Days of Distraction

by Alexandra Chang

  We are that couple in the restaurant eating in silence. On occasion we look up from our food, at each other, and half smile. I never thought it would be like this. Now it seems like our new normal. I watch him beneath the dim yellow light. His mouth moves strangely as he chews.

  “What?” he says.

  “Nothing. I guess I should tell you,” I say. He waits. “I’m going to go to China.”

  He chews some more. Say something. Say anything. Have a reaction. A piece of his hair on the left side of his head is distressingly displaced. From where do I know this person? What goes on inside of him?

  “I’m going to go to China,” I say, with firmness. “I found cheap tickets already, and I’ve had my visa ready for a while.”

  “When are you going?”

  “In a couple weeks,” I say.

  “That’s really soon. You’re coming back, right?”

  He looks confused and hurt. The question surprises me. I hadn’t thought that far. But then, since he’s asked, since he’s suggested it, it occurs to me that there are other possibilities in leaving.

  “Well, I have a ticket back, but I don’t know about after.”

  “Oh. Okay,” he says.

  “We can talk about it later,” I say.

  We sit for an eternity of silence. I think about all of his flaws. The silence.

  Now he’s opening his mouth to end it. “I’m going to miss you.”

  For a moment, I feel it, too. Missing him, missing us. But then something inside me shuts off.

  “Have you read the articles about race I sent you?”

  He looks away guiltily. “I started, but then I got busy. They’re pretty dense. I’m going to finish, though, I swear.”

  My mom thinks it’s a wonderful idea. “Good, visit your father,” she says. “He is your father.”

  In addition: “Bring me back some good tea. And silk scarves. And my favorite candies, the white rabbit ones, but not the kind you can get here, there’s special ones, with nuts too, only in China, do you know which?”

  In the weeks leading up to my trip, we are cautious with one another. It’s almost better that he’s hardly around. From an outside perspective, if there were one, we might even appear to be a happy couple. We have polite sex a couple of times. (Though once, afterward, I feel like shit.) When he is home, we have conversations about his work, random things in the past, our pets. (I secretly apply to jobs in all the major acronym cities: SF and NYC and LA and DC.) We go out to eat when he can. We don’t fight.

  Until the day before I leave, when I tell him that we need to talk, seriously. I try to explain as much as I can of what I’ve been holding in—that I’m too unhappy here, and it doesn’t seem to be getting better. That it’s not his fault. It’s just that our priorities and our lives are no longer aligned. I say a lot I don’t expect to say, like that moving to Ithaca has felt both right and wrong, and I can’t recognize anymore what is cause versus symptom. How am I supposed to know if I’m depressed due to the state of our relationship, or my lack of career, or the town? I’m afraid of waking up at thirty and being in the exact same position I’m in now. If I come to accept that I won’t ever be totally satisfied, will I make different decisions? Will some other factors I’m not considering become more important? And isn’t being satisfied a really shallow and egotistical motivation? But what if how I feel here does matter, every small deficiency amounting to a completely changed state? I don’t feel like myself anymore.

  He stares at me as I ramble. He says he thought things were getting better. He says he wants this to work. What if he tries harder? Can I try harder, too?

  A text from Rob: Hey, how’s it going? Somebody I know is leaving his job in the comms office next to mine. Would that be work you’re into? Could put in a word if you want.

  I tell him maybe, and that I’m going to China for the holidays, can I let him know later?

  Yeah, no prob. Have a great trip!

  There is more than one possibility in staying, too. But for now, I’m leaving.

  “I love both America and China dearly,” says the little, slender woman, sweet voiced and charming, who has earned unusual distinction in two lands and in two fields of learned and studious endeavor. “They both seem like home to me. I have spent almost as much time in America as in China, and I am sure I am thoroughly American in many things, although I am proud of the fact that I am a pure bred Chinese woman—a member of the literary class.

  “In which country shall I eventually choose to make my permanent home? Well that would be hard to say. I think perhaps I shall take up more or less permanent residence in China by and by, but not for some years yet. Since I have never passed five consecutive years in a single place, or lived three years in a single house, however I don’t feel that it would be advisable to say anything definite on this question.”

  —Chicago Daily Tribune, 1903

  She wished to be a new woman. She wearied of him. She declined on the ground that she had engagements to fill in the East.

  IV.

  A Father Without a Home

  Knowing what desires we have had (some flaring, beautiful ambitions),

  And have had to let go,

  And knowing what questions we have put off answering,

  Slurring over them, always,

  Seeing double, gladly,

  (Fearful, unbigoted minds grasping at both sides of every question),

  It is not surprising, only regrettable that we should have come to this.

  —Diana Chang, “Knowing What Desires We Have Had”

  I take the bus from Ithaca to midtown New York, then the subway to the airport. The trip from my door to JFK’s international terminal takes seven long hours. And in those hours I cycle through excitement, fear, relief, regret, and back again. I close my eyes and see nothing, try to feel nothing.

  He’s said before that if we broke up, he would join the military. He would need an incredibly regimented environment and routine to get over it. He would need to go away.

