The Cooked Seed: A Memoir
Page 32
It was my wedding day. I drove with Lauryann to Lloyd’s place at dawn. Lloyd was standing in front of his bathroom mirror, putting on his tie. I was the photographer. Lloyd said that he hadn’t slept well the night before. He’d had nightmares about his two failed marriages. I told him that I shared a similar fear. Neither of us wanted this to be another mistake.
For good luck, I wore a deep-red Chinese jacket. I dressed Lauryann in the same color. She would be our witness and sign our marriage certificate. She was excited about the ceremony.
Lloyd couldn’t get his tie straight. He tied it either too long, too short, too loose, or too tight. He stood in front of the mirror pulling at the tie and choking himself.
I tried not to laugh. It was 5:30 in the morning. We had decided to leave early to beat the traffic. We wanted to make sure that we were not late to our own wedding ceremony. We were going to the county offices to register and be married. Lloyd had a ring for me.
Finally, Lloyd was ready. He was wearing a deep-ocean-blue suit with a red tie. I looked at him and thought, What a lucky woman I am!
Lauryann asked, “Lloydee, why don’t you look happy? You are the groom. Today is your wedding day. You should smile.”
“Nothing is real until it happens,” Lloyd said. “Things can go wrong.”
At the last minute, I changed my mind about my hairstyle. I didn’t want it to look like the Egyptian Sphinx. I had used up a whole bottle of mousse to tame my hair. I heard Lloyd tell Lauryann, “Your mother has a photogenic face. She looks good no matter what hairstyle she wears. She is the sexiest lady alive!”
When we got into Lloyd’s car, I turned on the radio. The voice of Pavarotti sent my blood stirring. He was singing “Nessun Dorma” from Turandot. There couldn’t be a better omen, I thought.
The picture showed the three of us as a new family. Lloyd and I were now officially “man and his wife.” I liked the term “man and his wife” better than “man and woman” or “husband and wife.” I liked the feeling of being protected as “his wife.” Lloyd looked relaxed and comfortable. I loved his silver-gray curly hair. I had tears in my eyes when Lloyd said, “I do.” We both wept. It was hard not to. This was too good to be true. Lloyd whispered in my ear that he would die a happy man if he would have “a good twenty to twenty-five years” with me.
Lauryann looked like a china doll in the photo. She stood between us, beaming. The top of her head just reached Lloyd’s elbow. She had just finished placing her signature on our marriage certificate. For weeks she had practiced her cursive.
Lauryann insisted that she had missed the kiss. She demanded that we “do it again” in front of her. “I signed as a witness, and I must witness the act.”
Lloyd turned to me. His expression read, “I don’t think it’s proper.”
“Lauryann has been getting her way since she was two,” I said. “Once she was mad at my interviewers and she threw my phone in the toilet. She’s a spoiled American brat.”
“I am an expert in dealing with spoiled American brats,” Lloyd said. “You want to be a witness? Here you have it!” Striking a Rhett Butler pose, he pulled me toward him and pressed his mouth to mine and wouldn’t let go.
We heard Lauryann screaming, “Eeeew!”
“You’re grossed out!” Lloyd laughed. “You asked for it! You insisted! Yes, you did! Don’t you say it’s disgusting. That’s how I kiss!”
To punish Lloyd, Lauryann offered to teach him some “useful” Chinese phrases such as “good morning,” “apple,” and “please.” Lauryann picked these words knowing that he was tone-deaf. Lloyd ended up saying “Zao!” (good morning) in the fourth tone instead of the third, which turned the meaning into “Screw you!” His “Ping-guo” (apple) turned into “ass,” and his “Qing, Qing!” (please) became “Let’s kiss!” Imagine Lloyd doing this to a Chinese officer at the embassy:
Officer: Would you like a Chinese visa?
Lloyd: Let’s kiss.
