by Ha Jin
He told her how his mother wanted to come to work for them and how Uncle Zhao still set his sights on holding a one-man show in America. The whole trip had been mostly torture, and he should have listened to Pingping, who had warned him not to go. He had just wasted time and money. “I felt out of place wherever I went in China,” he told her. “Trash, trash everywhere, so many places were like a garbage dump. I had an awful time, awful.”
Pingping was relieved that he hadn’t promised his mother anything. She not only disliked the old woman but also was frightened of her. Every once in a while she’d have nightmares in which her mother-in-law jabbed her fingers at her face, sneering or calling her names. From the first days of their marriage she had wanted to live as far away as possible from Old Yulan, Nan’s mother, yet Pingping could never break off with her completely, no matter where she was. Whenever she opened a letter from her, she couldn’t help but shudder a little, and she often heard her abrasive voice at night. If only she could banish that old woman from her mind altogether. On the other hand, she liked her father-in-law and felt grateful to him because the old man had often carried Taotao astride his neck and allowed the boy to play in his large office. Once Taotao squeezed his grandfather’s toothpaste all over his desk and sofas, but the old man didn’t throw a fit and just made him promise not to do it again. So the five hundred dollars Nan had given his father didn’t bother her, and even the money for an air conditioner for Uncle Zhao was well spent, having cleared the debt they had owed him.
With more devotion Nan resumed working at the Gold Wok, and the long hours didn’t bother him as much as before. He was grateful to Pingping, who had over the years spent more time at the restaurant than himself. For better or worse, this place was their own, and with it they could make an honest, decent living. But a few weeks later Nan grew restless again, scribbling poems whenever he had free time. A new concern began to trouble him as well. By now they had saved almost $30,000, and the money, sitting in the bank, would hardly accrue. Should they buy another restaurant? He and Pingping talked about this but couldn’t decide what to do, because a new business would mean they’d have to hire some people, whose wages would consume most, if not all, of the profit.
Then Janet suggested that Pingping consider buying some stocks. She loaned her a few issues of Money magazine. Through reading them Pingping began to understand what mutual funds were. Janet also told the Wus that Dave’s retirement money had been invested entirely in mutual funds, so Nan and Pingping were convinced that it wouldn’t be too risky to buy the stocks. They bought $20,000 worth of 500 Index. From then on Pingping would pay close attention to the Dow Jones, but Nan didn’t bother to think about money. He was occupied with work and some poetry books.
Recently he had fallen in love with a volume of poems, The Lost Geography, by Linda Dewit, who lived in Vermont according to the biographical note on the back of the book. He liked her dark lyricism, which reminded him of Kent Philips’s paintings. How strange this coincidence was. That man painted landscapes in Montana, whereas the old poet wrote about people and things in New England, but their works seemed to have some kindred spirit. Perhaps the dark luminosity had stemmed not from without but from within, from the depths of their souls. Nan also believed that the beauty of Dewit’s poetry might be due to the always present awareness of mortality in the speaker’s mind, even when she celebrated nature and life. Her lines were elegant, supple, honest, and always intelligent, for example, “Imagine, in a northern dusk / even a breeze brings you extra light,” and “I hate the erosion of your affection / and will stop wearing smiles.” Nan was fascinated and pored over Linda Dewit’s poems whenever he was free. He even hand-copied the pieces he liked most.
One day he was surprised to receive a letter from Bao Yuan. His friend had written on the inside of a card bearing a pair of swans in rippling water:
August 26, 1997
Dear Nan,
By the time you read this letter I’m already on my way back to China. Life in America is too difficult for me, and I am reluctant to have my wife live here. She is the youngest child of her family and might not be able to endure the loneliness or survive the struggle we would have to wage if I stayed. Besides, her parents wouldn’t let her live far away from home. Also, they are obssessed with their granddaughter, my baby girl. Now that I am a U.S. citizen, I can travel back and forth, so I made up my mind to settle down in our homeland. I’m sure I will miss the Blue Ridge Mountains, but I plan to stay and work on the mountain for three or four months a year. That’s to say, from now on I will live as a world citizen. When I come back, I’ll let you know beforehand. Meanwhile, may your business and writing both flourish.
