by Julie Wu
He laughed at my expression. “Partly to test our design. We want to make sure our recovery system works.”
The door banged far behind us, and I glanced over my shoulder to see Li-wen and the Professor stumble out into the light, shielding their eyes.
“How do you know Professor Hong?” Wen-chong asked.
“I met him in San Francisco.”
We approached the group surrounding the truck. A man with gray hair stood with his hand on his hip, looking down at a radio receiver attached to the top shelf of a metal cart in the grass. As we drew close, Wen-chong hailed him. “Professor Gleason!”
He glanced up at Wen-chong. “You have a schematic?”
“What?”
“Hear that?”
A loud hum came from the receiver.
“It’ll cover up our transmission.”
They unscrewed the back plate of the receiver and gazed at the tangle of capacitors. It looked to be a unit dating from the war. I had rescued similar ones from the trash during my college days.
“Who put this thing together? Les? Didn’t he leave for White Sands?”
“Hm. Where he put the schematic . . . ,” Wen-chong said. “What model number?” They turned the receiver back around.
I leaned over the gray-haired man’s shoulder and turned the volume down all the way.
The hum remained. All this American higher education and they couldn’t diagnose the simplest radio problem in the world!
The gray-haired man squinted back at me in surprise. “That’s right. Still humming. Wen-chong, tell me what that means.”
Wen-chong looked down at the radio and then sideways at me.
“Capacitor,” I said.
“Who is this guy, Wen-chong?”
“Friend of Peter Hong’s.”
The professor straightened up and looked me in the eye. He was taller than me, with a broad forehead and kind eyes. He took a pair of horn-rimmed glasses out of his pocket and put them on.
“I’m Chia-lin,” I said.
“John Gleason.” He shook my hand. “Fix this in an hour and I’ll take you out to dinner.”
I smiled. “Twenty minutes.”
Professor Gleason laughed. “I’ll time you,” he said.
WEN-CHONG AND I pushed the receiver back into the building and took it up the elevator. In the lab he rummaged through little metal drawers. I glanced at the photograph of the rocket at Fort Churchill, and at the gleaming equipment around me. My heart raced, but I sat down to examine the receiver’s circuitry, following the flow of electrons—zipping through wires, handing off the charge inside each capacitor in a kind of molecular relay race.
“Here!” Wen-chong threw a new capacitor and a roll of solder onto the counter beside me. He laughed. “I know Gleason. If you’re one minute late, he won’t take you to dinner.”
“Who is he?” I grabbed a pair of wire cutters and snipped out the faulty capacitor. Circuit broken.
“Gleason? You don’t know? He’s the most important man in atmospheric research. He’s one of the lead scientists for the IGY.”
“The what? Where’s the flux?”
“Oh.” He trotted over to a tall metal cabinet by the window. “The IGY? The International Geophysical Year, of course. It starts July thirty-first. Haven’t you heard?”
I checked the soldering iron, which I could tell from the smell was almost hot enough. “I have read about it,” I said. “A little bit.”
“Oh, of course,” Wen-chong said. “You’re from Taiwan. They’re late entrants. The only reason they entered at all was because they heard China was involved.”
“Entered what?”
“The IGY! The greatest example of cooperation in the scientific community the world has ever seen. You see, we must coordinate our efforts to learn more about the earth. If we send transmitters into orbit, there have to be receivers around the world to track its signal.”
He bent over to watch me and I asked him to hold the new capacitor in place for a moment. I could hear his wristwatch ticking next to my ear. Twenty minutes was just enough time to change a capacitor with my own equipment. What had I been thinking to wager that it would be enough time in a foreign lab?
“And what does Gleason do?” I asked.
“We study the ionosphere. We’re planning to send up sounding rockets during solar flares to measure their effects.”
“To figure out why we have radio blackouts?”
“Sure. And more.”
The solder melted, creating a silvery liquid bridge for electrons to dance across. I was almost there. My heart pounded. This school had rejected me, I reminded myself.
