by Julie Wu
The doctor came bustling in, wearing a scrub suit.
I stood. “Do you think maybe it’s ready early?” I asked him. “Maybe the dates were wrong. Maybe—”
He gave a shake of his head.
“No,” Yoshiko said in English. “I know why. Because I have to get in and out of a car, all over everyplace.”
Her words hit me in the chest.
“ . . . not a primary cause of preterm labor,” the doctor said.
“I’m mother, I know,” Yoshiko said bitterly. “Backseat all the time. Squeeze a bag, it break.”
“It’s not your fault,” he told her. He released the stretcher’s brake.
As he wheeled her away, Yoshiko turned her face to me, her eyes spilling tears. “I miss Toru,” she whispered.
43
I LOOKED OUT THE waiting room window, watching clouds blow in over the Huron River. The maple trees on the riverbank, just beginning their autumn transformation, blew in the wind, their golden tips ruffling.
It began to rain.
A thin stream of water poured down from the roof over the window, dripping onto the low roof below. It dripped, dripped, in regular rhythm like a temple muyu, like the clacking of a steam engine on its tracks, like the syllabic chant of a childhood schoolroom:
Bo po mo fo
De te le ne
Ge ke he
Zhi chi shi ri
The rhythm calmed me, imposed external order on the desperate chaos in my mind. This was the way of the Old World—thoughtless repetition, relieving a person of the burden of reflection, self-examination, and free will.
Bo po mo fo
De te le ne
Breaking my rhythm, the doctor’s voice: It’s not your fault.
No, it was not her fault; it was mine.
I had stood up to my father. But it was too late.
44
WE TOLD EVERYONE THAT Yoshiko had had a miscarriage. It wasn’t true. Our baby boy lived for a day, tiny and gasping, a ghastly translucent pink, the size of a trembling kitten. We didn’t have the heart, or the money, for a funeral.
THE SNOWS SWEPT in over Ann Arbor, blanketing the town with white cold, weighing down the roof of our duplex. I shoveled a path from the front door, heaving aside the drifts of snow that trapped us in our little house of grief and devastation.
I had heard nothing from my father. From my sister I received news of the recent death of my fourth uncle’s eldest son, who had been left in charge of Taikong while my father vacationed in America.
My fourth uncle’s family blamed my father for their loss. “He was too harsh and critical, and this is what caused our brother to die.” Why else would someone so young have a brain hemorrhage?
“So,” Yoshiko said, “now your father will blame it on us.” She sat on our green flowered couch, putting neat stitches into a hole in Kai-ming’s winter jacket.
I ran my fingers along the parallel razor marks in the armchair. “It had nothing to do with us,” I said. Though I wondered if she was right. My father’s silence greatly distressed me. I did not know whether he would ever talk to me again.
“Of course. He would have died, anyway. That’s what doctors always say. Isn’t that what you told me?”
She repositioned the little jacket. She had been terribly moody since losing the baby, and I hadn’t known how to help her except to realize that I would never understand how it could feel to carry a child for so many months and then lose him.
DESPITE EVERYTHING, I worked on my thesis and prepared for the December launch. There was no possibility of my taking time to mourn. My father’s little tour of America had completely depleted our finances, and I would have to have some kind of income at the end of the academic year, whether or not I received my PhD. If I did not receive my PhD by the end of the year, I would have to abandon it, as Tom Reynolds had, and retreat to the School of Mines, having wasted years of my life and thousands of dollars. All that studying and last-minute driving for naught—the conflicts with my father, the baby’s death, completely, utterly gratuitous.
I could not let it happen. Yoshiko, too, despite her sorrow and physical weakness from losing the baby, felt the same urgency. She did not complain about my long nights in the lab. As December neared, Yoshiko insisted that she and Kai-ming come along to Fort Churchill.
“It’s not safe for you there,” I said. “It’s no environment for a child and you’re not strong enough yet.”
