Repeat After Me

by Rachel Dewoskin

“I love you,” I said.

  She paused. “I love you too, Aysh.”

  “That’s all,” I said. “I just wanted you to know it.”

  She shifted her weight; I felt it. “You sure you’re okay?” she asked.

  “Never better.”

  “Where are you? Are you taking your meds?”

  I was annoyed. “I’m downtown. And yes, I’m taking my meds. Can’t I call you without seeming like a psychopath?”

  “Of course,” she said, and blew me a kiss through the phone. We hung up, and I walked back into the room where Da Ge was waiting.

  “Sorry about that,” I said. I looked at the justice of the peace. “I do,” I said. She nodded, annoyed that we had taken extra time. We put the rings on. Then we were lawful and wedded. She said nothing about you may now kiss the bride, but I stood on my tiptoes anyway and kissed Da Ge with so much force I hoped it would make the whole thing real. Exactly the way I wanted to. He stumbled back.

  “Tian!” he said. My God. One of the few expressions I had already learned.

  “Congratulations,” said our knocked-up witness.

  Da Ge and I had to create a photo album of the life we’d need to prove we had together. I made him keys to my apartment, and we spent a few days sightseeing, making memories, taking pictures. We went to the Central Park Zoo, where sea lions darted under water like fat, slippery spears and polar bears slept, their toys floating pointlessly in a bright blue pool. Monkeys leapt and swung, stuck their tongues out at us. Da Ge stuck his tongue out back. I took a picture. One monkey picked nits out of his friend’s fur.

  “You would do it for me?” Da Ge asked me, tugging on my hair.

  “Do you have nits?” I asked him.

  “What is this nit?”

  “This nit’s the egg of a bug in your hair,” I said, laughing. It was shocking how bad my own English was getting.

  “Egg of a bug?” he asked.

  “Insect,” I said, and made a buzzing noise, waved my fingers around like flies.

  “Oh, that,” he said. “Bug have eggs?”

  “I think so,” I said, no longer sure.

  “Do you have?”

  “Do I have what?”

  “This nit!” Da Ge grabbed me by the waist and pulled my stomach toward his. He peered into my hair and then picked at it with his fingers.

  Our one spring. We walked to the Central Park duck pond, where cherry blossoms were falling on the grass and families pushed strollers by. We sat on the library steps while Columbia students inflated a thousand blue and white balloons. We ate Thai food, bought socks at a street fair, watched the cannibal horror The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, which I found dizzying. Maybe Da Ge wanted a reality check, too, because he put his hand under my skirt, played with the elastic edge of my underpants.

  “Did you like that?” I asked afterwards. We were in Young, New Seafood on Amsterdam, buying dinner. I was worried he’d hold me and/or Americans responsible for the movie.

  “Like what?” He grinned. I probably giggled at this.

  “I meant the movie.”

  “That was too crazy,” he said. “I think it’s meant to be joke.”

  The fishmonger handed him a whole red snapper.

  “What are you going to do with the eyes?” I asked, unable to resist.

  “What eyes?” he asked. He glanced at the paper-wrapped fish. “Those? Nothing.”

  We went to University Food Market so Da Ge could buy bean sprouts, ginger, and scallions. I bought some rice cakes and Popsicles.

  “Do you have the soy sauce and sesame oil?”

  When I said I had soy sauce, he looked as if he had been expecting this answer. Here we are, I thought, a regular married couple, shopping in the supermarket.

  “Next time we go to Chinatown,” Da Ge said. “Here, there is nothing.”

  At home there were streaks of rain on the windows. I turned on all the lamps, lit candles. Da Ge took over my kitchen again, chopping and frying and pouring things onto the stove. I tried to help, but he shooed me away. It was just as well, since I was put off by the slack-bellied fish. I used to like my meat filleted and clean, its animal life kept secret. Now I’ve changed. I prefer my flavored potato chips have pictures of twitching shrimp on the package, and I’ve eaten things I never knew existed: sea slugs, “horse whip,” mosquito eyes. Apparently bats devour mosquitoes but can’t digest their eyes, so chefs roast whole bats, slice them open like melons, and scoop out the seedy, googly clumps. What makes that tasty is that somebody thought it up in the first place. But since Da Ge’s life was what made me adventurous, he never saw the fruits of his effort. I tasted his dishes, but I doubt he thought I’d ever devour turtles, eels, tripe, or feet the way I do now.

