by Francie Lin
The man on my left stood out in a quiet way. Older, more reserved, he sat at the table but seemed somehow disconnected from the others, appearing to listen with great attention to all the muttered conversation without being invited to take part. If he was insulted, he did not show it; he ate neatly and sipped a glass of warmed sake with evident enjoyment, studying his tiny glass from all angles.
"Rrrice." He crooked his finger slightly at the tureen in front of me and said, "Rrrice, please." He smiled at me, conspiratorial, as I passed him the bowl.
"I had lived for twenty years in New York," he explained. "As a professor of engineering. My name is Li An-Qing. Atticus in English."
He removed a piece of bone from his mouth and placed it on the rim of his plate, then wiped the tips of his fingers carefully on a napkin and studied me. "So you are Xiao P’s brother?"
"Yes, older brother."
He sipped his sake, the sharp corner of his tongue darting out to catch a stray drop. "Intéressant. Xiao P does not talk about you very much. In fact, yesterday is the first time he has mentioned you in a long time."
I looked over at Little P. He was bent solicitously over Uncle, his head inclined toward the old man in an attitude of deep attention.
"I’m a lot older," I said, though that hardly seemed to explain. "We don’t talk much. We don’t talk at all."
"Oh? Then this must be an occasion. It was very good of you to come so far." He patted my hand. "The reason is unfortunate—your mother—but I am very glad you have come. I have wanted to meet you for many years."
"Me? Why?"
He laughed. "It is not so surprising. Xiao P is with us for eight, ten years. You are always curious to know where your compatriots have come from. Tell me." He hesitated. "Do you find much… similarity in your brother?"
"Similarity to me?"
"Similarity to before, I am talking about."
I remembered my encounter in the stairwell yesterday—the hard, narrow face; the slashing knife.
"I don’t know.… I guess not," I said, half-resentful. "Why?"
He looked down the table toward Little P, who caught his eye and held it for a long, veiled moment before returning to an argument with Big One. Atticus stopped chewing. Then resumed, more slowly.
"Rien d’important," he said. He finished off his sake abruptly, in a large mouthful. "I only wish to have a better insight." He looked toward Little P again and lowered his voice urgently. "You must know that Xiao P is quite different."
My scalp pricked. "You say ’different’ like you mean something else."
Atticus shook his head violently. "No, no, no! Pas du tout. I have no wish to slander your brother. You must not tell him I said such a thing. I mean only that he is quite driven."
"In work, you mean."
"Work, life." He was evasive, distracted. "In a way, I admire your brother. He has his own… rectitude."
"Rectitude."
"Principle. Xiao P has his principles. You could say he is the most principled man you will ever meet," he said, and laughed suddenly, surveying the table with dry amusement.
He was even older than Uncle, but despite the peppered hair and shrunken bones, his face was smooth, unlined, he himself timeless in a formal gray mandarin shirt and buttoned vest. Where did he belong among this tattered, disjointed crew? He seemed to know much more about my brother than I did. Did he know about the angry red graffito on his doors? The hair with its clots of blood? The quick, terrible economy with which he handled a blade? Atticus’s fingers fluttered at his throat as he coughed a little, then resumed his eating.
"Are you," I asked carefully, "a friend of Uncle’s?"
He grinned. "Friend is a nice word. I work for Zhou Jian-Ping—Uncle, as you call him. I manage the finance for the karaoke and some of his other business. Those two"—he indicated Big One and Poison with a lift of his chin—"probably like to have someone else for the accountant, but the family have obligation to me."
"Obligation?" Somehow it was hard to imagine my raw-looking cousins feeling obligation to anyone, let alone this slight, courtly old man. "You mean financial obligations?"
He frowned. "How to explain. Uncle and I, we are neighbors in our youth. His father—your grandfather, you probably know—was an interpreter for the Japanese."
"I didn’t know he worked for the Japanese."
"Everyone here worked for the Japanese in the 1930s. You know your history? This is World War Two. Japan is in Manchuria, Taiwan is the Japanese colony. Japan needs translators on the mainland but cannot use a mainland Chinese. Too risky. So they send your grandfather and others instead—loyal subjects of the Emperor," he said, a little derisive.
