by Ling Ma
He didn’t call me that day. A week passed before he summoned me back to his apartment. We lay in his bed, undressed. He was trying to go down on me. The sun was only just setting outside his loft windows, in shades of lavender and pink. Everything felt too earnest.
He did that thing where he laid me down on my back and worked his way south, kissing my breasts, my rib cage, my belly. I found his overtrimmed facial hair alarming. The loose-coiled mattress shifted skittishly underneath me. The only guy I had ever let go down on me was the college boyfriend, and that was under the pretense of love.
Hey. I touched his head, his salt-and-pepper hair. I wouldn’t do that. When he seemed not to have heard, I tried again. Maybe we should have a safe word.
The safe word is yes, he bristled.
I lay on my back, looking up at his high ceiling, trying to relax. I pretended that it was the end of yoga class and I was practicing corpse pose. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just lie there.
I’m on my period, I lied.
That’s okay. It doesn’t bother me.
Really? But, I’m like four days into it. At this point, it kind of tastes like rust, old dried blood.
He looked up, smiling. Okay, I’ll stop.
Like licking a rusty barbed wire, I added.
You don’t have to get into it. His smile had vanished.
Yeah, but can I say it anyway?
What we ended up doing was something like three-quarters fucking and one-quarter lovemaking—and by lovemaking, I just mean the part that was missionary. That part was in the beginning, when he clasped me, almost tenderly and wistfully, and I shut my eyes against his confused gaze, both paternal and lustful. I didn’t want to be part of the meaningful postdivorce narrative he was constructing. Like, Obligatory Sexual Interlude with Inappropriate Twentysomething. If he was looking for newfound meaning, I would be the first to tell him this was nothing. I did this all the time, I would say. And if he left cab fare on the nightstand, I wasn’t going to take it. I didn’t want anything. I didn’t need anything.
Turn over, he said.
I turned over.
In the morning, he left a hundred-dollar bill and I used it for groceries.
Instead of taking a cab, I walked home to the Lower East Side, crossing the Williamsburg Bridge. Halfway across, I realized my dress, or my mother’s dress, was on backward, and I took it off and put it back on, in front of the rush-hour traffic, my breasts cold and peaked in the morning air.
When I finally arrived home, my roommate, Jane, was watching TV and eating yogurt.
You got a package, she said, gesturing to a big moving box next to the sofa.
When did this come in?
I saw it when I got back last night.
I opened up the box to discover a strangely curated selection of my mother’s belongings. I could smell traces of her scent, a mix of Caress soap and medicinal Clinique. Most of our family belongings had been placed in storage, but likely because of a clerical mix-up, the hospice had shipped the remaining “personal effects” to me instead of to the law firm overseeing my parents’ estate. The law firm would have then forwarded this last box to the storage facility that held my family’s possessions, from my childhood things to my father’s collection of Chinese literature.
Jane knelt down next to me, observing. I unpacked the items slowly. Laid across the scratched wood floor, my mother’s belongings looked small, measly, shopworn. There were clothes and jewelry, pictures of ancestral relatives I couldn’t name, a silver gooseneck-spouted coffeepot from the silver service we never used, and cooking implements she’d long retired: a brass wire ladle for draining oil, broken sections of a bamboo steamer, small jars of dried star anise and other herbs, and, bundled in a bouquet of tissue paper, a heavy cleaver with a handle made of wood, swollen and split. There was no kitchen in the hospice, and she was definitely not well enough to do any cooking, but these were the items she had chosen to take.
At the bottom of one of the boxes was a plastic Ziploc pint bag filled with what looked like chunks of amber-colored tree resin. I opened up the bag. They were triangular slices, with linear grain and a golden fibrous gleam. Maybe they were hunks of dried shellfish like abalone, the kind you’d find in Asian supermarkets.
What is that, do you think? I asked.
Jane held the bag up to the light. She took out a piece, sniffed. Shark! Shark fins, she pronounced. She smelled again, as if to confirm. For shark fin soup, she added, handing me a fin.
