Home Remedies

by Xuan Juliana Wang

  In Boston there is terrible weather. Girlhood taught me the art of straying off course, but architecture school taught me to stay and make something.

  With cardboard and rubber bands I imitated Mies van der Rohe and idolized Frederick Kiesler and De Stijl, the Fascists and Hornbostel. In the studio I built imaginary walls and foundations, then experimented with having no walls and no foundations. I indulged every aesthetic fantasy, strove full-heartedly for fashionable affectations of the time. I toyed with supporting and nonsupporting supports and reached for a building system of tensions in free space. I learned to toil quietly over details no one else could see, to break down the merits of intricacy, to value beauty.

  A teenage boy was crying on the train to Philadelphia. I didn’t think to help him until I had walked off the platform. My mind was preoccupied with exactness and symmetry. I was rushing toward the taxi stand, armed with prototypes and experiments, off to a conference about glass.

  We fixed up a property on the west side of SoHo next to the Hudson River. “We might never be able to pay your parents back,” David said, while measuring the high ceilings of our office. We began our practice in minimalism, using our cunning and being stringent. He built offices and I designed dwellings. He handled big dreams and I found places for childhood toys.

  I plotted homes on green vistas with expensive stone facades to highlight panoramas. I wanted to evoke a certain kind of life that would be worthy of future nostalgia. Time passed and people moved through these homes, took photos, and put them on websites.

  My ideal clients were nostalgic ambassadors and millionaire wives suffering from a diaspora. I understood them. I gave them my spiel: “We live in a time where we relocate around the globe, native languages are forgotten, and citizenships piled on. Our dwellings must be specially built to re-create that sense of belonging, reinforce the notion of home.” For the Japanese ambassador I installed tatami-floor bedrooms in a Midtown high-rise, and a young bride with a thick accent fawned over the Hungarian bath I designed for her Georgian Revival.

  I found clever places for HVAC systems, sourced brass doorknobs that looked just like copper, chose and installed the handles on doors I never opened or closed. I looped David in on emails and we made sensible compromises. Clients showed me their Pinterest pages, their Instagram accounts, and said, “Like this and like that, but also like this. Could it be cheaper than this but better?” I carried on the work by devaluing my time.

  David and I had a daughter, then another daughter. Decades ended in cautionary before-and-after tales about aging movie stars with bad plastic surgery.

  In Providence, I was asked to teach a course on Le Corbusier’s Five Points in architecture school. But instead of supports and roof gardens, I went the romantic route. On the first day of class I asked, “What if life is a space that can be mapped, what would yours look like?” I lectured that the family home was a deposit box of emotions and that reading other people’s diaries was just another opportunity to encounter yourself.

  During those days, I suffered bouts of panic and bewilderment. I found every explanation troubling. I doubt I was happy, but what good would it have done to know for sure? Peering at me over his glasses at our drafting table, my husband asked, “What now? Really? What do you have to complain about now?”

  For long periods of time, people emailed me only if they were promoting themselves. I signed contracts, acquired loans, and paid bills on time. I nursed young children until they were old enough to be sent to boarding school. They returned home changed, fought viciously over their new differences, calling each other terrible names.

  I stopped liking his smell and it horrified me. We went on a series of vacations.

  In Rome, gypsy children chased us down Via Margutta. They tried to shove their hands into my pockets to get at the few coins inside. David needed my protection then, his bad hip made him lean to the left. Under moonlight in our hotel suite we did not collapse into each other’s arms; we streamed shows about the inner lives of serial killers and talked vaguely about beloved dead singers.

  We called our daughters sparingly. I could speak well of my children to others, but to them my voice sounded insincere and overblown. I was fearful of such angry, incomplete beings. Should their wanting take the place of mine? Should their accomplishments feel like my own? Must I leave my work to smell their baby heads?

