by Jess Row
Thin, she thinks, but not too thin; he’s eaten the lentils I left in the refrigerator, used my sauce on his noodles. I should have written out recipes, and told him how to order the proper vegetables from the supermarket: all he knows to cook are things that will burn his insides away. She tilts her head so both eyes can see around the doorway. As he talks to Sunim he balances himself against his cane with both hands, like a picture of an old master leaning on his staff and talking to a frog. What a teacher he will be someday, to someone, she thinks. She closes her eyes. They are asleep again, his broad forearms locked around her waist, and in her dream a swallow veers above a golden wheatfield and lights on a fence post, preening in the morning sun. There are no swallows there, she thinks, not in midsummer. Tears spatter the rain-blackened pavement. She looks up to see him and he is gone.
Heaven Lake
My daughters are almost grown: sixteen and twelve. Mei-ling, the elder, makes her own cup of coffee, and twists her hair into a careless rope at the breakfast table; Mei-po, tall and slender as a rice shoot, carries a backpack that weighs thirty pounds, as if at any moment she could be summoned to climb Mount Everest. They move through the apartment beginning at dawn: I open my eyes to the sound of the shower running, bare heels knocking along the hallway, a burst of music, a door slammed shut. When I walk into the kitchen, their eyes slide from the table to the floor to the television without looking up. Zao, I say, morning, and they stiffen, as if I’ve dropped a glass, or scraped my nails against a chalkboard. Sometimes I imagine I’ve stumbled into an opera at the pause between the overture and the aria, and at any moment their voices will twine together in lament. Our father keeps us captive in his castle, I can hear them sing. Rescue us!
Of course there’s nothing wrong with them. They are sensitive, untouchable things—like butterflies that have just broken their cocoons. If their mother were alive, she would say, Let them be. Enjoy the silence. And perhaps I should. In the six years since she left this world I’ve learned to make French braids and instant noodles, and memorized the names of a hundred pop singers. I imagine I am the only teacher of comparative philosophy who has ever shaken hands with the Backstreet Boys. How hard can it be, after all that, to learn to be ignored? But when I sit next to them, bent over a cup of tea and the Ming Pao, and no one says a word, I have a feeling I can’t easily describe. It’s as if my heart has puffed up inside my chest like a balloon, and every beat presses against my ribs, like the thump of a muffled drum. It’s nothing, my doctor says, but he’s wrong. That beat is the sound of time passing. I stare down at my newspaper and think, No, it’s not so easy. Silence is not a luxury for me.
Look, Mei-ling tells her sister, flipping the pages of a fashion magazine. In July she will go to Paris, to finish her last year of high school at the American University there. She stabs a finger at a picture. It’s where all the models live, she says. In the fifth arrondissement.
Mei-po looks curiously over her shoulder. I thought you said Monaco, she says.
That’s for the winter. In the spring you have to be in Paris. Everyone knows that.
I raise my head. Don’t get any ideas, I say. You’re going there to study. Not to have men taking pictures of you.
I know that, she says. I know. Her eyes flicker across my face and she turns her head away. Old man, I hear her thinking, what more do you have to say to me? Tell me something I haven’t heard before.
And I have an answer for her, too. That’s the worst of it.
After they’ve left, in the pale morning light, I put on my favorite CD—Rostropovich, the Bach unaccompanied cello suites—and pace the floor in my socks, soundless. Outside my windows the March sun burns away the mist, and if I wanted to, I could look out all the way across Tolo Harbor to the eight peaks, the Eight Immortals, their broad green slopes dappled with cloud shadows. But I don’t. I’ve lived in Hong Kong for thirteen years, and it has always seemed unreal to me, so clean and bright, like a picture postcard some clever photographer has retouched. In my study there are stacks of papers to grade, books I should have read and reviewed months ago, but I have no concentration: the time slips through my fingers like water. I whisper my daughters’ names to the air and say, Listen. Listen to me.
When I was your age, I was just like you. I thought that everythingin my life had happened by accident. I decided that when I was old enough I’d go to the other side of the world. Everyone said that it was impossible, but I worked hard, and waited, and finally my chance came. And then—
And then?
