Beautiful as Yesterday

by Fan Wu

  So where was she in Alice’s and her friends’ racial and social hierarchy? It amused Ingrid to speculate. Certainly below Caucasians and American-born Asians, and probably below American-born blacks and Hispanics as well, since she didn’t even speak good English or possess an American passport.

  But today, in Violet’s house, Alice was friendly and kind, without any of the old arrogance. Maybe divorcing and being a single mother had changed her, or maybe it was because Ingrid speaks English almost as well as she does, or because her whole family is benefiting from the economic boom in China. Or maybe it was simply because when Alice acted unkindly to her she had been merely an immature teenager.

  All this, of course, thinks Ingrid, matters little to her now; she doesn’t care how others see her, and she isn’t asking for acceptance. She turns onto Mission Street, passing a man holding a big sign that reads, “Culture contains the seed of resistance that blossoms into the flowers of liberation.” She smiles, pondering the depth of what she recognized as Amilcar Lopes Cabral’s words.

  Three days later, Ingrid moves to the studio on Eighteenth Street. She has little kitchenware, but that’s fine with her. She doesn’t like cooking. It’s convenient to eat out, sparing the hassle of doing dishes. She shops at grocery stores now and then, but only to buy fruit, juice, premixed salads, canned food, snacks, bread, and cheese. Occasionally she eats canned beans and boiled eggs for supper when those are the only foods in her kitchen. If she remembers, she makes sure that she has cheese in her fridge: when she first arrived in the United States, she couldn’t stand the smell of cheese; now, she’s addicted to it.

  Though she doesn’t want to invite her mother and Mary to her apartment, Ingrid knows she must. In her mind, she can hear Mary asking her skeptically when she and their mother can take a look at her apartment as soon as they meet. Of course, Mary won’t believe she actually has a place to stay in the city until she sees it with her own eyes. Ingrid can also see her sister cook a lot of food for her and put it in containers or Ziploc bags, and ask her to take them home.

  To prepare for their visit and, more important, to convince them that she has a good income, Ingrid has decided to furnish the studio with decent furniture, instead of cheap IKEA stuff; when she leaves, she’ll just sell it. She couldn’t have been luckier: the day she moved in, she spotted a liquidation sale notice on her building’s message board, advertising designer furniture including Aeron chairs, Noguchi tables, Tolomeo lamps, and Eames desks, the kind of furniture she likes but has often found too expensive. It was a small e-commerce company that had just announced bankruptcy. As Ingrid looked at the pieces of furniture, being sold at less than half their original prices, some of the employees were packing their belongings with grim faces. One young girl was shouting into her cell phone in a conference room clustered with computers and documents. “I know, I know, don’t act like a smart-ass! I don’t need you to tell me this right now. It wasn’t like this a year ago. I really thought I’d become a millionaire. We came so close!”

  The studio doesn’t look bad at all after being cleaned and furnished. Now, Ingrid wants to ship the furniture to New York when she leaves. She also bought a few nice flowerpots and has planted a Fire Dragon Japanese maple and New Zealand grass on the tiny balcony.

  It’s time for a family reunion, she says to herself, stretching comfortably as she stands on the balcony, looking up at the sky, which has just turned sunny. Of course, she’s been missing her mother, but strangely, she has to admit that she’s been looking forward to seeing Mary too.

  NINE

  December

  TELEGRAPH AVENUE HAD BEEN Mary’s favorite street in Berkeley when she was a student there. It swarmed with restaurants, bookstores, boutiques, bakeries and coffee shops, street vendors selling handmade crafts, jewelry, secondhand clothes, sunglasses, and cheap art. She used to like rambling from Bancroft Way to Dwight Way, checking out the various stores, enjoying the flowers and creeping vines, or just watching the eccentrically dressed people—there were many of them—and being amused by them. Basking in the street’s dynamics and diversity, she could easily look past the garbage at the corners and the graffiti on the walls and doors, imagining that she was in a fairy tale. Now, when she thinks of Berkeley, she thinks of Telegraph Avenue, its noise and bustle, rather than the campus and classrooms, which remind her of her unpleasant time as a graduate student in chemistry.

