by Julie Wu
Rockets. Atmosphere.
“Yes.” Hong smiled at my expression. “Since you like turbojets and aurora borealis, perhaps this will interest you?”
“Of course!”
Pat laughed genially. “I think we have a future rocket scientist here.”
“Ni Wen-chong,” Hong said. “And perhaps you could give this to him.” He pulled an envelope out of his pocket. “Going to mail it, but hand delivery will be better, just as your brother says.” He laughed, but his eyes met mine pointedly. “You do it?”
I cannot say that I was in any way naive. I had seen Kuo-hong and known why he was there. I had grown up in a milieu where dissent from the government was expected to bring a sentence of death, and I was the son of a man who would slam the door on his friends and shuffle to the side of the man carrying the biggest stick. Professor Hong represented, for me, the Taoyuan magistrate, the university professors, the young students dragged off to become prisoners or mere inked characters that dripped in the mist above the train station. I should have feared any association with the man. But something shifted in me. Perhaps it was the clean white carpet or the odorless American air, free of any lingering traces of history, or perhaps it was my innate self-righteousness, untying itself from its bonds, for I felt, rising above all else in importance, Hong’s essential goodness, his own righteousness and his rightness. I had worked, fought so hard to get here, because of what Toru had told me while he assaulted the venom that ran through my veins: that America was the land of personal freedom, the land of making your own choices. I was here, and Hong needed help.
And I wanted to meet Ni Wen-chong.
“I’ll do it,” I said. And I took the envelope.
16
I LOOKED OUT THE window. For a moment I saw my eyes reflected back, as wide and watchful as they had been when I fished in the paddies. And then the suspension wires of the Bay Bridge whipped past, the soaring towers anchored unfathomably deep in the bay’s muddy bottom. I stared, knowing I might never see these sights again: the San Joaquin Valley with its neat rectangles of green, its vineyards and cotton fields stretching in straight lines to the base of the Sierra; the conifer-studded shoulders of the Sierra Nevada; and then, plunging down, the arid monotony of the Nevada desert, punctuated only by cacti, their arms raised in perpetual salute. If I scoured these landscapes I might find the secret to succeeding in America, the secret to getting a master’s degree in electrical engineering in half a year. I had not even told Yoshiko the conditions of my year’s funding. To get the money from the family, my father had promised his brothers that I would study pharmacy after one semester of electrical engineering at the South Dakota School of Mines. Taikong had no need for an electrical engineer, and my uncles had no desire to indulge my personal aspirations. They had spent enough money on my father’s political campaign. And unfortunately I had received a scholarship to an undergraduate pharmacy program at Baylor, and no scholarship to the School of Mines.
“Reno!” The bus brakes screeched, and the driver, tossing on his stately-looking cap, jumped off the bus. The other passengers jumped off behind him and hurried after his lanky receding figure into the squat building by the highway. I assumed they were after the restrooms, as the bathroom on the bus—very impressive to me, as I had never seen one—was somewhat cramped and unpleasant smelling.
I stepped off the bus, wishing I had not skipped the restroom at Truckee. But it was not the restroom that had everyone running.
In the building’s darkened interior, our lithe and otherwise respectable bus driver leaned on a long silver handle. With his other hand, he fed quarter after quarter into a machine with spinning cartoon drawings of fruit. The quarters glinted in the dim light, each one representing the equivalent of my daily wage at Taikong. Behind the driver, the passengers waited, peering over his shoulders, hands jangling their own quarters in their pockets, waiting to pour them into the machine, too. It made me ill to watch and to hear each quarter drop into the machine. I walked away. I actually did need to use the restroom.
At the ticket counter, a man in a Greyhound uniform slouched over an issue of Life. Extralong hair from the back of his head was brushed over a bald patch on his crown.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I need to go to the bathroom.”
He gestured, not looking. “There.”
“Yes,” I said. “But one sign says ‘Whites Only’ and one says ‘Colored.’ ”
He glanced up briefly at my face. “Use the white bathroom. The other one’s for niggers.”
He returned to his magazine.