Why should it be so difficult to explain?
In the fall of 1982, when I was nineteen, I went to New York City from Wuhan, China; I had won a government competition and received a special scholarship to study at Columbia University. It’s hard for me to imagine, now, how innocent I was. New York then was not like those television shows my daughters watch, where young people stroll the streets, laughing and making jokes. At that time muggings were so common that no one went outside unless they had to, even during the day. After sunset the shop owners pulled grates over their storefronts to keep robbers from breaking the windows; even in the dormitories we locked ourselves into our rooms three times over. On warm nights that September I stuck my head out my window in the International House and looked up and down Claremont Avenue, searching for a single person in the street. The buildings were as faceless as prisons. I knew New York was the biggest city in the world, that there were twelve million people hidden behind those walls, and yet I felt as if I had been locked in an isolation chamber. I thought, Either I’ll go insane in here or I’ll be killed by a madman on the street. How can anyone live this way?
The problem was that I had to make money. Even with my tuition and my books and my room paid for I didn’t have enough to eat three meals a day. Though it rained all through that first October, I couldn’t buy an umbrella, or new shoes to replace the ones I’d brought with me from home. I wore the same ragged suit to class every day, and the other students stared at me. I was humiliated. In China my family was not poor; my father had survived the Cultural Revolution, and had been reinstated to his post in the history department at Huizhong University. But then, of course, in China everyone wore the same clothes day after day, unless they were fabulously wealthy. There were many times that term when I looked out the windows of my classroom at the American students in their fashionable ragged shirts and jeans worn through at the knees, and wished I could go to the scholarship office and ask for a ticket back to Beijing, where at least they didn’t make promises they couldn’t keep.
But the answer was much closer at hand. One day on the bulletin board in the International House lobby I saw an index card of scribbled characters. Make Money Now Without A Work Visa. Just Call Wu, it said, and gave a telephone number.
You’re a student? he asked in Chinese, as soon as he heard my voice.
I live in the International House—
Come to Fifty-sixth and Broadway, he said. Look for the Lucky Dragon.
Yes—
He slammed down the phone.
The Lucky Dragon was a Chinese restaurant on a busy corner in midtown, with enormous dark windows that reflected the street. I stood on the sidewalk for a moment, trying to comb my hair with my fingers, and then cupped my hands to the glass. I was astonished. There were no Chinese there, only Americans, whites and blacks and Latins, eating on enormous American plates, with forks and knives, drinking cocktails and Coca-Cola. The woman at the register saw me and shouted something, and an enormously fat man came out of the kitchen and opened the door. He wore a white jacket that looked as if someone had vomited on it. Speak English? he barked at me in Mandarin, with a thick Cantonese accent.
Yes.
Do sums without an abacus?
Of course.
Ride a bicycle?
I burst out laughing, despite myself. Asking a person from China whether he can ride a bicycle is like asking a fish if he can swim. Only in Hong Kong do Chinese people ride bicycles fo
r exercise.
Good, Wu said. I’ll give you a map. The bicycle is down in the basement.
Uncle, I said, what will I be doing?
Chinese food delivery! he shouted at me in English, his eyes nearly popping out of his head. Twenty minutes or less! What did you think, Mr. Peking Duck?
At first I was always afraid. I studied the map that Wu gave me until I could reproduce every cross-street in my mind, so that I’d never have to stop, never ask directions. I rode with the heavy bicycle chain looped around my shoulder, the lock undone; if someone grabbed me from behind, I told myself, I would swing it around and strike. Another delivery boy showed me how to tie a white cloth across my forehead so I would look like the gongfu actor Bruce Lee. If someone tries to mug you, he said, just wave your arms and make a face and shout a lot. They’ll leave you alone. But really I knew I’d never have the courage to fight. I was a fast bicycle rider, and that was what I relied on. Each delivery was like a mission into enemy territory, and I returned at the edge of panic, whipping between delivery trucks and taxis, as if fox ghosts and ox demons pursued me.
