Repeat After Me

by Rachel Dewoskin

  Unlike me, Julia Too was thrilled about her first solo flight. At the airport she patted her backpack when she said good-bye to me, as if to say, “I have everything I need; I’ll be fine.” It was a gesture I found stunningly mature, even though I knew the bag held Sam-the-doll, a Hello Kitty wallet, lip gloss, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and vanilla milk. Julia Too tapped her pink cell phone.

  “I’ll call you as soon as Nomi picks me up,” she said, and walked away, turning around once to grin and blow me a kiss. Her bangs flopped over her eyes.

  Seventeen hours later, in my Beijing evening, the phone rang. I was in Julia Too’s room organizing stuffed animals by color: shelf of black and white penguins, pandas, beagles, seals, polar bear. A rainbow basket held red Elmo, an orange doll, two yellow ducks, the green monster, blue cat, hugging purple monkeys. I had done the dollhouse first; each miniature creature waited in place for Julia Too’s return—at the table, in the bathtub, in bed. She was outgrowing her toys faster than I was my love of arranging them. Her young-adult books were alphabetized by author, the kid ones in order of descending size. I leapt up and ran for the phone, tripping over a stack of pink pigs and the dress-up trunk.

  Julia’s voice sounded close, and I could hear my mom’s whole place through the wires: swirly antique rugs, blue velvet couch, the lunch I knew she had already set out, had probably been considering for weeks even though it was just for her, Jack, and Julia Too. Lox, tomatoes, bagels from Absolute on 108th, homemade quiche, rugelach. I could see my mother’s hands under a stream of water from the silver faucet. Her kitchen island with its bowls of apples, avocados, olives, and lemons; my Grandma Leah’s painted glass shakers full of salt and pepper. I even imagined my dad, leaning against the counter with a cup of coffee in one hand, mail in the other, laughing. I closed my eyes.

  “I don’t have the jet lag!” Julia Too shouted gleefully, a rare trace of Chinglish in her English. “Nomi and Jack are taking me to Rockefeller. They got me my own skates! I won’t have to rent skates at the China World anymore!”

  Her voice on the phone gave me a rush of hope—that she’s tougher, better adjusted than I ever was or will be, in spite of Da Ge and his genes. That she’s an unbroken girl.

  I hung up happy, finished her room, put on tight jeans and a red sweater, and headed for a place called “Intercourse Bar,” my favorite for its transliterated drinks and straightforward ambitions. I ordered Jack Daniels wi-si-ki on the rocks, and called Yang Tao from my cell phone. The numbers lit up as I pressed each one. 137 01234 8898, round, even numbers, all dark blues and purples. Auspicious numbers in Chinese, where colors for the digits make better sense than ever.

  He showed up twenty minutes later, breezing in with the street on his clothes and face. He drank Coke with no ice and smiled at me, the lines around his mouth inviting. My whiskey was smoky and tasted like flowers. I thought I would like to kiss him.

  I said, “Julia Too invented a language. Chavinglavish. Your name is Yavang Tavao.” I was flushed from the heat of my drink.

  Yang Tao laughed. “Is yours “Avai Shava?”

  Call me nerdy, but I found his immediate fluency in Chavinglavish sexy. So when he said, “Gaven wavo havui javia, bava,” or come home with me, I did.

  His apartment was clean, and his body, lovely. He said less than any boyfriend in the history of the world ever has, inspiring me to wonder even more what he might be thinking. I did not ask, because I did not want him to think I harbored the implied desire of that question, that the answer be “you.” In fact, I actually wanted to know what he was thinking, even, and especially, if it wasn’t about me. Maybe it was the shape of the morning we woke up to, the color of a certain Chinese character, or the sound of winter light singing into his windows. Maybe he was thinking about last year’s taxes. Any glimpse of his private mind would have been fine.

  February 1990, New York, NY

  Dear Teacher,

  This week we should write about food. I know it’s not modest, but you already know I am excellent cook, like many Chinese men. I make delicious fish, with scallions and ginger. And succulent chicken—drunken chicken. I soak it in complex sauce.