  I have thought about that statement every so often and checked in with him. Would you still join the military? Would you quit your job? Yes. Yes.

  Before I left, I thought this notion of his would surely have passed. He is in a Ph.D. program. He has at least five years of his life laid out, a schedule, before him. So I asked again.

  He said, Yes. Nothing has changed. Didn’t I understand? It wasn’t about what was or was not going on in his life. He would join the military in response to the heartbreak.

  I had always found the resolve sweet. But this was the first time I understood it, too, with a sliver of a threat.

  “I’ve not made a single decision on my own in seven years,” a former coworker once told me after her breakup. “It was always as a ‘we.’ For an ‘us.’ And now I hate making decisions by myself.”

  But look. I’ve done it. Not so hard, was it? I’ve made a decision, to go to China, completely on my own.

  Already, several Chinese people have approached to ask, in various dialects, for directions or something to somewhere. They could have been asking if I knew of a good place to eat in this derelict airport, or whether I had an extra tampon to share, or if I could watch their suitcase for a while. Whatever it is, I don’t understand. I try to make guesses, respond with points and nods and shakes and noises, like a dog performing tricks. There is always a look, whether it lasts on their faces for much longer (with those disappointed in me) or it comes and goes quickly (with those embarrassed for me), after discovering I’m one of those. Is this what China will be like, but times 1.3 billion?

  Back when I was fluent in Mandarin, fifteen years ago, on a flight in China, an attendant asked my mother, “How do you have three kids? Do they have the same father?”

  She explained we were American, not bound by the one-child policy.

  “Yes, all the same father.”

  “They look like they have three different fathers,” said the attendant. “This one”—pointing to m
y brother—“a Chinese father. This one”—pointing to my sister—“looks Japanese. And this one”—pointing to me—“looks mixed.”

  My mother laughed. “Do they really look that different from each other?”

  The attendant nodded and said that she had already discussed it with her co-attendants. “But we agree that they are all very beautiful, especially this one,” she said, and touched my shoulder.

  I have brought that story up to my mom since.

  “I don’t look remotely white,” I say. “And only Chinese people say that kind of thing. Are you mixed? Are you half?”

  “It’s just a compliment,” she says. “Like, you have big eyes.”

  Miraculously, I am upgraded to business class. Perhaps the man behind the counter saw some admirable quality in me—like that attendant—or it could be this new joint credit card with travel perks I got for me and J (a reminder of our ties) doing its magic. Granted, it is a middle seat—“still much better, more space,” the counter man assured me—between two middle-aged Chinese men. The one closest to the aisle through which I enter does not get up when I point at the seat next to him. Instead, he shifts his legs slightly to one side. I stare at him and wait for his next move. He says something quickly, annoyed, in Mandarin—you, you is all I catch—but I understand well and clear, as he points vigorously at my seat. I need to crawl over him to get there.

  It’s very crowded in China. They don’t have same personal space as Westerners, texts my mom before we’re told to turn our devices to airplane mode.

  A flight attendant asks me a question. I apologize in English.

  “You asked for vegetarian meals?” she translates herself to me.

  I glance back down at the thick menu we’d all been handed, where we had a choice between teriyaki chicken and salmon, a choice I had been contemplating for nearly half an hour, excited at the prospect of eating the higher-end business-class food for the first time, food described in multiple languages on an embossed menu, which seemed to convey all the benefits of moving up in society.

  “Oh,” I say, regretfully. “Yes, but—”

  She walks away after the confirmation.

  I eat a bland tofu dish as my neighbors eat their sweet-smelling, steaming meat. The earlier version of myself had thought it was such a great idea to do this, to avoid the shitty airplane meat served in economy. I couldn’t have known it would come to this.

  At first I try again to read from Yamei Kin’s biography. A San Francisco Chronicle article in 1904, too, details Yamei’s divorce from her husband. She must have been quite famous by then to be getting so much attention in the papers, or else this was a common practice for the then-uncommon occurrence of divorce. Most of the details are the same, with a few additions:

  No one appeared in court on Yamei Kin’s behalf.

  Da Silva is described as “a comely young man . . . born in China of Spanish and Chinese heritage” and Yamei Kin as “a full-blooded Chinese.”

  The article gives their San Francisco address on Broadway.

  A full quote from Da Silva in court: “She obtained a doctor’s diploma from an Eastern college, and is now practicing medicine in Boston. She wanted to be up to date and independent, and she felt she could not be if she were bound to a husband. Her chief reason for leaving me was that she was ‘a new woman.’”

  And a quote from a witness, William L. Ward, a Chinatown guide: “I got acquainted with these parties three hours after they hit San Francisco nearly ten years ago. She told me at Christmas 1902 that she was tired of living with her husband and shook him.”

  Apparently after “deserting” her husband in 1902 to go on her trip, Yamei Kin returned to California with difficulty due to the Chinese Exclusion Act. After helping to get her back into the country, Da Silva attempted and failed to get back together with her.

  The summary of the article is quite funny: “Anxious to be a ‘new’ woman: Chinese wife adopts American customs and deserts her spouse to become a doctor. Now lives in Boston and supports herself. Man with an extensive name, who was married to her in Orient, gets a divorce—Other unhappy marriages.”

