North of Beautiful

by Justina Chen Headley

  “Are we geocaching?”

  “Well, no . . .”

  “And we’re not snowshoeing.”

  “No . . .”

  “Then slow down. We’ve got all day.”

  “I would have thought you’d want us to speed through this.”

  “What would have been the point of coming then?” He guided us to a covered walkway set atop pillars of craggy rock over the pond. Miraculously, no one lingered here. It could have had something to do with the lack of seating aside from the railing. If only a while, we could claim this space our own. Jacob dug in his pocket and pulled out his ticket to the garden, handing it to me. “Before I forget.”

  Automatically, I accepted the slender strip of paper, feeling burdened the way I do with Mom, me always managing the minutiae, the keeper of the details: passports, emergency contact information, extra U.S. dollars in case the market failed and we needed our way out. It was exhausting to be paranoid and prepared. I asked, “Do they spot check tickets here?”

  His brows furrowed. “No, I thought you might want it for a collage.”

  “Oh.” I shook my head at my own misgivings and tucked his ticket with mine in the manila envelope I had packed specifically to hold whatever materials I encountered that would be perfect for a future collage. Now I took out my camera, and when Jacob wasn’t looking, I snapped his photograph. At the last second, he turned to me, a half smile forming on his lips like he was about to tell me something salacious, something he knew would make me laugh uproariously and then be chagrined. I would know that smile anywhere. I lowered my camera, tucked it back into my messenger bag, wishing I could tuck away my painful thought just as easily: if you had asked me at that moment to close my eyes and conjure Erik, I couldn’t have.

  “What are you thinking about?” Jacob asked, straddling the railing like he was riding a horse, resting one foot on the bridge, the other on its ledge.

  “Nothing,” I said hastily, and perched on the railing myself, both feet on the ground. “Why?”

  “You were someplace else for a second.”

  “Nope,” I said, breathed in. The air here wasn’t fume-choked, possibly because the garden and surrounding marketplace were pedestrian-only. Instead, I caught a whiff of earthy bamboo, the ripe odor of pond water, and the heavy scent of my guilt. “Just thinking this is exactly where I want to be.”

  I looked away from Jacob’s inquiring stare, wishing I could tell him about Erik but not knowing how to explain that I had a boyfriend, especially after we’d had so many conversations. How would I bring it up now — oh, by the way, I’ve been seeing this guy at home? How could I explain that the routine of staying together with Erik was easier than the drama of breaking up? I could barely admit to myself, much less out loud, that I hadn’t broken up with Erik because of the real risk that no one else would want me.

  I swallowed, gestured around the garden. “Can you imagine what this would be like without all the people?”

  “Nah, you need people for a garden to feel real, otherwise it’s just a lab, some kind of social experiment with plants.” Jacob leaned against the carved column, looking at me. “Me, though? I prefer Mother Nature, weeds and forest fires and bugs and all.”

  “But isn’t this perfect?”

  “It’s manmade,” he said slowly, considering his words. He pointed to the carefully placed waterfall tucked in the far corner, the garden’s focal point. “I think there’ve been a lot of misguided attempts to change what’s already perfect.”

  “Nothing’s perfect.”

  “Maybe we don’t have the same definition about what’s beautiful. So define it. Define true beauty.”

  I watched a sinuous rivulet of water pour into the pond, thinking that I’d only had this type of conversation with the Twisted Sisters. It was as if we spoke a common language: art. The few times I had tried to express myself on this very topic — on why I was compelled to try to interpret and reflect beauty in my work — to Karin, to Erik, even to Claudius, they all had stared back at me, eyes glazed with boredom or indifference.

  Without looking at Jacob, I said slowly, “Well, it seeps into you. It doesn’t make you forget yourself, but totally the opposite.” I chanced a glance at him. He was watching me intently. No glaze in his eyes. So I continued more bravely: “It connects you with everything and fills you with awe that you share the same space with something that glorious. Like a sunrise or a clear blue day or the most extraordinary piece of glass. And then suddenly” — my hands escaped their tight grip in my lap, and now my fingers splayed wide like fireworks in the air — “you have this epiphany that there’s more to the world than just you and what you want or even who you are.”

