She led me out, and when her teacher called good-bye, she responded coolly without a backward glance. She had even been an aloof baby, seeming to not need comfort, crying only in extreme situations—the opposite of her older sister, Emily, who had squalled at the smallest dampness in her diaper and like clockwork a few minutes before her scheduled feedings. Emily, who was silly and loud and the captain of every ragtag child army she formed.
In the car, Stephanie sat on the floor of the backseat.
“Stephanie, please sit on the seat.”
“No.” Her voice lacked defiance; her answer was simply a statement of fact: No, it was not negotiable.
“I can’t drive if you don’t sit in your seat.” I felt as if I were in an enclosed tank of water, gasping for the final sliver of air at the top. I had almost nothing left. “Lin Yi Qing,” I spat. “Sit in your seat.” She pretended to not notice that I’d used my “serious” voice. She sighed and stayed a moment longer, then clambered onto the seat and I shut the door.
I clenched the steering wheel. Shouting was no use. My mother firmly believed that personalities were inborn, and you could know a child by her first few months. Stephanie had been born at Alta Bates, her tiny wrist strapped with a plastic band that read BABY GIRL LIN. Even now, when I told Stephanie I loved her, she would only look at me. Wei was much more tolerant of it—perhaps he felt a kinship with her because of their close resemblance. I held my patience most of the time. Today, it rankled me.
“I’m very upset with you,” I finally said. I watched her through the rearview mirror.
She looked up and asked earnestly, “Why, Mama?”
“Because when I ask you to do something, it is for your own safety. The rules aren’t arbitrary.”
She frowned. “What’s ‘arbitrary’?”
“It means that I don’t just make them up. I have good reasons. Besides, you’re just a child. A good daughter listens to her mother.” The words were like sand in my mouth. The rules were arbitrary. I was exasperated, as if she had forced me to this lie.
She kneeled on the seat and stared out the window for a moment. “Okay, Mama. I understand,” she said finally. I felt an impulse to thank her, but bit my lip. I wanted her to feel the sternness of my silence, so I did not speak until we had arrived home.
—
That night, Wei asked about the pictures. “I thought you were going to pick them up today.” He was in the doorway of the den. He rarely stood: his muscles were always half tensed, anticipating movement, like some sort of crouched cat sighting prey. Was he halfway in the room or halfway out? The lamp on the desk glowed; the room was a mess of stacked books and heaps of papers atop the thrift store desk and the frayed Oriental rug. Beyond him, a streetlamp illuminated the road and the park. Along the palisade of trees at the far side of the park, unseen, men curled in sleeping bags atop tarps, their arms woven through the straps of their backpacks.
Upstairs, the girls were asleep. I’d checked on them just minutes before: Emily’s leg protruded from her nightgown. Sweat sheened across her forehead. Stephanie’s thumb fell from her mouth, the indent from her teeth still glistening. My heart had seized with awe; I still had not gotten over the idea that they were my children.
I squatted in front of the television, clicking through the channels looking for Johnny Carson. The alternating hiss and chatter of the changing stations camouflaged the long pause as I decided how to answer. I didn’t have the energy for the discussion that was sure to follow. I would tell him, I promised myself, on a day when we had the space for it.
“I went by, but the kid had ruined them somehow. He told me to come back.”
“Did he let you have the ruined set? What did he do with them? Were they all ruined?”
“I didn’t ask.” The knob slipped off and I carefully positioned it back into the groove and turned it again. Dolly Parton was going to be on Carson.
“You should have checked. I can’t believe—” He stopped. “It’s probably fine but you should have checked. Just in case.” He cracked his knuckles. “It’s probably fine.” I sensed him casting around for a relief from his worry. He yawned theatrically. “School’s barely started and I’m already sick of it.”
“Go to bed, honey.”
“Already they’re asking about the midterm.”
My hand paused on the knob and I looked at him. “You’ll feel better if you sleep.”
“I’ll have to grade all weekend. You sound like you’re trying to get rid of me.”
“I just want to watch a little TV. I’ll be up in a bit.”
The grating enthusiasm of a late-night mattress-king commercial filled the room, a glue for the moment in which we both decided not to acknowledge what we were ignoring. The jumping light made me blink; my pupils felt strained.
“I have an early class,” he reminded me.
“I’ll be quiet.”
I waited until I heard him through the upstairs floorboards before I settled onto the sofa. The TV murmured; the studio audience occasionally clattered into applause. I could just tell him. I could just hand the card to him. Would he trust me more or less? We could construct stories together, shield ourselves with fiction. Together, we would feint. Wei could make up the stories that I would tell. And when the events we created did not come to pass, we would cry that we had been misinformed.
No, he wouldn’t understand; every decision, starting from getting out of the car, had been wrong. He would tell me so in ten different ways.
My purse was on a chair in the kitchen. I found the card. I ran my finger along the thick paper edge and flicked it with my nail.
My father had sat at his own table and, with my pen and paper, had written a letter to his friend. That was deceit too. Fiction. And cooperation had not freed or protected him. When the water cried in the kettle, I had not been able to move. I’d watched my father sign the letter, all the weight of the gesture dragging down his face. Every burdened cell.
