The Art of Confidence

by Wendy Lee

  Hong had married the owner of a shoe repair shop in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, and by the time they’d sponsored Jin to come over, they’d had two daughters, ages seven and nine. When she first arrived in America, Jin had shared her nieces’ bedroom. She often commented to me about the state of their Americanness, from their names (Sophie and Olivia) to their interests (princesses and horses). “They’re growing up just like American children,” she said, with equal amounts of wonderment and disdain.

  After she moved in with me, Jin continued to visit her sister’s family almost every week, bringing them Ecuadorian pastries and Peruvian roast chicken, even though those things were also readily available in their neighborhood. The Chinese population of Sunset Park was mostly Fujianese, like an extension of East Broadway in Manhattan’s Chinatown. They’d settled along Eighth Avenue, while Fifth Avenue remained mostly Hispanic.

  I never went on these visits, citing the weekend classes I had to teach and that I wanted to take advantage of the afternoon when Jin wasn’t there to do some of my own work. Also, from comments relayed by Jin, I felt Hong disapproved of me. Jin told me her sister had said she should have married a hard worker like her shoe-repair husband rather than an older itinerant artist like myself. “Does he do anything that justifies his existence?” Jin reported her sister as saying, whenever we were having a fight. Sometimes I wondered that myself.

  I wasn’t surprised when Hong had not been forthcoming about how much she knew concerning her sister’s disappearance. It was clear over the phone that she had been expecting me to call her and had been coached as to what to say. No, Jin had not been in touch with her recently. No, Jin didn’t have any friends to stay with. No, she didn’t know where Jin had gone. I knew Hong was lying but couldn’t very well say it.

  So, that Saturday I boarded the train for the hour-plus ride from Elmhurst to Sunset Park, which wound its way through Manhattan. Slowly the passengers changed from mostly Hispanic and Asian to white, then back to Hispanic and Asian again. I stepped into the bright sunlight, momentarily disoriented by the combination of takeout restaurants, cheap electronics stores, and bodegas that also characterized my neighborhood.

  Hong’s apartment couldn’t be far away. I located the correct, postwar brick building, and rang the buzzer. A woman’s voice answered, and I wavered. Should I act like I was there on some sort of pretense, like delivering a package, and risk being turned away, or just be myself and risk the same? I chose the latter.

  “It’s Liu Qingwu. I’ve come to talk to you about Jin.”

  There was such a long silence afterward I wondered whether she had been able to hear me over the staticky connection. Then the front door buzzed and I pushed my way through.

  Three flights up, Hong was waiting for me. When I entered her cluttered but homey apartment, I saw Jin’s nieces playing with a board game on the coffee table. I didn’t know which was Sophie and which was Olivia, and it didn’t help that both of them had bangs and shoulder-length hair, making one look like a slightly smaller version of the other.

  “Say hello to your aunt Jin’s husband, girls,” Hong said in English. I was heartened that she acknowledged my relationship to them, rather than treating me as if I were a stranger.

  “Hello,” they chorused without looking up from their game.

  “Girls, go to your bedroom while we have a chat.”

  “But we just started,” the larger of them (Sophie?) complained.

  “Now, please.”

  At the sharpness in Hong’s voice, both girls jumped up, leaving their game on the table.

  “I am sorry about that,” Hong said to me. “Would you like some tea?”

  I declined, and we both sat down on the sofa, awkwardly angled toward each other. From this proximity, I could sense the physical similarities between Hong and Jin—their delicate noses, the round set of their chins—features that must have been inherited from their shared father. An unexpected sense of longing rose in me, and I looked at the pattern of the rug beneath my feet for a moment to compose myself before speaking.

  “I know you’re hiding something about Jin,” I said. “I have a right to know—I’m her husband. What if you disappeared?” I tried to remember her husband, the shoe-repair owner’s name, but failed to recall it. “Your husband would want to know, too.”