"I didn’t know," I repeated. The sudden brush of my own blood with the faceless bulk of history sent a tremor through my limbs, like a drumbeat felt from far away.
"The army says one year, two years only. But five years pass, and still your grandfather is not allowed home. Your grandmother was sick then, and cannot manage your mother and Uncle both, so my father took Uncle and raise him along with me and my sister. Only temporary, of course. Your grandfather come back eventually, but very, very late—not until after Hiroshima. Uncle was about twelve, I think. He barely know his father at all. But he was always very grateful to my family. Grateful, and angry."
I glanced down at the end of the table, where Uncle was painfully feeding himself a spoonful of soup.
"I expect he does not remember enough for it to be important now," said Atticus.
After dinner, Poison and the others immediately got down to their intended business, setting up a few tables of mah-jongg, the click of the tiles like glass rolled by the sea, accompanied by a lot of cigarette smoke and cursing. Poison tried to engage me as a fourth at his table, but I didn’t want to play. My flight home was tomorrow, and there was still the business of my mother’s ashes to take care of; the will; the sudden yearning to talk to my brother, the hundreds of things I had to tell him, to ask.
The room seemed suddenly too crowded, and I wanted to get my brother alone for a while, though he himself appeared to have no need of a tête-à-tête. He stood on the other side of the card tables, opposite me, not playing, watching their games as he smoked. I had the idea that he was using the men as a kind of live barrier, a defense against me. I had accustomed myself to his face, with its stitches and bruises, but as I looked at him across the room now, it blinked once more into anonymity.
"Emerson?" Atticus, who had been sitting next to Uncle, got up to leave. "Will you help me?" He pulled a handful of plastic bags out of his raincoat pocket.
I followed him to the entry. He sat down with some difficulty on an overturned crate near the door and tied a bag around his left foot, then one around his right to keep the rain off his shoes.
"I am sorry you are leaving so soon," he said. "But if you come back, I invite you to look me up." He handed me his card. "It was a vigorous conversation."
"Yes, it was." I knotted the bags securely around his ankles and sat back, uncertain.
"What did you mean about Little P, about his having… rectitude?"
Atticus suddenly appeared very interested in his shoes and adjusted the knot around his right ankle.
"I think this will hold." He held out a hand, and I pulled him up. He tied the belt of his raincoat, stamping his feet experimentally a couple of times. He seemed not to have heard my question, offering me his hand instead. "Good-bye, Emerson. I wish you good luck."
But as he opened the door, he cast a furtive glance over my shoulder at Uncle and the others. He paused, then drew me out into the entryway, closing the door behind us.
"Écoutez-moi, Xiao Chang," he said quietly. "I asked before if you noticed some change in your brother. Why did you not answer me?"
I bit my lip. "Because I don’t know."
"Wrong," he said. "You are afraid to acknowledge what changes you see. Well, and perhaps you are right," he said, with a small sigh. "Maybe it is right to be afraid."
He shook his head. "I must go," he said, making a movement toward the elevators.
I caught his arm. "But you said he was principled. The most principled man I would ever meet."
"Yes, of course. Buguo, many kinds of people have principle. Mao Zedong, you know, was also a man of great rectitude."
"I don’t understand."
The door opened, and one of the men came out, muttering: he had not won his pot. Before the door closed, I caught a glimpse of Little P and Uncle conferring. Atticus saw them too. He shook out his rain hat with an air of resolution.
"Have you notice the maid?" he asked softly. Then he stuffed his hat on his head and left.
Uncle’s gaze followed me as I went back inside. Little P was pushing some poker chips around on the sideboard, running them through his fingers like gold coins.
"Dinner good? You like it?" he asked.
"Dinner was fine."
"Just ’fine’? That’s the best fucking roast duck in Taipei. That place is famous."
"The duck was good. Listen. We need to finish talking." I made a vague gesture toward the closet where I’d stashed my mother.
He put out his cigarette in a bowl of ashes meant for incense.
