Wei had been right—with Jia Bao out of the house, Stephanie seemed more and more like herself, as if she could finally relax back into the embrace of our once again complete family, even if her parents were barely speaking.
—
Jia Bao came over for an early-afternoon dinner. I could not look at him either. I vowed spitefully to be the dutiful wife. I served more food before they had finished chewing, poured more water before their glasses emptied. When the meal was over, Wei and Jia Bao disappeared on a walk and I took the girls, pushing their babies in tiny strollers, to the park.
—
The explosion happened that afternoon at the KMT headquarters in San Francisco, singeing the brass plaque black, shattering the glass door, and pocking the cement wall.
Wei was watching the late news and I was drying dishes. I leaned into the room. “What?”
“A bombing.”
Plate and towel in hand, I came and stood next to the couch. Yellow police tape cut across the sidewalk to the street, wrapped around a trash can and back. Pulled from her Christmas dinner to weep in front of the damaged building and still dressed in a red-and-green snowflake sweater, a woman from the Coordination Council for North American Affairs—the new stand-in for the closed ROC consulate—said to the reporter, “Thank god it’s Christmas. Who knows how many would have died.” She reached beneath her glasses and wiped away a tear. “There’s too much evil in this world.”
The police spokesman said, “This is obviously an act of intimidation. Even though there doesn’t seem to have been an intent to harm, we will be fully pursuing this.”
Shock was replaced by disbelief, then disgust. This was what they had been doing when “playing bridge”? This was how Wei planned to keep us safe? I saw nothing but reckless, selfish ego.
“I don’t want to know,” I spat. I wondered how much will it took for Wei to empty his eyes, as if his soul had gone slack. He clenched his jaw and his temple throbbed.
“I have nothing to tell you,” he said.
The anchor turned and began reporting on Christmas traffic fatalities.
I went back into the kitchen and stood at the sink. Leave. Just leave. In America, you can leave. You can be a divorcée in tight plaid capris pushing a cart along narrow grocery-store aisles, a kerchief on your head and your fingers free of rings. My heart didn’t beat. I didn’t breathe. I was air. I set the plates in the cabinet and looped the towel through a drawer handle and went upstairs.
I was not really conscious of what I put into my suitcase—a couple pairs of pants, a few sweaters and blouses, a fistful of underwear. I carried the suitcase to the girls’ rooms and tossed in a few outfits and their new dolls, then went downstairs and pulled their coats from the hall closet.
From the living room, Wei said, “What’s the racket?” What did he care, sitting on the couch, musing over his handiwork?
Without answering, I returned upstairs and roused the girls. They were heavy headed and sleepy eyed as I struggled them into their jackets and buttoned them up.
“What?” Emily murmured. “I’m tired.” Stephanie rubbed her fist against her eye and yawned.
“You can sleep in the car.”
I carried them both down the stairs, carefully, my hip pushed to the banister as a guide. The girls dropped their heads into my neck, one on either side. I braced myself against the door and turned the lock and knob. My key ring dangled off one finger.
“Going somewhere?” Wei’s interest sounded obligatory.
With my foot, I nudged the suitcase through the door. Stephanie wailed.
“Hush, baby.” I left the suitcase on the porch and was down the steps when Wei, yelling, bounded to the doorway.
“You can’t do this!” His voice echoed across the yard and against our neighbors’ dark windows.
I hurried toward the gate and knocked it open with my shoulder. The girls slowed me down, and before I could reach the car, Wei was there, his hands up in protest.
“No, no, no. You’re wrong. Stop. Stop.”
“Move.”
Wordless and now awake, Emily lifted her head and watched her father.
“Open the door,” I said.
“This isn’t right. Come here, Stephanie.” Wei reached out for her. She tucked her face into me and said, “Mama.” Her rejection pleased me, and I hoped it hurt Wei.
Wei’s fist flew back against the car. “You’re not going anywhere.” Across the park, one of the transients rose, curiosity and tension in his dark outline.
