Beautiful as Yesterday

by Fan Wu

  “Tingting also wanted to emigrate to Canada, but her parents didn’t allow her,” Bing’er says. “Her grandma even threatened her with suicide. She’s the only child in the family, poor thing. Whenever she writes me, she asks a lot of questions. Are white people nice, funny, or are they difficult to make friends with? Do white women shave their legs every day? Do white women wear sexy lingerie under normal clothes to work? Do white people often visit strip clubs? God knows where she has gotten all these ideas about white people.”

  Ingrid laughs: she has been asked similar questions by the people in her tour groups. “Aren’t you the old child?” she then asks, thinking of the one-child-per-family policy implemented in China in the past twenty years.

  “Lucky me, I have an older brother. He was born prematurely and was often ill when he was little, so my parents bribed the people in charge of the Planned Reproduction Work Unit and had the second child. They almost lost their hospital jobs for that. Both my parents are doctors.”

  “But you’re the young one. They probably worry about you more.”

  “My parents don’t like me much,” Bing’er says quickly, seemingly happy with the fact. “My brother is very good-looking. He’s tall and slim, has a fair complexion, a cute nose, thick eyelashes, and nicely curved lips, a perfect showcase of my parents’ best genes. I think he looks like a girl, but that’s just my opinion. But I have inherited the worst of my parents’ appearances, with my father’s dark skin and small eyes, and my mother’s flat nose and thick lips.” She opens her arms, as if to invite Ingrid to have a better look at her ordinary face. “Also, he went to college and is an engineer at a state-run railroad company. A lucrative job, you bet. I didn’t go to college, and for a while I roamed the streets, befriending ‘bad kids’—that’s what they were called—and learned how to smoke and play mah-jongg. My parents had told me many times that they wished they didn’t have a child like me.”

  “They were just saying that,” Ingrid says, feeling the need to console Bing’er.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m actually glad they don’t like me, I’m free to do what I want. I can support myself, that’s not a problem.” Bing’er shrugs. “When I was in China, I didn’t get along well with my brother and his wife, either; they were both living with my parents because they were saving to buy their own house. That woman has a small face, small eyes, small nose, small mouth, and small hands and feet—I am sure she has a small heart too, and a small mind. That makes a matched set. My brother had always been cold to me—of course, he too thought he was much better than I was. With his wife bad-mouthing me constantly, he had little to say to me. The day I moved to the government’s dorm, my sister-in-law persuaded my parents to remove the wall between my room and her and my brother’s bedroom, saying that she was planning to get pregnant and needed more space. So if I went home, I had to sleep on the living room sofa. Oh, I’ve got to tell you about my ear piercing. I got my ears pierced when I was in middle school. That evening my mother didn’t allow me to eat dinner and my father told me to sleep on the floor. My family was fascist.”

  Ingrid thinks of her own father, who was also very strict with her, and she was rebellious just like Bing’er. Though she’s a decade older than Bing’er, she feels close to her.

  “Don’t you miss your family at all?” Ingrid asks.

  “Hmm, no, at least not right now. Maybe later. Maybe never. Now, I only want to travel all over the world.” Bing’er strokes her chin with one hand and squints at Ingrid. “Do you write?”

  “Write what?”

  “I mean, are you a writer?”

  “What made you think so?”

  “I don’t know. You just look like someone who writes. Literature stuff.”

  “Maybe. I haven’t written much.”

  “So, you are a writer!”

  Ingrid shakes her head. “I don’t know about that. I’ve not been published yet. You know, in New York, there are lots of wannabe writers. All the big publishers are here. Greenwich Village, Chelsea, and SoHo are also here. Well, not many writers can afford to live there anymore, but they’re still nice places. And Columbia University is here too. It has a respected writing program.”

  “I like New York, but it’s too expensive. Even deli food is not cheap. I’m glad all these nice parks are at least free.”

