The Dissident

by Nell Freudenberger

  All of a sudden I identified the familiar smell I had noticed when I walked in the door: June’s grandmother used the same lemon cold cream my mother did. When you’re suffering from a crush, anything can seem like a sign; still, the next thing June said gave me a chill, as if there were something about this family that allowed them to see inside my head.

  “Do you want to see my birds?”

  “Professor Yuan is hungry,” Mrs. Wang said. “He can see your birds after dinner.”

  “What birds?” I asked June urgently, as we followed her grandmother to the dining alcove. Was it possible that June was also a painter of birds? Why had she never shown them to me?

  “I’ll show you after,” June said. I had little interest in food, until Mrs. Wang began bringing dishes from the kitchen: pork and shrimp dumplings, red-braised beef, giant prawns with lotus root, and fiery fried morning glory. There was even a fragrant bowl of sesame rice, under a bamboo lid.

  “I wish I had known you were coming further in advance,” Mrs. Wang said slyly, switching back to Chinese. “I would have prepared something special.”

  “You’ve prepared a feast,” I said. The sun was setting earlier now, and it seemed later than it was. Mrs. Wang turned on the lamps in the living room and then fussed over June and me, serving us large portions of everything, and watching as we took our first bites. My plea sure must have been evident:

  “Do you get enough to eat with that family?” Mrs. Wang asked me.

  “Speak English,” June exclaimed. When her grandmother repeated the question in English, June sighed: “Of course he gets enough to eat. They’re rich.”

  “Rich from what business?” her grandmother asked.

  I explained that Dr. Travers was a psychiatrist.

  Mrs. Wang was unimpressed: “There are still not many psychiatrists in China. Is that right?”

  “Not many,” I said. “It isn’t popular.”

  “A waste of money,” she declared. “What kind of business were you in before you became a teacher?”

  I looked at June, who seemed unconcerned by the fact that she’d gotten me into an awkward situation. She was innocently eating a large shrimp dumpling, not particularly gracefully, taking sips of water to avoid burning her tongue.

  “My father’s business is oil. In Shanghai.”

  Mrs. Wang frowned. “What oil company is in Shanghai?”

  “There’s an office there now, but I grew up in Harbin.”

  “Daqing,” Mrs. Wang inferred, nodding her approval: “Harbin, Beijing, and Shandong people are all good people.”

  “How could everyone in a whole city be good?” June asked.

  “Harbin and Beijing are cities,” I told her. “Shandong is a province—where Confucius was from.”

  “She knows, she knows,” her grandmother said. “My father—her great-grandfather was from Shandong. He was a marshal under General Chiang. We left the mainland when I was her age.” She turned to her granddaughter. “Can you imagine?”

  “No,” said June. “I never get to go anywhere.”

  Mrs. Wang appeared shocked by her rudeness, although I had a feeling it wasn’t the first time June had made this complaint to her grandmother.

  “Are you interested in business?” I asked neutrally. I was trying to smooth things over, and also (I admit) to steer the conversation away from my personal history.

  “I’m a businesswoman myself,” Mrs. Wang said modestly. “I majored in economics at National Taiwan University. Now I run my own company.”

  “What sort—”

  “Japanese imports,” Mrs. Wang said. “Let me show you.”

  “Oh man,” said June. She got up and went into the kitchen. A moment later the back door slammed.

  Mrs. Wang also left the room. A moment later she returned, carrying a large cardboard box.

  “Do you by chance suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome, Professor Yuan?”

  “Excuse me?” I was sure that Mrs. Wang wouldn’t have allowed her granddaughter to go out at night, but what was June doing in the backyard? I did not want to leave without seeing her drawings.

  “Or any other repetitive stress injuries?” She set the box on the table and began removing thick, elasticized wristbands, headbands, and gloves. As soon as her granddaughter was gone, she had reverted to her own language. “All with a special electromagnetic lining. They’re also good for diabetes and insomnia. Take them out of the package.”

