by Te-Ping Chen
“More like a small town,” he said. “My mom was a high school principal,” he added. “My dad was a government official.”
I hadn’t known either of these things, and it made me feel foolish, exposed. I got up, annoyed, and went out to the porch with a glass in hand, expecting him to follow, but he didn’t, and after a few minutes I returned, not wanting to make a scene.
* * *
In the months after that, Gao was often away, working late at the office or spending hours at the gym. I didn’t mind; I still hadn’t accustomed myself to spending so much time with another person. Though we took many of our weekday meals apart, we ate dinner together at a Sichuan restaurant every Friday, dining on petal-soft pieces of white fish cooked with blood-red chilies that made my lips tingle.
Now and then we’d go for a hike along the fire trails up in the hills. We were good companions. Only occasionally did it occur to me to wish for something more. For our first anniversary—paper—he’d given me a beautifully fashioned set of origami boxes that he’d made himself. I’d opened them, expecting a gift inside, and flushed when I found them empty, realizing my mistake, hoping he hadn’t noticed.
At night these memories swim up to me, unbidden. Most of the time I pat them on the head and send them away, releasing them back into dark waters. I tell myself it doesn’t do to fixate too much on the dead: apart from everything else, they can’t answer you.
The journey to Gao’s hometown was six thousand miles and seventeen hours. Flight attendants came through the aisles offering tea and almond cookies. I leaned my forehead against the inky, cold window and watched the plane icon trace our passage on the blue and green map on the screen before me. As we neared our destination, the airline played a welcome video of misty pagodas and a pond flecked with golden fish, observed by a woman dressed in trailing magenta robes and carrying a paper parasol.
The scene outside the airport nearest Gao’s hometown was considerably less appealing: sprawling lines of warehouses that ran for miles in bleak repetition, hardly the small town Gao had described, though I supposed it might still have been one when he left. As we entered its outskirts, I felt the cabdriver eyeing me, a woman alone in his backseat. “America,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “Yes,” I said, in an attitude of brightness, but he just nodded.
After an hour, we reached the hotel, a stained concrete block adorned with a sign that read GOLD PHOENIX VILLA. Tinny advertisements blared from a shop selling hosiery across the street. Inside, the hotel’s lobby was cold and featured a faded watch ad depicting a Western couple. The woman had sallow cheeks and a wide nose that wouldn’t have made the cut in an American advertisement, posing beside a blond man who smiled with the grimace of a serial killer appearing in a family portrait.
Gao’s mother met me there the next morning. She wore her hair in tightly wound curls and had on a purple velour tracksuit, and came straight over and took my arm with a warmth that I didn’t expect. Neither she nor Gao’s father had come to his funeral, and I had tried not to judge them for it, unsuccessfully.
“You’re here,” she said, and briskly steered me outside, not quite making eye contact. “Welcome.”
“I’m so pleased to meet you,” I said, a little self-consciously. “I’ve wanted to come here for so long.”
Outside in the parking lot, she slid her legs behind the wheel of a dark-gray sedan and made an elaborate performance of adjusting the mirrors. “My baby, new,” she said, and laughed, as though to make sure I knew it was a joke. She had studied English in college, Gao had told me, but even so, her apparent ease with the language surprised me.
We drove for a while, passing shops with drab pasteboard signs I couldn’t read, though some gave clues to their wares: a picture of tools and nails, another of a sheep standing before a pot (presumably a restaurant of some sort). All around us, rain darkened the road.
She had not invited me to visit; I had invited myself, and as we drove in silence, I wondered if I was truly welcome. “It’s good to be here,” I finally said, tentatively. “Gao told me so much about this place.”
It wasn’t true, and perhaps she sensed it, simply nodding. There was a temple, she said, she’d take me. There was a museum, as well, not very large. What else did I want to see?
“Anything from Gao’s childhood,” I said.
