UNTIL IT RAINED by Lingyue Zheng

UNTIL IT RAINED

Lingyue Zheng

Submitted to the

Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences

of American University

in Partial Fulfillment of

the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Fine Arts

Creative Writing

______Stephanieh i GGrant,M M.A.A

______Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Ph.D

______Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences

April 27, 2021 ______Date

2021

American University

Washington, D.C. 20016

Lingyue Zheng

2021

UNTIL IT RAINED

Lingyue Zheng

ABSTRACT

This short story collection explores the intersectionality and alternative interpretation of race, sexuality, class, and identity among underrepresented communities. Each story ponders on the relation of nationality and individual identity, revealing the nuanced emotional ties between them even when their divergent interests persuade individuals to perilously break from the bond.

The collection also discusses the intricacy between identity migration and society assimilation against the backdrop of transformative cultural and political changes, searching for alternative interpretation of the concept of time and societal progression. These short stories depict the marginal of the marginal, with an observing, interrogating but no judging, fun but thoughtful undertone.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... 3

THE FUNERAL OF JIIN LEE ...... 5

LILIAN AND LI LIAN ...... 28

BLACK-NECKED CRANE ...... 49

ONE MISSING HEART...... 71

UNTIL IT RAINED ...... 86

THE FUNERAL OF JIIN LEE

After picking me up from work, Shen-yi took me to one of the oldest and most overlooked hotels in Beijing, which was made popular by those who were seeking to hide their secret affairs. I was overwhelmed with the agarwood incense which had burned for years beyond my imagination; the scent filled every crack on the red-soil wall. After downing two cups of rice wine at the restaurant where I waitressed, I found it impossible to maintain an upright position.

Slumped in a wooden armchair in the hotel lobby, I pressed my index finger to a glass jar next to me. Two golden fish waved their tails and fins, spewing out a rapid stream of bubbles.

“Nihao, little fish.” I greeted them in Mandarin. Even after three years in China, there was still an abruptness to my North-Korean-accented Mandarin.

Some Chinese people say that fish only maintain a memory of seven seconds, counting down from seven, and then they would forget about everything. I was jealous of their inimical memory. If only I could have left all my North Korean memories behind, I could start anew.

“It’s all done.” Shen-yi tapped the jar. The two fish swarmed away.

There were five rows of electronic red lanterns that lit the lobby but remained dim enough to provide a healthy look on everyone. Shen-yi looked much more alive tonight than he did under the sunlight.

He sprayed some fish food into the jar; I traced the minuscule letter H on his wedding ring. After the first time I slept with Shen-yi, he told me, in a nonchalant bemusement, that his wife insisted on paying an extra seventy thousand yuan to get that almost an unnoticeable H carved on the ring’s inner rim, just to send whoever had a sharp eye one clear message: it was expensive. The fact was that nobody had ever noticed the lonely H, if not for Shen-yi to remove

the ring and ask others to observe closely. Shen-yi looked so unremarkable that no one would cast him another glance, not to mention examine his fingers. While he babbled on, I learned the brand name: Harry Winston. Harry Winston the coveted, plain-looking ring. I wanted no ring from Shen-yi, but to me he was the H on the rim: ordinary at first sight, but of value overlooked by others. I needed him to get me a new identity, and because my inarticulate Mandarin did not allow me to speak in riddles, I always tried to speak straight my mind.

“Get me a Chinese ID. I cannot always hide behind the jar and avoid the hotel registration,” I mumbled behind him. The alcohol had loosened me up; I would have made it sound less coy were I sober.

Shen-yi strode to the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator. One time we ran into Shen- yi’s supervisor, who was walking out from the elevator that we were about to get on. Both men panicked, because only corrupted government officials spent time at a hotel like this, but the supervisor resumed normalcy faster. He quickly sized me up, gave Shen-yi an endorsing nod, and left. This encounter made Shen-yi frown at me, as if I had made it happen. He turned and left without casting a second look at me, and I had to walk two hours to my dormitory in the cold.

Since then, Shen-yi had been avoiding the elevator because, for him, the best way to avoid acquaintances was to preempt all possible congregation. He might enjoy the tantalizing excitement of having an affair, but not the risk of helping a North Korean woman defect to

China, which, if known by the Chinese authority, would not only end Shen-yi’s career and family, but send him to prison. Without acquaintances in sight, Shen-yi would indeed entertain the thought of helping me escape. He did so by persistently asking about what really happened to my father, which, to me, meant that I had to descend deeper to my memory pit and extract unvisited details; sometimes I found myself making up outrageous minutiae which I added to the

previous version. After several rounds of asking and telling, I realized his probing into my past was a kind of foreplay, exciting him into further entanglement with me. He justified and ennobled his extramarital affair with humanitarian motives, envisioning himself extending his arms, warm and firm, to a fledgling North Korean chick. I took pleasure in entertaining him in this way. When a country was scrutinized constantly, but barely known by the outside, its people, no matter how ordinary, became desirable objects of intense fetish. I then could easily guide their curiosity around and around in the maze of secluded North Korea, speaking in my deep, soothing voice to make the country oscillate between a seething demon and a petulant, unliked kid, the sorrowful type. At other times, he seemed to forget that I was North Korean, and tried to maintain the boundary he had previously upheld when he was with women other than his wife. He executed his precaution in flawless elegance. His gait was stable and fast. He always looked like he was off to take care of some important business. I have to hurry a bit to follow him into the stairwell. He coughed two or three times in order to alert the automatic light, but in vain. The sultry late July air had crept in through windows; I felt the sweat on my face.

I thought about those nights when power had been cut in Pyongyang. The entire city would sink into a deep black hole, save the sole brightness from the national emblem in Grand

Square. Glistening with a fuzzy orange aura, the national emblem would become a sun alone in the universe. In old days, I would always draw back the curtain, wishing to be a moth, twirling in the midnight air, and hoping to be carried away by the wind. I would fly through the dying walnut tree branches over the empty four-lane asphalt avenue, rising up to the memorial’s roof, finally perching on one of the five shining, pointed stars on the emblem’s face. There I would melt in the light.

“Why did you drink so much?” Shen-yi grunted. “Are they still asking you to sing and drink with those inane men?” Once we were completely alone in the staircase, Shen-yi would start talking.

All I could do was smile back at him. “They” referred to my co-workers and supervisor at the restaurant. As part of North Korean’s government mission to promote its international tie with ally countries, the government installed state-owned restaurants in foreign cities. They had three in Beijing, and I was working at Pyongyang Begonia Flower Restaurant, the one near the bustling Chaoyang Gate.

Unlike Shen-yi, I took relief in my supervisor still assigning me to sing patriotic Korean songs and dance for Chinese customers because, at least for now, he did not suspect me of doing anything out of line. I relished in their tentative ignorance of my wrongdoing and slyly took pride in my effective tactic to seduce those Chinese men: I maintained careful but suggestive manner when I looked into their eyes and poured the wine, while calculating if they were interested in me. If so, I left them a tiny paper patch hidden up to my sleeves on which my break time was written in Mandarin. Later, I would complain about my chronic headache to my co- workers, ask one of the girls to cover my tables while pretending to retreat to the dorm. I would then sneak out to meet the man in the parking lot during the peak time of the restaurant, when everyone was occupied with their orders. I wouldn’t immediately sleep with those men. The parking lot meeting was the initiation. Sometimes it worked, and we would see each other several times until they stopped showing up or frankly told me they simply would not take the risk, while others did not even make it to the parking lot. Shen-yi was one of the parking lot men

I met, and the only one I began to put more hope in, though, in my mind, he was always one of the “inane men” to which he was referring.

But at this moment, the moonlight trickled down from the windows like water, all I could see was Shen-yi as he climbed this spiral staircase step by step, pausing now and then to take a deep breath. I did not hurry to catch up to him, always keeping one flight between us. His hair was almost gone, what remained diligently circled around to hide the barren center patch. From behind, it looked like a burnt, sunny side-up egg laying on a sizzling pan.

I liked tailing him. From afar, I could smell his intentions and comprehend his unseen expressions. I followed his turns, stops, speeding up and slowing down, and finally ending up at the same secret place. Our trysts excited him; it transformed me into a hunter. I would stalk my prey, measuring chances, adjusting arrows and stretching my fingers before loosening the string on the bow.

Shen-yi turned around and extended his arm to me. “Let’s climb the rest of stairs together.” He was mine. In the thrill of the chase, I had forgotten to keep my distance.

He had an extra finger on his right hand, branching out from the thumb. He habitually curled up that hand to hide this minor deformity. The unwanted finger now stroked my palm. I pulled my hand away and grabbed his sleeves to steady myself.

“Why?” He frowned.

“Carry me on your back, carry me on your back!” I jumped one step down and leaned on his back, thereby avoiding walking with him shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand.

It was not because Shen-yi was mid-fifty and doughy. I was still clinging to the slim hope that the only man who I would walk with, shoulder to shoulder, would be my Min Jun, the only man I had cared enough to love, and probably still loved. My Min Jun, though, had wedded and settled well in my homeland. I knew I would never see him again; this was the only way I could

preserve the memory of us. The boy with a pair of eyes faint as the distant foggy mountains, who always smelled like a clean as cotton, would fade away eternally if his particular place was taken by someone else.

“You behave like a child,” Shen-yi scorned. But I knew he would comply; his self- satisfied undertone betrayed him. “Tell me” – here began his foreplay again – “your father was eaten alive by wild dogs?”

Of course not. My dad died on his way to his labor camp, but Shen-yi would in no way be fine with such a fact. I fed Shen-yi with gaudy and fabricated tale of his death because in an amusing (but horrifying) sense, Shen-yi got turneed on by it. His waning libido fawned over tragedies, and I wouldn’t mind stirring it up. My father died after the alleged betrayal of his

North Korean Labor Party, government and people, followed by a heavy sentence of forty years menial labor in Chongori, the northernmost North Korean internment camp where nothing grew but ice and despair. However, he did not receive the sentence for well-respected causes but for his attempt to elope with a Russian woman he fell for in Moscow. I hid the truth away from

Shen-yi because the last thing I wanted was telling my story as a grim morality check on his own faltering marriage. Besides, a despondent daughter of a hero who died fighting an autocratic regime sounded so much more worth saving than a troubled kid of an unfaithful douchebag.

Shen-yi admired the part that I had a miserable but glorified past, and it made him feel better to sleep with a damsel in distress, rather than a sly little mouse. So each time I started my saying

“there is one more thing I didn’t tell you last time,” I felt like a mischievous mouse mulching the heap of rice in a human’s plate, scared to be caught but could not stop.

Shen-yi walked even slower after carrying me on his back. Every step forward felt like a hefty boat smacking against the waves of humidity. The lull of Shen-yi’s soft body pushed me

back to Min Jun. The bony and pale boy who had waited for me outside the Military Academy.

We used to be the best pair to chase down dragonflies and weave bamboo bowls back in days when we lived in the same building complex in Pyongyang. Min Jun’s father and mine were colleagues at the Foreign Ministry and best friends since their middle school days. Our mothers often knit together and joked that they should marry us off when we were older so we would become a real family. Min Jun was only three months older than me, so we grew up together.

