The Dim Sum of All Things

by Kim Wong Keltner

  At home she distracted herself by jam-packing her suitcase with trendy outfits. She measured out small amounts of all her toiletries into plastic, ounce-sized bottles and packed them into her carry-on luggage. For the rest of the evening she relaxed in front of the television, watching appraisers as they examined a Lalique decanter set, a Civil War-era rifle, and a pair of Ch’ien Lung vases. She did nothing else to prepare for her trip, figuring it would be pretty much the same as when she’d gone to the Chinese pavilion at Epcot Center in Walt Disney World.

  About two hours into the flight, she realized that she would be sitting in her plane seat for at least twelve more hours. It slowly began to dawn on her that she was going really far away. Pau Pau was snoring softly.

  After Lindsey fell asleep and woke up several times, she ate three meals and read four magazines, but the flight dragged on. The lights were dimmed now, so wherever they were flying above, it must have been nighttime. Pau Pau was now awake.

  “We going to see my auntie’s son,” she said. Lindsey was groggy with airplane head, so she barely heard her grandmother.

  “We go to Beijing to see her, and I show you some sightseeing.” Pau Pau often mixed up “him” and “her,” but Lindsey knew what she meant.

  She sat up in her butt-numbing, matted-down foam airplane seat and pushed herself up by leaning against the aluminum armrests.

  “Pau Pau?”

  “Eh?”

  “When did you leave China to come to the U.S.?”

  Her grandmother feigned sleep. “During war,” she answered, with her eyes still shut.

  “World War II?” Lindsey asked.

  She received merely an affirmative nod.

  “Where were you born?” she asked, deciding to start from the beginning. She figured that Pau Pau was trapped on this plane with nothing to do except answer questions.

  Pau Pau opened her eyes to find her granddaughter looking attentively at her. She, too, seemed to realize that now was as good a time as any to tell Lindsey what she had been angling for months to hear.

  “I was born in Shanghai, but my father die when I was very small. My grandfather had a tea factory, but we very poor. China very poor!”

  Lindsey nodded and kept her mouth shut, hoping Pau Pau would keep talking.

  “My mother remarry to old rich man who eat plum all day. He not know she marry before. I was secret, see? I live with grandparents, but my ma live in big house with old rich man. He own big store, like Emporium.”

  “So, did you ever see your mother?”

  Pau Pau closed her eyes again. “After while, she told the old man she had friend who had daughter who need job as servant. So I went to live in big house, but she could not say I was daughter. So I was servant.”

  Pau Pau spoke her sentences matter-of-factly.

  “I go to school, come home and do chore. Old man say I have big feet, say, ‘Like your ma, eh?’ He laugh like, how you say, buff-oon? But he not know my ma is his wife, and her feet like lotus.” Pau Pau held out her thumb and index finger a few inches apart to illustrate how small her mother’s feet were.

  Lindsey searched her mind for ways to keep the conversation going, but Pau Pau said, “No matter, no matter. When Japanese come, bomb everything! Kill so many people. Make me sick. Bomb everything.”

  Just then, the seat-belt light came on and an announcement about turbulence broke the mood of their conversation. Pau Pau closed her eyes and stopped talking.

  They arrived in Beijing around 3 A.M. Lindsey was half-asleep as they disembarked from their plane and, although she should have been helping her grandmother, she reverted back to childhood and blindly followed Pau Pau through the baggage claim and customs.

  She awoke in the hotel room the next morning, vaguely remembering the bus they’d taken in the middle of the night. Even though she had already slept in the twin bed, she did a quick scan now for mites or general lack of cleanliness. She decided it was all right, except the blankets felt thin and cheap.

  Pau Pau’s bed was already made, and she sat at a small table, pouring boiled water into a paper cup.

  “I’m hungry,” Lindsey complained. She knew she sounded whiny, but she was too cranky to reform her behavior just now.

  “Don’t drink from sink here,” Pau Pau explained. “Brush teeth with this,” she said as she handed Lindsey the cup of boiled water. Lindsey took the cup into the not-so-clean bathroom and washed up, annoyed further by a trickling shower that did not get hot enough and, even worse, blasted spurts of freezing water at random.