  He showed me a plate. “Tiger food,” he said. Cucumber, cilantro, pepper, and scallion in sesame oil, hot chili, and sugar. I tasted it. “Crispy and sharp,” I said. “It’s delicious.” The fish stared at me.

  Da Ge took his disposable chopsticks, rubbed them together, and tore off a hunk of cheek flesh. I thought he was joking, but he leaned across the table and set it on my plate.

  “Really?” I asked. He rolled his eyes, a gesture that struck me as imported. Maybe eye rolling is an American habit, since it contrasted oddly with his slapping a fish cheek on my plate.

  “. . . the best part,” he was saying.

  I ate the cheek. “It’s great,” I said. Now Da Ge was eyeing me, giving me the sense that I had passed some kind of test, even if I was an ingrate, faking it.

  “My mother always like this dish,” he said, gesturing to some shriveled green beans under a blanket of sauce and ground pork. “My father like to make that.”

  “Yum,” I said. I put a green bean between my teeth, hoping to look like my mom.

  “My father have a lot of girlfriends. Thin, fat, tall, every kind.”

  “Your father had mistresses while your mom was alive?”

  “I mean after, but maybe before, too. Every Chinese businessman has it.”

  “You’re hard on China,” I said. “Men have mistresses everywhere.”

  “In your family?” he asked.

  I stared at him. “Yeah,” I said finally. “My dad, too, I guess.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I do know. He cheated on my mom, and I saw him with the woman.” It came back to me in a surge almost as sickening as the one I’d had when I saw them: her curly dark head tilted back so she could look up at him, my father laughing in a way I’d never seen. Her lips were red and wet, waiting for my dad to press his mouth against them.

  I inhaled. “I decided to tell my mom,” I said to Da Ge.

  “Of course you do,” Da Ge said. He set his chopsticks down, reached across the table, and put his hand over mine. “That was right. Of course you tell your mom this.”

  “I don’t know if it counts as a mistress anyway, since my dad married her.”

  Now Da Ge nodded. “Maybe now he married her he will also have a new one. Usually men who are like this—are like this.”

  “I know what you mean, but I don’t think my—”

  “My mother hate the men like this. Maybe even my father and me.”

  I gulped some wine. What did he mean? Was he “like this,” too?

  “She couldn’t have hated you,” I said.

  “My mother had honor,” he said. “I am the product made by my father, maybe she hate this product.”

  “You were her baby,” I said, “not a product. She definitely loved you, and she must have loved your father at some point, enough to have had you, right?”

  He sighed. “I think she do love him. He can be kind. He like to talk the zodiac with me. Or fly kites. When I’m a kid. Maybe my mother believe he is—how do you say—mouth of a dagger, heart of tofu.”

  “Do you believe that, too?”

  “Believe what?”

  “That you father has a heart of tofu?”

  “I used to think it’s right.”
<
br />   “And now?”

  “He sent her away and now he also sent me away. I believe nothing, like she finally believe nothing, even after she believe so many thing in her life.”

  I considered this, arranged tiger food into a spicy doily on my plate. “Did she leave you a note?”

  “No. She say nothing. My mother is, how do you say, internal person.” He took a sip of water. “Maybe her heart break because my father and me, even she doesn’t know yet how bad we will both be. Or maybe she do know.”

  He leaned back in his chair, and I gasped, thought he might fall. But he caught himself, hooked a foot around the leg of the table. “My mother see from history more bad thing will happen,” he said. “She will be too much sorrow. She won’t be able to live.”

  I placed my chopsticks in parallel lines next to my plate. “But that’s not your father’s fault,” I said, groping. “Or yours.” I didn’t know whether I believed this or just wanted to. In fact, I just wanted to believe it so much that I did. And I still do. “People kill themselves because they’re ill,” I said, thinking it was precisely what my mother would have said in that conversation, especially if she’d been having it with me. “Not because they don’t love their families. I’m certain she loved you.”