  Hong sighed. “That’s true. But I have to honor Jin’s wishes. She told me under no circumstances to tell you where she’s gone.”

  “But why? Did she say something about our fighting?” I held up my hands. “I never touched her, I swear. I’d never hurt her.”

  Hong seemed to take pity on me. “I know you wouldn’t. Jin is one to keep secrets. From me, even.”

  “Is it about her past? Before she came to America? Did she have money or boyfriend problems back home in Guangzhou?”

  Something in Hong’s face when I’d said “Guangzhou” suggested I’d hit upon something. “She’s not in New York anymore,” I stated. “She’s not even in America. She’s gone back to China.”

  Hong’s silence afterward indicated I was correct. So the question of where Jin had gone was answered. But why? If it was to get away from me, China was a safe bet, because there was no way I had enough money to be able to afford a plane ticket, and it wasn’t clear whether I’d be allowed back into the States if I left. The same was true for Jin, too, that she would not be able to reenter this country. She’d effectively cut me off and ensured I would never see her again by what she’d done. Could she hate me that much?

  I decided to play the sympathy card. In my most dejected voice I said, “Jin must really detest me if she decided to go so far away. I don’t know what I did to deserve it.”

  “You didn’t do anything,” Hong blurted out. “It’s because of something else.”

  Something, not someone, else. I let hope creep into my voice. “Like what?”

  “All right.” Hong leaned forward. “I can tell that you’re a sincere man, Liu Qingwu. I had my doubts at first, but I do believe that you care about my sister, even if you weren’t able to give her the kind of life here she deserved.”

  “If she came back, I would give her anything she wanted,” I declared. “I’d stop being an artist. I’d find a steady job. We’d try to have a child.” Until then I hadn’t considered these possibilities, but once I’d voiced them, I knew they were true. I’d do anything for Jin if she came back to me.

  Hong shook her head sadly. “I’m afraid it’s too late for that. Especially that last part.”

  “What do you mean?”

  As Hong turned her large, dark eyes on me, I belatedly recognized she also shared that physical trait with Jin, or it could be that my eyes were playing tricks on me. “Jin is very sick. It’s doubtful she could come back even if she wanted to. The last I heard, she was living with her parents in Guangzhou. They’re looking for a miracle cure.”

  The familiar features started falling away—the nose, the chin, the eyes—leaving a void beneath. I caught my breath. When I was able to speak again, I said, “What does she have?”

  “Ovarian cancer.”

  I recalled how Jin had fainted one day at the salon, and how she’d thought she might be pregnant. Instead, the truth was the opposite—instead of harboring life within her, she was harboring a darkness. “That’s why she left the salon,” I said.

  Hong nodded. “She didn’t feel like she could work there anymore. She was convinced that something in the chemicals she used had made her sick.”

  I thought of the women who came in to the salon to get their hair dyed, the poor ventilation, how the smell of the substances made me want to retch every time I went in there. Jin had been a hairdresser in Guangzhou, too, so the exposure must have started years ago. “Did she tell Old Guo this?”

  “She tried to but he wouldn’t listen to her. Said she couldn’t prove it and if she didn’t want to work at the salon, she could leave. So she did.”

  I couldn’t believe that Jin had done al
l this behind my back. When had she gone to the doctor? How could she have lived with this secret without informing me, her husband? Had she thought me so ineffectual, so incapable of comforting her?

  “I wish she had told me,” I said.

  “I wish she did, too,” Hong agreed. “I told her you should know. But she didn’t want you to suffer with her, and she didn’t think you could do anything about it. No one could. First she went to an American doctor, who told her about the treatments available, all very expensive. Then she went to a Chinese doctor, who told her to take medicine to compensate for her yang as opposed to yin deficiency, also very expensive.”

  “So, why go back to China?” I asked. “The best medicine is here.”