How do you even know this? I asked. I brought a dried husk to my nose. They smelled stale, a tinge of oceanic rust, salt crust.
We should make shark fin soup! Jane said, too excited to answer. Restaurants don’t serve this stuff anymore because, you know, animal rights. I read that they cut the fins off and then throw the sharks back in the water.
What happens to the sharks? I smelled them again.
They die, obviously. Slow, painful deaths. That’s why it’s outlawed, and also! That’s why we shouldn’t waste these.
Yeah, but shark fin soup is so outdated. It’s like banquet-hall food, I said, trying to remember if my mother had ever made shark fin soup. I was pretty sure she hadn’t. Could she have been saving them for a special occasion?
Jane smiled. So we’ll have an outdated dinner party. I know! She almost burst into flames with glee, scheming. It’ll be eighties-decadence themed. Sheath cocktail dresses, gold jewelry. The shark fin soup will be the centerpiece. Three courses. For the first course, something totally passé, like salmon puffs …
Because Jane and I were bad at planning things—disorganized, prone to grandiose, unrealistic ideas—the dinner party didn’t actually happen for several weeks. In the meanwhile, my college friends slowly found their ways to credible internships and entry-level jobs. The group gatherings at sidewalk cafés continued until there were too few of us to sustain the same festive mood. When rush hour rolled in and people started their evening commutes around us, we reached for our drinks, avoiding one another’s eyes. Someone stood up. He had to be out early to paddle down the Gowanus. Another person excused herself because she had to attend a dreamcatcher workshop. No one asked questions.
Instead of wasting time with others, I began to waste time alone. I walked. I had a routine. I woke early, did my stretches, and ate a bowl of granola drenched in milk. I brushed my teeth, I washed my face, foaming up a clear brown bar of Neutrogena soap. I shaved my legs. I shaved my armpits. To shave my pussy, I lowered myself into the tub, crouching like a sumo wrestler pre-bout. Like a champion sumo wrestler. I placed a hand mirror at the bottom of the basin; I liked to be thorough. My body chafed easily in the heat. Afterward, I showered with scaldingly hot water, watching all the hair run down the drain. I put on a Contempo Casuals dress. I took my purse, a small cross-body that only held a wallet, ChapStick, and a Canon Elph digital camera.
Freshly shaved, freshly showered, freshly dressed, I went outside. The morning air was cool against my skin, still red from the shower. I smelled like Neutrogena and green apple shampoo, fruity and medicinal at the same time. I closed the heavy door behind me and started walking, passing by the familiar sights: the used bookstore with its window display of architecture tomes, the coded graffiti tags, the dollar pizza place, the diner featuring the same people sitting at the same window booths, stirring their coffees with tiny spoons. Then out of the Lower East Side entirely, west to SoHo or north to Union Square.
The sun rose. Humidity levels increased. As the day warmed, my breath steadied. My shoulders browned to a crisp, like an athlete’s. Blisters formed on my feet. Midday, heat came off the sidewalks, creating an illusory wave effect, as if I were observing the world through a thick pane of glass. To cool down, I’d skim through the air-conditioned lobby of a hotel or museum or department store, like a swimmer taking a quick, splashy lap, slipping past doormen, salesgirls, concierges, docents, security guards before bursting back outside.
Periodically I’d take pictures. Picture
s of ordinary things; of trash bin contents, of doormen yawning, of graffiti splashed across subway cars, of poorly worded advertisements, of pigeon flocks across the sky—all the usual clichés. I used to feel sheepish doing it, fishing around in my purse for the camera discreetly, as if for a lipstick or a compact. But then I would keep the Canon Elph on me openly, dangling from my hand by a wristlet. I preferred if people thought I was a tourist. It looked less weird that way.