  At last Bing’er talks about her new brush-and-ink paintings. “How do you like the idea of painting Chinese characters? You know, you translate them into English, while I draw them. I’m not talking about calligraphy; it’s more about telling a story. If you look at the Chinese character for crying, it looks like someone is crying, and the character for laughing looks like someone is laughing. The English words don’t have that effect. Also, just look at how much is embodied in Chinese characters! The characters for rape, wizard, envy, prostitute, and shrewd all have ‘female’ as part of them. Doesn’t that mean that women’s social and familial status was low in the old days? If they’re translated into English, they lose that kind of intrinsic culture. I’ve started to draw certain photographic characters: mu becomes different trees; shui, creeks or waterfalls; ma, galloping horses.” She pauses and bends to extract a thin stack of paper from her bag. “Look! Here are some ideas in sketches. Back in Canada, I have a few brush-and-ink paintings at home. They’re just experiments. I don’t know exactly how I’m going to draw Chinese characters right now. Later, I may have more ideas.”

  Ingrid studies the highly abstracted images. “Brilliant. Very creative. You should go to art school. You have talent.”

  “I’ve got to save money first.” Bing’er smiles. “Unless I can get a scholarship, which is unlikely. I’ve never had any formal training in drawing. Not even summer school. My parents thought drawing was a waste of time. And I want to travel for a while.” She pauses, giving Ingrid a trusting glance. “I do have some money. I made it with Tingting doing business in China, but I’m putting it aside for traveling. I like waiting on tables. I can leave when I please. There are so many Chinese restaurants in Toronto. I can always find jobs.”

  Bing’er checks her watch. “Jeez, I didn’t realize it was so late already. I’d better get going. Today is my last day here. I came to New York with a friend two days ago. She’ll pick me up at a bus stop on Forty-second Street.”

  They exchange e-mail addresses, and Ingrid invites Bing’er to stay with her next time she is in New York.

  Ingrid doesn’t go inside the library until the sun is behind the clouds and the air has cooled slightly: somehow, Bing’er’s drawings of Chinese characters linger in her mind. It has been a long while since she thought about the beauty of those ideographic characters.

  When Ingrid arrives home, it is almost dinnertime. Today is the day that Angelina is having a party. Though none of the guests is here yet—all are habitually unpunctual—the music of “Margarita”, is playing cheerfully on the stereo, with its accordion and saxophone duet. On the living room table Ingrid finds two trays of mixed finger foods: chicken drumsticks, triangle samosas, spring rolls, cheese, olives, pâté, and some tortilla chips. Angelina is making the salsa for the chips; she always makes it herself, saying that nothing from the store can beat her grandmother’s recipe.

  Ingrid sees a big Mexican flag nailed on the wall above the sofa: it looks brand new.

  “Did you just get another flag?” she asks as she walks into the kitchen, leaning against the counter watching Angelina prepare the salsa. Angelina has changed into a red Mexican dress embroidered heavily across the chest and along the hem, which she bought at the Cinco de Mayo Festival in California last year, and her hair is combed into two thick braids, with a pink carnation on either side.

  “Sí. Isn’t it pretty?”

  Angelina is a patriot. In addition to a Mexican map taking up two thirds of a wall in her room, she has a few Mexican national flags. One is placed in the bonsai pot Ingrid gave her as a birthday gift—Angelina claims to love plants. The bonsai’s leaves long ago turned yellow and
its roots have dried out. The plant’s lifelessness brings out the flag’s vivid colors, as if the flag had killed the bonsai.

  Though Angelina doesn’t like reading (she claims that she’s too busy “reading” men), she has an impressive collection of literature by Spanish-speaking writers, some first editions, hunted down from secondhand bookstores all over the United States and Mexico. More than five hundred books fill her three tall bookshelves, mainly in Spanish, some in English, some in other languages she can neither speak nor read. Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Camilo José Cela…both well-or little-known authors. Ingrid credits Angelina for her increasing interest in Latin American writers.

