Across a Green Ocean

by Wendy Lee

  “Where are you?” he finally asked.

  “Where do you think? Home,” David replied.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What is this, some kind of late-night hotline?” Michael could hear the grin in David’s voice. “Should I slip into something more comfortable?”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Okay, I’m getting ready to go out for a run. And I’m wearing a T-shirt and shorts, in case you’re wondering.”

  It was Michael’s turn to smile.

  “How are your parents?” David asked.

  Michael was surprised by how genuinely David seemed to be interested in his parents, asking about them whenever Michael mentioned his mother had called. When Michael said he was planning to visit them that weekend, he almost thought David was going to ask if he could come along. But it was far too early for that; Michael didn’t want to think yet where that could lead. He’d be more comfortable with introducing Emily to David first, but he knew a sister wouldn’t carry as much weight. He’d told David that his parents were typical immigrant Chinese parents: his mother a conscientious churchgoer who complained to her friends about her lack of grandchildren; his father withdrawn and obsessed with maintenance of nonhuman things, like his lawn.

  “They’re fine,” Michael replied. Unconsciously, he turned toward the house and thought he caught sight of someone standing at a second-story window before the curtain dropped. It could only be his father. Had his father been watching him and had he been able to deduce from that distance who he was talking to?

  Michael walked farther away from the house, but he no longer felt comfortable.

  “I have to go,” he finally said. “My mom’s back from the store and I should help her.”

  “Okay,” David said. “Call me when you get in on Sunday?”

  “Sure.” The things that weren’t appropriate yet for them to say to each other lingered in the silence afterward, before they both hung up.

  Michael was thinking about this, the things they could have said, when a voice asked, “Who were you talking to?”

  He turned around to see his father walking across the lawn to him, in his beat-up slippers that must have once been brown leather but now were so cracked they looked like an old catcher’s mitt. His father must have indeed been sleeping, because a lock of graying hair stuck up on the back of his head. Michael had the urge to reach over and smooth it down. He was taller than his father now, and stronger.

  “Just a friend,” Michael replied.

  “Your mother is home?”

  His father must have caught the last part of his phone conversation. “I guess not. I thought I heard a car, but it must have been the neighbor’s.”

  “You should get your ears checked,” his father said.

  And you should get your eyes checked, Michael thought. His father was wearing his usual summer ensemble of an undershirt and pants that he sometimes rolled up when he was seated, making them into de facto shorts. (Michael had always wondered where that custom came from, until he made his trip to Beijing and saw elderly men everywhere sporting the same look.)

  “Did you rest well?” he asked, but his father had already moved out of earshot and on to something else.

  He was standing by the crape myrtle to the side of the lawn, near the garage, inspecting its bare branches. “Not good,” he said.

  Michael walked over to join him. He couldn’t remember what this tree looked like when it was healthy and in full bloom. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Cercospora fungus. Causes the leaves to fall off.”

  Michael thought it sounded like the kind of disease you caught on the bottom of your foot. “Can you do anything about it?”

  His father shook his head. “The tree is dead. It’ll have to be cut down.” He shaded his face against the sun, as if to check how far the day had progressed. “Let’s do it now before your mother comes back.”

  “Do what?” Michael wasn’t sure if it was the lazy afternoon or being in the presence of his father that was making his comprehension slower than usual.

  “Cut down the tree.”

  His father went to the garage and came back with a shovel and handsaw, and working side by side they uprooted the tree and cut it down to a manageable size. As he stuffed branches into a black plastic trash bag, Michael considered that this was probably the most time he’d spent with his father in years. His father wasn’t the sort to teach him to play baseball or ride a bike when he was a child, or tell him what to expect from girls, as he imagined everyone else’s father had. But he had eventually learned to fill those gaps, in his own way.

  Michael hauled the trash bag out onto the curb, and when he came back, he saw his father sitting on the top step of the back porch. He went and sat down beside him. Like his father, he looked out to where the tree had been, but since he couldn’t say that it had made much of an impression on him before, he couldn’t tell whether the backyard looked better or worse without it.

  “Too bad we can’t go out and get a replacement before your mother comes home, eh?” his father said.

  Michael shook his head with a laugh.

  “That friend of yours.” His father regarded him. “Is it a good friend?”

  “Yes,” Michael replied. “A very good friend.”

  “I am glad.”

  They didn’t say anything else, and that was how his mother found them when she came back from the store.

  “But I don’t want to go back to the hotel!” a voice cuts through his memory.

  That petulant little British girl again. Michael turns to see her trailing her parents, kicking at the grass. She’s six or seven years old, and, to his surprise, she looks Chinese. Michael wonders where her family’s from. England, or possibly Hong Kong? What these past few days in China have taught him is that people who look Chinese can be anything.

