Repeat After Me

by Rachel Dewoskin

  “I think I need a favor,” he said.

  “From me?”

  But now he was distracted, staring at the menu. I wondered how good his reading comprehension was, and what he was doing here. In New York. In my diner, in my life. Crowding my space in some specific but unidentifiable way.

  “Excuse me!” he shouted at the waitress’s back. She returned, upset, sloshed my coffee down.

  “I like tea and this,” said Da Ge, jabbing a finger at the “hearty man” breakfast. Three eggs, bacon, coffee, juice, and a cheese Danish.

  “Fine,” the waitress said.

  “Do Chinese people like cheese?” I asked Da Ge. Xiao Wang had told the class she thought cheese was a kind of dirt.

  “How do I know?”

  “You are Chinese, right?”

  “But I’m not represent the idea of every peasant. Anyway, what are you?”

  “What am I?”

  “What are you?”

  “I don’t know. American? An English teacher?”

  “I mean what are you, Not what do you.”

  I didn’t correct his English. Just like lying about him, a habit I began as soon as Julia asked for details, the practice of never correcting Da Ge’s English snowballed. As a result, I failed to teach him a single thing about language. Or anything else.

  “I don’t know,” I started to qualify, but he interrupted me.

  “This, I already can tell.”

  “You can tell what?”

  “I can tell about you.”

  His food arrived, lively and yellow on the porcelain plate. I thought of Sesame Street. Big Bird. I wondered whether Big Bird lays eggs. Whether he hatched from one.

  “You don’t eat?”

  “I eat plenty,” I said, criticized.

  “But now?”

  “Oh.” I realized he was offering me some of his sweaty food. I swallowed, gagging slightly. “No, no,” I said. “I already ate.” He seemed to soften at this.

  “In China,” he said, “We say, ‘Did you eat?’ instead of ‘How are you?’”

  “Really?” I thought of Xiao Wang, flushing when he spoke to her. His jaw was moving on the food.

  “Why really?” he asked. “It’s weird to you?”

  “No, just interesting. I’m interested in languages.”

  “You are very American, I think.”

  “Yes, I’m American. And?”

  “Everything is the thing you know. Americans talk all the time—straight to the point of what. It’s never polite talk.”

  He was one to talk, but I said nothing. Da Ge finished his food in several bites. His scar stretched when he opened his mouth; the black eye shined under the diner lights.

  “What happened to your eye?”

  “Just like this,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “Like American talk.”

  He made a fist and smashed it upward, just missing my face. He blew air out in the sound of a cartoon punch. When I flinched, he laughed, a low and angry laugh that sounded like it came from somewhere underneath him, not even his stomach but a hollowed-out section of ground. I saw him with a mining hat on, moving through a dark tunnel from which his own laughter emerged. The one bright light, hot in the middle of his forehead, would lead him out behind the echo of his laugh. He was watching me.

  My heart rattled in a roller-coaster, Disney-movie-dark-part way. I thought he was the exciting kind of scary, that either doesn’t get realized or returns to safe and happy fast enough to have been worth it.

  “What is your thought?” he asked.

  I couldn’t have articulated it if I’d wanted to. “What was the favor you mentioned?” I asked, feeling brave.

  He shook his head a little, as if reconsidering. “Do you know about Tiananmen?”

  I scrambled in my mind for what he might mean and managed, “The protests in June? Of course.” I felt pretty good about having come up with at least that.

  He looked skeptical. “Yeah, that ‘protests.’”

  “I know only what I saw in the news. Why? What should I know?”

  His scar crawled up the side of his face. “Most Americans only know a guy in front of tank,” he said. “But I was at that massacre. I watched that story.”

  “Where’d you learn the word ‘massacre’?”

  “In America.”

  “Oh.”

  “Your newspaper.”

  I didn’t want to be responsible for America’s newspaper. “Does my newspaper have to do with the favor you want?”

  He looked bored. “Let’s talk that later,” he suggested. “No time now.”

  I wondered if that were true, or whether he’d judged something about me that made him want to retract the offer. I didn’t question why I thought of his request as an offer.