The third photo was taken in China a few days later. There were four people in the frame: my father, my mother, Lloyd, and me. We had flown to China to see my parents, family, and relatives. We held a reception dinner at the old Jinjiang Hotel, where Nixon stayed in 1972. The place held a special meaning to me. As a teen I had stood a few hundred yards from the hotel with thousands of others and welcomed the American president. If anyone had told me that I would one day be married to an American, I would have never believed it.
My mother was so weak that she could barely walk, but she looked happy in the photo. She stood by her American son-in-law looking proud. Her left hand held on to Lloyd’s arm. She had been distressed over my divorcing Qigu. She knew the fate of a divorced woman in China. She was afraid that I had ruined my life as well as Lauryann’s. Joy overwhelmed her when she saw me come home with Lloyd.
My father was glad that I divorced Qigu. It had always troubled him that Qigu did not have a real job. I had to tell my father that Qigu worked as an artist. I warned Qigu about my father’s discontent and asked him to behave himself in front of my father. But Qigu could not stop being himself.
To smooth things over, Qigu offered my father a haircut during his first visit to America. The old man was to visit Chicago’s Adler Planetarium. My father regarded the opportunity as a great honor, the highlight in his career as an expert in the field of China’s astronomical education.
My father told Qigu exactly what he wanted done. “Just trim lightly.” He wanted to keep the foot-long strand of hair that covered his balding top.
Humming a happy tune, Qigu picked up the scissors. While his scissors danced, the old man waited excitedly.
It was too late when I tried to stop Qigu from playing with the foot-long strand. Qigu lifted its end up and murmured to himself, “To be or not to be? To cut or not to cut?”
Before I could say anything, Qigu’s scissors snipped.
I sucked in my breath as the foot-long strand fell to the floor.
When Qigu finished and I gave my father a mirror, his face froze. He tried hard to hold on to his composure. His eyes shut as if to wipe out what was happening.
After my father came out of the shower, he was beyond rage. “You have ruined my look!” he yelled hysterically at Qigu. “You failed to deliver what you promised! I look silly, ugly, and bald! How can I go out and face people? You know tomorrow is my big day! I want my old hair back!”
It was no use comforting the old man. “You did this on purpose!” he yelled at Qigu.
“What’s the big deal?” Qigu shrugged. “It’s a great cut. Many people shave their heads. It’s cool to look bald. If you don’t like it, that’s fine too. Hair grows back. There is no point acting like it is the end of the world.”
“It is the end of the world for my father,” I said to Qigu later. “He only gets one chance to meet with his fellow American planetarium people. You really shouldn’t have done this to him. He told you what he wanted. I warned you. You deliberately did this. Why?”
“Life is about being spontaneous,” Qigu said. “I was inspired by the moment. I felt creative. It was an experiment. That stupid strand looked silly on him. The more he tried to hide his baldness, the more it stood out. That strand of hair fooled nobody but himself.”
“I agree with you. However, it is important that my father feels good about his appearance. You should have let it be. It was his hair.”
“Too bad,” Qigu said. “There is nothing I can do if your old man has fixed his mind on making me his enemy.”
My father loved Lloyd the moment he learned that he had served in the US Marine Corps. “My favorite movie is Midway,” was the first thing my father said to Lloyd.
Lloyd responded, “That was the turning point in World War II—”
My father interrupted him. “The US beat the Japs!” He stuck up a thumb. “US Marines good … Japanese killed Chinese, my family … in 1937 … I was a child. Japanese soldier beheaded my cousin. They tied him on a post. I saw with my own eyes. They c
hopped his head, like this, off … That’s why I watch Midway.”
My family welcomed Lloyd, although there were inconveniences. For example, nobody could pronounce Lloyd’s name. I was asked to translate his name and make it pronounceable in Chinese. “Lloyd, Llo-y-d, like Lao-yet, which sounds in Chinese like Lao-ye, which means ‘Old Master.’ ”
“There is no way we are going to call him Old Master,” my uncles protested. “We must respect our status.”
“How are you going to address him, then?” I asked.
“Anything but Old Master,” my father said.
My family wanted to verify Lloyd’s mental state. My grandaunt worried that he might “apply force” and murder me and Lauryann by accident.