  The little girl continues to declare that she doesn’t want to go back to her hotel, but Michael knows he has to go back to his if he wants to catch his flight. He stands up, brushing the dust that permeates Beijing from his clothes. That, he guesses, will be the souvenir he brings back, not a trinket or mass-produced object, but the dirt in the creases of his jeans, the piece of rubble that he picked up that morning in his pocket. These are the only tangible things that are left, and, perhaps, they’re enough. For what really matters is the story of his father that’s he’s bringing back to his mother and sister, and how it’s tied into his own story that they never knew, while they were living under the same roof. Even then, it’s just a layer to be peeled back, in the hopes of eventually, someday, getting to the person inside.

  Then he starts walking down the path after the girl and her parents. It’s time for him to go home.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to my editor, Esi Sogah, and my agent, Deborah Schneider. Both of them were wonderful to work with in other capacities, but this is the best working relationship I could have imagined.

  I would also like to thank Karen Auerbach, Paula Reedy, Kristine Mills, and the rest of the team at Kensington.

  Thanks to The MacDowell Colony and the Corporation of Yaddo for giving me the time and space to write, as well as to my supervisors and colleagues at HarperCollins Publishers who so generously allowed me to attend these residencies and filled in for me while I was there. Much appreciation goes to the crew at Lantern Books for providing me with such a pleasant work environment while I was looking for a home for this book.

  I am indebted to those who read this manuscript in its various stages, including Marie Argeris, Katie Chase, Luke Fiske, Kay Kim, Jono Mischkot, Zoraya Nambi, Samuel Park, and Jennifer Pooley. I’m grateful to have spent a year working as an English teacher at Qinghai Normal University in Xining, China, with its amazing staff and students—little did I know that fifteen years later I would be writing about my experiences there in a novel. A special shout-out goes to my fellow teacher Naomi Furnish Yamada, who played the What You Would Be Willing to Pick Up in the O
uthouse game with me.

  Above all, thank you to my family: my father, James Lee, who came to America at the age of eleven and worked his way up from dishwasher to engineer; my mother, Claire Lee, who passed on to me her love of writing; and my sister, Lydia Lee, who continually inspires me with her own family. Finally, I’d like to thank my husband, Neil Gladstone.

  Keep reading for more from Wendy Lee,

  including a behind-the-book essay,

  a Q&A with the author,

  and a reading group guide.

  A RE-EDUCATION

  When I signed up to teach English in China through a volunteer program, I spent hours wondering where I’d be posted. Beijing, the cosmopolitan capital of the country? Ma’anshan, a quaint town on the Yangtze River? Qingdao, the German-influenced coastal city where the beer comes from?

  I wound up being posted in Xining, the capital of Qinghai Province, which is located in China’s northwest. One of the poorest and most backward provinces in the country, Qinghai became a place where political prisoners were sent for re-education through labor starting from the 1950s, due to its remote location on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Xining was once a flourishing trade city on the Silk Route. By the late 1990s, when I was there, it was a dusty, windswept, polluted metropolis of more than a million people.

  While Xining wasn’t exactly what I expected, I was ready for a challenge. As a recent college graduate, I wanted to experience real life—not just outside of the bubble provided by a suburban upbringing and school but outside of the United States itself.

  My college experience in the Bay Area had been filled with literal and metaphorical sunshine. I lived in a vegan co-op where activities included mixing lentil loaf for fifty, line-drying clothes, and holding house meetings where everything was decided by consensus. When chemistry and biology proved too difficult for my nontechnical mind, I took creative writing classes, which left me with few options after graduation. Most of my friends were going to grad school, joining start-ups, or moving into shared houses in San Francisco. I knew I wanted to be a writer but had absolutely nothing to write about.

  So, I decided to teach English in China, where at least I would know how to speak the language—that is, conversational Mandarin learned from my parents, which could get me as far as asking for directions and ordering certain foods.

  When I told my parents I was going to be spending the following year in Xining, I expected them to be happy that I was returning to their homeland. However, my mother’s paranoia kicked into high gear. “They won’t know you’re an American and you might get deported!” I promised her that I’d always carry my passport with me.

  She wasn’t reassured. “Don’t you know what happened to my uncle in the 1950s?”

  My great-uncle was my grandmother’s much-younger brother, the sole boy in a well-to-do Shanghai family. He was a pilot and traveled internationally, which led to him meeting his Russian wife. My mother told me that he had to race on a pony across the steppes of Russia to win a rabbit, and thus his bride’s hand.

  “Isn’t that a Mongolian custom?” I asked skeptically. My mother loved to embellish her stories.

  In 1949, when the Communists took over the country, my grandmother fled to Taiwan, due to her husband’s problematic position in Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government. My great-uncle and his family stayed behind on the mainland. During Mao’s Anti-Rightist Campaign of the late 1950s, he was one of the thousands of intellectuals sentenced to re-education through labor—exiled to Qinghai Province and ordered to get a divorce. His wife took their four children to Moscow, and it’s unlikely he ever saw them again.

  Listening to her stories about my great-uncle, I realized why my mother was worried. For many of her relatives, mainland China was a place you escaped from, not where you willingly returned.

