The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  It was for this reason I told Gao Lan we must file the claim against Shuying's father, so the two of them would never, ever be hungry.

  As for Gao Lan's secrets, I decided to let them rest. I had told her long ago that Old Gao, her father, did not have to know the whole truth. We would file the claim. That would be all. It was a necessity. She and the child needed support.

  To this she agreed, for it was the undeniable truth that no matter how much Old Gao and I loved the little girl, we were growing old. "All life's uncertain," I said to Gao Lan. "Should we just wait for our death with folded arms? Or provide for her?"

  "I don't think you will go to see Marx anytime soon," she had answered, invoking the old joke that had been popular under communism when referring to death, jian Makesi qu. Going to see Marx.

  I understood that my daughter would only speak lightly about these things. Yet it was important to be pragmatic. In time she understood, and we filed, and my old husband and I agreed to receive the American widow and her escort.

  And then it was the day of their visit. They were coming to meet Shuying. I awoke filled with anticipation. I believed I would know at a glance whether or not the American saw her husband in our little girl.

  Teacher Sheng arrived first. His black hair was brushed back with an unexpected pomade, and his narrow shoulders twitched beneath a dark suit. He proclaimed himself delighted to be here and assured me that he, the middle school English teacher, would take care of everything. We talked together about the weather. A storm was coming.

  Then they were at the door. Sheng and I went together to open it. The woman was not what I'd imagined, though when I saw her I also found that what I had imagined was something I could no longer quite remember. She was small for a foreigner, only an inch or two taller than I, and dark, though her halo of curly hair immediately made her different. The man with her, Teacher Sheng explained, was her lawyer.

  "Lawyer?" I said. "He's no lawyer. Look at that hair." To me he appeared more like a mathematician, or an artist.

  "He's a lawyer," said Teacher Sheng.

  I went into the kitchen to prepare tea. While I was there Shuying poked her head in at the door. "Naughty little treasure!" I hissed, seeing the small curly head, loving her. "I told you to stay in your room until we call."

  "I want to see them."

  "Not until I call you." I was firm. She ran back to her room. We had spoken in the local version of the Wu dialect, which was the language of Shaoxing and the only tongue we used with Shuying. When my old man and I didn't want her to understand us, we spoke Mandarin. Our privacy in that language would be finished the following year, when she went to school and learned it.

  I carried the tray out front and set a teapot in the center of the low table, surrounded by cups. I did not serve. It was not ready. In deference to foreign ways I also set out cold cans of Coca-Cola, one for each person. No one opened them or touched them or even looked at them. This was proper, of course, though I was surprised, for they were Americans.

  Teacher Sheng leaned toward me. "She says her hope was to meet Shuying."

  Of course it was her hope, I thought, why else had she come here? And yet even I had not expected her to care so much about seeing the child. Gao Lan had told me a little bit about this woman's husband. He had loved her, his wife, but he was not happy. He wanted a child. She was not ready. These things he had confided in Gao Lan, and she in me, and I held them carefully in my mind now as I looked at the woman. "A step at a time," I told Sheng. "I'll call Shuying out in a minute. Here. Drink tea." Now it had steeped, so I poured. My husband came out, Gao Fei, and introductions were exchanged between him, the widow, and her lawyer. I poured another cup.

  Finally the widow spoke. Teacher Sheng translated. "She says if this child really is her husband's daughter, she wants to take care of her. No question. But she says to do that, to make everything work with his estate, she needs a lab test. She hopes you agree."

  Gao Fei and I looked at each other.

  "The outcome will be positive, right?" my husband said in Mandarin, just in case Shuying was listening. "It cannot be otherwise. So we should do it."

  "No test," I said. I heard the stubbornness in my voice.

  He looked at me. His gray brows rose toward his hair.

  "No need to do more," I said. "We filed the claim already."

  "But you heard what the widow said. And it's clear, isn't it? Anyone can see Shuying's father was a foreigner. It is not as if we are trying to pass off fish eyes as pearls."

  I felt my heart trembling. "Teacher Sheng," I said, "will you let us speak between ourselves?"

  "Certainly! Yes!" He all but fell over himself trying to get out of the room to leave Old Gao and me alone. Of course the widow and her lawyer were there, but they were foreigners. They did not understand.

  "The truth," Gao Fei demanded. "What's this about?"

  "It's something our daughter didn't want to tell you." I was trying to soften him by invoking her, but I knew I was equally culpable. I had agreed with her to keep this hidden.

  "Well?" He was growing heated.

  "She had another man at the same time. Another foreigner."

  He stared, his understanding slow in building.

  "Another boyfriend," I said.

  He caved back from me slightly, ashamed, almost as if someone had punched him. "Does she know which is the father?"

  "No," I said sadly. "She has never known." For Gao Lan had never been able to say clearly, not when Shuying was a baby, not when she became the precious child she was now. Just then I saw the American man watching us. He felt my gaze and looked away.

  "Why her husband, then?" Gao Fei's gaze traveled briefly to the wife, the widow, who sat across from us watching. She looked naïve. She looked kind.

  "Because Gao Lan won't go to the other one," I said.