  “The best Western medicine. In the village where our father grew up, before he went to Guangzhou, lives a healer who has cured everything from liver cancer to mental illness. When Jin told our father she was sick, he said she should come home and he would take her to this man, who could treat her.”

  “Do you really think he can cure her?”

  “She has to have some hope,” Hong said gently.

  In a daze, I thanked Hong for her help, and emerged onto the streets of Sunset Park more confused than when I had arrived earlier that day. Jin was sick but didn’t want my help, and I couldn’t blame her. I had done nothing in our marriage to indicate that I could be of any use.

  Many times in the ensuing days I started writing Jin a letter—Hong had given me her parents’ address in Guangzhou—but always ended up putting down the pen. Was she getting better? Or was her illness progressing? Did she miss me? Every time I wrote something, it ended up coming back to myself. I understood even more why Jin hadn’t told me anything about her condition. I was unable to think about anyone outside of me, of my painting, that damn mountain in my mind. I was useless to her—even more so now, separated by an ocean and continent.

  * * *

  I did what I usually did, which was to ask Wang for advice. He looked gravely at me as I talked about going to Jin’s sister and discovering Jin’s illness.

  “I should have tried harder to find out what was troubling her,” I said. “Even before she left, I knew something was wrong.”

  “It’s too late for that now,” Wang replied reasonably. “The question is, what will you do now? And I think there is only one answer.”

  I mournfully lifted my face from my hands. “What is that?”

  “You must go to her.”

  “In China? But you know my situation. I could never come back here.”

  “We are all in that situation. But really”—he gestured at the walls of my small apartment—“what is left for you here?”

  He had a point. I had no family, no real friends besides him, and no artist career to speak of in New York. This had been true for most of my thirty years here. I also now had the money from the forged painting. I could afford a plane ticket.

  “You’re right,” I said. “Wang Muping, you’ve been a good friend to me all these years.”

  Wang clapped me briefly on the shoulder. “So have you.”

  In the next couple of weeks I got rid of nearly everything I owned. None of it was valuable, especially the furniture. For so many years I had not paid attention to what I slept on, sat on, ate meals from. I had not accumulated any possessions worth saving. I could see how a woman like Jin might find this fact infuriating. More regretfully, I discarded the small items she had bought to try to make our apartment livelier: the colorful dishes, the cheery knickknacks. When she had first bought them, I had ignored them. If only I had known.

  When it came to my studio, I was indecisive. Here were the paintings I had labored over, that were distinctive to me even if an outsider might say they all looked the same. But ultimately, I was ruthless. After dipping a rag in turpentine, I wiped the surface of one canvas. The top of the mountain was instantly erased, as if hidden by a cloud. Another wipe, and its eastern side was gone as if obliterated in an earthquake. I found this strangely cathartic, as if by physically removing the mountain from the painting, I was also removing it from my psyche.

  What I had left after a day’s work was a pile of blank canvases, still streaked here and there with green where my paint removal had been less successful. I suppose a more appropriate disposal for them would be to burn them in the backyard, but mindful of my neighbors, I just piled them into the already overflowing trash bins.

  I told my landlord I was leaving and paid up any outstanding rent. I also told the Chinese Baptist Church senior center that I would no longer be teaching classes; I think the only person who would regret my absence was the flirty widow. The framework for my stall I left to a neighboring vendor. No one there would notice my absence; another poor artist from another country would soon take my place.

  As summer had turned into fall, so had the category of tourists changed from overseas visitors to groups of students. As a treat, I spent a weekday afternoon at the museum like a regular tourist. I hadn’t stepped inside its massive halls for years, ever since I was a student myself, even though I’d worked so many days just outside its entrance. I spent most of my time looking at the Greek and Roman sculpture and Islamic art, which had not been on display the last time I’d been there. The paintings, including the Impressionist and post-Impressionist rooms, I skipped entirely.

