Face

by Aimee Liu

  A tent of sheets forms the backstage area. Silhouetted forms rustle the cloth. Their laughter clashes with the wary quiet of the audience outside.

  He insisted he’d meet me here. Now I recognize no one. Eyes pass over me, pull away, steal hesitant glances back again. As I move, a dark circle widens around me. Without Tommy’s introduction, they are afraid of me, of the bag slung over my shoulder, of my hair and eyes and skin and height. I try smiling, but my smiles glance off frozen stares.

  The muttering backstage falters as a jet streaks overhead, its bright tail crossing the sky’s dying band of color. The crowd grows silently. Children down in front. Parents behind. The old folks give up their game and join the spectators. But there are others now. Dim figures behind and around us. Swellings of shape and low voices. I can’t see them, but I sense their breathing, their bodies adding to the midsummer’s heat. There are no movie theaters in Chinatown. To sit in a close dark space here would be too dangerous and everyone knows it. Just as everyone knows why the shops must pay lixi. Why crimes go unreported. Why young men feel free to leer. Everyone knows. Even I know.

  The women around me stoop and crouch by their children. Lights go out in windows overhead. A bird screams from the top of a tree, and my heart begins to hiccup as the surrounding space contracts. Someone is standing behind me. Eyes tight and hard, hands clenched. Long black hair. Skin glistening with sweat. The smells of salt and blood and beer.

  It’s in my head, I tell myself. My imagination. Because I’ve come alone.

  I could run.

  Instead I whirl and press the trigger.

  The flash bursts in the eyes of a child. Mouth open, closed, wailing without a sound. A lost child.

  Arms reach and snatch him up, and a woman with pink plastic elephants in her hair glowers at me, then both of them disappear. I press the camera to my face, eyes shut.

  Everything I’ve gained in the past weeks threatens to topple back into nightmare. But I force myself to open my eyes. I won’t leave. Where is Tommy?

  A drum sounds once, twice, three times. Resolute and reassuring. Turn, it commands. Turn and listen and watch. I obey because it is something I know I can do. Gaze from a balcony into a world that never quite looks back. And find safety there.

  A ripple of white silk banners makes snow. The green and blue mask of a horse canters among the folds. Other players creeping forward from the sides of the stage wear black gowns and white oval masks with the same bold details as the eggshell finger puppets Li once gave me. I look for Tommy one last time, take a reading of available light, and make the necessary camera adjustments. No flashes. The narrator addresses the audience in Chinese.

  The voice I hear is Li’s.

  “Jade Maiden,” he says. “You listen closely. This story is about you.”

  It was winter, snowing hard. The plows had not yet come to Catherine Street and the quiet, rare and soft as crushed silk, seemed to quilt the shop inside as well as the city without. Li said it had been a night just like this when the story began, but in Old China, in the district of Liu-ho, where a viceroy named Wu Chi lived with his wife and beautiful daughter.

  “Into this night, Wu Chi’s favorite steed run away. Horse name is Fortune, but in this snow and cold, Wu Chi believe horse must not be too fortunate. You know? He is wrong. Next day old man leads horse home. Oh, so old, ancient, dressed in rags, face all wrinkles, this poor gamekeeper Chu. But viceroy is so glad for his horse, he tell Chu can have any reward. Chu sees Wu Chi’s daughter, jade-green eyes, skin like ivory. Chu says he is not married… Viceroy cry out, No! But the girl tell her father, ‘Lao Chu is my fate.’ And then she recite poem she spoke—a miracle!—day she was born:

  Mysterious is will of Heaven!

  My love in wooded darkness waits.

  Ashes grown cold shall blaze anew,

  Jade from gray willow sway once more.

  “White turn to green to white. When green again the maiden’s betrothed, Wei I-fang, ride home from duty in Emperor’s army. He sees peasant woman in front of old cottage selling melons. Perfect melons, round as pearls and so fragrant! I-fang climb down from his horse to buy one, but closer he sees his beloved has become poor peasant, wife of old man. He is enraged! Draws sword against Chu. The blade shatters in his hand.

  “Next day I-fang return to fight again, but finds only a peach tree with this writing:

  When Jade Maiden long for earth

  Immortal turns to flesh.