After my father’s supposed crime against the regime, my mother and I were removed from the community. I was six. On the day of leaving, she admonished me not to say goodbye to Min

Jun, because our intimacy with his family would now put their entire household at peril. She said that from this moment on, their life and ours would be like Paeku mountain and Taedong River.

There would be no intersecting point. Min Jun’s parents saw us off behind the closed curtain.

They pulled the curtain rhythmically, so from afar we could see the curtain rise and fall, as if sobbing. However, Min Jun and I kept in touch in private. He biked to see me once every month in a nearby park, bringing me extra ration tickets for sugar, oil and meat. And he always brought me books. Years later, when Min Jun’s father crested another political turn and became the diplomat based in China, Min Jun was naturally accepted to the Military Academy, the most prestigious college in North Korea while I, the daughter of a treasonous criminal, was assigned to sorting documents and boiling tea at a rural production unit, forever banned from a brighter future. I felt the ravine between Min Jun and me grow deeper, deeper than what was between

Paeku Mountain and Taedong river.

II.

I tightened my arms around Shen-yi’s neck, as if doing so could squeeze out the remaining memory of Min Jun. Shen-yi’s shoulder had the odor exclusive to old men. I knew I was gambling crazily, but I thought I might win. I thought the man who came alone to the North

Korean restaurant to order some naengmyeon at midnight might help me stay in China. I was an exhausted bird flying across an ocean, feathers soaked, and claws numb, and I craved a rock to land on just to take a breath.

“Is this part of your conspiracy, Jiin, to strangle me to death?” Upon arrival at our floor, he shook me off to the ground. I was five-seven and always plump, so I would not be a feather to be carried around, especially for a man like Shen-yi, whose muscles were no longer in their prime. Still his way of flirtation startled me. In the dim corridor, I could not tell if he was flirting or scolding, or probably both.

“Way too soon for you to die,” I giggled to hide my racing heartbeat, balancing myself, and immersed into excessive playfulness to disguise my uncertainty. I tried to sound ingenuous:

“I haven’t finished my business with you yet.”

“Come on in and show me your little trick.” It worked. He swiped open the door, misinterpreting my words. “But before that, daddy really needs to take a rest.”

Neither of us bothered to switch on the light so we simply collapsed on the bed, and

Shen-yi, who really needed some rest after climbing eighth stories, lay supine with rapid breathing.

The longer I listened to his breathing, the more I thought about the possibility that Shen- yi might have enjoyed my company more than my body, which was different from other Chinese men I had secretly dated. I once tried a doctor who looked benign, after several times, he offered to do half of my boob job free on condition that I had to advertise for him. Another man who

said himself a researcher asked me if I would share my apartment in North Korea with him if he was going to visit in summer. All those secret affairs died out like ripples hitting the edge of the lake. I wanted them to take me out of North Korea, but they wanted more from me.

I looked at photos of Shen-yi and me on my Huawei phone; he’d bought a second-handed phone for me so he could contact me easily. Those photos were taken not for purpose of memory, but in case the time spent with him backfired.

In those candid moments, Shen-yi looked unguarded. Not gullible, but unprepared vulnerability, which made my clothless shoulders and dimples look pretentious. Shen-yi was a shadow figure in his family. He never talked about his marriage, nor family, and I never bothered to ask, but I had drawn some bits and connected dots. He had been working for the Chinese government in the thermo-energy sector for ten years. His wife had some business in

Guangzhou, a southeastern port city, and rarely came back to Beijing. Their only daughter was older than me. He had developed a habit of slightly bowing his lower back when he talked to people who were socially superior to him. I imagined over these years he had slowly lost his wholesome self at some corners in his insipid and compromised life.

Shen-yi was a perfect match for me. He came to the restaurant where I worked to cozy up to North Korean officials and smooth out the natural gas contract with the North Korean government. He was vying for a finalization before September, which would leave ample time for logistics and installation for the coming winter. Now that he had secured the contract, the tightness wore off, and the wrinkled, sagging, decaying him appeared. His Zhonghua cigarettes seeped through the quilt and reached me. I stared at a swelling tile on the ceiling, deciding if it was real or my imagination to think, at some point, that I was his wife, daughter, mistress, and companion: trophy and sanctuary combined.

“We agreed to no photos.” It came from Shen- yi. I didn’t know how long he had observed, but it was part of the plan.

“Haven’t you missed me when I am not around? Photos help.” My desperation to impress him made it sound strikingly genuine. I uttered those words with my best voice possible. If spoken properly, my voice could be deceiving. Under the lamp, a moth swirled toward the bulb and got burnt from its heat. It fell onto the nightstand.

He rolled out of the bed and lit a cigarette. The red dot at the tip twinkled like an eye of a wolf at midnight.

The smoke stung my eyes, but I wouldn’t let the prolonged nothingness slice my resolve.

“Too risky to have photos.” He pulled the switch and rose from the bed. The orange light flooding over his bare chest. I squinted. He continued, “I made it clear when we started. I have my family.”

I pulled the cover sheet over my mouth and turned my face away from him, pretending to be heartbroken but my heart quickly calculated: Should I fuel up his guilt by starting to sob? Or should I tell him flatly that if he gives me an identity his reputation and family will be intact?

Shen-yi exhaled, slumping back onto the bed, combing my hair with his fingers. “Listen, get rid of them. As long as you behave, I will take care of you.”

“Find me a Chinese identity card, and those photos will be erased. Gone like nothing.” I could not afford to wait any longer—working at the restaurant was a time bomb, and I did not know when it would explode. My frequent breaches of the night curfew were already an alarming sign. If I was charged with treason and sent back to North Korea, I would die a thousand times. I would die as people say, a vicious seed is doomed because of the foul soil. The father, the daughter.

Shen-yi’s grey oversized underwear was loose and hanging, a cluster of errant pubic hairs popping out and glaring at me.

“I have many photos and videos of us stored in my phone, and I will turn it in to Chinese government, or your wife, if you don’t obey.” Saying out loud instructions felt good, no matter how tentative my authority last.

He pushed me away and stood up. I fell to the ground.

“What are you doing?” He put on his spectacles. “Threatening me?

“I want a Chinese National ID. Give it to me and I will be quiet.”

“Lanhuo! You dare to set me up?” He leaped across the bed and pulled my hair. “Rotten bitch!” He clutched my jaw and pressed me to the plastic headboard and then pulled me up to look into his eyes. No matter how I had prepared for the violence, I was not used to functioning under the sudden, throbbing pain. In seconds, aches at my temples shut my eyes and, incapacitated me from orienting myself. I tried to feel where he was and readied to fling myself onto him if he continued the beating.

Then his phone rang. Rustling sounds of his pants ensued. Shen-yi’s genteel voice soon filled the room. It was his wife. Ironically, the man whom I thought would help me out cursed and beat me just now, while it was his wife who came to my rescue, even though it might not be part of her plan.

When Shen-yi finished the call, my vision cleared but my head still heavy. I lay on the floor and felt each second a universe. He came back with a shocking face, as if he could not recall the mess he had just made, but soon he renewed his fury and looked down at me with contempt.

“Why should I help you?” His belly vibrated hysterically as he inhaled.

Tick. Shen-yi was a decent man. He put on his black leather shoes and walked to the door. Tick. Shen-yi paused and turned back, shuffling one of his feet between my breasts, as if they were sponge to brush off the dust. He moaned and cursed, the sound of hands hitting against skin echoing the room like an ancient ritual. Some warm droplets fell onto my face. Tick. The door cricketed. Lights from the hallway crept in and then darkness consumed everything.

The semen dried and glued my facial muscles still. I felt sore all over. Perhaps I was dying. My body floating along a river, surrounded with purple daisies and cyan lilies. Ophelia in death. Water soaking my white gown and seaweed brushing off my earlobes. Currents carrying me like a newborn. I would glide on shore where a tall woman dressed in clouds would hold me up and kiss my fingertips. She would say, “my dear daughter, welcome home.”

III.

Two years ago, I went home to collect my mother’s ashes.

After staying in Beijing for a year, I had been called to my supervisor’s office. He told me that my mother had died, and the government was allowing me to take a break from my work to go back to North Korea and take care of her burial. If you wanted, he enunciated each word with a hint of suggestion that only people who had lived in North Korea understood. He was a handsome, middle-aged man who had five-year-old twin daughters in Nampo, a river city a forty-minute-drive from Pyongyang. More than once I spotted him squatting in the darkness staring into Beijing’s night after the restaurant closed. To us, Beijing was heaven and its night the pearl. I always accompanied him in the darkness, squatting and staring. The way he asked if I wanted to go back, and if I had no other family back home made me tremble. Half because I realized that after my mother’s passing, I was alone, but also free of any reasons to go home with

no hostage being held back, and half because I realized that he might already know my scheme with those Chinese men, but turned a blind eye.

The institution where my mom had stayed her last ten years was situated in suburban

Pyongyang. A three-story grey building with two wings on each side. When I arrived after her death, some residents cast curious looks at me; however, the goods they carried on their heads were too cumbersome to allow them to have a good look at the stranger. On that drizzling day, the ivy leaves formed a lush canopy that prevented the rain from dripping down. The smell of coal was strong in the air. One of the elder women handed me a square bronze box with both hands, patting my shoulder.

“I am sorry for your loss,” her voice sounded formal. There was no room for pity; no room for sorrow.

The bronze box felt heavier than it looked. Here was my mother.

I asked if I could see the room where my mother had spent her last few days. The woman gave me a grim look. She was so skinny that her cheekbones could barely buttress her face that would have otherwise fallen. “You’re already past the time for visitors.”

I inserted a 900 Won note in her palm.

My mother’s room was at the corner of an isolated wing because she had become very erratic in the last few years. The institute had relocated her several times before they decided to lock her up in the most secluded area. She once alarmed the nurse on shift at night. While the nurse leaned in to take her temperature, my mom sprang up and bit her. She was also prone to sneaking into other patients’ room at midnight, slapping them awake and then cradling them to sleep, murmuring “don’t worry, mama is here.” Mama in her good years never said anything that gentle to me, and perhaps in her sane days she hewed pride too tight around her to even allow her

dearest ones to get closer. I was afraid of her, who would come to my room later at night after a big gathering and point out what I did less properly. She did not like my manners, or my personality, which she reprimanded as too inhibitive to be considered intelligent. I adored my dad, who, when at home, played seek-and-hide with me and other kids from the same living compound. He never frowned upon when school report wrote that I lacked “appropriate female behavior” for chasing down a boy who smeared my red scarf with ink and laughed at my dirty sweaty face. So when I learned that my dad attempted an elopement, I did not think what this decision meant to harm my mom and me, but felt an almost cheering assurance, as if his straying validated my distaste for my mother, who was too poetic for him, and he too pragmatic for her.

Mother always missed him in his absence but was pained by his company. Years later I realized that she might have loved a delusional swath of my father, the tall and handsome diplomat with broad shoulders and versatility in languages. Yet any love story between a contained poet and a pragmatic warrior ended in heartbreaking notes, and by no means a poet shall triumph. She threw away all the Russian carpet, vases and perfume dad brought home after his affair was exposed and did not shed a tear listening to his exile sentence. In silence, she accepted our lesser new life with a sneer, uprooted our lives, and moved to rural Pyongyang where I learned what hardship really meant. During all this I kept the Matryoshka doll my dad gave to me. I was his pragmatic kid.

