by Fan Wu
“My mother is arrive two weeks from now, you know. It’d be nice if we could go to the airport together,” she changed the topic. She realized the mistake in her sentence but ignored it.
“I’ll try. But it’s not for sure that I can take time off.”
Her face darkened. “It’s the first time she visit us. I’m not asking your whole day, just a few hours.”
“I said I’ll try.”
“And maybe we should talk about our plan of buying a house with an in-law unit. It doesn’t have to be big or in an expensive area.”
Bob linked his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea for her to live with us. I mean in the future, permanently.”
“But we agreed on that, don’t we?” Mary straightened up. “We said that for our next house we’ll buy a place with an in-law unit. Separate entrance for her and our privacy, separate kitchen too.”
“I know, I know. But how can we afford a house like that? If it’s decent, you’re talking about $750,000, if not more. In this economy, it’s not guaranteed that my company can swing its IPO. And some companies that have tried that haven’t been doing well at all. A few Wall Street analysts have predicted a recession.”
“We should be able to make a good profit from selling this house,” she muttered after a pause. “It’ll be at least another four or five years before my mother can immigrate to the U.S. anyway. We has time save more money.”
“Well, I just don’t think it’s a good idea that she live with us. But, of course, she can visit whenever she feels like it. Isn’t that better?”
That was why Bob had been unwilling to talk about this issue, she thought. “She getting old. It’s difficult for her to travel so long a distance. And she not in great health. I can’t let her live alone in China, don’t I?” Her mind throbbed momentarily as a headache came over her. She was almost angry that she had to speak English.
“Mary.” Bob put a hand on her arm, looking up at her. “I understand where you came from, but I’ve been thinking about it too. Your mother can’t speak English, can’t drive, doesn’t have friends. She’ll need us to be around all the time. On weekends, on holidays, we won’t be able to go anywhere unless we bring her with us. Even if she has a private kitchen, most likely she’ll have dinner with us every day. You know it’s true. Have you thought about all this?”
She avoided Bob’s eyes. “Do I has a choice? I don’t think Ingrid can take care of her. She in New York, single. She have no house. I’d be happy if she could support herself.”
“Of course you have a choice. Just look around. How many of our friends live with their parents or in-laws?” Bob’s voice was slightly impatient. “How many would have their parents or in-laws over for six months? Half a year is a long time, don’t you think? I understand that it means a lot to you to have your mother here, but it’s just too inconvenient for us. I have to use the computer in our bedroom. Just look at the mess in that corner! Books, CDs, power cables—”
“But it because we don’t have an in-law unit yet. If we did, you’d have your own study and my mother live in her own unit.”
“Don’t fool yourself. Even if we had a house like that, your mother would be over at our place most of the time.”
Mary wanted to say he was being selfish, but she knew what he said was true: he was the one who was making the compromise, the sacrifice. After all, his mother lived comfortably in a four-bedroom home in Florida. Yet she felt that Bob should have supported her decision to have her mother live with them, knowing that she, as the older child, was expected to take care of her according to Chinese custom.
Bob continued, “Also, our family life would be affected. For this six months, it’ll be hard for us to make love. I’d always feel there was a stranger living in the house, watching us.”
“A stranger?” Mary shook off Bob’s hand. “How can you say that? My mother a stranger? It is her first time visit us and you didn’t even help with clean the guest room.”
Bob didn’t answer, which made her regret instantly her harsh tone—it was uncharacteristic for her to speak this way. And he was right, it would be hard for them to make love with her mother in the next room. But the truth was that even now they hadn’t made love much—she hadn’t felt the desire and she doubted he had; many nights he fell asleep as soon as he got into bed. He was just using their lost opportunities for lovemaking to argue that her mother shouldn’t live with them. Though when they first got married they’d had a passionate sex life, it had faded soon, especially after Alex was born. Now, it had become like this: if he didn’t initiate, she wouldn’t ask.
For a while Mary listened to the wall clock ticking; it seemed to urge her to end the argument before she and Bob started quarreling more seriously.
Bob finally spoke: “We could rent an apartment somewhere for her. Or send her to a complex for seniors.”
She shook her head firmly. “No, definite not. It don’t sound right.”
“But we’re in the U.S. It’s common that parents and children live separately. Even in China, how often do you see three or four generations under the same roof in the city? Just the other day I read an article saying that young couples there prefer to live on their own.”
“Ziyang’s parents live with her and her husband for five years, and her husband never complain.” Ziyang was someone at Mary’s church, whom Bob knew too.
“He’s Chinese. I am not!”
She was startled by this reply and gazed at Bob’s face for a few seconds as if it suddenly looked different.
He seemed to regret what he’d said. He closed his eyes and sighed.
The unflattering ceiling light exposed the exhaustion on Bob’s pallid face, where the muscles hung a little loose on his cheeks and chin. Though he was only thirty-nine, his hairline was receding. Mary looked away from her husband to her own image in the closet mirror. In faded green pajamas, with her shapeless, permed hair, her flat chest, her bent neck, she looked plain and unattractive.
