by Fan Wu
She wouldn’t mind hopping from one gallery to another—there are many in this neighborhood—but she decides to roam on Market Street toward the Civic Center. All along the way are scattered demonstrators carrying signs and banners, saying things like “Bush is a thief,” “He is not my president,” “Where’s democracy?” and “Gore had half a million more votes. Gore won the election!” As she approaches the Civic Center, she sees that thousands of people have gathered in the plaza. An effigy of George Bush, at least fifteen feet tall, is visible from far away. At each intersection are uniformed and fully equipped policemen, including some on horseback; despite their formidable batons and riot gear, they look friendly and even greet passersby. They can be harsh to protesters should there be conflict, arresting them and charging them with disorderly conduct or other crimes, Ingrid knows, but there won’t be machine guns and tanks.
As she stands across from the Civic Center, she hears a loud, cheerful voice behind her. “Hi, I knew you’d come.”
She turns: it’s Matthew, pink-cheeked and short-breathed, his jacket askew and open. “I cut the meeting short. I went back to the café to look for you. You know what, I think I’ll write about the Montana widow anyway. But there won’t be any young, good-looking politician. Just a manipulative philistine priest.”
Before she can say anything, Matthew takes her by the arm and drags her across the street, into the crowd.
Not until Ingrid arrives home does she realize that she wants to see Matthew again. She’s both surprised and amused. Matthew has nothing in common with the men she used to see; he’s like a big boy, passionate yet reckless. And he cannot be called handsome. Or knowledgeable or artsy—at least he hasn’t demonstrated that side of him. Though she doesn’t know his exact age, it’s very likely that he is younger than she, perhaps barely thirty. She thinks of his dropping his change all over the floor in the café, tripping over a chair, his impatience in urging her to tell the modified story from Stendhal, his clumsy way of asking for her phone number, and later his dragging her across the street. Even just a few months ago, she wouldn’t have imagined herself being with someone like him. Glendive? Where is Glendive? She looks it up on the Internet and learns that it’s a tiny town, with fewer than five thousand people. She wasn’t completely wrong about his association with cowboys—there are rodeo competitions around that area every summer, not to mention that he grew up with horses and cows. Despite all these things, she felt relaxed and comfortable with him, a feeling she hasn’t experienced for a long time with men. Then she recalls his support of gay groups and wonders whether he is straight or gay.
It’s an April morning. Ingrid is driving her Volkswagen on Highway 680, with Bing’er in the front passenger seat and her mother in the back. They’re heading to Lake Tahoe: Ingrid has reserved a cabin in South Lake Tahoe for two nights. It’ll be a four-hour drive. Two weeks ago, her mother had expressed an interest in visiting casinos—not to gamble but to satisfy her curiosity. “All the people in my morning exercise group say that I must see them and play the slot machine,” she said to her two daughters. “They say that’ll bring me and our whole family good luck.”
“Ma, casinos aren’t temples, and slot machines aren’t gods.” Ingrid told her and laughed. But then she thought it was not a bad idea to take her mother to Lake Tahoe to see some shows and do a little sightseeing. Coincidently, Bing’er was visiting, so Ingrid decided that she’d take both of them; Bing’er could ski. Mary and Bob wouldn’t be able to make the trip because of a five-day retreat in Sonoma County organized by Mary’s church. There would be activities such as hiking, wine tasting, and horseback riding, as well as preaching and seminars about marriage, finances, child rearing, and other matters. Mary had invited their mother to go with them, but she didn’t want to.
At the end of March, her mother had told both Ingrid and Mary that she had decided not to emigrate to the United States. “I like living in China, and you can come to visit me. When Dongdong is recovered from asthma, he can come see me too,” she had said with resolve. Mary had cried that night, in front of Ingrid, after their mother went to bed.
This morning, Mary and Bob left early for Sonoma County, taking Alex with them. Ingrid could tell they’d both slept poorly; she heard them talking around one a.m., when she was getting ready for bed after reading Zweig’s Letter from an Unknown Woman. In the morning though, they looked normal; they even kissed on the lips swiftly before getting into the car. Ingrid hadn’t seen them kissing for a while.