"I have to go to work," he said. "These cocklovers"—indicating the cousins—"they won’t move until their game is done."
"I’ll go with you."
He sighed, impatient. "Emerson." Then he seemed to check himself. "Okay. Fine, come with me."
I went upstairs to use the bathroom. It was a tremendous relief to close the door and be alone for a moment. I washed my hands in the rusty water and tried to think over what Atticus had just said. Now that he was gone, my conversation with him seemed only to raise more questions. I splashed water on my face, thinking of the ashes in the downstairs closet, the dark, squat box that had come to stand in for my mother. And now I would have to give her up to Little P for burial. The thought stretched bleakly before me.
On my way back down the upstairs hall, a door flapped in a sudden draft. I paused, glancing in. A lamp shone in the far corner of the small room, among the mildewed storage boxes and old furniture. Along the rim of murky half-glow where the lamplight petered out, someone was moving.
"Hello?" I whispered, pushing open the door.
A woman, an older girl, huddled on a thin cot against the wall, half-hidden by a pillar of boxes. She drew back when she saw me in the doorway, clutching the front of a new, ill-fitting dress to her chest. Her feet were bare, her skin scrubbed clean and raw. A notch broke the line of her upper lip, an old deformity, clumsily repaired to leave a scar. She scrunched farther into her corner as I approached, and her gaze flickered anxiously around the room.
"It’s all right," I whispered. "Are you… a friend of Little P’s?"
No answer. She watched me, apprehensive.
"What’s your name?" The wild vacancy in her eyes was shocking; I just wanted to hear her say something, anything. "I’m Emerson."
"Hey!" Little P’s voice came faintly up the stairwell.
"Coming!"
The girl jumped at my shout, and her jagged lip trembled. But as I backed out of the room, she suddenly spoke in a voice husky with disuse, murmuring low and unfathomably before subsiding into a ragged sob like the end of a prayer.
CHAPTER 6
IN THE NARROW, mildewed back hall of the Sing Palace, Little P unlocked a door and flicked on the light.
"Voilà," he said—a dry joke, because the office was grim, with concrete walls and a ceiling that showed rusty metal beams, all lit by a greenish fluorescence. Discarded computer equipment littered the floor, along with empty boxes and half-packed crates of salt fish, jug wine; a clatch of mosquitoes whined in a damp corner. The shabbiness contrasted sharply with the Palace’s lobby, which had the slick veneer of put-on class, the walls gilded and the reception counter polished black, manned by a sleepy young man stuffed into a black-and-white tuxedo.
Little P threw his jacket over a group of black banquettes, which had been torn out of the walls and stood like sheep in a slaughterhouse. The room was cold; I noticed that my brother was shivering.
"Are you lonely, Little P?" I asked him suddenly.
He was rummaging around on the desk with papers. His hands paused, then continued, resolute.
"I have people around from the time I get up to piss to my last smoke at night. No, I’m not lonely," he said. "Not lonely enough."
I shook my head. "I don’t mean physically alone. It’s something else. The way you live? The people you’re surrounded by…" trailing off, because I couldn’t nail down what was bothering me so much.
"What about them?" Defensive now. He had always been sensitive to criticism.
"I don’t know. Uncle, Poison… I just can’t believe they would really get you."
"And who would?" An edge of bitterness to his voice, just below the light teasing note. "You?"
I lowered my eyes and didn’t say anything. After some time he realized his mistake.
"Shit, Emerson." He rubbed his stitches fretfully. "You’ve been riding my ass ever since you showed up. What do you want from me? What do you want me to say? Ten years. What would you understand about me after that long?"
"But that’s just it," I said. "I know nothing about you. I understand nothing. I won’t pretend I do. But I want to know—something, anything. You’re all I have left now."
The sentimentality of it made him nervous. He jumped up from his desk and shifted restlessly among the junk in the room. He paused beside the long window. It was dark outside, and raining again; the glass reflected the office, the disorder, the thin, baleful figure he cut in the grainy light.
