Across a Green Ocean

by Wendy Lee

  When I was thirteen, an American missionary named Mr. Frazier came to live in the neighborhood. He offered to teach English to the local children, but I was the only one, at the suggestion of my father, who took him up on it. I suppose that at the same time I was learning English, Mr. Frazier was teaching Han’s father about Christianity. I liked my missionary teacher, especially compared to my Chinese instructors. He had an easy manner about him, and was patient with my frequent questions about America. He told me that he was from a place called the Ohio River Valley, and that he had left behind a wife and two sons. My mother felt sorry for him and often invited him over for dinner. And, strangely enough, I seemed to have an aptitude for this foreign language.

  Mr. Frazier’s method of teaching was not to sit in a classroom, but for us to take walks around the rambling back streets of Houhai. He would encourage me to describe what I saw in English, stepping in now and then to provide the necessary vocabulary word.

  Once, he asked quite seriously, what I thought of the people I saw: Did they appear content?

  I glanced at the small shops, the owners sitting outside on stools and fanning themselves, chatting with their customers or people walking by. No one looked like they were in want of anything. I remembered something my father had told me, about hundreds of people who had died from hunger and floods when I was a child. But that had mostly affected the peasants, not city folk. My father sounded sure that nothing horrible like that would happen to us.

  “I guess they look happy?” I said.

  Mr. Frazier smiled. “There is no right or wrong answer. Maybe they are happy, as you say. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there was change afoot.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Just that there is something in the air. You can smell it.” Mr. Frazier winked at me and walked on.

  I sniffed the air, but all I could smell was the faint fishy odor coming from the lake. I still had no idea what Mr. Frazier was talking about. That evening I related our conversation to Han and asked what he thought of it.

  “Your foreigner teacher sounds crazy,” he said. “I would be careful around him if I were you, or you’re going to start saying crazy things too.”

  In general, Han scoffed at my English lessons. He would mimic my tones and say that I would start looking like a foreigner, that my nose would become bigger and my face as pale as that of a ghost. But I think he was jealous of my lessons that didn’t include him, that I knew something he didn’t. That this was one subject in which I was better than him.

  Then, in the summer of 1966, Mr. Frazier went back to America. He said he had been recalled by his church, but all of us knew that something else was going on, even if the adults never spoke of it. Of course, religion during this time was effectively banned. Although we were aware of the atrocities that were occurring in the rest of the country, even in Beijing, we were sheltered from most of it. Because my father worked with metals, he was considered useful to the state. Han’s father cleared the foreign goods from the shelves in his shop and started selling Mao badges and commemorative plates. He replaced the cross that hung on the wall with a propaganda poster that featured the Great Helmsman’s face.

  Then one day Han confided his father had started stealing away in the middle of the night, only to come home in the early morning.

  “What do you think he’s doing?” I asked.

  “Maybe he has a gambling problem,” Han guessed. Gambling was also banned during this time, but people got around it, as they got around everything. “Maybe”—and his eyes grew wide—“he has a mistress!” I should add that we were sixteen years old and knew nothing about women.

  “I don’t think so,” I said, more out of respect for Han’s mother, who had always been kind to me, than knowing what a mistress did.

  “I’m going to follow him the next time and see what he’s up to,” Han said. “Will you come with me?”

  “I’m not sure.” I hesitated. “What if my father catches me?”

  “Your father sleeps like a log. He’ll never wake up.”

  This was true; my father was so exhausted by his proletarian job that the house could come down around his ears and he wouldn’t stir.

  So one night I snuck out of our compound and met up with Han without anyone knowing. We followed his father’s shadow at a safe distance, down streets and alleyways, until he entered what appeared to be an ordinary house like our own. Maybe he did have a mistress and another family, I thought. Han and I found a window, and through the glass we saw my father sitting among several other men I did not recognize. One man was standing in front, reading from a book.

  A sudden intake of breath from Han. “They’re praying.”

  I asked, “Is your father a jidu tu?” A Christian. “How can that be?” For some reason, I thought that religion had stopped when Mr. Frazier had returned to America.

  “He isn’t,” Han said. “He wouldn’t do that to our family. There must be some mistake.”

  He started to walk away, and I ran to keep up with him. At the time, neither of us knew that his father was in a house church and part of an underground network. Although these churches appeared after 1949, they proliferated during this time period when religion was illegal—some of them still exist today.

  Even though Han and I didn’t fully understand what we had just seen, we knew it was something serious. At one point on our way home, Han stopped and turned so abruptly that I almost ran into him.

  “Promise me you won’t tell anyone about this,” he said. Even in the softening moonlight, his eyes were hard.

  “I promise,” I said.

  “So my grandfather was a Christian?” Michael wonders aloud.

  “Yes, are you surprised to hear that?” Liao asks.

  “No, it’s just funny. My mother’s the one who’s the Christian in our family. My dad never liked it.”

  “Well,” Liao says, “now maybe you know why. It was dangerous back then to be religious. A little bit today, even.”

  Michael hopes Liao will continue with his reminiscing, but Ben taps his watch. “We should go if we want to see Qinghai Lake.”