Outside, the bougainvilleas clinging to the sound walls along the freeway are blooming, purple, crimson, or yellow. Now and then, slim, tall cypress trees, which help block the traffic sounds further, can be seen above the wall. There aren’t many cars on the road, so Ingrid sets the cruise control to seventy.
Bing’er is telling Ingrid’s mother about her aborted cross-country trip while munching on a tea egg Fenglan made this morning as breakfast. Back in March, toward the end of the second week of her road trip, Bing’er’s Jeep broke down in Colorado, not far from Rocky Mountain National Park. With more than 150,000 miles on the car already, it was not worthwhile to fix it, a mechanic told her. So she disposed of it and flew back to Canada.
Bing’er says that when she was in Texas, an old couple let her stay with them for two nights. They asked her if Chinese still wore Mao-style jackets and worried about her family being persecuted because she lived overseas.
“Didn’t they know that was the old times?” Fenglan says.
“I don’t think so. They probably haven’t watched TV or listened to the radio for years.”
“Don’t they read newspapers?”
“The newspapers they read probably don’t say much about China. But I really shouldn’t make fun of them. I made a ridiculous mistake myself in Mississippi. I thought there were still a lot of Ku Klux Klan members around, wearing white caps and hoods over their faces and long white robes. I always remember a movie called Mississippi Burning.”
“Who are these people?” Fenglan asks.
“Bad people, white supremacists.”
Obviously impressed by Bing’er’s solo adventure, Ingrid’s mother keeps asking questions.
Ingrid wants to join their conversation but cannot help thinking about her interview for a contracting research position with KQED last week. The San Francisco-based public broadcasting station is planning a documentary series called China in the New Millennium. Should she be hired, there would be a chance for her to travel with the camera crew to China, helping with interpreting, interviewing, and researching. Matthew Stein had heard of this opportunity from a friend and immediately informed Ingrid. Though the pay is not generous—the work is only two days a week—Ingrid hopes she can get the job. Of course, she would have to continue doing translation and interpretation to supplement her income.
It’s turned out that Matthew is straight, though he has more gay and lesbian friends and neighbors than anyone Ingrid has known. He lives in the Castro March. The day after the anti-Bush rally in January, he called and they dined at a Mexican restaurant in her neighborhood, eating tacos and drinking tequila. Since then, they have been seeing each other a few times a week. He’s a good chef and likes camping. So far, they’ve camped out three times, in Big Sur, Lassen Volcanic National Park, and Death Valley. Instead of a short stay in San Francisco for the sake of her mother, Ingrid now feels she’d like to live here longer: maybe KQED will hire her, maybe she and Matthew will get along well, who knows? Anyway, she called Angelina and her other friends in New York about her interview, and they wished her good luck and asked her to promise to visit them soon. As for the Italian student who’s subletting from Ingrid, she thrilled that she doesn’t have to move.
“Guo-Ying, don’t drive too fast,” her mother suddenly says.
“It’s only seventy.” Ingrid glances at the speedometer. “We’re in the slow lane. Look! The other cars are going much faster.”
“I drove eighty-five on some roads when I
was in Texas,” Bing’er says with pride.
“That’s probably why your Jeep broke down,” Ingrid teases.
“I thought it could at least reach Arizona, if not California. Well, I’ll have to do it again sometime. A friend is selling her car, a Honda hatchback, one hundred thousand miles on it. What do you think? You can put a lot of stuff into the trunk.”
“Are you becoming a nomad?” Ingrid smiles. “That sounds a lot of miles to me.”
“But she’s only asking eight hundred Canadian dollars. You know, Japanese cars run forever.”
“Well, maybe it’s a bargain.”
Ingrid’s cell phone rings. She puts on the headset. It’s Mary. “We just arrived,” she says. “The driving was smooth. Only a little over an hour. How’s Ma doing?”