  Chinese men are help women. In class, when you talk about the right of women, that men should consider women equal, I think this is American problem. In China, in 1949, the government already say that men and women are equal. In China men like to cook for girlfriend and wife, even my father who is selfish busy person still like to cook. Chinese men are helpful. Even though sometime, in backward place in China, maybe in the peasant village, some men might feel angry to hear that the wife have sex business with other men. Then I read in American newspaper that maybe he will throw this kind of acid on her face. I never know this when I live in China. Maybe only in America they report that Chinese men do this action. I think American newspaper use this story to hide the story of American men, what American men do to American women. It must be happens everywhere, especially in violent society like this. I wonder in China do we print story about American men. America is hypocrite and bully.

  Even American food is not kind. And also not tasty. Who wants his own plate of meat and several potato with no sauce?

  Da Ge

  CHAPTER SIX

  Februarys

  DA GE USED TO LEND ME BOOKS. “I WANT TO GIVE TO YOU some things,” he told me one day before class at Embassy. “Diary of a Madman, and The True Story of Ah Q. It’s both by Lu Xun. He will teach you about China, even though the books are maybe quite old fashioned.” He handed me one of them, held on to the other.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll read them and maybe we can talk about them.”

  “Maybe I can read it to you now.” He opened the book in his hands.

  “Yeah? Of course. That would be nice.”

  I still remember the single passage Da Ge recited, standing in front of my desk. It was Tuesday, February 6, 1990, and he read from The True Story of Ah Q, in which Lu Xun’s protagonist, Ah Q, “changes defeat into victory” by beating himself up. “Raising his right hand he slapped his face hard twice, so that it tingled with pain. After this slapping his heart felt lighter, for it seemed as if the one who had given the slap was himself, the one slapped some other self, and soon it was just as if he had beaten someone else—in spite of the fact that his face was still tingling. He lay down satisfied that he had gained the victory. Soon he was asleep.”

  The only word Da Ge mispronounced was “tingled,” in which he substituted an r for the l. Other than that, it was brilliantly executed. He didn’t ask or add anything, just took a seat in the back of the room and left immediately when I dismissed the class. Even so, and even though I never learned to like Lu Xun, I took that first taste of a book in Da Ge’s voice to be an invitation. I wanted to follow him somewhere, maybe to China.

  It was Xiao Wang who taught me to read Chinese for real. She found Teacher Hao when I moved to Beijing, and she read me everything from Mao’s poems to letters posted by students on the Democracy Wall in 1957 and Wang Shuo’s short stories. She showed me a folder of love poetry her father had written when he and her mother were young. Xiao Wang said they had a political undercurrent, like most Chinese poems. We watched illicit films from the time when she—and Da Ge, I guess—were teenagers, including one called Frozen, about a guy who fakes his death to see how people will react. Everyone mourns horribly at first, and he’s satisfied, but then within a few weeks, the world’s parts fall back in place. The sun still sets and rises; his friends recover, move on. Furious at having been forgotten, he revives.

  I always find Da Ge in Chinese books and movies. Sometimes he’s the satirist, coolly observing and narrating. Others, he’s the earnest, innocent victim. Often he’s an extra, a few scattered sentences or a single line. But he’s always around, because for me, he’s endless characters. I can’t help it. Even though Da Ge once made fun of me for this, I still think of him as the dissident he wanted to be, a skinny one-student army standing in front of
some tank even he couldn’t quite identify. Trying to stand up to a larger power and failing. The only constant is he’s always gone by the end of the story.

  At an Embassy staff meeting that February, Bonita Verna introduced the director, Pete Batwan, as if we didn’t all know him already. I glanced around the room, wondering first whether anyone else on the staff found it weird and then again why Pete Batwan had possibly hired me. I wasn’t the newest staff member at Embassy anymore; lots of the teachers there were part-time, and the turnover rate was fairly high, which meant that no one, including Pete, really noticed me. I liked it this way.

  A teacher named Ben Rosenbaum was the exception. He liked me. I think it might have been in part because he mistook my interest in him for something it wasn’t. I noticed him because his name was Ben, and he noticed me notice. Ben Rosenbaum let me wonder what my brother looked like, whether he still had dark hair curling down around his ears like Ben Rosenbaum did. Ben Rosenbaum talked a lot during staff meetings because he wanted everyone to know that he was smart. His students must never have had a chance to practice their English. Maybe they learned by listening to him, but he used expressions like “MO,” for modus operandi, whenever he had a chance. Or maybe he was just happy to have the chance to abbreviate since everyone spoke English so well.