The interior of her room was kept tidy and organized, as if it had just been cleaned in anticipation of a special guest. She had changed the dark blue curtain to a bright green one. A atypical choice of hers. She used to resent garish colors. On her desk were gathered a stack of letters and a book called A Glance of Beijing. The letters were all from me, which she must have read numerous times because the page corners were yellowing and torn; still, she managed to

fold them back perfectly. I randomly flipped through the book. It automatically stopped at the introductory page of Pyongyang Begonia Flower Restaurant. The front shot of the restaurant looked grand. There was a tiny pencil sketch my mother had drawn on the photo. The sketch was of two cartoonish figures, one tall woman and the other a chubby girl, in front of the restaurant, smiling. In her chaotic mind, she still reserved a spot for me. My mother, who in her youthful years tried to mold me to more resemble her, spent her lonely aging decades missing her daughter like a little pensive kid longed for its mother.

“She was out of her element again that morning and even tried to stab the surgeon approaching her. We had to pin her down and inject her with sedative. And then her heart just stopped,” the woman announced. It was the official account of my mother’s cause of death, with possible omissions of the institutional abuse and other unsaid ugliness. Every North Korean knew but none of us spoke against it, at least not from me, the daughter of an antirevolutionary.

I filled the indentations on her bedding with my hands, picturing her shrinking over these years and becoming as light as a feather. Under her bed, I found her pink wedges; the heels were already torn off.

The staff mumbled some directions about registering the death certificate and other things. The words all floated up and intertwined. All I could see was one day after school, my mother crouched under the counter in the kitchen, gripping a pillow and patting it like an infant.

All I could hear was my mother saying: “First your dad, now they are coming for us, Jiin, they are coming for us.” That was the day I learned my father was beaten to death on the way to the labor camp by his peer inmates, because one who committed treason could no longer breathe

North Korean air again. If the law did not insure that, its people would.

I never really thought of defecting until the moment of holding my mom’s ashes. I used to think I wanted to be closer to my homeland, no matter how cruel my life would be, I would love to live closer to where my beloved resided. Now my mother, my father, and Min Jun, all were no longer there. I had no reason to stay.

IV.

When I returned to work a week later, I took my mother’s ashes with me. I was on the shift to sing a song on the stage. It was the peak time during a day. Chinese women and men occupied every vacant seat in the restaurant. They bestowed a benevolent look upon North

Korean waitresses, while politely concealing their pride. Women murmured in each other’s ears that North Korean women indeed had lighter complexions, or that these waitresses must have come from elite families to be capable of speaking a foreign language. Men drank their rice wine and blushed, mentally undressing each of the waitresses. I scanned my North Korean colleagues’ swishing in their Hanbok and bringing out dishes we could never afford in North Korea. I wondered if they had ever considered the idea of leaving their homeland behind. The restaurant was exuberant in North Korean patriotic songs, filling the hall with exotic thrill to enchant

Chinese customers and reminding us we belonged to North Korea; our time in China was ticking away.

That was when I noticed Shen-yi. He sat right next to some Korean officials in the farthest table from me. He tapped the shoulder of the head of Korean officials, toasting to him.

The North Korean official complied and finished his cup. It was easy to mistake Shen-yi as some confident, successful man, but his nearly imperceptible, habitual bending of his lower back and subtle nod whenever his eyes met the head of Korean officials revealed his obedience and

diffidence. Would a sheepish soul ever crave to be a savior? Would he help a North Korean woman to elevate his sainthood? Eyes. Wine. Tiny paper patch. Excuse to leave. Parking lot. I cast my bet.

That night after meeting Shen-yi, I dreamt of what I saw on the flight back to Beijing.

From above, the land without greenery looked dark brown. But the atmosphere on the flight was jovial. The patriotic music blaring in an aircraft of faithful North Korean daughters and sons.

One flight attendant sat right across from me. She’d gotten this job because she came from an elite family, because there were no dirty spots on her family history. Her eyes shone happy light like twelve sparrows chattering on a spring branch.

I craved that glistening light in her eyes called hope.

It had been five nights since Shen-yi left me on the floor, and five nights at the hotel without even a ghost coming to talk to me. At this point, Pyongyang Begonia Flower Restaurant should have already noticed my absence and might have started searching for me. Once they got me, no matter how sympathetic the supervisor might feel for me, he would wrap me up like a package and ship me back to North Korea for my attempted defecting, otherwise he would endanger his own life. Good thing was that Shen-yi had this hotel room booked yearlong, so after

I hung out the “do not disturb” sign, at least cleaning staff would leave me alone. I glanced at my phone every five minutes, alternating between knowing Shen-yi would graciously give me a

Chinese ID card to thinking death was waiting upon me. I yearned to receive a message from

Shen-yi, no matter if it was a curse or a condescending reply.

I dared not talk to other people, either, as I was afraid that they would detect I was not

Chinese and would create a scene that might attract police. I checked the locked door every two minutes and gasped at each approaching footstep in the hallway.

When the night descended, I snuck out of my room to buy some food from the vending machine at the corner of the Big Black Tiger Hutong. The Hutong was narrow and winding, and tiny stores were all carved into the wall to make room for passers-by. A skinny receptionist I passed at an internet Café dozed off. The C-store next to the internet Café now was filled with elementary students released from their late-night extracurricular. They ran around and called their parents. The beeping of the cars, the clicking of high heels, the electronic music from video games and a billboard flashing “Pleasure of Flesh” reminded me that I was not dead yet.

As I walked quietly back to the hotel, Min Jun drifted back to my mind like a shadow.

The faded days loomed whenever I thought about death: In late February, Pyongyang was bald.

No greenery, no birds, and the warmth was yet to come. Min Jun walked me from

Comprehensive Library to the Atomic Energy Department at Kim II-sung University. Bicycles flew by in clusters, their bells ringing at the same time. The scent of crimson kimjongilia flowers blended with the nippy air that filled my lungs and heart, piercing through my cardigan and blowing up my scarf. Min Jun walked very slowly to accommodate my pace. I staggered in my mother’s faded pink wedges, imagining myself a mermaid dancing on a knife blade. My shoulder and Min Jun’s shoulder were one, two hills connected at the hilt. I told Min Jun that day I decided to work as a waitress in Beijing, and he gave me the most sorrowful smile I had ever seen. Working in an overseas restaurant was seen by North Korean as a hard labor: first, one had to go through formative training in singing, posture and manners to be considered qualified, and while they worked and lived in a military-style life for three years overseas, they did not get

paid. In the restaurant, other Korean girls and I followed a strict schedule in everyday life, and no one could negotiate anything with our supervisor. What we did was obey orders. Good family always shielded their children from the onerous duty and had other means to groom their children. However, I wanted this job, because North Korean leaders encouraged young people like me to scour clear our family’s muddy past by serving heavy duty for the country. What I did not tell Min Jun was that I hoped after working hard for three years, I would erase my name as an antirevolutionary’s daughter. I wouldn’t be a hero, but at least a clean background that was good enough to marry Min Jun.

Upon my leaving for Beijing, I already walked elegantly in high heels. Min Jun gave me his golden brooches of our Great Leaders and told me he was proud of me. The three brooches were still warm as he handed them to me.

I hadn’t seen him since then, but when I went back to collect my mother’s ashes, I heard that he was already a father of a two-year old girl, whose name was Haein.

I wrapped his Great Leader brooches in an envelope and locked them in a drawer I never opened.

VI.

After I returned from my food foraging, I started calling Shen-yi non-stop.

“It’s me,” I pressed my ear to the phone, when it finally went through, hoping to get closer to Shen-yi’s heart, trying to catch a glimpse of what he was thinking.

“I have something to offer,” I said.

He laughed. “Let me hear it out.”

“There is one thing I didn’t tell you last time. I am with your kid.” I almost despised myself for coming up with such a hackneyed excuse. It felt humiliating to admit that what I could give him was an ill-choregraphed piece of fiction, as if my body, which he already had, my time with him, which he had proved commonplace, and my soul, which he did not think too lofty, all mattered naught. In stories of ancient times, a king threatened to kill his queen unless she told him a good story every night. Even a queen had to be a tremendous storyteller to survive. The tradition seemed never slipped out of time. In order to live, I had to first tell a good story.

Who was the hunter here? I hung up before Shen-yi did.

VII.

The following afternoon, Shen-yi unlocked the door and strode into the room in his familiar gait and those Playboy leather shoes while I was mopping the floor the fifth time of the day.

“Where were you? I would have been deported had my supervisor found me!” I had learned to speak in a way that even a desperate protest sounded like a benign flirting, though at this moment I simply wanted to throw myself at him and kneel down to kiss him until he melted.

“Everything takes time, don’t you understand?” He spoke with a controlled pride, flinging my reparation at me. It hit my left eye. I rubbed it with my hands, tears welling up.

The slim card stuck to the floor and I had to use my nails to pick it up. It was a crisp, rectangular, blue national ID.

“Ha! This little thing cost me thousands of Yuan. You never know how difficult it is these days to get an ID without legal documentation.” Shen-yi walked back and forth in front of me.

“Thousands. Thousands,” he repeated. “I also talked to your supervisor. I gave him a fake marriage registration, to get you out of your dog-fart country. I paid that fake marriage card, lanhuo, another thousands.”

I recognized my photo on the card. It came from my passport. I had no idea what the

Mandarin said.

“Here is your name,” Shen-yi pointed and pronounced.

“Here is your address,” he pointed to the next line and explained.

“But none of this is real. It is all made-up.” Parking himself down at the edge of the bed, he grabbed my wrists with one hand, tapping my belly which contained nothing, and quickly cupped my breast. “But this is real.”

I pulled my hands away and pummeled his chest with all my strength, and then hugged and squeezed his butt until my arms and hands went sore. He was turned on by my unusual wildness and pushed me onto the bed. I felt the clammy little card pressing into my belly as

Shen-yi rode me like his horse, heralding his conquest over the Paeku Mountain. The pride of saving me invigorated him and brought me to an overwhelming orgasm.

I lay, facing the window as Shen-yi dressed. As he clasped the last button of his pants, he became the gentle and polite old man. He seemed calm and composed as he left the room.

Controlling and helping me indeed had boosted his confidence.

I was quite happy being alone at this moment. I saw a round moon through a small patch where the curtain had parted. I lay on the bed, feeling the weight of the card on my belly. I held a ceremony to announce the death of Jiin Lee while giving birth to a new, nameless me.

Under the pale moonlight, I tried to eulogize Jiin Lee and bury her forever.

“At 6-years-old, Jiin witnessed her father being dragged away by unknown men. His glasses were smashed and nose bleeding. She stood alone in the kitchen, the kettle whistling.”

“At 10-years-old, Jiin peered through the window, watching the other girls rehearse for the National Day’s ceremony. Longingly she stared, wishing to join in, and cursing being unqualified to perform this honor, as the daughter of treasonous father.”