  As she pulled her bra on, she tried to remember the things she had packed in her suitcase so she could figure out what she wanted to wear. She selected a blue sequined sweater with plaid pants. She pinched the midget toe in hasty greeting before thrusting it and its nine little friends into a pair of chartreuse socks.

  Pau Pau went down to the hotel lobby and brought back breakfast, which consisted of a runny, dishwater-looking gruel with a stale, soggy bit of fried bread.

  “What is that?” Lindsey asked, with a look of minor disgust.

  “It’s jook, eat.”

  Lindsey peered at the bowl. Jook as she knew it was a delicious, creamy, and thick rice porridge made with leftover chicken or turkey stock. At the least, it was a simple white-rice-and-water remedy to be eaten when one was ill. The concoction in front of her now, with its mysterious brown flecks, resembled something that would most definitely cause an upset stomach rather than relieve one.

  “I’m not eating that. Don’t they have scrambled eggs here?” Lindsey asked, already knowing that Pau Pau would have gotten her an American breakfast if one had been available.

  “No scramble egg. Only jook,” Pau Pau explained patiently. She pulled a plastic jar of malted Ovaltine out of her suitcase and mixed a heaping spoonful with boiled water. She handed it to Lindsey with a few Pepperidge Farm butter cookies she had stashed in her bag. “Ho sik, eh? I know you like.”

  Lindsey accepted the hot drink and nodded her head. She was grateful and was starting to have a slight inkling that this trip might not be so easy.

  “We early one day. Sightsee today, go visit Auntie’s son tomorrow.” Pau Pau gestured for Lindsey to hurry up.

  Down in the lobby, Lindsey looked through the glass door to her first daylight in Beijing. Her eyes were still tired due to the early hour, and she squinted at the cold yellow sunlight that was illuminating the concrete outside. A few hotel employees were watching her with expressionless faces. When she looked away and then back again several times, the men stood motionless, surveying her. She was too familiar with the fact that Chinese people never averted their eyes to be polite. For some reason she felt compelled to speak very loudly in English.

  “Are you ready to go?” she yelled over to Pau Pau, who was conversing with a concierge.

  Pau Pau came over and clutched her by the elbow in that decisive, grandma kind of way. She held her arm as they walked, and meanwhile, other Chinese men and women in bland outfits strained their necks to look at Lindsey like she was some sort of movie star.

  They climbed onto one of the hotel’s chartered buses and sat in silence for a few minutes, waiting for other tourists, mostly other Chinese, to fill up the seats so the coach could get going.

  Pau Pau glanced over to her granddaughter.

  “Ai-ya, why you wear this?” she asked, suddenly observing Lindsey’s outfit for the first time. She slapped at the rhinestone and glitter fringe on her granddaughter’s shoulder bag.

  “Auntie Vivien gave it to me,” Lindsey said, as if the fact that Pau Pau’s own daughter had given it to her would somehow make it acceptable.

  “Why you get dressed up here? No one know you, you don’t know no one.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Lindsey that she was dressed up at all. But as she looked out the bus window, she did notice that the people of Beijing looked rather dowdy.

  The bus made the rounds to several other hotels before continuing on the route that would lead
them to the Great Wall. In addition to the Chinese nationals and a handful of middle-aged Chinese-Americans, one German couple and one older French-Canadian couple joined the tour bus.

  Lindsey definitely felt a part of the Chinese majority, with the two Anglo couples visually sticking out like sore thumbs. She did not understand the Mandarin chatter that was drifting down the aisle, but she easily translated the French conversation a few rows back. She eavesdropped as the French-Canadians discussed how they were dissatisfied with their shower but were glad they’d remembered the extra film cannisters, which were good for holding travel-size amounts of Nivea hand lotion.

  With twists and turns, and exhaust fumes permeating the coach’s interior, the bus ride was fairly nauseating. Lindsey was glad she hadn’t consumed that watery, gray jook. She listened to David Bowie’s “China Girl” on her Sony Discman until she noticed that her grandmother was staring into space and might be interested in talking some more. Lindsey took off her headset and asked, “Pau Pau, how did you meet Gung Gung?”