As ever,
Bao
To Nan, Bao had been a remarkable success, so the letter threw him deep into thought. What had made Bao retreat to China? Hadn’t he already bought a building lot for his future home in Cobb County? Why had he changed his plan all of a sudden? He seemed to have given up too easily. Clever, that man was too clever.
Nan couldn’t picture Bao’s actual situation, but he was sure that the reasons his friend mentioned in the letter might not be the real ones. He suspected that Bao must have suffered a setback in his art. Perhaps his agent, Ian Bernstein, had lost interest and confidence in him after the debacle of Bao’s Shanghai series. In retrospect, Nan could see that this had been bound to happen, since Bao rushed too much and fell prey to moneygrubbing instead of aspiring to a higher order of artistic achievement. Even in this capitalist land a true artist ought to spurn the temptation of money. Indeed, China was probably more suitable for a man like Bao. Nan thought of writing back, but his friend had given no return address. Bao must have left in a hurry.
Later Nan heard that Frank, the lawyer, had sold the piece of land on which Bao’s studio sat to a developer, which all of a sudden rendered his teacher homeless in this country.
16
ONCE in a while Nan would call Dick using phone cards he had bought at the World Bookstore; calls within the United States were only three cents a minute, and they didn’t show up on the phone bill, so Pingping couldn’t complain or suspect that Dick might mislead Nan into something shady or even take him away from her. In the fall Dick invited Nan to visit him, saying that if Nan liked the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he would try to get a scholarship for him, provided Nan worked hard on his poetry and came up with some strong writing samples with which Dick could convince his colleagues of his talent. Despite his distrust of such workshops, Nan was intrigued and eager to see his friend. Pingping wasn’t happy about the idea and said to him, “You just came back from China two months ago. You can’t leave this place to me again.”
“Only this once, please. I won’t do it again, I promise.”
“No.”
“Please let me go and see what the writers’ workshop is like.”
“I’ve said no.”
That topic came up every day, and a week later Pingping caved. They asked Shubo to stand in for Nan and he agreed readily. Shubo was unemployed again because the marble quarry had shut down. Mr. Mu, the backup chef, had left for Alabama to work for his nephew who had just opened a restaurant in Mobile. Though Shubo couldn’t cook as well as Nan, Pingping could give him a hand in the kitchen if need be. Nan promised his wife he would be away for just five days at most.
There was another motivation he hadn’t revealed to Pingping, namely that he planned to visit Beina on this trip. He knew this was crazy and that the woman might not be pleased to see him, but he couldn’t help himself, as if a supernatural force possessed him, driving him toward her. To his mind, even if she wasn’t happy about his reappearance, the sight of his first love in this land might rekindle the intense passion he needed for writing poetry, for which he wouldn’t mind exposing himself to new wounds.
He knew he was acting like a reckless, love-crazed youth, but despite his uneasiness, he couldn’t wait to see her—as if his sanity depended on such a meeting. He was going to drive
the hatchback he had bought secondhand the previous winter after his old Ford’s clutch had gone. This reliable Dodge should make the trip enjoyable and less tiring.
He set out before daybreak on Monday, September 22, and drove northwest along I-75 and then switched to I-24. He enjoyed driving through the mountains and forests in Tennessee, but Kentucky was a bit too flat to him, although the cruise was smooth and pleasant, there being little traffic. Now and then a shower blurred the view of farmsteads—the corn, soybean, and tobacco fields, some of which had just been cut, were a dappled brown. At some places kudzu had engulfed abandoned farmhouses, shacks, and barns. Nan disliked this kind of lush vegetation because it suggested there were snakes and animals lurking in it. He often missed the forests in the North, which had a sparse undergrowth. Toward evening, a fog began gathering and even obscured the road signs along the way, so he got off I-57 and checked into the Thrifty Inn at Mt. Vernon, Illinois. The motel was in a three-story brick building, its rooms having wide windows. A plump woman at the front desk gave Nan a clean, comfortable room on the top floor, which was five dollars cheaper than those below. Nan cooked himself noodle soup for dinner and ate it directly from the pot, with a jar of kimchee, while watching a CNN interview with a blue-helmeted general of the U.S. peacekeeping force in Bosnia. After a hot shower, he went to bed and slept nine hours on end.