Plain and unattractive, as Mary lies on the bed in the master bedroom, mentally reviewing what happened last Friday between her and Bob, these two words pop up again and bother her like sand in the eye. She gets up and walks to the closet mirror, where she sees a young-looking and slim yet well-proportioned woman wearing a pair of tight jeans and a black V-neck sweater. Well, maybe a little plain, but definitely not unattractive, she says to herself. She turns to look at her profile: she doesn’t have a big chest or buttocks, but she’s curvy; not by a black woman’s standard but certainly by an Asian woman’s. Didn’t Julia once say that she wished she had Mary’s figure?
A sudden urge to prove something overtakes Mary. She fumbles in the closet and finds a blue silk qipao which she’d had tailor-made when she visited China three years ago. She wore it only once, at her company’s year-end party at the Hyatt in San Francisco, and it had won her a lot of admiration from her colleagues. She takes off her jeans and sweater and puts on the qipao. Sleeveless, high-collared, with white plum flowers embroidered along the bottom, it reaches her ankles and opens to the middle of her thighs on both sides. She studies herself from different angles with a sense of wonder. Then, with abrupt determination, she removes the qipao, then her bra and pantie. When was the last time she looked at herself naked? She doesn’t remember. Her skin is creamy and smooth, though there are several light stretch marks on her lower abdomen and upper thighs, thanks to childbearing. Her breasts, though not very big, are cone-shaped, fulsome, with dark brown nipples. Under her abdomen, her pubic hair seems a bit too long, too dense; it could use some trimming. She blushes, embarrassed by the thought. Do women actually do that, trim their pubic hair? she asks herself. Even the outspoken Yaya and Julia have never mentioned this. At this moment, she hears footsteps from outside. Startled, she quickly puts her jeans and sweater back on, thinking it might be Bob, who had gone to Dave and Buster’s in Milpitas for a friend’s birthday lunch. But it is only someone running
along the sidewalk outside.
Now, with the urge to assure herself that she’s still attractive gone, she sits on the bed, her thoughts going back to what Bob said on Friday night. Why was she surprised by his answer? she asks herself. Didn’t she always know that her husband was American-born and American-raised? Then she thinks that she should take him to China someday, so he won’t feel that it is completely alien. Once or twice, he had wanted to go along with her, but somehow it had never happened—he wasn’t insistent, perhaps because he feared meeting her parents, and she wasn’t enthusiastic, thinking of the poverty and backwardness in her hometown. They had honeymooned in Hawaii, then for vacation, other than visiting his parents in Florida every year, they took a cruise to Mexico and stayed one week in Paris. Since Alex was born, they haven’t traveled outside the United States.
It wouldn’t make any difference even if Bob had visited China. Mary shakes her head, realizing that there’s something wrong with her marriage. Just admit it, she thinks. She and Bob communicate and make love less and less. Yes, they rarely argue, they sleep in the same room, in the same bed, they grocery shop together occasionally, Bob still calls her “honey” now and then, and in their friends’ eyes, they are a good couple. But an unspeakable tension is there, hanging in every corner of the house like the sky on a rainy day: overcast, gray, heavy.
Maybe it’s just her own imagination. Everything is fine between them, she counters. She should focus on the good times they have had together, like their annual vacation to see his parents. She, Bob, and Alex walked on the white powder sand at Siesta Beach, sunset tinting the sky with soft pink and lilac; they tasted pies made from freshly squeezed key limes; they took a private yacht trip through the swamp infested with alligators. They had a lot of laughs, didn’t they? And she thought herself lucky to have Bob and Alex in her life, didn’t she? But those good times…how come they seem so far away? A rush of sorrow attacks her.
Her eyes move to two silver-framed photos on the wall facing the bed. In the left one, she is wearing a beaded ivory-colored lace wedding gown, her hair in a classic braided upswept style accented by a jeweled hair clip, a bouquet tied with a lavender ribbon in her hands. Sporting a tuxedo, Bob is standing behind her, embracing her waist with both hands, kissing her behind her ear. In the other picture, they are wearing traditional Chinese costumes: for her, a scarlet, high-necked qipao with golden silk piping and frog buttons; for him, a long silk magua printed with a pattern containing four Chinese characters: fu, lu, shou, and xi—fortune, wealth, longevity, and happiness. She is leaning against one end of a mahogany table, bending slightly to pour tea for him, while he is sitting at the other end, holding out his teacup, looking at her, smiling. They had this picture taken at a studio in Chinatown on their way back from City Hall, where they had just been issued their marriage certificate.
Maybe her mother’s pending arrival has exposed the hidden, unspoken crisis in their marriage, Mary speculates. Maintaining a lukewarm marriage isn’t that difficult, especially when you have kids. You go to work, you come home, you cook, you clean the house and tend the garden, you take care of the kids; little time is left for the couple themselves, and sex becomes an obligation, a burden, a nuisance. She suddenly remembers the idiom “seven-year itch.” How funny is it that the Chinese have the same expression! Is it true that most divorces happen after a couple has been married for seven years? She and Bob have passed that threshold; they have been married for almost ten years. Should she worry about their marriage? She throws another glance at the two wedding pictures on the wall.
