Home Remedies

by Xuan Juliana Wang

  There were blue, yellow, and black bras hanging on the line that he used for developing negatives. The enormous hat was on the floor in the center of the room.

  “Are you crazy?” he asked. “Do you know that this is how a crazy person acts?”

  “So what if I am a tad crazy,” she said with a gasp. “Maybe you should learn from me, be more crazy! Then maybe you wouldn’t just be moping around like a mute, scared of this and scared of that.” She held up her phone so that she was speaking directly to her audience. “You know what they say, when everything is easy and smooth, it’s dangerous for an artist. You fall asleep on the job.

  “Maybe one day you’ll thank me for waking you up,” the actress announced, half to him, half to her screen. “What do you think, guys?”

  He sighed and hot pain seized his rotting tooth. He held his face with one hand and stuffed a week’s worth of clean underwear into his backpack with the other.

  Against his better judgment, he downloaded the Livestreaming app on his phone. She wasn’t exaggerating: the actress really was one of its top users, with hundreds of thousands of active users watching her channel every day, showering her with cartoon Lamborghinis.

  There she was pouting on his screen, having changed into a loose wrap dress, streaming from the fire escape just a few feet from him. She earnestly answered her viewers’ questions: “Isn’t Brooklyn dangerous?” “Do Americans really eat at McDonald’s every day?”

  The collective commentary of strangers on her message board was clear and knowing.

  “Yang is just jealous of you.”

  “What has he done to make him feel like he deserves this life more than you do?”

  “He must be a closet case.”

  “If he really wanted her to leave, she would have been gone by now. I mean, really.”

  “Is he attractive?”

  “No. Too passive.”

  “Weak, just like his generation. Doesn’t know what he wants.”

  “Enough already!” Yang wanted to shout at his phone. “Get out of my life! None of you know me! You don’t know what I’ve been through, what I’ve had to deal with in my life!”

  The actress’s face popped back on his screen. She was walking briskly down what he could tell was Franklin Avenue. Her candid gaze was different from the one that had emerged from the crowd to greet him at the airport. She no longer smiled. She already looked like a New Yorker.

  As he scrolled through the comments aggregated over the course of the last few days, he began to realize that these people talked about the actress as if she were their friend. Even when she turned her camera off, they continued to talk about her among themselves. They knew that both her parents were diplomats and they had left her with her grandparents because they weren’t allowed to take her with them. They knew that her mother died of cancer when she was very young and so the actress never knew her at all. Now she dedicated her life to making money and having fun. The viewers defended her. They doted on her, complimented her. They couldn’t live without her. Some of them were in love with her.

  They said, “She’s great. Her whole life. Everything about her.”

  After an hour Yang had to delete the app. The voices of strangers were like birdsong in a forest, near and then far, and then it became an echo.

  That night, Yang tried to sleep under the peeling plaster of Seth’s ceiling for what would be the very last time. As he lay awake, he could understand why the actress had come to New York, a city without parents, and set up camp in his apartment, a place where there was nobody to say “I know you, I know what you’re capable of. What kind of person you are.”

  After a while he decided to go buy some cigarettes. There was music playing in the kitchen, but he went straight for his winter coat, hanging by the door, and ran down the stairs. Outside he could hear the train rushing to a stop in the distance, screaming as it approached the few bundled-up passengers backing away from the noise. He walked on new snowdrifts, freshly settling on the sidewalks, and past small piles of snow with cars underneath.

  By the time spring comes perhaps the actress would still be living in his room. On weekends the actress could go sell bracelets with Jesus near the Prince Street subway and on weekdays she could attend the same English classes as he did in the financial district. Maybe Bryan would ask her to do some translation for his independent press, and when her English got good enough, maybe she’d start going to all those Broadway auditions with Julian’s boyfriend. Any tension and unhappiness will have been neutralized and the only person it would inconvenience would be him.

  At the deli, Yang purchased a pack of American Spirits and a lighter. The first inhale made him dizzy and he had to lean his back against the shop’s advertisement-covered windows. The streetlights illuminated the shapes of the industrial chimneys in the distance, which so closely resembled the factories he used to play inside of as a boy. Come to think of it, they were nearly identical to the warehouses in Changchun that he and his friends had broken into for fun, bursting out to tag one another, stepping on broken glass, nails ripping their winter coats. The site managers were always after them, but the boys and girls scattered into the dark corners, giggling, escaping the reach of grown-up hands. Yang was never trying to get into trouble. He just wanted to extend each minute of time, before the sky got dark, before it inevitably started to rain and playtime was over.

  Just then three girls turned the corner, all of them in a festive mood. Their voices hushed to a conspiratorial octave as they passed him. One of them came up from behind Yang and draped the soft sleeve of her suede coat over his neck.

  “I think you should come with us to this party,” said the girl, her eyes blue like glaciers, her mouth sweet with whiskey. “Isn’t he hot, you guys? He’s so hot, right?” she asked her friends, who tried to drag her away. The blue-eyed girl was still holding on to his hand and he was about to ask “Where is the party?” but the words came to him in Chinese.