“At 17-years-old, Jiin wept in front of college admission people who rejected her request to take the college entrance exams because she was not ‘red’ enough.”

…

I laughed. Letting go was an indefinite process. I had said goodbyes to too many people in my life, my father, then Min Jun, and my mother, yet they still dwelled on the most tenacious tip of my mind. Now how many times should I bid farewell to Jiin Lee, who was survived by no one and yet by everyone, in order to eventually become a fresh newborn?

As I closed my eyes, I thought of Pyongyang one last time, as I told myself: now going back at the pond in Pyongyang, doing whatever you want, and never, never returning again, not even in dreams. So in my last imaginary trip back, I was free to do anything. I would fill the porcelain bowl that my father brought me from Russia with parrot blood. The sky would be as inky as my eyes, and the moon and stars would be showering in osmanthus breeze. I would hear one more time cicadas humming in the midsummer, and see one more time the slender wings of cranes brushing the glassy water surface. At the innocent night, I would scratch the mosquito

bites on my legs, jumping back and forth, and then kiss Min Jun, with all my ferocity and tenderness. The moon reflecting in the bamboo bowl. The water shaking like a fat lady’s cheeks.

I would start to run, holding my arms as stable as I could, trying to keep the moon lady in the water, not losing a drop.

LILIAN AND LI LIAN

It was not until many years later that Lilian admitted to herself that perhaps Li Lian was merely the catalyst for the ensuing changes in her life. Before that, she sort of quietly blamed him, and even the year of 2020 for letting them get to know each other. Now as she grew old enough to learn that at the core of blaming lay self-loathing, and hindsight wisdom never brought true solace for past mistakes or justification of future decisions, she stopped rummaging her memory for a defining moment, an event, or a person to be culpable for her life. In fact, she loved the craziness of those unexpected turns as an American-Chinese who became Chinese citizen, and she wanted to take full credit for her own decisions. If her life had left her anything it was life went on but not necessarily went forward and going forward or backward depended on how you looked at it. So take good care of the memory. Cherish it, may it be unbearable or joyful, as it was the only belonging you had. Future was not yours. It was not anyone’s because one could not own the unknown. There was no way of knowing what would follow the meeting with Li Lian, or after the year of 2020. There was only wild guess they made after Li Lian started to pursue his American dream and ventured into a life rising and fall with the country’s breath.

Her life, as she traced down her origin and settled back down in China, felt like a tragic epic. No one knew that one day communication on paper would replace chats via mobile devices. No one could rightly predict which way humanity would evolve. Sixty years, longer than some people’s entire life, but shorter than the sequoia tree outside her widow. It took sixty years for her to realize that she and Li Lian, neither of them, resisted the sweeping force of history, but they did not succumb to it, in their different yet similar ways, they withstood, endured and survived.

2020

Lilian still remembered her first meeting Li Lian like it was yesterday, though her computer screen had long been an antique piece of work collecting dust in the cabinet. That year, the computer was still at its height. The world seemed to be pivoting around its signals. Lilian and Li

Lian were no exception. As freshman in college, they met and learned online. Much to Lilian’s woe, entering college life virtually soon lost charm on her, and in seeking for something new, she soon noticed Li Lian, a Chinese boy in her chemistry class that met every Monday and

Wednesday. At first glance, she knew he was Chinese. Another glance, she thought him a

Casanova. His eyes had that raw, curious look of a wolf cub that oscillated between killer and cuddler. Certainly, Lilian had not seen enough Chinese people in her life to make sense of their ways of flirting. The schools she attended had many half-Chinese, but like her, they were

American at heart. Where she lived, her mom was the only Chinese in the otherwise white neighborhood. Her mother Dr. Li never winked in the way this Li did. Lilian pinned his small window on the screen, and there she observed: This Li’s left eye was forever closed, and only flickered open when the professor introduced a chemistry formula. Lilian had no interest in chemistry, if not because of Li Lian, and now she felt a tinge of disappointment. His recalcitrant left eye, if flirting, only expressed interest in chemistry, not her. She was collateral damage of her own uninhibited imagination. Still she started the search. Soon his name appeared on her

Google browser and Facebook history. Li Lian, a proud Chongqing-er. His hometown

Chongqing was a mountainous city shrouded in yearlong fog, his mother an elegant woman with short, curly hair. He loved spicy, cold fungus mixed with shredded lettuce. He had a high school sweetheart, one year older, who now studied at Georgia Tech. Lilian took down bits of his information, this and that, etcetera, etcetera, to contour him. Shortly after that, she sent him a private message, with a feigned innocence, as if she knew nothing about him:

Look at our names

Twins on the other side of the ocean

Despite the name, they didn’t share many similarities. Lilian had never been to

Chongqing, and the only place she’d visited in China was Beijing, her mom’s hometown, ten years ago. China to her was foreign and familiar at once, though she was half-Chinese, and her mother still spoke Mandarin at home and demanded that she reply in the same tongue. Lilian could pass as Chinese, if she did not wear that much eye shadows to deepen her hooded eyes, but she could as well pass for white, if she dared to wear a tube top in summer, ignoring her mom’s condemning eye.

Her mother, Diane Li Forsell, was born and raised in Beijing, and then immigrated to the

U.S. after marrying her dad, a retired German lawyer, and before that, she was tethered med school, in the middle of nowhere Arkansas, where she completed her degree and residency. Dad had been her first patient, and also her first love. Diane’s American-made self was lackluster, but underneath that perfect ordinary layer was buried another life, her life in Beijing, her past concealed within her present life, which was mysterious and romantic to Lilian. Lilian visited

Beijing when she was ten years old to attend her grandfather’s funeral, whose face she only saw once, as the black-and-white portrait carved to the side of the casket. She could not recall much of the funeral, but remembered more of what happened after the funeral: her grandmother holding her hand and guiding her to the squat toilet at home, where she could breathe the detergent from the buzzing washing machine mixed with the lingering stink of the urine. It was just one tiny bit of her mother’s past.

Perhaps it only took one generation to rewrite one’s notions of home. Lilian’s home was the three-storey beige house in suburban Austin, Texas, where she lived with a sister three years

younger and a lot prettier than her, and a brother two years older and a whole bunch more troublesome than her. She was, in her mind, hinged on this embarrassing middle ground, but also because of her plainness, she was freer to enjoy the liberating mediocrity. She bore less burden of expectation or attention and had more time to indulge in her whims. Now she was searching for snippets of her crush on the internet, rather than being asked by her mom to practice the violin.

Lilian was reading Rivertown by Peter Hessler when she received a formal introduction message from Li Lian. It was a thorough run-down of Li Lian’s past and now: name, hometown, major and hobbies, as if he had just copied and pasted from his college personal statement. Lilian was amused by the seriousness of the message, and then, in the first time in a while, gave up being playful and reciprocated a well-articulated introduction of herself.

Later in the semester, Li Lian was enchanted by the catalytic cycle introduced by the class. In a form of a loop, the initial step entails binding of one or more reactants by the catalyst, and the final step is the release of the product and regeneration of the catalyst.

So dope. The beginning the end, and the end reinitiates the cycle again. Li Lian began to mimic young American way of texting.

Really. Lilian only half-heartedly listened to the class and preferred a simpler concept. I like straightforward formula. Beginning is the beginning, and end is the end.

It might be too cruel for young Lilian to reconcile at the time the ongoing momentum of time with the directionless nature of life. We thought we were going on, but in fact might be revolving around an origin. In a way, life was the catalytic cycle. The beginning already concealed an end, and the end revealed a new beginning. What had past shall, in a kinder light, reappear.

Years later Lilian realized that was some valuable life lesson shoved to her without appearing important, though at that moment she was occupied with a thrill of stepping into a prepared initiation of adult relationship. She started writing many, many more full, easy sentences that helped Li Lian -- who started his freshman year across the Pacific, in his old bedroom adjacent to a leaky kitchen -- to materialize what America felt like. Lilian, like all relationship initiators, offered what he wanted and anticipated his needs. They messaged every day, both brooding curiosities about the other’s life. Lilian realized that life can be recalibrated from previously unheeded angles, and thanks to Li Lian’s probing questions, beyond explaining the differences between BLM and BLT, shit and sheet, bitch and beach, she saw a whole new world awaited and unfolded beyond the confines of her small life.

2030

It took a while for the world to return to normal after the pandemic ransacked every corner civilization took pride in. However, something about it permanently changed. Countries were now in a persistent worry of another infection outbreak, and thereby enforced strict, long term regulations on international travel. Previously normative and formidable globalization seemed to halt in light of public health concerns. The less than frequent international communication slowed down business collaborations, and gradually stagnated economies. After graduation Li Lian found a cold condo in Ashburn, Virginia, close to a nearby cyber center where he worked as a field technician repairing broken antenna in maintaining the functioning service of an ICU data center. After a long day carrying around cumbersome computer parts and squatting besides broken machines, he and other colleagues would end the day smoking

cigarettes in the parking lot. Li Lian’s colleagues still kept their Wall Street habits of chatting the rise and fall of stocks and real estate investments in their spare time, though now it was more an airing of nostalgic complaints than the sharing shrewd business insights. After the chaotic Trump administration ended in a sheer mess, an ambitious black man named Obama won the election and swore to rekindle the spirit of the country. The charismatic new leader promised recovery in the economy and bought onerous national debts to help the government deficits after the grueling pandemic. The real estate market soared with the fresh flow of money, but soon plummeted and brought down finance tycoons like Lehman brothers. The center of finance crumbled. Many former Wall Street employees quickly withdrew from stagnant finance practices, moved out of

New York, and got themselves employed in some tech-related companies in anticipation that relatively thriving and stable tech fields would save them from falling to the bottom. Li Lian’s colleagues were once suited financial advisors or certified stock analysts, but now they could only reminisce of the old days after a day’s menial work, when their fingers smeared with oil on the machine parts. After mild gripping about the current job, they were grateful because at least they were still getting paychecks and having a place to shelter at night. Li Lian seldom joined his collogues’ newly established happy hour ranting, because he was not grateful for the current situation, and as a starving but inexperienced wolf, he was waiting for an opportunity to rise.

It was during one of those afternoons that Lilian, after breaking up with her boyfriend and needing a temporary place to stay, came to visit Li Lian. The summer was unusually chilly, and she had just completed the first draft of her anthropology dissertation on Hmong ethnic groups immigrating to Thailand. She dragged her suitcases to Li Lian’s apartment, laughing at his unshaved chin.

You now look like an old uncle of mine, she said.

The great recession wore out everyone except her, largely because anthropology made her aware of the ups and downs in life. The crash or bonanza were just how life went. To her, it made no difference. She believed that human beings were born into chaos, and evolved as mess kicking around, and till this day, every mistake they once made would occur a second time, and every action they previously condemned might be embraced again. The pain induced by the recession was just one of all these pains that had been inflicted upon us once, twice, and many times before, and certainly would many times after. All they could do was endure.

