by May-lee Chai
What she’d said to the girl at the customer service counter was “I’ll take a rain check!” (She had learned this term from a book that she’d picked up at the Chinese bookstore on sale, Useful Phrases for Immigrants.)
Surprisingly, the girl had liked this solution. She wrote up “a ticket” for Guili and said she could return next week for her bins and she could still use the same coupon and someone else at work would have to deal with it that day.
This was a perfectly face-saving strategy and Guili would have been proud of herself if not for the fact that a week from now she’d be living in a completely different city in a different, cheaper part of the state, and the whole point of the bins was getting them now.
But she took the “rain check” and left.
GUILI TURNED over in their bed. She didn’t want to wake Xiaobing with her restlessness, but she could find no comfortable spot on her side of the mattress. Guili worried as she did every night that they had missed their time.
Back when they’d first decided to xia hai, jump into the ocean and leave their government-factory jobs and strike out on their own, no obstacle seemed too harsh. They’d been willing to work hard, Xiaobing crisscrossed the country, representative of the company his classmates had formed. Guili kept the books, she saved money, economized, sacrificed; they saved and saved. They put off having a child until nearly too late, Guili was nearly forty when she gave birth. Fifteen years had flown by.
Now here they were in America finally, California, only to discover everywhere they looked, there were Chinese who’d come earlier, bought real estate when it was cheaper, started mindless businesses, and made a fortune. A woman in her mother-in-law’s geriatric taiji group had a daughter and son-in-law with three boba shops in a strip mall on Olympic Boulevard and a son in Stanford. They owned five houses, renting all but one. With the profit from their rentals, they no longer had to work. Instead they leased their business licenses to new families, new poor immigrants willing to put in 100-hour weeks but who might never be able to pay off their debts because the economy had changed.
Meanwhile, Guili’s and her husband’s degrees were worthless because they weren’t from one of the few Chinese universities famous in America, all their experience meaningless to the people here. She felt she’d arrived at the station only to find the train departed five minutes early, leaving her stranded on the border of her dreams, unable to make the cross.
WELL BEFORE dawn Xiaobing had to leave for his business trip to Japan. The shuttle picked him up from the house at 4:55. Guili had barely slept at all.
She sat on the edge of the bed as he dressed. She did not allow her feelings to overcome her.
She threw on her robe and made him some breakfast, heating the leftover xifan on the stove.
“It’s not necessary. I’m not hungry,” he said.
“You should eat.”
But he only grabbed a banana from the kitchen counter and took it with him as his cellphone buzzed. “Shuttle’s here,” he said.
She let him go with a studied casualness that belied everything she felt churning in her stomach. Her performance was an act of courage, she decided. Not cowardice. No, not that at all.
Guili had read about Japanese businessmen. She imagined her husband drinking half the night and becoming very ill. She imagined him sick, his face leaden, retching in a modern, Japanese toilet, the kind with a seat warmer, three nozzles for wiping the shit from the ass so one never had to so much as touch a piece of toilet paper ever. World Journal was filled with such stories. And the men’s trip to brothels, to bath houses with Japanese prostitutes. She knew from how the Japanese had operated in China how they must do business at home. But the bills were piling up. It would be important for her husband to succeed on this trip.
At breakfast, Guili looked at her husband’s empty space at the table.
Her heart beat fast in her chest.
The TV was blaring, but this time with the Today show, her mother-in-law’s favorite, and the sound of Americans laughing circled in her ears.
The kitchen table, the wind against the windows, the faces of her in-laws, her father-in-law’s doughy jowls, her mother-in-law’s knitted brows. Guili forced her eyes wide open, she refused to blink, but her chest hurt. The world was melting, the edges and the corners bending and running together.
She took a shallow breath, and it hurt her lungs.
Her in-laws gazed at the television, her son stared at his phone. Guili felt completely alone.