For a month I worked this way, four nights a week; then I relaxed a little, and began to look around, reading the signs as I rode. Jake’s Deli. The Floral Arcade. Columbus Circle. The Sherry-Netherland. In the theater district I learned the network of alleys and side streets where the stage doors were, where men in black clothes snatched the bags and thrust wads of money into my hand: sometimes twenty dollars for a fifteen-dollar order, sometimes ten for thirteen fifty. On Central Park West, the doormen waved me inside impatiently, and old women living alone lectured me on staying warm and keeping safe. I interrupted arguments, let cats escape past my ankles, and held crying babies while their mothers counted out the last penny of their order, nothing extra.
The money was terrible—I know that now. But at the time it seemed like a fortune: enough for a winter coat and a pair of boots at Woolworth’s, and five shirts for fifty cents each at the Salvation Army. And when I glided into the alley behind the Lucky Dragon I felt very happy. To me it was a great adventure, the kind of thing I had never imagined in my parents’ apartment in Wuhan. Who would have thought that I would move freely and alone through the streets of New York City, speaking the language, handling the money, as if I belonged there, as if it was nothing extraordinary at all?
I wish that were the end of the story. I’d give anything for that.
At eleven o’clock on a Thursday night in late October, one last order came in from Tenth Avenue. Two bags of food, so heavy the kitchen boy grunted as he carried them out the door. I looked at the receipt—three orange chicken, two moo shu pork, six egg rolls—and raised my eyebrows when I came to the bottom. Forty-three dollars. Who had that kind of money to spend on Chinese food?
They said it’s a birthday party, Wu shouted at me from the doorway. He had a cleaver in one hand and a scalded chicken by the neck in the other; blood ran down the edge of the blade and dripped onto his shoes. Promised a big tip. Don’t worry.
I thought we didn’t deliver past Eighth Avenue at night.
If you don’t want it, anyone else will take it. Daak m’daak a?
Daak, I said. Fine. I pushed away from the curb carelessly, balancing on one pedal, as I’d seen the other delivery boys do. But when I passed the last lit bodega at the corner of Fifty-second and Ninth, I cursed my bravado. It was a neighborhood where the warehouses and garages didn’t even have windows, only blank walls and steel doors bolted shut. Most of the streetlights were broken: I sped from one small pool of light to the next, sometimes half a block away. When I turned onto Tenth I could feel the sweat pooling under my arms, on my chest, at the base of my throat. But here, at last, there was a light: a storefront, its windows covered with brown paper, glowing like a lantern at the Moon Festival. I checked the number: this was the place. There were no sounds coming from inside, but still, I was relieved. As long as the address was right—as long as no one stepped out of the shadows and brained me with a brick—the delivery was all right. By that time I had made hundreds of trips from the Lucky Dragon; perhaps I thought I was invincible.
The door opened a few inches when I knocked, and a face appeared in the crack: a nose, a thin mustache, and lips, the eyes hidden from view. Who is it?
You order Chinese food?
The face disappeared, and the door swung wide open. I took a step forward and all at once the lights switched off and two hands pushed me to the side; I dropped one of the bags and swung the other in front of me. It struck nothing, and flew from my fingers, and I heard it hit the floor with a heavy thud. The door slammed shut; I was sealed in darkness. The hands pushed me again, and my shoulders bumped against a wall. Hold still! the same voice said. I got a gun! Hold still!
OK! I said. OK! No problem! I put my hands up in the air. What you want?
Shut up for a second. A flashlight beam swept across the floor and into my face; I winced, and closed my eyes. Where’s the money?
I reached under my shirt and unbuckled the belt we used to carry change. I don’t see you, I said, holding it out. I don’t see you, you let me go, OK?
The light dropped from my face. I heard the pouch unzipping, coins tinkling on the floor. Fuck! he hissed. Fuck! This all you got? Ten bucks?
Delivery only carry ten.
Where’s your wallet?
I took it from my front pocket and held it out. I have nothing, I said. I am poor.
