North of Beautiful

by Justina Chen Headley

Discomfited, I finally released his hand and started for another arching stone bridge. Its reflection turned the bridge into a full circle, half submerged in the calm lake. Off to the left, an old man sat on a bench, legs crossed, his back hunched in the same angle as his long curving bamboo fishing rod. He didn’t move, and I had a feeling that if we watched him for the next hour, the next decade, he would be right there, fixed in place like a painting.

  Jacob turned away first and said, “I have something for you.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out the GPS, handing it to me. “So you don’t get lost, Control Freak.”

  Touched — even though I had my doubts about the device ever helping me to find my way — I smiled at Jacob. As I was about to put away the GPS, a tiny paper stuck to its back scratched me. Curiously, I flipped the GPS over; two coordinates were written precisely on hotel stationery.

  “For the Great Wall,” he explained. And then added more bashfully, “It’s my favorite geocache in the world. My dad took me there when I was ten.”

  I knew what it was like to share something I loved, a collage I had labored over, a book that changed my view. So I assured him, “I bet I’ll love it.”

  “You will.” And then his lips curved into the mischievous smile I so loved. “I have one more thing for you.” From the depths of his pockets, he withdrew a pile of napkins neatly enclosed in a clean plastic bag. “Your own stash, Trouble Magnet.”

  I laughed so hard I snorted. I couldn’t help it, but the napkins were so silly, so perfect. The bathroom inside the restaurant hadn’t had either toilet or toilet paper, and I suspected there would be a few more of those primitive latrines in my future. I was still laughing when I tucked both the napkins and the GPS safely inside my messenger bag, and when I looked up, Jacob was staring at me as if he wanted to tuck me away safely, keep me with him.

  There must be a few times in life when you stand at a precipice of a decision. When you know there will forever be a Before and an After. Mom’s life was twice marked: Before Dad, After Dad. Before her sister’s death and After. I knew there would be no turning back if I designated this moment as my own Prime Meridian from which everything else would be measured. Mom’s urging to be fair to Jacob, Karin’s warning about losing the security of a miracle boyfriend, the image of Erik’s easygoing grin itself — all those conspired now, convincing me to stay in the Before.

  And then there was Jacob, who stepped closer to me and then waited, letting me decide whether I would take that next step. Balanced there in indecision, it was as if the Twisted Sisters were before me, shaking their pom-poms, asking: But what is fair about staying with a guy who is ashamed to be seen with you? What was so miraculous about a relationship that was based more on my gratitude than mutual respect?

  I wanted more. I wanted better. I wanted Jacob.

  Even knowing that what I was doing was wrong, I jumped off my Before and reached for my After.

  I traveled that short, short distance separating Jacob from me and stepped into his waiting arms. My face tilted up, my lips parted, so ready for Jacob’s kiss. Unexpectedly, he let go of me, and my breath caught, painfully, deep in my chest. Had I so misread this map leading me to him?

  Then slowly, so slowly, Jacob cupped my face in his hands, his thumbs brushing gently across my cheeks, the good side and the bad.

  “You know, I don’t even see your birthmark anymore,” he said to me, tracing the ragged edges of my port-wine stain beneath my makeup with the tip of his finger. I shivered. “Which makes me sad,” he continued, “because it looks like Bhutan. That’s the one place in the world I’ve really wanted to see.” His lips replaced his finger, equally soft as it explored the contour of my cheek, down to the corner of my lips. I had never been so aware of my mouth before. My lips were buzzing. Just kiss me, damn it. I parted them and heard the answering intake of his breath.

  Jacob’s gaze, inexpressibly warm, bored into mine, saw past my prickly outer surface. I closed my eyes, then decided I didn’t want to hide anymore. So I opened them. Only then did he lower his lips onto mine. That first kiss was so gentle, a fleeting touch, barely there. It was a kiss meant to tease, to leave me wanting more. More. His mouth hovered above mine, for one breath, then two. My lips swelled from wanting him. Just as I pulled urgently on his shoulders, his lips came down hard on mine.

  Mine, I thought. And I swear, in his kiss, I heard his echo: Mine.