All at once the tears came burning to her eyes. Guili picked up her rice bowl from the table, her first instinct to keep her hands busy. She meant to carry it into the kitchen, something to do, something to hide the fact that she was going to cry. But as she felt the bowl in her hands, the glass cool and smooth against her skin, she felt a new urge. Facing her family, Guili raised the bowl above her head then dashed it against the floor.
The glass broke into a thousand shards.
Her father-in-law jumped in his chair. “What? What happened?”
“Clumsy,” Guili said out loud, as though it had been an accident. Secretly she felt a little shiver of delight.
All eyes were on her. They were looking at her for the first time in a very long while.
Guili thought about all she could say while she had their attention.
But her mother-in-law spoke first.
“It’s nothing. She’s just on edge. Because of the doctor,” Anping whispered loudly.
“What?”
But Anping didn’t answer. She went into the kitchen and returned with the dustpan.
Her father-in-law turned back to the television, her son to his phone. The moment was lost.
“Nai-nai, let me get that,” Guili said at last.
“No, no, no. Don’t bother. You’re sick. You should rest.”
“What are you talking about?”
Guili’s mother-in-law began wiping the floor in exaggerated circles with a napkin, sighing like a martyr. “I wasn’t going to tell you yet. The doctor called. She left a message. Call her back. So I did.”
“You called my doctor?”
“Her assistant. She said your test is positive.”
“She did not. You can’t say these things over the phone.” (There was an entire chapter in the phrase book called “Know Your Rights” with sections on Store Clerks, School Teachers, Police, Landlords, Doctors. Guili could hear the clear voice of the instructor from the accompanying CD: Repeat after me. I know my rights. You cannot do this. I know my rights.)
Her mother-in-law was nonchalant. “She mistook me for you. We have the same voice to these Americans. She said you need to make an appointment to come to their office.” Anping stood up and stretched her back. “I don’t want to cause trouble. I don’t want to argue with you. You should conserve your strength. I didn’t want to say anything while Xiaobing was here. No point worrying him.”
Guili’s heart beat like a drum in her ears.
Guili turned her back on her mother-in-law and the blaring television and she marched past the battalion of boxes that lined the hall and marched up the stairs to her bedroom and shut the door, not even slamming it. She pushed a tower of three packing boxes against it. And then she opened her closet, all the clothes yet unpacked; she’d wanted to wait till the last possible minute to prevent wrinkling, which seemed foolish now, stupid even, laughable. She slipped her arms around her coat, while it was still on the hanger. She put her hand in the pocket. She stroked the sleeve. The Italian fabric was smooth to the touch. Soft.
Guili remembered the morning that her mother had given her the coat.
Her father was startled when he saw it. Then he was furious. He’d marched across their apartment to the wooden box where her mother kept their ration coupons and he’d dumped the small slips of paper for flour and rice and cooking oil onto the table top. “What have you done?”
And her mother had laughed, inexplicably, and said, “What are a few coupons worth compared to our
daughter?”
And in his rage, her father had raised his hand as though he meant to slap her mother.
Whether for using up the coupons or for laughing at him or for all the million other things in his life he could not control, it was hard to tell.
“Don’t hit my mother!” Guili had shouted, but her mother grabbed her by the arms and pulled her out the door, saying, “Hush, the neighbors.”
Guili’s father then smashed the rice bowls, one after the other. “Foolish!” he shouted, a bowl shattering against the floor. Ben dan! Stupid egg!
Guili could hear the glass breaking through the closed door as she and her mother walked down the stairs of the apartment building together. In his rage, her father seemed to forget it was Guili’s last morning at home.
On the walk to the long-distance bus station, the early morning light clean and pure against the sidewalk, her mother had explained that she’d hidden all their ration coupons for cloth in advance. In order to keep him from suspecting that she’d traded the earrings. “Your father would not understand,” she said.
On an ordinary day, Guili might have said, “He’s a counter-revolutionary! All he thinks are feudal thoughts!” her usual teenage sullenness, but this morning Guili had been too shocked to reply.
