The Train to Lo Wu

by Jess Row

  When I was a child in Wuhan, during the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards that ruled our city split into factions and fought battles in the streets, with sticks and knives, with machine guns and hand grenades. In those years I learned many extraordinary things; one of them is that a small pistol can only be fired accurately from a few feet away. If I was able to get away from this man, and run, I was sure that he would miss. This is what was in my mind as we left the building and walked along Tenth Avenue, toward Fifty-second; as soon as we turned the corner, I thought, I would sprint away, zigzagging from side to side, to make it harder for him to aim.

  Can’t believe it, he said, as we walked. He seemed even smaller than he had inside, hunched over, darting glances up and down the street. His voice was almost tearful. Once I get out, that’s it, he said. Can’t ever come back to the Apple. Ronnie Francis, man, even I showed up after he was dead, his ghost would track me down and get me.

  I said nothing. My eyes were locked on the corner, estimating the number of steps it would take, and wondering whether I should simply run, or shove him aside first, to give myself an extra second or two.

  My name’s William, he said. My friends call me Willie. What’s your name, man?

  Liu, I said. My name is Liu.

  What the hell kind of a name is that? Loo? That’s a girl’s name, man. Like Lucinda, or Lulu, or something. No, I got a name for you. You’re from the Lucky Dragon, right? So you’re Mr. Lucky. You’re my luck, man.

  OK. Mr. Lucky, I said, barely hearing him.

  I got a bad feeling. He took a long, trembling breath, and wrapped his arms around his chest again, although it was a warm, humid night for October. I feel like I’m going to die, man, he said. I’m scared.

  You not going to die, I said. Everything fine. Soon the van come.

  Tell me a story, he said. Would you do that? Just to get my mind off it.

  We were twenty feet from the corner now, six or seven paces, and my body was tingling, sizzling, as if I’d jammed my finger into an electric socket. I was tempted to leap on him and wrestle the gun away, although I knew that that, more than anything, could easily get me killed. I clenched my fists so hard the nails tore my skin. I don’t know any stories, I said. I’m sorry.

  Come on! He was breathing so hard I thought he might have a heart attack. Everybody knows a story. Gimme a break, man!

  All right. I closed my eyes for a moment, and heard a string of Chinese words, out of nowhere; at first I didn’t recognize them at all. There was a fish, I said. A giant fish in the northern ocean. And it changed to a bird—a bird big as the whole sky. This bird flew to the Heaven Lake.

  William nodded vigorously. That’s cool, he said. I like it. The Heaven Lake. So where’s that? Where’s Heaven Lake?

  We had almost reached the corner, and the muscles in my legs were tensed to run; I felt as if I were walking on stilts. A taxi rounded the corner and sped up Tenth Avenue, and I turned to make sure it didn’t stop; and that’s when I saw the blue car, coming slowly down the street from the opposite direction. It was a Chevrolet, I think, and one door was painted a different color, as if it had been replaced. It was driving with its lights off. Two men were sitting in the front, and I could see their arms and chests in the glow of the streetlights, their faces hidden in shadow.

  Come on, man, William said to me. Heaven Lake! Don’t stop now.

  The car sped up and pulled alongside us, the driver’s door opening as it moved.

  Hey, Willie. Where you going, Willie?

  William stopped, and his mouth sagged open, like a child caught sneaking a piece of candy. He turned around, and I stepped away from him. I wanted to run, but my legs locked at the knees; instead, I folded my arms in front of my chest, as if that would protect me.

  Hey, William said, his voice cracking. Curt. It’s OK, man. I was just waiting for you.

  Curt stepped out of the car and stared over William’s shoulder at me. He was tall, dressed in a tan leather coat, and his eyes were the palest blue I’d ever seen, like a cat’s eyes. I squeezed my arms tight around my chest; my ribs felt ready to crack.

  This is Mr. Loo, William said. He’s going to get me a little loan. I’ll have it for Ronnie tomorrow. I swear.

