by May-lee Chai
The wife paced in the foyer. She looked up when she heard the General call into the receiver, “Wei? Are you there?”
Before long, the General returned, shaking his head. “He can’t come. He has work.”
“Ah,” my father said. “He’s busy.”
The General’s wife blew air over her teeth.
My father refused to let me help him get out of the chair, and then he teetered across the floor. The General took hold of his arm and helped him to the door.
“You’re lucky! You don’t need a cane!” my father said. “I fell a few years ago. Slipped on the ice. I could have died. A colleague of mine, a young woman, she moved from UCLA. She went outside to smoke one night and fell. They found her the next morning. Frozen solid. Dead like that.”
“It’s that cold?” the General said, eyes wide.
“My daughter wants me to move in with her, she thinks it’s too dangerous for me to spend the winter alone in my house, but her apartment is too small.”
“Your daughter worries about you. She’s a good daughter.”
“She’s a teacher. Teachers don’t make any money. I taught fifty years and I can’t afford to retire where I want. I have to live in that terrible cold place.”
“Be careful!”
They were gingerly taking the front steps together, then shuffling to my car. I opened the doors and waited for them to climb inside, my father and the General in the back, his wife in the front passenger side seat.
“Where are we going? I can program it into my GPS,” I said.
“She can tell you the directions,” the General said in his careful English.
“Wang qian zou,” his wife said, waving a hand down the street like a practiced traffic cop.
I followed her directions over to the Ranch 99 shopping center. The parking lot was packed, cars circling like land sharks, but I lucked out, a spot in front of a hair salon, just a video store, eyeglass emporium, and jewelry store down from the restaurant.
My father felt confident enough not to use his cane.
“I don’t need it,” he said after I held it out to him, frowning as though he’d never seen it before, as though I’d found some stranger’s cane and now waved it at him, foolishly imagining it was his.
As the General and his wife walked to the restaurant, my father grabbed my arm tightly, and I could feel his body tremble and sway with each step.
Inside the Mayflower, the General rubbed his hands as he surveyed the carts wending their way around the crowded tables. “What do you like to eat?” he asked.
“You’re lucky you can still eat! At my age, I don’t know what I can eat. Ask my daughter.”
“What does your father like to eat?” he asked me.
“Bland foods. No spice. No pork. Good for the heart.”
The General’s bushy white eyebrows fell.
“Don’t eat what I can eat. Go ahead. Get what you like,” my father said. “My daughter can eat.”
Actually, that wasn’t true either, I had enough food intolerances to catalog, but the General seemed heartened and began waving at the cart ladies: fried taro cakes, shiu mai dumplings, xiao long soup dumplings, giant mushrooms stuffed with pork, eggplant stuffed with shrimp, a tureen of fish soup, a clay pot of something that looked like fungus and tentacles, steamed barbecue pork buns, chicken feet, and small bowls of fried rice.
“That’s too much,” the General’s wife said, scowling.
“Eat, eat!” the General said, spinning the lazy Susan towards my father. He stretched his chopsticks to pluck the fattest foods for my father.
“Really, I can’t have that,” my father protested.
“I know what he can eat,” I said, and plunked some mushrooms onto my father’s plate. “Don’t eat the pork,” I said in English.
“Eat eat!” the General said. “This is the best restaurant I have found. Authentic flavor.”
“Don’t be polite,” my father said. “You should eat.”
“He’s not polite,” the General’s wife said. “Everyone says my husband is so polite, has the best manners, he’s such a great man, but really he is terrible.”
My father laughed politely.
“My husband is a scoundrel,” she said. “Really he’s the worst person on earth.”
A waiter in a red coat walked by carrying a tray of porcelain teapots. “Here, here!” the General called. “Do you like black, oolong, jasmine, chrysanthemum tea?”
“He put me in the hospital for three months. He told them I was crazy,” the General’s wife said. “My own son wouldn’t help me. He took all my money and gave it away. I don’t have anything!”
“Your husband is a good man—” my father began.
“No, he’s not!” she shrieked. “He’s the worst man on earth! Everyone thinks my husband is a good man. But he is a bad man. God will judge him.” She pulled a necklace with a cross pendant out from underneath her sweater. “I believe in God. I believe in heaven. My husband is a bad man!”
“Have some tea?” the General said, pouring the hot liquid into the tiny porcelain cup.
“Have something to eat,” my father said, turning the lazy Susan, sending the mushrooms toward the General’s wife.
She ignored the mushrooms but grabbed a bun and two chicken feet with her chopsticks.
I took up the teapot and filled her cup.
“So how is your new book coming along?” the General asked my father.
“My husband is such a bad man. He had all those women in all those places,” she waved a chicken foot in the air for emphasis. “A bad man!”
She was so angry, her face changed color, darkening purplish along her jaw. Her black eyes flashed and the penciled lines of her eyebrows met. She gnashed the bones between her teeth.