  Then like a voice in an interrupted dream, they flew out of him in perfect English.

  TIME AND SPACE

  Algorithmic Problem-Solving for Father-Daughter Relationships

  To be a leader in the field, every computer scientist first needs to understand the basics. Back away from the computer itself and into the concepts. After all, a computer is just a general-purpose machine; its purpose is to perform algorithms.

  It is due to the fact that algorithms are unambiguous, that they are effective and executable. However, algorithms aren’t just for machines. In designing an algorithm, a person can execute a complex task through observation and analysis. To be a good father, it would be a logical assumption that these same acquired skills should apply.

  As I used to say during my lectures at Heilongjiang University some thirty years ago: Everything in life, every exploit of the mind, is really just the result of an algorithm being executed.

  For example: To peel garlic

  Obtain a bulb of garlic and a small plastic bag

  As long as there is garlic, continue to execute the following steps:

  1.Break the garlic petal from the garlic bulb.

  2.Peel off the outer skin.

  3.Place the smooth garlic into the bag.

  4.Throw the skin into the wastebasket.

  To my students and colleagues I once famously said the same can be applied to something as complicated as getting married. As long as an adult male is still without a wife, continue to execute the following steps:

  1.Ask librarians, family members, and coworkers if they know any single girls.

  2.Invite girls to watch movies.

  3.Assess compatibility facts as follows:

  a. Beauty

  b. Family

  c. Education

  d. If compatibility measures up to previously set standard, move to step 4; if not, start from beginning.

  4
.Ask the girl to be your wife.

  A librarian introduced me to my ex-wife. Her nose was too small for her face, her hairline too high. However, she came from a family with good Communist party standing and we attended similarly ranked universities.

  One day, on the way to see a play, she lost the tickets and I yelled at her for her carelessness. I thought that was the end of us. Then on our way back, I stopped along the street and tied an old man’s shoes for him. She agreed to marry me after that.

  There was a miscalculation in this equation, which I now see, of course. I liked the girl I married very much, but not the woman she became after we immigrated to America. This woman never respected me. All the data was there to be sorted, I just didn’t decode it until it was too late. She had this way of making me feel spectacularly incompetent. She was a literature major in college and she had what people said was a good sense of humor. Once I took her to a company party and all anybody could talk about the next day was how ravishing my wife was. That was when it began to bother me. That people didn’t think I deserved her. That they thought I was somehow less than her.

  I don’t think she understood the protocol of being a good wife. “Let’s go into the city and eat at a nice place,” she used to say. Why? So I could feel more out of place for not being able to read the menu? No, thank you.

  But without her, there would be no daughter, Wendy. There’s that to consider.

  Now that I’m older, I see that my theory proves itself day after day. Until illness and then death, life is indeed the outcome of algorithms being performed. I didn’t need a coach to learn how to play tennis, because before I even stepped on the court, I understood the fundamental math of the game using an algorithm. I know that the GPS in my car is using another algorithm, taking its calculations to a satellite to tell me where my car is.

  So right now I need to make a new algorithm to solve the problem of Wendy. My only daughter, who I somehow managed to drive away from me—door slamming and eyes pooling up during dinner.

  I wish to concentrate on the relevant details of our relationship from tonight and beyond in order to break down our problem into something that can be decoded, processed, and used to save our relationship. How did I hurt her? Will she ever come back to me?

  This evening was one of those calm, snowless December evenings in Westchester County. My daughter, whom I hadn’t seen in nearly a year, was home on vacation from studying in England and planned to spend two weeks living in her old bedroom. I had already prepped the pigs’ feet to throw in the pressure cooker and defrosted tofu skins I’d smuggled in from my last trip to Jilin. When she walked through the door, pink nosed and taller than I remembered, I felt such a rush of affection for the girl that I went right up to her and pinched her arm really hard.

  I broke down these two weeks into pseudo code just to see how it was going to work out in my mind:

  If (daughter comes to stay) then (if [temperature = cold])

  then (enjoy home cooking)

  else (watch movies)

  else (buy her consumer electronics)

  “Baba, is it your goal to make me obese?” she asked when I showed her the five-pound bag of uncured bacon shoved in my fridge. I replied, “Oh, come on, little fatty, you know you crave my pork stew,” and she laughed. She hadn’t changed very much, had the same soft chubby hands that I love squeezing. She still had my smile, the one that was all gums.

  Even before I had finished putting out all the vegetables and meats on the counter for prepping, Wendy was already showing me pictures of all her weekend trips. She’d been to France, Italy, and Spain. I pulled my head back so that the countries came into focus.

  “Where are pictures of you?” I asked as she clicked.

  “I was too busy documenting the landscape.” She went through the snapshots slowly, importantly, lifting her computer to show me pictures of bus stops, lampposts, jars of pickles.

  “How do you have so much time to travel when you’re supposed to be studying?” I asked.