  She hasn’t been back to Berkeley much since she moved to the South Bay to work, but whenever she is in town she feels a surge of excitement and knows that she must visit Telegraph Avenue, order a cup of steaming espresso at a coffee shop, and sit under a low-hanging tree for a while, listening to a musician play jazz or rock music nearby. Despite her liking the street, where time seems to go by faster, she prefers to live in her South Bay suburb. One is like a midnight party going wild, the other a serene spring morning in an exquisite garden; yes, periodically she longs for a party, but most of the time she would rather smell her freshly cut lawn and feel the breeze.

  Before she came to the United States, Telegraph Avenue was what Mary had imagined the country would be like; now, after all these years, she still thinks it is for her one of the most representative images of the country.

  For their meeting, Han Dong has booked a table at Le Bateau Ivre, a French restaurant on Telegraph Avenue. Since they talked on the phone, Mary hasn’t forgotten him for a day. Though she informed Bob a week ago that she would be meeting an old classmate for lunch in Berkeley this Saturday and had canceled her usual Saturday get-together with Mingyi, Yaya, and Julia, she was occasionally desperate to find an excuse to call off her meeting with Han Dong. Even this morning, when she woke up at three a.m. she considered calling his hotel, leaving a message saying that Alex was sick and she had to take him to see a doctor; in fact, she wished that Alex would get sick, a light cold, a sore throat, for instance, nothing big, so she wouldn’t have to lie—she is never comfortable lying. But in the morning Alex was naughtier than ever, running the length of the house, then the backyard, nagging his grandma to play Ping-Pong with him on the dining room table.

  To kill time, Mary cleaned the kitchen though there was nothing to clean and swept the backyard patio though only the day before she had washed it with the hose. At ten a.m., as if being put under a spell, she rushed to the hallway bathroom to get ready. She was anxious when she came out of the bathroom, afraid that she had put on too much makeup. But when she said good-bye to her mother and Alex, neither commented on her face. Bob was on a conference call with a co-worker in India in their bedroom. As she walked in, he only glanced at her and, with one hand covering the phone, said that she must have slept well because she looked refreshed. Then he returned to his call.

  Mary parks her car at Sather Gate Garage, where she usually parks when she visits this neighborhood. She remains in her seat for a while, praying to God not to let her lose her conscience and good sense, asking for His forgiveness for skipping choir practice. Almost reluctantly, she takes a bottle of Hugo Boss’s Deep Red from her black leather Prada handbag, both purchased at Saks Fifth Avenue a week ago, inspired by a recent issue of Vogue. She sprays the perfume around her neck, behind her ears, and on her wrists a few times, then checks herself in the rearview mirror. Her hair, dyed recently at a salon called Fantasia, recommended by a co-worker, shines with a copper gleam in the soft sunlight. Before she walked into the salon that day, the color she had decided on was a more aggressive dark red, but as soon as she sat in the chair, she changed her mind. Her face looks pale and her lips a little dull, so she outlines her lips with a strawberry shade, fills them in with a plum color, and dabs a light bronzer on her cheeks. As she is doing all this, she is careful and focused, yet without enthusiasm, as if she were being forced into it.

  Standing outside the restaurant, Mary wonders if she should go in. Several teenage boys carrying skating boards dash in her direction; to avoid being smacked, she steps forward, presenting herself right at the entranc
e. Without consciously willing it, she opens the door and enters. She spots him right away, sitting at a window table, a glass of red wine and a basket of bread in front of him. He is looking out the window at a long-haired white girl in a pink, low-cut top, a denim miniskirt, and a pair of knee-high cowboy boots. She saw the girl earlier, when she was standing on the street, but didn’t pay attention to her. Now she does. The girl is leaning against a lamppost, smoking, an imitation mink coat hanging over her left arm. It’s chilly, but she doesn’t seem to care, sucking on her cigarette greedily. She is perhaps in her early twenties. She isn’t pretty, is wearing too much makeup, but she has an ample bosom, curvy hips, and long legs. Now and then, she smiles at the passing men who look at her.

