by Ha Jin
Now that Tan Mai’s refusal to play at the state banquet had been made public, she was being attacked online by a swarm of “fifty cents”—a moniker for Internet commenters hired by the Chinese government because they are paid fifty cents for each post. There are tens of thousands of them, plaguing the Internet like locusts. Many of them are recent college graduates who can’t find full-time work; some are haters of Western values or nationalistic freaks. Tian wanted to show his support for Tan Mai, so he wrote to the newspaper The China Press, which had been printing comments on Tan Mai’s case. He spoke as a colleague of hers, saying: “Certainly, like others, artists should serve their country, but the service must never be unconditional. No responsible individual should serve a country blindly. What if your country is an evil power, a danger to humanity and to world peace? What if your country has been ruthless to you and your family, making your life intolerable? What if your country has oppressed and exploited its citizens mercilessly? What if your country intends to reduce you to an insect or a tool? In short, if I serve my country, I must serve on my own terms, because I am an individual, not an obedient servant of the state. No one should do anything against their conscience.”
His letter triggered a barrage of flak. Some people claimed Tian was a traitor to China, unqualified to join the debate. Some said that an artist was merely an entertainer and whoever paid could call the tune. One man even insisted that Tian was already an American and mustn’t meddle with China’s affairs. He was outraged and at last confronted them openly online. He challenged them: “What if you are paid by your country to hurt or murder others? As a human being, one must have his or her own principles and there are lines one must never cross!”
To counter the lie about his American citizenship, he posted online his Chinese passport with the upper corner of its front cover cut off to show that it had been canceled by China. He wrote, “I have been here without a passport for almost three years. As a result, I cannot travel outside North America, and my singing career has been crippled. If you were in my shoes, what would you do? Wouldn’t you try to become a U.S. citizen? My country should be where freedom is, where I can feel safe and at home. Truth be told, once I have held my green card for five years, I won’t wait a second to become naturalized. You can call me a traitor to China, but China has betrayed me first.”
To his amazement, the condemnations stopped and a good number of people supported his choice to become a U.S. citizen. One even quoted Marx, though somewhat jokingly: “Workers of the world have no homeland.” Three people said that they too had had their passports confiscated when they’d gone to the Chinese consulate to renew them. The security guards there had thrown them out of the building. One person even announced, “Fuck China! If my country rejects me, I can reject it too.” Another weighed in, “China is just a pair of shoes I used to wear and have outgrown now.” A third declared, “China is a beast that eats you without blinking its eyes!” A fourth wrote, “Your country is not your mother like you are told. You are the parents of your country!” A fifth claimed, “To me, my country is somewhat like my condo association, to which I pay a fee regularly. If it does not respond to my needs, I can fire it. Freedom also means that you can dismiss your country like a service.” These cutting remarks unsettled Tian so much that he held back from making more comments. Of course those radical commentators caught a good deal of fire from the fifty-cent party.
Tan Mai noticed the criticism Tian was receiving for her sake, and she thanked him when they ran into each other again in Chicago. They had coffee together in a hotel bar. She had aged somewhat, but she was still quick with her words, and her face was as lively as four years earlier when they’d first met. She told him she’d been having some family trouble in recent months, mainly with her older son. The teenager was refusing to go to Chinese school on Sundays, claiming that he hated copying out the characters. For some reason he was convinced that the written language had made the Chinese habitual imitators with little originality. By copying the characters for millennia, people had evolved into copycats, whose imitative genes had been passed from generation to generation. Tan Mai and her husband thought this argument was nonsense, but still they couldn’t persuade him to go back to Chinese school.
Though unconvinced by the boy’s argument, Tian felt sympathetic toward him. He told Tan Mai, “If he doesn’t use the script, he’ll lose it anyway. Maybe he should live in China or Taiwan for a few years—that will help him learn and retain the language.”