  “You’re easy person to be certain,” Da Ge said. He stood up and started clearing the dishes. I stood up too, and stopped him, put the plates back on the table and my right hand on his face. I felt him slow down. Encouraged, I added my other hand, held his chin.

  “I am not an easy person to be certain,” I corrected. “But maybe your mother thought that if she said good-bye, she wouldn’t be able to do what she felt she had to do.”

  How many times I would replay that stupid speech in my mind.

  “What she had to do?” he repeated. I heard my voice in his. “Do you mean leave me forever?” He twisted his face away from my hands.

  That dinner was our honeymoon.

  May 1990, New York, NY

  Dear Aysha,

  Now you are not my teacher anymore, but I think I will still write you letters. Is that OK for you?

  Your,

  Da Ge

  CHAPTER NINE

  Mays

  THREE YEARS AFTER JULIA TOO AND I MOVED TO BEIJING, I HAD collected enough courage to call the one Chinese friend Da Ge had ever mentioned by name. He’s a painter who calls himself Red Moon. I had followed him online, thinking he might be able to give me some history, a kind of ghost fix. But it took me three years to call information and get his number, which I dialed from school. When he picked up, I sat down on the floor of my classroom.

  “Wei?” Hello?

  “Nihao,” I said, hi. “I’m, um, is this Hong Yue?”

  “Shi de.” Yes.

  I contemplated hanging up.

  “Wei?” he said again, “ni shi shei?” Who is this?

  “I’m a friend of your old friend Chen Da Ge,” I said in Chinese.

  At this, he switched to choppy English. “You are her wife?”

  “Yes,” I said. My heart banged in its cage.

  “I heard you are Beijing.”

  “I am in Beijing,” I said. “I’d like to meet you. Would that be okay?”

  “Dangran,” he said, of course.

  So I took Julia Too, who was six at the time, out past Tong Xian to the countryside. Hong Yue’s house and studio are part of a forbidden-city-like compound built by a wealthy friend, patron, and probably lover of his. The buildings are concrete, kilns in the summer and freezers in the winter. They surround an enormous square, grassy courtyard with four stone statues in its corners. The first two are a set of lions, the male rolling a ball under his paw and the female a cub under hers. Their presence makes the second two statues seem out of place: a ballerina in a dress that fans out around her, and a brawny socialist realist worker wiping sweat off his brow.

  Our first time there, Julia Too ran from statue to statue, touching them. I looked at Hong Yue, to make sure that was okay, and he nodded. Then he led us into a soaring room with paintings everywhere: hanging on the white walls, stacked against each other, in progress on easels, part-framed. They were red, black, yellow, and green. I walked over to a row of birds, some dressed in People’s Liberation Army uniforms, others hot mynahs in bikinis. Two of the birds were depicted as old cadres, clapping their wings at a performance. On the wall opposite the birds were self-portraits: a baby, naked except for a CPC cap, floated on an ocean of blue so bright it hurt to look at. A toddler-sized Hong Yue sat atop a mushroom cloud that tossed him like a rag doll, rode a rocking horse on which he transformed into Chairman Mao, and struggled inside a box that contained other boxes. On close inspection, I saw that those boxes were full of smaller and smaller Hong Yues, also struggling.

  “These are my new ones,” he said, pointing to a row of panty-clad poultry. A less sexy, actual live bird stood on a twig in a wicker cage near the door of the room. It reminded me of the mynah Xiao Wang’s Nai Nai had kept in Chinatown. I wondered what had happened to that bird.

  “How long do they live?” I asked Hong Yue.

  “What, birds?”

  “Ba Ge birds.”

  “They can live twenty-five years,” he said, tilting his head at me. Maybe Nai Nai’s mynah was flying around New York City somewhere still. Julia Too walked over and began squawking nihao’s back and forth. “Ba Ge loves girls,” Hong Yue told her in Chinese. “But nihao is his only word, so he can’t make good conversation.”

  Then he pulled out a basket of shadow puppets for Julia Too to play with, and poured me some tea.

