An Ocean Apart, a World Away

by Lensey Namioka

  During the noisy, lurching cable car ride, I didn’t get a chance to exchange more than a few words with James, but in his eyes I saw humor and gentleness as he looked at Ailin. She had chosen well.

  “Here we are,” said James when we arrived at our stop. He took my suitcase and helped me climb down.

  We walked a short distance up a street and entered the door of the restaurant that Ailin and her husband owned. It was called Peng Lai, after a mythical isle in Chinese folklore. In spite of its poetic name, the restaurant was a small place, not any bigger than the Peach Garden in Ithaca. Inside, it was crowded with customers. A harassed-looking man rushed up to James and started talking excitedly. I realized that they were speaking Cantonese, which I didn’t understand.

  Ailin took me to the back of the house and we mounted the stairs to the second floor. “I’m afraid I’ll have to go back down and help out,” she said. “The restaurant is very busy because it’s Friday.”

  She showed me to a small room overlooking an alley in the back. “This is our only spare room. You’ll have to push aside those boxes so you can put your suitcase down.”

  “My room in Ithaca is no bigger,” I said quickly. “Don’t worry about me.”

  Giving me a quick smile, Ailin turned and hurried downstairs. I felt guilty, inviting myself to stay when they had their hands so full already. But Ailin had looked so happy to see me that I wasn’t sorry I had come. I lay down on the bed for a short rest, and the next thing I knew, I opened my eyes to find that it was dark. I looked at my small travel clock and saw that it was eight-thirty in the evening. I heard someone coming up the stairs, and Ailin poked her head in. “Oh, good. You’re awake. We have time to eat some supper now. Let’s go down.”

  The staircase still smelled of cooking—Chinese cooking—and I found myself ravenously hungry. In the dining room there were only a few customers left. Most of the customers were Chinese, and they ate early. Ailin led me to one of the empty tables. “You’ll be eating my cooking tonight. Are you willing to take a chance on it?”

  “After months of corned beef and cabbage, what do you think?” I said.

  While Ailin went to fetch food for us, James was with the last of the customers, putting their leftover food into small paper cartons.

  “Do your customers usually take food home with them?” I asked when the customers were all gone and James sat down with us to eat.

  “Yes,” James admitted. “All the Chinese restaurants here provide paper cartons for taking home leftovers. The customers always order more than they can finish, and it would be a great waste to throw all that food away.”

  It was true that we Chinese expected to have some food left over at the end of the meal. Having the platters completely empty was shameful, because it implied that we were too stingy to prepare any extra food. If there were leftovers, the servants ate them. But here in America, where not many families had servants, the customers themselves ate the leftovers.

  I thought of the time I bought food from the Peach Garden in Ithaca, and I had an idea. “Why don’t you prepare food that’s especially meant to be taken away and eaten at people’s homes?” I said eagerly. “You can use your paper cartons for that.”

  James stared at me. “That’s not a bad idea! Is this something you learned at the university?”

  I looked down. “No, I was stupid enough to invite some Chinese students at Cornell to a dinner party that I was hoping to prepare myself—” I stopped when Ailin started to giggle. I glared at her. “Well, you didn’t become a great cook overnight!”

  Ailin stopped giggling. “No, it took weeks and weeks of practice. I was cooking for the Warner family, and they were very patient with me.” She grinned. “But then they didn’t have much choice. It was either my cooking or Mrs. Warner’s wooden pork chops.”

  I didn’t know what wooden pork chops were, but they couldn’t be as bad as corned beef and sulfurous cabbage.

  James turned to Ailin and smiled. He had an attractive smile, which immediately made him handsomer. “Your friend has a good head for business!”

  “How can you say that?” protested Ailin. “Yanyan plans to be a doctor!”

  “We don’t always end up doing what we intended, do we?” I said gently. Ailin herself had had plans to be a teacher, but she had to give them up when her uncle took her out of school. My remark wasn’t meant to be cruel. Seeing Ailin’s contentment as she smiled back at James convinced me that she had not been hurt.