She said there wasn’t much left: The government had torn down their old family home years ago and replaced it with a shopping mall. The school had been converted into government offices.
I was sorry, but tried not to show it. “I’d still like to see it,” I said.
“The mall?” The fact that Gao’s mother had been a high school principal showed, I thought; beyond the perm and purple velour, she had an aura of steely competence to her.
I said yes, but she shook her head impatiently. “There’s nothing there. You should see some history. This city has four thousand years of history.”
When I agreed, she smiled and turned on the radio, drowning out the need for further conversation.
* * *
Gao hadn’t been a popular child, he told me, but he’d commanded a certain amount of respect because of his mother’s position. Other parents, in particular, fawned over him. They passed him sweets when picking up their children after school, they praised his cleverness. Eventually he drew to him a small coterie of boys like himself, bright and a little insecure. Their names regularly topped the list of students with the best grades, posted weekly outside the school gates for all the parents to see.
But there was one boy who always outdid everyone in both reading and math, not of their group, whom they called Mouse. He was one of the boarders, had come from a village a day’s travel away. Gao shrugged when I’d asked about the nickname. “He was small,” he said.
As the high school entrance exam neared, students studied six days a week, eleven hours a day, and Gao hardest of all, because everyone expected him to do well. “You can’t imagine what the pressure was like,” he told me. “It was cruel.”
At the time, we were in Germany on our honeymoon and he’d taken me to see the university where he’d done his degree. We’d visited the carrel in the library where he used to study and the classroom where he’d defended his dissertation, and it was there that he’d paused, and for a while it didn’t seem like he’d ever want to move again. “So you can imagine how glad I was to get away,” he said.
* * *
At the temple, I asked Gao’s mother what her son was like as a child. “He was a good student,” she said. We were standing side by side, staring at a statue of a robed god painted blue, with vermillion eyes. She had linked her arm firmly through mine, making it hard to see her expression, though when I asked her what else she could remember, I could feel her sigh at my side, just a little.
“He was very well behaved. Hardworking, good at his studies.”
Something about her repetition of these qualities annoyed me, and I walked away on the pretext of examining a placard more closely. “Was he a happy kid?” I asked.
“Yes, of course,” she said, voice defensive.
“It’s a shame he never came back,” I said.
“Not really. Why should he?”
We resumed walking. The temple was composed of a series of courtyards, with one long corridor dotted with small niches containing scores of Buddhas cast in shiny gold plastic. The green and white and maroon stripes swirled about the ceiling’s wooden beams looked freshly painted, and there were heaps of new tiles and nails scattered about. A sign said that the temple had been destroyed in a fifteenth-century fire and rebuilt, and damaged in an earthquake and rebuilt again.
“It has a history of six hundred years,” Gao’s mother said. “Very old. Not like your America.”
We walked farther, and she urged me to stand in front of a Buddha statue, and snapped a photo of me with my camera. Already that afternoon she’d had me pose before an inscribed stele, a rock formation, and a small pavilion. My cheeks hurt from smiling.
>
“How about over there?” she asked, gesturing to another courtyard. I went over, not wanting to disappoint her. She took another photo, one I didn’t smile for. Finally, to my relief, we began moving toward the exit.
“Would Gao ever have come here?” I asked.
She thought about it, then shook her head. “It’s mostly for tourists.”
“Well,” I said, and didn’t have anything else to add. “It’s very pretty,” I said flatly.
* * *
After two years of marriage, Gao seemed to draw still further into himself. He spent increasingly long hours at the office, but his publications were sparse and failed to gain attention; he’d recently been passed over for a grant that he once would have won easily. The German department wasn’t large and that semester had hired a young Ukrainian scholar fresh from his Ph.D. whom everyone considered its next star. One day I came into Gao’s office and found him with his head in his arms. I stood there for a few minutes, watching him, before touching him on the shoulder. He said he’d been sleeping.
