China Mountain Zhang

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  And then I wait, sitting on the edge of the chair, watching the vid. If I sit back in the chair, I’ll probably fall asleep. I fall asleep a lot of evenings in this chair, sitting in front of the vid.

  The building system says someone’s at the outside door, I check the console and there she stands with a slouch bag over her shoulder. Until I see the bag it doesn’t occur to me that she might want to stay here the night. Hell, doesn’t she have friends? I let her in, tell the building to recognize her and let her in whenever she comes, and leave the door off the latch.

  San-xiang stops at the door. I am in the kitchen, but I hear her heels and then I imagine her stopping, her chinless little face upturned. “I’m in the kitchen,” I call.

  When she comes in the kitchen she doesn’t have her bag.

  ” Yao pijiu ma?” I ask and hand her a beer without waiting for her to answer.

  “Hi,” she says, looking at the beer as if she doesn’t know whether she wants it or not. She takes a sip. She stands, uncertain of her reception.

  “This is my decadent flat,” I say, gesturing. It is two real rooms and a kitchen and bathroom roughly the size of closets. Compared to her parents apartment it’s little bigger than a drawer. And it’s a rathole. The flooring is that synthetic stuff and doesn’t go quite to the corners and the wall covering needs to be replaced. The apartment is brown except where the gray concrete shows in the corners. I could fix it up, I think about it once in awhile, but I never know how long I’m going to live here. And I’m rarely here except to eat and sleep.

  She looks around, looks back at me. “I’m sorry to just show up this way.”

  “Sit down,” I say, “have something to eat. Tell me what happened.”

  She sits down and I stick chopsticks in the noodles. I hand her a plate and a pair of chopsticks, sit down and pick up a piece of chicken.

  She sits for a moment, looking at the noodles but clearly not seeing them. Her attitude reminds me of someone saying grace. I put a piece of chicken on her plate. “Thank you,” she says.

  I eat and watch her eat. Finally she says, “I had an argument with my parents.”

  “What about?” I ask.

  She shrugs. “Nothing. Money. Everything.”

  I wait.

  “It was just a little argument, and things kept coming in. Like why I didn’t study hard enough to go to the University and how my father spent the money that was supposed to be for me, for,” her voice drops to a whisper, “my face.”

  For just a second I think she means ‘face’ in the Chinese sense, as in ‘not lose face.’ Then I realize she means her physical face.

  “My father thinks I should save my money for that, not for a commune.”

  I don’t know what to say, everything I say may be wrong, so I say the innocuous. “What do you think?”

  “I think I am an adult and it is my decision,” she says. “He says that as long as I live in his house it is his decision. But I can’t get assigned housing unless I get married and I want to save my money so I don’t want to pay rent. But maybe it’s an excuse to stay at home?”

  “It sounds very sensible to me,” I say.

  “Do you think I am immature?” she asks.

  Yes, but I cannot say that. “I think you are very sensible,” I say.

  “You don’t live with your family,” she says.

  “I don’t have a family,” I say. Which is not true, strictly speaking, but my father has been gone for years, and my mother has a new family. I couldn’t live with either of them. And wouldn’t want to.

  “This is a nice apartment,” she says.

  I laugh and she is startled. “It’s a dump,” I say. “But it is what I can afford.”

  So we eat.

  “I have to get up early,” I say, “lets get you settled.”

  She nods, all tension.

  I go into my bedroom and dig a sheet out of my closet. I have two pillows on my bed, so I skin one out of the case and put a clean case on it. San-xiang stands in the doorway and watches me. I feel as if something is wrong, but I don’t know what it is. My bedroom is a mess, I wonder if she is upset. Did she have some idea that I lived this elegant life? If so, the actual squalor of coffee cups in the bedroom could be a little distressing.

  I have a quilt and use the pillow, sheet and quilt to create a makeshift bed on the couch. It’s not going to adjust to body temperature but it should be comfortable enough. I probably should put her on my bed and sleep out here, but damn it, I didn’t ask her to come over, and besides, all the rest of my sheets are dirty and I’m not going to bring dirty sheets out here to sleep and put her in my bed.