Not fate. Free will. Malleable. Choices burned to ash, new lives shooting up from the devastation. Wasn’t that why I had come to California?
I turned on the stove and watched the blue flames erupt one by one out of the burner. They hissed. I touched the corner of the card to the fire and the paper lit up. The edges curled, blackened, quickly eaten. When the heat seared my fingers, I dropped it in the sink.
31
IN THE MORNING, I had Nineteenth-Century American Literature and a James Joyce seminar back-to-back. I was one year away from finishing my degree in English literature. I laughed when I thought about it. I had come to the United States with a smattering of English, and soon I would have a bachelor’s degree.
I’d been told that America was the land of equality, where the garbageman had as much value as the president, but status had a place here too, which I discovered as the wife of a professor. Among the other faculty wives, I was the only one who had been a waitress. At faculty gatherings, I felt naked, my ignorance exposed and compounded by my frustrations with English.
“I love the delicacy of Asian women,” one wife commented to me. “So petite, so graceful.” Self-conscious with the language, I could only nod and smile while I railed against her silently in a string of words that were anything but delicate. Cow! Tell me next how my culture has given me the skills to be an amazing house cleaner. An obedient wife. Ask me how many of my friends were prostitutes for GIs. They were kind—too kind—as if I were helpless as a bald little newborn mole and they had to show how careful they could be with me, a testament to their generous and socially liberal natures.
I had to learn to speak. In the early days, though I had some rudimentary understanding from my lessons in Taiwan, learning the language was like puzzling out a code. I’d sit with my dictionary and piece it out. I learned roots and imagined histories extending down from each word. I marveled that I could understand individual words, but putting them together in a sentence would transform the meaning of all of them. And when Emily started schoo
l, she brought home more words for me. And culture too, through the jump-rope chants and gruesome urban legends that are perpetuated in each generation as if they are recent creations. From her, I learned rhyme and pun and even double entendre, which made her laugh though she clearly had no idea what they meant.
“Miss Susie had a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell,” Emily sang. “Miss Susie went to heaven, the steamboat went to…Hello, operator, please give me number nine. And if you disconnect me, I’ll kick you from…Behind the ’frigerator, there was a piece of glass. Miss Susie fell upon it, and broke her little…Ask me no more questions, tell me no more lies. Miss Susie told me all this, the day before she…”
Emily stopped when she noticed I was both crying and laughing. She giggled. “Mom, what’s so funny?”
I tried to catch my breath and wiped my face. “It’s a funny song, darling. I’m not laughing at you. Go on.”
Her laugh sounded like a bark of surprise. “You’re silly, Mommy!” And then she fell into a fit of giggles too and continued the song.
After my seminar, I went and found Wei in his office hours. It was still early in the semester, and the halls were recently waxed and empty.
He had arranged his desk to face the door. Visitors squinted into the light of the window behind him while he sat in a halo. The books on the Steelcase shelves lay on their back covers, or up on their spines, no reason to their arrangement. Some weighted down stacks of unclaimed final exams. He had one hand thrust up in his hair and, with the other, tapped his chin with a pencil. He wore corduroys in neutral tones and some sort of thin sweater every day. This was his idea of a professorial uniform.
I felt a tightening from my throat to my chest. I knocked on the open door. “Professor Lin? I brought lunch.”
He looked up and smiled. “Happy anniversary. I’ve been told this is our bronze anniversary. I hope you brought a sculpture.”
We had married before falling in love, and I had made conscious note of all the subsequent moments. The night, six months in, when we brought home mangoes from the city and sex turned deeper than lust. The rainy day when he held an umbrella over me and taught me ai ai gasa, the Japanese term for lovers sharing an umbrella.
“No sculptures, just leftovers.” I unpacked the mustard-colored Tupperware and peeled off the sunburst lids.
“How was class?” he asked.
“Good. I’m the oldest one in there. No one talks to me.” I unwrapped chopsticks from their paper towel sheath and set them carefully across one of the bowls. He watched absentmindedly.
“They probably think you are a graduate student.”
I shrugged. “Maybe. Come on, eat.”
For the first year, we had lived in a studio on Shattuck Avenue, in a grand building with a canopy over the front door, rows of tiny brass mailboxes in the lobby, and an elevator with an accordion door. The bathroom had separate taps for hot and cold water, and its tiny single-pane window overlooked an airshaft and down into the window across the way. The small kitchenette had a California cooler where I stored produce. At night, our sleep stench filled the room, and every morning I opened the front window to the traffic on Shattuck. We had a television with foil-wrapped bunny ears set on an old dining chair.
During my first months in Berkeley, I didn’t dress until the early afternoon. I watched TV all morning, then wandered the streets. I was shocked by the people who went to work and school in shorts and T-shirts, who grew thick beards and wore feathers in their hair. Soapbox preachers decrypted the Bible so that we would know how closely to the devil we clung and that the war in Southeast Asia foretold the Apocalypse. The young, earnest students around him cried, “Tell it, brother.” Berkeley was nearly a decade past the Free Speech Movement and its tear gas and fire hoses; its reputation was firmly established. The war seemed endless and people spoke to me in loud, slow voices, some sympathetic, some angry, as if by virtue of my face I were directly tied to all their pain. When Wei came home in the afternoons, I’d be in my house clothes again, sitting at the dinette as if I’d never left.