  This was quite the opposite of my first visit to the museum, thirty years ago, just a few weeks after arriving from China. I went with Wang, he with his long hair and me with my buzz cut, two twenty-year-olds working their way through the Old Masters. With our sketchbooks we camped in front of paintings that we had only seen in textbooks in China, works by Rembrandt and Velásquez and Vermeer, just inches away from our awestruck faces. We stayed so long that the guards had to ask us to leave.

  Now I was leaving America in an almost identical way that I had come to it, plane ticket in one hand, duffel bag with a few essential items and clothes in the other. Grayer and wiser, I liked to think, although maybe only that first part was true.

  The last thing I did was to pay Old Guo, Jin’s former boss, a visit.

  When I entered the hair salon, he looked up from the front desk and said, “What, you want to borrow a hair dryer again?”

  I ignored him and walked up to the counter so that we were eye to eye. Loudly enough for the hairdressers and their customers to hear, I demanded, “Why didn’t you tell me about your last conversation with Jin?”

  He feigned ignorance. “What conversation?”

  “She told you she was sick. That it was caused by working with chemicals here.”

  “Nonsense. Our working conditions here are fine. Look.” He pointed toward several framed notices on the wall behind him: beauty salon credentials from China, a minimum-wage poster, and some other ordinances I didn’t understand. “Besides,” he added, “what makes her think it was working here that got her sick? She’s only been here for five years. The rest of the time she was working in China. Their conditions are much worse. That’s where you should put your blame instead of a man’s honest business. Now, get out.”

  I looked around and saw that the people in the salon, hairdressers and customers alike, were hanging on our every word. Perhaps that was enough revenge. I turned around and walked out the door. I was ready to leave now.

  * * *

  Optimistically, I had thought that going back to China would feel like a kind of homecoming. That my senses would instantly adjust, despite the intervening decades. Nothing could be further from the truth, from the Cantonese language that assaulted my ears to the thick layer of pollution that engulfed me when I exited Baiyun Airport in Guangzhou. My eyes and lungs burning, I hailed a taxi and handed over a piece of paper that contained the address of Jin’s parents.

  The driver eyed my scant luggage, then gave my appearance a quick scan. “You just come over on the flight from America?” he asked in Mandarin Chinese.

  “Yes, New York,” I said, too tired to wonder what had given me away. M
aybe my physical reaction to the pollution.

  “Niu Yue!” he exclaimed. “What’s life like there?”

  “Difficult,” I replied, hoping my clipped answers would stem any further conversation.

  “How long were you over there?”

  “Thirty years.”

  “That’s a long time! Welcome back, brother.”

  Unexpectedly, I found his word encouraging as I gazed out the window at the street scenes beyond. I had never been to Guangzhou before, and of course I knew that in the past thirty years China had rapidly modernized—was still in the process of modernization, judging by all the half-finished skyscrapers and construction sites and cranes we drove by—but this was like an alternate universe. Despite it being around nine o’clock at night, couples strolled on the sidewalks, neon signs for restaurants and bars blared through the muggy haze, and traffic clogged every street artery. As the taxi inched forward, and I kept glancing at the meter, I wondered if it was a good idea to go straight to Jin’s parents’ house this late. Perhaps I should have found a cheap hotel in which to rest and clean up so I could properly present myself the next morning. But I was wide awake from jet lag, and mindful of my dwindling funds.

  About an hour later, the taxi pulled up in front of an apartment block. I handed the driver the correct fare, and then, when he looked disappointed—he obviously expected more from a compatriot returned from America—added a tip. He thanked me and drove off in a cloud of exhaust, leaving me in the street. I climbed the concrete stairs, each step more difficult than the last, despite the fact I was only carrying a light bag.

  When I reached the front door, which was behind a metal gate, I hesitated. The sound of a television came from within the apartment, as well as a crack of light from the bottom of the door. Then I knocked firmly, once, twice. A stirring came from inside, as well as the sound of slippers approaching across a linoleum floor.