“People live there,” she said. “And I’ve had enough of sitting around thinking about death. It’s not good for Kai-ming, either. He wants to see a launch.”
“People don’t bring their wives and children.”
“You told me someone’s wife watched from the bunkhouse.”
She did not want to be alone, and there was nothing I could do, once she had come to a decision. At the very least, I managed to persuade her to fly in a week later with Gleason. There was no need for her to ride in the Chevy and then the train all the way from Winnipeg.
THE NIGHT BEFORE I left, after Kai-ming had gone to bed, Yoshiko received word that her oldest uncle had died of a stroke.
I left her on the phone with her parents while I finished packing my papers. By the time I finished, she had hung up.
I was surprised to find the lights turned off in the bedroom. I had not heard Yoshiko wash up or bathe.
I stood in the doorway. It was raining outside, the raindrops splattering on ice. In a moment my eyes adjusted to the dark, and I saw her lying faceup on the bed, her face white as the moon.
“What a terrible year,” she said. “I can’t wait for it to be over.”
“Are you very sad about your uncle?”
It took her a minute to reply. “I suppose,” she said slowly. “We all lived together when I was a child. He was always nice to me, in a very patronizing and insincere way.”
I sat down on the bed, surprised that she would speak this way about an elder who had just died.
“You’re upset that he shut your family out of the lumberyard,” I said.
“He ruined my family. He let us starve to death.”
I thought of her brother on his bicycle, laughing, handsome, waving his farmer’s hat.
“But then he let your father back in.”
“Yes, by selling my father his own land.”
“What do you mean?”
“My father found out.”
“Found out what?”
“His name. Lo, not Cheng. He’s always wondered why, remember? Well, it turns out there was a contract between my grandfather and a man named Lo who had no sons. My father would bear his name in return for land. Guess what land? The land around the lumberyard.”
“But that was all your uncle’s land.”
“He took it when Lo died.”
“Did he know it was supposed to be your father’s?”
“Oh, he knew. He must have laughed when my father bought the land from him.”
I lay on the bed next to her and took her hand.
“All these years he drove by in his rickshaw,” she said. “My brother died, my sister’s living in a shack . . .” She sobbed, the tears falling on the pillowcase by my ear. “He always got the place of honor at our table.”
“Is your father going to do something about it?” I said. “Is there any evidence?”
Yoshiko blew her nose. “Evidence? Of course. There’s a signed contract. The Taoyuan magistrate signed it, that famous one who was killed right after February twenty-eighth.”
“He was a friend of my father’s,” I said.
“Yes, well, it’s a big, fancy contract, all in calligraphy and signed and in a bottle.”
“Well, it’s yours, then,” I said. “It’s legally your family’s land.”
“You’re like my mother. ‘Sue! Sue! Get the land back!’ ”
I pictured Chiu-yeh jumping from her chair, her hair coming lose from its bun as she shouted.
“Well,” I said, “why not?”
&nb
sp; Yoshiko tossed her tissue into the trash and lay back again, sighing. “It’s all my cousins living there on that land now. My father doesn’t want to kick them all out. He says they’re family and that’s that.” She rubbed her eyes. “Family. They made a fool of him all his life.”
We held hands, listening to the rain pouring down in spurts. In a few minutes she turned her head and went to sleep.
The wind picked up. The rain turned to snow, and the wind, whistling and shuddering, threw sodden flakes against the windows. This home was sturdier than my parents’, and the wind did not penetrate, did not hiss through the doorframes and rattle the paneling on the walls.
Family.
A wound that never healed. A promise never to be fulfilled.
That was family.
I rose from bed and stood at the window. The dawn was coming, and the pine branches swayed, dark and heavy with snow, against the lightening gray of the horizon.
The sweet sound of a child’s sneeze sounded down the hall. Kai-ming was awake. Such a good boy, he didn’t cry when he awoke, and he never had. He didn’t need to check if his mother was there for him. He already knew it.