Wei flipped through homework assignments as he picked at lunch. Years ago, a silence like this would have worried me. Now, I found it soothing.
He snapped the lid back on the Tupperware and wiped his mouth. “Let’s walk.”
“Are you taking me somewhere romantic?” I teased.
“It’s a beautiful day,” he said, but his eyes were on his crumpled napkin.
Students were strewn across steps and the lawns or walking briskly to class. Wei didn’t like to be touched—no hand-holding or linked arms—on campus. It wasn’t professional. With an appropriate space between us, we strolled to the oak-shaded creek at the bottom of the Faculty Glade.
He said, “I didn’t want to talk in my office.”
The anniversary glow was over. He knew. Mr. Lu must have come to him too. Maybe he wanted us to watch each other, but Wei—upstanding, moral Wei—was too loyal to keep it from me. Still, I was nonchalant. “About what?”
On a bench, two students necked. He gripped her cheek and she urged her breasts into him. I thought they were showing off. Wei watched them as he spoke.
“Tang Jia Bao left Taiwan.” Tang Jia Bao, a friend of a friend, had been under house arrest for a year for speaking out against the government. He had become a default martyr of the Taiwanese democracy movement and we had been following his story.
“They’ve stopped their surveillance?”
“No.”
“Then how?”
“It’s not important. He’s in Sweden now, and he’s applied for a visa to come here. And if all goes well, he will.”
I suddenly understood. “Stop. No. No, Wei.”
He continued. “I want him to stay with us.”
“Wei. Stop.”
His eyes left the groping couple and met mine. “I want him to stay with us.”
In the early days, I used to say to my husband, Tell me something that happened when you were five.
What’s the worst thing you ever did?
In the dark, late at night, when the broadcasting day had ended and all the TV channels had turned to the monotonous night programming of a waving American flag against the backdrop of the national anthem, I asked him questions. Who do your parents love more—you or your brother?
What’s the biggest lie you ever told?
His eyes hunted my expression for an answer. I looked again toward the couple on the bench. They pulled away from each other and the girl wiped the corners of her mouth with her fingertips. It was a delicate, sheepish gesture.
“For how long?”
“It might be days; it might be weeks.”
I shook my head. “Don’t tell me any more.”
“Once he gets here, it’ll be fine. It’s all aboveboard. We just need to help him get on his feet.”
“What about the girls?”
He twisted my hair around his fingers. It was a gesture like thumb-sucking, some childhood habit of comfort. “The girls will be fine. They won’t know a thing.”
I batted his hand away. “I don’t care what they know or don’t know. Will it be safe for them?”
“I told you, once he’s here, it’ll be fine. What are you worried about?”
“ ‘Fine’ like the man taking your picture last week? If it is ‘fine,’ why did you wear a mask? You know they are already watching us. You saw him taking pictures.” And Mr. Lu, I thought. They are watching us carefully. “What makes you think that they don’t know Emily’s and Stephanie’s school schedules?”
“They’re children. No one will hurt them.”
I wished I could believe him. I wanted to tell him about Mr. Lu, and his tone when he mentioned Stephanie’s preschool. The memory of it brought out gooseflesh. A tiny girl was surely a nothing obstacle. I reassured myself: I had burned the card. It was over. It had never happened.
I clasped his shoulder, reassured by the curve of muscle. “How long?”
“Like I said,
I don’t know. You don’t need to worry. You’ll wake up one day and he’ll be here and the girls will be fine.”
That’s how I wanted it. I wanted to wake up with the entire situation taken care of: all of us safe, all of us innocent. I didn’t want the details. I wanted to be able to say with conviction—to Mr. Lu or anybody else—I don’t know.
Early on, I’d wanted to know everything. I looked at the bottom of Wei’s feet, searched for all his birthmarks. I kept him awake with questions.
What kind of student were you?
Who was your childhood crush?
Did your parents fight? About what?
What is your recurring nightmare?
32
JIA BAO CAME TO US late one night in mid-September, his face obscured by a thick beard, bearing a single duffel bag. He felt like a cousin or schoolmate I’d not seen since childhood, unknown yet familiar. The sense that we had met before was so strong that I had to comment on it when Wei introduced us on the porch, where I had been waiting as soon as I heard our car pull up.
“My wife,” Wei said.
“Mr. Tang. Welcome,” I said. I seemed to step through uncanny curtains of time as déjà vu washed over me. “Your face is so familiar.”
“Well, he’s been in every paper by now.” Wei sounded embarrassed. He patted me on the back. “Let’s go inside.”
“We probably know a few people in common,” Jia Bao said politely.
“Of course,” I said.
“Of course,” Wei echoed. “Now, let me show you around.”
Not quite sure of what to do with myself, I followed as Wei led him through the house. Then Wei invited him to freshen up, and when he disappeared into our guest bath, Wei and I whispered in the kitchen.
“Is he okay?” I asked.
Wei kissed my forehead, squeezed my shoulders, and hushed me.
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