  But fire send the fairy home,

  Peach Blossom Village, Paradise.

  “I-fang travels high into mountains, across deep, icy river. He sees palace of white jade near the clouds. Here gamekeeper Chu and I-fang’s beloved sit in rich silks on golden throne. When I-fang comes before them, Chu tell him kowtow lower, lower, until the lady begs for mercy. Only for Jade Maiden, Chu lets I-fang go. But he tell him, ‘Your fondness for violence has cost you your place in heaven. You must leave alone, never enter paradise again.’

  “I-fang travels only one month home, but when he arrives, sixty years have passed. Wu Chi and his family have ascended to the skies. Only horse Fortune remains. This horse carry I-fang to an herbalist who gives him one hundred thousand strings of gold cash. I-fang use this to build new homes and roads, feed the poor. He is good and generous, soon is appointed viceroy like Wu Chi.

  “One day a chariot of cranes brings Lao Chu back to earth. He tells Wei I-fang, ‘You have waited long to know the truth. I am Chu the Ancient, Elder Immortal of Eternal Joy. My bride is Jade Maiden of the Upper Heaven. Her home is in Paradise, yet she longed for earth. The Celestial took pity, allowed her to go, but as she grew older He feared she would be defiled by mortal men. I was sent to rescue her and bring her back to the sky. You were wrong to oppose the will of Heaven. She could never marry you.’ When finished speaking he make a sign with his hands, and fairy cranes carry him back through the clouds.

  “Wei I-fang lived long and peaceful life. But he did not marry. He did not love again. And not even after death he could persuade gods to reunite him with his Jade Maiden.”

  A murmur runs through the audience as the players step forward, hands clasped, squinting past the lanterns. Jade Maiden, he called me. I looked it up once. It’s an honest translation. Mei-bi. Little sister of Jade. He feared she’d be defiled by mortal men. But the confusion between heaven and earth, protector, beloved, mortal and god, what the maiden herself really wanted—all the rules seemed backward and suspect, and trying to figure them out made my head swim. Perhaps that’s why, of all the stories Li told me, this is the one I most fully forgot. Though the outcome is true to form. For Li, true love never triumphed in the end.

  Why, then, his matchmaking? To spare me from heartbreak? Or to force it on me? He reminded me of his pleasure-pain principle often enough. The thought of my old friend wishing—no, engineering—despair for me… But it is not impossible.

  The actors blink and bow, remove their masks one by one. I recognize some of them. That’s David Ling who played the viceroy and I-fang. The young woman from the bus protest. She was Jade Maiden. And Tommy.

  Holding the streaked, demonic mask of Lao Chu.

  I drop the camera into my bag and turn to get away before he sees me. Everywhere people are folding chairs, blankets, lifting babies over their shoulders, moving quickly and silently. I try to slip between them.

  “Maibelle.” The sudden closeness of his voice makes me pivot, nearly striking him. He catches my hand, holds it as if we are about to waltz.

  He sees my face. “I have stage fright. If you’d known, I’d have been a mess.”

  “Other people knew it was you.”

  “Yes.”

  He runs his tongue across his upper lip. My right arm, clenched around the strap of my camera bag, is throbbing.

  “Come to a party with me?”

  I glance at the fleeing spectators. Soon the park will be empty except for the crew tearing down the stage. I concentrate on relaxing my arm.
<
br />   “Party.”

  He grins and pulls the gown over his head. Underneath he wears a black T-shirt with “I , Lubbock” printed in Day-Glo pink.

  “Lubbock, Texas?”

  He shrugs. “I have a friend who gets cards and gifts sent from weird places. She’s never been out of New York. You’ll meet her at the party.”

  “I didn’t say I’d go.”

  “It’s not a date, Maibelle. When we get there, I have something to give you.”

  “No.” I catch myself. “No. I know it’s not a date.”

  He nods, hands me his robe and mask, and picks up a backpack from the side of the stage. “Stay here a minute. I have something to take care of. Then we’ll go.”