  Mrs. Wang seemed agitated. I examined the socks. “Very comfortable.”

  “Put them on, put them on,” Mrs. Wang said. “I’m sorry my granddaughter is so impolite!”

  “No problem,” I said. “She’s very talented.”

  “She’s been very difficult recently. In fact, that’s why I invited you. At first I thought she was worried about college, but now…” Mrs. Wang paused, embarrassed. She searched through her carton for another gift.

  “All teenagers are troublesome,” I said, using some American wisdom to reassure her. “It’s when they are not difficult that you should worry.”

  “Mushroom pills!” Mrs. Wang exclaimed, ignoring me. “Chinese people have had the secret of anti-aging medication since the Three Kingdoms period. In Japan they cost sixty dollars per bottle, but I know how to get them cheaply from Guangzhou. Why do you think my skin looks so smooth?”

  “You look very young,” I said politely. There was something about talking with Mrs. Wang that relaxed me, as if I were a child again, and could depend on her to tell me what to do.

  “Don’t flatter me,” Mrs. Wang said. “I’m an old lady. My granddaughter is older than she looks as well.”

  “She is?”

  Mrs. Wang lowered her voice, although we were alone. “I kept her out of school,” she whispered. “I waited two years, until we could afford a good kindergarten.”

  If June had been held back two years, that would make her at least nineteen. I thought that explained some of the sophistication of her work. I tried not to meditate any further on the significance of her age: nineteen, after all, was still very young.

  “It’s my fault,” Mrs. Wang confessed. “All my fault. I didn’t want her to go to the public school—full of black children.”

  “Never mind,” I said. “June is very advanced, even for a nineteen-year-old. She’s the best student I have.”

  “Professor Yuan, you’re flattering us. June has no head for business. I can see that.”

  “I know,” I said carefully. “That’s why I think an art college might be better than a business college.”

  Mrs. Wang nodded calmly. “June likes to draw.”

  I was startled: had I succeeded in convincing her so easily? “You wouldn’t be opposed to that?”

  “Any good college is fine with me. The specialty doesn’t matter.”

  “But that’s wonderful,” I said. “What is she worried about?”

  Mrs. Wang shook her head. “You ask her. I can’t talk to her. Sometimes I wish I had tried harder. I thought I was doing the right thing. But maybe it would have been better?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I didn’t want her to be confused,” Mrs. Wang explained. “I thought that if she only spoke English, there would be no problems. But I wonder if it might be better now, if I could speak to her in Chinese? Maybe in a foreign language we can never say exactly what we mean—do you think so, Professor Yuan?”

  There was a rap on the dining room window. A ghostly face appeared in the dark behind the glass.

  “Go on,” Mrs. Wang said. “Please. Find out what I’m doing wrong.”

  50.

  WHEN JUNE BECKONED ME OUTSIDE, AND HER GRANDMOTHER URGED me to go, I expected we might have a talk. However, my student put her finger to her lips and led me toward the back of a surprisingly large yard, which seemed to end in a chain-link fence. Lights from the dining room and the kitchen did not quite reach this barrier; in the dark June slid back a latch and stepped into an enclosed area, even darker than outside.


  “What is this?” I whispered, but June just motioned for me to close the gate. When I looked back, I could see Mrs. Wang doing the dishes behind the kitchen window.

  We were inside an open shed, enclosed with chicken wire. At first I took it for some kind of outdoor studio; I was expecting to see drawings, and even after I heard a few querulous notes and breathed the sour sharpness of guano, it took me a moment to understand that we were standing in an aviary. My student did not paint birds—she raised them. Parakeets, cockatiels, Australian finches (not only the common Gouldian, zebra, and owl varieties, I would later learn, but a rare South American warbler and a skittish pair of violet-eared waxbills). June switched on a battery-powered lantern. In the dim light, the bewildered birds began to welcome a premature sunrise.

  “You keep birds.”