We rolled the cart back onto the grass with two minutes to spare.
I smiled, jubilant, imagining myself across a restaurant table from John Gleason, imagining myself part of his lab, at the sounding-rocket launches at Fort Churchill, which Wen-chong explained was far up north, in Canada. Gleason had his back toward us, and as the cart bumped along the grass, he turned around and gave us a smile and a thumbs-up. “Work now?” he called.
“A-OK!” I called happily, but then my smile faded.
For there facing John Gleason, with big smiles on their faces, were Li-wen and the Professor.
I SAT ACROSS the table from John Gleason. So did Li-wen. The Professor sat next to Gleason, across from us.
I closed my eyes, breathing in the mixed smells of vinyl and disinfectant, and bit into a piece of raw lettuce.
“Taiwan University,” Li-wen was saying. Though his accent was strong, he set his glass of Coke on the checkered tablecloth with pompous authority, a smile on his wide face. “Best university in Taiwan. Two of us, educated there.” He waved his finger between himself and the Professor.
I wanted to punch Li-wen between his little beady eyes. But I was old enough to have realized by now that my outbursts of anger did not always serve me well, and I forced myself to keep chewing my lettuce.
“Oh yeah?” Gleason asked with interest. His hair hung down over the sides of his forehead, almost to the top of his glasses. “Where is that? Taipei? Is that a government-run institution?”
I took another bite of salad, really just a mixture of uncooked vegetables with a too-sweet, gooey sauce on top. I chewed slowly, deliberately. I should have known Gleason would lump me together with all the other “Chinamen” and invite them, too. I soothed myself with the thought that I was having the best experience I might have hoped for at this school—a nice dinner that I would never have been able to afford on my own, with a famous atmospheric scientist. I would write Yoshiko about my amusing adventures in an Ann Arbor steak house with a moose head mounted above a painted styrofoam fireplace, with waitresses wearing red-and-white checked dresses with frilly aprons.
“. . . formerly the Taipei Imperial University . . . twenty-two departments . . . ”
I sawed my steak into bite-size chunks that bled pinkish red. To my surprise, the meat was tender and tasty. I would tell Yoshiko about this, too. It amazed me that, somewhere along the way, American women had discovered they could just as well please their families by throwing whole slabs of meat into the pan and raw lettuce into a bowl, while women all over Asia spent the prime of their lives chopping, mincing, and marinating, crimping and steaming and stirring over a hot fire until their feet ached and their backs bent into a permanent hump.
Yoshiko could have a better life here. If only I could get her here. My mind slipped again into reviewing, as I already had a hundred times, the conflicting parameters—my promise to bring her over, my father’s promise that I would study pharmacy for Taikong, my year’s limit in funds.
I took a sip of ice water, the ice cubes tumbling and sliding along my upper lip, cooling me.
“We know so little about Free China,” Gleason was saying. “I know there’s always squabbling between them and the Communists about representation.”
“It is just temporary situation,” Li-wen said. “Soon Chiang Kai-shek will go back to Main
land.” He smiled without any hint of irony.
“Sure, he’ll beat the Communists, if Madame Chiang has anything to do with it,” Gleason said. “I saw her speak in 1943. That’s one feisty lady! Beautiful, too. Tell me, are the Chiangs popular back home?”
“Of course!” Li-wen said. “They have done so much for Republic of China.” He went on to list all the economic gains, the superb infrastructure . . .
I felt my anger rising up again. Gleason showed such curiosity and openness of mind, and here was Li-wen giving him the full measure of Nationalist propaganda. How could Li-wen, a Taiwanese, say such things? My father had said similar things during his campaign, but he knew his audience had lived through February 28 and the White Terror. They understood what the truth was, and that it could not be spoken.
“Railroads were built by the Japanese,” I blurted out.
Li-wen’s leather jacket squeaked as he turned to look at me sideways, the traces of a smile still lingering on his face.