  The Amalfi coast is not that far from Naples, but David didn’t want to go. “These roads are too dangerous. You should think about my heart condition.” He squeezed his eyes shut and grabbed my hand. I could see that the coast was pure fantasy; it was so breathtaking that I was afraid it didn’t really exist, that it was just a legend in a cloud. Mermaids must have had homes in the surf and fairies in the hills.

  I meticulously documented the modest houses, balconies of flowers, crumbling picture windows that faced the sea.

  I knew the hotel project in DUMBO would be our firm’s pièce de résistance. I went alone to win the heart of the investor. I promised the hotel would be a work of art, both distinctive and enduring.

  “Architecture is not about rationality. It’s about irrationality. Everything memorable is irrational,” I told him. Holding his eyes, I saw a spoiled childhood become an emotionally deprived adolescence. I saw the philharmonic building in Hamburg with his father’s name engraved in stone, where his mother sang, and the hours of waiting that shattered his little boy’s heart.

  “Let’s imagine, in the next biggest superhero movie, where the villain is going to stay?” I leaned close enough to smell his breath. “He’s going to stay in your hotel. And nobody, nobody, can ever take that away from you.”

  We gave a decade over to Brooklyn and the Eleanor Hotel. As it took form, it became known as “awe-inspiring,” “important,” and “a marquee work of artistry’s nuptial with ingenuity,” then as the years went on it was deemed the project that finally sank our firm. Construction stumbled upon ancient ruins, which were then accidentally damaged during excavation. Tons of steel had to be brought in. Delays upon delays. Neighbors talked of a curse. Six months before it was due to open, the investor’s son threw a party for his friends and one of the fireworks shot into the penthouse and burned the hotel down to the ground.

  “Did my face always look gray?” David asked. “Also, where did you put my keys?”

  In the morning I made him green juice and at night I checked his heart rate and body temperature. My actions began to feel like an improvised performance I had over-prepared for. “Boys who fell in love with me were never the right ones,” I told my youngest daughter. Then because she didn’t cry, I said, “You know, I am not your real mother,” then, “I’m just joking, I’m joking!”

  My parents passed away in quick succession and I did not write down any family recipes. I plucked out my white hairs until suddenly there were just too many. I wore flattering suits until I just wore comfortable pants.

  I faulted David for not being young until I became just like him.

  Then it stopped being about him at all. It was as if the lights had come on and I was being ushered out of an empty room with brooms. I moved out of the last of the homes I had felt lonely in for so long.

  How did I get here? Where is it and when is it that I truly exist? I no longer lived in an age of impressions. Every glance and gesture of people and places can be evoked all at once. I learned to draw on a computer. I sketched ideas by touch, plotted the form on a grid, rendered simple lines into three-dimensional structures, adding details, importing textures, and even inserting people to scale. I could turn any idea into space with complete fluidity on the screen, no matter how big or small or implausible.

  Something was beginning to take shape just beyond my reach. The essential part of me that had vanished into architecture. I decided to do the only thing I knew how to do well. I decided to search for proof in the embers. I’ve achieved beauty and practicality, exactness and symmetry, but wh
at of me is left?

  Instead of adding forms where nothing existed, I would recollect the fragments I’d left behind. If I left something in every city I’ve ever lived, with every person I’ve ever loved, at every building I’ve ever called home, then I would go looking.

  Apartment balconies become walk-in freezers in harsh Heilongjiang winters. My family’s hibernation supply held an entire side of pig, twenty heads of cabbage, a potato mountain, and a small gathering of persimmons.

  A retired mistress of a former client picked me up from the airport in a car that was so crammed with gifts that I had to sit with my feet on a box of single-serving-size milk.

  I woke up right as her car pulled up outside my grandmother’s block. Relatives were distant and courteous. They stood up straight to hold my hand and didn’t ask about my divorce. Most of them had never met me before. In my honor they prepared a braised carp and dumplings, but we ran out of things to say as we ate. I felt an eerie warmth returning, like a concealed joint, once discovered, that would turn the corner to reveal something previously invisible.