In her mid-twenties, Lilian couldn’t care less: she was prettier than she was when eighteen. Her freckles, which she tried to cover with thick powder throughout her teens, had become a trendy fashion. Her slightly buck teeth used to bother her now made her mature face looked more sensual. Despite her sudden beauty, she grew more pensive. The newly gained attention dazzled her, and for the first time she felt comfortable flirting with Li Lian, in a less suggestive but more friendly way. They watched the Beijing Olympics opening and Li Lian tried to tell her what was where. Somedays, Li Lian also talked about the Wenchuan earthquake that shook the Sichuan ground in May, the land close to Chongqing, close to his home, and his left eye dangled open like a crevice of that plot of land which was cracked open by the tectonic movement.

Lilian always caught an almost unnoticeable gap between the Li Lian who talked about

China and the Li Lian who had an American dream. The Li Lian in China vibe was more relaxed, and childlike, and to Lilian’s mind, calmer and more appealing. She once asked Li Lian when he wanted to go home, and Li Lian always told her that he would go home once he got the green card, the permanent residency in the U.S. The idea of gaining residency and then leaving the same place befuddled Lilian, especially when she thought about the time and effort he needed

to obtain that immigration status. Just like Lilian’s mother, Li Lian was now reticent about his life in China, and his silent but persistent pursuit of a green card became the best means to prove his resilience and brilliance to people back home. What confused Lilian the most was Li Lian’s endless rejection of integrating into the Chinese American community, and the help offered by one of them, Lilian herself.

How about us getting married to get you out of all this? Lilian said more than once, joking or not joking. “This” referring to the crappy place with a stinky carpet, the leaky air conditioner, and the constant worry of uncertainty.

Why not. Each time this joke met with Li Lian’s comfortable burst of laughter, and a playful but innocent “why not”. But he never kissed her. Not even, like her other American friends, hugged her or attempted to touch her. Not even once.

2040

Lilian called Li Lian when the plan hit the Twin Towers. She, at the time, was the head of Peace

Corp in a southern river town in China, close to Li Lian’s hometown, while Li Lian, who now asked everyone to call him David, had established a food factory based in New York, handling the manufacturing, selling and shipment of Asian snacks within the U.S. He married a ravishing beauty from North Carolina one year before Lilian set off for the Peace Corps in China. On his wedding, Lilian joked that she was going to claim his Chinese name and heritage, since he no longer needed them. She was truly happy for Li Lian and his wife Kelsey, but she also felt displaced, as she saw him, getting more comfortable in his American self, exiling his Chinese core to some colder, and more primitive tundra. When she started picking up Sichuanese slangs

and understood inside jokes among her Chinese co-workers, she felt she had become more

Chinese than he did.

She strode with the marching crowd to Renmin Square when the protest against the U.S. took place. Elsewhere in China, young people paraded on street, torching the U.S national flag, shouting to get revenge for the U.S. bombing of Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia, be it intentional or not. Lilian, in the beginning, only went with the crowd out of curiosity and wanted to see what the young Chinese were going to do. Then when the flaming American star-and-stripe flag burnt to ashes among louder cheer and thicker sweat, she felt a debilitating fear, as if she were about to be tried and executed for her Americanness. No one noticed Lilian, or rather, Lilian, at a face level, blended in so well. Young volunteers handed Lilian plastic bottles of water and bars of chocolate at the Renmin Square, and shook her hands with an exuberant, comradery jiayou, add oil, meaning hang in there, my dear people. So Lily, listening to their slogans, strike down

American imperialism, an eye for an eye, blood for blood, and following their routes circling around the local martyrs monument, which was dedicated to soldiers who lost their lives assisting Korea in the U.S.-Korean war, Lily wondered in her heart how deep the hatred ran.

The broiling nationalism soared one more time when a year later, an accused U.S spying airplane invaded Chinese aerial territory and downed one Chinese patrol aircraft, causing the death of the Chinese pilot, Wang Wei. This time, Lilian felt at ease with the anti-American enmity. No one knew she was an American, or no one thought she was. She rambled in the river town where she taught, greeting fisherman returning from their dawn hunt, as well as her

Chinese colleagues cycling to work, with a quick, casual, chilemei? Have you eaten? Their answers were not important, sometimes they answered with a smile. What mattered was her friendly gesture, her mastery of the dialect, and her seemingly smooth usage to them. The same

went with when her students, children of local peasants, asked her timidly what she thought of the American atrocity against China. Her attitude, not her answer, spoke for her. An ambiguous digression, a gentle but firm saying that she condemned all unfair, and violent behaviors sufficed. Her students, with gratification of knowing their teacher teamed up with them, would very soon leave her alone. From the bottom of her heart, there were things she did not want to say to her students, and things she could not because of the political restrain. She desperately wanted to talk to Li Lian, as he knew more of this place, and should well understand her feelings.

Yet when they Skyped and his face, along with Kelsey’s grin, appeared on the other end, she changed topics and instead asked how things were in the U.S. He would always say they were fine before 9.11, and now he would say, very contemplatively, that they were considering moving out of New York and would not settle in any major city in the U.S., worrying about potential future attacks. He talked about racial tension rearing its ominous head, and that his factory laid off many Muslim workers who sought political refuge. Li Lian said so with a sorry look typical of an American: pursed, tightened, lower lip, almost like a smile but not. He then asked about Lilian’s life, and asked when she would return, but his interest in his homeland was fleeting, and soon he was distracted by his work. His expanding factory plants. His indolent workers.

Lilian dared not to ask that if Li Lian rejected her because he did not want a half- assimilation, he wanted an unreserved, full admittance to a new identity. Which was why he’d married a local. A true American, in Li Lian’s way of thinking, was white, and by doing so, he denied Lilian, and her entire half-Chinese family who became naturalized in the States their rightful belongingness. To Lilian, her former compatriot forever reminded he that she only half- belonged. She brought upon the protests against the U.S. happening in China, and in sharing so

and so, Lilian reveled in a subtle revenge, as if suggesting China’s ferocious rejection of the U.S. denied the efforts made by Li Lian to erase his Chineseness. See, Lilian wanted to say upfront, your countrymen thought so little of America.

The rest of her words were overwhelmed by the approaching parading steps and car honking, and the loud, fierce chanting: strike down American imperialism, an eye for an eye, blood for blood.

2050

Li Lian’s business seemed to rocket for a while and then plateaued as fewer Chinese coming to visit or looking for opportunities in the U.S. Li Lian had been waiting for a speedy, improved diplomatic relationship to have his profits back, while Asian economy faltered under George

Soros flexing of the financial muscle. Asian Financial Crisis shrouded the prospects of a lucrative market, and further dragged Li Lian’s factory into a debt pit. Although the international travel regulation had been lifted, the grim economic situation chilled Asian previously heated wanderlust. As Li Lian struggled to land some deals, The Gulf war started. In an effort to adapt,

Li Lian quickly remolded his snack factory plant to accommodate higher standard food production and started to contract with the U.S. government in packaging military food. Li Lian paid for the small respite. Hearing the engine initiation sound ricocheted in the factory plant, he found his footsteps and eyelids heavier than before. The weight of years had been growing on him.

The entire world readily jumped into the war for natural gas and fossil fuel. Lilian, on the other side, readily sat down and wrote about them. She thanked god for the always eventful life that offered her boundless material to report. The communication between Lilian and Li Lian

became more sporadic, partly because they were busy with their own lives, and partly because of the slow internet speed. The world seemed to be overloaded and disgusted by social media that pervasively saturated people’s lives and glued their eyes to virtual reality and forget about real life. Those platforms died one by one, and everyone now simply loved texting. Everyone wanted to go back to simple words. Text without images or sounds felt soothing and direct, and constant sharing one’s life with others were deemed as a social taboo. In a way to combat people’s obsessive texting, each text message cost money, and international texting charged extra, so

Lilian and Li Lian would sometimes go back to the older platform, WeChat, to save money.

However, the transmission rate sometimes only allowed them to type a few lines before finally cut them off:

Boss Li, Lilian would sarcastically call Li Lian, though she knew his business was staggering.

Might be interested in buying or renting a booth in our shopping mall? Lilian would always laugh at her way of speaking. More eager and less polite. She could not tell whether it was her journalistic instinct, or her noticeable integration to her surrounding Chinese people. At this time it was trendy for Chinese people to get into business. Everyone dreamed to become a retailer of something. Even Lilian’s colleagues at Xinhua News Agency once told her in their spare time they sold their knitted scarves and gloves at a booth in the shopping mall.

Sometimes the internet would cut before Li Lian could finish typing his long, eloquent speech. After the total disconnect, Lilian would open a Word document to type. It was a long- forgotten skill. Everyone handwrote these days because it was safer and avoided all digital scrutiny. Changshan, her twelve-year-old son was writing his homework next to her. She could not complain about her life: she was now the assigned foreign journalist working for Xinhua

News Agency, a Chinese party news outlet, after she became a mistress to a son of a higher-up local party cadre. She initiated the relationship, because she hadn’t had enough troubles in her past life that dissuaded her from getting something she eventually had to pay, and after living in

China for a while, she became pragmatic enough to know her limit: she could not access any of the information that she wanted to write about if she got no connection with some insiders. Her first husband was the administrator at the Peace Corp’s Chinese branch and marrying him gave her opportunity to relocate to Beijing. During the 1989 Tiananmen protest, she got to

Tiananmen square to interview a bunch of government officials before things went south. There she started: she was culpable in seducing the young man, whom she knew was already married, but she nevertheless went ahead with her scheme.

She did not recall how many times she had been in a Chinese protest. First against the

U.S. bombing, then against the claimed U.S. spying airplane, and now the anger was directed inward, pointedly at the Party that was supposed to be the beacon for their future. She ran with the crowd of young Chinese who railed against the bureaucratic corruption, advocated for democracy, and surprisingly found she did not really care. The thought scared her, as she was once passionate about the pursuit of an equal and society, but now she calculated her own gains with the authority. She chased after the son of the official when she was not around the square.

The young son reminded her of Li Lian when he just started his journey in the U.S.: serious, reticent, aspiring and ambitious. The young man would soon enter politics, so Lilian sweettalked to him, charmed him with her knowledge of world beyond China, and pegged him with questions and promised a friendly report in exchange for information. She later assembled pieces of information into her notebook, but she found it too risky to send it to overseas publishers.

Beside, she grew possessive of the information she had been hoarding. That was her story, she

thought, and later on, she would tell it on her own. She would not allow anyone to edit her way of remembering the event. She reluctantly accepted the consequence of her reckless pursuit of information: she was pregnant. Now it was the young official who asked her to be quiet in exchange for an easier life. He did not love her enough to marry her, nor dislike her enough to discard her. It was, as Lilian learned later, that men would never say no to any women approaching them. With Changshan in her belly, she filed for divorce and stayed in Beijing. She tried to speak Mandarin with a Beijing accent, refreshing in her head how her mother used to speak to her, and mused how much more she resembled her mother than before.

During her pregnancy, she had to quit her job to hide her swelling body, so in her ample leisure time, she left Li Lian many messages. In their chats, she did not tell Li Lian that her whacked heart could not conjure up more rosy dreams, because having already failed one marriage, too short and ugly to be worth bringing up, she had already thrown herself in a hot mess with a married man. She did not tell him that she missed him and missed the days when she was in the U.S.