He didn’t make breakfast the next morning and just ate two chocolate cookies and drank a large mug of coffee provided by the motel in its lobby around the clock. He set off rather late, after eight, because there were only about four hundred miles left.
It was a fine day and the farmland was dark, loamy, and boundless. The land was so flat that even the sky seemed lower than the day before. At one place a swarm of windmills was scattered among prairie grass like a flock of giant birds in flight. Nan especially enjoyed seeing the corn and soybean fields, in some of which combines were rolling, often accompanied by trucks. He was amazed to see cascades of the kernels pour into the backs of the trucks directly so that the farmers wouldn’t have to do threshing and winnowing afterward. He had seen harvesters of a less advanced type back in the northeast of China, but they had all been owned by the state farms, each of which consisted of at least five hundred people. In contrast, here every individual family used such a machine.
Pulling up on the roadside, Nan stepped out of his car and sat down on the grass to watch a combine reaping corn. The sight touched him as he remembered that in middle school the students of his grade had once gone to the countryside to help the peasants gather in crops. After all the ears of corn in a field had been plucked off by hand the previous day, each of his grade-mates took charge of a row and sickled down the plants, which the villagers would peel and use the skins to weave mats. How tedious and backbreaking that work was! Within two hours most of them began to complain of backaches and had blisters on their hands, yet they had to continue for a whole day to finish cutting that field of corn plants. By comparison, here the combines shredded the stalks and left them in the fields to fertilize the soil. Furthermore, a regular-size field here, much larger than those in China, could be harvested by two people in just a few hours. As Nan was observing the rolling machines and remembering how human labor had been wasted back in China, tears welled in his eyes and blurred his vision. He wished he could tarry longer to watch the harvesting some more.
The vast land was so sparsely populated that occasionally it looked desolate. Some farmsteads were decayed—the red barns with gambrel roofs, the silos topped with silver domes, and even the white farmhouses seemed to have fallen into disrepair, though beyond them meadows were dotted with fresh hay bundles and with milk cows grazing indolently. Nan couldn’t help but wonder how lonesome those farmers living far away from the highways must have felt, especially in the wintertime when they were snowed in.
He didn’t reach Iowa City till six p.m. as a result of an accident near Davenport—an eighteen-wheeler sideswiped a pickup and caused a standstill on the highway. Without difficulty he found Dick’s apartment in a brick building with a mansard roof. Dick was relieved to see that Nan had arrived safely. He had to moderate a students’ reading that evening, and Nan was too exhausted to go with him. Instead, Nan took a shower, then cooked himself a simple meal. After dinner, he looked through Dick’s collection of poetry books, most of them hardbacks, which filled four tall bookcases. Dick also had hundreds of CDs and DVDs, some of which were Hong Kong kung fu movies. Nan was fascinated but too tired to go through all the disks stacked against the wall. He made his bed on the long sofa in the study and lay down to sleep, having left the floor lamp on.
A frost fell that night, and the city was blazingly bright the next morning, the warm sun shining on the streets, roofs, electrical wires, and trees, though the sidewalks were plastered with wet leaves. Nan loved the cool weather and took a walk in the bracing air. Dick didn’t accompany him because he had to prepare for the afternoon poetry workshop and would have meetings the whole morning. Nan enjoyed seeing a few white houses with red roofs, red jalousies, and red porches, as if they were gigantic toys. Passing a small pond, he came upon some yellow lotus flowers, which he had never seen before and which, though wilting, delighted him. A few lotus pads were as big as coffee tables. And with a flashing plop, a tiny fish skipped out, disappeared, and left behind expanding ripples. Strolling on such a fall morning in this midwestern town, he felt rejuvenated and full of expectations, as if he were a graduate student again. The dark soil of the roadside fields smelled familiar and brought Manchuria back to his mind. Now and then one or two cyclists passing by would greet him heartily or give him a cheerful nod.