  “I’ve seen your picture,” my niece’s daughter whispered, tugging at my sleeve as I started to leave. “You wrote ‘Only for Grandma’ on the back.”

  When we immigrated to California my parents used to count quarters to buy furniture at garage sales but spent dollars per minute on phone calls. The few calls were events in themselves. Mom pressed her mouth to the receiver and I pictured our whole extended family gathered around the phone on the other end. We couldn’t bring ourselves to even speak to one another, the only thing phones were good at doing.

  “Da Gu! It’s Ying,” my mother said.

  “Oh, sister! How are you? Are you well?” replied my favorite aunt.

  “. . .”

  “. . .” The sound of crying without sound.

  Then it was time to hang up.

  At first I was disappointed it wouldn’t snow in Harbin, but then it started to rain. Here, just as the waters of the Songhua River turned to ice, I awoke again as if for the first time, swaddled in a blanket, on one of the hard seats of a green-skinned train. I remembered opening my eyes to see my mother’s face, framed by the sun on the compartment’s windows behind her.

  My mother did not anticipate my father showing up with me in his arms. The news had not yet begun to report student arrests, and “rumormongering” charges had not yet been dealt. Bullets with eyes had yet to fly, the pipes and bricks did not yet have to go up against the tanks. Each side still thought they would prevail and each side still thought the other outcome would be unimaginable and unacceptable. My mother still had a choice.

  The rain carried the scent of jasmine blossoms that led me to the very alley where, on stormy nights, the streets would flood with a foot of water. As a child, I used to float with the neighborhood children in plastic washbasins, splashing and giggling at our marvelous fortunes.

  My grandmother would have been watching me when my mother preached about the Hundred Flowers movement, while she learned how to kiss by watching Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. When she learned how to sing by singing “L’Internationale.” “Neutrality only aids the oppressor,” she would have said. “What do we really have but our moral consciousness?”

  It was not difficult to find the very apartment that was my first childhood home, that place between memory and dream. As I approached the door from the commercial street, I saw the sign that advertised it as a “one-hour hotel.”

  The proprietor with wind-chapped cheeks sat thumbing his phone at the door, and I walked right past him without a word. I thought I felt his eyes on me as I peered out from behind old windows. I ran my fingers along my paint-peeled walls. The balcony contained a display for sex toys. On the walls were numbers for masseuses with glamour shots.

  I tried to grasp the particulars of my mother’s experience, the foundation upon which she built an unhappy marriage. But I wasn’t satisfied with the finish. I couldn’t do it without injecting the heroic.

  It took first walking out these doors, and then farther still, onto the legal and illegal routes to reach California. My parents waited tables at a restaurant while selling imported kitchen knickknacks out of our one-bedroom apartment, until they bought shiny household appliances to be installed in a suburban house. They earned their citizenship, then spent the rest of their lives importing soup pots, negotiating quotas, sourcing kitchen tiles for discount stores, and becoming rich.

  Time slowed, down to the slowest seconds. I stood in the room of my first steps, my first words, but the distance grew in oblique directions. I sat down on the bed, shrugged off my coat, and watched my right hand holding my left hand, turning around some invisible orb as if to wash it away.

  The kite shop had become a restaurant after the park became a road. Before me there was my mother and my mother’s mother and hers before that. All these empty rooms filled with their voices, their wants and dreams, their hair falling everywhere.

  Strangers who looked like me walked by and threw their ragged shadows against newly erected walls, changing the landscape day after day. Concrete and stone held my remembered paths in place, but with the rise and fall of sun and moon, the beginning moved farther away still. This was all that’s left. A gloriously crooked tree once home to birds, named after a river that no longer flowed here. The birds were meant to fly, always and far away.

