by Ann Mah
Claire is pregnant. About ten weeks, she says, which is still not too late. Too late for what, I don’t ask. After I’ve coaxed her into bed and made her a cup of oolong tea, I try to get her to talk, not an easy task considering the sobs that continue to spill from her small frame. Plus, we’re not exactly, well, close. Still, in between the tears—the silent, unceasing, scary kind—I manage to extract a few details.
At first she blamed the nausea on a dodgy plate of salmon tartare. But when it didn’t go away after three weeks, she got worried, stopping in at Beijing United on her lunch hour. When the doctor broke the news, she fainted. The clinic wouldn’t let her leave alone, and so she called Wang Wei.
“He accused me of getting pregnant on purpose.” Her cheeks burn indignant despite her distress. “He said I was trying to entrap him into spending the rest of his life with me!”
Wang Wei wants nothing to do with the baby; he made his feelings clear as he dropped Claire back at work because it was more convenient than taking her back to our apartment.
“I’m sure he was just in shock,” I say soothingly. “He’ll call—” I stop. Picturing Wang Wei’s cold eyes, his careless charm, the cruel twist of his smile, I am not sure he’ll ever call Claire.
“I haven’t talked to him for more than two weeks,” Claire continues, as more tears slide down her cheeks. “He offered to give me money for an…Anyway, he offered me money, and when I refused, he stopped answering my calls.”
Two weeks! “How long have you known about the…the, uh…the…” I gesture at her stomach, unable to say the word.
“Almost a month,” she admits as her eyes well up again.
I hand her tissues for her nose, a cold washcloth for her eyes, a tumbler of whiskey for her nerves, and eventually she stops crying. But I’m unprepared for everything else Claire is about to say. Because of course there’s more.
Chinese families are often secretive, and ours is no exception. As her little sister, I knew better than to ask questions about Claire’s divorce, to poke, to pry. Instead, I was left to fit together the clues and guess their meaning. Like the night, home for our weekly Sunday dinner, when my mother asked me to set the table for four, not five. “Where’s Tom?” I asked when Claire showed up alone.
“He’s not coming,” my mother answered for her. When we sat down to eat, I noticed Claire’s ring finger was bare of her plain gold wedding band.
And there were other signs, like that day in the diner when Claire ate her way through the entire menu and then puked everything up in the bathroom. Or the three weeks in a row she missed Sunday dinner, claiming she had to prepare for a trial, except when I stopped by her office with leftovers, it was dark and empty. Or the way my mother started to speak about Tom, in the wistful tone she usually reserved for pre-Communist Shanghai, or Bruce Lee.
Indeed, the clues were there—not obvious, but not obtuse either—and at the time I congratulated myself for piecing together the truth. But I should have known that it wasn’t the whole truth. In all stories, there are layers, and I had scarcely cracked the surface.
Now, as Claire lies beneath her Frette duvet, sobbing, I sit awkwardly on the edge of the bed and try to comfort her.
“What am I going to do?” she moans.
I hesitate. “Have you thought at all about, um, maybe keeping the, uh…” My voice trails off as I glance around her bedroom, its varying shades and textures of stark white a defiance against sticky fingers and spit-up.
Her eyes widen in horror. “Have a baby? I can’t even take care of myself!”
“Of course you can take care of yourself,” I say soothingly. “You have a successful career, a beautiful, clean apartment…”
“Our ayi keeps the apartment clean!” she wails. “I don’t even know how to use the washing machine.” Which, come to think of it, is probably true.
“Well…” I swallow. “You know you have other…options. You don’t have to…um, you know, you could…”
“I know.” She takes a shaky breath. “But let’s be honest. I’m thirty-six years old. This might be my only chance to have a baby.” More sobs. “Besides, I just don’t know if I can go through that again.”
My hand freezes as I hand her a tissue. “Again? You mean you’ve had an—uh, before you—”
Total silence fills the room. For a second she even stops crying. “I thought you knew,” she says slowly.
“No.” I glance at her face, which is pale, her eyes dark and wide.
