The Other Side of the World

by Jay Neugeboren

  Then I got lucky. Yu-huan, a woman Nick had been seeing for a few months, came to me, not to ask me to plead with Nick, but to tell me what she was going to do if and when he broke up with her. Like the others, Yu-huan was born into a wealthy Chinese family—hers owned an import-export business in fishing gear: nets, traps, hooks, lines, motors, and various electronic gizmos. Her great-grandfather, illiterate but ingeniously shrewd in playing the Communists against the Nationalists, and in his timing—knowing which side to play when—had built up the business after the Second World War, and at ninety-three years old was still running it, still going over every detail of every contract before affixing his ‘chop’—the seal that represented his name—without which ‘chop’ no deal could be finalized.

  What was different about Yu-huan was that she didn’t care if Nick married her or not. She’d fallen in love with him, yes, and had been foolish, for sure, but her foolishness, she said, had given her something more precious than love: the chance to be independent in the way men in her family were, which meant, she said (and in language that sounded like stuff I’d been hearing from women in the States for years), not being dependent upon a husband for her identity and well-being. What she did desire, however, was to have Nick’s child, and about this she’d found within herself the ability, like her great-grandfather, to be ruthless.

  ‘Decide what you want,’ her great-grandfather had taught her, ‘and take it, and in the taking beware, above all, of useless moral scruples.’ Yu-huan had made inquiries, and had discovered the way Nick had treated other women from families like hers, and having this information, she said, gave her the courage to act upon her great-grandfather’s teachings. So that if and when she became pregnant with Nick’s son (and the child, she insisted—even mild skepticism was forbidden—would be male), and if he refused to marry her, instead of killing herself, or having an abortion (her inquiries also revealed what I didn’t deny: that I’d arranged an abortion for one of Nick’s ex-girlfriends), she would kill him. In this way, she reasoned, the father of her child being dead, there would be no shame in having the child, only public mourning for the man to whom, she would claim (a claim to be verified by her mother and an aunt, in both of whom she would have previously, and falsely, confided), she had been secretly betrothed.

  Her plan had had its equivalent in an earlier era—it had prevailed, she said, throughout the nineteenth century—when it had been possible for a young Chinese woman to marry a dead man. The arrangement was called a ‘ghost marriage,’ and it enabled families to consolidate wealth and power while permitting young women to pursue their ambitions without the interference of husbands.

  When she came to me the first time, she was two weeks late in her menstrual cycle, and though alarmed by her plan and by the eerily toneless way she presented it (and alarmed, too, to realize how much it appealed to me), I tried to show nothing. I heard her out, then asked why she’d chosen to confide in me.

  “Because I have seen the way you look at Nick when he is not looking at you,” she said, “and therefore know you will understand what I am going to do if I must, and that you will not oppose me or betray me.”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “And because I have come to understand myself well enough to know I cannot do what I am going to do alone. Therefore, I have decided to place my trust in you.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Yes what?”

  “Yes, you can trust me.”

  By the time she came to me five weeks later, she had confirmed the fact that she was pregnant and that the child would be a boy. She’d informed Nick and, as expected, he’d told her it wasn’t his problem—he’d made no promises, had advised her to take precautions—and declared there was no way under the sun he was going to marry her. In fact, given her condition, it was best, he’d declared, if they never saw each other again.

  “I am, therefore, going to follow through on my plan,” she said, “which will embody in my newborn son a triumph of both justice and vengeance. And I am here today to invite you to be with me when I do what I must do.”

  She was so serene in the way she presented her decision—her gray-green eyes clear and unwavering while seeming to demand that I return her gaze with equal resolve—that I didn’t know what to do except to nod assent, and to blink a few times so that we didn’t get into a stare-me-down contest.

  “Am I bitter?” she asked calmly. “Of course. But my bitterness, I have found, is bringing more joy than love ever has. Can you understand that?”

  “I can understand why you’d want to do away with Nick,” I said. “Sure. You’re not the first, believe me.”

  “I know that,” she said.

  “But look,” I said. “You can’t just go around killing people whenever you want.”

  “Why not?” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Yes. Why not? People do it all the time, in your country and in mine, though I will admit we do not often perform the act ourselves—that we have the luxury of employing other people to do it for us. Certainly the men in my family are not strangers to such matters.”

  For a moment, I found myself wondering what might happen to me if she came to doubt my loyalty, and I had to wonder too, as I already had, about what demons might lie below her cool affect, and whether or not I was dealing with a seriously deranged woman. The instant this thought passed through my mind, though, she put her hand on top of mine.

  “I am not mad, Charles,” she said. “Not at all. And I will take full responsibility for the consequences of my act, both for me and for my child. You will in no way be implicated.”

  She stroked my hand gently even as she repeated what she’d said before: that she took joy not only from being pregnant, but from the prospect of being a mother without a husband—a free woman!—and while she talked, she continued to caress my hand, glancing down at my lap now and then and smiling with amusement to let me know she’d noticed what I couldn’t hide: that I was becoming aroused.