I watched him turn the page, casually, confident in his prejudice. It was universal: my people, the descendants of Han Chinese, had been suppressed on Taiwan by the Spanish, the Dutch, the Japanese, and the Mainland Chinese. We in turn suppressed the Hakka minority and the aborigines. And yet, walking into the bleach-scented white bathroom, I was amazed to think that a person might not even be allowed to enter a bathroom because of his race, that no amount of antiseptic could scrub away the traces of a man’s trespass there enough to satisfy a white man’s delicate sensibilities.
We crossed the Utah border into a tortuous landscape as red and alien as any scene from science fiction. And I caught my first, albeit distant, glimpse of snow on the peaks of the Rockies, so barren and angular compared to the lush mountains of my homeland, as we wove between them.
We stopped at Post House restaurants with log-cabin facades and cafeteria-style interiors. I shuffled through the line, bending my ear close as the person in front of me ordered and repeating the same words when I was asked. Cheeseburger with fries. T-bone steak. Pork chop with mashed potatoes.
My stomach churned at the fatty aromas and the unaccustomed surplus of protein, and I thought guiltily of Yoshiko having steamed bread and rice porridge with the vegetables she’d pickled herself.
The food servers squinted at me, though I spoke as clearly as I had with Pat and Mary. One man frowned and threw his spatula down. “I’m not serving a gook.”
“Huh?”
His coworker stepped forward and said to me, “Sorry, sir, he’s a vet. I’ll get that for you. You want coffee with that?”
“No.” Coffee cost a nickel, the equivalent of a bowl of noodles and a steamer of shio mai on Gongyuan Road.
For days we traveled, and I saw neither the answers I sought in the landscapes hurtling by nor any Asian face but the reflection of my own greasy, yawning visage in the window. I began missing my own bed and Yoshiko’s soft embrace within it. Kai-ming could have learned to roll over by now.
Somewhere in the Nebraskan plains, the endless sitting began to exacerbate the pain in my back, and I moved the plush reclining seat back and forth every few minutes, trying to get comfortable. I was still eager to see Ann Arbor and the school too mighty to admit me. But what an obliging fool I was, to deliver Kazuo’s present by hand! Were it not for the promise of meeting Ni Wen-chong, I might well have taken a bus in the reverse direction.
By Lincoln, I was more resentful than not. By the rest stop in Omaha, I was convinced that Kazuo had known full well what he had asked me to do, and by Des Moines I knew for certain that Kazuo had consulted a map of the United States and planned this detour for me as revenge for his having lost Yoshiko.
17
I DRAGGED MY SUITCASES onto the wet sidewalk of West Huron Street in front of the Ann Arbor Greyhound depot. The air was cool but fresh, smelling of wet earth, and I breathed it in gratefully after a week confined to the staleness of the bus.
In contrast to San Francisco, Chicago, and many cities in between, Ann Arbor was quite small and quiet, with low buildings and large maple trees lining the road, branches newly budded and shivering in the gray drizzle. Cars were plentiful, the reflection of their rounded noses slipping calmly over the curved surfaces of the windows flanking me. We were near Detroit, and I had no doubt that this area benefited from its proximity to the car-manufacturing center of the world.
How odd, then,
to see an old yellow Volkswagen Beetle come chugging down the street. Who would buy a German vehicle in this area? As it came closer, I saw that the driver was Chinese, and then the car stopped, slightly away from the curb, just in front of me. It idled loudly, obviously lacking a muffler, and the air filled with the stench of burning petroleum.
The Beetle’s passenger door opened, and out jumped a plump young man who straightened the collar of his leather jacket with a familiar movement.
I stared into his small eyes and realized it was Li-wen.
He laughed. “Professor!” he said. “Get this man some smelling salts. He didn’t know his brother sent him halfway around the world to see me!”
And there was Li-wen’s emaciated friend with the horn-rimmed glasses, leaning against the car and nodding nervously at the pavement. I realized he had been the driver. “It has been a long time . . . ,” he said.
How had I not known? I had simply not recognized the family name on the package.
