by Gish Jen
— If you learn anything from Lan, she tells Lizzy, it should be that Mr. Wrong is Mr. Wrong. You can follow your heart right into trouble.
LIZZY / But I was not interested in learning from Lanlan. First of all Lanlan wasn’t following her heart, and second of all Russell wasn’t even one of the ones who broke into the school.
— He’s not his friends, I said. He’s an independent mind. You should hear what he writes, it is so much his own sound. It has like totally nothing to do with his friends or anybody else. Including his parents, who can’t even sing on tune.
— Is that so, said Mom.
— He’s not like you, I said. Reading what your friends read and running because your friends run and doing yoga because everyone in the world is doing yoga. Russell says gardening is the number-one hobby in America besides, you are such a follower.
WENDY / Russell wants Lizzy to live with him, that’s the new thing. Mom and Dad say absolutely positively no, but Lizzy wants to try it.
— It’s not like I’d stop going to high school, she says. Or like I wouldn’t apply to college.
— So you’re planning on going to college, says Dad.
LIZZY / —What you really mean is, You must be kidding, I said.
— You’re sixteen, said Dad. One-six.
— Sixteen may be a baby to you but it’s old enough to get a job, I said. It’s old enough to drive. It’s old enough for a lot of things.
— Do tell, said Dad.
He wanted to call Russell’s parents, but couldn’t remember Russell’s stepmother’s name. He said he could only remember the names of wife one, who was friends with a neighbor of ours, and wife three, who he knew some other way. Wife four he could not remember for the life of him.
— The question is, If I give Russell’s dad the pop quiz, think he’ll know?
— Dad, I said, you can’t manage me the way you managed Lanlan. You don’t get to decide who lives with who, I have news for you.
— I did not manage Lan, he said.
WENDY / Lanlan and Uncle Su get married almost right away but nobody goes to their wedding because they don’t even call first. Also it’s not really a wedding, they just go to some office, there’s no dress or cake or anything, it’s just to solve the visa problem because Lanlan was on this J-1 and had to be in school, and now she’s not in school. Lizzy says maybe she’s pregnant but I say remember how she thought she was getting too old?
— She gets her period, says Lizzy.
— Still, I say.
And sure enough instead of having a baby they have a shop where they sell Chinese food.
— Remember all the food she cooked for us? Mom says. Now she’s cooking it for other people. She says she’s so lucky she learned American taste.
Nobody can sit down in the shop, it’s like so small they can only do takeout. But it’s doing well, that’s what Dad says, it’s the immigrant success story all over again. He says they work all the time, it’s hard hard work, much more work than homework, which we shouldn’t complain about, as long as we think homework is work we will never get anywhere in life. He says that in this big pleased way, as if he’s finally found something he can vote for in the world. It’s like things are going terrible for him at work but at least this one thing is going great.
LIZZY / As if there was somewhere to get to.
All grown-ups cared about was houses and cars and sending the kids to college. As if we even wanted to go.
WENDY / Dad says Lanlan is an inspiration to us all, but Lizzy says Lanlan is practically the same as Mom and Dad now, doesn’t that kill you?
— Like she had an affair with Shang and with Uncle Su both, figuring one or the other of them was bound to marry her, says Lizzy.
— That’s not why, she was in love with Uncle Su! You said so yourself, I say.
But now Lizzy says Lanlan was just using her brain.
— Uncle Su wasn’t married, she says. Shang was. But Shang had a great plan for making money in China. Remember how he was going to make her a cofounder of his company? Uncle Su just meant a green card and a job who knew where. McDonald’s.
Lizzy says this while putting these little braids in her hair, like all over.
LIZZY / Lanlan was like that. Like when I asked her should I live with Russell, she said I should think about how much money a musician was going to make. And how I was going to make him marry me. And whether anyone else was going to marry me either, after I lived with him. I tried to tell her how living with someone didn’t make you, like, ruined. It wasn’t like I was headed for some seconds bin in some bargain basement.
— You are still young, Lanlan told me. Don’t sell short.
WENDY / Whatever, I still think she’s great. Like she told me that I shouldn’t worry so much about Elaine, that no matter how bright a sun, in the end it goes down. And she was right. Like it turns out Elaine’s father is going to jail for stock fraud, which Dad says is a fancy way of saying cheating, everyone is so depressed at her house people say they’re not even going skiing over Thanksgiving. Now when anyone sees Elaine, all they have to do is put their fingers up in front of their face like bars and she runs away crying. She wrote a whole essay for the class magazine called ‘Kids Can Be Mean,’ which just made everybody laugh more. Then she wrote one called ‘You’re Not Anything, You’re Just You’ and one called ‘People Just Need to Pick On Somebody.’ I feel sorry for her but Lizzy says I have to learn to tell people to go to hell.
— You think Elaine would feel sorry for you if you wrote an essay and everybody laughed? she says.
And she makes me practice saying it: — Go to hell! she says.
— Go to hell! Go to hell! Go to hell! I say.
One day I even say it to Elaine’s face: — Go to hell! I say.