Real jade, just for some cloth. And the wool wasn’t heavy. The coat in fact was not quite warm enough even on this spring morning.
But it was too late, and her mother was so happy, her cheeks flushed red in the wind. She looked youthful and pleased. “Remember, Guili,” she whispered, “I wanted you to have something beautiful.” Then she’d slipped her arm through Guili’s and the two of them had walked to the bus station together like this, arm in arm like schoolgirls with no cares in the world despite the fact that everything familiar and safe in their world was ending.
This feeling of hopeless hope or suspended despair or temporary consolation amidst unknowingness, Guili thought, was the phrase missing from her book. How useful it would have been to name this feeling exactly in this new and perilous land.
She slipped her arms into the coat sleeves; the expensive cloth—silk, cotton, and 3 percent cashmere—felt like an embrace, like a promise, like good luck. She’d known the love of her mother, who was willing to sacrifice her most treasured possession just to make Guili a coat. That love felt like the Prada. It gave Guili confidence.
And she at long last understood her father’s rage. For the unjust nature of life.
In an hour or so, Guili knew that she would call the doctor and find out the news herself, what the test results meant, what kind of suffering was in store for her and how expensive it would be. And she would use this answer, whatever it was, as an excuse to send her in-laws back to Henan. Her husband was gone, busy; he wouldn’t be able to fly back and intervene. Later she would claim that she’d acted out of consideration for Anping, how Guili hadn’t wanted to burden the old woman who, after all, already had her aged husband to look after. How would it look if Guili had allowed her mother-in-law to take care of her, too? Xiaobing would not be able to fault her logic.
Guili imagined the old woman’s surprise. Outfoxed in the last move.
And then it occurred to her, the exact useful word she needed. Guili could hear it enunciated in her ear in the soft flat voice of the woman who read all the English phrases on the CD. Checkmate.
FISH BOY
HEY, KID, YOU just gonna sit there?” The Boss was standing in front of Xiao Yu. Xiao Yu recognized the man’s polished leather shoes, the cuffs of his expensive pants, his complicated watch, the clean white cuffs of his shirt. Out of politeness he’d never stared the man in the face. Now Xiao Yu stood up and stared at the man’s shoes.
“No, Uncle,” he said politely as his grandfather had instructed him to say. “I can work, too.”
“Work?” The Boss laughed. The men in the kitchen laughed. “The squirt wants to work, did you hear that?” The Boss put his hand on top of Xiao Yu’s head. He could feel the sweat of the man’s palms dripping through his hair to his scalp. “And what can you do, Squirt?”
“I can scale fish. I know how to kill chickens. I can—”
“Whoa, whoa, listen to this! The squirt really does want to work!” The Boss pulled a pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of his crisp white shirt and tapped one out for himself. “Fine, fine, glad to hear you can be useful. Country kids, much better than a city brat,” the Boss said. “A kid who’s willing to work.” He tapped one of the men with the cleavers between the shoulder blades. “You! Show the kid how it works with the fish. Kid wants to scale fish, let him.”
Xiao Yu’s heart jumped inside his ribcage. To earn real money!
The Boss headed toward the door. He turned, jabbing his cigarette in the air at Xiao Yu’s nose. “Show me what you’re worth, kid, and maybe I’ll hire you, too.” Then he opened the door—the sound of a woman singing a Hong Kong pop song momentarily flooded the kitchen along with a thousand dots of colored light from the mirrored disco balls—then the Boss was gone and the door swung shut.
“Fuck his mother! What am I supposed to do? Babysit?” The man with the cleaver spat on the kitchen floor.
“I know how to scale—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know everything. I heard you. But this is the city. Things are different here.” The man sighed. “Come with me.”
He led Xiao Yu to a little room just to the side of the kitchen where the walls were lined with fish tanks. Just then one of the waitresses dressed in a shiny red qipao slit to her thigh hurried in. “Give me a grouper, quick! Make it a big one.”
The man grabbed a net and fished a grouper out of one of the tanks and slipped it quickly into a yellow plastic box, where it flipped and flopped, gasping for breath.