  “I have to be at work at seven tomorrow,” I explain, “so I’ll be leaving a little after six. What time do you have to be at work?”

  “Nine,” she says.

  “What time do you need to wake up?”

  “About seven-thirty?” she says.

  “Okay, I’ll tell the system. There’s coffee and tea in the kitchen. Feel free to watch the vid, make yourself at home.”

  She sits down on the couch, her hands folded in her lap. Again I have the feeling that she is upset. It is probably strange to her.

  “Have you ever been away from home before?”

  “Oh yeah,” she says. “Every year I go somewhere for a couple of weeks and Cuo sent me to Arkansas for training two years ago. I was there for eighteen weeks.” She looks up at me, straight at me instead of her usual sidelong glance. “Why are you always looking at me?”

  Flustered I say, “What do you mean?”

  “You are always studying me. Is it because I am ugly?”

  “No,” I say too quickly, “of course not.”

  “It’s okay,” she says, “I know I’m ugly. Someday, when I have enough money, I will have my face fixed. It’s a bone problem, it only happens to one in twenty thousand children. It’s not so expensive if they do something right at adolescence, but my father was in trouble, so we had to come here.”

  “What happened to your father?”

  “He managed a branch of Huang-Kamakai in Guangzhou and his branch lost a lot of money, hundreds of thousands of yuan. So they transferred him to the United States and sent him to work at Hong Fangzhen Construction. They used to own it. Then during the Cleansing Winds it lost so much money they sold it to an ABC so now we can never be transferred back.”

  Well, I have to get up, so I go to bed. After a few minutes I hear the vid on very low. I go to sleep with my back to the crack of light showing under my door.

  The system gets me up and I creep through the front room to the bathroom, clean up and dress. When I come out of the bathroom, the hills and valleys on the couch shift and San-xiang sits up.

  “Go back to sleep,” I whisper, “it’s only quarter of six.”

  “I’m awake,” she says and turns on the light. She blinks in the glare. “I can make you coffee,” she says.

  “I always get it at the site,” I say, “go to sleep.”

  But she gets up, wearing a loose shift and barefoot, her hair tangled, and takes her bag into the bathroom. I’m ready early, I usually sit around, watch the vid a bit, sometimes make coffee. Or I sleep too late and rush out at six-thirty.

  This morning I make coffee and sit down with a cup. I wonder how long she’ll stay. I don’t have the ambition to bring it up in the morning. She comes out dressed.

  “Coffee?” I ask.

  She pours a cup.

  “Sugar is by the sink, I don’t have milk,” I say.

  She gets sugar and brings it back to the couch but sits with the cup untasted.

  “Did you sleep well?” I ask.

  “Fine,” she says brightly.

  We make small talk. I ask her about her work, she works for Cuo, one of the big Chinese conglomerates, she’s a clerk in the international transport department. She routes orders.

  She doesn’t like coffee, but I pretend not to notice. And in a few minutes, I leave for work.

 
; When I get home that evening-we are on rush work which means we work long hours and I don’t get home until nearly seven-thirty-she is already there. I hear her in the kitchen when I open the door. The living room is neat, the sheet and quilt neatly folded on the end of the couch. She is chopping in the kitchen, I wait until I hear the cleaver stop before calling hello.

  “Zhong Shan?” she calls.

  I am tired to the bone. Foreman Qian was not on the site today, a small blessing, but there were too many things to do. I worked for twelve hours, the hard physical work of pounding excess off forms and pulling the forms, polishing the face of the building. Painstaking hand work with a crew that wants to get it done and go home. I have shouted myself nearly hoarse. The crew is mutinous. But the job will be done by Friday if we don’t get disastrous weather.

  I don’t really want company. If Peter called I would tell him to go pound sand. “San-xiang,” I say. I smell rice cooking.

  “Are you always so late?” she says. She is chopping scallions.