I had no idea if anything she said about the General was rooted in truth or if perhaps she really was mentally ill or in some form of dementia, the past literally haunting her present, but it was clear in any case that she was very angry at her husband.
After we’d all pretended to eat, pushing everything around our plates, the General’s wife had everything boxed to go and the General flagged the waiter and grabbed the bill.
“Let me pay!” my father said. “You have done so much for my family. My father said I must never forget how you have helped us.”
“No,” the General told my father. “Your father was my teacher. He was a very good teacher. I am inviting you and your daughter today.”
I leaned close to my father’s ear. “I can grab it from him,” I said. “Should I?”
“No, no, no!” my father whispered back. “Let him. He wants to invite us.”
I never understood the check ritual, when it was all right to let someone else pay, when I was supposed to play the filial daughter and snatch it from one of my father’s colleague’s hands so that we could pay instead. I shrugged and let the General pay the bill.
Then the General turned to his wife and held out his hand, and she rummaged in her purse for her wallet, took out a credit card, and handed it to him.
Walking back to the car, my father held onto the General’s arm, and his wife leaned in toward me. “I remember the General telling me about your grandparents. He talked about them all the time,” she said, a shrewd look on her face. “He said they argued all the time. He said he’d never seen anyone argue like that. The way they would shout!” Her lips thinned against her teeth in a half smile.
I looked her in the eye. “I know,” I said. “It’s how they communicated. Shouting for that generation practically meant ‘I love you.’”
She looked startled. She must have imagined that I’d try arguing with her, and she was gearing up for a fight, but I wasn’t going to take her bait. I didn’t care what she thought. The General’s wife turned away for a second, frowning.
“You aren’t married,” she said, as though she’d just realized this fact. “It’s better not to be married. I should never have married. A happy life to be single
.”
Then the General and my father returned, and we walked back to the car talking of nothing more than the pleasant weather in Northern California in December, the tall palms silhouetted against the clear blue sky.
DRIVING BACK to San Francisco, I figured there would be less traffic on 101 than 880. Better than trying to cross the Bay Bridge on a Saturday afternoon at least. And for once, my traffic instincts paid off. We made it through 237 to 101 in twenty minutes, and then we were heading up the Peninsula, the oddly retro billboards for Silicon Valley’s companies dotting the sides of the highway.
“The General’s pretty lucky. He’s older than me and didn’t need a cane,” my father said. “All those steps in his house! That would kill me!”
“It’s ironic. Perfect health but a long, miserable marriage. The General’s wife told me it was good not to be married.”
“She said that?”
“She told me Ye-ye and Nai-nai argued and shouted all the time.”
“Well.” My father shook his head.
We drove along in silence for a while. I hesitated to put on NPR, thinking my father might need to fall asleep again, but he remained fully awake, staring out the windshield, unblinking.
“I worry about your brother,” my father said at last. “I don’t worry about you, I know you’ll be all right, but I worry about him.”
“Don’t say that.” That’s what my mother used to say before she went through the house and took all my “extra” things, clothes, shoes, toys, and sent them to her sisters’ kids. “I don’t worry about you, you’ll be all right,” was code for this-is-why-I’m-going-to-take-your-stuff. I learned early to hide things I liked: books under the mattress or slid between the bed and the wall, favorite dolls hidden in old shoeboxes pushed to the back of my closet.
“He quit his job,” my father said. “He gave up his good job like that.”
“He wanted to start his own company.”
“Who gives up tenure?”
“He does.” I sighed. “It’s the era of entrepreneurship.”
“You could tell him—”
“He won’t listen to me. I’m not going to get involved in this.” My mother was good with messages. Tell your brother this, she’d say. Tell your father to do such and such. Now that she was gone, my father had picked up her habit. But I wasn’t going to fall into that old trap again. Years of therapy had helped me to see the light. “If you have something to say, you’ll have to tell him yourself,” I said.
My father stared out the windshield without replying.
“So what happened to the General’s wife?” I wanted to change the subject.
“To think, they’ve been married all this time,” my father said. “More than sixty years.”
“Did you ever meet her before? In Taiwan?”
My father shook his head, trying to remember. “Maybe in Hawaii. I think she was a real beauty when she was young.”
“Was she this unhappy then?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember noticing anything.”
“No wonder the son didn’t want to come. What a nightmare.”
“I was so lucky,” my father said. “Mama was so nice to me. I was a lucky man.”
And then he sniffed because thinking of my mother still made my father want to cry.
I thought he might break down, in fact, and dug in the space between the seats for the box of Kleenex I used to keep there, but it must have slid into the back. My fingers touched coins, a pen, what felt like a sock, an old plastic bag, but I couldn’t find the tissues.
“I forgive you,” my father said, breaking the silence.
“What?”
“The General’s wife is so bitter. She should just forgive him. They’re too old. What’s the point? That’s what I think at my age.” He nodded and settled back into the seat, satisfied. “I just want you to know,” my father said, “I forgive you.”
“For what?” I said.
“For everything.”
