by Gish Jen
Now the greenhouse flapped with shirts hung to dry.
We went back to visit, not so often, but every once in a while.
My father loved Chinese music. If he came upon a street musician playing the erhu, he’d often stop and sing along. The songs were mostly pingtan—folk songs in Suzhou dialect—or else songs from Kunqu opera, which are famous all over China—very graceful and slow and touching. Very gentle, very soft. Of course, all this was before the Cultural Revolution, when people still played these things.
It was true he loved Western music too, especially Tchaikovsky and Western opera. I grew up humming arias my father remembered, working them out on the violin. It gave him such pleasure to hear me play them on the violin. I grew up listening to the stories too, the big sad stories. Yet it was not fair to say my father worshipped Western ideas. Once when I criticized the father in La Traviata, saying that he had stood in the way of true love and wronged the heroine, my own father stiffened.
— She would have died anyway, he said. Those young people should have had more consideration for the father.
What’s more, he was anti-imperialist. He completely believed that the West was out to destroy China. They talk so nice, he said, but does not every weasel standing at the gate of a farmyard talk nice? In the morning, he would go to the tiger kitchen in our alley to get hot water, but also to talk with the neighbors about how to strengthen China.
Still he was struggled against during the Cultural Revolution. For his laugh, I always felt. Also because he weakly applauded model Beijing operas like ‘Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy.’ He claimed he was clapping loudly. Other members of his unit, though, maintained that his hands were not flat when he clapped, but loosely cupped. His hands were moving like summer ducks, they said. Sometimes his palms did not even meet. Neither was he looking at the cast as he moved his hands, but apparently at the sky.
— That was because I was contemplating the message of art, he said. So profound.
— There’s nothing profound about it! yelled the Red Guards in reply, and cut his throat to see if it had turned black with all the foreign words that had passed through it.
This sort of thing had happened to so so many people. But when it happened to my father, I only wished they had killed me too. It was a pain as long as the Yellow River. You could only hope one day to empty into the ocean. They left him lying on the ground, covered with nothing but a straw mat, for two days. In the sun. I was not allowed to move him; no one was allowed to move him. His body was black with flies. His head swelled. Children ran to his body and back, daring each other to touch him with a stick.
Not long after that, I was sent down to the countryside to be reeducated. If my father had been alive, he might have been able to keep me home. Families were usually allowed to keep one child home. Sometimes a boy would be kept, and a girl sent. Often the girls wanted to be sent, to help the family. But usually families with only one child could keep that child, so though I was a girl, I might have been spared. For a short time too it seemed that I might be able to use my violin to escape my fate. How gratefully I would have played the very revolutionary operas my father abhorred. How enthusiastically I would have toured with a troupe. I know my father would not have minded at all, quite the contrary. He would have done anything to keep me from being sent down. The sound of those operas was Chinese, of course, but Western instruments were needed for volume and projection; and I could play thanks to a friend of my father’s who had himself once studied with a White Russian. I got so far as to begin rehearsals in Shanghai.
But in the end a PLA soldier’s daughter who could barely rosin a bow was deemed to play louder than I. Moreover, my overuse of vibrato, it was said, betrayed my rightist leanings. And so like many other young people who did not have the connections to join a music troupe or the army, or to produce a medical affidavit of ill health, I was sent down to live with the common folk.
Or rather up, I should say, and not to the Subei countryside, with the Suzhou youth, to live among peasants. Instead I was sent with the Shanghai youth to a decomissioned army unit in frigid Heilongjiang, near the Russian border. There we lived in barracks and trained to defend China against aggressors. In between exercises, we also hacked at the frozen earth with pickaxes, sometimes, and of course denounced this one or that at mass rallies. That was hard for me. I shouted and leered like everyone else, but in my heart cried, still, for my father. How many of us were stuck there for six, eight, ten years? We cried to see the clouds drift in and out of sight, free. We cried to see buses come and go.
If I hadn’t developed TB, I would never have been allowed to leave. But sick as I was, so pale and thin people said they could see through me, I was transferred to my father’s aunt’s work unit in the Shandong countryside. That was lucky. By then things had loosened up enough for me to get bing tui—sick leave. If I’d gotten sick earlier, I would probably have been left in Heilongjiang to die.
My great-aunt was a spinster, and very old. She knew nothing about nursing. She tried herbs randomly, sometimes. If she forgot what something was for, she tried it anyway, to see what happened.
Yet she was fearless. She did not try to avoid getting sick too. Rather she sat next to me, for hour after hour after hour. She said she was not afraid of dying. How should an old woman like her be afraid of dying? It was time for her to die anyway, she said. And how long had it been since she had someone to sit next to? Too long. So she sat close by me, proffering herbs, monitoring acupuncturists, until slowly I got better—perhaps, I thought later, out of terror. My great-aunt might not have been afraid of dying. I, though, was terrified of making her sick.