  On last year’s Mexican Independence Day, Angelina hung a big Mexican flag outside her window. The commotion it created on the street exceeded her expectations—she couldn’t have been more excited if she had been given a leading role in a Broadway show. As soon as it got dark, chaos ensued: small stones and paper balls were thrown at the flag, accompanied by expletives that American TV and radio would beep out. The indignant people included passersby in the mood for a prank; the most loyal American citizens, who couldn’t tolerate the sight of a flag that didn’t contain thirteen stripes and fifty stars; anarchists, who hated all national flags; and drunkards constantly looking for opportunities to spit and throw stones. An Irish bar sits two blocks down the street, so there is no shortage of drunkards in the neighborhood; some have developed a habit of peeing in the few half-dead boxwood bushes outside Ingrid’s building. When Ingrid comes home in the evening, she can sometimes hear them mumbling or humming while doing their business in the bushes.

  Seeing Angelina’s Mexican flag, these drunkards felt the need to express their political views.

  “Italian bastards, get the hell outta here!”

  “Ya go back to Africa! All of ya!”

  “Kiss my ass, Canada!”

  Ingrid was leaning against the window, wanting to peek at the people who didn’t recognize the Mexican national flag, when she heard a yell: “Down with Japan!”

  Their Korean landlord, Kim Choi, knocked on their door, asking Angelina to take down the flag. Having lived in the United States for more than two decades, Kim has transformed herself into a perfect hybrid, blending Korean industriousness, American practicality, and immigrant frugality, along with a deep fear of trouble. She is in her late forties and lives in the smallest apartment, on the first floor. Her face is big and round; her eyes, nose, and mouth squeeze together, making her face look like a spacious room with furniture crowded into the middle. She seldom smiles, though her comic face makes it impossible for her to look serious.

  Now Angelina tells Ingrid, “I got something for you too.” Seeding an avocado, Angelina motions with her chin toward the fridge. Ingrid sees a magnet of a Chinese national flag on its door. “Where did you get it?” she asks.

  “From that Chinese grocery store on Thirty-eighth Street. When I passed the store, I saw this magnet. What’s the meaning of the pattern?”

  Ingrid tells her: red stands for revolution, the big star circled by the four smaller ones signifies the gathering of the people under the leadership of the Communist Party. Each of the four smaller stars has a corner pointing at the big star, symbolizing unanimous assistance and support for the Party. She learned all this in primary school. As she talks, she remembers the first time she observed the national flag-raising ceremony at Tiananmen Square at dawn, in 1988, her first college year. Along with thousands of tourists, she watched the flag be raised by uniformed soldiers. As the national anthem was played, many people cried. Ingrid was one of them. Her tears glistened on her cheeks and glued her eyelashes together, and through her tears she saw the flag billowing like burning fire against the sky. At that moment, she was filled with the pride of being Chinese, of being born and raised in a country with a long history and tradition of civilization.

  “Hmm, good design.” Angelina nods. “I have no interest in politics or party membership. I love no political parties. It’s not like my love for Mexico, rooted in me even before I was born. That’s about the land and the culture. Oh, did you read the news today? Something about the Chinese national flag. The newspaper is on the sofa.”

  Ingrid opens The New York Times and finds the article Angelina referred to: a company specializing in Chinese immigrants’ affairs hung a Chinese national flag on the top of their building in Queens on the day of their opening. Within minutes a crowd of protesters had gathered, led by a Korean War veteran, demanding that the flag be taken down. The police intervened, and the company was ordered to remove the flag.

  “What are these people afraid of? It’s just a flag,” Angelina comments, chopping a tomato into small cubes. “Isn’t America supposed to be a free-speech country? I’ve never seen another country as fearful of Communism as the U.S. Fifty years ago, they were afraid. Now, they’re still afraid. Actually, is China a Communist country nowadays? I’m not sure about that. All the news about the economic boom and the new rich. And big American corporations setting up offices there. Well, if Chinese people shop at Wal-Mart, eat at McDonald’s, drink Coca-Cola, use IBM computers, and drive Toyota or Honda cars, they aren’t Communists to me.”