  “I am strong enough to follow through on my intention,” she said. “But, as I have confessed before, I am not strong enough to do so by myself. In this—my need to have a man by my side—I remain weak. But because this is who I am, I must ask you to answer one question.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Do you care if Nick lives or dies?”

  “No,” I said, and I didn’t add that there were times (though this happened mostly in Borneo, rarely in Singapore) when I no longer cared whether I lived or died.

  “Good,” she said. “Then we are in agreement.”

  “No,” I said, and when I said the word this time, I felt a strange and pleasant rush, for instead of seeing Yu-huan’s smile, I saw Max looking out at me from her face. As soon as I started to smile at him, though, I felt a blazing jolt that made me double over in pain—an arrow of electricity zapping through me while I watched two wires, like snakes, uncoil inside my chest, one from each side of my rib cage, their frayed ends touching, sparking, sizzling…

  “Are you all right?” Yu-huan was asking. “Talk to me, Charles. Please. Do you need to lie down?”

  I shook my head sideways, but did not speak.

  “Would you like to withdraw your answer, and think more about it?” she asked.

  I shook my head sideways again, took deep breaths.

  “We are not in a rush,” she said. “By my arithmetic, we still have six and one half months until the time for…”

  “No,” I said again. “No,” and I gathered the strength to stand—we were in my living room on a Sunday evening—and I walked across the room, my eyes on my shoes as they set down, one in front of the other, on the carpeting. I fixed us tall, strong drinks: vodka and tonic—eighty percent vodka, twenty percent tonic. We clinked glasses, then sat side by side without talking, and after a short while I found my voice and told her the story I’d been remembering a few moments before, from when I was nine or ten years old—about how my father had returned home one aft
ernoon from the funeral of a colleague—a man about his age whom I’d met a few times but didn’t really know—and about how, when I met my father at the front door and gave him a hug, and said something about it probably being a very sad day for him, to have gone to a funeral and seen a friend lowered into the ground, he’d shrugged.

  “No loss,” he’d said.

  “No loss? I don’t understand.”

  “When some people leave the world, we’re better for it,” he said, and he did so in a very off-hand manner, after which he smiled at me with great affection—the smile that was like Yu-huan’s—put his arm around me, and walked me toward our kitchen.

  “So let’s talk about supper,” he said. “What are you in the mood for?”

  In truth, I never believed Yu-huan would or could kill Nick, though I did believe she believed she would. But she was determined to have their son, no matter the price, and somewhere along the way I’d made the decision to help her through the pregnancy and its aftermath as best I could. She took to visiting me regularly on Sunday evenings when I was in town—to report on the state of her health and the baby’s, and to renew her vows concerning Nick’s fate. We drank quite a lot—she declared it nonsense to think that mere alcohol could sap her son’s health or strength—and once she began drinking, she became a different woman. The placid demeanor vanished, and she became animated, expansive, exuberant. She talked about her son, and the life that lay ahead for him—in her plans, the two of them would emigrate either to New York City (where she’d never been, though her English was virtually flawless from her years in British schools in Shanghai), or to France (she’d spent a year as a student at the American University in Paris), and her son would become either a brain surgeon, an architect, or an explorer and activist in Asia or Africa, like Edmund Hillary, Paul Farmer, Bono, or even, though in a secular incarnation, the Dalai Lama.

  She told me stories about growing up in Shanghai, and how she’d been her great-grandfather’s favorite—his first great grand-child whom he believed, because of this fact, was destined for greatness, and whom he’d endowed with a sense of ambition and self-confidence he’d previously reserved only for sons and grandsons.

  “You can and will be whatever you choose,” he’d said to her repeatedly from as far back as she could recall, and whenever she asked what he meant—what was it she would become?—his answer was the same: “Whatever you choose to be.”

  We also talked about books, for it turned out Yu-huan was a voracious reader of novels (her love of stories had started with her reading of favorite folk tales to her great-grandfather—Madam White Snake, A Dream of Red Mansions, Pongu Creates the Universe, and, most often, Journey to the West), and would, when I mentioned a favorite novel of mine she’d read, launch into an extended soliloquy about the book—its plot, characters, themes, symbols, significance, and relation to its author’s life. When she talked about how great a book was, she became ebullient, and would roam around my apartment, gesticulating extravagantly while arguing with herself about which book was greater than which other book.

  Madame Bovary was the-greatest-book-ever-written, much greater than Anna Karenina, she might proclaim one Sunday evening, and then on a subsequent Sunday apologize for having had flawed judgment, since it was clear that Anna Karenina was much much greater than Madame Bovary, though neither book, she might declare a week later, could compare with Chekhov’s two greatest stories—“Ward Six” and “My Life.”

  Once she’d had a few drinks and got going, I could barely get a word in without her scoffing at what she called my hollow, weak-willed opinions. Now and then, though, I’d enter the conversation, quietly suggesting (and in ways I thought would have pleased Max) that what mattered most was not which book or writer was ‘greater,’ Chekhov or Tolstoy, Kafka or Flaubert (or others she admitted to her pantheon—Dickens, Turgenev, Gogol, Camus, Woolf), but to think instead of the particular pleasures each book, or writer, could give that were unlike the pleasures—the experience—one could get from any other novel or writer, or, for that matter, from life itself. For what I’d come to believe—this from weekends alone in my apartment—was that the experience of reading novels—of being immersed in worlds that had no actual existence—was an experience unlike any other, and was, among its other virtues, one of the last truly private experiences left to us in this world.