Lilian sometimes felt jealous of Li Lian, whose life seemed so smooth that she did not want to disturb him. But when she thought about him longer, her jealousy became gentler on account of her feeling something akin to love. Because though his still-accented English yielded nothing but a disguised past and a fortified readiness to become someone new—she knew the yearning now as she tried to forge a new identity for herself. A part of her was buried in him, a part of her lost in him, a part of her found and born in him—so many parts they shared with each other. An ache in her chest like sawing of an old ginkgo tree. Across the ocean the people looked like her, but they did not know the silt of the Potamic river, or the monotonous boredom of the morning newsroom, or the taste of a roommate’s cold turkey leftover—all these things that

shaped Lilian within as her freckles and teeth shape her without. Maybe the jealousy dissipated quicker on account of her mourning, already, the loss of her past.

2060

Time flew by and everything that was once invincible now had passed like a breeze. After the domestic disturbance, China resumed its opening up policy, and for a while Lilian thought life was about to return to its track.

She and Li Lian exchanged emails once in a while until the internet was no longer in service. Chinese people deemed the crappy internet speed incompatible with what required by developing a more advanced China, and they needed a substitute that connected them more promptly and instantaneously. They did not have time to sit down in front of a computer, dialed the number and waited in uncertainty for the internet to work. Soon, the affluent switched to portable phones, which was modeled upon the cellphone people used forty or so years ago, only bigger and heavier. Technology helped the leap, and everyone cheered the development that people now could talk to a giant black box with someone who either had the same device, or had a phone installed at their abode. Computers were tools of an older generation. As conglomerate internet companies adapted their service to accommodate telecommunication, many factories and plants shut down. People left their company where they worked their entire youth with bitter nostalgia. As Lilian wrote about their stories, she made phone call to Li Lian, and saying their generation, the generation growing up with internet, were soon to be replaced by newer technology.

Li Lian was more than happy to switch to phones. He maintained that communication via computer also deemed old fashioned in the U.S., and it was much easier to contact someone by phone. Besides, he admitted that he felt it was conducive to his eyes not to stare at any screens, because the light from the screen was irritating.

They called each other, but the bill was simply too high, so each time they chatted less.

Gradually, they resorted to letters, though it took longer to receive. They had no urgent matters to update anymore. From the letters, Li Lian wrote that what he had the most now was time, so he did not mind waiting for Lilian’s letter, and then writing one. He said after The Gulf War, he had to find new contracts for his factory plants. Eventually settling for manufacturing canned fruits and meat, the factory plants kept themselves running with tons of spam and sardine produced each year. In order to cut some expense, Li Lian boldly devised a cheaper way to seal the can based on his college education of chemistry. One day when a worker tried to seal a overheating can of spam with the new invented method, the factory plant exploded, killing a dozen and injured more. With the closing of the factory plants, so good-byed Kelsey with their teenage son. Li Lian said his son looked too Caucasian to be his real son, and he said for years he had been turning a tolerant eye to what Kelsey had done behind his back because he thanked her for agreeing to marry him and help him obtain citizenship. He loved his son, though he was sure this son was not his. He was even happy that his son did not have a tint of his Asian blood.

Lilian did not know what prompted Li Lian to have such a dismay outlook of race, but she was no longer in a position to have a say on this topic—after living as a child of the diaspora in China, the U.S. had long become the most familiar yet foreign land on the earth. Then she thought what she felt at this moment ironically, and aptly, captured what she experienced forty years ago—Asians were deemed as white adjacent, but in fact were always a disposable prism,

used to deflect or excuse racial tension against other minorities. They remained foreign, but never fit neatly into American racial narrative. So even at that time, as a half-Chinese, she was quiet about her own struggle of racial reconciliation. Her heart was pained after reading this type of letter from Li Lian. In China, the higher-up party cadre had been quite open-minded in the past twenty years, allowing western influences to continue seeping in and taking roots. However, she did not know how long it would last—the economy was doing fairly well but could not be compared with where it was many years ago—but it may still have been a better place for Li

Lian to retire, who now had no family attachment to the U.S.

Lilian decided to invite Li Lian to come back home, and she needed to find a solid reason.

2070

Lilian felt certain that she did not make the invite, as the cultural revolution unfolded, she could not imagine what life would wait for Li Lian, if he were coming back from a capitalist country, the U.S. in particular. Lilian’s husband was elected to the leadership of communist party the year when Deng Xiaoping stepped down and a young man named Hua Guofeng rose to the power.

The same year, Lilian got married. At age of 68, she got married to the father of her 32 year-old- son. In marrying her, the official proved sufficient political savvy to erase all Lilian’s past and rewrote a new identity for. In her new document, she had no past in the U.S. She was born and raised in a village in Chongqing. Her parents died when she was young. She grew up in an orphanage and then went to study English at Sichuan International Studies University. After that, she became an interpreter for her future father-in-law. Later she married. Little was known to

Lilian at the time when her husband made all the effort to eradicate her past, forge a new

identity, and pester her to memorize everything new of her. It was proved to be the wisest decision: the party, after seeing how the Soviet Union got involved with the U.S. on all fronts and the international climate grew more hostile, determined it was no longer beneficial for the country to continue the reform and opening policy. They severed all the ties with the west, and launched a successive range of political campaigns including the cultural revolution to condemn everything originating from the U.S. The borders with other countries were indefinitely closed and the communication between the two sides of the Pacific stopped. She learned that she would have died if not for the new identity her husband procured for her. People struggled, beat, and killed each other all the time.

Lilian heard that Li Lian moved to Honolulu, or he moved to California. She lost track of his whereabouts. She of course did not know that Li Lian, sensing the growing tension between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, refrained from any letters or communications so not to cause any troubles for her. He moved to San Francisco, where the bumpy hills likened to his hometown,

Chongqing. He used his savings to purchase a plot of land on an uphill and built a small house there. His legs grew bad because he squatted too much in his early years working as a field technician. His spiderly fingers clutched his cane when he read news of China. It was said that the political battle in China was fierce enough that everything in the country drew to a full stop.

It was said millions of people were starving, suffering, and dying. Li Lian thought about Lilian more often than when he was young, and he wondered if they would see one another one more time before they died.

2080

Lilian’s husband died not long after he took the position, and then his protection of Lilian dissipated over time. Lilian became the target of people’s hatred, for no reason. Some hated her elegant posture, while others simply hated that she had led a slightly better life than them. Lilian grew old day by day, until reaching a point that brought all virulent gossip about her to an end.

She no longer held watery skin of a young girl nor elegant posture of a well-to-do married woman. Willow waist, slim ankles, lush hair, a white rose. Long gone the time for stirring hearts and stories, for men secretly asking for her name. But this year her apparent aging soothed all anger against the vein of hutong, and all Small Black Tiger Hutong residents relented. A few kids started bowing to Lilian, calling her “teacher Li,” young men held doors for her and nodded with downcast eyes, Li lao, you go first, they said. Li Lao literally means Li old, a respectful way to address the elderly, became how Lilian was known to others. Yesterday a woman came by

Lilian’s door and brought with her three baskets of fresh produce while apologizing profusely for how she was misdirected by the rumor and had wronged her in previous years. A batch of her pickled radish added to Lilian’s already full kitchen counter. Respect was this summer’s trendy fashion, as bickering was last summer’s, and beating people to death the summer before’s.

Lilian, of course, no longer cared.

In that summer, the party dispatched the last round of scholars to the U.S., hoping they would return with more qualified individuals who knew a thing or two about nuclear weapon, even including people who had experiences in chemical manufacturing process. Lilian was one of the appointed scholars, and the person she was going to persuade was Li Lian. After all these years, she finally set her feet upon the old continent which housed her parents’ ashes. She was already seventy-eight. They finally saw each other again, but with switched positions, altered life.

“Old friend,” Li Lian said, in an American accent but a more Chinese way of frowning.

He was taller than Lilian remembered, with a much more prominent stern chin.

“Can you drop that word “old”?” She bantered and shared with him all names she had been called in her life: Teacher Li when she was in the Peace Corp, journalist Li when she reported, then Fawning Dog for Capitalism, wench, and now, received a docile nodding when people greeted her.

She imagined what she looked like now under the California sun. She wondered how she wore those years on her face, if they made interesting lines or forgiving wrinkles. His divorce, bankruptcy, and then tighter and more stringent financial situation in succession had sculpted his face. He of course no longer talked about money, and to Lilian’s relief, did not press her, as he had decades ago, recklessly asking things about the U.S., to inquire about China’s political situation. Both of them cautiously skittered around the harsh topics: China’s politics, U.S. racial discrimination. Her being relatively intact in the Chinese political movement. His being harmlessly fine at a little hut on a decrepit San Francisco hill.

Lilian thought of Li Lian. The day when they met, and his half-closed left eye that only lazily flickered open when excited. She thought about when she peeled that wrinkled tangerine at the kitchen counter in Li Lian’s cold and moldy apartment and, at the time, offering what he desired and would spend the rest of his life fighting for. His refusal to take it from her was frustrating, but now she knew they were really not savior for each other, but companion. She thought what had been between them, attraction akin to friendship, friendship evolving to camaraderie, or love, if she dared to put it, was nothing, really, compared to what they each went through later in their life. Life to life a grim parody. Who could truly predict it, the irresistible and maddening political changes, the non-stopping reshaping force from life, individuals who

attempted to write their own legends but were only rewritten and revised with every stroke of an opposite force: who they were, and what they strove to become, Chinese or American, good or bad, lucky or unlucky, countless possibilities birthed and destroyed by fate’s terror and generosity.

“What are you thinking?” Li Lian asked, drawing Lilian back to his house standing on an incline hill. An orange tree in his garden stood tall, several still-wrinkled oranges hanging in the branches.

“You knew it better than me,” Lilian said, observing Li Lian’s bursts of saliva flew from his mouth, arced and tumbled, forming an evanescent dim mist. “We are in the loop without beginning and end.”

Li Lian, while brewing the tea, held his left eyelid half open.

BLACK-NECKED CRANE

What bothered Lily White was that her name too white while herself too Chinese.

If she was in fact Caucasian, not an adopted Chinese growing up in a white family in

Middleburg, Virginia, she would only belittle her name when she needed to make a point of white insensitivity to race issues, the blatant ignorance of the Lily-White Movement, championed by some backward politicians in the late 19th . Or, if she was a cooler, bolder, and hippier girl, she would tattoo an “F U” sign on her arm and ask everyone to call her Fu the

Oriental, and even dare to keep that invented moniker on all yearbooks and alum bulletins.