  “I love your paintings,” I told him.

  “Thanks.”

  We looked at the walls.

  “I spend five years experimenting,” Hong Yue said. “When I come to the kind of paintings I want to do, I spend the next five years doing them. But it takes me half a decade every decade to figure out what to do for the second half.”

  We wandered back out to the courtyard, where sunlight was blasting the grass so hard I wondered how they kept it alive. I shielded my eyes. Hong Yue and I sat at a low stone table and sipped our tea. Julia Too propped the shadow puppets in a parade at the foot of the female stone lion.

  “Now I am mostly painting my bird, because I’m an old man and old men love birds,” Hong Yue said.

  I laughed. He was thirty-five, the age I am now, and I often tease him for having made it seem like the edge of death.

  “But you don’t want to hear about this, do you?” he asked, squinting up into a flash of sudden sun that had burned through cloud sheer. “Let’s talk about Da Ge.”

  “I would love to,” I said. “I didn’t know if—”

  “I’m as zhishuai as an American,” Hong Yue said, as straight to the point of what, as Da Ge had put it. “You can ask me anything.”

  “What was he like?”

  I looked over at Julia Too, who had abandoned her puppet parade in favor of a snail she’d found on the ground. She was turning it over in her open palm, listening to us.

  “Tian,” Hong Yue said, my God. He continued in Chinese: “Da Ge was difficult. We burned his father’s house down once, smoking. He refused to apologize, and his father was furious, made him pay. Da Ge used to beat the shit out of people when we were young, including me. Maybe because of, you know, the business with his mother. But he was quiet, too, I guess. He read. He was always giving me books I hated.”

  “He beat you up?”

  Now Hong Yue looked at Julia Too. She was absorbed, studying the snail.

  “Da Ge could be a son of a bitch.”

  “Why did he beat you up?”

  “Over a girl.”

  “Oh. Why do you say it was because of his mother?”

  Hong Yue looked me over, perhaps trying to determine how I could possibly know so little about a person I had once married.

  “Maybe the way she died was—well, in China, it was embarrassing,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “S
o if people brought it up. You know. He was angry.”

  “Right.”

  “Sometimes he was angry at me, too, because my life seemed easier, maybe.”

  “Was it?”

  He smiled kindly. “No one’s life feels easy to the one living it. But my mother was okay, and that was enough.”

  “Enough to make him feel bad, you mean?”

  “Enough to make my life seem easy. Then again, I was poor, really poor, and he used to steal money from his father to ‘buy my paintings.’ Then he’d leave them here ‘accidentally’ so I could sell them to other people. Except for one. He had a favorite, one I painted right before the Tiananmen business, right before he left for America. I don’t know what happened to it. He paid me ten times what it was worth.”

  He stopped and looked over at me as if he were trying to remember who I was, where we had met, why we were having this conversation. I weathered the pause, spelled p-l-e-a-s-e t-e-l-l m-e s-o-m-e m-o-r-e. It worked.

  “Da Ge used to steal food when we were kids,” Hong Yue said. “Everyone was poor as hell then, even his big-shot old man. But Da Ge gave shit away, down to the final grain. He could be sweet, even though that’s not how people thought of him.”

  Julia Too had put the snail down and was turning somersaults in the grass.

  “How did people think of him?”

  Hong Yue shrugged. “Once I got busted for drawing on the wall outside the gym at school. Da Ge told the officials he’d done it. I would have had to do self-criticisms, which were a nightmare and would have conflicted with the only art class I had in those days. So he did them for me. For eleven fucking months. Every day.” Hong Yue grinned.

  “What was it you drew by the gym?”

  At this, he laughed like a trumpet. “My name,” he said, “in big, red characters.”

  “Your name? How did—”

  “Da Ge said he’d framed me—as a practical joke. He practiced imitating my writing so he could prove his own guilt. But he didn’t even need to. I mean, he was always in deep shit at school, so they were happy to believe him. Eleven months of my self-criticism and humiliation.”

  He poured more tea. Julia Too stopped somersaulting, retrieved her snail, and trotted over with it. She handed it to me, and I looked at the brown whorls on its shell.