Once I was better, I was beaten up once a week. That was what it meant to be a ‘class enemy’—the very worst category of social pests, worse even than being a ‘stinking intellectual.’ People eyed my bicycle enviously. Never mind that it had been my father’s and, if he were alive, would be his still. Back then it was unusual for a young person to have her own bike. I stood out. People predicted flats, then proved themselves right. I did my repairs secretly, at night. They made fun of my umbrella too. I put it away. They made fun of the condition of my lips—so soft and kissable, said one older cadre. I allowed them to chap, that they not be kissed. Still they were, of course.
Every now and then, someone proved kind. At the end of the Cultural Revolution, a man even asked me to marry him. An old man with a VCR. Later he got a DVD player. I used to go watch movies at his place, and probably I should have said yes. The neighbors, at least, agreed I had no choice. Who was I to be picky? Who was I to be proud? They said I was used up, spent—an arrow at the end of its flight. A worn shoe. Only my great-aunt said I should follow my heart. And in my heart, I felt he was too old and too short. Of course, many people feel there is nothing the matter with that, so long as he is rich. But anyway, in the end he married somebody else.
Shandong was mantou country—Northerners ate steamed buns with their vegetables. Such rice as my great-aunt and I got was gray and full of stones. I had to bring it outside, into the daylight, to pick the stones out. I ate in small mouthfuls, worried with every bite about cracking my teeth, not to say what were left of my great-aunt’s teeth too. The air stank of night soil. Everywhere there were flies. Even in the winter there would be a few staggering around, looking drunk.
Still, I was alive.
Besides work in the shoe factory, there were the neighbors, the chickens, the weather, and a set of English-language cassettes the Red Guards had somehow missed. Also my father’s cassette deck. No batteries, though. Often I snuck into the factory early in the morning to use the electrical outlets.
I studied, practiced, studied, practiced. I knew I would never be allowed to go to college. They called class enemies ‘black families.’ We would never be red revolutionaries. Still, I knew someone in another factory, a line worker, who had placed high enough on a provincial exam that she now gave factory tours. People said she came from a black family too.
So I studied, practiced, studied, practiced. Not hoping, exactly, but listening to the English broadcasts on the radio anyway. People said no one was ever going to want to see our factory, but who knew where I might be one day reassigned. When ‘Follow Me’ started on TV, I tried to find opportunities to watch.
I was not reassigned. Instead the factory closed and I became a migrant worker. I stopped practicing my English then. It was everything I could do to find work enough to survive, and I had my great-aunt to take care of too, don’t forget. I worked in all kinds of factories. Making toys, fertilizer, rubber mats. Anything. I was working as a karaoke xiaojie—a karaoke miss—when one day I heard that some distant relative had somehow heard of me.
An American relative! I had not known I had any such relative. And what could have moved this person to take an interest in me? My great-aunt looked me up and down. Then in the same voice she used for chickens she hoped would lay eggs, she said: — Fortune has come to you like a mother looking for her child.
Outside our one window, the squash vines flowered. The light outside was blinding, but inside it was dark and cool.
I had hung a few magazine pictures on the wall—mostly of movie stars, with big eyes and beautiful clothes—arranged in a little grouping. These were placed so that the morning sun shone on them. Of course the light only lasted for twenty minutes because of the building next door. But how beautiful the pictures at breakfast! There was another grouping, across the room, for supper. The light then didn’t last quite as long, but almost, depending on the season. I particularly loved the moment when the pictures were losing their color and only one still glowed, a picture of a young girl with bright pink cheeks and laughing eyes. This was an old picture—the kind of picture you didn’t see much anymore. But I liked it because it reminded me of simpler times, when a bumper harvest was something to celebrate and people were more genuine. It reminded me of the time before people started talking so much about money. Before anyone knew that the next generation would have opportunities we wouldn’t, and that my generation had been left out of the new China.
Those old pictures usually looked completely fake. But in this light, for these few seconds, this picture seemed to be of a genuinely happy girl. Like myself! I was leaving! Of course I would have to come back unless I found someone to marry there, people said. They said, Watch, this time even if the man has no legs, she’ll let him poke her. Do it right in his wheelchair.
Anyway, I thought there might be fewer flies in America, and less dust in the spring. All spring my hands and face and hair were gritty here. Shandong was terrible that way.
— Buy some clothes, said my great-aunt. Go to the city. I will give you money. Buy everything new. You don’t want them to look down on you.
Of course. They would look down on me.
— You will be their ayi, said my great-aunt. But you will be able to study too. And who knows? Maybe you will find someone to marry you. But first you must try to find out what they want from you. What are they trying to arrange?
— Who will take care of you if I go? I asked.
The picture of the girl fell, like the others, into shadow. My great-aunt allowed a fly to walk clear across her wrinkled cheek. All her clothes were fastened with buttons and ties—she had never owned anything with a zipper. Her skin was thick and scarred and brown. Her toenails were thick too, and yellow with fungus.
— I will die, my great-aunt answered simply, when the fly took off.
And a week later, flat on her back, her arms by her sides, in her sleep, she did.
6
Wendy
CARNEGIE / — Baby crazy, said Mama Wong, if we boasted about Lizzy.
Of course, we did boast about her unconscionably, as you could with a child who was not yours biologically. She lines her animals up! She unscrews the dresser knobs! She knows absolutely all her animal sounds! Et cetera.