Yoshiko stirred and turned her head to look back at me. “Huh?” she said sleepily. “What are you doing? Why are you still up?”
“I’m thinking.”
“Don’t think. Go to sleep.” She turned away and closed her eyes.
I climbed into bed and lay on my back. In the waning darkness, the shadows of the trees danced back and forth on the ceiling like bamboo whips. I put my hand on my chest. The bruises and scrapes were gone, but the nerve endings were still raw. They would never heal.
Yoshiko reached back and touched my arm, her hand so soft it still surprised me, her touch the balm I had sought all my life. Even when she was at her most depleted, she had healing and love to give. “Sleep. You have a long drive.”
Her breathing deepened. Her hand slipped away and curled under her chin.
The wind howled and shook the building at its very core, and then it whirled up into the dark night, fleeing the onslaught of day.
I AWOKE TO see pools of light rippling across the ceiling. The storm had passed, and Yoshiko had already gotten out of bed, leaving a warm nest of pillows and sheets beside me. Sounds came from the kitchen—the plunking down of glasses, the rush of the water faucet, the sizzle of eggs frying in oil as Yoshiko prepared breakfast for Kai-ming. The smell wafted through the bedroom.
I rose and entered the kitchen, and Yoshiko handed me a plate with a perfect fried egg on it, sunny-side up. Kai-ming had finished and was getting down from his chair.
“Say good morning to your papa,” Yoshiko said.
“Gau tsa, Papa,” Kai-ming said.
I awkwardly reached out to pat his shoulder, but he ran by me to turn on The Jetsons. I watched helplessly as he turned the tuner and hopped onto the couch. Would we ever be like father and son? I wondered.
“Who has the contract?” I asked.
“What?”
“The contract between your grandfather and that Lo person,” I said. “Who has it?”
“Oh.” She waved dismissively, scraping the egg off the pan. “My aunt gave it to my father, but my father gave it back.”
“Gave it back?”
“Yes. He said he has no use for it and life goes on. He’s such a fool,” Yoshiko said bitterly.
“Actually,” I said, “he is the wise one this time.”
YOSHIKO MET ME on the tundra at Fort Churchill, she and Kai-ming wrapped in so many layers of clothes they barely looked human. They watched as the rocket zoomed off into the ionosphere, sending signals back with my new, compact telemetry unit.
When we returned to Ann Arbor, the weather had taken another warm turn, the icicles on the eaves of our little apartment building dripping, splashing onto the snow, which melted into slushy puddles. On our doorstep, a telegram in a windowed envelope was waiting. It was from my father:
IT ALL WORKED OUT.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Yoshiko said.
“He got his money, I guess.”
“He sent you a telegram just to tell you that?”
“Maybe he feels bad,” I said.
Yoshiko took Kai-ming inside. I stayed on our doorstep, staring at the frugal line, the closest to an apology I would ever get from my father. Water from an icicle dripped onto the yellow paper and washed the words into an inky blob.
IN THE SPRING, to our joy, Toru visited us on his way back from a medical conference in Chicago.
He sat in our living room, taking neat packages out of his suitcase and smiling as he handed an aboriginal drum to Kai-ming. His hair looked grayer than I remembered, his face more drawn. He had stayed with Chen, and I wondered whether Chen had told him of our conversation that rainy night.
Toru took out a canister of very fine tea, dried shiitake mushrooms, spicy beef jerky, a package of rice crackers for Kai-ming, and a small package for me, in red wrapping paper and twine. He smiled a little, handing it to me.
“What’s this?” I said.
“For your graduation. Open it.”
“I haven’t graduated yet.”
“You’ve finished your thesis.”
“I have to defend it still.”
“You think you won’t pass?”
I smiled and untied the twine.
I pulled aside the wrapping paper to reveal a blue book. “But this was burned.”
I flipped it over. There was the gold kanji. The Earth.