“He must have taken lives in Vietnam,” my granduncle said. “He couldn’t have avoided it, could he? He might have killed Chinese as well.”
“He might flip. Heaven forbid!” my uncle said. “He doesn’t understand Chinese, does he?”
“No, not at all,” I replied.
“Be very careful, Anchee. This man has blood on his hands! He is a trained killer. We want to see no tragedy. Think twice, Anchee.”
“It’s too late,” I said. “I already married him. You know why I am not afraid? Because I was trained to kill American soldiers too. We all were. According to your logic, he should be afraid of me too. ”
“Nonsense! Our guerrilla-style training does not count. Compared to American marines, we were apes living in caves. Anyway, we want you to pay attention to his unusual habits.”
“Like what?”
“Like eating meat cooked rare. It’s a sign of blood thirst.”
“Don’t worry, he is a vegan.”
“What’s a vegan?”
“He eats no meat.”
My granduncle screwed up his eyes, then nodded. “This makes sense to me.”
“Makes what sense?”
“He stopped eating meat because he is seeking redemption. Too much blood on his hands.”
Lloyd said on our wedding night, “I hope I don’t have flashbacks.”
I looked at him and replied, “I hope I don’t have flashbacks.”
The second night, I woke to the sound of Lloyd’s heavy breathing. He was kicking his feet with his eyes shut tight. His head jerked from side to side as if he were dodging blows. Because of the bright moonlight, I didn’t bother turning on the light.
“Lloyd! Lloyd, are you having a bad dream?”
The expression on his face terrified me. Lloyd opened his eyes and stared at me as if he didn’t know who I was. I could see him struggling to recognize me, but he could not. His eyes showed fear and horror.
“I am Anchee, your wife!”
The thought that Lloyd might be experiencing a flashback scared me. After all, I looked like a Vietcong.
“I am Anchee. I am your wife,” I repeated. “We are at home. Wake up, Lloyd!”
Instead of coming out of his trance, he rolled over to his side of the bed and reached under the mattress for the knife he had concealed there.
I had less than a second to react. I reached for the light. The sudden brightness jolted Lloyd from his spell. He recognized me. He was breathing heavily and was sweating.
“Were you fighting the Vietcong in your dreams?” I asked.
Lloyd didn’t reply. He got up and went into the bathroom. He was in the shower for a long time. The next day he moved the pistol he kept in a drawer to a high shelf in the closet. Later in the day, he apologized for disturbing my sleep.
I didn’t tell him that there were moments his high nose scared me.
Over the next ten years of our marriage, Lloyd experienced the occasional flashback. For example, he would tell me that someone was in our yard trying to harm us.
“It’s two A.M.!” I said. “What makes you think that someone is in our yard?”
“The crickets!”
“Crickets? What about the crickets?”
“They’ve stopped singing.”
Lloyd got up and picked up his .38 caliber Smith & Wesson. “Someone could be hiding in the bushes. I have to check.”
So began my husband’s two-in-the-morning house-patrol pattern. There was no way I could convince him that it was just his imagination.
We moved several times as Lloyd approached his retirement from teaching. We tried to find a home that fulfilled his security requirements. He preferred a dead-end street, with the property high up and fortress-like. Lloyd wanted to be able to set up a one-man defense. We eventually located a property in northern California near Mount Diablo with the features he had been looking for.
“Now there really is somebody in our yard every night.” I drew Lloyd’s attention to a family of deer presided over by a five-hundred-pound buck with antlers as tall as small trees. The deer ate everything I planted and anything green in sight. I didn’t need exercise because I had to go up and down the slope to chase them off. They uprooted my tomato plants and stripped the lawn. They sat next to my kitchen window, sunbathing. I was awestruck by their beauty, but I didn’t like them killing the trees when they chewed off the bark. The only thing they couldn’t destroy were the three-hundred-year-old oaks, the roosting place for a flock of wild turkeys. Thirty or forty of them flew in every day at dusk like soundless black helicopters. They alighted in the canopy of the oak trees and settled in for the night. Each dawn, the turkeys silently glided off from their high perch into the surrounding forest. It was an incredible sight. Wild turkeys were my natural alarm clock. Precisely at daybreak, both the males and the females started their courting songs. It was a magnificent orchestra, though unwelcome if one had gone to bed late.