I felt anger flash up from my feet to my neck. “How did you get here?” I said to Li-wen. And I meant it in more than one sense, for I distinctly remembered that no name like his had been announced on the radio with those who had passed the entrance exam.
He raised his finger. “How does one get anywhere? It’s all in who you know.” He tapped his finger to his head. I recalled his position with the Anti-Communist Youth Corps. No doubt some Nationalist official had helped waive some requirements for him. “Come, we’re in America now. Let’s let bygones be bygones and beat these American bastards at their own game.”
I had little choice, and I went with them.
THEY WERE NOT yet degree candidates but merely took courses in the graduate department of electrical engineering; this much I gleaned from their elliptical speech. They were sharing the dorm room of a true graduate student who was also an alumnus of Taiwan University. The square, cramped room smelled of sesame oil and stale fish—such a contrast to the ivy-covered facade of the building, the broad walkways through campus shaded by oak and redbud trees. I had little desire to stay and urged Li-wen to open his present as soon as possible so I could venture out.
Li-wen sat on a couch between piles of magazines, pillows, and packages of dried seaweed. He pulled lazily at the brown package, talking to the Professor and his host.
“This is damn heavy. What shall we have for dinner? That pork loin?”
Finally the brown paper was gone, revealing a large glass vase.
A vase!
We all sat staring at this thing I had lugged, day in and day out, gritting my teeth as pain shot down from my back all the way to the sole of my foot, through bus terminals halfway across North America. It was a perfectly ordinary vase with some etched flowers around the rim; there must have been similar ones all over the world. Even across the world, my brother played me for a fool.
Even Li-wen was embarrassed. “The bastard! He thinks by torturing you with this he can make up for insulting me. You wouldn’t believe what he called me when he found out I was coming here. Talk about a sore loser.”
I said nothing. If not for Ni Wen-chong, I would have smashed that vase.
Li-wen glanced at me, setting the vase on a leather trunk that functioned as a coffee table. “Well, there’s not a scratch on it. For all that, little brother, we at least owe you first dibs on choosing what’s for dinner.”
“You may cook whatever you choose,” I said, “but perhaps you can help me find someone I’m looking for.”
“And who is that?”
“A postdoctoral fellow.”
“In what?”
“Double E.”
His little eyes looked up. “What is his name?”
“Ni Wen-chong.”
“And how do you know him?”
“He’s a friend of a friend,” I said evasively. Despite Li-wen’s sympathizing with me about the vase, I did not trust him. “How do I find him?”
“Here.” He tossed me a stapled booklet. “There’s the directory. But it’s dinnertime now, so no one is in the labs at the moment. At least none of the Chinese.” He laughed, patting his belly.
Reluctantly I hung my suit on the back of a door to wait for the morning. Dinner was as could be expected from three bachelors in a foreign country, though after so many days of eating hamburgers and mashed potatoes, I was glad to have rice again, and to be able to examine another refrigerator; even in this nearly squalid dormitory they had one. I opened and closed it several times, admiring the clever design, the feeling of suction on its closure. To think that even students in America had refrigerators, while in Taiwan, middle-class families had just started to buy iceboxes! Yoshiko’s eldest uncle had just started a new ice company.
I opened and closed the refrigerator once more and noticed some notebook paper held to the front of the refrigerator with a magnet. On the paper was an address: Bryn Mawr Country Club, 6600 North Crawford Avenue, Lincolnwood.
The Professor, whose name was actually Sun-kwei, was filling a teakettle at the sink.
“What’s this?” I indicated the address.
“They pay well for dishwashers,” Sun-kwei replied. “That’s how everyone makes money in the summer.”
“Washing dishes?”
“Hyo. That’s how it works.”
They cleared a space for me on the couch, which smelled of mildew and soy sauce. I slept, dreaming I was sleeping on my futon in the northern countryside during the war, Yoshiko at my side. And then I was fishing, a carp swimming at my feet, but when I bent to reach for it, I couldn’t move my arm. It was in one of Toru’s splints, a large-bore needle sticking out of my vein and dripping blood.