But unfortunately, Lily was neither. She was not too bold to ridicule nor too numb to overlook, so the only way left for her was to maintain a lame mediocrity by playfully pronouncing her last name, each time when pressed by anyone who got curious enough to ask, as

Wyatt. Lily Wyatt. W-Y-A-T-T. The replaced, almost silly sounding “a,” the prolonged vowel, the misplaced stress, and the subtle, mocking letter change from a definite “i” in “White” to a more uncertain “a” in Wyatt, all helped messing up the gravity of Lily White, and offered a comical, sarcastic enough alternative that met Lily’s smirking intention. There, she got along with the name Lily White for almost twenty-four years now and had mastered her identity game:

Lily White the girl with her white family, blissful and confident, valedictorian of class 2009 at

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a lovely daughter and sister, a telling tale of ivy-league prodigy in Middleburg; Lily Wyatt at times the saucy young graduate of

Columbia, living in a studio with Kevin, her college boyfriend, in Harlem, and mingling with elites by day and cocaine snorters by night. She was less of an idol than Lily White because she was less perfect, but imperfection is synonymous with being charismatic because flaws endear her. She got drunk. She flirted dirty. She worked late into the night for applications that turned

her down. She ventured for love that broke her heart. Lily Wyatt was tough and stalwart, so she was the safe, intermediate cushion, less imposing and more capable of adjustment, between Lily

White and the Lily Last Name Unknown. So at those troubled nights when sleep took forever to come, when drunk minds, broken hearts, and wailing souls made Lily White the good girl, tremble; somewhere within Lily Wyatt, or Lily White, a Lily something, whose last name, be it

Huang, Li, or Yang, remained in the fog, would break free and roam like a beast, gnawing at everything, demanding to know who deserted her, who betrayed her, and who to make amends to her.

She did not resent her current life and was not desperate for an alternative reality check to distill some gratitude in her for what she had, nor did she brew condescending thought towards her biological parents and wanted to bitterly prove that because of their decision to abandon her, she thrived. As she grew older, she thought of China more often, because underneath layers of more mature, wittier Lily, there was that pensive child Lily who begged where home was, who now a wiser Lily would be able to pacify.

So In the end of June in 2016, having finalized itinerary and details of her legacy trip with a Chinese cultural institute, she asked her supervisor, an advertisement jiggle guru, for a ten-day leave, with a promise of returning with a well-rested body and creative mind. She hadn’t told Jane and Charles, her adoptive parents, that she planned to visit the very orphanage at which she spent her first or so year. In the beginning, she did not mean to conceal the forthcoming trip from them, but when her boyfriend, Kevin, came to visit them on a weekend, and all of them, including Lily herself, could not stop chatting about their summertime in Italy, she sealed her lips on the topic of China. She cautiously layered up to protect her core from Jane and Charles, as she still hadn’t maintained a fine balance between those two identities, that she could not be a

happy, and confident Lily White, while being a sensitive, sarcastic Chinese adoptee. Moreover, she did not want them to think they were not good enough in their effort in her upbringing. Till this day they still joked about baby Lily's stubborn lips being furled to a triangle shape as if she bore a firm grudge against the world, even in her dreams. Barely a year later, that impressive little mouth popped a painful question: where do I come from? The nonstop inquiry from Lily about her origin still startled the mentally unprepared white couple. They did not know the race education would start this early. Lily’s question was like the first cracking pop of wood in a fireplace, reminding them of the time and season. They poured their hearts into her upbringing, and it was not an exaggeration that they had spent no less time and energy on Lily than their son,

Lucas, who was born seven years later, when the couple had long given up the hope of their fertility. In order to help Lily connect with her culture, they hired a Mandarin tutor, signed her up for Chinese dance classes in Rockville, Maryland that Jane would drive forty-five minutes to every Saturday so Lily could wear those garish costumes and jump with other kids. The family had meant to take her to explore the continent and had been supportive in all endeavors. Lily, however, never wanted to go to China before she turned twenty. She did not think that was necessary, as she had no recollection of that land whatsoever, but as she grew older, when she knew enough what failure tasted like, and lay awake through nights, a bitterness took seed and sprouted out, and year by year the longing for an imaginary homeland, for its delayed welcome and owed apology, grew and gripped her. She was more and more tethered to the topic of China as if an invisible whip had shepherd her around—the dinner with her parents went great. Lily knew her parents liked Kevin, and Kevin, whose blonde hair had been soaked because of the heat of the day, seemed to be genuinely relaxed with them and made a bunch of silly jokes that not only the four of them laughed at, but also the waiter serving them. Middleburg’s The Hunter’s

Inn was brimming with lively chats and rounds of drinks, but Lily had a moment of dislocation: while they sat and talked, she wondered how others would imagine the relationships of the family. For the first time in her life, she felt very far away from her beloved Jane and Charles, and very distant from Kevin.

A week after the dinner, alone, Lily went onboard, while her parents assumed she was back in New York, and while Kevin still thought she was spending extra days with her parents.

She thought that if she was once lived in China alone, then let that expedition into her past belong to her and her alone.

Lily found it unreal that, after two days of transportation, from planes to trains to shuttles to a yellow tractor, she was now swaying on a horseback. The old and scrawny horse had such a protruding spine Lily felt apologetic for sitting on it. At times, she lifted up one side of her butt to dry the sweat that had stitched her undies to her nylon pants. Regardless of this minor discomfort, Lily was filled with anticipation for the destination. Miles away, the home Lily coveted was a fertile belt of gently sloping land nestled among the China’s southwestern highlands. Da Shan Bao was its name, and in Lily’s mind, it already rhymed with home. What

Lily did not know was that beyond her self-proclaimed home, between the impenetrable walls of the Yungui plateau mountains to the west and the broad expanse of Meigong river to the east, there stood hundreds, if not thousands, villages locally known as Da Shan Bao, that for centuries they had been accustomed to consoling, sojourners of several years, settlers for generations, or dreamers like Lily.

However, Lily was now only preoccupied with what was in front of her. A slender, muddy road and taller-than-ever trees. The rustic sign that read Da Shan Bao had dark green

ferns crawling all over it. The trail took forever to end. Lily started to realize that she had been way too optimistic about her body’s tolerance for change. She craved for the morning brew from

Vigilante, or some modest coffee from her office kitchen would suffice. She had munched her last energy bar this morning, knowing that she would regret having done so too early, and now she could not stop thinking about that almond crunch. She scratched her mosquito-frequented legs to death, and with each inhale, the ox dung filled her nostrils. Even the bony horse was giving her trouble. Lily had grown up with horses, and in Middleburg, she had learned to get along with them. Here, her American ways failed to rein the Chinese-bred horse. What’s more,

Lily could even tell that her way of disciplining the horse was irritating the very creature.

Eventually Lily gave up. Other than sitting on the horse upright, she let the new guide, who was leading the horse, to do the job.

The noon heat set in. As the horse stopped more and more frequently to drink, the new guide stopped more often and longer, which unsettled her. There was something off about him.

Other guides arranged by the cultural institute were expert in planning, fluent in English, and had brilliant insights into local culture to share with her. They cut down unnecessary tourist stops, but still provided enough for Lily to see the cities and explore a bit while on her way to the remote village nestled in Yunnan province. The guide in Beijing, Mike, took her to tour off-the- beaten path Hutong and brought her to eat traditional cuisine at a Beijing Opera artist’s house. In

Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan, Mia had a chauffeured car at their fingertips and brought

Lily to Lijiang and Dali, old Ming-Dynasty towns that still preserved the ancient way of living.

They made sure Lily’s journey was a refreshingly pleasurable and culturally explorative one.

Lily understood that as they approached the destination, a small village in Yunnan, in southwestern China, with its less-developed terrain, the situation would be less agreeable. The

hardship should start when her itinerary led to rural areas. Her private transportation was replaced with public shuttles and then horses as they traveled to deeper and more reclusive mountain areas; she had braced herself for the worst and readily compromised some of her comforts. However, this new guide was proof of the decline in quality, and what confused Lily the most was that he did not even bother to try to make her comfortable, as previous guides had done. He kept to himself, and did not utter another sound after helping Lily mount the horse.

Now he just took off his sweat-soaked vest and tied it around his waist, exposing his hairy chest.

He was reedy, but field work sculpted him. His figure, to Lily’s mind, was not bad. He may have been older than her, but Lily could not tell. Not until he stripped himself naked did Lily realized how the exposure to sun and the punishing plateau wind had dried and wrinkled his face, because the skin underneath his vest was pale and tender.

He mumbled instructions for the horse that Lily did not comprehend. When Lily tried to initiate conversations in her limited Mandarin, the guide simply pointed in the direction they were heading without even turning his head. The journey bred wild imaginings on Lily's side.

The guy was wearing grey khaki shorts with an 'Adidass' logo on the bottoms. The longer Lily stared at the misspelled logo, the more she was concerned that this reticent dude was a badass who plotted to take advantage of her in the middle-of-nowhere wilderness. After all, she knew nothing about where she was.

“Can you understand what I am saying?” Lily initiated again, louder, more earnest. She started learning Mandarin when she was seven, first at school, and then with a private tutor.

However, her Mandarin was limited to simple communication and no way had it reached perfection—it did not take a seasoned Mandarin ear to notice her misplaced intonations and awkward diction. Her former local guides all spoke superb English and demonstrated

professional hospitality. However, this new guide, as the agency warned before, may not even be educated enough to speak good Mandarin.

The guide turned. This time he lingered long on Lily's face. His hooded, narrow eyes were sharp and searching. Not a pair of eyes of shy peasants. “Where do you come from? You are not Chinese.”

"You are not the representative from the Wild China tour agency?"

“Hell no. There is no travel agency allowed to arrange your black-necked crane viewing.”

Lily gasped. She realized that she had made a big mistake. The man was not the local guide the agency had fixed for her. Otherwise, he would not have even asked the question in the first place. He was perhaps a local wrangler who beckoned travelers to ride his horse. When he saw Lily waiting and searching for the guide at the foothills, he naturally asked if she was visiting the Dashan Bun village, and she thought he was her guide. Lily reached to her pocket for her phone. No signal. Nothing. She put the phone back and wondered what she should do.

“You travel alone?” the wrangler asked. “For black-necked cranes? Wrong season. Those birds are only here in winter."

“I am not single, and you have to bring me back to where you picked me up,” Lily blurted out. Her mandarin hadn’t reached the level yet to tell "alone" from "single." In misunderstanding the wrangler’s question, she was stunned by his straightforward boldness and in no mood for flirting. What was the black-necked crane that the wrangler had mentioned twice?

“Why bother—We’re already halfway there. If we go back, you have to pay me the same amount nevertheless.” The wrangler seemed to be amused at Lily’s unusual way of speaking and her manners.

“It is not about the money,” Lily pressed. If she could not find the local guide, the trip would be meaningless. The guide knew all the information and connections here, which would help Lily meet the head of the orphanage. From there, Lily might learn more.

“Then what is it about?” The wrangler insisted. He massaged the horse’s rear end, and his hand was several inches away from Lily’s right lap.

Lily thought about how much she could open up to this utter stranger, and she could not ignore the increasing discomfort, and the alarming threat, of being around an unknown man in the middle-of-nowhere. She decided to lie, in a clumsy effort. She said the tour was waiting for her at the foothill. What she wanted to warn the wrangler was that she was not alone, and if she were to be missing, people would start searching for her. In order to persuade the wrangler to turn around, Lily said she would pay him an extra 100 yuan.

This worked. He stopped the grooming the horse and examined her. Then he asked the same question again. “What do you want to do here? Where do you come from?”

“I needed to meet my tour guide there, as I told you. Without their guidance, my trip to the Da Shan Bun village would be meaningless.” Lily had no interest in telling him her story.