  The old woman shifted in her seat and fished a few Tootsie Rolls out of her purse. She handed the candy to Lindsey and thought for a long moment before saying anything.

  “I have some girlfriend, very rich. Their family own business on Nanking Road, the best in Shanghai. We go to dance, I borrow nice dress from them, they very nice to me. We style our hair wavy, see? Very popular 1930 style.”

  Lindsey nodded.

  “My friend say I prettiest of all, but how can? I poor. Just borrow dress, borrow nice purse, hai-la…” Pau Pau shrugged.

  “One time we all stand there at dance, wait for someone to ask us. I see your Gung Gung. He walk like American, talk and laugh loud like American. I say, ‘How can be Chinese?’ He walk up to me and my three girlfriend, and guess who he ask to dance?”

  Lindsey saw her grandmother’s eyes light up and her lips spread into a proud smile.

  “I see him lots time after that. We go to dance together, many time. But my ma…” Pau Pau shook her head. “My ma don’t like Gung Gung. She say he too flashy. Call him white devil in Chinese clothing.”

  Lindsey couldn’t wait to hear more, but just then the bus slowed down to pull into a rest area.

  Pau Pau had signed them up for a package deal that included a luncheon before arriving at their final destination. The busload of passengers filed into the restaurant and crammed around three big round tables, drinking tea and warm Coca-Colas until the pre-ordered lunch arrived. Lindsey noticed that the tablecloth was stained. No one mingled much, and she and Pau Pau kept to themselves. She felt inclined to speak French to the couple she had overheard, but she figured Pau Pau might think she was making a spectacle of herself.

  When the food arrived, she scanned the lazy Susan for dishes she might want. But the more she searched, the more she found that she didn’t recognize anything. The mushy-looking brown goo bore no resemblance to the various dishes of mushy brown goo she was familiar with back home. A couple of selections looked vaguely like seafood but lacked discernible parts that could be verified as either animal or vegetable. A bowl of sautéed beef, upon closer inspection, was not beef at all but tiny severed duck tongues.

  Lindsey was having another Temple of Doom moment. She didn’t want to stick around and discover chilled monkey brains for dessert.

  “What’s wrong?” Pau Pau gestured with her chopsticks to the bowl of duck tongues and said, “Is delicacy!”

  Lindsey nodded and ate some plain white rice.

  The others at the table seemed to get along just fine, but she was almost convinced that this whole meal was a joke on tourists. She tasted small portions of certain dishes, but only after she watched Pau Pau eat them first. She noticed a platter with a whole fish, and that seemed safe to eat because it still maintained the shape of the original animal, but the “sauce” of oily sweet-and-sour red gelatin tasted slightly rancid, and the fried batter was spongy.

  Once the bus arrived at the Great Wall, the passengers followed their guide, who held up a big orange megaphone and navigated the group through a maze of buses and tourists. As Lindsey jostled through the crowd, she felt like she was at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco.

  On the plane she had read that the Great Wall of China was the only man-made thing visible from the moon. She had wondered if, upon first glance at the majestic monument, she’d be struck with instantaneous cultural enlightenment. Pushing through the tourists, she held the railing and climbed the steep steps and looked at the sweeping view of the enormous structure, which wound up through the dark green hills like a gargantuan serpent. She could barely believe that the Great Wall had been built over two thousand years ago, and she pondered the manpower it had required to build. Regarding any epiphanies about Chinese culture, however, no lightning bolts were going off in her head. She needed a Diet Coke.

  They hiked up and down through crumbling walls and archways. Sightseers snapped through rolls of film as they oohed and aahed and captured perfect Kodak moments. Back near the buses, Lindsey perused the available souvenirs, impressed to find that one’s portrait could be superimposed on a porcelain plate with the image of the Great Wall in the background. Plastic caps and Frisbees with slashing, eighties-style letters read “Great Wau, China.” She spotted a bunch of bamboo sticks painted with, “My godparents went to the Great Wau of China and all I got was this lousy backscratcher.”

  That night she was so exhausted from the combination jet lag, bus lag, and weird brown goo-lag that she took a drippy, cold-spurt shower and went right to bed.