  The three of them get back into the car and drive northwest. There are few vehicles on the road, just some motorcycles and trucks that are headed from the city to distant townships. The rolling green mountains are bleak, occasionally punctuated by a gleaming white stupa capped with gold. One distant hill is covered by what appears to be ants. Then, as they get closer, the dots morph into animals that look like a cross between a buffalo and a skunk, with white stripes down the backs of their dark, woolly hides. Michael realizes that these are yaks, the source of the smelly butter. A herdsman, dressed incongruously in a muddy-looking suit and cap, turns his head to watch the car pass.

  The car dips, and when it rises again, a silver glint is discernable between two hills. It grows larger until it turns into an expanse of water that is a darker blue than the sky above. Ben stops the car by the side of the road, and he and Liao and Michael get out and walk. There is no sound but the wind whipping past them, over the flatness of the water and to the mountains beyond. Michael has never seen a lake this big before, where it looks like it’ll never end. Waves lap softly against the sandy shore, as if they don’t know this isn’t really a beach.

  “It’s like an ocean,” he murmurs.

  Ben overhears him. “Yes,” he says. “Qinghai Province gets its name from this lake. Qinghai means ‘green lake.’ Some people say it is because the water in the lake sometimes looks green. Others say it means the grasslands around the lake.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Michael says.

  He means it. The vastness of the sky and water around him, the fields and the mountains, makes him feel wonderfully small and inconsequential. No matter what he does, what he says, it won’t make a drop of difference. As time passes, and people come and go, this landscape will stay the same.

  Michael is reminded of a vacation his family took many years ago, to the south of F
lorida. They’d made the trip down by car, and his mother had packed a huge amount of sandwiches into a cooler that rested in between the front and backseats. They took this cooler into motel rooms where the television never worked and a dripping faucet left a rusty streak in the sink like a bad memory. Emily and their mother would sleep in one double bed, and their father and Michael in the other. With his back turned, Michael could sense every rise and fall of his father’s chest, and he’d try to synchronize himself to his father’s breathing.

  He was eight and Emily fourteen, and they had clamored for their parents to take them to Disney World. Even their mother had pleaded with their father that they had already come so far, that the children would never have this chance again, that it might actually be fun. But their father was unrelenting. Looking back, Michael wonders whether he felt it was too expensive, that you shouldn’t pay so much for kids to have fun when they wouldn’t even learn anything.

  Instead, their father had insisted that they go to Cape Canaveral, to the park from which the public could watch the space shuttles launch. Of course, there were no shuttles in sight that day: just scantily clad beachgoers throwing Frisbees at one another or splashing about in the water. What a strange sight the Tangs must have been in comparison, like alien beings, their mother dressed all in flowing white, and a wide-brimmed hat to protect her skin, their father in his bug-eyed sunglasses to prevent cataracts. Emily, surreptitiously rolling up the sleeves of her T-shirt to try and get a tan; Michael in shorts that, ironically, had a Mickey Mouse patch on the back pocket.

  They had picked their way over the sand and stopped where the water met the land, since not one of them was in a bathing suit, had not even thought to pack any. The places where they stayed didn’t have swimming pools, or at least ones that you dared try. Their mother sat on the sand holding an umbrella, guarding their pile of shoes, while Emily, Michael, and their father waded into the surf. The ocean here was mild, gently tugging at their legs. Emily soon got tired of trying to keep from getting wet and went back to join their mother. Their father, however, waded in farther. Michael followed as far as he could, which wasn’t very far, since he was so small. So he just stood and watched as his father headed toward the blurry line of the horizon.

  A wave came up and hit Michael in the chest. Later, his mother would scold him for letting himself get soaked, but he couldn’t turn around, couldn’t tear his eyes from the figure before him. His father had stopped now, and was looking out toward the empty space where on other occasions there would be the cottony trail of smoke, the winking star of a shuttle hurtling toward space. Try as he might, Michael couldn’t see what his father was looking at in the brilliant blue sky, whether it was something in the future or the past.

  The touch of a hand on his shoulder brings Michael back into the present, to the shore of a lake, not an ocean; to a country located miles away from the scene in his head.

  “Should we go back now?” Liao asks him.

  “Yes,” Michael says.

  CHAPTER 10

  Emily figured that she’d left her mother’s house early enough in the afternoon to escape the onslaught of people returning from their weekends away in the country or at the shore, but traffic was at a near standstill once she approached the city. She switched the radio from station to station, hoping to get a traffic update, but instead received a weather advisory. It was supposed to storm that night, breaking the heat wave, which Emily took as good news. The air felt about ten times hotter in the city than in the suburbs, what with all the concrete and glass, and the honking horns from the stalled cars didn’t make things any better. Emily didn’t know how people could stand it. Of course, she had once withstood it; it seemed like years ago, although it only had been two since she’d moved away.