Ingrid unplugs the headset and passes the phone to her mother. Her mother speaks with Mary first, then Dongdong, then Mary again. Mary then asks to speak with Ingrid, reminding her of safety.
“Ma, I think Guo-Mei is going through a midlife crisis,” Ingrid says to her mother in the rearview mirror with a naughty wink after shutting off her phone.
Before Ingrid hits Highway 80 to Sacramento, her mother has fallen asleep in the backseat; she has taken carsickness medicine, which makes her drowsy. Ingrid exits the freeway and stops at a gas station to put a blanket over her mother before continuing to drive.
“You’re very nice to your mother,” Bing’er says.
“When I was your age, I only wanted to be as far from my parents as possible. And the last thing I wanted was to go home.” Ingrid thinks of what Mary once said to her about her not wanting to go home: she had a different reason from her sister’s, but the result was the same.
“That sounds like me. I don’t want to go home at all.”
“The day will come when you’ll want to.”
“Maybe when I am down and out.” Bing’er extends her head outside the window, shaking it in the wind like a happy dog, her hair flying.
The radio, tuned to the National Public Radio station, is broadcasting the news about Slobodan Milosevic, former president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, who was arrested in his Belgrade apartment by Special Forces recently.
“His name was in the news all the time when I was growing up,” Bing’er says, looking puzzled. “My classmates and I nicknamed him Old Mi. I always thought he was a hero. How can he be charged with war crimes?”
“You don’t get the full story from the media. Not in China, nor in the U.S.”
“Which means that people will never know the truth.” Bing’er laughs. “Anyway, Old Mi is history now. My memory of him as Dear Old Mi is also history now.” She rummages in the backpack between her feet. “Politicians come and go, but artists don’t. Let’s play Bob Dylan. I have his CD here.” She finds the CD and inserts it into the player. The singer’s unique voice rises: a little hoarse, a little nasal, a little melancholy.
“I recently began to watch sitcoms,” Bing’er says. “It seems a good way to learn English, especially slangs. You don’t get those from news.”
Ingrid agrees, then says she watched a lot of sitcoms herself the first few years she was here. And she tried to memorize the whole Oxford American Dictionary. “I think I managed one hundred pages before giving up.”
“Wow, that would kill me fast,” Bing’er marvels. “Speaking of sitcoms, there are shows about Caucasians, about black people, but nothing about Asians.”
“TV producers don’t think Asians are funny, I guess.”
Bing’er grunts her disapproval but doesn’t say more. Then she changes the subject. “I don’t think I want to see Tom anymore.” She looks out the window. “Remember the boy I told you about a while back?”
“The American boy you met through language exchange? What happened? I thought you liked him?” Ingrid glances at Bing’er before looking back at the road. The traffic is getting a little busy. She presses the brake gently.
“Well, I’ve been thinking. He is doing his master’s in linguistics at the University of Toronto. I haven’t even been to college.”
“You’re a nine-headed bird. When did you start to worry so much? It doesn’t matter, does it? As long as you like each other. Also, you can always go to college in Canada. It’s not as difficult there as it is in China.”
“But the thing is…the thing is that I lied to him. I told him I had earned a bachelor’s degree in art.” Bing’er’s voice is dismal. “From the Central Art Academy in Beijing. I don’t know why I lied, somehow those words just slipped out of my month. I guess I did like him a little.”
“Cheer up! How can he check? You’re a good painter. That’s more important than having a degree. Look at me! I have a degree in accounting, but I wish I didn’t.”
“He surely can find out,” Bing’er mumbles. “Sooner or later. Then he’d call me a liar.”
“Then just tell him the truth and apologize.”
“There’s more, though.” Bing’er pauses. “Don’t laugh at me for being oversensitive if I tell you.”
Ingrid nods.
“One week ago I met his parents and spent a night in their house in Buffalo. They were kind to me. His father is some kind of boss at a computer company, his mother a housewife. After dinner, Tom went to the basement to do laundry—he had brought some of his dirty clothes from school. Since I’d spilled orange juice on my jacket and jeans during the dinner, he took them and threw them in the washer too. A few minutes later, his mother went to the basement and stopped the machine. It wasn’t until later that night that I realized she had washed my clothes in a separate load, and I overheard her saying to Tom’s father that she thought the clothes made in China were of poor quality and she didn’t want Tom’s clothes to get stained if the colors bled.”