  “No,” I say, “usually I am home around five.” I find a beer and collapse in a chair.

  “Did you see my father?”

  “He wasn’t on site today. He might be tomorrow.”

  “Will you tell him where I am?”

  “If he asks,” I say.

  She frowns at the wok, tosses chicken in sesame oil. It is a smell that reminds me of growing up. “Don’t tell him, okay? Tell him you don’t know where I am. I don’t want him to know.”

  I don’t like this. I shrug.

  She stirs the chicken, tosses in green scallions and chinese chilis and adds a glob of sesame paste. Then she spills it onto plates. “Are you hungry?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “This is very nice of you.”

  “It’s nice of you to let me stay,” she says.

  I hadn’t planned on her staying this long. “How long will you be here?” I ask.

  “Whenever you want me to go,” she says, “you tell me. I’ll understand.”

  I don’t exactly know what to say. Tonight. I want you to leave tonight. Go stay with one of your friends from the political study group. I don’t say anything, just shovel food into my mouth while I think about this.

  I decide that tomorrow I’ll tell her to leave. “This is very good.”

  “Thank you.”

  I should tell her to be out by the weekend. I should tell her right now. But it seems terrible to sit eating her food telling her not to stay. Tomorrow I’ll eat before I get home. She doesn’t think about the position she’s put me in because she doesn’t have any friends, she’s not accustomed to being around people. I am furious. But as always, I hesitate to reject her. I look into that monkey face and think, she’s been rejected and hurt enough, and I put it off. I am a coward.

  We sit and watch the vid for awhile, “Do you want to see kite races?” she asks.

  “I don’t really care,” I say. Actually I don’t watch the kites on vid much, but since I took her she thinks it’s the most important thing in my life. We watch a serial. We make small talk. I fall asleep in my chair and wake up with a jerk. Where can she go? She can’t get housing, not unless her parents will file a separation. Surely she has friends. Surely it is not my problem.

  I go to bed and sleep badly. I dream of middle school.

  In the morning San-xiang doesn’t get up when I do, so I leave early without coffee. I am on the site by six-forty-five and sit in the gray morning waiting for coffee and for the day to begin. The crew greets the site of their tech engineer perched on the back of a concrete bench with dismay-“Jesus, Zhang, you goin’ to be bustin balls all day today?” And the tone of the day is set.

  We are under deadline and I am mean, I do not want to be here Friday night under the lights, working. I want to be here Saturday even less. If we work on Saturday, the men will expect big bonus and I will get chewed out.

  Foreman Qian shows up at a little before nine and disappears into the trailer. If he stays in the trailer, maybe I will get some work out of the crew. But he doesn’t. He comes back out, coffee cup in hand, and surveys the crew work.

  “Zhang!” he snaps.

  “Foreman Qian,” I say, trotting over, dutiful dog.

  “You think Friday already you finish?”

  I drop into Chinese. “If the weather is good, yes. If the weather is bad, or we have problems, no.”

  Foreman Qian nods. Sips his morning tea.

  “Engineer Zhang,” he says, “Have you talked to my daughter?”

  “Lately?” I ask. “Not since Thursday.”

  He looks unhappy and tired. “She gives you a call, you call me, okay?”

  “Something is wrong?” I ask.

  “A misunderstanding,” he says. “She is staying with one of her friends.”

  I nod, we stand looking at the crew for a moment in apparent comraderie. Then I trot back and Foreman Qian goes into the trailer. I don’t like being in the middle of this, tonight I’ll tell her to call him. That will take care of my problems.

  In the afternoon we have a box playing-we always have a box playing, sounds of Brooklyn -and I catch a weather report. Rain tomorrow. The crew watches me, obviously they already know. I rest a polisher on the edge of the granite planter I am working on.

  “Okay,” I say, “I hear it. Work starts at noon tomorrow. Tell your mothers to put your dinners on the counter, we’ll be working under the lights.”

  “Shit,” someone says. But I turn the polisher back on and go back to work. I pretend not to notice them bitching. They knew what I was going to say, but hell, bitching is one of the few satisfactions they have.