We were celebrating our second anniversary when Gao told me the rest of Mouse’s story. We’d gone to the Sichuan restaurant downtown, where the maître d’ had given us a table beside the big plate-glass window. The waiter brought us fish, rice, and cubes of tofu cooked with chilies, bristling with dashes of green onion. A cluster of unopened chrysanthemums sat between us, curled like tiny fists in a small vase. It had been a long day for Gao at the office, a department meeting and hours spent revising a paper that had already been rejected twice for publication, and he was quiet. The restaurant was quiet, too—it was a weeknight—and I wondered if the waiters could tell there was something wrong. Outside, it had grown dark, and I imagined that we looked like a pair of silent actors to passersby on the sidewalk, seen through the lit window as though onstage.
“Tell me something,” I said to him, when the silence had gone on too long.
“Like what?”
“Anything. Something I don’t know about you.”
“You first,” he said. With a fork, he began to carefully debone the fish, extracting each wispy fragment with his fingertips.
“Okay,” I said. “Are you sure you don’t want to order some wine?” He nodded and placed his hand over mine. It was a gesture I’d noticed he’d been using more and more; lately it had stopped feeling affectionate and more like someone gently closing your mouth.
I told him the story of our first cat. She was supposed to be mine, but she never liked me much, always preferred my parents’ bed. I used to sneak into my parents’ room to snatch her and make her sleep with me, I told him, only to wake to hear her scratching at the door, trying to get out. “She died when I was in college,” I told him, attempting a laugh. “Up until the end, she didn’t like me very much.”
He smiled absently and wiped his mouth. “Stupid cat.”
“Your turn,” I said. He protested he had nothing to share, but I pressed him. Finally he folded his napkin and put it on the table and a strange look came over his face. “I’ll tell you something,” he said slowly, “since you ask.”
He told me that when he and his friends turned fourteen, somehow it was decided among them that Mouse was a Japanese spy. He’d come from far away; no one knew his antecedents. He looked odd, with hair that was paler than that of the rest. (“I know now it was probably malnutrition,” Gao said.) He was unbeatable in tests, “almost militaristic,” they told one another. He had a funny white shirt they became convinced was cut in a Japanese style.
For months, they watched him closely for clues. Someone had seen him make a nighttime trip to the bathroom; it was possible he was meeting secret accomplices. A teacher had kept him after class; perhaps the two were in league. At some point he went back to his village. It was said his grandmother had died, but Gao and his friends knew better: Mouse was training in the hills. When he came back, it was as though all their fears were confirmed. The attack he was training for would come any day now, they said.
Gradually their plot took shape. “It was a game at first,” Gao said. He stole some rat poison from the janitor. “We joked it was rat poison for a mouse,” he said. Another boy, not to be outdone, befriended Mouse, started eating lunch with him. A third obtained still more rat poison in case the first attempt failed. It was the second boy who slipped a generous dose of it into Mouse’s stir-fried eggplant at the canteen.
“Oh, God,” I said. “What happened?”
Gao looked at me as though I’d asked a stupid question. “He died, of course,” he said with irritation.
I didn’t know what to say. “Did they ever catch anyone?”
He didn’t answer me for a while. “One boy,” he said eventually. “The boy who gave him the poison.”
When the boy’s parents came from their home village in the mountains to take the body away, the mother hysterical, the father wooden and stunned, they realized their mistake: Mouse’s parents were poor villagers, speaking in a tongue so heavy and coarse the school administrators had trouble understanding them.
“And then you went to Germany,” I said.
He nodded. “And then I went to Germany.”
That spring, when the rains came, the ants invaded our apartment, making wobbly black lines across the bathroom. We bought a tub of petroleum and erected walls of it across the linoleum to try and stop their steady march. When that failed, Gao stood guard with the hose of a vacuum cleaner at the ready, determined to catch any escapees. The morning-glory vines that clung to our front porch unfurled themselves in purple trumpets. He seemed more relaxed after our conversation, I thought. He laughed more frequently, and spent more time at home. We started talking about having a family. We were going to begin trying any day now.