  That true?

  I swallowed hard; my mouth tasted as if it were coated with dirt. I looked at Curt’s face, and his hands hanging open at his sides, and I thought, he’ll know. He’ll know if you’re lying. I shook my head slowly.

  Get in the car, Curt said to William.

  What? Why? I just said I was—

  Curt grabbed William’s wrist and bent his arm back, took his shirt by the collar, and swung him around, banging him against the side of the car. William turned his head and stared at me. Call the police! he shouted. Call the police! The rear door swung open, as if by magic, and Curt pushed him inside and slammed it. Then he turned to me, and took out his wallet. Charlie, he said. Hey. Charlie. Here’s fifty bucks. He threw the bills in front of him, and they scattered on the sidewalk like loose napkins, bits of trash. Everything’s OK, he said. Get down on the ground. Don’t look up. Please. You understand me?

  I understand, I said.

  Then get down there. And count to a hundred.

  I did what he said. I pressed my face to the sidewalk until the car rounded the corner, and then raised my head. There were no shouts, no sirens; only the echo of my own breathing. I stood up slowly, leaning forward, my hands on my knees. After a minute I broke into a run. I unlocked my bicycle and pedaled furiously away, taking a long, circling route. When I finally reached the Lucky Dragon I left the bicycle and chain at the back door.

  I am a teacher of philosophy. My gods, if I have gods, are ancient, dry-lipped men, who stay awake in the small hours worrying over the substitution of one word for another. Yi, for example, which means righteousness. Ren, which means benevolence: the love of a father for his children, the love of one man for all men. I speak of these things in my seminars, and often my young students, who are the same age that I was in 1982, say, there are no exceptions. Kant was right. Mencius was right. I look at them and I think of myself lying in bed in the International House that night, rolling over and over, the sheet coiled around me like a rope. There was a telephone next to my bed, and a white sticker on the side that said EMERGENCY CALL 911. I could see William’s face, twisted in pain, and then I thought of my father, and how the police nearly beat him to death in 1968, when he dared to report the murder of his friend. I think of these things, and I look at my students and say, No. It’s not our job to decide.

  In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says, In some cases there is no praise, but there is pardon, whenever someone does a wrong actionbecause of conditions that no one would endure. Sometimes I take great comfort from this. Not because I feel guilty for saving my own life. No, because I know there are people who would say that William deserved to suffer, and that I was brave, like an action hero. Even my own daughters, I think, would look at me with new admiration: as if I were like Schwarzenegger, who always rolls away from the cliff, or turns so that the knife strikes the other man instead. This is why I like the word pardon. A pardon is a little space, an opening, where the world stands back and leaves you alone. It is the door I walk through every day when I open my eyes.

  Here is my problem, again: I understand perfectly. But a pardon isn’t an explanation; it isn’t something to pass on to your children. A pardon is the opposite of a story.

  The CD is finished: its fourth repetition. The sun pours through my windows, and the water of the harbor has turned a bright blue-green, the color of laundry soap. It strikes me, now, how foolish I am to think this way. Another man would be able to say, this is what I’ve learned from my life. And he would include everything I haven’t: the woman named An Yi I met later that year in the International House cafeteria, and how we struggled for five years in New York while I finished my degree; how Mei-ling was born one night in the Columbia Presbyterian hospital during a driving r
ainstorm in June. How we came here, to Hong Kong, and how the cancer in An Yi’s breast took her and left me alone with two small children and a heart as hollow as a Buddhist’s wooden drum. I try to hold it all in my mind at once, and it slips away from me, like my shadow; as if I’d raised my hands to cup the light that falls across the floor.

  Where is Heaven Lake?

  In the ancient tale, it was the home of the Immortals; a place we humans could never reach. But this is what I think: in this world there are no more Immortals. We cross the oceans in a matter of hours; we talk to people thousands of miles away; we even visit the moon. So if Heaven Lake exists, it is wherever we are, right in front of us. Even here, in this strange city, where I so often wake up and wonder if I am still dreaming. And it may be that stories do not have to have endings we understand, any more than human lives do. Perhaps beginnings are enough.