I had never spoken such words before, but now that they were out, more followed in a heady rush. “Schools, too,” I said.
Gleason’s eyes shot back and forth between us.
The Professor laughed nervously and shook his head. “Schools, no, no, no. . . ”
“This is true, of course,” Li-wen said, turning back to Gleason. “But who is running schools and railroads after the war? Not Japanese.” He skillfully went on to tout the Land to the Tiller Act, which had robbed my family of the land my grandfather had toiled his whole life to buy.
That was enough. As soon as Li-wen paused to put steak in his mouth, I interrupted. “What kind of rockets do you use for the real launch?” I asked Gleason, my voice unnecessarily loud. “Solid fuel? Liquid fuel?”
Gleason looked at me in surprise. And then his eyes brightened. “Solid. It’s a two-stage rocket. We developed it here at Michigan. It’s designed to be portable, easy to use by a research team.” He took off his glasses and pointed them in the air. “Something you can do when you can use your head. You can’t just use those V-2 rockets from Germany . . . American industry is completely fractured. Here you’ve got the air force and the army going off in completely different directions, and then there’s private industry doing their own thing . . . They’ve basically been reduced to using German design. And German equipment, actually. Higher education here is so theoretical, people don’t even know how to construct a simple circuit.”
Li-wen laughed heartily. “Simple circuit! Yes, yes.”
“Rocket!” said the Professor, smiling and pushing up his glasses.
“Some things you have to learn on your own,” I said. “They don’t teach you in class.”
Gleason nodded. “That’s right. That how you learned?”
“Yes,” I said. “I took some interest in building radios. I built the radios, read the magazines, fixed up broken ones . . .”
“Oh, well, that’s swell,” Gleason said. “That kind of initiative can take you places. Take Tom, he’s the guy behind the model rocket. Fooled around with model rockets since he was a kid. Now he’s doing real ones, and he sure does know what he’s doing.”
Li-wen gave his hearty laugh once more. He patted my back. “Because his school. Vocational.”
Gleason glanced at Li-wen again. “What’s that?”
“He goes—”
“I went to vocational school,” I said. “They did have some class on radio repair, but the class is not enough to know how to build on your own.” I glared at Li-wen, but he busied himself sawing his steak.
“That’s right,” Gleason said. He put a chunk of meat into his mouth and chewed for a moment. “Why’d you go to vocational school, Chia-lin?”
I hesitated. “I was a bad boy.”
Gleason laughed. “I can’t believe it. You’re the politest young man I’ve met.”
I told him about the wall-drawing incident in middle school and my subsequent expulsion, though I omitted the political circumstances, which seemed too complicated to explain. I had never told anyone but Yoshiko about my expulsion before, and I felt a tremendous relief at telling this kind man, who seemed more perceptive by the minute. I didn’t care that Li-wen and the Professor were listening, too.
“Well,” Gleason said, wiping his mouth with his napkin, “if something like that happened to my son at school, you can bet I’d have that principal’s throat in a jiffy. Harmless prank like that. Child abuse, really. You’re not a bad boy, just playful and honest.”
I smiled down at my steak, so overcome for a moment that I could not speak.
“Different society, of course,” he said.
I nodded.
“What school did you say you were going to here?”
I looked up. “South Dakota School of Mines.”
“Oh, that’s right. South Dakota. They have a doctorate program?”
“No.”
The four of us chewed for a minute.
“Do you have opportunity in your lab for two graduate students?” Li-wen said, indicating himself and the Professor.
“Hm?” Gleason said. “Oh yes. Submit your résumé to my secretary at the office, and we’ll see what we can do.”
Li-wen talked for a few minutes about work he had done with one of his Taiwan University professors over the summer. I had no idea whether any of what he said was true, but his English was much better than I had initially thought and he sounded very impressive. He caught my eye and shrugged, as if to say, Too bad for you.