  “So,” I fumbled. “What do you do in New York?”

  “Now I will study English with you,” he said, smiling. “My speaking not so good because I don’t have chance to speak so much before, only write. I have excellent English teacher at Beijing University. He is Chinese but live abroad many years, so maybe my writing English is excellent and diligent.”

  “I’m sure your essays will be great,” I agreed. We both waited.

  “So, do you work, too? Or just study?” I asked.

  “My visa do not allow this.”

  “Oh.”

  I considered asking how he supported himself, but thought he might be offended. As if he had heard my thought, he took a fist-sized roll of money from the pocket of his jeans and left twenty dollars on the table.

  “For you, too,” he said. “I invite.”

  “No, no, it’s fine—I’ll get my . . .”

  “We do not split with me.” He leaned into my face, and I took a step back.

  “Fine.” I put my wallet back in my bag, crushing my students’ essays, and followed Da Ge out. He pointed at a ratty moped with two helmets locked to the back.

  “It’s okay. I drive you.”

  I wondered whether he always carried two helmets or had been presumptuous enough to think I’d actually ride with him. And been right. I put one on, even though I thought we’d probably die in a wreck. I didn’t want to argue with him, didn’t want to insult him, didn’t want—what didn’t I want, exactly? I pulled the helmet on and shut its plastic shield, which steamed up. When I tried to close the strap I missed the latch, and Da Ge reached under my chin to fasten it. His fingers brushed my neck, and I looked down at the pavement. Da Ge started the engine, which growled feebly, and then craned around and gestured for me to sit.

  “Hold to me,” he said, pointing at his waist. I climbed on and wrapped my hands around him, impassively, I thought. Then I peered forward over his shoulder as he took off into traffic. The curbs were like punctuation, rolling down into the street on either side. Parentheses. He picked up speed. The lanes shot ahead of themselves, and inside my helmet, I began laughing. Da Ge cut across to Riverside Drive and up to 180th. Sunlight bounced off the water underneath the George Washington Bridge. My scarf flew behind me like a fighter pilot’s. I thought of Isadora Duncan, the dancer who died when her scarf got caught in the wheel of a convertible she was riding in. The silk yanked her out of the car by her throat and dragged her along a street in Nice, right after she had waved good-bye and called out to her friend, “I’m off to love!” My mother, also a modern dancer, had told me this story several times. When Da Ge pulled up in front of the school at 186th, I let go of his waist and stood, retied my scarf. He lifted his hand to wave.

  “I can’t go to class,” he said, “I have business. Tomorrow I will be back to class.”

  I couldn’t think of what to say. Attendance is mandatory? I was still wearing my helmet. “Oh!” I said, reaching to unclasp it. Da Ge put his hand on my arm to stop me.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “You can keep this safety hat for next time.”

  Before I could argue, he jammed his heel down and disappeared. I turned, walked up the stone steps c
ounting on my fingers the letters in “I-m o-f-f t-o l-o-v-e.” But there are eleven letters in that so it landed on my thumb, felt wrong, didn’t fit.

  That motorcycle ride happened thirteen years ago this month. And now it’s September again in Beijing. September always reminds me of New York during those first Embassy classes, of Da Ge walking in straight out of the square, off the plane, looking like another city. This month has been no exception; I remember that one in my bones, the way you know how to swim or sing, so viscerally it isn’t even real remembering. It’s just a smell or song, bringing someone back until he’s standing staring at you again, even if he’s been gone twelve years.

  This kind of remembering is similar to the way I sometimes sense the crazy me standing behind the grown-up one in the mirror, the two of us brushing my teeth. Or walking down the street, thinking how many letters are there in that sentence, but stopping short of counting. Not spelling words out. Sometimes being an adult is about pretending to be one. The girl behind the façade doesn’t matter, as long as you don’t let her stand in front, because the harder you work to fake something, the more it can become true. I went from pretending to be a teacher to being a real one, from acting okay to being okay.