Early in the afternoon he went to Dick’s workshop. He found the Creative Writing Program easily, in a white wooden colonial on North Clinton Street, its shutters, windows, doors, and eaves all blackish green. Before its front entrance stood a young oak and around the house were maples, their leaves showing their pale undersides whenever a wind ruffled them. The interior of the house was much nicer than its exterior, with fine woodwork and a few stained-glass windows. The seminar room was in the back of the first floor, and Nan went in without saying a word to anyone. Sitting against a wall, he quietly observed the students seated around two large tables pushed together. At the other side of the room stood a tall metal cabinet. Dick didn’t introduce Nan to the class and just mentioned they had a visitor today, then he went ahead to conduct the workshop. Behind him two chalkboards hung on the wall; one of them still bore three lines left by a past class illustrating the metrical pattern, marked with alliterative ticks. Nan liked the ambience of the seminar, which was cozy and informal. Most of the aspiring poets were smart and articulate, full of nervous energy, but he wasn’t impressed by the poems being discussed, which were too light and too arty to him. One piece addressed the speaker’s own breasts as a pair of little friends, and another was about the palatal sensations produced by mint chocolate.
These beginning writers seemed quite fragile and seemed to be writing poetry mainly for themselves or for an elite readership. True, they argued heatedly with reddened cheeks, flashing eyes, and sly smirks, but the passion seemed to have originated more from personal feelings and the obsession with linguistic devices than from the love for ideas and deep emotions. To a degree, poetry had become an esoteric art here, somewhat deprived of its vitality and earnestness. It was hard for Nan to imagine fitting in such a group. He was afraid they might laugh at his ineptitude for English and attack him where he was weak.
A passionate exchange broke out between a Latino man and a myopic blonde over whether it was music or meaning that gave poetry the power to captivate the audience. The man, wearing a crew cut and an earring, emphasized that genuine poetry must sing, like the blues, and that meaning must come secondarily, whereas the woman argued that melodic sounds without meaning would be empty and valueless, so semantics ought to take priority in poetic composition. While she was speaking, she kept glancing at Nan over the top of her rimless
glasses as if she expected him to disagree with her. Dick intervened and talked about “the auditory understanding,” saying that sometimes even though we didn’t get the meaning of a poem, we could still be moved just by listening to it, so there must be some inherent connection between the sound and the meaning. Ideally speaking, the sound should echo the sense, as Alexander Pope said three centuries ago. Despite the teacher’s explication, the two students didn’t seem reconciled, staring at each other from time to time. Nan wondered whether there had been some personal friction between them. Dick announced a ten-minute break, and Nan left without returning to the second half of the workshop.
Late in the afternoon, over a glass of Merlot, Dick asked Nan, “What do you think of my students?”
“Very impressive, especially zer nearsighted blonde.”
“You mean Samantha, the tall one?”
“Yes. She’s smart.”
“Samantha knows more than the rest of the class. Actually, she’s published a chapbook. Don’t you want to come and join us here?”
“I cannot decide now. I have to be very careful about zis. You know I have a family and a business to take care of.”
“As I told you before, you should try to become a professional poet eventually.” Dick’s voice then turned solemn. “‘The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work.’”
Nan knew he quoted some poet, but whom he couldn’t say. He asked, “Why does it have to be one way or zee other? Why can’t one have a middle way?”
“Like how?”
“Do you have to live a literary life to produce literary work?”
“Well, poetry has its own logic. If you want to be a poet, you may not have perfection of both the work and the life. It all depends on how much you’re willing to sacrifice.”
“Is zat why you don’t have a family?”