  Chapter twenty-six

  Mappery

  FROM THE VERY CORNER OF the street where we had nearly experienced our own Pamplona of stampeding bicycles, Mom and I now waved at the Fremonts as they got into their cab, bound for the airport. Jacob didn’t exactly smile, but his last look at me from inside the cab was nothing short of smoldering. My lips tingled in response, as if it was his soft mouth, not his eyes, that had just raked me.

  The cab pulled away from the curb. Mom sighed. I would have sighed, too, except I didn’t want to be one of those pathetic girls who pined for their boyfriends . . . even though I was pining. And worrying. And feeling guiltier than ever. I wished I could go back to all those opportunities I had to tell Jacob about Erik. Or better yet, go back and actually break up with Erik.

  I tore my eyes away from the receding cab. Boisterous as a camp counselor, I told Mom, “Okay, onwards to the Forbidden City.”

  Mom sighed again. “Onwards.”

  “We’ll be okay.”

  She squeezed my hand. “I know we will.”

  I just wished she’d sound more sure of us. I wished I were more sure of us, too. Swells of familiar worry that I’d get us lost, or worse, get us lost and in trouble tumbled over me even as I started to cross the street. The traffic gods were with us this time. We made it to the other side with not even a close call. Already, I spotted the tall walls separating the former home of two dynasties from the masses. How hard could it be to navigate to the most massive palace in the world?

  Obviously harder than I thought it would be. According to my research, most tourists entered the Forbidden City through the south via the Meridian Gate, but the lines were shorter from the opposite end in the North. The problem was, I didn’t know which way to turn.

  We don’t need the Fremonts to be our pathfinders, I reminded myself. And had to keep reminding myself of that when Mom echoed the question in my head: “So which way do we go?” Her helplessness was as burdensome as my second-guessing, which was plentiful enough as it was. I wondered about her chicken-and-egg relationship with Dad. Which came first? Her helplessness or his controlling?

  If Mom wasn’t going to take charge, I would. I couldn’t wait on this corner forever. I studied the map, couldn’t make any sense of it. A woman passed us, an Asian version of Norah in a bright red suit, carrying a briefcase. Here was a woman in control of her destiny.

  So for the second time that day, I tried out my rudimentary Excuse me. For a moment, the woman’s plucked eyebrows furrowed, not understanding me. I covered how shy and stupid I felt with a smile. Let me just say this. Anyone who transplants from their homeland to another country, trading in their culture and language for a different one — that is a person of courage. Grudgingly, I had to admit, that included Merc. I could feel Mom pressing in on me, wondering what I was doing, but not doing anything herself.

  Imagine my surprise when Mom grabbed the map out of my hands and tapped on the North gate.

  The woman nodded in understanding and pointed wordlessly in the direction we should take.

  “Xiexie,” Mom said. I straightened in surprise. I had yet to hear her speak a single word of Chinese — not a single “thank you,” not one “delicious” after a meal. For all I knew, she could have been practicing in private all along.

  The woman smiled back at us. “Bu yong xie.”

  Maybe getting around in life was nothing but map-reading. A skill that required practice. A key to unlock where you wanted to go. A legend to show where you were.

  “Mom, you kicked butt,” I told her as we went to the North Gate. />
  “Xiexie.”

  True to Fodor’s word, there was barely a line in the back entrance, just a few people and one tour group, led by a woman lofting a yellow umbrella over her head. As much as it would be nice to have a tour guide paving the way for us, I was glad to be alone with Mom.

  “Ready to walk among the emperors?” she asked me now, while I held both of our tickets and she put away the change.

  “Definitely.” I straightened my shoulders like a woman warrior, and before the tour group had gathered around their guide, Mom and I were already striding toward the Gate of the Divine Prowess.

  Visiting the Forbidden City backward was like stepping inside a huge three-dimensional collage — seeing the most intimate layers first, the Inner Palace, where only the emperor and his family were allowed to live. The deeper we went into the Imperial Gardens — past the enormous planters, trees that looked as old as the Forbidden City itself — the harder it was to remember that modern-day Beijing in all its pollution and population existed just outside the gate.