It was just unbelievable. I had taken care of my mother when she was ill. I had taken care of my father after his heart surgery. Had they paid me? Had they worried that this might be a hardship for me? Had they asked my brother to take time off the tenure track to help them? And now, here it was my winter break, I had friends going on trips, Hong Kong, Myanmar, but no, I’d told them all I couldn’t go because my father had said he wanted to visit me. So I let him come and gave him my bed, and I drive him across the Bay to visit his crazy old friends and play the filial game, and now this! When I was a teenager, he’d spent money on my brother for a car, a motorcycle, a three-wheeler even, and I wasn’t allowed to go out after dark, and the housework I’d done, and the cooking, and who had to work her way through college? I felt the old familiar anger settling into my stomach again, and I remembered why I’d wanted to move far away from my family in the first place, vowing to stay away.
I took a deep cleansing breath, the kind the therapist recommended when she talked about family dynamics and repeating the cycle and breaking the cycle, and I exhaled slowly over my teeth. I tried to count to ten but only made it to five.
“I forgive you, too,” I said tightly.
“You’re welcome,” my father agreed.
“No, I said I FORGIVE YOU. I didn’t thank you.”
“You don’t need to thank me,” my father said. “I’m your father.”
“You’re not listening to me!”
“Why are you shouting?”
“Because you can’t hear me!”
“Why are you shouting?”
“OH, my god,” I said, clenching and unclenching the wheel. And I was fifteen years old all over again, arguing at the dinner table: “You don’t listen to me!” I was twelve, I was eight. My father was lecturing me instead of answering a question, speaking as though to a room filled with undergraduates diligently taking notes.
I took another even deeper breath and exhaled.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Why are you sorry?”
“You said you forgive me. So, I say I’m sorry.”
“What for? What happened?”
“Good lord. This is going to kill me.”
“What’s going to kill you? What’s the matter with you?”
“How come you can hear me now? Half the time you can’t hear anything I say!”
“Don’t be angry when you drive,” my father said. “You shouldn’t
—Watch! Watch!” He pointed out the window at a giant white bus switching into our lane.
I hit my brakes just in time to prevent being sideswiped. “Goddamn Google bus!” I pounded my wheel.
HONK! HONK!
“Oh, that’s the Google bus!” my father said. He pushed his glasses higher up onto his nose. “That’s what it looks like.”
“Look out your window,” I said. “I’ll pass them so you can see. The techies are all trying to hide inside, but we all know what they look like.”
I sped up so that my father could watch the white side of the bus rush by his window. The bus’s windows were tinted, but I could imagine the smooth-faced tech workers within serenely checking the price of their stock options on their laptops. I honked again as we passed.
HONK! HONK! HONK!
The third honk felt especially satisfying.
“It doesn’t look like anything special,” my father said. “I’m not impressed.”
“Neither am I.”
“You’re my daughter,” he said. “We’re not impressive.”
“No. Impressionable, not impressive.”
“Yes. We’re the same, you and me.”
I didn’t even try to take the third cleansing breath. All that deep breathing only made me feel light-headed anyway. I gripped the wheel and kept my eyes on the road, and I thought, Why not? We were the same, in our way. Same blood, same family, same method of communicating, therapy be damned.
Eventually, my father fell asleep, his chin on his chest.
And we didn
’t argue again, not for the entire drive back to San Francisco.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to my friends and family for all their encouragement during the writing of these stories, especially Kate Agathon, Nerissa Balce, Penelope Dane, Nina de Gramont, Carolyn Desalu, Sheryl D. Fairchild, Jeni Fong, Gwynn Gacosta, David Gessner, Gary Kramer, Sue Jean Halvorsen, Felicia Luna Lemus, George Lew, Beth Roddy, Lorraine Saulino-Klein, Nitasha Sharma, Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Nina Wolff, Howard Wong, Yi-Li Wu, and Susan Xin Xu; many thanks to my former students and colleagues in the Creative Writing Department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where many of these stories were written—the creative atmosphere and sense of camaraderie that you all fostered inspired me greatly; special thanks to my colleagues at San Francisco State University for their support and good will; and very special thanks to my father, Winberg Chai, for his love and constant enthusiasm.
I would like to thank the editors of the journals who first published some of these stories in somewhat different form, including Elizabeth Weld at The Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts; Jon Tribble at Crab Orchard Review; Trish O’Hare, publisher, at GemmaMedia Open Door; Allison Grimaldi-Donahue at Queen Mob’s Tea House; and Susan Burmeister-Brown and Linda Swanson-Davies at Glimmer Train. I am honored that the Crab Orchard Review awarded the Jack Dyer Prize in Fiction to my story “Fish Boy.”
I am grateful to the team at Blair—my editor, Robin Miura; publisher, Lynn York; and cover designer, Laura Williams—for taking such good care of this manuscript at every step of the publication process. It has been a pleasure to work with you all. And very special thanks to Tayari Jones, whose own work has been such an inspiration over the years, for choosing this collection as the winner of the Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman.