“It was Tom’s,” she says as the tears spill down her cheeks again. “The day I discovered I was pregnant was the day I found a pair of panties in his suit jacket. Someone else’s.” Her mouth twists. “When I confronted him, he admitted he’d been having an affair with someone from his office. He said it was a mistake, that he’d never do it again. I gave him another chance, but I waited to tell him about the baby. And then three weeks later I found credit card receipts on our dresser. Hotel bills from the Plaza,” she says flatly. “We went to the Plaza on our wedding night.”
I don’t know what to say. Her voice is matter-of-fact, like she’s briefing me on a deposition, but the tears don’t stop flowing down her cheeks.
“It was a late-term abortion. Fourteen weeks. They say sometimes you can hear the baby cry, but I didn’t hear it cry. For a long time that’s all I could be grateful for. That I didn’t hear it cry.” She closes her eyes for a long minute. “I took a cab to the clinic by myself, but afterward they wouldn’t let me leave alone. I had to call someone and—” She draws a ragged breath. “—I was all drugged up, and scared, and I didn’t know who to call. So I called Mom.”
“Oh my God. Claire.” I wrap my arms around myself trying to shut out the image of Claire, pale and shaking in a hospital waiting room.
“I told her I’d had a miscarriage, but she took one look at the waiting room and I think she knew. She took me home and made me stay in bed for a week and told everyone I had mono. And we’ve never talked about any of it.”
“Any of it? Not even Tom’s affair?”
She shakes her head slightly, as if it’s too painful to move. “I couldn’t. I was too embarrassed. I didn’t want her to think it was my fault…that my husband didn’t want me…” She starts to cry again. “I didn’t love him, Iz. I didn’t love him. But I could have loved our baby.”
“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” I whisper over and over again, rubbing circles on her back.
“And now, I’m here all over again. Knocked up, with a boyfriend who cheats on me. You’d think I’d have at least learned my lesson about birth control.” She tries to smile but it turns into another flood of tears. “What am I going to do?”
I stall for time by handing her another tissue and waiting for her to blow her nose. “You’re going to be fine, Claire. Whatever you decide to do.”
“Are you sure?”
No. “Yes.”
“What will Mom say if I have the baby?”
“She’ll be thrilled,” I say firmly. “Thrilled,” I repeat, in an effort to convince us both.
“I doubt it.” Claire barks a laugh. “Unwed mother? Deadbeat dad?”
“Look, if her first grandchild has even the remotest chance of being one hundred percent Han Chinese, I know she’ll be over the moon with happiness.”
“Maybe.” Claire turns anxious eyes upon me. “But don’t say anything yet, okay? I still don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Later, as I lie in bed, something prevents me from drifting to sleep, a sticky, unsettled feeling that’s caused by something more than Claire’s distress. I can’t stop fitting together the puzzle pieces, the veiled comments that now make sense, Claire’s swift flight from New York, her sudden detachment.
We are not like those sisters in books, Claire and I, not loving like Little Women’s Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, or even playfully competitive like the Bennetts from Pride and Prejudice. Our relationship is characterized by distance. At times I’ve even forgotten that I have
a sister. “I’ve always wanted a sibling,” Julia once sighed, over the dregs of an umpteenth round of saketinis. “Me too,” I replied without thinking.
Yet now that I know Claire’s secrets—or some of them, at least—I can’t help but wish I didn’t. Of course I want to know my sister, to understand her. But to imagine her sad and scared is almost too great a gap to cross. She is the accomplished one, strong and smart, worthy of admiration. For Claire to become suddenly vulnerable would mean that our roles have changed, that we’ve outgrown them. That we have grown up. And I’m not sure if I’m ready for that.
At seven-thirty Centro’s faux suede sofas are scattered with a stylish crowd of local and expat yuppies liberally sipping two-for-one happy hour cocktails. Geraldine plucks the olive out of her martini glass and pops it into her mouth. “Should we get another round?”
“Definitely,” I agree, and drain my glass.
Our waitress shimmies up to our table, tosses her shimmering mane of black hair and hovers over us, shifting her weight from one stiletto clad foot to the other. “Women zai lai liang bei, yiyang de,” says Geraldine in her perfect Mandarin tones.
