the minute she comes back to Flatland, her Holyoke friends want to lock her up.
The Overstory Page 4