  June gave this observation the attention it deserved. “Hold this,” she said, handing me the flashlight. Then she began filling the feeders with seed and suet.

  “Do you have any thrashers?” I asked.

  “What are thrashers?”

  “Mockingbirds are the most well known, but there are different types—the brown, the American—”

  “You can’t keep native species in an aviary,” June said. “It’s against the law. I’m going to get an African gray parrot, though. Not for here—he would murder the others. But for my room. I’m going to teach him how to say, ‘Go away and leave me alone.’” June paused. “How do you say that in Chinese?”

  “In Mandarin: Ni chuqu ba.”

  “Is that impolite?”

  “Not really. It’s more like, ‘Please go out.’”

  June sighed. “What about ‘Leave me alone’?”

  I had to think for a moment. “You could say: Bie xiao wo.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Literally, ‘Don’t laugh at me.’”

  “That’s even worse!”

  The birds clustered around the feeders in the dim light. There was a clicking sound, like beads on a string.

  “I have an aunt and uncle in China.” June tilted her head toward the kitchen. “Did she tell you that?”

  I shook my head.

  “My aunt looks just like my mom did,” June said. “She has two kids—their names are, like, Yee and Yin or something. They invited me to come visit them in Wuhan.”

  “That would be interesting for you.”

  “My grandmother doesn’t think so.”

  “I think you underestimate her,” I said. “She just told me that she would be happy for you to go to an art college.”

  I think I expected June to be stunned and grateful, perhaps even to thank me, and so I was surprised to see her expression of genuine disgust. “An art college? Who wants to go to an art college?”

  “I thought you did. You should,” I told her. “You’re very talented.”

  But June was already shaking her head. “I want to go to China to see my family. I don’t want to go to art college. I’m not sure I want to go to any college.”

  “What can you do in America without college?”

  “I hate it here,” June said. “My grandmother doesn’t understand me.”

  I was afraid her Wuhan relatives might be even less likely to “understand” her, but I didn’t want to tell her that.

  “She thinks I miss my parents. But she’s the one who misses them. How could I miss them? I didn’t even know them.”

  I wanted to tell her about my grandfather, and the stories I’d heard all through my childhood. I wanted to tell her how I had imagined him, coughing up blood in a freezing cell, and how those images (handed down carefully by my mother, like an inheritance) had made me angry for all the wrong reasons. I was not indignant on my grandfather’s behalf, nor did I admire his patriotism and sacrifice. I did not long to have known him. When I thought of him at all, I resented the tragedy that forced me to share my mother’s love with this noble ghost, who would always trump my father and me in her affections.

  “How did they die?” I asked June. I had trouble reading her expression in the dim light from the lantern, but her voice, when she answered, was matter-of-fact:

  “My dad had a friend who was a tourist pilot—you know—taking people to the islands. My dad wanted to go with him, but my mom was afraid of flying. Then one day they convinced her. The pi lot survived, but both my parents were killed.”

  I was not sure whether to touch June’s shoulder or take her hand, or pretend to be casual, and so I did nothing. Maybe that was what made her continue.

  “They were going to a place called Orchid Island, to look at birds—isn’t that funny? Did you know that Taiwan is the winter home of the blackfaced spoonbill?”

  “No.”

  “Also the whistling green pigeon. Is it true that there are hardly any birds in China because Mao killed them all?”

  “Some species have died out,” I told her. “I think it has more to do with pollution than with Mao Zedong.”

  June nodded, filing this information for future reference. Then she looked at me and, as if this question followed from the last, asked:

  “What’s your real name?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, but my heart was pounding.

  “I mean, in China. Besides Teacher Yuan.” We were sitting on plastic chairs, unsteady on the gravel. The lantern hung from a hook above our heads. June was sitting on her hands; when she leaned forward, I had a glimpse of a bit of a white lace bra. I looked away, but in that moment, I wanted to tell her everything.

  “My parents used to call me Xiao Pangzi,” I said.