  Then I tire.

  The rest of the flight, I fall in and out of sleep. Twice, I must climb over the man next to me to go to the toilet.

  In the early morning hours of the empty Taipei airport, I wish, for a moment, that J were here. Is it that I miss him? Or is it that I want him to see these ridiculous and wonderful themed terminals, the one with gigantic Hello Kitty statues, the one set up like a movie theater, the one like a jungle, and the one, especially, with all the vintage bicycles. Him and his bicycles. No, this is not the same as missing. There must be a clear delineation between the two.

  That’s not cheap! My mom in reply to a photo of a pork bun for which I paid the equivalent of one U.S. dollar.

  There he is waiting for me, physically real, however rail thin. UC Davis baseball cap, sunglasses, leather jacket, Wrangler jeans, and his familiar fifteen-year-old Lucchese calfskin cowboy boots, still looking polished and new. We hug. I feel the bones of his shoulders and back.

  Now he’s saying, “It’s all Mickey Mouse. The best way to describe it is as the biggest mafia in the world. It’s just like the Godfather,” about the Chinese government as we wait in line for the first bus that will take us from the Macau airport back to his apartment in Zhuhai, a city where he has no relatives or close friends, but a city that is smaller, cheaper, less crowded, and warmer than Shanghai.

  “This isn’t America, that’s for sure,” he says. “In America, you have freedom of speech. You think people can say whatever they want here? I can, because I’m me. Other people, not so lucky.”

  The air is heavy with moisture. Everywhere smells of a familiar mildew.

  “The Zhuhai fisher girl.” My dad points out the bus window. “Take a picture.”

  I take a few blurry, zoomed-in shots.

  “There’s a love story behind it, but I don’t remember. She was an angel that came to earth and fell in love with a man, something like that. Now she’s a symbol of Zhuhai. You can look it up later.”

  At another bus stop, a woman approaches and speaks to me. I look up at my dad for help. He talks to the woman, who, satisfied with the answers, walks away.

  “It’s time for you to learn Chinese,” he says. “You’re a writer. You’re of Chinese background. You should know how to speak and read.”

  “Okay, okay. People are always asking me things anyway, even here,” I say. “Do I look like somebody who has answers?”

  “It could be. Or they think you look approachable. Maybe they think you’re friendly and nice, and somebody who will help them. You don’t look intimidating, like I do.”

  He wears sunglasses at all times, no matter the place or the time of day, yes, even in a dimly lit bar at night, sunglasses covering his eyes. It’s better that way, to not let people see you entirely, to always be hidden, and to make others uneasy.

  Remember, remember. In the bath, I used to trace Chinese characters on the water’s surface. Horse. Love. Me. House. Family. I needed to memorize their strokes to make them useful. And to my mother I said, Wŏ de pŭtōnghuà bĬ wŏ de shànghăihuà hăo. My Mandarin is better than my Shanghainese.

  He takes his time in the mornings. He walks from small room to small room, sweeping and wiping surfaces, moving items from one place to another. The apartment has a kitchen the size of a small bathroom and a bathroom the size of a closet—the toilet practically inside the wall- and curtain-less shower area. But the bedroom is bigger, with a queen-size bed and side table. The living room has a TV, a small couch, and a built-in desk with shelving, where he keeps his belongings lined up, neat. Two shelves are dedicated to empty bottles and cans, of beer, water, wine, and soda. (“I bring them down for recycling every few days.”) Inside the mini fridge are the bottles of hot sauce, links of salami, and blocks of cheese he requested, and a container of old noodles. (“They might not be good to eat anymore. Smell them first
.”) By the looks of it, he subsists almost entirely on liquid. He puts away the rest of the stuff I’ve brought to him, then brings me a pair of kitchen scissors he bought on sale. (“Two for one and I figured you and your bonehead could use this.”) The TV plays the news.

  I sit, hungry, on the couch. I look at my phone. No signal. No Wi-Fi. Nothing from the outside.

  My dad says I will have to go to the tea and coffee shop around the corner for internet. He hasn’t bothered to get it installed in his apartment. What for? He has no use for it. But I’ve brought an old smartphone with me, so we can FaceTime once I go back. (“What’s FaceTime?” “Okay, so you can see this old man’s face each time?”) But when I ask if he wants to join me at the coffee shop so we can get something to eat and I can show him how to use the phone, he replies, Later, there’s plenty of time. Two planned weeks. He doesn’t like to be rushed. (“You go. I’ll meet you when I’m done with my morning routines.”) He doesn’t like to leave the house until after he’s had a bowel movement. He shows me his daily planner, where he has documented the times of each morning shit. He holds up a water bottle I’d left on the living room’s coffee table the night before, which he is now going to place on the bedroom’s side table, the cap marked with my initials in black permanent marker: JJ. (The ones I share with J . . . “So we both know this one is yours,” he says. “I have a certain way of doing things.”)

  When he’s not paying attention, I take a photo of his back, his neck pitched forward, the lines of ribs visible through his worn, old shirt.