by Fan Wu
Beautiful as Yesterday
ATRIA BOOKS
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Fan Wu
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wu, Fan.
Beautiful as yesterday / Fan Wu.—1st Atria Books hardcover ed.
p.cm.
I. Title.
PR9450.9.W76B43 2009
823'.92—dc22 2009002096
ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-0955-7
ISBN-10: 1-4391-0955-9(ebook)
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To the Eadys and John Joss for trust, wisdom, and friendship
Beautiful as Yesterday
Contents
IN THE YEAR 2000
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
IN THE YEAR 2001
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
IN THE YEAR 2000
ONE
November
IT’S A SUNNY DAY in California. The sky is a transparent blue. Occasionally a plane flies by, very high, tiny as a bird, dragging a straight white contrail. Somewhere in Mary Chang’s Sunnyvale neighborhood, a lawn mower hums, disturbing the otherwise quiet Saturday morning. Mary, standing in her backyard, arms akimbo, inhales deeply to take in the aroma of freshly cut grass, one of her favorite smells. Thirty-seven years old, she looks good for her age, with a petite but firm body under a pair of well-washed jeans and a blue sweatshirt with rolled-up sleeves—her usual gardening outfit—though fine wrinkles have begun to climb to her forehead and surround her eyes. She has large, beautiful eyes, almond-shaped, narrowed habitually when she is in thought, and if you saw her in this state of mind, you’d think she’s quite a pensive person while in fact she might just be wondering what to cook for dinner.
A man sneezes loudly inside the house. That’s her husband, Bob Chang, who is rushing to close the sliding window in his study. Medium-built, fair-skinned, with hair closely cut, wearing a pair of silver-rimmed glasses, he looks more like a doctor or a teacher than an engineer, which is what he is.
“Honey, could you shut the backyard door?” Bob shouts from inside.
“Didn’t you take your medicine today?” Mary says as she starts for the French doors, and after taking off her outdoor shoes and arranging them neatly beside the straw doormat, she steps inside the house, shutting the door behind her. “You know Richard always mows the lawn on Saturday mornings.” She washes her hands in the kitchen and gets a glass of water from the fridge dispenser, meeting Bob in the living room with a Claritin pill in his hand. Bob swallows the pill with the water and hands the glass back to her. “I have to go to the office to restore a corrupted database. I’ll have lunch with my co-workers.” His voice is apologetic. Since he joined a communications networking start-up with forty-plus employees one month ago, he’s been working often on weekends.
“But you worked until midnight yesterday.” Mary frowns and is about to complain. What about the afternoon walk in the community park he promised her earlier? But when she opens her mouth, the words that come out are “You need to look after your health. You don’t want to get burned out so soon.” What else can she say? She knows that working for a start-up is not just a job, it’s a lifestyle, as people in Silicon Valley like to say. Also, it was she who suggested that Bob join a start-up. But it’s not all her fault, she reasons. He was bored at Santa Clara University and wanted a challenge. It was his idea to go into the private sector. If she were to blame, it was because she suggested that he join a pre-IPO company—she had heard so many stories of people becoming millionaires overnight because of stock options.
“Pick up Alex on your way back then,” she adds as Bob plants a casual kiss on her lips. Alex is their only son, six years old. To help him learn Mandarin, they have hired a Chinese teacher, a student at De Anza College, sharing with a friend who has two children under ten. The teacher comes to their house every Wednesday evening; every Saturday she goes to their friend’s house in Mountain View, a few miles north. Earlier this morning, Mary dropped Alex at their friend’s house.
After seeing Bob off in the driveway, Mary returns to the backyard. This autumn has been unseasonably warm, and her flowers are lush, basking in the unfiltered sunlight. Along the fence, to the east, a row of camellias blooms; they were planted more than thirty years earlier by the house’s first owners, a family from Japan. The palm-size scarlet, pink, white, and yellow flowers attract bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds. Too bright and gaudily colorful these camellias are for Mary's taste but she has never considered getting rid of them; after all, they are the house’s real owners; besides, the plants form a nice hedge, offering privacy between her yard and the two-story pink house next door.
The star jasmines she grew in late summer in both side yards are thriving and in her mind’s eye, she can see their soft white flowers quivering in the spring breeze like tiny hands waving. They’re the type of plant she likes, leafy, small-flowered, a little subdued. Her favorites are clivias, however, and her fascination with them started six years ago, when she visited a flower show in San Francisco’s Japantown, around the time she and Bob bought their first home, a tiny two-bedroom condo in downtown San Jose, two blocks from San Jose State University.
