by Julie Wu
I had wondered why Toru wasn’t married. “So he didn’t.”
“He didn’t. He’s told you this before?”
“No,” I said. “But he told me once, I had only one chance at life.”
“And did you listen?” Chen looked at me intently.
I hesitated. “Yes.”
“Good. Because I said much the same to Toru and he did not listen to me.”
“He’s alone,” I said.
“He is.”
“What happened to the nurse—the girl?”
“She married Toru’s best friend.”
For so many years I had thought of Toru as only a doctor. Of course he was a man, too. I remembered his agitation when I told him about Yoshiko.
“What about you,” I said. “Why are you alone?”
“My wife died ten years ago,” Chen said. “Pancreatic cancer. There was nothing to do. So you see I know both, having and losing.” He got up and took my dishes into the kitchen, his flip-flops slapping against his feet.
I followed him into the kitchen. He stood at the sink, filling it up with soapy water.
“Did you know my wife has tuberculosis?” I said.
He looked over his shoulder. “Yes.”
I stepped forward. “Why didn’t you mention it?”
“I thought you knew.”
“What about Toru? Why didn’t he write me or wire me or something?”
Chen shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe he was told not to?”
Blood rose to my face. I was angry at Chen. Angry at Toru. Angry at Kazuo. And then I felt my anger melt away. They were not the ones at fault.
Chen finished rinsing the dishes, turned off the water, and dried his hands. He glanced shrewdly at my face. “Come. The orchid is still opening.”
I followed him out to the dining room, where we sat in facing chairs by the flowerpot. The blossoms had indeed opened slightly more, revealing the long, powdery stamens at their core, the scent of the orchid blooms mingling with the traces of savory red wine.
“My parents won’t pay for my wife to go to the hospital,” I said. “But they paid for my eldest brother to come to the United States for vacation.”
“Hm.” Chen struck a match and lit a pipe, his toes tensing in his flip-flops. He puffed, waving out the match, and wiggled his toes. “Why do you think that is?”
I considered. “Because they think he’s worth everything and I’m worth nothing.”
“Have they always thought so?”
“Yes.” I felt a twinge in my chest.
“Do you think that’s true?”
“No, of course not. I’m the one who passed the exam.”
“Self-worth is more than an exam.” He puffed, looking at me through the smoke. And then he started shuffling through the books, papers, and magazines on his dining table. He pulled out a telephone, yanking a length of wire from the piles, and set it before me. “Remember what Toru told you. Don’t lose the girl.”
For a moment I was speechless with relief. I put my hand on the receiver. It was cold and solid under my palm. “I’ll pay you back right away,” I said.
“You’d better. Landscaping doesn’t pay that well.”
25
I HELD THE RECEIVER, awaiting the operator’s cue. I waited, hearing clicks, hisses.
“Just two calls ahead of you, sir.”
My ear was sore, and I shifted the receiver to the other side. Chen got up and left the room, his feet flip-flopping.
“Okay. Now, sir.”
I waited, hearing more clicks. And then:
Brrrr-brrrr. Brrrr-brrrr.
They would no longer be sleeping, as it was now past nine in Chicago. The sun was rising high over Taoyuan, oppressively hot, baking our dirt road into fissures, dulling the colors of the earth so that even the cranes flew low, close to the water in the paddies.
Brrrr-brrrr.
“Ue?”
I pressed the hissing telephone receiver to my ear, but the distortion of sound was so great it was impossible to discern even the gender of the person who had answered.
“Eh,” I said. “It’s Saburo.” My voice, translated from sine wave to radio wave, was broadcast over the Pacific Ocean. It went so far across the earth that, were it not for the band of electrically charged particles called the ionosphere, it would have shot straight through the atmosphere into space. It was the ionosphere that reflected my voice back toward the earth and around its far curvature toward that tiny green island—Isla Formosa, Republic of China, Taiwan—where the waves were funneled into a succession of cables and wires running through the cities, through the fields and the paddies, through a small hole behind the heavy front door with the old lock, to snake along the wall and reach the dull black phone by my father’s chair.
“Is that really you?”
“Of course it’s me,” I said. “Who’s this?”
“It’s your mother, stupid.”
Some of the frequencies escaped through the ionosphere into space, leaving a sound not true to life. The words, though, were true, and they echoed.
Your mother mother, stupid stupid.
I saw her standing there in her old gray dress and plastic slippers, no longer holding bamboo branches, clutching the phone instead.
“Li-hsiang needs to go to the hospital,” I said. My radio waves crashed into hers, intersecting, passing through, driving toward home.
“What did she tell you?”
“She needs to go to the hospital.”
“What did she tell you?”
“I saw Kazuo here,” I shouted. “Take her to the hospital!”
I was handed to my cousin. And to another cousin. I was a novelty.
“Is that really you?” they said. Is it you you you . . .
Finally a woman’s voice came on the phone and told me she was all right.
The voice was nasal, echoing, and harsh and did not sound like Yoshiko’s at all. I found myself saying, “Is that really you?”
“Ai! Who else would get on the phone and say she was your wife?”