  I stopped, embarrassed I had gone too far. I dug my nails into the railing at my hips, berating myself. Now, he’d think I was strange. Or worse, cerebral.

  Jacob didn’t say, I know what you mean, the way Erik might have even if he had no inkling what I was trying to say. Jacob didn’t try to one-up me in a Dad-esque way to illustrate how uninformed and sophomoric my ideas were. Instead, he simply said, “That’s exactly why nature always trumps gardens. Gardens are just reality pruned of chaos. What doesn’t work, you rip out.”

  I thought now about Mom’s garden, the one she labored over, planting vegetables and trees that had to be encircled in mesh to protect against deer. “Heaven forbid there’s a dying patch of grass.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You’ve thought about this a lot.”

  “My dad’s a landscape architect, you know.” Jacob, for once, sounded bitter. “His job is to orchestrate beauty.”

  “I remember you telling me that.” Gently, I asked, “You okay?”

  “The wedding’s in five days.”

  I nodded. I remembered that, too.

  He sighed, clasped his arms around himself. “God, he’s as clichéd as the gardens he designs.”

  I waited. I was good at waiting, and while I did, I listened to his breathing and the tinkling of the waterfall that drowned out everything but him and me.

  “You know,” he finally continued without meeting my eyes, “Mom put him through school, supported him while he was making a name for himself, and now that he’s the go-to guy for people who’ve got money to burn and know zip about plants or design, he leaves her for a bimbette.”

  “At least your mom has her own career,” I pointed out.

  “Had.”

  “Had,” I conceded. “But she isn’t a cliché. That’s a woman who never had a job, who became a stay-at-home mom and is stuck in a terrible relationship and can’t leave because she doesn’t think she can make it on her own.” I didn’t realize how angry I was at my mom until those words blew out of me, a micro squall in this garden. “Your mom can get a job tomorrow if she wanted. She doesn’t need your dad.”

  “Maybe that was the problem,” Jacob said softly. “Don’t we all need to feel needed? That we’d be missed if we were gone?”

  Three enormous carp swam to us, their heads emerging from the water, mouths craning wide in hope of a free meal. They looked a little too rapacious to be trusted. Still, as scary as their gaping mouths were, I felt bad. I had nothing to give.

  Jacob stood abruptly. “Which way do you want to go?”

  The pavilion had two entry points, one leading back to where we had come from, the other to places we had yet to see. North and south, east and west, regardless of the direction we could take, there were people, more and more people. This wasn’t the China I had come to see.

  “Out of here,” I said.

  His hand settled comfortably on the small of my back. And with an unerring and enviable sense of direction, Jacob found our way out of the walled garden.

  The Shanghai Jacob showed me couldn’t have been farther removed from the gleaming, futuristic skyline we had left this morning, or the populous garden we had just vacated. Instead, the narrow alley we were exploring was cramped, dark, filled with fetid smells. Where the markets surrounding t
he garden had featured beautiful architecture — those soaring, upturned rooflines that looked poised to take wing at any moment — I couldn’t believe that people lived crammed in here amid molding wooden pallets, upturned buckets of uncertain origin. Parked outside a few doors were rounded pots. I didn’t have the guts to peer inside.

  “Please tell me those aren’t what I think they are,” I said. I kept my messenger bag clutched at my side.

  “Well, they don’t have toilets, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  My toes curled inside my shoes. I decided it would be wise to watch where I stepped while keeping a sharp eye overhead.

  “A different world, isn’t it?” Jacob asked.

  “Definitely.” I sidestepped a suspicious-looking puddle.

  “Places like these won’t last much longer.”

  Thank God, I thought.

  He said, “Isn’t it weird to think that this neighborhood has survived here for centuries, but the next time we’re here, all of this will probably be razed for another skyscraper?”

  “Progress is hard on history.”

