Repeat After Me

by Rachel Dewoskin

  I was horrified. “I didn’t mean to intrude. I’m sorry. Of course you shouldn’t wait, and I don’t have to come. I just thought since you mentioned—I just thought—” I debated whether to put my arm around her.

  “No, no, Aysha. This is not if you come or don’t come. I just cannot stay here anymore. I think I will not be back to New York after that trip.”

  “But what would be wrong with that? I mean, other than my missing you.”

  She looked up at me. “Maybe my family, even Nai Nai, would be disappoint.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “They’re going to want that baby around desperately.”

  I remember the way we were then: young, shocked, freshly finished teaching and studying, six and three months pregnant. We waddled onto a plane east with our prenatal vitamins and Nai Nai’s ashes in an urn in the overheard compartment. It was almost comical, even then. Xiao Wang clucked about, feeding and bossing me endlessly about her theory that once we delivered our babies, we had to do something called “zuo yuezi,” which meant we weren’t to leave the house for a month.

  “I will be home in Jinhong so for me this zuo yuezi will be convenient. Maybe you will have to find some friend to help you in New York. I know a Chinese girl who—”

  “Zuo yue—what? Not leaving the house for a month sounds like clinical depression to me.”

  “This why American women have so many wrinkle. You don’t rest after baby, so skin—how do you say?” She spread her hands as if she were making Jacob’s cradle out of lanyard.

  “Stretch?”

  “How do you spell?”

  “S-t-r-e-t-c-h.” Seven fingers.

  “Okay. You also get disease of this.” She pointed to her elbow.

  “You’re telling me that to prevent arthritis and wrinkles, women should stay home for a month after their babies are born.”

  “Yes. And no water into the body.” She opened a bag of dried cuttlefish and offered me some. It smelled so strong I thought I might go blind.

  “No thanks,” I said. “What do you mean, no water into the body?”

  “No shower.”

  “No showering for a month after you have a baby?”

  “Shower makes cold and easy to get sick.”

  “Maybe this is a cultural thing, but I think I have to shower after I give birth.”

  I should add here that Xiao Wang still looks identical to how she looked that day, and I, somehow, am twelve years older. I’m not saying I’m crippled with arthritis, but she could absolutely pass for twenty-five. So maybe I should have zuo’ed yue zi.

  When we arrived at the old Capital Airport with our dusty throats and eyes, we rode a moving floor past shops empty of customers and full of bored women in blue pinafores. I had the sensation of riding in a barrel over a waterfall, surrounded by the pouring sounds of a language I could not understand. I had expected China to be either as rural as a movie or as dark as in American accounts, so I was surprised to find Beijing neon even then, its streets a scatter of brilliant billboards and rainbow light displays on highway overpasses. The roads rippled out in rings around the city, as if a stone had been thrown into its center: second-ring, third-ring, fourth-ring roads. New decades will mean fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth. Beijing loves to count. Just like me.

  Xiao Wang took me to dinners with her cousins, her classmates, her husband’s colleagues, her mother’s old friends, and what seemed to me to be thousands of people. They all exchanged gifts with her, and to my chagrin, with me, even though I hadn’t brought any. Xiao Wang’s presents for them included Levi’s jeans, “I love NYC” T-shirts, and ceramic miniatures of the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and hilariously, the Eiffel Tower. Her friends presented me with oranges, cooking oil, a rubber moose, a poster of Whitney Houston from her Body Guard days, and a plate with a furry, marble-eyed cat between two layers of glass.

  “It’s for decorate the house with,” Xiao Wang explained later. I scolded her for not having warned me to bring gifts. She dug in her suitcase and came out with a stuffed penguin in a Central Park Zoo T-shirt.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “You can give to my mother when we arrive to Jinhong.”

  “Perfect.”

  On rides out to the Great Wall and Ming Tombs, I pressed my face to bus windows. Cotton-padded people filled the wide streets. Laundry waved out windows, surrendering to coal smoke. Traffic was flanked by a rush of bicycles, and everything seemed to me to be taking place on a screen, rather than in real time, just like Da Ge had described life in the United States. Grief is similar to being abroad. Everything’s changed, awkward, off, and unfamiliar. Of course the same thing can be said of falling in love.