  Even though I wanted to experience real life, I wasn’t quite prepared for what I faced upon arrival in China. In Xining, my status as an outsider was apparent. Within my first few days there, I was pickpocketed. When I tried to order food with my parental-taught, conversational Chinese by asking for dan chao fan (eggs and rice), the waitress laughed and said, “You must be from Hong Kong.” As a first-time teacher, I floundered in front of my class of thirty students, who were only a little younger than me. Even among the other foreign teachers at the school, I felt different because I wasn’t religious.

  Loneliness set in. Xining’s bleak winters lasted from October to May, which meant that when I wasn’t teaching class, I was holed up inside my apartment. Back home, there would have been movies, books, or TV to turn to for solace. Here, the one English-language program on television was state-run news; in other words, pure propaganda. The radio played one pop song in English, the theme from the movie Titanic (apparently, the song was as popular in China as it was in America that year). Bereft of anything in a language I could understand, I’d sit for hours next to the hissing radiator in my apartment and look out my window into a bare garden dusted with snow.

  The apartments across from me had windows glowing with warmth and life. This was where the other, Chinese teachers lived, often families of several generations crammed into a one-bedroom like my own. Because the school wanted to modernize the foreign teachers’ apartments, they had added tubs and sit-down toilets to the bathrooms. A regular Chinese bathroom was just a squat toilet in a closet. Once, I’d asked a Chinese teacher how he bathed. “I go to the bathhouse,” he said. Apparently, there was a bathhouse on campus that served everyone who wasn’t fortunate enough to have a Western bathroom.

  Those families didn’t have privacy or first-world comforts, but they spent meals around the table with parents and grandparents, spouses and children. Even if they had to sleep four or five to a room, they didn’t have to wake up to an empty apartment. In those times, I’d think about my great-uncle and how lonely he must have felt, separated from his wife and children, sent to what felt like the end of the Earth.

  After he had been released from prison in the 1960s, my mother told me, my great-uncle became a teacher in Xining—not at my school, but an agricultural college on the outskirts of town. I wondered whether he was able to relate to his students better than I could. While my class consisted of students who were intending to become English teachers, and they’d been studying English since primary school, I had a hard time understanding them, and vice versa. On my first day of class, a student came up afterward and asked me to speak more “lowly.” Had my voice been too loud? Belatedly, I realized that he had asked me to speak more “slowly.”

  Toward the end of the school year, my mother came out to travel with me to Kashgar, a city on the Silk Road that was even farther west and more remote than Xining. By that time I was a hardened and obnoxious “China Hand” (a foreigner who’s become—or thinks they’ve become—an expert in Chinese culture), embarrassed to be paying for tour guides and taking the soft seat rather than hard seat class on trains. When we ate in restaurants I mentally calculated how many bowls of noodles the cost of our meal could have bought from a street stall.

  Before my mother and I left for our trip, we visited the agricultural college where my great-uncle had been a teacher. Visually, this school was pretty much the same as mine, with its nondescript, Soviet-inspired architecture. We visited a dorm, where my mother insisted that she was able to “feel her uncle’s spirit.”

  Later, my mother showed me a picture of my great-uncle that my grandmother had passed on to her. In a faded photograph, he is wearing dark glasses and standing in a garden in a Mao suit, next to a female student. “He loved women,” my mother said. So maybe he wasn’t quite as lonely as I’d thought.

  After nine months, I also wasn’t as lonely as I’d once been. By this time I’d gotten to know my neighbors, who invited me over for dinner and to practice their English. I’d also made a few religious and nonreligious friends, both foreign and Chinese.

  Most of all, I had learned how to live by myself in a big city, so that I could do it two
years later when I moved to New York City to try and become a writer.

  A Q&A WITH WENDY LEE

  Across a Green Ocean deals with family secrets and the harm that silence can bring to a family. How much of this is based on your own family?

  Some superficial details of the Tang family are similar to that of my own. My parents did meet in New York City and moved to suburban New Jersey after getting married. I have a sister who is five years older than me, which I guess makes me the gay son.

  The character of Liao Weishu, Han Tang’s friend who is sent to a labor camp in Qinghai Province during the Cultural Revolution, is based on my mother’s uncle. He was exiled in the 1950s, so, an earlier time period, but for the similar reason of intellectual persecution. He was married to a Russian woman, and they were forced to get a divorce.

  What research did you do about northwestern China and Beijing in the 1960s and ’70s, around the time of the Cultural Revolution?

  There were two items in particular that contributed to how I chose to write about that time period. The first is the memoir In Search of My Homeland by Er Tai Gao, an intellectual who was sent to a labor camp in Gansu Province, which neighbors Qinghai Province, in the 1950s. Although the book describes incredible hardships in an even, matter-of-fact way, there are also moments of surprising humor.

  The other is the film In the Heat of the Sun directed by Jiang Wen, which is partly based on his own youth as a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution. The unusual thing about his depiction is that he doesn’t focus on the terrible acts that the Red Guards committed or the terror they invoked. Instead, the tone is very nostalgic, and it shows just how much fun these kids had, as would any who suddenly didn’t have to go to school, while they navigated the usual teenage territory of first love and newfound freedom.

  The case that Emily Tang works on involves an immigrant who dies in detention under questionable circumstances. Where did you get the idea for that story?