  He glanced at me, a small jerky nod of approval. I breathed in, wished I hadn’t. The pond in Yu Garden smelled like paradise compared to this rancid odor. But because I didn’t want Jacob to think I was someone I was not, I admitted, “It’ll be sad for this to disappear. But I have to tell you, I couldn’t live here. I like indoor plumbing too much.”

  “Nothing wrong with modern conveniences. But just think: this is nothing compared to the rural villages.”

  We came to another intersection, headed right. I hoped Jacob knew where we were going since I was too disoriented.

  “So what is” — I made quote marks — “‘real Chinese culture’? Is it this? Or your hotel?”

  “It’s anything to do with money.”

  “Jacob!”

  “I’m not kidding. Everything in China is tied to making a buck.”

  I wondered about what he said, whether it was just a deliberate comment to distance himself from his heritage, declare that he was wholly American, not somewhat Chinese. We passed a house with a cancerous mass of exposed wires. A round red lantern lay on the ground next to a battered stool. I stopped, riveted. Above us hung laundry, so gray Mom would never have deigned to use them even as rags back home. Who wouldn’t be consumed with money if they lived in such squalor, if they had to worry about their next meal — and whether they would have a home because of the threat of progress.

  I lifted my camera, photographed the laundry that fluttered languidly, tattered flags of surrender.

  The funny thing was, after that, the longer we walked, the less revolted I felt. I slowed down, appreciating the unexpected vignettes as they revealed themselves to me: a tiny overgrown courtyard glimpsed through an open door. A bird serenading itself inside a bamboo cage. Three sun-faded lanterns hanging gaily in a row, like old women who still loved to dress up.

  As I lifted my camera to a peeling door, Jacob marveled, “You could see beauty anywhere.”

  That’s what I wished he could see, too, in China: that even within its ugliness, there lay a surprising beauty, breathtaking because it was so unexpected.

  On our phone calls leading up to this trip, I’d relate some new fact about China I had dug up to Jacob. For all that time and all those conversations, there was one thing we never discussed: his orphanage.

  “Can I ask you something?” I asked now from behind the comfort of my camera, unable to resist my urge to snap his picture against the weather-worn door.

  “Shoot.”

  “Do you remember anything from when you lived here?”

  Jacob thrust both hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunching. He quickened his pace, passed an open door, uncharacteristically didn’t peer within, curious about what it hid. He was so silent, I thought he might ignore my question. God, me and my big mouth.

  Then, suddenly, Jacob said, “I remember a few things, but I wonder how much of it I remember because of the pictures Mom took. Like at the orphanage. Do I remember the nursery or is it the picture of all those cribs?”

  “I didn’t think they allowed people to take pictures?” I asked quietly, remembering what I had read about China’s orphanages. I kept my eyes on the ground now, not to look where I was going but so I could focus on Jacob’s words, undistracted by anything else around me.

  “They don’t now — and they stopped letting people right after Mom adopted me. Some stupid BBC program about Chinese orphanages shut down adoptions for almost a year. They claimed that there were dying rooms for certain kids.”

  I could imagine those kids. The ones with birth defects or diseases, cerebral palsy, club feet, cleft palates. Port-wine stains.

  “There was no real proof of them,” Jacob said. “Anyway, Mom slid right on in before that lockdown.”

  “How old were you?”

  “About three.”

  “Three.”

  “Some of the kids stay at the orphanages until they’re eighteen.” He shrugged, matter-of-factly. “That’s where I probably would have been still. I mean, who would have wanted a boy with a cleft lip when they could have tried for a normal kid?”

  “But your mom saw you.”

  “She was thirty and had given up on finding her soul mate. So she decided to adopt. And then a couple years after that, she met Dad. She should have held out.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  Jacob stopped, drew in a breath, and then looked meaningfully at me. “But then we wouldn’t be here.”

  “True.” I never thought I’d be grateful to my dad for anything. But standing here with Jacob in this dirty alley within sight of at least two chamber pots, I was. Without my father, I wouldn’t be here.

  “And what about your dad?”