  By silent agreement, both of us halted before a red-painted door, decorated with bulbous knob-shaped nails too big to fit my palm. Set in rows of nine by nine, I had read they symbolized luck.

  “Rub one, Mom,” I encouraged her, camera to my eye. “Make a wish while you do.” She looked up at me in surprise, unable to fathom making a wish for herself. I grinned at her from behind my camera.

  “What would you wish for? A house like this?” Then I told her about the sheer magnitude of the Forbidden City, an astonishing eight hundred buildings, and ten times as many rooms.

  “I wouldn’t have wanted to be the maid,” Mom said, stepping away from the door hastily.

  “I’m not sure I would have wanted to live here, period. There was too much court intrigue, everyone plotting against everyone else. Living in a city-sized palace definitely has its downside.”

  “Living in a log cabin in a small town has its fair share, too,” Mom said.

  I lowered my camera, waited for Mom to say more, but she motioned me to the door, telling me, “I’ll take your picture, and you make a wish.”

  Wishes were dangerous. You only had to pick out any of the fantasy books in Claudius’s bedroom to know how many misadventures started with one bad wish, haphazardly worded, impetuously made. I inspected these bronze knobs, and finally settled on one, the highest I could reach, that didn’t look too worn: just enough power to grant a wish, not enough to distort it. Wouldn’t you know it? As I wished for us to be safe on this trip, I thought of the fragment of the China map I had carried with me in my messenger bag. Merc had denied any knowledge of the Kryptonite geocache on our property when I had asked him about it on our last night in Shanghai.

  That left Mom. I took out the notes I had made of the Forbidden City, and now I pointed out the animal statuettes on each of the building’s roofs, the more animals the more important the building. You can imagine how many animals there were on the emperor’s private bedchambers.

  I shot Mom a look and said casually, “The world would have been a different place if China had kept on exploring. Just think — what if Dad was right and China really had discovered America first? Everything would have been different. Our houses, our clothes. We’d probably be speaking Mandarin right now.”

  Mom looked startled; I wasn’t surprised. We never talked about Dad’s shame, his fall from cartographic grace that made him exile himself — and us — to Colville, the hinterlands of Seattle.

  “But they didn’t,” she said finally, her lips pursing. This was not a topic she wished to revisit.

  So I continued our tour, kept to the script, pointing out the Hall of Preserving Harmony and the palace’s most precious stone carving, an enormous ramp of two hundred tons of marble, etched with dragons. Even if Mom didn’t want to discuss it, I couldn’t help but think about that pivotal moment in China’s history. Instead of exploring and sending out more intrepid adventurers like Zheng He, China had turned inward. This great civilization wheeled backward the way Europe had in its Dark Ages. Advancements made over a thousand years before the western world — like its invention of the movable type printing press, compass, paper — all that great technological lead had disappeared. Other countries rose in power and knowledge, and China went to sleep.

  The dragon was waking now.

  Mom was making motions like she was ready to move on to the next building, shifting her weight from foot to foot. Still, I stared at those dragons, their sinuous snakelike bodies, their claws. I’m sure they were protecting the emperor — everything in this city was designed to protect the emperor — but to me, the dragons looked like they were circling each other, preparing to battle for supremacy.

  The one person I could remember standing up for Mom when Dad berated her was Aunt Susannah. The last time Susannah came to visit had been five years ago, two years before her untimely death. That, as far as I knew, was the last time Mom saw her — any of us saw her.

  On that last visit, Dad began his incessant nitpicking at Mom’s cooking — the eggshell she purportedly had left in his brownie.

  “It’s an eggshell, no big deal,” Susannah had said softly, but I could feel the tension in her toned body as she rested her hip against the kitchen island, ready to pounce and gouge and protect her little sister if necessary.

  Dad smirked in response. From where I stood at the sink, washing the dinner dishes, I hoped that, for once, he would let this questioning of his authority pass. It was a sister’s prerogative to stick up for her sibling, especially her little sister. And Aunt Susannah was a guest.

  But, no, Dad had to correct her in that calm patronizing voice of his: “It’s a big deal to me.”