I often ended up in Chinatown around lunch. Specifically, the Fujianese side, separated by the Bowery from the tourist-pandering Cantonese part. This part was cheaper, more run-down, less conscious of the Western gaze. You could get a plate of dumplings for two dollars, spiked with black vinegar and julienned ginger on a flimsy, buckling Styrofoam plate. When it felt like my legs would give out, I’d eat pork-cabbage dumplings at a shallow storefront underneath the Manhattan Bridge, then sit outside in its shade and drink an iced milk tea. I could feel the bridge above me rumbling and bouncing with the weight of vehicles. The air was dense with afternoon exhaust and fried foods. Old ladies and hunchbacked men in white wife-beaters fanned themselves with palm leaves, eating chicken hearts impaled on skewers.
In the evenings, as people returned home, I looked into the windows above and imagined the lives of the occupants inside. Their desk lamps, their hanging spider ferns in wicker baskets, calico cats lounging on throw pillows. I could do that indefinitely: roam the streets, look up into windows and imagine myself into other people’s lives. Maybe I could be a creepy Peeping Tom and that could just be my life.
When I returned home, I would go through the images on my camera and upload the good ones to NY Ghost. The ghost was me. Walking around aimlessly, without anywhere to go, anything to do, I was just a specter haunting the scene. A wind could blow and knock me to Jersey or Ohio or back to Salt Lake. It seemed appropriate that I kept the blog anonymous. Or maybe the anonymity was because I didn’t know whether the photos were any good. What I enjoyed, or at least what I felt compelled to keep doing, was the routine.
I held this walking-and-photographing routine through almost all of that first summer in New York. I did it five days a week, Mondays through Fridays, from ten in the morning to six in the evening. June, July, August. A deep, grim satisfaction buoyed me. The thing was just to keep walking, just keep going, and by some point, the third or fourth hour, the fifth or sixth, my mind drained until empty. Hours blurred together. Traffic blared. Cars honked. A man asked me if I was okay, if I needed anything. What do you think I need? I asked, and something about my face made him look away.
*
Walking down Central Park South one day, I unwittingly passed by the Helmsley Park Lane. It took a moment to realize why it seemed so familiar: it was the hotel my parents and I stayed the first time we visited New York, as a family. I was maybe nine. It was the first business trip my father ever took, for the first American job he ever landed, an analyst position at an insurance firm.
He was away during most of the day, so my mother and I were left to wander around the city by ourselves. We’d wake up to Central Park and walk down Fifth Avenue for croissants and coffee. We pretended to live there, imagining different lives. She was a divorcée with a massive alimony settlement and I was her spoiled daughter. She was a single Shanghainese socialite and I her little child servant, holding her purse as she paid for leather heels at Ferragamo, where, upon purchase, the saleslady allowed me to use the employee bathroom. It didn’t matter what she bought; she just wanted to parade her fancy American luxury wares to her two younger sisters back in Fuzhou.
In the evenings, when my father returned to the hotel room, my parents fought, arguing in Fujianese instead of Mandarin because they thought I couldn’t understand. I have always thought of Fujianese as the language of arguments, of fights. And in fact I did understand the language, better known as Hokkien, but never learned to speak it.
It was the same fight every time. My mother wanted to return to China, if not today then eventually, and my father wanted to stay. It would begin as a rational conversation, then disintegrate.
If we moved back, my mother reasoned, you could have any job you want in China.
The only good jobs in China are government jobs, my father said. I didn’t study this hard through university just to sit around and accept bribes.
Your friends back home have government jobs, she fumed. They’re happy.
They’re happy because they don’t have a choice but to be happy. That’s the best that they can do. My father raised his voice. If they had the choice to come here like us, you think they’d rather stay in China? he scoffed. You’re being naïve.
I have family in Fujian. My mother raised her voice defiantly, matching his.
Right. And how do you think we send money back to your family?
She glared at him in icy silence.
This isn’t just about me! He tried a different tack. This is what I’m trying to tell you. There are more opportunities here. Candace can really make something of herself.
Ai-yah! You think she wants to grow up somewhere where she’s estranged from her cousins, her grandparents? She only has us. If anything ever happened—
You’re being melodramatic. Nothing is going to happen to us.
My mother exploded. A car accident, an illness, an act of God! This is about you being successful at everyone else’s expense.
I disagree, he said, his voice suddenly dropping to a calm, measured tone.
