My mom calls; she’s back in Davis. She asks how I’m doing. Fine, I say.
“You don’t sound fine,” she says.
“I’m just tired. We walk around a lot. Daddy is more active here than I thought he’d be.”
“You worry so much. You think he’s that old he can’t do anything? I always tell you, he’s fine. You always think the worst. Just like him.”
“I just said everything is fine,” I say.
My father has come up beside me and says, “Let me talk to your mother.”
“Daddy wants to talk to you.”
“Why? I don’t want to talk to him.”
“Just let me talk to your mother.”
He waves his hand, impatient.
So I give him the phone and go into the bedroom and close the door behind me. I lie on the hard bed and stare up at the ceiling.
He comes into the room and hands me back the phone.
“Hello?” I say.
“Yeah.”
“What?”
“Don’t talk to your father about bad stuff in your relationship. He doesn’t like to hear about that.”
“What?”
“He says it’s hard for him to listen, because he won’t forget. If you say something bad about your boyfriend, then that will be all he can think about. So only talk bad stuff if you really think it’s bad and you want it to end. Otherwise, he won’t like your boyfriend anymore and then you both suffer.”
“Why didn’t he just tell me that?”
“I don’t know. Ask him.”
“No. I don’t want to.”
“Okay. I don’t want to talk to him again, either. Don’t make me talk to him again.”
“He made me.”
“Whatever. I don’t want to talk to him again. He make me crazy.”
“Okay, fine, bye . . . Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
The last days in Zhuhai are tense. Our frustrations can’t be hidden or buried any longer, and we flare up into several arguments. So much for no conflict. If I had to chart our relationship, it would look like tall skinny mountains dropping into deep gorges, over and over. Am I replicating this pattern in my relationship? I confirm my suspicions as I scroll through hundreds of photos of J, swinging between high and low emotional states.
At the coffee shop again, an email from Rob, with the subject line: Job at Cornell.
Hope you’re having fun in China. Here’s the link to the job listing I was talking about. Think you’d be a shoe in.
It occurs to me that I never gave him my email address. Then I remember it is available on a site I use to get freelance work. The thought of him putting my name into Google creeps me out a little. Also, it isn’t “shoe in,” it’s “shoo-in” as in to shoo somebody in a certain direction. But maybe he meant the shoe thing on purpose. Who knows.
I look again at the job listing and I think, Fuck it. I spend hours writing a cover letter, then submit my application.
On the bus, after a long day of my dad’s drinking. My last full day. We ride without speaking, and as we near our stop, he walks down the stairs from the upper level to the lower level, trips, grabs a pole with one hand, and it seems everything is fine, but then his body swings from one side of the stairs to the other and he smashes his knee against a hand rail. Rail against rail. I help him onto the street. When I ask about getting a cab, he brushes me off. He wobbles home. I walk slowly beside him.
Back at the apartment, we nap until dinner, when we have to meet his landlady and her family at a nearby restaurant. He has put off having this promised dinner with them until my last night, for reasons I don’t comprehend.
I wake up from the sound of his phone ringing in the other room. I lie there, waiting to hear if he picks it up. He doesn’t. There is snoring. I don’t want to spend this last night with strangers, random people, in a language I can’t understand. I am tired of it. I tell myself that I should have made my trip shorter, to have avoided souring our interactions to this extent. My dad’s phone rings again, and this time I hear him waking up, coughing, moving. I stay where I am. He talks on the phone, clears his throat, speaks in an upbeat voice.
My dad walks in and says, Come on, get ready. They’re waiting for us.
I don’t move. I’m tired. I’m drained. Can’t we cancel?
He tells me to stop being a child.
I don’t move.
Quit it. Get moving!
And my whole body recoils with resentment, then springs alive.
At the restaurant, the landlady’s granddaughter stares at me, but when I look back, the girl hides her face in her hands or in the landlady’s chest and squeals incomprehensibly. Then the girl starts running around the restaurant clapping her hands, making noises at people. It would be cute, except that she is twelve, and seems too grown up for the behavior. She is wild and they yell at her to stop. Next to her, the landlady’s mother puts up a fight with her nanny—or her aide—who is trying to tie a bib around her neck. The old woman slaps more and more hands away. The landlady makes an attempt, scolding her mother, who shakes her head violently and yells what are not words in any language, but painful utterances incomprehensible to anyone. The landlady tells my dad that her daughter, the mother of the child, who is not present, is not only a bad daughter, she is a bad mother, and look at how her child has turned out. Then she turns back to her own mother and tries again to put on the bib, but at this point, my father, who has been translating for me and giving me looks, his eyebrows bouncing above his sunglasses, interjects and says to stop. No bib for auntie. The family quietly acquiesces to this outside patriarch, and the old woman pats my father’s hands in thanks and smiles at him with her mouth of missing teeth.