She squats and tends the clivias in the shady area along the back of the house, loosening the soil, removing the weeds and wilted leaves, then watering the plants thoroughly. It is not flowering season yet for clivias; in another few months their orange or white flowers will blossom, wedged between the leaves like slightly parted lips. She strokes the wide and glittering leaves as if talking intimately with them—to her, even the leaves are pleasant to look at, elegant and graceful, reflecting the plant’s Latin name: Clivia miniata, which she had learned from a saleswoman at Spring Winds Garden, a local nursery where she bought all of her clivias. She likes even more the plant’s Chinese name, Junzi Lan, referring to its resemblance to a gentleman with noble appearance and virtue. A perfect translation, thinks Mary now.
A while ago, she wrote a friend in China who had studied horticulture in college, seeking advice on growing clivias. Instead of offering advice, the friend told her that the plants, though precious in China in the mid-eighties, when Mary had come to the United States—easily costing a month’s salary and commonly used to bribe officials who liked flowers—were no longer pricey. Even an average family could now afford to display them on their balconies. She suggested Mary grow rare orchids, saying that they were now in fashion and could also be a good investment. When Mary saw her friend’s reply, she laughed: why was everyone in China so prag
matic these days?
“You’ve been away from China too long. You’re out of date on what China is like,” the friend also wrote. Though Mary visits China every year for a week to see her mother, widowed eight years earlier, she has always been called by her friends there “a half-foreigner” or “a Chinese-American.” Thinking of her friends’ mockery, Mary shakes her head with a smile: well, whatever they say. But she admits they’re right that she wouldn’t be able to live in China anymore—she simply cannot image herself in a condo in a concrete high-rise, without immediate access to a garden. Her and her husband’s current Sunnyvale house, their second—with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a two-car garage, a yard of slightly over three thousand square feet—though standard in this neighborhood, would be a huge luxury in China.
Mary also cherishes their Sunnyvale house because they spent nearly a year having it renovated right after they moved in: the original dark green carpet in the hallways became maple floor; a double door replaced the single front door; recessed lights superseded the ugly fluorescent ceiling lights in the family room and living room; the master bathroom was enlarged and equipped with a Jacuzzi. She redesigned the kitchen herself, after having read stacks of Better Homes & Gardens, This Old House, and Dwell and borrowed ideas from friends’ houses, turning a dull and claustrophobic space into a spacious, open area with a black marble countertop, wooden cabinet doors, a large bay window, a skylight, and stainless-steel appliances. Though she and Bob have lived in this house for barely three years, she’s developed an attachment to it. Of course, now, since her mother might emigrate to the United States and live with them, it’d be nice to buy a house with an in-law unit so her own family can still have privacy. It’s only three weeks until her mother’s arrival: this time she’s staying for six months, the maximum stay her visitor’s visa allows, to see how she likes living here, living with them. Mary sinks into thought, fancying what kind of house she and Bob will get next. Then she remembers that she hasn’t eaten her breakfast. It’s almost ten now. Since Bob and Alex are not at home, she decides to fix herself a bowl of pidanzhou, “century egg” porridge, topped with green onion rings. Though Bob and Alex like Chinese food, they refuse to try this porridge. “Yuck!” Alex would cry out at the prospect. “Mommy is eating rotten eggs!”
No matter how exhausted or upset she is, whenever she enters the kitchen, Mary becomes joyful, like a thirsty person downing a glass of cold water. A skilled chef, she can cook various Chinese cuisines, her specialties being Sichuan, Shanghai, and Hunan. Her three best friends, Mingyi, Julia, and Yaya, who all go to the church she attends, nag her to cook for them when they crave certain dishes. Sometimes they bring ingredients to her house and make her cook them. She welcomes and even longs for these occasions: she likes to have her friends over, to chat, to gossip, to laugh, and since they are all from China, they converse in Mandarin, though each can also speak her hometown dialect. Some days, her friends come to help her in the garden, and afterward the four of them sit outside, at the teak table, chatting over tea and dessert Mary has prepared.
Mary met Mingyi at the Sunnyvale Chinese Christian Church two years ago, and they have been friends ever since. Yaya and Julia didn’t come to the church until last August. Mary sees them as a blessing from God. Since Alex started his Saturday Chinese class, the four of them have become accustomed to meeting at her house every Saturday for lunch. Bob has gotten used to their meetings and hangs out with his own friends that day, watching sports or playing golf (of course, these days, he might just as likely be working in his office). This week, however, Mary and her friends have had to cancel their rendezvous because Yaya is in China, Julia’s daughter, Sophie, is sick, and Mingyi needs to volunteer at a shelter for homeless people in East Palo Alto, a well-known troublesome area separate from the exclusive Palo Alto itself. Mingyi works as a manager in the human resources department at Intel, and after work she often volunteers. She lives close to Highway 101 in Menlo Park, next to a gas station where police cars are often seen patrolling. Just a few days ago the gas station was robbed by two armed men. But whenever Mary asks her to move to a better area, Mingyi just smiles, saying that she has become used to her community and has made friends with her neighbors.