Then came a night when I’d fallen asleep over a stack of student papers and awoke just after dawn. Gao had said he’d be back after a late bout of grading at his office, but his side of the bed was undisturbed, the apartment empty. I made myself some coffee, called his office, paced impatiently for a while, and finally went to the car.
The morning chill was still in the air, the kind of cold that makes you expect birdsong. Gao’s building was locked. I rapped on his window, but there was no reply. I found the facilities management office and waited until it opened. A janitor accompanied me back and unlocked the door: Gao’s chair was pushed tidily in, the place empty. I flicked on the light anyway, futilely. “Thanks,” I said, smiling, trying not to appear alarmed. “He must have lost track of time somewhere—I’ll check the library.”
He wasn’t there. I tried the gym, searching through rows of undergraduates, with their ellipticals, neat ponytails, and elastic skin, but Gao wasn’t among them. I stopped at the café where we’d first met, where the owner was just unlocking the doors, bleary-eyed. Finally I circled back to our home—maybe he’d returned in my absence.
He hadn’t. I made myself more coffee and sat on the couch. I put a blanket on. I thought perhaps he was angry with me, I scoured my mind to try and remember any unintended slight. I sat there all day, reheating bowls of soup, until the phone rang at 4 p.m. It was the local police, called in by the parks department. They’d found him.
It was an elderly man out walking his border collie in the hills who’d made the report. Gao’s body was dangling from a tree, face black, clad in his leather jacket, ID and car keys in his breast pocket. He’d been there all night. His car had been found in the otherwise empty parking lot, an index card with my name and number written in his hand on the dashboard. I searched the apartment in disbelief for days, but there wasn’t anything else, no apology, no note of explanation. He had been private in almost everything, and he was private, too, in his death.
The days proceeded in his absence: phone calls with friends and funeral homes, details that needed arranging. Friends waited for confidences, but I was numb, I had none to share. Our marriage had been brief, I said. I was sorry it was over. His life had been his own, I told myself, to do with it
what he would, and he did.
After the funeral, though, that sentiment cracked, and a chasm opened up within me. At night I buried myself under a pile of his shirts as I lay in bed, imagining the child we might have had together (his cheeks, my eyes). I found myself crying in grocery aisles and at the lecture podium, tears that came on quickly and tapered with equal speed. I resigned myself to their appearance; it was like a new cardiac rhythm or myopia, something unfamiliar but irrevocably now a part of me.
I kept his mug and plate in the dish rack. I kept a pair of his loafers by the front door. I began to feel an unreasonable resentment toward those whose marriages had been ruptured by affairs or neglect or abandonment, for their clarity of answers, or the fact that they could pick up the phone, at least, and demand them.
Whole weeks would go by and I couldn’t remember what had happened in them.
Fall passed, and then winter. When I looked up from my desk it was spring, and the dean was standing in the doorway. A leave of absence might be a good idea, she said. I had missed three of my classes in the past month, and students were complaining.
Not long after that, I found myself in the travel section of a bookshop and to my surprise—despite Gao’s insistence on its remoteness—there it was, listed in a China guide: a brief entry on his hometown. It didn’t sound very enticing, described as a “dingy stopover with good connection links and some adequate hotels,” with two temples listed and one museum. But still it sent a jolt through me, to see it printed in black and white, a real place, with clearly listed directions on how to get there. A month later, when classes finished for the summer, I was on a plane.
* * *
After the museum—a crowded affair of jostling children competing to peer into Plexiglas boxes containing oxidized bronze and old coins—Gao’s mother drove us silently back to their apartment on the town’s outskirts, past the recently poured roads and new high-rises dotting the landscape. Now and then we passed a few soon-to-be-demolished buildings that still showed signs of inhabitants: a line of laundry here, a toy tricycle there, a stooped man wandering with his hands behind his back.