  We went to Tiananmen on our last day in Beijing. Maybe we had waited out of fear—that his ghost would be there. Or that it wouldn’t. Xiao Wang stopped talking when the cement square came into view from the cab. My throat went tight, as if sealed off by pollution. I studied the guards in green before we got out and walked from corner to corner, saw the history museum, Mao’s mausoleum, the Martyrs’ Monument, the Great Hall of the People. I fought my feeling of surprise and disappointment. It was a place, not a person, not a time. I could sit there forever and he’d never show up again. Xiao Wang read Mao’s calligraphy from the Martyrs’ Monument, identified uprisings for me.

  “Maybe you even feel now you have Chinese history, too,” she said, kindly.

  I laughed. “My own Chinese history.”

  “Maybe Da Ge was teacher for you, too.”

  On the way back to the hotel, we walked by a market. Fish eyed me, and Julia Too kicked in my stomach like a many-legged sea monster herself. A vendor arrived pulling a rollerbag. When he opened it, six ducks came quacking out in a mad parade. I had an out-of-body experience, thought maybe we were in a Sesame Street episode.

  I needed grounding, told Xiao Wang I wanted to buy some vegetables.

  She disapproved. “We can’t eat it,” she said. “Must be cooked.”

  But I paid for some cilantro, only to put it on the nightstand back at the hotel. “I didn’t want to eat it,” I tried explaining. “I just wanted to buy it.”

  She clucked her tongue. “Wasting that!”

  “I wanted to buy the things Da Ge and his mother bought before she died,” I said. Before he died I did not say. Xiao Wang went into the bathroom and turned the water on.

  The next morning when Xiao Wang and I packed up to head to the airport for Jinhong, I put my cilantro, still reasonably fresh, in my purse.

  “Maybe I must teach your baby to be reasonable person,” she said, tucking Nai Nai’s urn under her arm.

  “Or maybe I’ll teach yours to be impulsive and unreasonable,” I said.

  She looked me over. “I like it if my baby learn from you. Even if she become like you, it’s okay for me.”

  “Thanks.” I pulled my roller bag out in the hotel hallway, crumpling our complimentary China Daily. Xiao Wang held up Nai Nai.

  “Time to go home,” she said. In English.

  Jinhong was the first Chinese city that had ever existed in the landscape of my imagination, before Beijing, even. It was the place Xiao Wang described at Embassy, and at dinner at her grandmother’s Chinatown place, home of the swimming Mekong, of palm trees and fruit trucks that spray papaya juice as they wind around mountain roads.

  “Usually we have the whole person. This ashes is unusual,” Xiao Wang told me on the drive to Nai Nai’s memorial. Her parents and husband Jin were silent.

  I was disoriented when we arrived, stumbled from the car into sunlight and a crowd of mourners. In a big, open room, shafts of white light divided the floor into rectangles and Nai Nai’s urn sat on a raised bed draped with red cloth, lilies, fruit, and three framed photographs of her: one young, one old, and one somewhere between, standing with her son, Xiao Wang’s father. He looked young and earnest in the photo, old and sad now, standing with his family. We mourners moved in a line, starting at the entran
ce, passing first the urn and then Xiao Wang’s family, exiting after having completed a full circle. Two old women were screaming with grief. Xiao Wang, her father, mother, and Jin shook each mourner’s hand and accepted red envelopes I guessed immediately must contain cash. Bewildered and nervous, I moved through the line, too.

  When I reached Xiao Wang, I whispered, “I don’t have a red envelope—I didn’t realize. I’m so sorry about Nai Nai. I should have brought—I can still—”

  “Calm down,” she said. She pulled me from the line. “Stand here. Be my family.”