  It’s only in September that Beijing reminds me of New York. Usually the two places don’t overlap. This is partly because Beijing is a frenzy of frying ginger, exhaust, tires, and sweet potatoes, and in my memory, America is mostly unscented. Yet, there’s something sharp in Chinese Septembers that suggests the ride uptown to Embassy, makes me feel like I’m about to meet Da Ge. There’s always some New York autumn underneath the Beijing one. Maybe it’s just school supplies: binders, folders, pencils, untouched grade books, or the promise of a list of students I’ll know by summer. Back to school has always been a kind of back in time.

  Global Beijing, the international private high school where I now teach, is full throttle under way, even though we started only two weeks ago. My “Introduction to American Literature” class is packed with twenty kids who range from giant marfans to wispy preteens. I always start with my favorite unit, poetry, assign Shel Silverstein, and make them write their own rhyming poems.

  Today, a fourteen-year-old boy named Martin read his original piece, “The Stupid Jeff,” about another kid in class: “The stupid Jeff are having cough. / He cutting medicine into half. / The stupid Jeff are playing golf. / He hitting ball onto roof. / The stupid Jeff are playing in fall. / He eat the leaf and then he barf.”

  I applauded vigorously before reminding Martin that it’s polite in fictional accounts to change the names of your subjects and protect their privacy. And then I told everyone about poetic license, that the grammar of poems can be more flexible than that of analytical papers. This was a big relief to all of us, including me. I have empathy for my non-native speakers, since I now suffer from the nuance paralysis common to expatriates and foreigners everywhere. In fact, I’ve become like one of my own students. Learning a language makes you vulnerable. Your thoughts become as simple as your expression of them, making you lobotomized in Chinese even if you’re brainy in English. After years here, I still wobble in search of nouns for daily objects. I am the kind of person who calls doorknobs “balls you turn on doors to open or shut.” I can get things done, but there’s nothing poetic or compact about not knowing the word for “knob.”

  Da Ge and I were forgiving of each other’s misunderstandings; neither of us cared for facts or accuracy. In fact, we took a kind of delight in each other’s mistakes. I still keep the Uranus backpack in my closet, for example. I’ve made all of his assignments, his hometown, and even what’s left of his family—my own. I’ve been to the neighborhood where he grew up, seen the sushi bars and skyrises grow above it like a gorgeous urban forest. I watched the barefoot workers from the countryside tear down Da Ge’s family’s courtyard house in 1996. And I watched them build a modern apartment complex in its place. I tried on the culture shock he had in America, by moving to China so disoriented that I felt for years as if I might slip off the edge of the world.

  Maybe Da Ge knew more than I did about what would happen to us. Maybe he even hoped I’d write something back then, that it would be immediate, epic, or sexy. If so, then the joke’s on him. He couldn’t have predicted that it would take me more than having known him and having been crazy to want to record what happened. He didn’t know there would be a person worth telling.

  But there is. My small girl Julia II Chen-Silvermintz, who calls herself Julia Too and said recently as I kissed and tucked her in, “There’s a Chinese girl with no daddy in my class. Maybe we’re sisters.”

  Her voice pitched up half hopefully, half sarcastically, at the end of the sentence. She resisted the full-on question mark, because she didn’t want to give me license to confirm that they’re not sisters. Or embarrass herself with earnestness. She meant Phoebe Taylor, a Chinese girl whose American parents adopted her from Hubei and lived in the United States until three years ago when they moved to Beijing so her dad could work for Whirlpool here. Then he left her mother, married his twenty-four-year-old Chinese secretary, and moved back to southern Michigan. He probably also bought a convertible; he had a love of cliché. Phoebe’s mom, Anne, surprised everyone by deciding to stay and raise her daughter alone in Beijing.

  I told Julia Too the good news: she can be sisters with anyone she wants, that girls stay friends for decades so they’ll be as legit as “real” siblings someday. I want her to share my idea that girls need and love each other, that it’s only in the Hollywood movie view that we’re all shrews, competing for glory and boys. I said of course Phoebe could come over on Friday night, could even stay again on Saturday like a real sister. We’d have to ask her mom about school nights.