  It is four o’clock. My daughters are on their way home; standing together in a crowded subway car, rolling up the sleeves of their uniforms, loosening their Peter Pan collars. Mei-ling is listening to her Walkman, and reading a fashion magazine; Mei-po pages quickly through a Japanese comic book she’s borrowed from a friend, the kind I won’t let her read. If my wife were alive, I would ask her: is this what it means to have children? To be able to see them so clearly, and never know what to say? I am not any kind of storyteller, but my daughters are coming to my door, in these precious last days, and I have to give them something. They come in, and let their heavy bags drop with a thud that shakes the apartment, and turn to see an old man standing with his arms open, and his mouth is open, as if he is about to sing.

  Notes

  “Revolutions”: The epigraph of this story is taken from an essay attributed to Bodhidharma, “The Twofold Entrance to the Tao,” translated by John C. H. Wu in The Golden Age of Zen. The line from the Great Dharani (shin-myo jang-gu dae-da-ra-ni) is taken from the daily liturgy of the Kwan Um School of Zen.

  “Heaven Lake”: The story of the fish turning into a bird is taken from the first sentence of the “Free and Easy Wandering” chapter of the Zhuangzi (Chuang-tzu), interpreted by the author.

  In writing “The American Girl,” I was aided greatly by two oral histories of the Cultural Revolution: Anne Aitken’s Enemies of the People and Feng Jicai’s Voices from the Whirl-wind. I would like to express my gratitude for their work.

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not have been possible without the support of the Yale-China Association and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who made it possible for me to live and work in Hong Kong from 1997 to 1999. Zen Master Dae Kwan (formerly Ven. Hyang Um Sunim) and the sangha of the Su Bong Zen Monastery provided invaluable support during my time there, as did, in different ways, David Bailey, Caroline Ross, Brian Seibert, Yonnie Kwok, Youru Wang, Mimi Ho, and Bill and Chenghui Watkins. Many thanks, also, to Charles Baxter, Nicholas Delbanco, Peter Ho Davies, and Reginald McKnight, and to Sean Norton, Jennifer Metsker, Aaron Matz, and Melanie Conroy-Goldman. Maybelle Hsueh and Christina Thompson provided vital editorial assistance. I’m deeply grateful to Elyse Cheney, my agent, who has worked tirelessly on my behalf, and Susan Kamil, my editor, who has an uncompromising eye and a fierce dedication to literature. My parents, Constance and Clark Row, have been as generous with their support and love as any parents could possibly be. Last, my greatest thanks go to my wife and best friend, Sonya Posmentier, who believed in these stories before I did.

  About the Author

  Jess Row taught English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 1997 to 1999, the two years immediately following the handover of Hong Kong to China. His stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2001 and 2003 and The Pushcart Prize XXVI, and he has received a Whiting Writers’ Award and a fellowship in fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and teaches at Montclair State University.

  THE TRAIN TO LO WU

  A Dial Press Trade Paperback Book

  Published by The Dial Press

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents

  either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used

  fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The stories in this collection originally appeared, in different form,

  in the following publications and anthologies: “Revolutions” in

  Green Mountains Review, “The Secrets of Bats” and “The Train to Lo

  Wu” in Ploughshares, “The American Girl” in Ontario Review, “The

  Ferry” in Threepenny Review, “For You” in Kyoto Journal, and

  “Heaven Lake” in Harvard Review.

  “The Secrets of Bats” appeared in The Best American Short Stories

  2001, and The Pushcart Prize XXVI: Best of the Small Presses. “Heaven

  Lake” appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2003.

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2005 by Jess Row

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 200456201

  The Dial Press and Dial Press Trade Paperbacks are registered

  trademarks of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a

  trademark of Random House, Inc.

  www.randomhouse.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-42339-9

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