  “Does anyone have any questions?” Mr. Batwan was asking.

  “I have a question,” said Ben. “I have always availed myself of the materials in the New York City Public Library because it is my philosophy that teachers who belong to a specific community should set an example for their students.”

  Where was the question?

  “So,” he said, “maybe it would be a good idea for us to establish a requirement that all students enrolled at Embassy be formally trained in how to use the New York Public Library by a current member of our faculty.”

  When he said faculty, a light spray of saliva misted the air in front of him. My Benj was nothing like him, I decided, and wondered how I could get out of taking his course on Cambridge Prep. Mr. Batwan took this opportunity to demonstrate his flair for making us a part of the administrative structure of the school.

  “Let’s see a show of hands,” he said. How could my mother have slept with him?

  Bonita was taking notes so fast I wanted to warn her of carpal tunnel syndrome. What could she possibly have been writing down? A flurry of hands went up. I couldn’t bring myself to raise mine.

  “Aysha,” Mr. Batwan said, “do you have a diverging opinion on the library?”

  “Of course not,” I said. Everyone was looking at me. “I’m just slow to raise my hand.” I put it up in the air, slow motion.

  Then a teacher named Jessica Noonan piped up about library cards, and I dissolved into the back of my chair, thinking I really had to go back to school. I couldn’t stay on at Embassy forever, teaching one class, hating staff meetings, and not finishing my own education. I vowed to start reapplying, as soon as—and here I had the delusional thought I had started having frequently that spring—I had settled down with Da Ge.

  I thought he’d show up that night, so on the way home I bought snapdragons and put them in an orange vase in front of the ninety-nine dragons scroll. I turned a track light on above them.

  He noticed right away when he arrived. “It looks nice,” he said.

  I smiled. “I’m glad you think so.” He touched one of the flowers.

  “Do you know what they’re called?” I asked.

  “Flowers,” he said.

  “Yeah, but I mean the name of this kind.”

  He raised an eyebrow and looked at me.

  “Snapdragons,” I said.

  “Snapdragons,” he repeated.

  “Another kind of dragon,” I added, stupidly. “You know, to keep your ninety-nine dragons company.” What was wrong with me? “Come in and sit,” I blathered, gesturing at the futon. “How are you? Are you doing okay? How have you been?”

  As soon as he was settled, I sat next to him, perhaps too close for comfort.

  “My Yeye dies,” he added, “the father of my father.”

  “I’m so sorry! When did he die?”

  “I speak to him just two day ago. Then he die.”

  I heard the suggestion in this of a causal relationship between the two events and was considering how to create a question that would be both comforting and grammatically accessible when he asked, “Excuse me, do you have water?”

  I leapt up, apoplectic that he’d been dying of thirst in my house. No one has ever been hungry or thirsty in my mother’s house. I vowed at that moment to do a complete grocery shopping and to keep foods Da Ge liked in my house. In the meantime, I took chips and salsa out of the cabinet and put them in bowls while I waited for his water to make its way through the Brita filter. I set the snack in front of him.

  “Thank you.”

  “The water will be ready in a second,” I said, and then, when I brought it in, he stared at it, as if trying to determine what possible preparation it could have required.

  “I cleaned it,” I said, knowing he wouldn’t know the word “filter.” I poured some into a glass for him.

  “Filter, yes?”

  I folded my legs up on the couch, hating myself. “It’s not cold,” I said.

  “I don’t like cold water. Thank you.” He took a sip and continued, “My Yeye, my grandfather. He was old, maybe like ninety-one years. He leave certain things he want to give me, but those are in Beijing. Maybe when he’s alive he always want me to marry a nice Chinese girl and give him grandson. Maybe if he knew I would never do that, then he won’t leave me his things.” A great-grandson, I thought, although I resisted correcting him. Da Ge’s glance shifted around the room, as if he were looking for his grandfather.

  “What would be wrong with marrying a nice Chinese girl and having a baby?”