“Are you okay?” I shouted.
“What?”
“Are you . . .” I paused, listening to the echoes. I wanted to tell her so many things—how I missed her, how I regretted everything. But the line crackled, echoed, popped.
Let me let me have it, I heard in the background. Give me give give me . . .
“Yoshiko?”
“What?”
“Go to the hospital,” I said.
I was still hearing ospital-ospital when she started to speak, so all I heard of what she said was expensive-pensive-pensive.
“Go to the hospital,” I said slowly, loudly. “Or I’ll come back to take you there.”
Her words came quickly, blended together.
No! Your visa no! the money you won’t get back in don’t!
“Go to the hospital, then! And tell my mother a funeral would be more expensive! Get well,” I shouted into the echoing space, “and I will get my master’s and bring you to America.”
26
I SETTLED UP WITH Chen and took a bus to Ann Arbor. I needed to talk to Gleason and I was never going to get past his secretary on the phone.
His laboratory was once again locked and quiet, and I ran up and down the halls peering into the windows. A door opened suddenly, hitting me on the forehead. I reeled backward in surprise.
“Oh! It’s you!” Ni Wen-chong appeared in the doorway, pushing a cart that held what looked like a large column of jumbled transmitter components.
“Where is everyone?” I said. “Did I come at a launch again?”
Wen-chong laughed. “Well, yes. A real one, this time, at Fort Churchill,” he said in his clipped Hong Kong accent. “You have quite the nose for launches. I stayed here to fix the telemetry unit. Actually, come here.” He opened the door and pulled the cart back into the laboratory. It rattled, banging against the door, and Wen-chong steadied the metal column with his hand. “I wasn’t able to fix it, an
d I was just going to drive it up, anyway, which would have made Gleason quite furious, though the data-collection device seems to be working properly. See, it all has to fit into the payload compartment, and we had to make modifications.” He spoke quickly, anxiously. “I don’t know what happened.”
“When’s the launch?” I asked.
“Wednesday morning.” He laughed.
“Oh, so there’s plenty of time.”
“Not at all. It’s way up in Manitoba, middle of nowhere. Subarctic, you know, there’s not even a road. It takes days to get there. You can’t just throw this equipment onto the baggage carousel, you have to use ground transport, and I don’t have access to a car with a trunk large enough to contain all this.” He looked at his watch. “There’s a train from Winnipeg to Fort Churchill on Sunday. I’d really have to start driving today to get up to Winnipeg—”
The phone rang and he quickly trotted over to the wall to answer it. “Yes, Professor Gleason. Yes, well, no, not yet . . . ”
I pulled up a chair and sat in front of the cart. In addition to the transmitter components, there was also a long white metal cone pierced with a metal rod that had spheres at each end. I had never seen anything like it.
“. . . someone here to help now,” Wen-chong was saying. He looked at me sheepishly. “Yes, I’ll make the train, don’t worry.”
He hung up and trotted over to where I sat. I pointed to one of the spheres. “What’s this?”
“It’s a Langmuir probe,” he said impatiently. “To measure the electron density. It works fine. It’s this that’s not working properly.” He pointed to the column of transmitter components. “I don’t know why he’s so worked up about it. We can get the information we need so long as we recover the nose cone somewhere. What do you think?”
“I need a tester,” I said, “and a soldering iron. Is this a pulse-code modulator?”
“Of course. The iron’s right here,” Wen-chong said, plugging it in. “Now, whatever you do, remember to do a solid job with the soldering. The vibrations are terrible during liftoff. Here. Let me help you set that upright.”
The transmitter column had transistors and parts I’d never seen before except in textbooks and Modern Radio. What was I doing attacking this thing with a soldering iron? This man had a PhD in electrical engineering and he couldn’t fix it. And if I wrecked this equipment, everything would be ruined. Their experiment, the launch, and, it went without saying, my future in atmospheric science.
I wiped off the tip of the iron, then picked up the solder coil and unrolled it, straightening out the end. The metal was soft and as pliable in my warm fingertips as the string I once twisted out of grass when I was a boy, making wings from scrap, wondering about that strange girl who thought me clever.
I bent toward the column and saw the circuits, the little electron highways looping and intersecting. I touched them, and the electrons skipped under my fingers. Where they paused, I pointed my soldering iron and made a bridge for them, the molecules of copper, lead, and tin jumbling together in the bubbling flux and rearranging their bonds into a new compound, so that the electrons zipped along smoothly, around and back, corralled together here and there into organized streams of electricity.
At 4:30 p.m. we checked all the components. Wen-chong, seeing the needle jump on his receiver, gave me a clap on the back. “Ah! Well done.”
I sat back, relieved. Things were going my way now. They had to.
He picked up the phone to call a rental car agency, but it was a small branch and they had no cars left.
“Damn this infernal college town!”
I watched him scratch the back of his neck and call an out-of-town agency, carefully logging his call in a notebook labeled “Long-Distance Calls.”
I was tired, and my back ached. I was tempted to find a hotel and go to bed—but how much more exhausted were Yoshiko and Kai-ming?