  "Why?" His eyebrows looked stuck together.

  "She's afraid of him."

  "Afraid!"

  "That's what she says."

  He trembled, drew a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, shook one out, and lit it. He smoked silently, his eyes fixed on me. Blue smoke formed a cloud of displeasure around him. "You didn't tell me this."

  "The Gods will strike me now that I have told!"

  "The Gods striking you?" he said sourly. "That would be the dragon and the tiger matched in battle indeed! I have no doubt who would win. I see done is done. These things we cannot change now. Call Sheng back. Let's hear what else they have to say."

  "Teacher Sheng!" I cried. The translator in his stiff suit hurried back from the kitchen.

  When we were all seated again the widow's lawyer took his turn to speak. Sheng listened and turned to us. "He says that for all the purposes of acting on the claim, speaking of the law firm that executes the man's estate and also the bank that has his holdings, all of them will need to see proof of paternity."

  Gao Fei and I looked at each other. "You see why I don't want to do it," I said softly.

  "Yes."

  "They both stress that she wants to take care of the child," Sheng said. "As a matter of principle. She just has to know for sure that the girl is his."

  Those were good, upright words, but I was scared. Best just to let her see Shuying first, I decided. Start with that.

  I sent the signal to Gao Fei. The lines on his walnut face creased deep into a smile. If anyone indulged her more than I, it was he. "Shuying!" he called out. "Come here!"

  Tiny footsteps spattered down the hall and our little treasure with her sparrow's body eased around the door frame. She darted over and wedged herself between my legs.

  "Gao Shuying," announced Teacher Sheng.

  The widow's eyes fastened on the child as I had known they would. Her gaze took in everything from her head to her little feet.

  Did she see her husband in her?

  Protectively I pulled the girl close. My little meat dumpling. Nothing would ever take her away from me. We were joined, like form and shadow
, by blood, by affection.

  "Does she say the child resembles her husband?" I put this to Teacher Sheng, and he asked her in English.

  When he turned back to me he said, "She is not sure. She wants to believe. Her heart is unreliable. She says, if you will please give permission for the test, she will live by whatever it says. It's a touch to the inside of the mouth, that is all. She has the kit and the forms in her bag."

  I listened. My heart was still pulled in two directions.

  "Gao Lan's working as hard as she can at the logistics start-up," Gao Fei said, in Mandarin so Shuying wouldn't understand. "I don't think she can work any harder. This is her rice bowl. It's important."

  "I know," I said, and I did. I had promised myself I would never forget. Even now. "Tell her yes," I said, turning to Sheng. "Tell her we give our permission."

  Sheng conveyed this, and the American woman drew a small box out of her shoulder bag.

  "Little Dumpling," my husband said to her in the local Shaoxing tongue, "I want you to let Auntie touch a stick inside your mouth."

  The widow got up, took a few steps, and knelt in front of the child. Her face was serious. Now it could not be stopped.

  She unscrewed a vial and took out a swab.

  I was unable to look. I busied myself by pouring a cup of tea for the long-haired man, who still sat in a watchful silence across the table. Something about him needled me. Who was he, really? I filled the cup, set down the pot, and then reached forward with my two hands, offering it. This was an old-fashioned gesture. Any civilized person knew that the cup must be taken with two hands as well. Outsiders rarely knew. I think I wanted to see him falter, show his ignorance. Maybe I even wanted to feel the brief comfort of derision, at the very moment I felt frightened that I might have lost something. I extended the cup.

  Without seeming even to think, he lifted two hands to take it. As was civilized. Proper. My eyes narrowed. Was it an accident? No. I felt something in the air of the room change. He was not an outsider.

  Yet the thought barely had time to form in my mind. "Open your mouth for Auntie," I heard my husband say.

  Maggie and Sam stepped out the front gate of the complex, walked to the corner, and veered left onto busy Jiefang Lu before they turned to each other, ready to burst with all they had to say. "We did it," she breathed first. She had the signed forms and the sample in her bag.

  "You were wonderful," he told her.

  " You were."

  "We both were. And you haven't heard anything yet." He raised his hand for a taxi.

  "Where are we going?"

  "Hangzhou, are you kidding? As fast as possible, to mail your sample. Then get me to my uncle's." A car pulled over and they climbed in. "Next bus is on the half-hour." They settled in the back. "Now. Are you ready for this? There were two men in Gao Lan's life. Two foreigners—at the same time. The right time. Either one could be the father. They don't know which."

  She stared. "Then why Matt?"

  "For some reason Gao Lan's afraid of the other guy. Wouldn't approach him. Wouldn't file against him. That's why this came to you."

  Maggie swallowed down this new and slightly darker understanding. The taxi jolted to a stop outside the bus station. They paid, jumped out, and ran into a concrete palace of a depot far too large and full of useless echoes for its light trickle of passengers. After buying their tickets they went to stand in line at the gate. "You know what doesn't quite make sense?" said Maggie. "That she doesn't know who the father is. Shuying is not a baby. She's a girl. She must look more like one than the other."

  "Well, you saw her too," said Sam. "What do you say? Is she Matt's?"

  Maggie thought a long time. "I suppose I can't be sure. Maybe. She could be."