“Get out of my way,” I screamed. Wei grabbed for the keys and the metal ring cut into my skin. “Stop! You asshole! Stop!” A dog barked.
Wei threw his hands up again. “The neighbors,” he whispered. His gaze drifted toward the lights coming up.
“The neighbors can go to hell!” I shouted. I lurched to the other side of the car. Wei watched me over the roof as I struggled to unlock and open the door, and finally dropped the girls inside. They huddled together and blinked at us through the windows. Wei slapped the car and the girls shuddered.
“Fine, go.” He grabbed the suitcase from the porch and tossed it in the car. “Go. Go. I don’t even want to look at you.”
I refused to get in until he left. I waited until he slipped through the gate and back to the porch. In the doorway, he turned and yelled, “Go!”
I slammed the door and went.
—
Without a plan, I drove around for nearly an hour before settling on a motel near the bottom of University Avenue well after midnight. A horseshoe of two-story buildings in chipped blue and white paint ringed the desolate parking lot. I locked the girls in the car and went to the office. Checking into a motel is always the same pathetic experience: the sallow light, the bored overnight clerk, the clinging odor of old cigarettes and surrender. The woman handed over a key on a glow-in-the-dark fob.
The room was on the second floor. The girls trudged up the stairs and stood quietly on the cement landing as I opened the door and turned on the light. Room 203 smelled like the front office plus laundry detergent: a sad, failed attempt to freshen the place. A large black grease stain spread out from under the bed along the flat blue industrial carpeting.
“Get into bed,” I urged as I shut the door. I set the suitcase against the wardrobe and pulled back the bedspread, hoping I wouldn’t find bedbugs.
“It smells bad,” Emily said. She wrinkled her nose. “It’s gross.”
“Emily.” The weariness in my voice was warning enough; she pulled off her jacket and climbed in. Stephanie said nothing as I lifted her up and tucked them both in with kisses.
“Don’t let the bedbugs bite.” A wry joke as our pitiful situation settled on me.
“Really, Mommy?” Stephanie said.
“No. It’s just a joke. There are absolutely no bedbugs.” I waved my hand over them. “Poof. Gone. Sleep, darlings.” I turned off the lamp and went into the bathroom. I sat on the closed toilet lid. The plastic shower curtain, edged with mildew, hung on knobby plastic rings and the small window above the shower sat crooked on its track. A watermark blackened the corner of the linoleum. My fantasy of the happy divorcée drained away within the beige bathroom walls. Every detail elicited self-pity: the ragged edge of the half-used toilet paper roll, the dingy drinking glass capped with a paper coaster, the remnant strands of hair ringing the base of the toilet.
We made a ritual of this faux vacation among hookers and down-on-their-luckers. A Styrofoam cooler served as our refrigerator: milk, bread, cold cuts, and a small jar of mayonnaise sat in half-melted ice chips. In the evenings, we ate at a diner close by, taking the same seats in the same black vinyl booth with the frayed tear patched with gray duct tape, becoming familiar with the waitress who had seen a dozen families like us: young mother and kids in limbo, fleeing or abandoned.
The rest of our long, empty days—the girls were still on winter break—we spent in room 203. The girls made forts with the chairs and blankets, while I, racke
d and splayed out by guilt, lay on the bed and watched TV.
—
I could already imagine my mother’s shock if she found out where I was and how I had left. Ah Zhay might be more sympathetic, but she would certainly tell my parents. Besides, I was embarrassed: I looked around this ugly motel room and saw only failure. I wondered who I could confide in. Only Jia Bao came to mind.
I parked across the street and a few houses down, just enough to give me a discreet view of his place. Even having come this far, I still wondered if I could trust him. Turning off Shattuck, he came sprinting down the street. He stumbled to a stop in front of his house and then paced in circles as he cooled down. From so far away, I could not hear him, but I could see his panting: his breath flashed in bursts of vapor. He stretched for a few minutes, then disappeared through the side gate. I locked the girls in the car, warning them not to open the door or window for anybody—not for anybody. “I will be right back,” I said. “Five minutes. I just need to talk to Uncle Jia Bao for five minutes.”