  During the next few days, I tried to help Ailin in the kitchen. By the third day, I was actually doing more good than harm. I was assigned the job of washing and slicing vegetables, and my skill with the knife improved. Just being in the kitchen with Ailin gave me a warm feeling of camaraderie.

  Finally Ailin had enough confidence in me to let me approach the stove itself. I was allowed to stir some of the food while it cooked over the blazing fire belching out of the open hole of the stove. Wielding the black iron spatula, I felt almost as powerful as if I held a sword in my hand. Was that why my parents always spoke to our chef with so much respect?

  Being allowed to do some of the actual cooking gave me confidence, and I begged Ailin to teach me at least one dish that I could master all by myself. “Why?” she asked, laughing. “Are you planning to open a boarding-house for Chinese students?”

  “You’re right about the Chinese students part,” I said. “I want to invite those students again and show them that I don’t have to buy all the food from the local Chinese restaurant.”

  We settled on a recipe for sour-hot soup. “It’s a Sichuan dish,” said Ailin. “When we tried it on our customers, it became a great hit and people come in asking for it especially.”

  I liked the idea of the sour-hot soup. Celia was from Sichuan, and it would give me great satisfaction to serve her something from her home province.

  With instructions from Ailin, I learned to thicken the soup stock with some starch, then add vinegar and black pepper to make it taste sour and hot. “You can add chopped vegetables, bits of meat, or beaten eggs— anything you want. It’s a good way of using up leftovers,” she added.

  “I can beat eggs,” I said. “But I’m not sure I want to put in any of Mrs. Harte’s leftover corned beef or cabbage.”

  Ailin finally had her day off, and we took the cable car to a part of San Francisco that I hadn’t seen before. We walked along a windswept bluff that faced the ocean. Since coming to America, I hadn’t been near the sea, and seeing the foamy waves reminded me that a wide ocean separated us from our home in China.

  “Are you planning to live in America for the rest of your life?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Ailin replied without hesitation. “This is now my home, and this is where I plan to raise a family someday.” After a moment she turned to look at me. “What about you? Are you returning to China?”

  “Yes,” I said, also without hesitation. “I’m glad I’m attending Cornell University. They have a good medical program, and I want to complete my medical training. But there is nothing in this country that holds me here.”

  Ailin looked at me curiously. “You sound very lonely. Haven’t you made any real friends at all in America?”

  I immediately thought of L.H., but he was in New York with Celia and the others. I thought of Maureen and Ellen, the two girls in my mathematics class. I liked them, but I had no opportunity to spend much time with them. I thought of Sibyl and the Pettigrews. They were good to me, but they were much older. “No, you’re my only true friend in America, Ailin.”

  “What about that dinner party you’re planning to give?” asked Ailin. “Isn’t that for some friends?”

  “They are some Chinese students at the university that I was hoping to know better. But they aren’t particularly eager to be friends with me.” Then I realized that I was doing an injustice to L.H. “Well, there is one boy who is nicer to me than the rest.”

  “Really?” asked Ailin, immediately looking interested. “What is he
like?”

  I discovered that I actually felt shy about discussing L.H. “Well, he’s thin, and he suffers from indigestion,” I said weakly, and stopped.

  Ailin laughed. “I can tell that he must have made quite an impression on you. Do you like him?”

  “I don’t have a chance to like or dislike him,” I muttered. “He’s guarded by a dragon called Celia, who breathes fire whenever she sees me near him.”

  We walked along the sandy path for a while, past tufts of coarse grass. Ailin broke the silence. “You said once that you didn’t intend to get married, and that you planned to support yourself. Do you still feel that way?”

  I thought of Baoshu, and as always I felt a sharp pang. “There is someone I nearly married . . .”

  Ailin stared at me. “You never said anything about this in your letters!”