My mother was silent, as if ready to drop the argument. But then, in the quiet tone she reserved for only the most scorched-earth malice, she said: Just because your family hates you, doesn’t mean I have to leave my family too.
He didn’t respond. Which more or less ended the conversation.
Observing from behind the crack in the bathroom door, I waited a few minutes until it seemed okay to come out and pretend that I’d finished taking my shower.
Get dressed! my father snapped. We’re going out for dinner.
My mother came over and tousled my dried hair. What do you want to eat? she asked gently. We can eat wherever you want tonight.
Chinese food, I said, because I knew that would please them. All I wanted to eat as a kid was pizza or spaghetti.
We went to a midtown Chinese place called Vega House. It was almost closing time when we arrived, around nine. The place was mostly empty. They seated us in the big corner booth next to the window. Outside, it had just started to rain; droplets streamed down the pane, blurring the scene outside. My skin broke out into goose bumps in the stale air-conditioning.
In a bid to impress my mother, my father ordered Peking duck. It was such a glamorous, high-maintenance dish; it required table-side service. The weary waiter rolled the glazed bird on a cart and lethargically carved it up, knife almost slipping out of his hand. I found the fatty blobs of duck skin off-putting, but I ate it anyway. I was my father’s co-conspirator. He was demonstrating that anything she wanted in China, she could get here. Halfway through the meal, my father put his arm around my mother, trying to indicate to her that the fight was over. For now.
The rain had stopped by the time we left the restaurant. The air was warm. Gasoline puddles formed in the streets. Office buildings glittered as if in half-sleep, a scattering of darkened windows. The city was really beautiful. In a few of the fluorescent windows, employees worked late hours, each alone in his or her office. Dressed in collared shirts, they sat at desks littered with thermoses and Chinese takeout cartons, papers piled high. What were they doing? Where were their homes?
Looking at the office workers suspended high above us, I sensed for the first time my father’s desire to leave China and to live in a foreign country. It was the anonymity. He wanted to be unknown, unpossessed by others’ knowledge of him. That was freedom.
I looked up at my father, his gaze also directed to those office buildings. He glanced down briefly and smiled. Like worker bees, he observed in English.
I remember thinki
ng in that moment that I was going to live in New York one day. That was the extent of my ambitions at age nine, but I felt it deeply. I didn’t want to go back to China. When we moved to the U.S., I had wanted to go back home, there was nothing I wanted more, I got on my knees and begged like a dog, but I was six then and stupider and I didn’t know anything. I didn’t feel that way anymore.
*
The shark fin dinner party took place on a cold, rainy Saturday night in late August. It marked the end of that strange transitory summer, and the beginning of something else.
The guests consisted of a mix of college friends and Jane’s people, coworkers and neighbors. They crowded into our railroad apartment, guys in skinny ties and suits, girls with big Aqua Net hair and acrylic nails. They piled their coats on our beds, rolled a keg up the stairs, brought little hostess gifts. Giorgio Moroder played in the background. Someone came dressed as Ronald Reagan, pelting girls with jelly beans from his suit pocket.
We’d created a makeshift Trump-themed dining table in our living room by arranging collapsible card tables end to end. Over this, Jane had laid a metallic gold tablecloth, weighted by a thrifted brass candelabra, and bouquets of fake plastic flowers she’d spray-painted gold. On the table were ironic predinner canapés: salmon mousse quenelles with dill cream, spinach dip in a bread bowl, Ritz crackers, and a ball of pimento cheese in the shape of Trump’s hair.
I navigated through the rooms in another of my mother’s loose, billowy Contempo Casuals dresses, this one black with a white burnout Africana print.
In the midst of this fray was Steven Reitman, dressed as if for a Hamptons boating party, standing amongst the secondhand furniture of my bedroom. I had invited him almost as a joke, considering that we hadn’t seen each other all summer, so I hadn’t actually expected him to come.
Is this a dinner party or a costume party? he asked, pressing his whiskered cheek to mine in an air kiss. The scent of his expensive yuzu aftershave made me suddenly wistful for the few times we’d spent together. I swallowed.