  In the morning, Pau Pau went downstairs to the lobby to figure out what local bus route would transport them to her cousin’s apartment. As Lindsey rubbed the sleep from her eyes, she looked out at the concrete courtyard and thought about the Russian stories she had read on prisoners of war. She thought briefly about Michael Cartier, and wondered if maybe she should send him a postcard. She wrote one to her parents instead.

  She decided to skip wearing mascara and lipstick. She supposed Pau Pau was right—she didn’t know any of these people, so who cared? Even with these makeup adjustments, she made sure to tease her hair up in the front. Under no circumstances could she tolerate flat hair.

  Pau Pau soon returned, and the two of them went out wrapped in layers of clothing and jackets. The air was polluted with coal dust, and even the leaves of trees were coated beneath layers of gray soot. They walked for a long time through the chaotic city streets, dodging bicycles and pedestrians rushing every which way, until they finally came to a corner where they waited for a city bus. Despite the downsized maquillage, Lindsey continued to attract intense stares from the local Chinese as she stumbled along, trying to keep up with Pau Pau’s fast pace.

  The bus was dilapidated and had no cushioned seats, heat, or working windows. The side panels were scrawled with graffiti in Chinese characters. The passengers looked especially drab and crabby, their faces distorted by down-turned carp mouths and austere expressions. Lindsey looked around and thought that today, without her lipstick, she blended in a bit. Little did she know that every single person on this bus could instantly tell she was an American-born Chinese by her mannerisms, her posture, and the eager-to-please dopiness about her.

  She felt good sitting there next to Pau Pau, and knew the two of them were sharing something special. She eagerly anticipated meeting Pau Pau’s cousin and saw herself as an ambassador from the United States, representing the good life that Pau Pau had now.

  “You know,” Pau Pau said, suddenly breaking Lindsey’s fantasy that she was an American icon, “your mommy almost died, long time ago…” She trailed off and left Lindsey hanging.

  “What?” Lindsey jerked up at the same time the bus gave a lurch.

  “My ma don’t like Gung Gung but I marry anyway. Gung Gung work for newspaper that say bad things about Japan, so we have to leave for village so they don’t catch him. Gung Gung tell my ma to leave Shanghai before too late. Japanese coming, he say. But no use. My ma
have nice house, why leave? When Japanese bomb come, kill her, kill her husband. But Gung Gung and me already flee to village. We have your mommy, we on boat, but we have nothing to eat. We floating, pack like sardine. No wind to blow boat, see? We have no food, so I have no milk. I only have little bit of cookie to give her. She eat only cookie, like you.”

  At this last comment, Lindsey stopped stuffing her face with the rest of the Pepperidge Farm Mint Milanos. She decided to ration them for later.

  “My father dead, and now my mother dead,” Pau Pau said softly. Lindsey looked away.

  After many more blocks, Pau Pau tugged at Lindsey’s sleeve to signal that their stop was coming up. They were in a section of town that was dominated by concrete, institutional-looking structures. This place was not what Lindsey had thought it would be. Where were the enchanting pagodas, the beautiful courtyards with ruby-throated finches in bamboo birdcages? She had anticipated peaceful neighborhoods with lots of trees and ceramic tiled roofs, but these buildings looked like neglected government housing. She wondered if they might get mugged.

  They climbed a littered, open-air stairwell, and Lindsey thought of the Ping Yuen projects back home in Chinatown. When they were kids, Franklin Ng briefly lived there and used to call it the Ping. He once told her he had seen ghosts dressed in old-style costumes floating through the walls. Now, here in Beijing, Lindsey remembered that story and got a little wigged out. As she and Pau Pau rang the buzzer on one of the doors, she didn’t know what they might encounter.

  A disheveled man in his late sixties wearing a very thin, short-sleeved shirt yanked open the security gate, shaking it on its shoddy hinges. He and Pau Pau greeted each other less warmly than one might expect. He was obviously the cousin, but if Lindsey was greeting her cousin after such a long absence, she probably would have at least hugged him. Maybe it was a Chinese thing.

  He led them into the unkempt apartment. Junk was piled around everywhere—newspapers, cardboard boxes, and sacks full of plastic scraps. Lindsey wondered what kind of work he did, if any.