  It is seven-thirty when I leave work. I get my dinner on the way home, stopping for a hamburger on the way to the subway. The subway isn’t crowded. Above me a paper sign says “Una luz brillara en tu camina/Ven a la iglesia. Descubre lo que has perdido.” Discover what I have lost? Not by going to church. I think whatever I have lost was gone before I was born. I fall asleep on the subway and nearly miss my stop.

  The apartment is dark, for a moment I think she has left, but then the lights come up and I see her bag sitting by the door. I check through the whole apartment. No sign, no note.

  Perhaps she, like me, is working late? Maybe she went to dinner with someone from work?

  So I sit in my chair and go to sleep with the vid on.

  The door wakes me and I sit up. The system has shut the vid off, which means I’ve been asleep for more than twenty minutes, I am confused and feel as if it is later than that.

  “San-xiang?” I say.

  “Hello,” she sings out, “I thought you’d be asleep.”

  I was. “I was watching the vid. Did you work late?”

  “Tonight is my political study meeting.”

  Oh yes, the optimum size of a community. Now what? Tell her she has to go. “Your father is very worried about you,” I say.

  “Did you talk to him today? What did he say?”

  “He asked me to call him if I saw you. I think you should talk to him. And I think you should decide what you are going to do.” Well put, I think to myself.

  She sits down on the couch. “If I call him, he’ll make me come home.”

  “But he threw you out,” I say.

  She makes a gesture with her hand, waving that away. “He didn’t really mean it.”

  “What are you going to do?” I ask.

  “I don’t know.” She looks down at her feet, “Call him, I guess. Do you mean tonight?”

  Shit. Grow up. All right, if you want me to be the parent. “Yeah, tonight.”

  She sits there for a moment, then gets up and goes into the kitchen. There is a long silence, longer than it takes to jack in and connect. Finally I hear her say, “Baba? Shi wo.” Papa, it’s me.

  A pause. “Zai Zhang gongchengshide jiali.” At Engineer Zhang’s place.

  A long pause. Dui, she breathes. “Wo dengideng.” I’ll wait.

  I hear the snap when she takes off the cont
act. “He’s coming to get me,” she says. She is about to cry and escapes into the bathroom. I think about getting a beer but decide I am too tired. At least I can sleep late tomorrow and there won’t be anyone here.

  I try not to listen to San-xiang crying in the bathroom.

  She comes back out and sits down on the couch. It is not my fault she is ugly, I have no reason to feel guilty. I have always had tremendous trouble defining the limits of responsibility.

  “My father is very upset,” she says, and has to regain her self-control.

  I nod.

  “I am in big trouble,” she says.

  “You’re an adult,” I point out.

  “Sometimes my father makes that hard to remember. He is pretty good at making people do what he wants.”

  “You can just tell him ‘no’.”

  “Like you did when he told you to take me out?” she asks.

  “That’s different,” I say, “taking you out is enjoyable.”

  She nods and looks at the vid. She is crying again, without allowing any sound to escape. I feel trapped. A few minutes and her father will be here. She takes a shuddery breath. “It’s okay,” she says, “you don’t have to ask me out anymore. I mean, you’re very nice but I know you really don’t want to.”

  “That’s not true,” I lie. “I enjoy our evenings together.” It’s not altogether a lie.

  She shrugs.

  “I consider you a friend, San-xiang,” I say as gently as I can.

  “Well maybe I’m not looking for friendship,” she snaps and then covers her face with her hands.

  I don’t know how to respond but she doesn’t say anything else. After a moment she goes back into the bathroom. I hear water running. My water bill is going to be terrible this month, last month it was pretty good, but this month will be bad. If I took public housing I wouldn’t have to pay anything for the first 800 liters of water I used.

  She comes out with her make-up repaired and her eyes red and we watch the vid until my system tells me that her father is outside. I check, and sure enough, there he is in his coveralls. I let him in, and while I am at it I take San-xiang out of the system so she can’t get in unless I let her.