  The barrier broke. I found words pouring out at last, words that I hadn’t dared to say to anyone, not even Ailin. I told her about Baoshu, about our train trip to Shanghai, and about our growing attraction to each other. Ailin’s eyes grew wide when I described Baoshu’s escape from the police, his gunshot wound, and my primitive surgery in digging out the bullet.

  “He asked me to run away with him,” I said at the end. My throat felt tight, and I had trouble getting the words out. “I would have had to give up everything, all my plans and my medical studies!”

  Ailin looked gravely at me. “Are your medical studies really so important to you?”

  “At first I was interested in medicine only because of curiosity,” I admitted. “I wanted to know why some treatments worked, and why some didn’t. Then I realized that I loved even more the thought of being able to make people well.” I stole a look at her and went on. “There are some diseases that cause so much suffering that we simply have to find a cure. Tuberculosis, for instance.”

  Ailin closed her eyes. Her father, whom she loved deeply, had died of tuberculosis. But I had to go on. “I knew that curing people was important to me, and that I had to continue my studies.”

  “You didn’t want to give up your studies and help Baoshu fight for his beliefs?” asked Ailin. She had put her finger on the most sensitive part of my relationship with Baoshu.

  “I think I would have made the sacrifice if I had thought he had deeply cherished beliefs,” I said slowly. “But the truth is that Baoshu loved danger for its own sake, and he wanted me to go with him because he thought I shared that love.”

  “He was fighting for the restoration of the Manchu dynasty, you said,” Ailin said. “Since he’s half Manchu, I can understand that he would want that.”

  “That’s what I thought at first,” I said. “But he’s also half Chinese. You can’t just throw that half away.”

  “Maybe he believed that China was in turmoil and needed an emperor to restore law and order,” suggested Ailin.

  “That’s what he said to my father,” I said. “But I’m not sure how much he believed it himself. I think it was the excitement that he craved.”

  I remembered how James had looked at Ailin with love and pride. Without her help, the restaurant could not have succeeded. She was a full partner.

  It was different with Baoshu. I finally came to what had caused me to reject him. “Baoshu wanted me, but what he wanted was a follower and a companion to share his adventures.”

  Ailin looked at me long and hard. I saw both pity and admiration in her eyes. “Yes, I think you did the right thing in refusing Baoshu.”

  CHAPTER 10

  The trip back to Ithaca didn’t seem nearly as long as the trip to San Francisco. When I wasn’t studying, I stared out the window at the passing scenery, and I treasured the memory of Ailin’s face as she waved good-bye to me at the train station. She looked assured and proud. She had every right to be.

  After the warmth and sunshine in California, the stinging cold in Ithaca hit me like a blow. My teeth were chattering as I walked out of the train station, but by the time I trudged up the hill to Mrs. Harte’s house, I was warm from the exercise. The climb was worse than usual because of the ice and slush underfoot.

  Mrs. Harte and Sibyl welcomed me back with genuine affection, and that warmed me even further. “Too bad you missed a good snowstorm last week,” said Sibyl. “But don’t worry, we’ll have plenty more before the end of the season.”

  On the first day of my physics class after the winter vacation, I found myself sitting next to L.H. “It took a whole semester,” he said, grinning. “But we finally managed to get adjacent seats.”

  I looked down, suddenly a little shy. It was an unusual sensation for me. “So how was your trip to New York City?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “A huge, busy city like that was exciting, after being in this isolated town for so long,” he replied. He started to say something, but the professor came in just then, and we had to turn our attention to the lecture.

  At the end of the class, instead of rushing away, L.H. walked along with me. “I don’t have to go to my philosophy class, because we’re doing independent study and writing papers for the rest of the semester,” he explained.

  We made our way carefully across the campus, trying to avoid the patches of hard, packed snow. “How was your trip to the West Coast?” L.H. asked.

  “I spent the whole time in San Francisco doing kitchen work in my friend’s restaurant,” I said. I glanced at him to see how he took the news.