The landlady’s husband says something, and looks profoundly at me.
“He says, ‘The Chinese smile at their duties, even if their duties make them suffer,’” my dad says.
My suffering is regular and small, and I want to suffer stoically and quietly, which perhaps then is the most Chinese quality about me.
At dinner, my father and I do this. We continue to smile. We eat and talk, we have our private conversations, I tell him to eat more, he tells me to drink more tea, have the lamb, we reminisce about earlier times, and we smile and we look at one another like we have never spoken an ill word, never raised our voices, never seen a day of turmoil. At first it seems we are pretending and performing for our hosts, but then, since we are so practiced, we forget we are pretending, and as the night goes on, it becomes real through the action, the living.
J writes to say he’s read the articles I sent him. He says he’s very sorry for not reading them sooner. He says he realizes how he’s been a generic, typical white person in many ways. He wants to pick me up from the airport.
I smile at the computer screen. But I am hesitant.
Are you sure you want to drive all that way?
He says yes, he’ll be there.
I have caused J suffering by coming here. And J, too, suffers quietly.
It is the nature of relationships that they are impossible to fully understand from the outside, their inner workings built both from memories and habits and histories made up from the exterior world, and from those known only between the two involved, that exist only through them and are lost when they are lost to each other. A relationship is particular in the way people are particular. Whatever lessons one can glean from other people’s relationships can only be taken in pieces, assembled into bare, minimal instructions. Yamei and Hippolytus had no further contact or longing. My dad and Sharon, the same with a hint of longing. My dad and my mom, of that, he says, “We have the three of you, so we will all always have each other.”
The next morning, early, he says we should take a cab, instead of the bus, to the border of Zhuhai and Macau. During the ride, he is quiet. I stare out the window at the trees and the bay; we pass the fisher girl again. At the Gongbei Port of Entry, he asks if I want a photo of myself in front of the big b
uilding and its sign. “You don’t have any photos of yourself here,” he says. I have taken many photos of him and the landscape, but he has not taken any of me. I show him how to use the camera on my phone. He tells me to move a little to the left, so he can get the Chinese flag in the frame.
Across the border in Macau, we go for tea at a big dim sum place. We get only a little lost trying to find it. While he’s in the bathroom—he says he’s not feeling well, he didn’t sleep well the night before—I request his favorite dishes: the tripe, the chicken feet, the duck tongue with peanuts. When he returns, he says, “Wow, you know how to order by yourself now?”
“Yeah, but I still only point and make sounds,” I say.
“Whatever works.”
We chat about random things. The topic of my mom visiting Australia comes up and he mentions a movie with an Australian actor I should watch when I get home, a comedy, which he begins to describe, though it’s hard for me to pick up what he’s saying. In the middle of detailing, according to him, one of the funnier scenes, he begins to laugh between his words.
“You should, ha ha, really watch it, heh heh heh, the man in it, ha, so funny,” he says, and lifts his sunglasses to wipe at his eyes.
“Okay, I will,” I say.
“It’s really, ha, worth checking out.” Tears run down his face and he continues to wipe at them.
“Daddy? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Just thinking about it. Makes me laugh.”
At the airport, we walk around. We look at posters on the walls. He goes to the bathroom again and does not come back for some time. I worry I will have to go through the security line before he returns, but just as I’m thinking it’s fine to run a little behind our intended schedule, the plane doesn’t leave for another hour, he reappears.
“Time for you to go in,” he says.
I nod. “When will you move back home?”
“Oh, I don’t know. We’ll see. I don’t have a place to go yet.”
“I’ll find you an apartment in Davis, or you can come to Ithaca.”
“Yeah, maybe. Let’s talk about it later. Don’t worry about me. Go on.”
At the end of the line, he hugs me. He pats me on the back and says, “Don’t worry, Jing Jing. Focus on yourself. You’ll figure things out. You get it from me. You’re my daughter.”
I go through the line. I have no coherent thoughts, just a rush of feeling, like oversaturated, garish bursts of color. I look back and see my dad standing in the same spot, watching me go. He waves. I wave back. I used to see them, the criers, in the security line, and even though it was an acceptable place for public displays of grief and sadness, where everybody blatantly ignored and allowed for them, I had judged. What was wrong with those people? My guesses had been shallow. They were sad to leave vacation. They were scared of flying. They were drunk or high. They were the type of emotional people who cried all the time. They didn’t want to go home. They were upset to leave home. But these are none of the reasons I am crying in the security line, and when the Macau airport agent checks my passport I can barely say thank you. He nods, expressionless.