Said Mama Wong: — I am not baby-sitter.
And: — What’s so special? A million babies like that. You go to China, can just pick one off the street.
When Mama Wong saw Lizzy, she softened and cooed and gave her nice things to eat. No sooner did Lizzy go down for a nap, though, than Mama Wong hardened.
— Lizzy think whole world revolve around her.
— Lizzy do not listen to reason.
— Lizzy temper no good, you wait and see.
Mama Wong had become more ornery than ever since I reneged on my promise to go into business with her.
— I’m sorry, I said. I promised more than I could deliver.
— I don’t know what you talking, she insisted proudly. —I give a million dollars to Blondie? For what?
She said: — Why should I hire Blondie work for me? She have job already.
And: — As if I have a million dollars! A million headaches, that’s what I have.
Being busy with Lizzy, we could not visit Mama Wong as often as we used to. And how sobering, when we did, to confront my mother alone in her house with her teacups everywhere; she seemed to pour and abandon them at the rate of one per hour. Sometimes I spent my entire visit on a cup hunt.
Of course, in time-honored fashion, I vowed every time to visit more often, like a proper filial son. But how could I? With a baby in the house?
The cups multiplied with each visit. They lay in wait; some with little pools of tea, some with the barest bit of sediment, the liquid having long since evaporated. Sometimes you could see, in the sediment, faint rings, irregularly spaced. Evidence of something, you felt. A record someone else could no doubt read about the temperature of the room, the rate of evaporation, the relative hope of the drinker. The relative length of the long, long day. As for me, though; how to begin to guess what went on in the house? And where did she get all those cups anyway? And wouldn’t it have been only grandmotherly of her to come visit us?
BLONDIE / My mother would have come. My mother would have realized that a woman needs her mother all over again once there’s a baby in the house.
Everywhere I looked there seemed to be a mother with a grandmother helping out.
CARNEGIE / — Since when mother go visit son, you tell me, said Mama Wong. Son should pay respect to mother. You pay me a million dollars, I’m not go.
She said: — If I had a million dollars to give somebody, I am give it to that National Basketball Association.
I sighed.
— Lizzy knows her whole alphabet, Ma, I said. You should come see. She is so amazing.
— Oh really. What time is it?
Blondie thought there might be something the matter with Mama Wong, but I thought my mother was just my mother. She did wear the two watches, and sometimes three or four rings to a finger now, but was there something the matter with Renata and Ariela, that they had made Lizzy seven hats and four sweaters between them?
— We’re just woolly, they explained, laughing.
— Bitten by the big bad craft bug, commented Doc Bailey. Dedicated to keeping young women in glue sticks.
How we wished her sisters lived closer to us! Or at least visited more often. But the suburbs exhausted them. Lawn care exhausted them. Shopping bags, especially the bags made of coated stock, with ribbon handles, exhausted them. Excess packaging exhausted them. Lap dogs exhausted them.
They were always needing to go home. To see working barns again, to buy oilcloth at the cooperative. To buy yarn. Their whole lives were tied up, so to speak, with yarn. And babies, of course. Renata had five children, Ariela had four.
— Have more children, said Ariela, daisies in her graying braid.
BLONDIE / We tried and tried.
WENDY / Nobody wanted me exactly. Really they wanted their own baby, I was their second choice.
BLONDIE / Oh, but that’s just not true!
CARNEGIE / Second choice didn’t mean second best.
We were stupid. We were tired. Our strategy was to try things. Drugs, procedures, acupuncture. We tried to relax, as if it was possible for two people with jobs and
a child and fertility issues to relax. We meditated. Accepted our fate. Got in touch with our anger. Embraced our helplessness. Moved past our disappointment.
Still no Wendy.
How many years did this go on?
By the time of the adoption, Mama Wong had been in assisted living for a goodish while. We tried to explain to her our game plan. The tremendous leap in the dark this was. The act of faith.
— Probably we are out of our minds, I said.
That at least occasioned some teeth grinding.
As did: — I won’t be able to visit you for a couple of weeks.
Overall we had better luck with Lizzy, who was, confoundingly, six and a half already. Our newborn, six and a half!
BLONDIE / Old enough to bring to Wuji to meet her new sister. An exciting prospect and a chance to reconnect, we thought, with something important. Never mind that her heritage might not be Chinese.
CARNEGIE / Was she part Japanese? Part Korean? Part Vietnamese? Was she any part Chinese at all? Who knew?
— That baby is mutt, Mama Wong had genially announced, shortly after Lizzy’s adoption. — You want to know who her father is? Her grandfather?
— No thank you, we said.
She did not look precisely Han, it was true, what with her long torso and short legs.
— You know why her mother give her away? said Mama Wong. I tell you why. Because you look at her, you see war.
Anyway, there was no harm, we thought, in Lizzy connecting with Asia.
BLONDIE / Or in knowing what adoption meant. We had tried to shelter her from my miscarrying and miscarrying. Still she had witnessed much too much. Now we wanted her to know something else—what a joy adoption was!