“He won’t leave home at all. Totally spoiled. I feel like I’m at the end of my rope and don’t know how to deal with him anymore. We shouldn’t have been so protective of him when he was little.”
“Now he’s old enough to follow his own heart,” Tian said. “You should let him be.”
“But we’ll have to pay for his college and everything.”
“This is the parents’ dilemma, isn’t it?”
Tan Mai’s problem reminded Tian of his own family—Shuna was having trouble with Tingting too. Their daughter seemed to be slacking in most of her classes. She wouldn’t finish her homework and had flunked her last math test. Fortunately she liked English and reading, and they didn’t have to make her work hard on a foreign language like Tan Mai’s son. She had quit dance school long ago. That didn’t bother Shuna, who had realized Tingting would never become a great dancer anyway.
Tian was worried that his wife and daughter were in an emotional tug-of-war. They would quarrel whenever one of the private tutors reported to Shuna on the girl’s laziness. Tingting would call her mother a control freak and refuse to do her homework. As a result, she couldn’t make any real progress. The math tutor had told Shuna, “I don’t want to just pocket the fee for a perfunctory job. Your daughter’s resistance to the work makes me feel frustrated. A failed student can hurt my reputation besides.”
But Tingting had her own views. As Tian spoke with her on the phone, trying to defend Shuna, the girl wouldn’t budge. She said, “You know I’m going to college in America, so I have to get a good SAT score and do well in the TOEFL. I have to concentrate on English, especially the listening comprehension and the reading. These sections are the hardest ones for Chinese students. I’ve learned enough math for the SAT already. As long as I can read fast enough in English, I can handle the math.”
He couldn’t argue with her, unfamiliar as he was with the American pre-college tests. In China, college admissions depend on the result of a single national entrance exam, which consists of a series of tests and is given only once a year. The combined score of all the tests will determine what kind of college a student can attend. Cutoff scores are set each year, which eliminate some applicants automatically. Therefore, if a cutoff line is 600, there will be a vital difference between a 600 and 599—a student below the line will only be admitted to the lower tier of schools. The SAT was something beyond Tian and Shuna’s experience. Still, Shuna was too anxious to let the girl go her own way—like most parents in China, she saw college admissions as a matter of life and death.
Shuna told Tian that a boy in Tingting’s school was interested in their daughter and that they often spent time together. Shuna didn’t think highly of the boy and felt that Tingting had been wasting her time and ought to concentrate more on her schoolwork, so she tried to intervene. But if Shuna attempted to stop their phone chats, they would switch to texting each other. One night, on her way to the bathroom, Shuna noticed their daughter’s light still on, so she tiptoed into Tingting’s room and saw her dozing away at her desk. It was almost two a.m. and her computer screen displayed a written story in progress. Shuna glanced at it and recognized it as a piece of fantasy, a parody of an episode from a chivalrous novel by Liang Yusheng, the Hong Kong novelist. She was puzzled—Tingting had never been interested in writing anything like that. At this point the girl woke with a jolt and demanded to know what her mother was doing in her room. Shuna countered by asking
why she’d been composing such a silly tale. Tingting admitted that she was writing it for Jawei, her boyfriend, to cheer him up—he’d been upset by an exchange of words with their physics teacher the day before. Shuna exploded and lashed out at Tingting for wasting her time. Midterms were just a week away and she needed to concentrate on her schoolwork. Mother and daughter wrangled for more than two hours. Their downstairs neighbor had to come up to calm them down.
Tian was caught in between—he knew nothing about Jawei, but he couldn’t criticize Tingting just for having a boyfriend. He was rather open about this. If Jawei was decent and good to Tingting, it wouldn’t hurt for her to date him, just to see where such a relationship would lead. But Tian couldn’t say this to Shuna, who was adamant about breaking them up, saying it was too early for the girl to have a boyfriend who could distract her mind from her studies.
“Neither of them are really serious about this crush,” Shuna told Tian on the phone.