  Mary feels a pang of envy. Young, tall, sexy, audacious, free—all the words that can be used to describe this girl have nothing to do with her, Mary Chang. But how ridiculous is her envy? She soon laughs at herself. That girl might well be a prostitute, while she, Mary Chang, is a highly educated statistician who works for a Fortune 500 company. Why compare herself with a slut? If it wasn’t for Han Dong looking at the girl, she wouldn’t have bothered to glance at her. At the same time, she snorts disdainfully: well, Han Dong is the same person he was before, easily attracted to women.

  It is not until she calls out his name that he looks away hurriedly from the window as if waking from a daydream.

  “Hi, Mei,” he addresses Mary as he did when they were lovers. “You’ve not changed the slightest bit, still young and pretty.” He seems sincere with his praise. He stands, circles to the other side of the table to pull out the chair for her, and as she sits, he pushes it in slightly to make sure that she will be comfortable. Then he returns to his own chair. Though he always behaved like an old-fashioned British gentleman when they were dating, she is still impressed by his natural, smooth movements. His well-practiced Western manners, she imagines, must have won him many women’s hearts all these years. Even Bob, her husband, born and raised in the United States, had begun to ignore all this etiquette soon after they got married, and nowadays he doesn’t even remember to open the car door for her.

  “I wish you were right,” Mary says. “But I must say, you look successful.” She shakes his hand across the table, and when she withdraws her hand, his thumb strokes the back of it slightly. She blushes, but he looks normal, as if it were an accident.

  The waiter arrives, and Mary orders a glass of house white wine.

  Han Dong looks different from the way she remembered him. His face, once thin and angular, is now smooth, even a little chubby. He has no wrinkles, either around his eyes or on his forehead, and his hair has been styled carefully; those locks that once dangled over his forehead like a bird’s wings, which once enchanted her, are gone. His facial features are still delicate, with a sensitive mouth and thoughtful eyes, though those eyes seem as if they belong to a seasoned businessman rather than a restless poet, the man he used to be. He has applied cologne, which she imagines to be Acqua di Gio by Armani—she once smelled a sample of it at Macy’s when she was Christmas shopping for Bob. She liked the smell but didn’t buy the cologne because Bob didn’t use any. She recalls how Han Dong used to talk about Giorgio Armani with passion, calling him a poet who wrote his poems with fabrics, when no one else among their friends had heard of him, when he himself couldn’t even afford to buy a pair of made-in-Shanghai leather shoes. That was in the early eighties, when people would be happy if they could eat meat every meal or wear unpatched clothes.

  “Successful or not, it’s hard to say, but after all these years I certainly have seen what I should see and have heard what I should hear.” There is panache in Han Dong’s demeanor. “I know how to survive, that much is true. No more bookishness in me now, for one good thing. Confucius, Taoism, Nietzsche, Aristotle, Spinoza, Thoreau—they all belong to history, my history. I’m not ashamed. You know, it’s just that you can’t live on the stuff called philosophy. Among my college classmates, after graduation, only one entered graduate school and eventually got a Ph.D. in philosophy. The rest of us went to work at banks, in the government, or for private companies. And you know what? Last year, that classmate of mine who got his Ph.D. in philosophy quit his college teaching job and is now running a model-training studio. You’ve got to be either a genius or a fool to study philosophy. Your father was wise to make you study science. Good that you listened to him.”

  “So I guess you don’t write poems anymore,” she says.

  “Poems?” He shakes his head and chuckles. “No. I haven’t written a line for years. Poetry is for little boys and girls. Who’s got time to write or read poetry, after all? Everyone is busy making money, and even so-called serious writers must include some sex in their books or no one will buy them.”

  “But you were very good.”

  “Nah, I wasn’t good. I don’t care about poetry anymore, so it doesn’t matter, really. Let’s talk about you instead. How’s your life in this free country? You must have had a few houses. Driving a BMW or a Mercedes-Benz? Are you a big boss at work? How much do you make?”