  "If you had to guess?"

  She hesitated. "I'd guess no."

  "Before you went in, did you want her to be his?"

  "Not at first. Definitely not. Later—I have to say, I thought about it. He's gone, is the thing. It would be like part of him came back. It would be like something happened that he wanted, too, wanted at least by the end of his life, and that was to have a kid."

  "He wanted a kid?"

  "Not at first. By the end."

  "You never had one."

  "No. Neither did you," she added, as if compelled.

  "I was never married."

  "Well, I was, I had a family. Matt and I were a family, a family of two." She paused. "Then he wanted three. I couldn't go up to that number. At least not so fast."

  The bus pulled away and quickly climbed onto an open highway with little traffic, only a few whizzing cars and trucks. On both sides of the road were factories, extending for miles. "You okay?" said Sam.

  "Yes. Fine." She wiped at her eyes.

  "You should be happy. You did great today. You got what you wanted."

  "It was luck," she said.

  "Maybe. But I told you the story and you applied it. And the heavens, in case you haven't noticed, are about to salute you." He aimed a triumphant look through the bus window to the world outside. They had left the line of factories behind and now were crossing the flat river country—low, green, featureless, brimming with insects and birds and unseen creatures. In front of the bus, the straight ribbon road narrowed to a point. Black clouds grumbled above it. "You know what that is?"

  "A storm?"

  He gave the wry smile that said no. The bus barreled into the dark bulkhead of sky. The pressure dropped. Daylight ebbed away as electricity rose. They could feel the dark charge in the air around them. Grass rippled across the marshes.

  Lightning flashed up ahead; then thunder rumbled. She saw that he was smiling next to her. The first drops came down and the big wipers at the front of the bus started up. She watched, mesmerized. Big drops tapped on the roof and the windows, a few at first, and then more quickly until the rain poured on them, a furious volley, a fusillade of gunshots slamming the roof and spraying all over the windows. It was like going through a car wash.

  "Do you know what it is yet?" Sam said.

  She shook her head. Water was sheeting across the road. The wheels sent up fans of spray. The wetlands were cloaked with darkness.

  He leaned close so she could hear him, and said, "It's the Sword-Grinding Rain."

  8

  The major cuisines of China were brought into being for different purposes, and for different kinds of diners. Beijing food was the cuisine of officials and rulers, up to the Emperor. Shanghai food was created for the wealthy traders and merchants. From Sichuan came the food of the common people, for, as we all know, some of the best-known Sichuan dishes originated in street stalls. Then there is Hangzhou, whence came the cuisine of the literati. This is food that takes poetry as its principal inspiration. From commemorating great poems of the past to dining on candlelit barges afloat upon West Lake where wine is drunk and new poems are created, Hangzhou cuisine strives always to delight men of letters. The aesthetic symmetry between food and literature is a pattern without end.

  —LIANG WEI, The Last Chinese Chef

  Sam had told her Hangzhou centered on a magnificent man-made lake, and that if she wanted to spend the night downtown while he stayed at his uncle's, he could book her at a hotel with a room facing the water. It sounded nice, but so far nothing Maggie had seen of the crowded gray city into which their bus disgorged them even hinted at such a fairyland. The streets, crawling with cars, were narrow canyons of glass-and-steel buildings. Sam waved over a taxi, explaining that the DHL office was outside town. She climbed in beside him, grateful. The rain had stopped, and everything was wet and washed clean.

  They soared on a half-empty freeway along a river, past farm fields and intermittent housing developments, to an enormous and newly built business park. In this labyrinth the driver somehow found his way to the DHL office with its fleet of red-and-yellow trucks, and with Sam translating she signed forms and paid and dispatched the package. Done. She walked out feeling oddly numb. Her steps seemed heavy, the b
uilding and the parking lot unreal. It was finished. It was sent. She climbed back into the car, not quite believing it.

  She stole a glance and saw him giving her a hopeful look. "Are you hungry?" he asked. "Because I have to eat immediately."

  "Starved." She had already decided she would eat as soon as he dropped her off, but it would be so much better to eat with him; he knew where to go, what to have, and how to tell her about it. Every meal here had been a breakthrough into the unexpected, but the food she had eaten in his company had been something more. With him, this world of cuisine seemed not only intricate but coherently beautiful. It did what art did, refracted civilization. "I'd love to have lunch with you," she said. "But I absolutely don't want to keep you. You need to get to your uncle's."

  "It's past one o'clock, I have to eat. I'm Chinese that way. Or I've gotten that way."

  "Meaning?"

  "Nobody delays meals here. Everybody eats by the clock. Meetings in offices stop at twelve sharp even if they're only ten minutes from concluding. By now, too, lunch will be over at my uncle's house, and I don't want to arrive hungry. It's part of my job as a family member to think ahead and avoid inconveniencing the people I care about."

  "Kind of like Southerners in America."

  "Yes," he said, brows lifting in surprise at her, "you're right. As opposed to say, New Yorkers, who just throw out their requests and expect you to be the one to say no, sorry, it's an inconvenience."

  "Exactly."

  "So you do want to eat," he said.