“I want to see Uncle Jia Bao!” Emily shouted.
“Five minutes.” I glanced back at Jia Bao’s house, and then at the girls. “Okay. Let’s all say hi.”
When Jia Bao answered the door, he’d already stripped off his shirt. His hair was damp. Our eyes met for an awkward moment, and then his attention turned to the girls. “Emily and Stephanie! Come in.” He stepped aside and they scrambled in, but he stopped me with a hand on my arm. “Where have you been?” he whispered. “Wei is worried.”
“Never mind.”
“Have you called him yet?”
“Not yet. I will when I’m ready.”
He took a deep breath and let me pass.
He shut the door. “I have something for you,” he said to the girls, who were poking into every nook and cranny and exclaiming to each other.
Emily turned from her snooping. “What is it?”
His apartment, without direct sunlight, was even colder than the street. “What happened to the heat?” I asked. I pulled my jacket tighter at the throat and crossed my arms.
He rapped on the radiator that was affixed to the wall. “I think it’s broken. The landlady says she’ll get it fixed soon.”
“My god, this is unlivable.” I sat down at his small kitchen table in one of the green vinyl chairs we’d picked up at Goodwill. “Girls, come sit down.” I squinted at his bare chest. “Aren’t you cold?”
“I was about to shower.” From a drawer near the sink, he pulled out two sheets of paper. “I picked these up at the grocery store.” He set one in front of each girl. Coloring sheets of Frosty the Snowman holding bags of groceries in his stick arms, part of a store promotion, “Color and Win!” along the bottom.
“What do we win?” Emily asked.
“I think the deadline has passed,” I said, then curbed my tone. “Wasn’t it nice of Uncle Jia Bao to think of you? What do you say?”
They thanked him and began squabbling over the crayons that he brought out.
“Do you want tea?” he asked me.
“I’m fine.”
“Then I’ll be right back.” He disappeared into the bedroom. I surveyed the kitchen. A bit of cellophane tape held his wife’s picture to the wall above the kitchen table. Next to it was a photo of the whole family, the four of them sitting stiffly on a white sofa. His daughter, in pigtails adorned with flowers and ribbons, had a theatrical smile, while his son awkwardly looked past the camera, as if posing miserably for a military ID card. Jia Bao had so few belongings that the place could not be anything but neat. A single cup and plate were drying on a cloth next to the sink. A shiver of loneliness and pity traveled through me.
He came back in a clean sweatshirt. “The other room is a little warmer. Why don’t you two color in there?”
We helped the girls carry their crayons, and they settled on the floor at the foot of the bed in a sliver of sunlight. Jia Bao and I returned to the kitchen.
“I have nothing to say,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about the book, or Wei, or anything else. I just want to sit here with you.”
“Sure.” He slid into the chair across from me.
His hands rested calmly in his lap; he was so still I thought he might have drifted off into a meditation. My eyes darted from his face to the ceiling (a pipe system led from the unit upstairs to the sink; a spiderweb clung to it) to the table (I rolled a grain of salt back and forth with my index finger). I thought I should leave, but now that I had entered, leaving felt as large a gesture as my arrival.
“You know,” I said, “I waited a long time to tell Wei I was pregnant with Emily.”
Jia Bao frowned. His face had lost its post-run flush, but the straw smell of his sweat still hung in the air. He said nothing and I continued, feeling my mouth dry as I spoke.
“For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. I couldn’t say it. I didn’t know how to say it. An event like that seems too big for words—any way you say it it sounds like a cliché. You should be able to tell your husband something like that without having to say it.
“I went to the hospital without him. I found it on the map and walked there one day when he was at school. I spoke a little bit of English; I’d been taking classes at the adult school for a few months. I walked into the hospital—it must have been the emergency room—and I said something about a ‘baby.’ They were patient enough to figure it out. They escorted me upstairs to obstetrics to be tested.