“You’re right,” he echoed. “We shouldn’t encourage them.”
But deep down he wasn’t sure. He suggested she bring their daughter to America the next summer to do her college visits. Once Tingting had a concrete goal in mind, she might be more motivated. Shuna agreed to apply for passports for both of them for the sake of Tingting’s going to college in America. Tian also spoke with their daughter, who liked the idea of a pre-college tour. Now he had to prepare for their visit, which would be expensive, but with his steady income, he could afford it.
Meanwhile, Shuna continued to press Tian to quit his job at the casino, insisting that he had to pull out of “the dump of Twin Waters” soon, but he was reluctant to give up the work. He told her in an email, “The casino has a decent backing band, which would be impossible for me to come by if I were on my own. As long as I still have the thrill of singing live, semi-obscurity suits me fine.” Tian’s fellow workers at Twin Waters were friendly, and the flexible hours allowed him to tour. More fundamentally, the job was something he could depend on to bring him a stable income, even though he made only $12.75 an hour, and even though he was no longer entitled to health insurance. Shuna must have felt embarrassed when others talked about his casino work, but they couldn’t see what things were like here. They didn’t know how precious a reliable job was for him.
In recent months Shuna had also complained about her difficulties in learning English, which was very hard going for her. She used to think it was just another foreign language, like Japanese, which she knew well. But she told Tian, “I never needed to memorize vocabulary when I studied Japanese, but with English it’s like a labor of Sisyphus. Many words are so slippery that they are impossible for me to remember. Also, the words are so hard to pronounce, they give me a sore throat. Perhaps I’m too old to learn it.” Hearing that, Tian chuckled, then urged her to persevere, saying her effort would pay off in the long run.
35
Funi saw Tian pouring boiled water on jasmine tea and said, “You should wash your tea with hot water before drinking it.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, baffled.
“Let me show you.” She picked up a small steel strainer, poured the tea through it to catch the leaves, gave them a rinse, then put the leaves back into his cup. “Teas from mainland China can be contaminated with insecticide, so you should rinse it with hot water before using it.”
“No wonder my throat feels itchy these days. It must be due to the polluted tea,” he half-joshed.
“I just learned about this from my boss. He prefers Taiwanese tea, but it’s expensive.” She poured the remaining boiled water into his cup. “Now you’re all set.”
He made a mental note that from now on, he’d buy only Taiwanese tea.
Sometimes, especially on weekends, Funi and he would sit over a pot of tea, chatting idly. They would talk about their past and their experiences in America. Because of Tian’s former career, once in a while he turned soft and regretted having left China and wondered whether he might have been more successful if he had stayed. But most of the time he was more convinced that he’d made the right decision to immigrate and to leave behind all the petty worries and constant fears of crossing official lines. He understood that now he’d left China, there would be no return. The spot he’d once occupied there had by now been taken by someone else—there was no room for him anymore. It was silly for Tian to lament his loss, and he ought to feel grateful for the opportunity to start anew. Here he could have control over his life. Unlike back in China, here no one would look down on you because you made a small salary or didn’t own a house or a fancy car. What’s more, he could sing any songs he wanted to. He didn’t talk to Funi about his thoughts on artistic freedom though—she was unfamiliar with his professional life and preoccupations. She had never regretted immigrating to America—she hadn’t passed the college entrance exam, and even if she had, her family couldn’t have afforded to send her. In her home county, Lianping, most young people left for coastal cities to find employment, so at best she would have ended up in a factory. “I have a decent job here and live comfortably,” she said. “I’m not like you, Tian. I’m nobody and am easily satisfied. I’ll be happy if I can have a family and two or three kids.”
She said those words so earnestly that he just nodded without speaking. She was already thirty and still single, though she might still be carrying on with Dennis, the cop in Chinatown. If she didn’t get married soon, it might not be so easy for her to raise the family she wanted. Lately she’d been looking unwell, her lower eyelids puffy and her cheeks gray. In the feeble light of their kitchen her pallor appeared more pronounced.