  Julia Too looked up at me gratefully with Da Ge’s eyes and my own mother’s eyelashes curling out like flames around them. I kissed her tiny, sweet beak twice and then sat down guiltily to write this story. For her.

  October 1989, New York, NY

  Dear Teacher,

  The courtyard house of my Grandmother and Grandfather, where I am born—used to be only eight people—my grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, and the brother of my father, his wife and son and me. But then when it is problem time the house have more than eight-teen people live there. You do not know this time, the Cultural Revolution. Some of those people are not even the family member but they need place to live. My grandfather, the father of my father must dig the tomb because he have many book he loves very much. During that time no one can have book, so before he go to the country to do work, he dig this tomb and then his book stay there for twenty years until later, after it is already in the 1980 decade now, he took those book out.

  My mother feel bad during those year when I am first arrive to the world. Maybe she do not want a shouting, crying baby. My mother sleeps on stone stove with some blanket. When I am born on that stove, crying with a lustily cry, my mother hear this voice and she know I can be trouble to her. Maybe she do want a baby but I am the kind of son my mother do not want. Even though maybe it’s better to have son, my mother would rather to have daughter. Maybe someone quiet and unusual with freckles like you.

  Because later although I am successful student and leader, especially as you can demonstrate in English class, I am also feel angry. I beat people and have lot of trouble. My mother and grandmother always call me little hooligan. Maybe my grandmother mean it kindly like calling me little baober or treasure. My mother mean it like you will probably go to prison. Maybe she is right.

  Da Ge

  CHAPTER TWO

  Octobers

  THE FIRST TIME DA GE SHOWED UP AT MY APARTMENT IN NEW York, Nixon was in China, dining with the premier, alternating between “Don’t let China sink into a backwater of oppression and stagnation,” and “Please pass the shark fin soup.” Da Ge was sitting on my stoop 6,847 miles away, reading newspaper reports of the visit. He had a giant cardboard tube on his lap.

  I had come home from
a Halloween party with my neighbor and best friend, Julia, when I saw him, his moped, the crumpled Times, and the cardboard tube. I wondered what the tube was—some sort of piping? Julia was dressed as a wizard, and I as a witch. I deliberately avoided looking at Da Ge, and he appeared not to see me either. I didn’t know how I’d manage to introduce Julia, especially since she was wearing a beard and carrying a stick. Julia, who would not have cared whether Da Ge found her manly, was nevertheless not likely to approve of my students stopping by in the middle of the night. But maybe he guessed I wouldn’t like to introduce them, since he didn’t approach me. Julia and I rode the elevator up together.

  “Call me if you’re unhappy or can’t sleep,” she said.

  I spelled out “Da Ge is here,” on my right hand. D-a Ge i-s h-e-r-e. Perfect. He had barely been to class in the weeks since he’d joined, and the few times he’d shown up, he had remained quiet. He hadn’t mentioned our lunch once; I had almost come to think I’d imagined the entire interaction.

  I unlocked my door and turned the lights on. The downstairs intercom rang and I said hello into the grid.

  “I am Da Ge.” His voice rose up through the walls of the building.

  “I’m in 8-A,” I said. “Come on up.”

  I buzzed him in, knowing I had roughly one minute if he noticed the elevator, and four if he took the stairs. I frantically threw my witch hat off as I raced to the bathroom, smoothing my straight bangs down with my hand. In the bathroom mirror, I saw that I had returned from looking witchedy to looking like Popeye’s Olive Oyl, zero to sixty. Why was I, even out of costume, so absurd?

  I flicked off the bathroom light and went to get Da Ge’s helmet from my closet, where it had shifted the impossibly tight balance of objects only realizable in New York apartments. A roller skate fell from the top shelf, and I dodged it and then stuffed it back in on the floor with two suitcases, an air conditioner, and blankets and pillows. I threw the witch hat on top. My mom had rented the place for me when I dropped out of college during my senior year. Her only criteria were that I be close to her place on 97th and even closer to Julia and Columbia. She hoped Julia’s sanity might inspire me to develop some of my own and that having Columbia in my line of sight no matter where I turned would remind me that I needed to finish school there.