  “I don’t think people in China care much about politics these days. The economy is the key now,” Ingrid says. That’s the impression she has gotten from the media and the tourists from China. But isn’t it too arbitrary for her, someone who hasn’t lived in China for a decade, to make such a statement?

  “I think you’re right. Oh, I read the other day that Starbucks opened an outlet inside Beijing’s Forbidden City. China has to be very capitalistic to let this happen. It’s not even good coffee! Ingrid, if I were you, I’d go back to China and open a teahouse in the Forbidden City. It goes well with the temples.”

  “We’d have to ask Donald Trump to be our investor.”

  “You bet he’d jump onto the deal. Who doesn’t want to invest in China nowadays?” Angelina laughs, then says, “I saw Kim’s lover today.”

  “Are you serious? I’ve never seen any guys visiting her.” Ingrid is glad that Angelina changed the topic.

  “I knocked on her door this morning and was going to tell her about our party. A black woman with a thin neck and long legs opened the door. She was in Kim’s pajamas, and she said Kim went to buy breakfast. Pretty cool, huh?”

  Angelina often says that you can meet any kind of person and see anything in New York. She once talked about a homicide that took place not far from their apartment. She told the story as if it were from a novel, and with the same easy, calm tone, another time she described to Ingrid how she saw a middle-aged man in a white shirt and pink underwear jump from the roof of a spectacular house: his brains spilled all over the brick pavement and her shoes and dress—he had landed right in front of her.

  New York is the city that suits her best, Angelina sometimes remarks, leaving Ingrid to wonder which city tops her own list. Ingrid has lived in New York more than three years: not too long a time, and not too short, in her opinion. She always remembers how lonely and miserable she was in her dimly lit, scarcely furnished studio in Chinatown during her first Christmas in New York. She’d had a fight with her sister, broken up with Steven, given away all her belongings, and left California on a Greyhound bus. She had little money because she had just written a big check to her sister to pay off part of the debt she owed. She’d worked as a waitress and door-to-door salesgirl. Some days, after working twelve to thirteen hours, she arrived home exhausted, and the moment she threw herself onto the bed, her body seemed to be collapsing into a pile of loose bones and flesh, and trivial things like brushing her teeth and taking a shower were difficult tasks. If someone had pushed her off the top of the Empire State Building, she imagined, she would have fallen asleep before hitting the ground: that was how tired she was. She had never before liked sleeping so much, and nothing was better than lying spread-eagled in bed in her tiny roo
m, which she nicknamed Womb, where the windows and mirrors would fog up when she took a shower. Though she didn’t do menial jobs for long, she has made herself remember those days not with shame but with pride: all this she sees now as part of what she had to go through to become independent, physically, financially, and psychologically: thinking of the times when she depended on her sister’s money fills her with self-loathing.

  Their guests—six of them—arrive finally. Except for Molly Holiday, Ingrid’s friend, the rest are either Angelina’s colleagues from the theater or people she has met at a bar or in a club. They are mostly little-known actors, artists, or aspiring writers. The apartment is now noisy, vibrating with music, chatter, and the clinking of glasses. Angelina carries drinks between the kitchen and the living room, stepping gracefully around the legs of the guests sitting on the floor.

  Ingrid sits next to Zonta, listening to her talk about a religious dance she has just designed. Zonta, a petite American Indian, is a frequent visitor. She is a dancer and goes on tour with different troupes. She has played trivial roles in Cats, Miss Saigon, and a few other Broadway shows. But what interests her is to dance her own dance and create her own show. She once performed at Ingrid and Angelina’s apartment. Her long black hair was her most powerful and expressive weapon, generating endless metaphors: a sword, a horse whip, a tree, a river, lightning.

  “I’m going to cut my hair at the end of the performance as a sacrifice to God,” she announces to Ingrid and Molly.