  When Yu-huan was not obsessively wedded to whatever new hierarchy of books and authors she was haranguing me with, she would shake her head and agree that what I said made sense. In fact, she admitted that what I said helped explain why, since the age of fourteen—she was now twenty-four—she had taken to re-reading Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina once each year, beginning at the time of the Chinese New Year, which usually occurred in late January, and finishing in mid-April, before Vesak Day, which day commemorated the birth of Buddha, his enlightenment, and his attainment of nirvana. These two novels, she maintained, though written by men, were essential to her own private nirvana. Because the stories were set in other times and places, they had allowed her to see her life in new ways, and to understand not merely the meaning but, more important, the texture of a woman’s life generally, and of her own small life in particular.

  Although we never became physically intimate on these evenings (she let me know early on that if we did, it would ruin everything that made our friendship possible), I did begin entertaining a fantasy that made me wonder if I wasn’t doing what I was doing only in order to outdo Nick in the kinds of things he’d been doing for young women who lacked Yu-huan’s wherewithal. I began imagining being with Yu-huan when she had the child, and visiting her and the child at home, and then, when I saw the ways her family was rejecting her—making plans for her removal, along with her son, from Singapore—I saw myself doing what Nick would have seen as the most predictable and foolish thing I could have done: offering to save her from disgrace and poverty by marrying her and taking her back to the States as my wife.

  In the scenario I conjured up, we would of course begin with a mariage blanc that would provide Yu-huan and her son a chance for a new life (his name, she announced one Sunday evening, would be Yun-shan, which meant cloud-mountain). But what would begin as a practical arrangement would in the course of time evolve, so that (in New York, Paris, or Kuching) we would come to care for one another as deeply as any two human beings ever had. I even saw myself, one night, after she’d given me the happy news that she was pregnant with our child, telling her how, in the Old Testament (something one of my Hebrew school teachers had taught me) it was usually written that a man and woman met, married, and then loved each other—the verbs ordered this way to emphasize what experience taught: that true love came after marriage—after two people had come to know one another, which was why the verbs, in ancient Hebrew, to know and to love were the same. I wasn’t foolish enough to share my fantasy with Yu-huan, though, for I sensed that the last thing she thought she wanted was to be helped or saved by any man.

  On the early evening of the day on which Nick died, however—a day on which we were planning to celebrate Singapore’s mid-autumn festival together—things changed between us. The mid-autumn festival, also known as the Moon Cake or Lantern Festival, coincided with the fall harvest, and was the night on which the moon was said to be fullest and brightest. There were a host of romantic stories associated with the festival, the most famous having to do with a woman, Chang-Er, who on this day swallowed the elixir of immortality, after which she’d floated up to the moon, so that when you gazed at the moon on this night, you might catch a glimpse of her, and of her pet rabbit. The other story attached to the festival had to do with rebels who hid their secret communications in round cakes, the messages urging their fellow sufferers to rise up at a certain time and place and to overthrow their oppressors. According to legend, the uprising was successful—a foreshadowing of Singapore’s liberation from colonial rule—and to commemorate the victory, people ate round moon-like cakes, cakes originally filled with red bean
or lotus paste, but now filled with every kind of food, from ground beef, pork, sea food, or grasshoppers, to the sweetest jams and honeys. Lanterns were hung everywhere in the city, and they came in all shapes and sizes, from small ones that opened up accordion-style, to amazing constructions of translucent plastic in the shapes of roosters, rabbits, and—how not in this most modern of modern cities?—cartoon and movie characters: Mickey Mouse and Tweetie, Batman, Spiderman, Bugs Bunny, Scooby-Doo, Road Runner, Shrek…

  Yu-huan had not seen Nick since the day he’d told her things were over between them, but as soon as she arrived at my apartment, she declared that after we went to the Chinese Gardens in Jurong to eat moon cakes and to see the famous display of lanterns there, we were going to Nick’s party together.

  “But why?”

  “Because it is time,” she said.

  “Time?”

  “Yes, time,” she said, squeezing my arm and kissing me in a way she never had before. “And time to have a drink, I think. What do you think?”

  I made us drinks, and then more drinks, and soon we were very drunk, with me teaching Yu-huan old camp songs—rounds like “Frère Jacques,” “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” and “Dona Nobis Pacem”—and the two of us congratulating ourselves on what splendid singers we were while I patted Yu-huan’s tummy and taught little Yun-shan the rounds so he could join in. Then, after Yu-huan fell across my lap, belly down, wiggled her butt, turned over, passed a fan across her eyes, and whispered, “I am Emma Bovary,” I couldn’t hold back any longer and, believing she was feeling the same way I was, I bent down to kiss her.