  Xiao Wang’s mother was my mother reinterpreted, a burst of energy and chatter, force feeder, happy family-running hen. If she was grief-stricken over her mother-in-law’s American death, she nursed herself back to emotional health by taking care of Xiao Wang and me while Xiao Wang’s father watched her with a combination of amusement and sorrow. I wondered whether she reminded him of his mother. He was a quietly busy person, moving about the house in a precise and committed way, feeding the two birds they called Po and Bo, weeding in the garden, fixing the table a neighbor’s child had sat upon and broken. He wore glasses and drank tea from a jar. Her mother was noisily busy and clucked an endless list of questions about America, including what Xiao Wang had worn every day to my class, whether she’d eaten porridge for breakfast, why I’d allowed her to get so skinny, even pregnant, and why I wasn’t married. I said I was married, that my husband had been killed in a tragic accident, and Xiao Wang’s mother suggested I marry a new man; perhaps she could introduce a local one I might like. She asked how much money I made, only to exclaim over how little it was. She asked after my classes, my books, my haircut, my eyebrows, whether I wore long underwear, why not, why I whistled, how my skin stayed so white. She kept the conversation alive every minute of every day I spent there, bustling around, shoving bowls of “crossing the bridge” noodles into our hands every twenty minutes, stuffing moon dumplings with sesame paste, seeping tea, feeding us marrow soup, tucking us in. When I presented her with the stuffed penguin, she said she would call it Aysha. Xiao Wang barely stopped translating long enough to take breaths.

  In the late afternoon of my last day there, Xiao Wang and I took a walk alone and watched women with babies wrapped to their backs in brightly colored cloths.

  “Will you carry your baby like that?” I asked.

  “Of course I do!” she said, and then, as if sensing my desolation, she said, “I’ll send you some this cloth for New York. You can be like Chinese peasant woman at the Upper West Side.” Then she threw her head back and laughed. I’ve never seen her cover her mouth when she laughs in China; here she’s free.

  We sat on the bank of the Mekong, its water so dark brown it looked almost black, and Xiao Wang chattered uncharacteristically about how she was going to find a job as an environmental specialist and help China.

  We walked out onto a handmade bamboo bridge over the water. The planks shivered enough to make us catch our breath.

  “Tomorrow you will go home,” Xiao Wang pointed out. “That make me miss New York.” I thought of my new students at Embassy, who had only known me pregnant, who, if they knew anything of the year before, had said nothing. I thought of the courses I had signed up to finish that spring at Columbia. I reached my hand out and felt the breeze while my mind zoomed back to the city, which seemed now like a board game: Broadway, Amsterdam, campus, downtown, uptown. Plastic hotels and miniature skyscrapers. Students and classmates. I wondered what it would feel like to be pregnant at Columbia, whether I would mind. I wasn’t looking forward to anything.

  “I don’t miss New York,” I said. “I want to stay here, far away from everything.”

  “No, no,” she said. “You have your baby in America where your mama live and finish your teaching and your study. That’s the business you must do. I will stay here, and sometime we will see each other again.”

  The light changed, turning the fields and river from green and gray to black. Then the sun set and everything began to disappear. Xiao Wang and I walked back out ragged paths, chickens clucking and scattering as we went.

  The night Julia Too was born, there was a sliver of white moon over New York. I saw it above buildings on the way to St. Luke’s, and again from the window of a twelfth-floor labor and delivery room. It was the same moon Xiao Wang would see when Lili was born at midnight in China three months later. My mother, Julia One, and I breathed, sang, jumped, stretched, shouted and chewed ice chips. Long after the sun had taken over, we had our baby.

  My mother was bionic with excitement, taking pictures so graphic I almost can’t look at them myself, running through the hospital halls telling everyone 7 lbs 10 ounces, 21 inches, even though they were all having babies, too. When the nurses handed Julia Too to me, I realized immediately that she was a whole person—with eyelashes and toes and a personality. I had been expecting a vaguely defined cartoon character of some sort. But she was crisp and detailed. They waited before slicking her eyes with gelatinous antibiotic so we could see each other. We looked for eleven seconds, and I recognized her in a way so wordless it was as if I had fallen asleep and was dreaming. I wondered what she saw. I thought of my grandmother, her mother, and hers, our entire line having this identical experience, each unable to believe it wasn’t singular.

  “She’s fantastic,” said Julia One.

  “She looks just like him,” I said.

  “No. To me, she looks like you,” Julia One said.

  My mother had come back in. “She looks just like herself,” she said. “Give her here.”