Confusion floods our waitress’s face before she turns to me. “Ta shuo shenme?” she asks urgently. What did she say?
“Ta bushi wo de fanyi,” says Geraldine politely, though there’s an undercurrent of exasperation in her tone. She’s not my translator.
“Liang bei futajiajiu ma-ti-ni,” I concede. Two vodka martinis. My tones are far from correct, but the waitress nods and totters away.
“Sorry about that,” says Geraldine. “I just get so frustrated when people can’t understand my Chinese.”
“I don’t think she’s the sharpest knife in the kit, if you catch my drift.” I jerk my head toward our retreating waitress. “I hear they hire their cocktail waitresses based on their height and head shots. The ACLU would have a field day with this place…”
“I’ve only been studying Mandarin for ten bloody years…” she continues to fume.
“Come on, Ger, you know how it is. If you have a foreign face, there’s no way in hell you’d ever be able to speak such a complex, intricate language as Chinese. You simply don’t have the mental capacity,” I tease. “But if you have an Asian face…”
“Then of course you speak fluent Mandarin. Silly me.” She laughs and reaches for a handful of peanuts.
The waitress carefully sets down our martinis. “Feichang ganxie ni de bangzhu,” Geraldine thanks her elaborately, receiving another baffled glance in return. We both take a sip, clear and cold with an icy burn. “So,” Geraldine places her glass back on the table, “is Claire pregnant?”
I nearly choke on my drink. “What?”
She shrugs. “Tina Chang’s been pushing it around on the rumor mill. But I just can’t imagine Claire—”
“As a mother? Join the club.”
“In that situation.”
“Yes, well, it could happen to anyone, I suppose.”
“So it’s true? And…Wang Wei?” she asks delicately.
“Out of the picture.”
“Of course. God forbid that anything distract him from his harem.”
There it is again, that strange, sticky feeling in my chest. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, Iz, I thought you knew.” Geraldine winces. “Wang Wei hasn’t exactly been the most…faithful…”
Of course I knew, I just didn’t want it to be true. I stare at the beads of moisture that have collected on my martini glass.
“How is Claire doing?” Geraldine’s voice is gentle.
I shrug. “Fine. Terrible. I’m not sure. She was a wreck last night but this morning she was back to usual.”
“Calm and composed?”
“More like chilly and aloof.” I sigh. The nagging feeling just won’t disappear, and as I watch the sleek people who surround us, laughing and smoking, I recognize it. Worry. I’m worried about Claire. I take another sip of my martini, hoping the vodka will ease my anxiety; instead, my stomach heaves in protest. I set my glass down with a thump and wipe my hand from the vodka that sloshes over the side. “I think I need to eat, before I get totally trashed and pass out.”
“Good idea.” Geraldine nods. “And I know just the place.”
“Where?” Suddenly my face feels extremely flexible.
She smiles and throws down a sheaf of pink one hundred kuai bills. “Have you ever been to the wild west?”
Before I moved to China, I didn’t know Xinjiang from Xi’an, or Uighur from Ulan Bataar. Now that I’ve lived here for almost a year, I know that Xi’an is home to the ancient terra-cotta warriors, while Xinjiang is the country’s western province, a rough, wild terrain that had its heyday during the Silk Road. Ulan Bataar is the capital of Malaysia. Er, Mongolia. As for Uighurs, they’re one of China’s fifty-four minority groups, far from Han with their high noses, tawny skin, and deep-set eyes. They speak a Turkic dialect, and when they use Chinese it has a singsongy lilt.
Even Xinjiang’s cities sound mysterious, with names like Kashgar, Urumqi, and Turpan. They conjure up images of bazaars filled with spices and silks, bright desert sunshine warming the region’s famous grape and melon vines, long-toothed camels roaming dusty streets. For many Chinese, Xinjiang is still uncharted territory, largely Muslim, resentful of the Beijing government—and a land of opportunity, with millions of Han migrating to seek their fortunes in Urumqi’s building boom and natural gas reserves, and to take advantage of generous government-funded relocation packages.