  His questions offend her, but she knows that Chinese people always ask these competitive questions when they meet their friends; there is no such thing as privacy. “Oh, I’m doing just okay, not too rich, not too poor,” she offers diplomatically.

  He smiles shrewdly. “Sorry, I forgot that you’re now an A-meri-can. Okay, I won’t ask you about your financial condition, or your religious or political views; so, relax.” He picks up a slice of bread and butters it, then takes a small bite.

  Mary finds herself watching his slender and agile fingers: they used to slide through her hair, seeming to be speaking to her. She quickly moves her eyes away from them and asks, “How’s your work?”

  “Working for a state bank is the same as working at a normal state-run company. It’s like eating chicken wings: it’s a waste to throw them away, yet if you eat them there is little meat. But really, I can’t complain. I’m a director in the loan department and have quite a bit of power. Almost every day I receive dinner invitations. People buy me gifts all the time. If I don’t make a mistake, I shouldn’t have any problem becoming a branch director in two years. I don’t want to go higher than that. Visibility means risk. If you get high enough, you can’t avoid politics, which is all about building connections with government officials. Those officials are always fighting for power or something else. If I weren’t connected with the right people, my career…” He lifts his hand and makes a gesture of cutting his throat.

  The man she once loved has turned into a bureaucrat, she thinks. Meanwhile she feels relieved, convinced that nothing will happen between them today: He is now a stranger to her, and all her trepidations were unnecessary. She straightens her back and sips her wine, looking briefly out the window, then puts down her glass and takes a piece of bread.

  The waiter returns. Both order Caesar salads and, for the main course, he asks for grilled chicken breast and she vegetarian penne pasta.

  Han Dong taps the table lightly with his fingers, as if trying to find something to say. Mary cannot help but glance again at those fingers.

  “China today is different from what you were familiar with,” he finally says.

  “Well, I try to keep myself up-to-date by reading newspapers or watching TV, and I go back once a year to visit my mother. Also, some of my friends go to China often, and they share with me what they’ve seen.”

  Han Dong laughs. “Mei, that’s just not enough. I live in China and still I sometimes have no idea what’s happening. Haven’t you heard the song ‘It’s not that I don’t understand but the world is just changing too fast’? That’s how I feel. You must follow your instincts. If there is a big opportunity somewhere, you must catch it and take advantage of it; if you can’t find any, you don’t just sit and wait; you take a detour and find your way around. Who knows, maybe you’ll get lucky. Believe me, there is always a way around. Being honest and conscientious doesn’t get you any
where.”

  “But you don’t want to break the law and go to jail,” Mary blurts out.

  “Law? Jail?” Han Dong shakes his head as if finding her comments ridiculous. “I believe in shortcuts and believe that you have to find ways to take care of yourself. These days, the word I hate the most is serious. Our generation lost big in believing the Party’s ideology education. When we were little, the Party said it was most honorable to be factory workers and peasants, but the current reality is that many state-run companies have gone bankrupt and a lot of workers have been forced out of employment. As for peasants, they live at the bottom of the society and are looked down upon. Nowadays, there’s even a cursing phrase ‘So peasant!’ The Party also said that soldiers were the most lovable people, and I used to dream of being enlisted, but now only people who cannot get into college join the army, and after demobilization they would be happy if they end up being a company’s security guard or a rich person’s bodyguard. Then it was said that knowledge is power, but take a look at wealthy businesspeople in Guangdong and other coastal cities. How many of them have even finished high school? Now their money has made them famous and respectable while intellectuals struggle to make ends meet. And also look at some of the business gurus in Hong Kong, who started their fortunes from gambling and the porn business. They’re the biggest philanthropists and the government’s best friends. Wonderful, isn’t it? This world is changing faster than you can ever imagine, and if you can’t ride the tide, you’ll live in misery. The only thing real is money. Power is about money too. Look at those billionaires in mainland China. How many can you name who don’t have kinship with a top-level official in Beijing? If you’re a prostitute, people won’t laugh at you, but if you’re poor, people will. That’s the reality.”

  She stares at his cynical face and feels sympathy: he must have stomached a lot of complaints that he cannot voice to any of his friends in China.