  “I do not want these old-fashioned marriage idea. I want to have democratic marriage, what is my free choice, and anyway, I don’t deserve to be back to China.”

  “What do you mean, deserve?”

  He ignored this. “My Yeye have a lot of old books. Used to be we read these together, but now I don’t want to think of it. Maybe he left it for me. He wish I will get married.” He tilted his head up, a question.

  “I’ll marry you if you want,” I said. I had considered us in love for weeks; he might as well, too. Marrying Da Ge would be sinister and safe at the same time, a sexy combination. And since I had never seen a good marriage, I had the wild notion that this might lead to one.

  “Are you sure it’s okay you can do that for me?” Da Ge asked. His eyes were glittering with excitement.

  “Yes, I’m sure.” I felt a rush of adrenaline, “It’ll be like an extension of teaching English. Extra credit.”

  Da Ge stood up. “Thank you,” he said. He walked over, and I thought he might pick up my hand or kiss me, but he did neither. “I will make it easy. So no work for you. And I can pay if you—”

  “I’m not interested in your money.”

  What did he believe motivated me? Generosity? Stupidity? Or did he simply have better perspective than I did and choose me because he knew I’d do it?

  In exchange for my vows and the bonus green card that would come with them, I asked if he would teach me Chinese. He laughed. Happily, I want to think. And then, right there, he began writing out characters, starting with numbers, because they were easiest. The number one was only a short horizontal line. “Should be okay for you, this one!” he said. “Two” was two lines. “Person” was also two lines, like a tepee.

  “No,” said Da Ge when told him it looked like a house. “It look like a person. Chinese language make sense, unlike your English. Each thing look like the thing it is.” He drew a box with a line through it. “See?” he told me. “Sun!”

  “That looks like a sun?”

  He drew a box with no line in it. “Mouth,” he said. “Like your big mouth.”

  He left that night as usual, and I con
tinued to hide him from everyone who mattered: my mom, Julia, even Dr. Meyers, who did well with truth. Da Ge was my trump card; I would bring him out last, I thought, shoot the moon.

  Yesterday was warmish for February in Beijing. Julia Too and I went shopping in Sanlitun, where we bought her fake “Miss Sixty” shirts, Diesel corduroys, and some new sneakers. My mother had sent Julia Too home from New York with red, pointy shoes of the sort that I forbid. I’m too mean to buy her such shoes myself, but not mean enough to take them away from her, so Julia Too wore them every single day of January, even though it was so cold I worried we’d have to amputate her feet.

  At the market, she climbed out from behind a sheet that doubles as a dressing room, wearing a striped, hooded sweaterdress. She looked like an old-fashioned candy stick, and I wanted to gobble her up like I used to when she was a baby.

  “How does it look?” she asked me.

  “Delicious,” I said. “You’re the love of my life.”

  She grinned, pulled the hood over her head. “You’re still mine, too,” she said. We have an agreement that as soon as I’m not the love of her life anymore, we’ll have a bottle of champagne in honor of the new love, even if she’s only eleven.

  For lunch, Julia Too chose Pure Lotus, and Yang Tao came to meet us. I had seen him a dozen times, for coffee by his office at Beijing University, for lunches during my breaks at Global Beijing, and for two sleepovers when Julia Too was sleeping at Lili’s and Phoebe’s. When he walked into Pure Lotus, I stood up and kissed him on each cheek. Julia Too was busily ordering for the table: sweet and sour tofu fish wrapped in a seaweed approximation of skin; fake Peking duck with pancakes, scallions, and sweet dark sauce; spareribs with bones made of bamboo shoots. Then she sipped ginger apple juice while Yang Tao asked her, in English, about school. She replied in Chinese. This was both a forgivable choice and a gesture of subtle hostility. All the bilingual children I know have the ability to divide the world up instantly and with astonishing accuracy—they know immediately who speaks native English and who speaks native Chinese. But Yang Tao also knows both that Julia Too considers herself American, and that in the teenage world of Global Beijing, English is “cooler” than Chinese. She was making the unfriendly point that Yang Tao is not in the inner circle of our family, that she and I speak an English so fluent and intimate that he’s not welcome even to try to participate. I disliked this undercurrent, but hoped Yang Tao would accommodate her and speak Chinese if she preferred that.