  Once, when she was three, Julia Too described death to me.

  “Today I pretended you were dead!” she said when I picked her up at day care. “Because I was such a big, big girl that I didn’t need a mommy anymore. And Emma played that her daddy was dead, because she was such a big, big girl that she didn’t need a daddy.” She laughed.

  “No kidding,” I said, my voice impressively even. “But everyone needs mommies and daddies, even when they’re grown-ups. Do you remember who my mommy is?”

  She grinned, triumphant. “Nomi!” she said.

  “Yes!” I waited for what I thought was a calm interval. “So, Julia, what does it mean to be dead?”

  She said, “You just fall over. You fall right over!”

  “That sounds about right. What else?”

  She scrunched up her face. “You have no eyes and no mouth and no head,” she said. She began pointing at her limbs. “No arms and no legs, your body just goes away! And you stop having days.” She brushed her hands against each other as if she had just finished the task of putting away some blocks.

  “Where did you hear all those things about being dead?” I asked.

  “I learned them up in my mind.”

  “You know what, though? Even though you stop having days when you’re dead, all the people who love you still remember you.”

  She looked up at me. “Mommy?”

  I collected myself. “Yes?”

  “Did you bring me a purple Fruit Roll-up?”

  Sometimes I take inventory of the memories Da Ge didn’t get to have: Julia Too riding my restored yellow wooden giraffe through Riverside Park, toddling up to leaves, twigs, dogs, and strangers. He never saw the stretch of mornings that made up her babyhood, or lazed away New York afternoons in the sandbox when she was two. He never pulled on or off her plastic rain boots, the ones with butterflies on the toes, wiggly antennae preceding her into puddles. Those boots are in Da Ge’s backpack, but he never held her, never slipped off the leather crib slippers with “dad” tattoos on them, an unfortunate gift from my mother’s daft second cousin. He never smelled her bald head, washed the scrumptious creases in her neck, or cut grapes into eighths. He never counted her new, mini-teeth. I collected her and her things alone or with my mother at the ends of those days: diapers, bibs, spoons, rattles, pacifiers, balls, bears, ducks, dolls, and all the nouns in a baby’s collection. Later, sparkling wands, the black stuffed c
at she mysteriously named “Binderlutie,” plastic beads, water colors, ballet slippers, alphabet letters, cardboard books, rubber animals, little people, bright buses. He missed every texture, stopped having days just as Julia Too and I learned to make them.

  I pined for China. That gave me a measure of cool control; China was still possible even if he was not. I could always fly back to Xiao Wang and live the movie Ju Dou. Even though Xiao Wang had long since moved to Beijing, in my dreams were dusty village houses, bolts of silk unraveling from rafters. And Da Ge; we would find him and be three people. He and Julia Too would fly kites, ride bikes, scratch characters in the sand. She and I would come in from sunlight outside to find him cooking dinner.

  Two months before I graduated, I called Xiao Wang. “My business in America is finished,” I said in Chinese. I had been practicing that phrase like an Olympic athlete.

  She laughed, asked in English, “You like to visit me and Jin and Lili in Beijing?”

  “Can we please?”

  “Of course! For as long as you like. You are welcome forever, if you still like it.”

  It was Old Chen who picked us up at Capital Airport. He was so polished he shone like a lamp, nervous and sad and ecstatic, clutching a sign that read “Ai-sha and Zhu Lia!! Warmly Welcome Home to Beijing.”

  It was the second time I had ever seen him, three years after our encounter in New York. Julia Too was asleep when we came down the ramp, and Old Chen insisted on carrying her out to the car, leaving the luggage to his driver and me. On the way to the hotel he had arranged in case his courtyard house was too old-fashioned or uncomfortable, Old Chen told me shyly that he hoped even if we didn’t decide to live with him, that we’d come “home” for dumplings every Saturday.

  Sometimes in the early fall, when I’m walking though an outdoor market, I can hear Da Ge’s voice in the collected chatter. Sometimes I see teenagers on the street, nerdy with backpacks or rebellious with tattoos and earrings, and I smile. My Global Beijing students, with their often broken speaking and the earth’s most earnest essays, give him back to me, and so does the city.