But the way she turns away I feel sorry for her, I can’t help it, which the therapist says is all right.
Her name is Mary Kay, and she has an iguana in her office.
LAN / Our storefront was the smallest one on Main Street. The store was like a tunnel. But sometimes there was a line all the way out the door to the street, even in the snow. People came from the next town over, even from the next county. And guess what our most popular dish was? Dumplings! The same dumplings I used to make for the family.
The line outside was better than any advertisement, in fact we moved the register even closer to the door to make the line longer. That was my idea, just like the window into the kitchen so people could watch the cooking, and the free dumplings we gave to the first ten customers of the day. Of course we didn’t say why we were moving the register. We said we needed more room in back, for the kitchen, because of the increased volume. Which was true too.
Already people were talking about us. There was an article in the newspaper. Because so many people had tried to open businesses on Main Street, and so many had failed. If you walked down the street all you saw were half-empty stores, with too many shelves.
What was our secret? the reporter wanted to know.
LIZZY / Of course the answer was work. The answer to questions like that was always work.
BLONDIE / We returned to the center of our lives. Bailey settled into day care. Lizzy moved in with Russell, then—thankfully—moved back home when she realized he was eavesdropping on her phone calls.
— I wasn’t allowed to go out without his permission, she said. That was another thing. I swear, he was worse than you guys.
Meanwhile, Wendy made a new friend, Mya, who was smart, and sweet, and good at chess.
CARNEGIE / Suddenly all three kids had new modes of transportation. Lizzy, unfortunately, got her driver’s license; how we worried and worried, though not any more, as Blondie pointed out, than we had worried about Russell driving. At least Lizzy didn’t say anything, to our surprise, about the Jeep.
More happily, Wendy claimed Lizzy’s Rollerblades and learned to do tricks. And Bailey became so enamored of a hopalong ball that he stopped walking entirely, that he might
hop everywhere like a kangaroo.
This precipitated a conference at day care.
BLONDIE / Carnegie got a new job—chief technology officer of an educational nonprofit dedicated to supporting teachers in rural areas. It was hardly cutting-edge, and who could get over how he had been treated at DMS? In this family, we do not speak of DMS. But he liked the people at his new job, and supported their mission, and found that in this outfit, he could take days off every so often. Even a week here and there.
CARNEGIE / I took up sailing. Thinking, as I tacked hither and thither in the sun, how healthy this was. How balanced. How sane.
But was it me?
BLONDIE / All fall and winter and spring our house seemed filled with our own music. There will be no nickel eating in this family. Of course we can get a new chess clock. A new way of defending against the Grunfeld, that’s terrific. There will be no licking Mom and Dad in this family. In this family, we do not tackle. In this family, the weekend curfew is eleven o’clock. Lollipops do not count as dinner in this family.
We had stopped looking for a sitter, not feeling that we needed one for more than an occasional Saturday night. And I was finding myself less depressed with less free time—in fact, happy—realizing, I suppose, that I needed to keep busy. This was hardly the deep revelation I had hoped for. But there it was.
In the meanwhile, I performed culinary experiments. One week was packet week—fish in parchment, chicken in foil, beef en croute. Next came a run of chutneys, followed by fun soups—tuber soup, pink soup, spider soup.
And celebration soup!—when Lizzy started seeing her old boyfriend Derek again.
WENDY / Derek the Normal.
CARNEGIE / How sweetly obsessed Bailey was with trains then, just like Lizzy, when she was little. Every day it was Choo choo! Choo choo! Then, Crash!—there was always plenty of crashing. And then, Break train!—meaning that he needed the breakdown train to come set things right. And of course the breakdown train did always come when he needed it.
Where did his sense of humor come from? He would call himself Juice and laugh; he gave his bears names like Butter. And when he discovered Blondie sleeping in one day, what did he say? But Oink oink, Mama! Oink oink!
It did not mean anything exactly, this sort of thing. And yet it did make you feel as though you had sat on banks such as you wouldn’t want to have missed. That you’d seen rivers.
BLONDIE / Then came the first news of trouble.
WENDY / — You’re kidding, says Mom. You’re kidding.
She has this look like something just ran over her face, everything is flattened out, and her voice is funny too, quick and kind of skipping around. Hyper and then quiet. The quiet is like this big box you know has something in it.
BLONDIE / The takeout business was a success. But when it was time to move into a bigger space, they found that there was only one landlord in town. And that landlord was set on a certain rent not only for a new space, but for their old space. He maneuvered and argued—I knew this man, he collected fire insurance on a building every other year. So in the end they moved into the new space—they had no choice. But really it was too expensive for them.
CARNEGIE / Did not people still swear by their dumplings, though? Which they offered in four scrumptious flavors, including All-American.( We didn’t dare ask what that meant; it came, they said, with special sauce.)
As for their landlord laments, what else was new? That landlord was a greedy bastard, everybody knew it. In fact some people said he was one reason the town was depressed, that he destroyed every business this way. The mayor himself, that great man, encouraged Lan and Jeb to stay.