Sometimes in the middle of the night we would wake up to the sounds of a battle, of someone thrashing around in the bushes. The male deer would be fighting each other in the yard. The engagement was intense and brutal. The loud slashing sound came from the deer as they crashed through the woods, the colliding sound from their antlers hitting. It was not unusual the next day to see a young buck strolling by with an antler missing.
I hired a fence company to build a six-foot-high fence around the property so that we could sleep. The deer now lived outside the fence, but the wild turkeys took their place almost immediately. They moved inside the fence and combed the slope, looking for worms. Squirrels dug for nuts along the side while the deer observed enviously from across the fence.
Lloyd built himself a bunkerlike basement office that faced the driveway and the street and from which he could see anyone coming onto the property through a small one-way window. He also built secret drawers where he hid his weapons. Locks were Lloyd’s favorite things, and he installed them everywhere. Each of our doors had three different types of locks. As time went by, Lloyd upgraded the locks. He got rid of doors and windows when he thought the locks were worn-out, too old-fashioned, or poorly designed. He replaced doors and windows with stronger lock designs. He followed the newest technology on locking devices. He would not hesitate to spend the money. He convinced himself that it was absolutely necessary for our security. I grew sick of getting locked out of the house all the time. The moment I stepped out to the yard or went to pick up the mail or simply went to get a breath of fresh air, Lloyd would lock the door behind me. He didn’t mind running up the stairs to reopen the door for me with an apologetic grin on his face. Eventually I started to carry a key when I left the house for any reason.
{ Chapter 33 }
“It’s a man’s world,” I had been telling Lauryann since she was in the cradle. “Being a girl is a disadvantage, but it doesn’t mean you’re destined for a sad life. Being an American girl means that you are entitled to reverse your ill fate.”
While we were visiting China, I could not prevent Lauryann from hearing the negative remarks about her “bad looks.” Her relatives, especially her grandma, Nai Nai, didn’t like her sun-kissed dark skin. “Why does Nai Nai wish that my skin was milky white?” Lauryann asked. She also told me that neighbors gathered a
round her and sang “The Sorry Kid from a Divorced Family,” which upset her. I had to tell her that people in China believed that a kid from a divorced family was “cracked porcelain.”
It made me feel fortunate that Lauryann did not live in China. A divorced family was not an issue in American society. Lauryann was proud of her natural olive-colored dark skin. It was considered attractive in America—some of her schoolmates even paid tanning salons to darken their fair skin.
When Lauryann was in Shanghai one summer, Nai Nai took Lauryann to be measured by the “height predictor.” The machine predicted that Lauryann would grow up to be a dwarf. Nai Nai was crushed. Lauryann’s height had always been her concern, because Nai Nai was less than four feet. Nai Nai feared that she had passed her “short gene” to Lauryann. She begged me to “beef up” Lauryann’s diet to help break the “curse.”
Believing that America was number one in the world in every aspect of life, I decided to change Lauryann’s diet to a high-protein one:
Monday – McDonald’s
Tuesday – Burger King
Wednesday – Kentucky Fried Chicken
Thursday – Domino’s Pizza
Friday – Jack in the Box
Saturday – Wendy’s or Fatburger
Sunday – Bagels, cheese, and ice cream
Lauryann developed plump cheeks and a double chin. It made Nai Nai happy. But I noticed that Lauryann was frequently tired and had to lie down. Her colds wouldn’t go away. Every time she had a fever, she had to be put on antibiotics or the fever wouldn’t come down. The intervals began to shorten between illnesses. Every two months she got sick enough to need antibiotics. What frightened me was that Lauryann seemed to fall ill again right after she had recovered.