  He walks away from the light toward the chess tables at the far end of the park. It looks at first as though the area is filled with fireflies. Then I realize the tiny lights are cigarettes. Behind each one crouches a barely visible shadow. The pink glow of the heart and lettering on Tommy’s T-shirt flashes briefly. Then, either turning or bending forward, his shadow becomes indistinguishable from the others.

  Watching him disappear, I feel the same surge of panic that seized me before the play. Breathing on the back of my neck. A barely perceptible rise in temperature. Close behind me a hand spread ready to clap over my mouth. As if my brain is sweating.

  “The nightmare.” I say it out loud. But it’s more real than that. More like déjà vu. My reaction is the dream.

  I picture myself throwing the robe and mask to the ground and running from the park toward the lights of Canal Street. Uptown through Little Italy. Slowing as I reach SoHo. Walking West Broadway to Johnny and his mourning doves. Flying away with him.

  My arms part. He takes something from me. He is talking. His left eyebrow has gotten tangled in itself, coarse dark hairs twisting every which way. I reach up and smooth those strands back into place.

  “Lucky money,” he says firmly, taking my hand. And leads me away from the shadows.

  “Lin Cheng, this is Maibelle Chung.”

  A woman in her fifties with short salt-and-pepper hair and energetic black eyes stands in the center of a crowded loft kitchen. A best-selling cookbook author, she went to Sarah Lawrence, also works as midnight chef at Silk Road, one of the trendy new Chinese restaurants uptown.

  She spots the camera bag over my shoulder.

  “I need a shot for my new book. Tai says you’re a professional.”

  I frame her against the stove with steam rising in spirals on either side. She looks like one of the witches in a Chinese production of Macbeth, and I’m not sure if she’s serious or joking but am glad for the assignment because it gives me something to do with my hands. Tommy spent the walk up describing everyone I’d meet tonight, and I haven’t retained a single detail.

  “Okay, you’re in!” She waves us forward. “Go join the others. We’ll eat as soon as David and Lon get here.”

  Tommy drops his backpack in the corner, guides me past two sawhorse tables laden with food and into a dimly lit space filled with easels, painting paraphernalia, and canvases of ominous, amoebic shapes against red, white, and blue wave patterns. An assortment of old globes painted into a new world order, with whole continents shifted. I hear talking and music from the other side of the partition, but we’re alone in the studio.

  “Lon is a painter, too.”

  Lon. I grope for the connection I know I’ve been told. Lin Cheng’s husband. He directed the play.

  “Why didn’t he take a bow?”

  “Prefers to stay behind the scenes. Typical Chinese.”

  I glance down at the Leica still clutched in my hand. “What about you? Are you typical Chinese?”

  “I’m joking. He’s a professional actor. Doesn’t want to get too attached to this amateur stuff. Especially not in Chinatown.”

  “No, I mean it. Which side do you prefer?”

  “Of the curtain? Or my race?” When I don’t reply, he says, “I prefer having a choice.”

  I think about that for a minute. Not what he means by it. Not even what I was really asking. Just the statement itself. A choice means multiple possibilities. Ways to go. To act. We all make different choices, and the only ones that count are those we make alone. I still don’t know if I believe that.

  A strong golden light slants through the doorway from the room beyond. People are dancing.

  “Come here.” I pull him by the shoulders until the line cuts his face in two. Half light, half dark. “Don’t move. I’ve got fast film, but this will still take a minute.”

  I shoot. Again. And again with the frame wider, the exposure even longer. He plays along, looking straight through the lens. As if he can see me.

  “Tai.”

  “What?”

  “Your name. What does it mean?”

  “Depends. Different intonations, different dialects, give it different meanings.”

  “Which do you like best?”

  “Tai. Like that, with a falling tone. Means ‘voice.’”

  “Voice. That’s a good name for a writer.”

  “Yes, Jade Maiden.” He smiles. “Yours suits you, too.”

  “Tai.” I push out my hand as if meeting him for the first time. He accepts, and we shake on it.

  Lin Cheng’s other dinner guests include Donna and LiLi, two small women who smile a lot and announce themselves as best friends, though Donna dresses like Loretta Lynn and LiLi like Laurie Anderson. Donna was the source of Tai’s Texas T-shirt. LiLi is married to Ben Ying, nicknamed Dr. Shoe because he dropped out of medical school in his third year and has been selling shoes ever since. Ben entertains the ladies with yo-yo tricks. His voluptuous black hair hangs below his shoulders and he wears his pink broadcloth shirt open to reveal a gold St. Christopher medal.