“That good enough, Little Sister?”
“Watch your mouth. I’m not your sister,” she said, and picked up the box and took it outside.
“All right, kid, now do you remember what that fish looked like?”
“Yes. It’s a gray fish with dark spots—”
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, the size? You think you could find its twin?”
“All groupers look like that.”
“Fuck. This kid is straight off the farm.” The man shook his head, but he took Xiao Yu by the shoulder and led him down the line of tanks, past crabs and lobsters, past lively colored fish that shone like gemstones, to a row of tanks packed so full of fish they could barely move. Many were ill, gray-white fungus growing from their gills, floating listlessly on their sides, their fins beating the dingy water futilely. “Find the grouper in this tank that looks exactly like the one we put in the box, and be quick.”
“But none of these fish look like that one. These fish are sick—”
“They’re okay, they’re going to die soon anyway. Consider it a blessing to kill them. Do you believe in the Buddha’s teachings?”
“The Buddha?”
The man shook his head. “Never mind. Just find the fish. Hurry up.”
Xiao Yu scanned the filthy tank. The sides were covered with algae, even the light bulb under the lid was covered with a greenish growth. “That one’s the same size.”
“Get it then.” The man handed a net hanging from a nail on the wall to Xiao Yu.
Xiao Yu lifted the lid gingerly and peered into the densely packed tank. He stuck the net in, trying not to accidentally scoop up the wrong fish, but it proved difficult to net the large grouper that was floating on its side slowly up and down toward the back of the tank. Other fish kept bumping it away or swam into the net. Xiao Yu had never seen such sick fish. Finally, he dropped the net onto the floor and rolled up the sleeve of his good sweater, the one his grandfather had insisted he wear to his First Week of Work, and stuck his right hand into the brine. He was able to grab the sick grouper by the gills and pull it up.
“Hey, that’s a useful trick.” The man nodded approvingly. “Here, put it in this bag.” The man grabbed a plastic bag from a pile on the shelf under
the tank and held it open so Xiao Yu could slip the grouper inside. It barely flopped at all. The only sign that it hadn’t died yet was the way the plastic was sucked into the fish’s gills as it tried to breathe, slowly suffocating in the dry air.
Suddenly the waitress reappeared and set the yellow plastic box on the ground next to the tank of healthy fish. “They want it steamed with garlic, ginger, and chives. No hot sauce this time.” She ran out again.
The man lifted the box and quickly dumped the lively grouper back into the clean tank, where it flipped once, twice, and then began to swim rapidly back and forth, as though it thought it might be able to swim away and escape.
“You heard her. Show me how you kill a fish now, clean it, and then I’ll show you which cook to give it to.
“Won’t the customers get angry?”
“They’ll be too drunk by the time they get to the fish course to even notice.” Then the man winked at Xiao Yu in a way that made him feel older, a part of things. Clever like these men, not like city kids who didn’t know how to work, like the Boss had said. Not like a kid at all really. And Xiao Yu squared his shoulders and stood a little taller.
AFTER HE’D been cleaning fish for four hours, Xiao Yu’s shoulders ached from hunching over the bucket where he was told to dump the scales and the guts. The smoke from the woks and the men’s cigarettes made his throat burn. Fatigued, the men had stopped yelling jokes and obscenities at each other. It was as if the night were flipping on its belly, like the fish in the filthy tank. Trapped amongst the other men, Xiao Yu felt the kitchen growing smaller, closing in on him, too. He imagined stretching out on his bunkbed in the dormitory. It would feel good to be able to stretch at all.
“Hey, kid, time to empty the buckets. We’ve got to get rid of this smell. Smells like a toilet in here. From now on, don’t wait so long. Throw the guts out back in the trash before we’ve got piles building up. This isn’t some farm.”
Xiao Yu bristled at the man’s insult, his cheeks burning hot, hot. He wanted to take his fish knife and hook the man who’d insulted him.