  Jean Hu had left a message earlier, and when Emily called her, they arranged to meet at a diner in the East 20s. Emily was surprised but glad to hear from Jean so soon, hoping this meant that she was ready to talk about the case. What Emily didn’t want Jean to ask her about was the last time she had seen Gao, which had been two weeks before his death, when he’d first complained of leg pain. It was possible that Emily had been the last person to speak to him rather than his wife, as the pain had progressed so much that he had been unable to walk to a pay phone in his final days.

  The detention center that Gao had been kept in was a turn-of-the-century redbrick building that looked as if it could be either an insane asylum or a boys’ boarding school in another life. The only indication that it housed inmates were the fourteen-foot-high barbed-wire fences surrounding the compound, beyond which rose gently forested hills. Not the worst place to be held, Emily had thought when she first saw it, thinking of the grim processing center in downtown Manhattan that Gao had been held in before being shuttled upstate. Inside, however, the center was typically spare and utilitarian, its white walls only broken by displays of patriotism, such as a flag or a mural.

  The last time Emily had seen Gao had been in the interview room. She observed that he looked thinner than when she had seen him last and that he noticeably winced when he sat down. “Is there something wrong?” she asked.

  “My leg is bothering me.” Although they could have conversed in Chinese, Gao seemed to be making a pointed effort to use English.

  “Has anyone checked it out?”

  “The nurse here thought nothing was wrong. Actually, they think I’m making it up. I have a top bunk and asked to switch bunks with my cell mate, but it was not allowed.”

  Emily made a note to herself to speak to the authorities about the bunk, as well as request an evaluation from an independent doctor. “You need to let me know if it gets any worse, okay? How are you doing otherwise?”

  Gao attempted a wry smile. “It’s not so bad here. There are some other Chinese-speaking detainees and I translate for them. A few have cases even worse than mine. But somehow, I feel less hopeful than them, that I have less of a chance.” He paused. “That’s why I want to drop the appeal.”

  “What?”

  “I want to accept deportation.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Emily said, before she realized that probably wasn’t the most diplomatic or persuasive response. “Have you told Jean?”

  “No.” He bowed his head. “I was hoping you would.”

  Emily looked at Gao for a moment, the back of his neck where his hair had been unevenly shaved in a jagged bristle. She wished she could step inside his mind, to understand why a man would chose to leave his wife and child, everything he had worked for, even under such duress. There must be something else going on, beyond any physical pain, that had brought him to this decision.

  “I know,” she said, “that you’re experiencing a lot of stress. You don’t know whether we’ll win this case. I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know either. But Rick and I are going to do the best we can. . . .” She stopped when she realized that the usual assurances she doled out to clients weren’t going to make any difference. Also, Gao appeared to have stopped listening to her.

  “Do you know the mural they have here?” he asked.

  Emily nodded. A mural featuring the Statue of Liberty next to a bald eagle next to the American flag was the first thing anyone saw when they entered the detention center. Every time she walked by it, it made her want to gag.

  “When I saw it, I finally understood what was going on. You aren’t wanted here. You don’t belong here. The message could not be clearer.”

  “I can see what you mean,” Emily tried.

  “You can’t. You were born here, yes? I hear what my son faces. He comes home from school and says some kid made fun of him, asked him if he sees the world slanted because of what his eyes look like. That’s nothing compared to being woken up by the police and taken away in front of your wife and child.”

  “What happened that morning?”

  “Jean and I were asleep. Sam was watching cartoons. When the doorbell rang, he answered it, although we had told him never to do that, t
o open the door to strangers. He went upstairs to get me, saying, ‘Daddy, they want you.’ I didn’t even get dressed. I thought they were those Jehovah’s Witnesses. Who else would ring so early on a Saturday morning? I remember feeling annoyed as I went downstairs, annoyed at Sam for answering the door and already annoyed at the people at the door. I thought my morning was going to be ruined.” He gave a short laugh. “I wish that were true. So, you see, even if I do get out, even if I become a citizen, I can never erase that morning. I’ll always be afraid that this could happen again.” Gao regarded her closely. “You don’t understand because you could never imagine yourself in my place. It’s not possible.”

  “No,” Emily admitted. “But if you do decide to . . . accept deportation, where will you go?”

  Gao shrugged. “I have some relatives back in China. Of course, they are strangers to me now.”

  “And Jean and Sam? What will they do without you?”

  “There are savings, a retirement account. They will be provided for.” Gao, Emily realized, had already disassociated himself from his family. “Sometimes I think they would be better off without me.”

  “Impossible. I’ve spent time with your family; I see how much they miss you. All they want is for you to come home.”

  “But can’t you see? That is no longer home for me. America is no longer my home, and neither is China. I am somewhere in between.”

  Which, Emily thought, described the detention center exactly, a place of neither freedom nor definite incarceration, but a white-walled, white-floored limbo. This place, coupled with the uncertainty of his situation and physical pain, must be the reason why Gao was talking such nonsense about giving up. She refused to think it was anything else, not a despair that had burrowed deep inside him and wouldn’t let go.

  “Listen,” she said, leaning forward and catching his eyes. “I’m not going to say anything to Jean about this. If you still feel this way in a couple of weeks, we can discuss it further. But first we have to get you some medical attention. Let’s focus on that, okay?”