"There isn’t anything to know," he said, after a while. "You’ve seen it all right here. I’m just a two-bit manager of a lousy KTV."
He drew the window shade.
"Mother’s ashes," he said, turning back to me.
I had almost forgotten them; the charge of sudden intimacy sparked by his not-quite-confession had sent her out of mind. But the dry knowledge of loss renewed itself as I took the box out of the bag and held it out to him.
"She’s in there," said Little P, hesitant, not a question but a dazed statement to himself. Slowly, he reached forward and took the box, staring down at it as if looking into a well that held an image in its deep, dark water.
"Have you thought any more about my offer for the motel?" I asked.
He frowned and set the box down.
"I’m only asking you to consider," I said, following him as he walked back to the desk and leaned against the edge. "The family home, Little P."
He lit a smoke, cupping his hand around the tip, and studied the lines of his palm.
"You talk to the lawyer and get me the papers first," he said abruptly. "Then I’ll consider it."
The papers, rightfully his, were back in my hotel room. Should I have brought them? The hardened look in Little P’s eye said no. I’d keep them to myself a little while longer. Still, conscience dictated that I compensate him somehow, some way, however inadequately. He was my brother; I couldn’t just leave him with nothing.
I took out my checkbook and filled in the amounts.
"Here"—holding it out to him.
"What for?"
"What do you mean? For you."
"Why?" He searched my face, suspicious.
"No reason." No reason but guilt. The box of ashes seemed to darken and glower: I give your brother the motel! You cannot just ignore my wish. "A present."
Part of me hoped that he wouldn’t take it, that some kind of pride or principle would prevent him from accepting a handout. Instead, he took the slip from my hand, glanced at the amount briefly, tucked it in his pocket.
"Thanks."
I wanted to ask him again about his face, what had happened; about Atticus; about Uncle, the knife, the girl, the red ciphers on the door. But
somehow the opportunity for confidences had passed. Too much had happened, there was no way to begin. A little good-luck totem sat on a shelf above his head, a golden cat with its jointed paw weaving up and down, tick-tock, like the second hand of a clock.
"Well." I looked at my watch. "I have to get going."
He stood up. "I’ll take care of the ashes. Don’t worry."
"She wanted a temple burial," I said. A suffocating grief swept over me as I gestured inadequately toward my mother. "It’s all up to you."
"You’ll talk to the lawyer, right?"
"Good-bye, Little P." I put a hand on his shoulder. "I’ll be in touch."
As I left, he was dialing someone on the office phone. He had taken my check out, his thumb marking the amount.
"Wei?" I heard him say, and then a low, urgent rumbling of Chinese. I turned at the doorway. His back was to me, the ashes forgotten, balanced precariously on a shaky stack of crates. I gritted my teeth and made myself continue out the door.
THE LITTLE cantina in the basement of the airport was quiet when I arrived for my flight. It was very early; the lights had not even been turned on except for a few above the bar, but there was a smell of coffee and hot oil. Small heaps of eggs and sausages sat patiently in warming pans laid out along the counter while a woman in a hairnet planted thermometers in them like flags. I surveyed the unappetizing counter, took a watery instant coffee with two sugars, and carried it to an empty table.
A few other travelers were scattered around the darkened tables, looking hollow-eyed and dazed. A man in a wheelchair approached, selling pens, toys, packages of smoky incense. I shook my head at him. Adamant, he wheeled closer, laid a selection of pens stiffly on my table. I shook my head. After a few moments he moved on, but the incense lingered, insistent, dark, smelling of death and its little gods. Yesterday, just before Little P and I had left for the Palace, Uncle had searched me out, breathing laboriously with intent, and pushed three sticks of incense into my hand, nudging me toward a little shrine set up in a back corner of the room. Two framed portraits hung over a shelf laid carefully with a plate of guava and a bowl of sand in which sticks of incense burned down to filaments: my grandparents, the same pictures my mother had had in her front hall. I had never met them, but the photos were as familiar to me as my own face. How strange, and somehow terrible, to come upon them in an alien place so far from home—like a nightmare in which you come upon strangers who have your face.