  He skidded and fell flat on his back. I laughed as I helped him to his feet. “I even learned to cook . . . well, just a little. I brought back all sorts of good things from San Francisco: dried scallops and shrimp, pickled mustard greens, and soybean paste.”

  As L.H. still stared, I continued, “One of these days, I’m going to invite all of you for a dinner I’ll try to cook myself. In fact, my friend gave me a recipe for Sichuan sour-hot soup, which should please Celia.”

  L.H. finally found his voice. “You always like to do the unexpected, don’t you?”

  He had said this before, meaning it as a compliment. I accepted it as such. We were arriving at my home economics class, and I could hardly wait to show the other students how much I had improved in cutting up vegetables.

  Just as Sibyl had predicted, we began to get snow-storms, one after another, throughout January. The streets were lined on either side with walls of accumulated snow almost as tall as I was. It was tough work just to get up the hill to the university. Giving a dinner party was out of the question.

  I hardly noticed the snow, since I became totally immersed in studying for the final examinations, which started a month after the winter vacation. The examinations were vitally important to me. Their results would determine whether I could enter the university as a regular student next semester.

  In spite of my fears about the examinations, I relished the challenge. At the MacIntosh School, most of the subjects had been easy for me, and I seldom found the examinations taxing. Here, I faced examinations so hard that I had a drowning sensation while taking them. The Cornell school song began with “Far above Cayuga’s waters, with its waves of blue. . . .” It was all I could do to keep my head above those waves of blue. Nevertheless, I found the struggle exhilarating.

  After taking my last exam, a period of anxious waiting began. I didn’t want to talk to people, even sympathetic ones such as Sibyl, and I spent most of the time sitting in my room, writing letters.

  Dear Ailin,

  I don’t know if I passed my examinations or not, but I enjoyed the fight. What I enjoyed even more was telling people that I spent the winter vacation working in your kitchen and learning to cook. At the earliest opportunity, I’m going to try out your recipe for the sour-hot soup!

  The visit with you not only brought me the comfort I needed, but also cleared up some things in my mind. Thank you, dearest friend. I hope we can see each other again soon.

  Yanyan

  When our grades were finally out, I was tremendously relieved to learn that I had passed all my courses. As e
xpected, my lowest grade was in the physics course, where I barely squeaked by. L.H. consoled me. “You should have taken the course in your sophomore year. Most students do.”

  “I know,” I admitted. “My advisor kept telling me it was too hard for me, and I took it just to show him he was wrong and to prove how brave I was. Now I know it wasn’t courage, just recklessness.”

  “So will you drop the physics course during the second semester?” asked L.H.

  “No, I’ll try to stick with it,” I said. “I made a mistake, and I’m prepared to pay for it. I hate to give up.”

  I didn’t do too badly in the mathematics course, although my score was far behind those of Maureen and Ellen. To the disgust of many of the boys in the class (and probably of the teacher as well), the two girls received the top grades.

  In English, I managed not to disgrace the language of Shakespeare completely, but the biggest surprise came in my home economics course, where the teacher wrote that I was the student showing the greatest improvement, and deserved a special mention for striving so hard.

  For the second semester, therefore, I could enroll as a regular freshman instead of a special student. Passing my exams also meant that I would be living in a girls’ dormitory on campus, instead of in a rooming house. Boys could live in rooming houses in the town, but regular girl students were required to live in university dormitories. The advantage was that I wouldn’t have to go up the hill twice a day, a grueling climb during the winter. But I also felt sad at the thought of leaving Mrs. Harte and Sibyl. They were the closest thing I had to a family in Ithaca.

  Another advantage to living in a dormitory was that I’d have a chance to see more of the other students, such as Maureen and Ellen. Even Celia would have to accept me as a regular student.

  There was a short break between the end of the examination period and the start of the new semester. It was too short for people to travel out of town, but long enough to unwind after examinations.