“The doctor confirmed what I’d thought. I was ecstatic. I imagined having this little doll that would be all my own. That’s what I wanted. I wanted her all for myself—yes, her—I was sure that the baby would be a girl. I didn’t want to share her with Wei. Everything else I had was half his. I felt—I felt alone here, and she was all mine. So I kept her to myself, for weeks, until Wei got the bill. I hadn’t expected it; I hadn’t even thought about the money. I think a nurse helped me fill out the forms. It turned out that’s how I told him. Bigger than words, right?”
“Why—”
I quieted him with my hand. “You want to know why I am telling you?” I brushed the stray salt off the table.
“No,” Jia Bao said in his sure voice. “I understand.”
“I know,” I said. Finally, I met his gaze.
The light was always gray in that apartment, even on the sunniest days. It made life seem quieter, monastic, washed in dinginess. We sat there, paralyzed, like two figures in a Vermeer.
“Did you take the money?” The question shook in my mouth and came out as a whisper. I felt my pulse as a flicker in my throat as I waited for his answer. I suddenly realized that it was this question, sitting quietly unsettled in my thoughts, that had compelled me here, even though I’d had no conscious plan to ever ask him about it.
He leaned forward, his eyes black and serious. “What money?”
“The money from…” I swallowed. “From…” I couldn’t say it.
Jia Bao’s voice was hard and dismissive. “You need to call your husband. You need to go home.”
I inhaled deeply. “Did you take money from them?”
His mouth drew up in an expression that was both closed off and sad. He looked beyond me through the doorway. I turned quickly to see what he was watching, but I realized he was trying to look anywhere but at me.
He spoke with his eyes trained on the far distance. “Wei was right.”
“What does that mean? Right about what?” My voice was shrill.
“I can’t have this conversation with you. This entire thing is way beyond you. Go home. Go home to your husband.”
“If the answer is no, just say no.”
“Go home.” He looked toward the sad slot of a dungeon window that peered up onto the sidewalk.
I grabbed my purse and stood up. “Girls! Time to go!” I laced the strap around my fingers and squeezed hard. “Don’t tell Wei I came over.” Still he didn’t look at me, but I knew that he wouldn’t tell.
That was the
last time I saw Tang Jia Bao.
—
I had $390 in the envelope. With it, we paid for the room. We paid Janet, the waitress at the diner. We bought milk and cereal.
The girls spread a blanket on the ground and had a picnic with their dolls, urging torn cold cuts into their closed plastic mouths and stuffing the tiny doll bloomers with squares of toilet paper meant to be diapers. The maternal urge struck even Stephanie, who was not yet five years old. Had it come from me? Even in play to reenact domestic duties? I wanted to stop them. I wanted to take away these dollies—“cousins,” Emily pointed out to me—but lethargy held me to bed. I missed Wei. I called home, but when he answered, I handed the phone to the girls and watched their faces as they dutifully answered his questions: Yes, Daddy. Fine. Good. Yes. When they were done, he always demanded to talk to me. I didn’t say a word as he told me what an awful wife and mother I was. He’d finish with a large sigh, which I took as my cue to hang up.
“When are we going home?” Stephanie asked. I told her I didn’t know.
1980
45
WE CALLED WEI on New Year’s Day. The girls went through their usual repertoire of answers—glancing at me as they spoke as if they were afraid of violating my trust and revealing too much—then Emily thrust the phone at me. I shook my head.
“Daddy says he needs to talk to you.”
I rolled my eyes and took the phone.
“You there?” he asked gruffly.
“Yes.”
“Your sister called. Your father has gone to Taipei again.” A reflexive euphemism. Feeling weak, I sank onto the bed.
I twisted the cord around my fingers. Emily and Stephanie had gone back to watching TV. Stephanie’s thumb drifted to her mouth.
Taipei meant interrogation. Baba was almost seventy years old. What could they want with him?
“When?”
“Yesterday. I would have called but you haven’t given me your number. You see how ridiculous this is?”
I brushed aside his comment. We could fight it out later. “I have to call her.”
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