  In the future, my daughters and I will vacation in space. My daughters are elegant as wet swans, so tall they stoop slightly when they bend down to embrace me. Maybe Nadia will be a textile designer by then, Alina a screenwriter, for as long as she can withstand the blows. I avoid their melancholy eyes. I want so much for them both to live carefree lives, but I tell them everything. Maybe everything is too much.

  It is a long drive to the hotel, the one on the very edge of the earth. The last stop to rest before we go interstellar, the last place we have never been. In the car, we wrap ourselves in woolen blankets to keep warm. I reach over and stroke Nadia’s cheek. I look at Alina, asleep in the backseat, her hands clasped like a schoolgirl’s.

  “Are you leaving or returning?” asks the young attendant behind glass. I point with one finger to the direction ahead and he waves us through.

  The road leads us to a brutal glass-fronted facade, steel balconies cantilevering through the clouds. There are no shadows in space, only the most perfect lines. Travertine steps the height of sycamores unveil marble arches and colonnades. The columns surround a formal pool to reflect the dome. It is then that I feel the recognition run through my body—I’ve seen this place before. The hotel and the shuttle to space, have I been there, too?

  Behind me, through the window, all the places I am trying to leave behind. All that wonderful chaos, horizontal, never-ending.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For this book to make it to the world, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the patience and care of so many mentors, institutions, colleagues, and friends.

  To Parisa Ebrahimi, my cherished editor and a true kindred spirit. It is such a privilege to work with you. Thank you for loving my book and for the care you took in making it better. To all the wonderful people at Hogarth who work behind the scenes and between the lines, thank you for having faith in my stories.

  To my fearless agent Claudia Ballard, who opened so many doors for me. You are simply wonderful.

  To University of Southern California, especially Aimee Bender, T.C. Boyle, and Carol Muske Dukes for the early encouragement. To Columbia University School of the Arts, especially Ben Marcus, Donald Antrim, Gary Shteyngart, Victor LaValle, and Binnie Kirshenbaum for an extraordinary education.

  To the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, for giving me the tremendous honor that still humbles me to this day. To Elizabeth Tallent, Tobias Wolff, Eavan Boland, and Adam Johnson for courage and inspiration. To all the talented writers in my cohort: David Hoon Kim, A
nthony Marra, Shannon Pufahl, Helen Hooper, Joshua Foster, Dana Kletter, Justin Perry, Nina Schloesser, NoViolet Bulawayo, Nicole Cullen, Monique Wentzel, Austin Smith, Lydia Fitzpatrick, and Justin Torres. I don’t know how I got to be so lucky.

  To the MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Cité des Arts, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the Napa Valley Writers Conference, and the Jerome Foundation, I am forever grateful for your life-changing gifts of time and space.

  I need to thank and then apologize to my brilliant friends whom I subjected to reading countless drafts of these stories, Wistar Watts Murray and Elysha Chang. And to Orion Jenkins who read every draft twice. Your gentle and thoughtful attentions helped me send them off.

  To friends who read and listened, to friends who printed my pages on their office printers, fed me, reassured me that I was a real person, and were so nice to me when I did so little to deserve it: Mike Fu, Charlotte Cho, Jackie Kan, Helen Mun, Bao-Viet Nguyen, Diane Chang, Diana Lin, Christine Chen, Hilary Leichter, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Paul Legault, John McManus, Diane Cook, Elizabeth Reinhardt, Taeyoon Choi, Derek Yang, Hanna Pylvainen, Maxim Duncan, and Liana Finck.

  To Lauren Groff, Emily Graff, Alexandra Kleeman, Yan Sze Li, Seth Fishman, and Denise Shannon whose generous advice came at all the crucial moments.

  To Beijing, for the days of my youth, and for giving me back my mother tongue. Thank you for the memories and the lifelong friends.

  To my family: Mom, Dad, Uncle, and grandparents, for the unconditional love. Thank you for teaching me to value kindness and generosity above all else and for encouraging me to try my hand at being an artist. To the ancestors, the well from which I drink, for all the rest.