He laughed. “You think they printed only one book? Professor Chen gave me the one I gave you before. He had another copy. It’s a later edition.”
I flipped through to the illustration of the aurora borealis. It had seemed so magnificent to me as a child.
“How does it compare?” Toru said.
“To what?”
“To the real thing.”
“Ah,” I said. “Nothing compares.”
Toru smiled. “It’s a bit elementary now, but perhaps you can keep it for Kai-ming one day.” He got up and swiftly retrieved the long package he’d leaned against the wall. “Now, also for your graduation. From Li-hsiang’s father.”
I put The Earth aside so Yoshiko and I could open her father’s package together. It was a large scroll with a very fine, heavy handle, and for a split second I thought it might be the contract with her father’s namesake. But then I recalled that the contract was sealed in a bottle and had to be small and that there would be no reason to send it to me.
We pulled out the heavy scroll and moved the coffee table out of the way. Toru took Kai-ming onto the couch beside him, and we unrolled the silk scroll across the carpet.
A pair of birds in spectacular hues of blue, red, and gold flew over a peach forest in bloom.
I couldn’t speak, and I saw Yoshiko’s eyes fill with tears.
AFTER DINNER, I took Toru for a walk through North Campus. We passed the new music building, its expansive grounds overtaking the field where I had first met Gleason, at the model-rocket launch. Yoshiko and I had been to concerts there and she had met friends for picnics on the lawn. Since Wei-ta’s group had shut us out, Yoshiko had found a group of international students’ wives who traded recipes for dumplings, samosas, and pastilla and shared plans for getting their own American education someday.
“What will you do after you graduate?” Toru asked.
“I have two job offers, one on each coast,” I said. “I’ll probably take the one in Boston.”
“Does it pay more?”
“No,” I said. “It will be more fun.”
He laughed and patted my arm.
He told me that he had seen my father at a banquet in Taoyuan. “He was complaining about all your brothers and sisters, your little brother in Japan, your little sister who’s always asking for more money. I mentioned I was coming here to visit and said I wasn’t staying long because you were finishing up your thesis and I didn’t want to distract you.
; “He looked a little embarrassed. And then he said, ‘They were the only ones I never worried about.’ ”
45
AFTER I GRADUATED, ALL that was left was to pack up and move again, to Boston.
I dipped my paddle into the Huron River, breaking the sky into slivers of floating blue. A heron rose beyond, wings flapping slowly, powerfully, a silver fish wriggling and sparkling in its beak. Off it soared, into the mysterious blue above, through the layers of life-giving gases that shifted in the wind. I would have believed it could fly into space.
It all worked out.
They were the ones I never worried about.
So be it. That was all I would ever get.
“I see a fish!” Kai-ming said excitedly. He sat facing me, dutifully strapped into his life jacket. He craned his neck to look over the edge of the canoe, his cheek still curved in the plump way of a child’s. It pained me every day to think I had missed the whole of his babyhood; his round cheek and the light fuzz on the nape of his neck reassured me, in some small way, that I had not missed everything. And if a lifetime of love would never fill the empty space of those four years, what else could I do but try?
Yoshiko, sitting in front of him, turned around and smiled so that her dimples showed, her eyes, tired for so long, glinting golden in the light. She carefully put down her paddle and buttoned the sleeve of her white seersucker shirt. Toru had urged her not to exert herself; she needed to fully recover before we could try for another baby.
One cannot truly start anew. Our little canoe was full with the memories of those who had died and those we had left behind—of our brothers, Aki and Kun-tai, of our premature son, of Yoshiko’s parents, loving through all their faultiness, of my own family even, with its betrayals and disappointments. They were, together with the sights and sounds, the smells and tastes, the joy and the bitterness of our lives in Taiwan, grown into the very core of our nervous systems. They formed the reference points of all that we were now and all that we would ever experience. We felt their loss every day. But still I pushed my paddle through the New World water, sparkling and cold, and somehow we went along.