I cried out. As I rose into consciousness, I reached for Yoshiko but found only the rough back cushions of the couch, and my arm jammed beneath.
18
NI WEN-CHONG’S LABORATORY WAS locked. I stood in the linoleum hallway knocking on the door and trying to peer into the lab between the posters taped to the window. The poster on top had an emblem I would come to see everywhere—a blue gridded globe orbited by a satellite: SYMPOSIUM ON SCIENTIFIC ASPECTS OF THE INTERNATIONAL GEOPHYSICAL YEAR, APRIL 1957 . . .
I stepped onto a low molding and pulled on the locked door handle to boost myself up. And in that moment of pulling my chin up to the top edge of the poster, I was again a schoolchild, standing atop piles of broken desks to watch the Nationalist soldiers scavenge the very outlets off the wall.
But I was no longer that provincial child spying on a force that I was helpless to resist, and the room before me now was empty of people, soldiers or otherwise. It shone, laboratory benches beckoning with piles of shining steel equipment—capacitors, battery testers, and a large machine with round glass screens and a reel-to-reel tape standing at the ready. Above, on the wall, hung a framed picture of three men in a barren, windy landscape, flanking a rocket. The images from my past slipped away, and I saw that my future was here, in this room.
“You see?” Li-wen said behind me. “There’s no one here, I’m telling you. Let’s go have lunch. We have some shio mai from Chicago.”
“They’ll take a long time to defrost,” Sun-kwei said. “What about the leftover pork chops?”
I had been putting up with them all morning. First, they had said Ni Wen-chong did not exist. Then, after I found his name listed in the University of Michigan telephone book and found his building in a brochure about North Campus, they said that the Aeronautical Engineering Department was too far away, that it required a car, that North Campus hadn’t even been built yet . . .
A door opened at the end of the hallway, and a group of young men appeared, carrying clipboards, their shadows flitting across the pool of reflected light on the linoleum. I jumped down from the window when I saw that one of the men was Chinese. How many Chinese guys could there be in this department?
I ran down the hallway, feet clattering. “Ni Wen-chong! Ni Wen-chong!” My voice echoed.
The man stopped, propping the door open with
his shoulder. He was slim, compact, holding his clipboard under his arm. He looked at me in annoyance as the rest of the group galloped down the stairs. “Please,” he said. “We’re late for the launch.” He spoke, to my surprise, with a Hong Kong accent.
“The launch?”
He started hurrying down the stairs, the tapping of his shoes against the concrete stairs echoing in the stairwell. I ran down after him.
“I’ll be back in the lab at one thirty,” he called. “You want help with class, Rodney can help you. He’s in the student lounge.”
His head bobbed up and down, disappearing from view.
“I have something for you,” I called out, my voice bouncing from wall to wall. “From Professor Hong, in San Francisco.”
His footsteps stopped. “Professor Hong?”
I caught up to him and handed him the letter. He glanced at me, his eyes sharp and appraising.
He tucked the letter into his shirt pocket and turned to go downstairs again.
“Wait!” I called out. “I want to see the launch!”
He glanced up at me. “Then hurry.” And he ran down the stairs.
I hurried after him down the stairs and outside.
It was a brilliant day, cool and calm, and the drizzly skies of the day before had cleared to a crystalline blue. As I rushed after Wen-chong, my feet swished in the grass, its smell so sweetly pure compared to the complexity of the earth around my parents’ house. In the distance a large group of people clustered around a pickup truck. All around them was such a display of nature’s indolence, of fields turning blade by blade from brown to green, of trees slowly awakening from their winter’s slumber to unfurl their tiny buds, that it was difficult to imagine the human industry that was planned here—the new engineering buildings, the music building, and now the . . . launch.
This did not look anything like the barren land I had seen in the lab photograph.
“You launch rockets here?” I said.
Wen-chong laughed briefly. “No, no. We do not destroy the campus. Model rocket,” he said. “Real launches are at Fort Churchill. Manitoba. This is just for fun.”