  “You think I went all the way to England just to sit in my room? Besides, all the Brits do it, too.”

  For me, she spoke Mandarin, which had gotten rusty. She mispronounced words and made up her own metaphors. But I loved hearing her talk, just like when she was a child, telling me stories while I tried to teach her how to make a good steamed fish. While her mother would be out taking real estate courses or painting a still life, Wendy would always keep me company in the kitchen. I didn’t want to look at the pictures, but I was happy having her voice fill up the house. I gutted a red snapper and stuffed it with ginger.

  “Can’t say I have the same attitude toward education,” I said. I handed her a potato peeler and she finally put away her laptop.

  “Of course I study, too, Dad, I study all the time. I’ve made a ton of friends from all over the world,” she said.

  “That’s good, expanding your horizons,” I said.

  “There are Chinese students at my school, too. Bunch of wackos. They just stay in their dorm rooms and make dumplings all the time. It’s fun, I guess, but all the time.” I nodded, and she went on. “In England. Can you believe that?”

  “And they are your friends, too?” I asked.

  “No, they don’t talk to me. Probably because I speak English and don’t study engineering.” She started slicing the carrots into strips, and I showed her how to make them into stars. “But I didn’t go over to England to pretend like I lived in China, you know?”

  “Probably good you aren’t friends with them,” I said solemnly. “The only Chinese kids who get to study in England have to come from crooked families with embezzled money.”

  “Maybe…but I can’t imagine it would be all of them,” she said, squinting at me. “There was this one crazy thing that happened while I was there. There’s a lake in the middle of campus where the university raises exotic geese from all over the world. Then one day the caretakers noticed that one of the Egyptian geese was missing its mate.”

  She stopped talking until I gave her my full attention. “Turns out this Chinese student had killed it! Goose dumplings.” She put down her chopping and with great effect said, “The university expelled him.”

  “That’s a pity.”

  “Isn’t it? I heard the guy was from Anhui,” she said. “And I just kept thinking, why did he do it? Even if he didn’t know they were pets. What made him see a magnificent bird and immediately want to kill it?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it, Wendy,” I said. How could she know that my brothers and I used to kill sparrows with slingshots in order to eat them. How we shot so many sparrows the birds couldn’t land and became so exhausted they began falling out of the sky, dead.

  “It’s just so typical of Chinese people, too, not to even protest their friend’s expulsion.” She went over to the sink and peeled with great indignation.

  If anything, I thought, it was she who protested too much. Always concerned with things that she had zero control over. Like missing her SATs for a hunger strike against the Iraq war, something she had nothing to do with.

  I could have told her about the look on my baby brother’s face when he reached the bottom of his bowl of cornmeal gruel and I gave him the roasted sparrow. Our teeth were worn down from eating that gruel and we were never full. Maybe then she might have understood. But the water came to a boil and the fish had to be steamed.

  Then there was the wine.

  “I brought you this wine, Baba, carried it on my back through three border crossings,” she said. “It’s from Ravello, below Naples, on the way to this scenic town called Amalfi.” I nodded at the unlabeled bottle, which was made of heavy green glass.

  “It was a family vineyard. The vintner said it was the best wine he’s ever made. The vines grew on the cliffs facing the ocean. I had to hitchhike just to get this bottle for you.” The girl kept going excitedly, her hands r
emembering Italy.

  Right then the phone rang. It was Charles and Old Ping, my two divorced and now bachelor buddies. They were wondering what I was doing for Christmas dinner. These buddies and I cut one another’s hair once a month. They had nowhere to go that night, so naturally I invited them over.

  “Come! We are going to have great food—and Wendy’s here,” I said.

  I smiled at Wendy and she shrugged and went about opening the wine. She couldn’t have been upset about that, could she? Having my best friends over to share our Christmas dinner? Surely she wouldn’t be that selfish. In fact, even though she’s not very logical, she was always a remarkably reasonable, well-behaved child.

  My ex-wife and I, we never hide things from her; she shared equal partnership in the family.

  Maybe there were some things we shouldn’t have told her. She probably shouldn’t have been at the lawyer’s during the divorce agreement where I probably shouldn’t have yelled at her crying mother, “What are you going to actually miss? Me or the money?” That was probably a mistake, but I can’t do anything about that now.

  Was it the wine? I bet it had something to do with that wine. As we were preparing the last of the food, we had a rather unpleasant conversation about the fundamentals that make up a good bottle. “The most popular cocktail in China right now is the Zhong Nai Hai #5,” I said. “They say it was created by former premier Jiang Zemin himself, wine with Sprite.”

  “Ba, let me tell you some of the basics. So the most common red wines are merlot, cabernet sauvignon, and Syrah,” she said. She continued on like an expert. “Wine is not supposed to be ganbei-ed, the way you do it. It’s supposed to be tasted and sipped, since it’s about the appearance, the smell, the aftertaste. Try!”

  “That sounds like a needless hassle to me,” I said. “It’s a drink.”