  Instead of being cowed, Susannah pulled herself to her full five feet. I knew that because I had just turned eleven and Susannah herself had made a point of measuring us against each other, back to back. We shared the same height, the same shoe size, but not much else. She had courage to spare; I had barely enough.

  “Then let me make this perfectly clear,” she said, every bit as calm as Dad. “Don’t disrespect my sister.”

  Mom fluttered around like a helpless bird caught away from her nest.

  “Or what?” Dad asked, resting his newspaper on the table.

  Susannah merely stared at him. “Lois, pack your things. You’re coming with me.”

  “Lois.” That’s all Dad had to say, her name, and Mom stopped moving. She would have stopped breathing if she could. I did, even as my hands continued to wash and dry, wash and dry.

  “You deserve better than this,” Susannah continued relentlessly, not shifting her eyes off Dad as though he were a rabid dog, unpredictable and out of his mind.

  Five years ago, Merc was long out of the house, finishing up law school at Yale.

  Five years ago, Claudius was out with his friends, getting high again. He wasn’t there to get into an accident to distract Dad.

  But I was.

  I remember staring at the reflection of my face in the window above the kitchen sink, hating my face. Hating that underneath the port-wine stain, I could see Dad and his blue-green eyes and his aristocratic nose. I remember taking the stain remover from under the kitchen sink, rubbing the cleanser on my face as if it were one of the fancy toners Mom bought to beautify my skin, not abrade it. The reaction was instantaneous. My skin bubbled, hiding the purple stain and my father within my face.

  It worked. Mom gasped, “Terra!”

  She stayed, Susannah left, and Dad fumed impotently. Another crisis diverted.

  But how many more times would we hurt ourselves to diffuse Dad?

  The miracle was, Dad wasn’t here. He wasn’t anywhere close to here. China was the last place he would go, this country of his shame. No wonder Merc had moved to this very country. Here, he was safe.

  Here, Mom and I were both safe.

  For all that I’d studied about China, reading at least eight different guidebooks, poring over expat discussion boards
about Beijing and Shanghai, borrowing Mandarin tapes from the library. As much as I read Wild Swans and Amy Tan and Lisa See, reread Da Chen and The Red Scarf Girl, nothing prepared me when I turned around to face the Hall of Supreme Harmony — that iconic building in the Outer Court. Nothing prepared me for the sad opulence, this tragic grandeur that once had been the bastion of both royalty and their eunuchs and concubines — all battling for survival.

  “Even emperors toppled,” I whispered. Empires are overthrown. Emperors lose power, die. The last emperor of China had been forced to serve as a farmer for seven ignoble years.

  No power was total, no power permanent, no power absolute.

  Not even Dad’s.

  There is a time to study a map passionately, obsessively. To see where you’ve gone, where others have gone before you. To commit to memory every obstacle, every danger. Shakespeare had a term for this obsession: mappery. But there is a time, too, when you say, come dragons. I challenge you to find me.

  I shivered, thinking about how life would have been so different had Mom kept on her path instead of stepping onto Dad’s. Had she enrolled in college, gotten her degree, could she have been like Norah, mistress of coffee beans, ruler of profit-and-loss statements? Could she have been fearless like her own sister and ventured to countries whose names I couldn’t pronounce, much less place on a map?

  What would life have been like for me without my port-wine stain?

  I opened my lips, then closed them. “Mom,” I said. Again, my lips parted and then pursed. I lifted my finger to them, not shushing my questions, not locking them in, just indecisive.

  “What, honey?”

  Oh, nothing. These words poised for their normal swan’s dive, that headlong plummet that would end any intimate sharing. I cleared my throat.

  “Would you look at that,” said Mom, laughing in wonderment. “A Starbucks right here in the Forbidden City.”

  “What?”

  I looked where Mom was pointing. There was no telltale sign, no emblematic mermaid to lure the thirsty and caffeine-deprived inside. That is, there was no sign of the Starbucks until a man stumbled out the nondescript door, clutching his coffee in one hand, a wad of napkins in the other. If ever I needed a nudge telling me I was on the right path, there it was.