  Then there are Bonnie and Gene, the pair sitting cross-legged across the room arguing immigration policy. Tai whispers their story before introducing me. They were arrested three years ago for bringing recreational pharmaceuticals into the country from Hong Kong. Gene had refused to pay a tong “rent tax” on his apartment, so the associations framed him. He and Bonnie ended up being investigated by the CIA for conspiracy to dose Manhattan’s water supply with Valium. They got married because their lawyer told them it would help their defense. Then the charges were dropped.

  “Would you mind if I took your picture?” I ask them.

  “As long as you don’t publish it in Chinatown.”

  They pose face-to-face, like one of those figure-ground illusions; you focus on the background and see the outline of a table, the foreground a man and wife.

  And suddenly everyone wants a portrait made. Kai, “the Fat Man,” who runs a program for disabled children, flexes like a circus muscle-man. Lee, who grew up in Staten Island and lost a brother in Vietnam, wants to be photographed doing a handstand. David Ling returns with the others from the drama troupe, and strikes the pose of Rodin’s Thinker.

  “Use a flash on me,” begs Wendy, the bus protester who played the viceroy’s daughter. “Go on. Right between the eyes. I’m sorry we insulted you.”

  What I’d feared would be viewed as a date spontaneously becomes a working session with Tai fading farther and farther from view as I spin from one set of readings to the next, establishing, however briefly and perfunctorily, a visual bridge with every person in the room. This is the first time since high school that people—friends—have asked me to take their picture.

  I am dancing with Wendy, flash firing madly—friendly fire, she calls it. As she bends backward into a limbo, the Temptations break into “Ball of Confusion.”

  “Ball of Confucian,” warbles David. Wendy falls on her back laughing.

  “What! Is this disrespect for our most illustrious ancestor?” a short square man in a mauve jogging suit roars from the studio doorway. Deep furrows radiate from his eyes. His smile is like a cartoon sunrise.

  “Lon,” Tai explains. “Artist, director of The Fairy’s Rescue and voice of Dynamo the
Wonder Dog. You know, that collie in the dog food commercials?”

  “The typical behind-the-scenes Chinese?”

  “The very one.”

  “I spend twenty years doing small theater.” Lon claps his broad hands over mine in greeting. He has a resonant, not remotely doglike voice. “I take acting lessons, go out on calls. Nothing. Then some Latino women’s group pickets the advertising agency for hiring only whites, and suddenly my phone rings. If I can talk like a dog, I’ve got a job. Only nobody will ever see me. Nobody will know it’s an Asian dog. Hah! Hah!”

  He throws his head back, stretches his mouth to let out the laugh. His eyes vanish into a nest of wrinkles. “My big chance! Hah! Hah!”

  It is my father’s laugh. A Chinese laugh. So vast and hard it seems to crack wide open.

  Instead it melts into the sound of a dinner gong. Lin Cheng calling us to feast.

  It surpassed even those New Year’s celebrations my father and I used to watch from our Chinatown balcony. “Ants climbing trees,” Lin Cheng announced, holding a platter of crispy fried bean threads dotted with ground pork “ants.” The same threadlike noodles formed the petals of “chrysanthemum flowers,” which sprouted from pods of chopped prawns. Her jade rice was dotted with bright bits of spinach and pork, and in honor of the play her clear green winter melon soup was afloat with shrimp balls “pale as pearls.” But the crowning glory was a whole glazed Peking duck surrounded by mounds of rice topped with cloud ears—an edible Paradise Village.

  The company received this dazzling array with admiration bordering on reverence. Then, like children released from grace, they let their chopsticks fly. When plates had been filled, most of the group returned to the other end of the loft. Only Tai and I remained in the kitchen.

  He poured a glass of water from the tap and watched me over the rim as he drained it. I set my plate on the counter and attempted to pick up a shrimp ball, but it slipped from my chopsticks and into the sink. He put down his glass and reached for my hand.