LAN / The mayor himself had lunch with us and told us how he didn’t want us forced into another town. He said what the landlord was doing wasn’t right, and that a store like ours brought all kinds of foot traffic into town. It was stimulating for the economy. It was good for everyone.
And so we promised him we’d stay. We shook hands with the mayor and had our picture taken with him. We told him that for the good of the town, we’d stay.
CARNEGIE / To bring down their labor costs, they replaced some of their help with Chinese immigrants like themselves—one legal and one not—whom they found through a community bulletin board on the Internet. As for how to explain this change:
Friends of the family, we have an obligation, they said.
We are very sorry, but you understand.
Mr. Su has these friends.
Most people called him Mr. Su. For example, the employees, at least until they were fired. Then they called him ‘that asshole Su.’
Those Chinese stick together, the only people they trust are their friends.
Jeb tried to suggest that there was a skills issue also, that the new help had more experience cooking authentic Chinese food. (Of course, here he glossed over the All-American dumpling.) Not long after that, though, it came out that the new help were not even friends, as they had been presented.
These guys do nothing but lie! I’m telling you.
Lan finally came clean and admitted the new help was just cheaper, but to no avail.
They pay these people nothing.
LAN / Finally we fired our immmigrants and replaced them with local help, at far higher rates. But even so the help believed themselves underpaid.
What the hell can we do? We could be replaced by immigrants anytime.
BLONDIE / We tried to tell Lan and Jeb to ignore what people said. It was just envy and resentment, we said.
CARNEGIE / — Red-eye disease, we said. You’ll be all right in the end. You have the support of the mayor.
And was not the mayor a great guy? O’Reilly, his name was, an Irishman, he knew how things could be. How long ago was it really that being Irish meant fighting with somebody over something all the time?
— People were having you left and right, he said.
LAN / Shu da chao feng—the tallest tree catches all the wind.
BLONDIE / The PR problem grew when the help started filling some bags fuller than others. In theory, they used scoops, and all the portions were the same. But in practice, there was variation. People started comparing what was in their bags, and the blacks in town—all six of them—claimed that they were routinely shorted.
Then there were claims that the shop used peanut oil in everything. Three children in town had peanut allergies; their parents always asked before ordering whether such-and-such dish had been made with peanut oil. And Lan was always careful to ask the cooks. But the cooks were perhaps not always honest in their answers—or perhaps they were. The fact that a child got sent to the hospital and that the mother blamed the shop was perhaps not even fair.
Still the rumor flew that Lan’s Chinese food had almost killed a child.
LAN / There was another rumor too—that in the interview we’d given to the newspaper we’d said that the reason we’d succeeded was not that we worked hard but that we worked harder than anyone else. Now there were people in the bar down the street asking, What’s the matter, don’t you work? To which their friends answered, No sir, I do not. I mean, not as hard as some, that’s why you see me in the very same fashion garments I’ve been wearing for ten years.
Of course, Jiabao and I never hung out at the bar ourselves, being too busy. That was a source of joking too. Our prep chef told us what people said.
What are you doing here, you lout? Loafing around again.
If you worked harder, you wouldn’t be living in a double-wide.
If you worked harder, you wouldn’t be hanging around here.
The way you work, pretty soon they’ll be needing you down in Mexico.
Of course, Jiabao thought it was true, that some of the townspeople were lazy. San tian diao yu, liang tian shai wang, he said—Fish for three days, take two days to dry the nets. The way they worked, he said, they could be Chinese government officials.
CARNEGIE / Then there was the house.
16
Sue’s Beach
CARNEGIE / Last backtrack—to just after Bailey was born.
Recall: I went up to the house alone, taking the day off, to see what manner of intruder was setting off our alarm.
That long, long drive.
Those rude, lewd beach bums.
Then turning on the cabin lights: only to discover empty cans, dirty plates, sippy cups. Unpopped popcorn. Someone having expected a microwave, it seemed, not realizing that the Baileys were die-hard Luddites who popped their popcorn in long-handled baskets over a campfire. Also I found diapers, wipes. Toys.
The woman had set up camp in the library building next door—the coolest of the outbuildings in the summer, thanks to the willows. I had never been met with someone so magnificently unkempt. A mountainous woman with felted hair, she did not stand when I came in, but only opened her eyes and glared glazedly at me as if to impress upon me my rudeness. I might as well have walked in on a séance. The corners of her mouth drew down in annoyance; she so pointedly closed her eyes again that they seemed to recede, as if hauled in, under her jutting brow. Her speckled bosom heaved and fell.
— Hello? I said. Hello?
She did not respond. Instead response came—startlingly—from a baby, emerging from under its mother’s wraps as if in a school play about Mother Hubbard.
I was not an infallible judge of children’s ages, but I guessed the baby (on closer inspection, a her) to be around eighteen months old or so. She was wearing a yellow T-shirt with a ruffled edge, and a heavy diaper. In her condition of hair and shelf-like brow she resembled her mother, but she could not have been less mountain-like. On the contrary, she toddled and tumbled, rolled and plunked, nonstop.
— Hello, I said.
She scurried back into her mother’s skirt.