After the bags and I are scanned through various machines (can they see what might explain this?), I jog to the nearest bathroom, where I am surprised to find large, pristine, individual toilet rooms, totally enclosed, perfectly private. I open the door to one and lock myself in, then rest my forehead against the cool wall, finally alone for a moment.
V.
Return
He drove through snow for five hours to the airport. It was dark, just around midnight, that jarring juncture stuck between the days. Then he turned around and drove us another five hours back into the dark.
He asked if I was tired. I was. It had been an unusually turbulent flight, and I had not slept during it. Then I’d gotten confused going through customs and followed the people ahead of me, joined a long line, waited there unmoving for half an hour until a staff member saw my blue U.S. passport and directed me to a grid of self-serve kiosks. I stood before one of the machines. Its camera took my photo and showed it back to me. A ghostly version of myself. I tapped at the screen, answered its questions in a daze, and then it was over in a matter of minutes. I could leave. I was allowed back in. I glanced at the people I’d left behind in line. I’d grown attached to them. It seemed they hadn’t moved an inch forward. I felt bad about going ahead without them. I explained this haphazardly to J and apologized that he’d had to wait.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You can sleep while I drive.”
Mostly, I did sleep, or existed in the space between.
A few times, I woke up and it was pitch black outside except for the car’s headlights and the falling snow against the window, and when I looked beside me, he, too, resembled a ghost, cast in the dark gray of night, and yet I wasn’t scared, half dreaming, half awake; he was preciously familiar, like a memory come alive, and it felt in that moving car, for those moments, like we were entirely alone on the road and in the world, wherever we were, that there was nothing outside but the dark and the snow, and to simply watch him, driving, rubbing his eyes, yawning, I was calm and inexplicably content; I could see pieces of our lives floating among the snowflakes, melting on the windshield, and for those brief moments I was living with the certainty that I was exactly where I should be, where everything was deeply quiet yet deeply alive. I thought about the many aspects in this life that I could not control or understand, despite how much I wanted to or tried, how my father’s life, my mother’s life, the lives around me and the figures from the past, they were not mine to determine, not mine to map out, no matter how much they shaped what I had become, however much we were connected, I could only help in small ways, I could listen and piece together and recount, but what was truly mine was only a little, no, a minuscule speck of it all, and while this was a sort of devastation to me, one I knew it would take some time to fully accept, it felt nice, at least, to be on the way, in spite of not knowing exactly how far I had come nor how far I had left to go.
Acknowledgments
Thanks so much to: Jeff Jorgensen, for always believing in me and for supporting me in too many ways to count; Vt Hung, whose thorough notes and many conversations sustained me while writing this book; Alexander Sammartino, for reading an early draft and for his invaluable perspective over the years; C Pam Zhang and Jonathan Dee, who read drafts and provided helpful advice; George and Paula Saunders, for all of their guidance and support, and the beautiful space to write; Dana Spiotta, Arthur Flowers, and Eleanor Henderson, for teaching me along the way; Sarah Neundorfer, Meghann Lilley, and Sylvie Lee, whose friendship and creativity inspire me; Alexa Stark and Ellen Levine, for seeing potential in those early pages and for their hard work in shepherding this book into the world; Megan Lynch, whose excellent editorial insights and feedback gave me the necessary push to make this story better; Sara Birmingham, for keeping everything beautifully on track; everyone at Ecco who helped make this book a reality; and Jeff’s family, especially Mary Ryan, constant champion of my work.
I am indebted to William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi at SoyInfo Center for compiling an extensive biography of Yamei Kin; Judy Yung, Gordon H. Chang, and Him Mark Lai, who edited Chinese American Voices: From the Gold Rush to the Present; and to the New York Times for their amazing archival TimesMachine.
And to my family—my mom, Leslie; my dad, Karl; my siblings, Aileen and Angus—I am beyond grateful. They give me life to draw on and the freedom to do with it what I want. Thank you especially to my sister, who read the book when I most needed it and kept me sane. And finally, again, to Jeff, who can’t be thanked enough, and because he reminded me to acknowledge Irving and AJ—all three, great loves of my life.
About the Author
ALEXANDRA CHANG is from Northern California. She wrote Days of Distraction while living in Ithaca, New York, with her husband and their dog and cat.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
DAYS OF DISTRACTION. Copyright © 2020 by Alexandra Chang. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Excerpt of “Writing of One’s Own” from Written on Water by Eileen Chang, translated by Andrew F. Jones, copyright 2005 by Columbia University Press. Reprinted by permission of Columbia University Press, New York Review of Books, and Robin Straus Agency. A reissue of Written on Water is forthcoming from New York Review Books Classics.
Excerpt of “Knowing What Desires We Have Had” by Diana Chang, copyright 1946 by Diana Chang. Reprinted by permission of The Estate of Diana Chang.
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