Then one day, as he was cooking breakfast, he heard her retching in the bathroom. Following the flushing of the toilet there came the running of water at the sink. When she stepped out, he joked, “Are you having morning sickness?”
She looked astonished. “Yes,” she said, “I’m pregnant.”
He didn’t know how to answer her, and for a while they just stared at each other. He tried to smile, but his face felt rigid. He managed to say, “Funi, what happened? I mean, what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to keep the baby.”
“How will you raise it? With Dennis?”
“Maybe not.” She sat down and picked up a slice of toast from his plate, scooped a gob of strawberry jam on it, and took a bite. “I have to eat more from now on.” She smiled, her face misshapen and her eyes watery.
They often shared food; he took more from her than she did from him. He went on, “What do you mean? He won’t help you raise the child?”
“He wants me to terminate the pregnancy, but I don’t want to. I’m already thirty, and it won’t be easy for me to have a baby again.”
“But have you thought of the difficulties in bringing up a child alone?”
“I won’t mind being a single mother,” she said, then collapsed into sobs, her face buried in her forearms on the table.
He patted her on the shoulder. “It’s tough, I know, but try to be rational about this.” He couldn’t say any more.
Hurriedly he finished breakfast and headed for President Plaza to catch the bus to Twin Waters. He paid his ten dollars for the round trip and took a front seat. On the way he mulled over Funi’s pregnancy. The more he thought about it, the more uneasy he felt. Dennis, whom he’d met twice in passing, didn’t seem reliable. This would make Funi a single mother and the child fatherless. For now she could work at the warehouse, but how long could she continue that way? Would she be able to make enough to provide for the child? Perhaps she should seriously consider finding someone to marry so the child could have an intact family. With her green card in hand, she should be able to find a recent arrival who was willing to marry her.
He was afraid to share his thoughts with Funi, worried he would appear too nosy. She went to work every morning, as usual. After a couple of weeks he noticed that her morning sickness
had subsided, and she began to look like she was feeling better. He wondered whether she was still determined to keep the baby, or whether she and Dennis had worked out some plan. He tried to distance himself from her troubles, though he mentioned her pregnancy to Shuna. His wife said Funi should abort if the child was out of wedlock. “Imagine how hard life will be for the child if it doesn’t have a father,” Shuna said. Hers was a typical response from a Chinese woman of their generation, few of whom viewed a fetus as a human life. The argument about whether life started at conception was alien to them. So Tian said nothing to Funi about what Shuna had said, and neither did he form his own opinion on abortion, aware of the enormity of such a topic in the American context.
Then one late afternoon Funi phoned him, even though they were both in the apartment, just with two walls between them. She panted, “Tian, can you come in here and help me? I’m bleeding.”
He rushed into her room and saw her lounging on her loveseat, her face pallid and her lips blue. At the sight of him, she pointed at her bed, on which was a bloody patch. He asked, “What happened?”
“I must be miscarrying,” she groaned, clutching her abdomen and biting her lower lip. “I must have lifted too many vegetable boxes in the warehouse today.”
“We must go to the hospital, now! Can you move?”
He supported her and put a flannel jacket on her shoulder. She first needed to change her pad to stanch the bleeding and turned into the bathroom. From the shelf in the living room Tian pulled out a book, The Best American Poetry 2012, and waited.
They went out the back door of their building, and he let her lean against the wall while he went to bring the car. Her cream-colored parka was unbuttoned, the front of her jeans soaked with blood—even a fresh pad didn’t hide the bleeding—but he didn’t know how to help besides rushing her to the ER. It was Friday and traffic was thick. The blacktop was littered with leaves, which a crosswind tossed up now and again. On the fringe of a small playground a stand of birch trees glimmered. Most of their branches were already naked, motionless in the darkening twilight.