  “Show Pongsy,” June repeated.

  I couldn’t help laughing. “Xiao Pangzi.”

  “How old are you, Show Pongsy?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Well then, what’s your sign?”

  “I’m the lobster,” I said.

  June frowned. “There’s no lobster. Do you think I’m stupid?”

  Before I could answer (an emphatic no!) June did something that surprised me. She took my hand and flipped it over, as if she might find the answer in my palm. She frowned, and traced the head and heart lines with one finger. It was as if she’d thrown her arms around me and put her lips against my neck. My chest constricted, and my face got hot.

  “Well, I won’t tell you my sign either,” she said.

  “I bet you’re the rooster.”

  June looked startled. “How did you know that?”

  I almost told her what her grandmother had said, and then thought better of it. I shrugged. “You’re outgoing, for one thing. Roosters say what they think. They’re not very good at trusting people—but it’s supposed to be a lucky sign.”

  June smiled, and suddenly all of her childishness was gone. “Tell me yours,” she said, putting her hand on my arm. She was looking at me clearly, asking me to trust her, and I felt like crying. Even if things might have been different, under other circumstances, I was her teacher. I was not free from consequences, simply because I was in a foreign country. I was here for a particular reason, playing a particular role. Not to mention the fact that I was sitting in her grandmother’s backyard.

  I removed June’s hand. “I’m sorry.”

  “I won’t tell anyone,” she said.

  I looked at June, who was smiling at me as if she already knew my secret. If she wanted to know, and I wanted to tell her, what could the harm be? I couldn’t tell her everything, of course, but I could give her this one, inconsequential piece of information, as long as I made a promise to myself. I would never again spend time with June outside of school, and therefore things would have no way of going any further. I would have this dreamlike moment in the aviary to remember, and she would satisfy her curiosity—or at least a piece of it. As long as I stuck to my resolution, everything would be fine.

  “I’m the rabbit,” I said. “Intuitive and creative. Also, honest. Not that I subscribe to this stuff.”

  “Of course not,” June said, smi
ling, and I couldn’t help it: I put my palm against her face and kissed her. It was only a couple of seconds; her mouth was soft and hot, almost feverish. I never felt that we were doing something wrong. I was so happy when we pulled away from each other that I laughed. It seemed appropriate there should be birdsong.

  “Ni choo-choo ba,” June said.

  “You want me to go away?”

  “No,” June said. “I just felt like saying something to you in Chinese.”

  I’d been afraid she would be angry, or upset, but it was just the opposite. It was as if she’d experienced the same feeling I had. I thought: She knows me.

  “We have to be careful!” I said ecstatically.

  “OK,” said June.

  “I think we should go inside now!”

  June picked up the lantern. The birds seemed to follow her movements, making small nighttime sounds and shifting on their perches. They had finished gorging themselves at the feeders; yellow seed was scattered in the gravel under our feet. June unlatched the gate to her aviary and then paused, holding up the light.

  “Can I ask you a favor?”

  “I won’t say anything,” I promised. “And even though I’m very—fond of you, and I think you have a terrific future” (what was I talking about?) “I want you to know that this doesn’t—have a future, I mean. It won’t happen again, no matter what—”

  “OK.” June smiled. “But that’s not what I was going to say.”

  I felt like an idiot.

  “I was going to ask—could you teach me to speak some Chinese?”

  I could think of few more pleasurable activities. But I had to be cautious. Language lessons, although they could occur on-campus, would certainly involve individual instruction. Under those circumstances, would I be able to stick to my resolution?

  “I’m sure your grandmother would be happy to teach you,” I suggested.

  “She wouldn’t teach me the right words,” June said. “I would learn to speak like a lao taitai.”

  “That’s good. You know some Chinese words already.”

  “That’s the name of a cake,” June said.

  “Do you like those?” I had a sudden craving for one of the flaky “old wives’” cakes, filled with melon paste and stamped with a cheerful red seal.