Her cell phone rings: not the familiar ring tone of Bob or any of her close friends. She walks to the living room to pick up the phone, thinking it might be Alex’s Chinese teacher.
“Hi, Guo-Mei, long time no talk.” The man speaks Mandarin. Then he asks Mary to guess who he is; after she makes some futile guesses, he laughs.
“It’s Han Dong!”
“Han Dong!” She almost drops the phone, her heart racing. “Where are you calling from?”
“Berkeley. I’m here for a three-month business course. I now work for the international loan department at the Bank of China. I got your phone number from one of our college friends. I surprised you, didn’t I?”
“You surely did,” she says. She still cannot believe she’s speaking with Han Dong. Fourteen years have vanished since they’ve seen each other. Is it a dream? But that voice is undoubtedly his: confident, magnetic, vibrating, as she remembers it.
“Did you bring your wife and kid?” she asks.
“We divorced last year, and the boy is with his mother right now. She remarried not long ago, and her husband is a European. They live in a mansion in Guangzhou. How are your husband and kids?”
“My husband and I have been married for almost ten years. We only have one child, and his name is Alex. He’s six. He looks like his father.”
“Can he speak Mandarin?”
“A little bit, but he’s taking classes. His father doesn’t speak Mandarin, though. He was born in the U.S.”
“How’re your parents?”
“Actually, my father passed away eight years ago. My mother still lives in Nanyi, and she’s visiting the U.S. soon.”
“Sorry to hear about your father. He was quite a character. I still remember him in his jail warden’s uniform. I used to be very afraid of him, honestly. Remember our signal when I needed to visit you at home?”
She remembers: if her father was home, she’d hang her red scarf on the clothesline on the balcony, which Han Dong could see from downstairs so he wouldn’t come up.
They talk a little more and, before saying good-bye, agree to meet in Berkeley on a Saturday in December.
Han Dong’s phone call deprives Mary of any chance for peace of mind.
They had been classmates since middle school, even shared a desk for a few years. At the end of their first year in high school, he lent her Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, and though it took her many tries to get through the book, she fell in love with philosophy and decided to study it in college. One year later, when the time came for students to be separated into classes according to their intentions to study either arts and humanities or science and technology at college, her father told her that she had to go to the science and technology class.
“Philosophy?” he growled. “There’s no future for idealists in China or for people with abstract ideas. If you think differently from the people high above, you’ll be in deep trouble. I’ve known many people tortured and exiled because of what they said or wrote. I saw with my own eyes a philosopher jump from his fourth-story apartment, his brains spilling everywhere.” Her father’s Adam’s apple rolled violently as he spoke, like that of a fighting rooster.
“But the Cultural Revolution has ended,” she replied.
“It only ended four years ago. How do you know there won’t be another one?”
They were having dinner when their fight broke out. Her mother looked anxiously at her father, then at her, and put a roasted duck leg in her bowl. That night her father stormed into her room and ripped up the philosophy books Han Dong had lent her.
Her teachers tried to persuade her too. “Studying philosophy won’t get you anywhere!” they said. “Since the Industrial Revolution, you don’t hear people mention philosophers’ names. China is on its way to the Four Modernizations, and the most important projects are in agriculture, industry, science and technology, and national defense. Who has the leisure to discuss philosophy? Don’t you know the saying ‘You’ll succeed wherever you go if you’ve learned math, physics, and chemistry’? You’re the best student in the class. Look at your classmates who have good marks! They’ve all chosen science or technology. Most of the leaders in the central government in Beijing studied science or technology. If you choose philosophy, you won’t find a job after graduation. You don’t want to sell tea eggs on the street, do you?”
So she gave in and chose science. When it was time to pick a colleg
e major, she took her teachers’ advice and studied chemistry—a discipline, her teachers said, more becoming to girls than math and physics, which were too theoretical and abstract.
Han Dong, however, chose to study philosophy and attended the same college in Beijing that Mary did. They soon began to date, and he promised her that they would get married upon graduation.
But he was not the type for commitment. He was a poet—artsy, passionate, easily distracted by his emotions. Tall and slender, he had elegantly chiseled facial features. His hair, not too long, not too short, was parted to the left, with a few wayward tufts over his forehead, like his restless heart. When he was lost in thought, he looked cold and arrogant and was thus called Truculent Shelley, a nickname that had made him famous on campus. He was the center of attention wherever he went, and his readings always attracted a lot of girls. The more poems he wrote, the more pretty girls surrounded him, and at the beginning of their fourth college year he confessed to Mary that he had been secretly seeing a girl from the English Department. Mary was caught completely off guard by his cheating. She began to apply for overseas study: she swore she would leave China and never see him again.
Soon after she arrived in the United States, she assumed the English name Mary, a derivation from the last character of her Chinese name, Guo-Mei.
Mary paces the living room, reminded of the old intimacy she and Han Dong shared and the time when she was still living with her parents in their gray apartment. Her father had worked at the same jail since the 1970s, but by the time he died, in 1992, he hadn’t been promoted even once. Some of his friends suggested that he bribe the jail management, but their suggestions were invariably rejected.