“Did his father say anything?”
“Well, he just said a lot of things were made in China now and he wouldn’t worry about that.”
“Did you tell Tom that?”
“No, and I don’t plan to. What can he say about it? He loves his mother to death. Since that night, I haven’t seen him. I just told him I was busy and I was going to visit you. He has a paper due, so he’s overwhelmed right now. Anyway, better not to think about it. So, did you have a boyfriend when you were at college in China?”
“I did.”
“Why did you break up?”
“We didn’t.”
“Then what happened? Where is he?”
“I guess somehow we just couldn’t be together.”
“Sounds like a mystery novel.” Bing’er drums her fingers on the dashboard. “Well, I like Matthew.”
They are silent for a while, listening to Bob Dylan:
I’m drifting in and out of dreamless sleep
Throwing all my memories in a ditch so deep
Bing’er yawns and says she is sleepy—she woke up early this morning. If Ingrid doesn’t mind, Bing’er says, she’d like to take a nap. Bing’er puts on her thick jacket and soon falls asleep, her head against the window, her body shaking slightly because of the uneven road. Despite the sad nature of her earlier story, she has a carefree, hopeful expression on her face, like a baby in a cradle. Several times, Ingrid glances at her admiringly.
Ingrid drives through Sacramento on Interstate 80 and soon reaches Highway 50. She likes driving—it makes her feel free. The first day she got a car, during her second year at San Jose State, she took it out for a spin. It was a blue ’85 Ford two-door sedan, the paint on either side faded in so many places that the gray primer underneath showed through. She drove off the campus, up Interstate 80, all the way to Napa, in the wine country. As she drove by a winery, a full moon appeared from behind the clouds, illuminating the silhouettes of the distant mountains and the bushes nearby and spreading a silvery sheen on the road. She stopped the car and walked into the bushes nearby feeling the chilly air like a purifying energy, cleansing her blood and soul. If there were ever a moment in which she believed that God existed, it was then. The
sky, the moon, the mountains, and the quietness of the night seemed to be delivering a message from God about the truth of a life—to her, it was a new life in a new country.
With equal clearness, she remembers another moment when she embraced such a freedom, such an intimacy. It was in China, her sophomore year. She traveled with her boyfriend to Qinghai Province, to his hometown. His uncle, a truck driver, drove them around. For a long time, their truck cruised on the desertlike land, no people or houses in sight. They saw many deer and wild goats, as well as coyotes. These animals must not have learned to be afraid of humans. They watched them curiously, and it was not until they were very close that the animals trotted away; some even galloped along as if keeping them company. The sky was so blue that it seemed to have absorbed all the oceans in the world. One day they arrived at Qinghai Lake. The huge prairie around it extended all the way to the horizon. She and her boyfriend ran, jumped, sang, danced, rolled on the grass, hollered at the lake like animals.
Ingrid’s grip on the steering wheel tightens. She inhales deeply and straightens her back. To her amazement, it begins to snow. Though she knows it’s not uncommon for snow to fall in the Lake Tahoe area in April and has brought tire chains with her, she still cannot believe her eyes as she sees small white dots sailing toward her and landing on the windshield, melting as quickly as they hit. She turns on the windshield wipers. Soon the small dots become feathers, thick and threatening, pattering on the windows like raindrops. She’s barely passed Echo Summit on Highway 50 when she sees the “Chains required” sign. Cars have formed a line, going no more than fifteen miles an hour. She knows the checkpoint is ahead. She pulls off the roadway to the right, turns off the engine, and begins to install the chains—she has done it before. She overhears people talking about an unexpected storm hitting the area. “But it will clear soon,” an old man in a North Face down jacket assures a woman in a red parka, who looks anxious as she stands next to her car just ahead.