I heard it slap against the floor, on the other side of the room. My wallet, I thought. It was the first thing I had bought in America, at Krieger’s Stationery on 112th and Broadway—to keep my new student ID card and a copy of my visa, a picture of my parents and my brother and sister. The room smelled of spilled Chinese food: garlic and ginger and the too-sweet orange sauce that Americans liked. If I have to die, I thought, let it be here. Don’t let him take me away from my parents’ faces and the smell of my own food.
I don’t see you, I said, more loudly this time. I won’t say anything. You let me go.
There was no answer. I opened my eyes. The flashlight was lying on the floor, throwing a dim half-moon against the front wall. He was crouched down with his back to the door: a small, pale man, hardly bigger than me, wearing an open-neck shirt and black polyester pants, holding his head in his hands. Beside him, on the ground, was a tiny silver pistol, shining like a child’s toy.
You got to help me, Chinaman, he said, his voice muffled by his palms. I got ten minutes to get seventy bucks.
But I have no money.
Yeah, no shit, he said. You got friends? There’s a phone in the back. You got family here? Someone with a car?
All my family in China.
You sure? He dropped his hands and looked at me: a handsome face, I thought, thin and angular, except for a long pink scar descending from the corner of his mouth. You got no cousins in Chinatown? Aren’t you supposed to all be cousins? Chin, Chong, Wong, like that?
My name is Liu.
Shit. He gave a sudden, high-pitched laugh, like a small dog barking. My damn luck, he said. Me and the loneliest gook in New York.
Why you need this seventy buck?
He looked at me incredulously, as if I’d asked him why the sun went down at night. I got debts, man. Serious debts.
You don’t have job? Don’t make money?
Yeah, I got a job. I run the numbers. You know what that means?
I nodded, though I had no idea.
I work for Ronnie Francis, he said, as if it were a name that everyone knew, like Nixon, or Colonel Sanders. Ronnie don’t mess around. Last time I took a little extra off the top, this is what he did. He held up his hand in front of him, the fingers splayed. I squinted in the half-light, and saw that his little finger was a stump, cut off at the knuckle.
This time I’m dead, he said. Ronnie promised me. I only get one warning.
I can not help you, I said in my loudest, most American voice. I am only delivery man. I don’t come home, my roommat
e calls police.
He stared at me for a moment without speaking. Chinaman, he said, you don’t get it. Time the police get here we’ll both be gone.
I felt a tingling sensation rise from my toes, as if I’d just stepped into a freezing bath. I’m his ransom, I thought. I’m his way out. He’ll never let me go. And then I thought, give him something. He’s desperate—he’ll believe you.
Why stay here? I asked. You hide somewhere else.
He picked up the pistol and stood, wrapping his arms around his chest and shaking from side to side, as if he were freezing cold. Can’t, he said. Ronnie’s got spotters everywhere. I couldn’t even get a bus out of Port Authority.
I call my boss, I said. He find someone take you to New Jersey. Easy. You pay him later.
After I kidnap his delivery boy?
He don’t care about me, I said. Only about money. You tell him you pay one hundred dollars, he take you anywhere.
He didn’t answer, but walked to the window and peeled away a scrap of paper so that he could look out at the street.
Chinese delivery van, I said. No windows. No one see you. You want me to call?
I got a cousin in Newark, he said. His voice had grown raspy, as if something was swollen in his throat. My sister’s in Philly. He looked down at the tiny gun, and out the window again. Would you do that for me?
Give me the light, I said. He tossed it over. I picked my way to the back of the room, stepping over a pile of broken bricks, bat-ting cobwebs and loose wires from my face. The telephone was on the floor in one corner, connected to a raw copper wire. I squatted next to it, and dialed the only number I knew: the office of my department at Columbia. I covered the mouthpiece and spoke loudly in Chinese. Father, I said, using his proper name, I hope you can hear me. I am about to do a terrible thing. You must forgive me. And then I said yes a few times, hao, hao, to make it seem like an agreement, and slammed down the phone.
We walk around the corner, I said. I turned and saw my wallet lying against the wall, a few feet away; I picked it up and put it back in my pocket, my fingers trembling. Hide behind Dumpster, I said. He meet us there.