  Again, Jacob went quiet, and this time, instead of assuming that he was blowing me off, I knew he was just thinking before he chose his words carefully. He stopped before a door that had been painted cinnabar red once, the color now a faint streak over bare wood.

  While I waited for him to answer, I zoomed into the rusty brass handle. I lowered the camera to find his intense gaze on me. “He’s such a hypocrite. For all his talk about naturally occurring beauty, he left Mom for a younger woman. God, I think Bimbette even has fake boobs.”

  “Would your mom have been happier if they stayed together?”

  “Happier?” He cocked his head to the side, ran his fingers along the warped door. “I think she just wanted to have the choice.”

  “Your mom doesn’t seem like the kind of woman who’d stay with a man who didn’t want her.”

  “Would you?”

  It was a rhetorical question, not a personal one directed at me. Still, I couldn’t look at Jacob when all I could picture was Erik’s face at Christmas, ashamed that his cousin had seen me after my surgery. And here I was, still officially together with him.

  We were at the end of the alley now, back near the bazaar. Above the roofline of these decrepit buildings was Shanghai, gleaming, modern, and new. The narrow streets were packed with even more shoppers now. Jacob checked his cell phone for the time. “We can do one more thing before lunch. Unless you’re hungry.”

  “I need a little something,” I admitted. And then, more suspiciously, “One more what?”

  “Oh, ye of little faith” was all he would say.

  “Just like home,” Jacob said, smiling wryly as we wandered back in the direction of the Yu Garden, toward a circular sign with a familiar green mermaid. He was right; we could have been in Seattle except this Starbucks sign hung off the corner of an upturned roof just like the ones in the garden.

  “No, remember?” I said. “Colville’s too small to have a Starbucks. This is nothing like my home.”

  It usually took a day before I got tired of Seattle’s sprawl and busyness, its steep hills that were hard for me to drive, its maddening one-way streets. Just three hours away from Merc’s quiet apartment and I was overwhelmed by Shanghai
and the sheer number of people walking, driving, and biking. Scores of bicyclists pedaled past us, their no-frill bikes nothing like the tricked-out roadsters the tourists in the Methow rode in their flashy spandex and special shoes.

  “You’ll get used to all the people,” he assured me as we crossed the street to Starbucks.

  “Okay, hang on,” I said, holding my hand to my chest in mock horror. “You’re actually stepping foot in a bastion of American consumerism over a homegrown place? Geez, I need my camera.”

  “Take a look inside. This is China.”

  True, there were more tourists in the teahouse across the street than in the Starbucks. Chic women tottered inside on impossibly high heels, a man in a tailored suit had not one but two cell phones at his ear. This was modern Shanghai.

  Jacob opened the door to the familiar scent of dark coffee. “Adventure in life is good; consistency in coffee even better.”

  “Spoken like a true coffee snob.”

  “That would be aficionado. Anyway, we need caffeine; you’re crashing.” He grinned at me, flourishing me inside.

  “Sorry, I have to document this.” But as soon as I removed my camera from my bag, the barista snapped something sharp at Jacob, glaring at him. He shrugged, shook his head: I don’t speak Chinese.

  The barista raised her eyebrows at him, obviously concluding he was an imbecile before she tapped emphatically on a sign at the counter: NO PHOTOGRAPHY. Chagrined, dumb tourist me, I dropped the camera back in my bag, but not before I whispered to Jacob, “Damned barista.”

  Jacob chortled, hugged me to him. “You got that right.”

  Chapter twenty-three

  Cartouche

  THE NEXT MORNING, I ROSE early, around four. I couldn’t fall back asleep. Mom must not have, either; she was rustling around in her bedroom. So I grabbed my journal from the bedside table and tiptoed to her room, careful not to wake Merc in the living room.

  “Jet-lagged, too?” she whispered when I opened her door. I nodded. Her packages from yesterday’s shopping excursion were laid out on the bed in a semicircle around her. She could have been Scrooge, counting her gold, just as gleeful, but much more generous. Mom turned down the sage green coverlet and scooted over to make room for me, giving me the warm spot.