A cloud of cigarette smoke mixed with the unmistakable sweaty, boozy whiff of baijiu greets us at Tian Shan Pai. The two of us huddle at the edge of a vast round table meant for twelve, and sip cool glasses of Yanjing beer.
“So, I have some news.” Geraldine reaches for the basket of flat nang bread. “I’m leaving the magazine.”
A mutton skewer drops from my hand onto the floor. “Well, you certainly buried the lede.” I kick the stick farther under the table. “What…where…when?” The vodka, beer, and cumin-scented meat combine to make my eyes swim.
“Well, you know how I spend a lot of time at the 798 galleries working on stuff for the arts section? A few weeks ago I was at this China Contemporary opening and this man came up to me, very thin, very bald, very Euro…”
She continues in a happy rush. He approached her as she was examining a plaster sculpture of a gigantic Mao suit, and asked her if she was “the acerbic Geraldine Elenski of Beijing NOW.” At first she thought he was trying to pick her up, but as their conversation progressed it became clear that he wasn’t interested in, well, women. They wandered over to the Star Gallery and then the Beijing-Tokyo Art Project, discussing recent Chinese avant-garde movements, “cynical realism,” and the postseventies generation.
“It turns out he owns 508 West!” She beams and looks at me expectantly.
“Er…remind me again…”
“You know, the gallery in Chelsea. Gillen—that’s his name—discovered all these young artists before they were famous…Jeff Koons, Chuck Close, Matthew Barney…And get this!” She takes a deep breath. “He wants me to open up a branch of 508 West in Beijing!”
“Oh my God!” I shriek, loud enough so that half the restaurant turns around to stare.
“He’s been checking out my columns online and thinks I’m the right person for the job! Can you believe it?”
“Of course!” I squeeze her arm. “You have great taste.”
“After all those years I struggled in the gallery world in New York…eating Top Ramen and walking home to save money on subway fare…I can’t believe this is really happening.” She slowly pulls the meat off a kebob. “Isn’t it ironic? Fifty years ago our grandparents left their native countries to make a better life in the new world. And yet two generations later we’re in China, finding better opportunities than in the States. Back home we’d just be cogs in the wheel. Here, we’re inventing the wheel.”
“Yes, but compared to most Chinese, w
e’re extremely privileged. We have college degrees and earn middle-class salaries,” I point out. “But…then again, when I lived in New York, I made grilled cheese sandwiches on my waffle iron.”
“And I bet you never thought you’d have a front-page feature in the New York Tribune.”
“Front page of the arts section,” I correct her. “But…no, you’re right. I would never have even tried.”
“Have you started pitching your next story yet?”
“No…still trying to come up with a good idea.”
“You could always do something on Jeff,” Geraldine suggests.
“Like a piece on break-up texts? I don’t know…Don’t you think I’ve done enough damage?” I tear off a chunk of bread.
“Are you kidding? You inspired him! His new single just hit the Billboard Hot 100!”
“What?” I examine her face for sarcasm, but she appears to be serious. “Single? What single?”
“It’s called…” She pauses for dramatic effect. “…‘I’ve Been Texted.’ I can’t believe you haven’t heard it yet. They play it at Babyface like forty times a night!”
“Oh my God.” I cover my face with my hands. “Please don’t tell me it was inspired by…”
“Er, yeah. I think it was. Sorry.” Geraldine pats my arm. “But don’t worry. The lyrics use your Chinese name!”
“Great.” I drain my beer.
“Besides, you’re off the hook now. There’s no way Jeff can be angry with you now that he’s got a platinum album.”
Our waiter sets down a heavy dish of stew. Chunks of chicken fall off the bone in a savory sauce laced with tomatoes, onions, and peppers. Underneath lurk cubes of potato and flat, doughy noodles, rough with a handmade edge. I scoop a spoonful into my bowl and breathe in the chickeny scent before dipping into the rich liquid. “Yum! What is this?” I dunk a piece of bread into the delicious sauce.
“Dapanji. Big plate chicken.”
“That’s it? No fancy name like ‘Phoenix Entwined in Earth’s Stalwart Roots’? Just big plate chicken?” I peer at her. “Are you sure this is Chinese food?”