Wen-chong hung up the phone, cursing.
Now was not the time to rest.
I stood up. “Wen-chong,” I said, “let’s go buy a car.”
27
I’LL LET YOU HAVE it for four hundred.”
I looked out the showroom window into the parking lot. The horizontal blinds had been pulled up, all the better for me to see what was at stake. Wen-chong stood by a sky-blue ’54 Chevy, his hand caressing the gleaming curve of its side-view mirror.
“Previous owner was an old lady. Hardly drove. That’s a great deal I’m giving you, Mr. Tong.”
I turned toward the salesman. He sat at his desk, tapping his box of cigarettes against the table. His hair was long and white and fanned out to the sides. His large brown eyes searched mine. “Four hundred. It’s a beautiful car, isn’t it? Takes a—”
“Okay.”
“What?”
“I’ll take it. Four hundred dollars.”
The sides of his mouth turned up slightly, then opened into a big wolf smile. “Well then! Nothing I like better than—” He coughed. “How much you putting down, Mr. Tong?”
“Putting . . .”
“To finance.”
“What?”
His eyes fixed on mine. “You mean you got it in cash?”
“Of course.” I patted my pocket.
The lupine smile. He pulled a sheaf of papers from his drawer. “All right. I’ll need your license.”
“No driver’s license.” No one I knew had a driver’s license back in Taiwan; it was virtually impossible to pass the exam.
The smile disappeared. He brought out his cigarette lighter from the pocket of his blazer. “Auto insurance?”
“Huh?”
I felt a sense of panic. The car would slip through my fingers. I wouldn’t be able to buy any car at all. We wouldn’t make it to Manitoba. This pink-faced man, who was trying so desperately to light the wrong end of his cigarette, was going to stand in my way because of rules I didn’t even understand.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out my wad of bills. As I counted them out on the table, the salesman’s eyes fixated on them. I thought of my father and his red envelope.
These people are obviously desperate and corrupt. There’s only one way to deal with people like that.
My father the cynic. The survivor. I gave the pile a little push toward the poor salesman. He probably had a family at home waiting around the table. Waiting for his commission. We were all caught up in the same game, just trying to stay alive.
“Four hundred,” I said.
The salesman rapped his fingers on the desk, eyeing the little pile of money. He blinked, then stuffed the money into his shirt pocket and closed the papers back into the desk. The teeth shone again. “Deal.”
WEN-CHONG SETTLED INTO the passenger seat next to me and pulled the door shut.
I fondled the steering wheel, chrome and white. I had my own rocket now.
Wen-chong looked sideways at me, his face obscured by the night. “He sold it to you even though you don’t have a license?”
“Yes.”
“That’s illegal.”
“Really?”
“And how come you had four hundred dollars in cash with you? Why did you come to Ann Arbor, anyway? Are you some kind of overseas agent?”
“Oh no! I loathe agents. I came to work for Gleason,” I said.
He looked at me sideways again as I turned out of the lot onto the darkened highway. “You need to turn on your headlights.”
I paused, fumbling at the knobs. “I brought all my money. Everything depends on what I do here.”
“Did Gleason invite you?”
“Of course not,” I said. “But I need to do research this summer.”
“We’re full. We don’t need any more students.”
“I know.”
WE DROVE WEST, then north, the highways stretching on for a thousand miles into the darkness.
“How do you know Professor Hong?” I asked Wen-chong.
“My father was an economics professor at Peking University under th
e Nationalists,” he said. It was his turn to drive, and the light from the streetlamps slid rhythmically over his trim, almost childlike frame. He sat on a tote bag filled with papers so he could see over the dashboard. “He moderated the student protests there—he just opposed the civil war and the fascist nature of the government’s crackdown on the Communists. He wasn’t Communist. He was an economist, after all.
“But I’m sure you know the Nationalists don’t make such refined distinctions. One day when my father was giving a speech at a student rally, disguised government soldiers stole in and threw a hand grenade. It went over his shoulder and exploded in the hand of a poor literature student who had picked it up from the stage and tried to lob it back. A piece of the grenade lodged in my father’s neck. After that, my father took me and my mother and fled to Hong Kong. It was just in time. Shortly thereafter, as the Communists began to win the war, the Nationalists cracked down on university students and those professors who had aided them.
“In Hong Kong my father had nothing. The University of Hong Kong did not even have an economics department at that time. My mother had worked as a seamstress in Peking, and her skillful labor supported us in Hong Kong. But my father was unhappy and booked passage to Canada. It was there, at McGill University, that he heard Peng Ming-min, the Taiwanese political activist, speak about self-determination, and in the audience was our Professor Hong, although he was only a student at that time.”
“I see,” I said. “He’s a friend of your father’s.”
“Not only,” Wen-chong said. He glanced in the rearview mirror and switched lanes. “Many years later my father died. That fragment of grenade was always getting infected and he would never stop working long enough to get it removed. He said he wanted to keep it to remind himself never to become complacent. And one day the infection overwhelmed him and he died.”
I watched Wen-chong as he drove, but his expression was unreadable in the dark. So much suffering there was in the world!