As Mary cuts a semitransparent, greenish century egg into tiny cubes and throws them into the boiling rice soup, she recalls those happy luncheons with her friends, and their lively conversations. It’d be nice if she and Bob could talk like that. This thought makes her regret, once more, that Bob speaks so little Mandarin. Not his fault, of course. After all, he is a fifth-generation Chinese, whose ancestors came to the United States from Fujian Province in the late nineteenth century to build the California Central Railroad over the Sierra Nevada. Maybe she should be glad that he understands at least some Mandarin and can manage a few common greetings, she tells herself. Also, he was very supportive when she suggested they hire a private Chinese tutor for Alex one year ago.
“What do you talk about with Mingyi, Yaya, and Julia?” Bob once asked.
“Everything,” Mary said. “Husbands, kids, movies, books, cooking, gardening, shopping, work. Just…everything.” As she replied, she remembered a Chinese saying: three women together is a show. Unlike men, who seem incapable of sharing things intimately, women talk with each other about almost everything.
Afterward, Bob called Mary and her friends “The Gang of Four,” not knowing that this term, to Chinese, refers to a leftist political faction arrested in 1976, the year the Cultural Revolution ended, following the death of Mao Zedong. Mary once considered telling Bob about that period of China’s history, which she had experienced, when what Mao started as an anti–liberal bourgeois campaign turned violent, causing millions of people their lives. But what was the point? A person like Bob, who grew up in a well-to-do neighborhood in Los Angeles, wouldn’t be able to relate to it. And even she herself wanted to forget about that unpleasant time.
After finishing the porridge, Mary continues tending the clivias in the backyard, noticing now that the bark mulch she applied several weeks ago is thin around some plants, because of rain, wind, or animals like squirrels, cats, or raccoons. She saw raccoons in the yard the day before yesterday, an adult and two babies moving along the fence. Luckily they didn’t do any damage to the lawn and plants, but neighbors later complained about missing pond fish and destroyed plants in their vegetable garden. Mary walks to the white plastic shed hidden behind a Kentia palm tree in the other side yard and takes out a half bag of bark mulch. She spreads the mulch evenly, remembering that the tree man she talked with a while back had told her that the palm tree needed to be felled because it had grown dangerously tall and thin for trimming. And the street-facing fence has been infested with woods ants and should be replaced, according to a contractor. The gutters also requires a thorough cleaning now that winter is approaching. She sighs: having an old house does require a lot of work. Bob promised her that he’d take care of these matters, but with his crazy work schedule…Mary’s face darkens, and her large eyes narrow. A breeze brushes her face, and she breathes deeply, feeling the gentleness of a lovely late autumn day. “Things will get better. They always do,” she says to herself as she dumps the empty mulch bag into the recycle bin.
She calls the tree guy and the contractor to schedule appointments. As for the gutters, it seems easy enough for her and Bob to clean them themselves. She’ll have to talk with Bob tonight to decide on a time.
Mary met Bob the fourth year after she had come to the United States. She was a Ph.D. candidate in analytical chemistry at U.C. Berkeley, observing rows and rows of bottles and tubes in her lab most of her days and nights. After eight years studying chemistry, four for undergraduate and another four for graduate studies, she suddenly realized that she had neither the talent nor the passion to become like Madame Curie, her idol through college. But she was determined to complete the Ph.D. program, to be called “Doctor,” so that her years of hard study would pay off.
H
er adviser, an ambitious Russian with a heavy beard, bushy eyebrows, and coarse white hair, had his eye on the Nobel Prize. He was strict with her from the day she joined his team, and while he chatted and joked with his American students, asking them about their pastimes and even their romances, he grilled her and a few other Asian students only on their experiments and test results, as if Asian students knew nothing but how to work hard, a stereotype secretly shared by many professors in the department. After she failed in a few experiments, he warned her that should she not make significant progress she wouldn’t be able to pass her thesis defense coming up in a year.
Mary began to toil through her days in the lab. Her stress and exhaustion did little to help the experiments. She knew better than anyone else that she couldn’t afford to lose her scholarship, because she had already brought her younger sister to the United States. Ingrid was studying accounting at San Jose State University, an hour’s drive from Berkeley. Mary had paid most of her sister’s tuition with what she had saved from her scholarship and the little money she made from grading undergraduates’ papers. It was quite a financial stretch, but she faced it without complaining.
The pressure weighed her down, though, and sometimes she wished she could talk with her parents in China about her depressing situation. But what could she say to them? In their letters they only asked if she ate well or slept well or had enough to wear, and what they wrote about was so trivial: a colleague in her mother’s factory just had twins, her father’s working unit was organizing a study of Deng Xiaoping’s Collection, Old Wang’s hen died of plague, there were a lot more mosquitoes this summer than last year. When she read their letters, Mary would sigh, knowing that she would never be able to tell her parents the truth about her life in America. She could have talked with her sister about her worries—after all, Ingrid was her only family in the United States—but she refrained from doing so, fearing that her sister would refuse to take her money if she knew her situation.