The waitress brought our tab, and Gleason laid his dollar bills on the table. As we were all pushing out the glass doors of the restaurant, I eyed the low clouds that swept over Ann Arbor. Drawing on that wall had cost me everything.
But on the sidewalk, Gleason turned to me and shook my hand.
“Get your master’s from South Dakota, Chia-lin,” he said. “Then come back and work in my lab.”
And he walked away, the Professor on one side, Li-wen touching his arm and gesticulating on the other.
19
Dear Saburo,
I’m sorry it has taken me a couple of days to write my first letter. By the time this reaches you, you will be in South Dakota, so I will address this to your department office. I hope it reaches you.
After we dropped you off at the airport, your mother and I rode back in the jeep. Kai-ming was crying, and I tried to get him to sleep, but it was hard because he was hungry and I had run out of formula. Then I realized he had a fever.
So, with taking care of Kai-ming, filling dumplings with your mother, and folding your sisters’ fancy underwear, I have not had much time to myself. Luckily, Kai-ming seems to be recovering, and so I have a moment to write you while he sleeps at my side.
His eyelashes are fluttering. He must be dreaming of something good—plentiful milk, perhaps, or a life without needles. I just gave him a bath and he has that warm, fresh baby smell. It’s the first night this week he hasn’t been sick. This morning your father rubbed his eyes and complained about all the crying last night, as though I should have been able to stop it for his comfort!
Though Kai-ming is good company for me, it is not the same without you here. Your side of the futon is very cold at night, and I am lonely at the dinner table surrounded by all your family, poised with their chopsticks to snatch at the meat. Your mother keeps pulling me aside to confide things. She complains about your sisters and brothers. She says she always knew you were smart but she didn’t know how to control you. She says being a mother is very hard and we should have waited longer. I think she has had a lonely life.
She also keeps telling everyone that you are studying pharmacy so that you will benefit Taikong. She says that you should raise chickens and send home a hundred dollars every month. Where does she get these ideas?
When we said good-bye, you did not seem convinced that you could get your degree and bring me over. But you can. It can be done.
Love,
Yoshiko
It can be done.
“That letter came last Tuesday. When you’re done with that, I need you to fill out a few forms.”
I looked up, the sudden movement sending pains down my spine, which had stiffened unbearably from the multiple bus rides back from Michigan.
The secretary for the School of Mines Electrical Engineering Department, Mrs. Larsson, was peeling thin sheets of paper from a large machine on her desk and placing them in front of me. She wore a pink dress with a little jacket on top, and her eyes were such a transparent blue that I saw the light shining through them from the window as she looked to the side. Her hair was white blond, like Marilyn Monroe’s, with carefully sculpted curls. I had not realized that people actually looked like this except in movies. I stared, watching her eyes flickering back and forth, catching the light—not necessarily because I thought she was beautiful, which it was possible that she was, but because I had never seen anyone up close who looked so alien.
The papers were warm, their chemical smell mingling with the smells of the coffee and the sugary pastries that were nestled between the copy machine and the adding machine on her desk. No abacus here.
The papers curled up as I tried to sign my name.
“Here.” She flattened out a sheet for me with her hand. “Darn Thermo-Fax,” she said. “I love it and I hate it.”
“What’s that? It makes copies?”
“More or less. Saves me a lot of typing, anyway.” She gathered up the curling papers and shoved them into a file drawer. “There.” She turned and smiled at me, her eyes flickering up to meet mine, her pupils startling black disks.
“How does the machine work?” I asked.
She opened the lid to show me the glass bed. “You put the paper you want to copy here, and this special paper on top, and the infrared shines through.”
“Ah, infrared. I have read about these machines.”
“Here. I’ll show you.” She took Yoshiko’s letter and placed it on the glass.
As the machine hummed and she peered down at it, I stretched out my neck, side to side, getting out the stiffness. I said, “I would like to meet the head of the department, Professor Beck.”