The much-appreciated breeze disappeared as the heat of the day climbed up. The horse snorted, and swayed several steps closer to graze on a cluster of leafy grass growing at the edge of the cliff, making Lily tremble at the sight of how steep the rocky cliff was, and how far they had dragged into the mountain, away from the foothills.

“That’s what I am asking, what do you guys want to do here? Why can’t you wait for them in the village? I can go pick them up later—with a reasonable price,” the wrangler insisted, raising his thick eyebrows. He was determined to make more money. Lily grew agitated. This guy had such a strong accent that each sound he uttered ricocheted between his mouth and

tongue a thousand times before breaking free to the outside. Lily barely understood what he’d just said and did not feel confident in this bargaining. Dizziness set in, and Lily could not tell whether it was because of low sugar or the altitude.

“I needed to see a specific person.” Lily relented. “Only my tour guide had the contact.”

“So you are really not for the birds? That’s good to know. I can help you cross the check point easier if you only wanted to visit some folks there. Just tell me who do you want to see! I know everyone in the village. I can take you there.” The wrangler seemed to be excited by the prospect of show his usefulness. He held the horse firmly, and Lily sensed that the horse was also determined to continue uphill as if it had taken on the will of wrangler.

“I am not here for birds. I need to see James Hu. Do you know him?"

“Who?”

Lily realized the English name “James” was for her familiarity. None of the people here had English names like that. She pulled up the information stored in her phone. James Hu is the name was the name of a cheerful but serious-looking young man, Lily’s supposed guide.

“Him? No way. He is a known by everyone here as laoqian.” The wrangler spit out a thick wad of phlegm and kicked the grass. “A big liar. What did you call him? He truly believes himself a rip-off of 007 agent. I tell you this. The only similarity between them is their deceits and multiple identities.”

The wrangler’s anger slightly disturbed Lily. She found herself in a situation in which her everyday knowledge evaded her. Uncertainty made her lose her normal sense of judgement.

Grey clouds gathered, foretelling a chance of rain.

“Why do you need to see him? For business—this bunny has nothing to offer. Tell me what you want from the village and maybe I can do it for you.”

Lily thought the least thing she was prepared was to get soaked in the foresty mountain, then told the wrangler the true purpose of her trip. The wrangler looked befuddled but also shocked.

“No wonder you Mandarin is awful. You are an American. Why do you want to visit here if you said you came from Meiguo?” for Meiguo Lily registered, the Chinese way of saying the

U.S., literally translated to “pretty country.”

“I would be really appreciative if you could lead me to the orphanage. I wanted to talk to the head of the orphanage, and maybe get a look at my past documents.”

“How much money did he charge you for this nonsense?”

“I don’t know how much he earned from this. My travel agency arranged this trip for me, and they are, supposedly, expert in helping overseas adoptees reconnect with their origins.” Lily tried to sound formal enough to refute the “nonsense” said by the wrangler.

“Do such agencies exist. Damn, and you paid for it.”

Lily was irritated, but she could not let her frustration take hold of her. She had to keep a sane mind to find a way around. “Do you happen to know the head of the orphanage?” Lily asked, in her feigned, cheerful persuading tone.

“I will take you to my mother.” The wrangler said. “She used to have a baby girl, and she threw it away.” The wrangler squinted his eyes. “Might be around your age. I will bring you to her and you can ask her. An extra 500 yuan for this, no?”

“You’re kidding me.” Lily did not know what to make of the information and could not help feeling the weight and possibility from his offer. Would this wrangler be her brother? Lily wanted to scream that he was crazy.

“When was your birthday?” The wrangler asked, serious and inquisitive. To Lily, the wrangler looked as he cared about it enough, at least he behaved like it.

“Might be somewhere around 1991, and I don’t know a specific date. I was brought to the

U.S. in 1992. ”

“My mom deserted a girl in around the same time. 1990 or 1991.” The wrangler nodded his head in certainty. Now the gathered clouds dissipated, a brighter sunshine lit up their faces.

Lily bit the inner side of her upper lip hard. The wrangler might be deceiving her because he wanted the money, but if what he said was true, what he was offering was equally alluring. If his mother was, in fact, her mother, or she knew something about other women who left their children at the orphanage, then she would be one step closer to connect with her roots. James would be offering some help, but Lily felt she was closer to the bottom of something if she stuck it through with the wrangler.

“In that case,” Lily found her voice grow softer. “Let’s keep moving?”

“You are so lucky,” the wrangler took out two cigarettes from a Chinese-looking pack, swiping one behind his left ear and lighting the other. With a cigarette on his lips, his words became less coherent. “You. Take my horse. The rightest decision you ever made. The government now bans tourism for natural rehabilitation. No visit. No business. They only allow residents to get in. The guy you just showed me the photo of was the one who made the new rule to forbid people like us from competing with him. He uses his connections with the government, and charges tourists a lot of money, way more than what I charge, to bring them in. You are lucky.”

Maybe the cigarette relaxed him, or probably the prospect of earning more money brightened him, but he talked more, and in finding Lily’s from the U.S. interested him, the

wrangler talked more of the place. Lily quickly learned that over the past several years, the local government had shifted its focus from tourism to nature rehabilitation. The new tourism ban locked those furnished lodges that once housed and fed numerous tourists. The pathways designed to ease travelers' hiking were now coated with layers of mold. They installed multiple checkpoints to block waves of tourists from entering the heaven of cranes. However, the local government did not expect these policies to, in fact, provoke tourist passions among professional photographers and adventure-seekers. Since the ban, many tourists who never shed an interest in nature, became eager to sneak in and get a glance of the cranes. As a result, the stream of curious outsiders inspired a secret, lucrative business among locals who helped sneak in tourists in trucks or by horseback in return for money.

“Checkpoints? How are we going about that?” Lily asked. They passed a row of huge billboards, partly torn off by the wind, that showed pictures of elegant black-necked cranes stretching their wings. Maybe she would fail to pass the inspection at the checkpoints, and all her efforts to make the trip would end in futility.

“Stay assured,” the wrangler waved his hand, his nails dark with soil. “I will take care of it.”

Lily had a weakness for certainty, even a blinded, exaggerated one. When they took the classics class in their freshmen years, Kevin never held back from reading out loud the Latin text in class, despite others making fun of his mispronunciation. That was the moment Lily wanted to know him. His cheerful robins-egg blue eyes, loud laughter, and effortless good manners enchanted her. After all those years together, Lily sometimes would still stare at Kevin’s sleeping face and wonder what made such an attractive man noticed in her, a small and plain Asian girl, and never part from her. Lily thought it was her own insecurity that led her to crave people who

exuded confidence, or even arrogance, to compensate for her own lacking. Perhaps she was better than she thought. After all, Kevin’s friend, Louis, once said she was an eight out of ten.

Now as she started to feel the wrangler’s company soothing, she asked more questions and became livelier.

“Do you mind my asking,” Lily tried to phrase the question. “How do you know your mother had once discarded a girl?”

“She told me when I had my first baby girl. She said we had kids at the same age, and both girls. She threw it away because she did not know who the girl’s father was.”

Lily was stunned by the information embedded in the reply.

“You’re already a father?” Lily asked.

“I married at eighteen when my wife was five months pregnant. I’m twenty-one and just had another child, a son, a couple of days ago. Villagers say my son looks very smart.”

“Eighteen and married.” Surprise took hold Lily and she did not even sense the wrangler’s specification of his child’s gender. She thought about her eighteen, entering college and applying thick powder before going to class, and her twenty-one, having a gap year. She added “You are still a baby.”

Three years younger than me, Lily thought. She stared into his face, imagining the similar genes running in his veins and how hers, a slightly different permutation, lived across the Pacific

Ocean in the U.S. She was twenty-four, unsatisfied with the PR company she worked for as a crisis management staff. She spoke English and talked about big ideas. The wrangler, twenty- one, lived among the mountains and had his own problems to deal with. The idea of this reunion, which Lily has been expecting for a long time, became a cruel and disturbing joke to Lily. Lily looked at the wrangler whose slouched shoulders blades could not align. He kicked a stone and

got dirt all over his pants. His round eyes, the freckled and small nose, the messy and curly dark hair. She discerned all the similarities and differences between them and realized they were strangers connected only through the blood.

“My wife is younger. One year younger than me," the wrangler continued sharing his life with Lily, regardless of Lily’s obvious growing impatience. “She went back to ploughing the field just a week after our son was born.”

Lily wanted to bring the topic over to his mother, so she said, “you mentioned that your mother did not know the father of the girl, so it happened before, I suppose, your dad?”

“Hell yes. She was a factory girl in the city at the time and god-damn knew what happened to her. After that, she returned to the village and married my dad.”

“Did you father agree to throw away the baby because it was a girl?”

“My father did not know about this kid.” The wrangler looked around as if to check whether people were around and dipped his head. “He already died when my mother told me this.”

“I’m sorry,” Lily felt hurt, as if the chance she was going to see her own father crushed.

The smell of wild honeysuckles growing along the muddy road filling her lungs, but she took no pleasure in it. She looked at the wrangler’s broad shoulders, as if he was somehow related to her.

“It must have been hard for you, and your mother.”

“My mother was fine. She had seen that coming.” The wrangler kept leading the horse forward, as if he could not bear thinking he was sharing with a stranger some of his intimate life events. The uphill road grew narrower, but trees stood taller, forming a thick shelter overhead.

Lily wondered if his opening-up a friendly gesture to reveal new realm of him, or simply an unplanned, emotional release to someone who he deemed would never intersect with his life

again? “He had been sick for a while. It was a relief to my mother, to all of us, because we no longer needed to spare a hand to take care of him.” His voice grew lighter, and when he said

“relief,” he cast his eyes down like a child who made a mistake. Lily understood that being emotional sometimes was a privilege, and that one needed to forsake some tenderness in extreme hardship when life was not easy. A survival mode it was. She simply hoped that other than stout toughness, her birth parents had reserved some tender spots for her, even when they decided to cut her away.

Lily received so little from her birth country, and yet got her life started from here, which made her feel a weird attachment to and sour resentment of this place. Whenever other

Chinese nationals bragged about the generosity of China and abundant opportunities it had offered them, Lily would listen intently but brushed if off. Her Western education had given her a solid foundation to easily find fault with China, from human rights to democracy, from freedom of speech to civilian privacy. She could lecture on gender equality for hours. However, her education had never prepared her to think that these points only mattered to herself. Now she entered a country that all her education found no measures to gauge.

The wrangler did not continue the topic and Lily thought of her own past and conjured in her mind the wrangler’s. Silence ensued. The wrangler commanded the horse to move faster, and returned to his previous muteness, and Lily, ashamed and lost, could not focus on appreciating her surroundings any longer. As they approached the destination and vaguely saw a checkpoint,

Lily finally allowed an unvisited, or unrecognized, sentiment to scrawl all over her: why was she here?

At the vanishing point, beige, small huts perched along the mountain line, forming a fence for another world. The trip was supposed to be a very formal, prepared experience, but with this guy, the whole plan took a sharp turn. Still, she thought, I made it here. At least I would get a glimpse of this place. Lily tried to think hard and hoped there was something in her memory that would reconnect to this place. She glanced at the wrangler now and then, hoping he could say something, so she knew for what to prepare herself. Finally, the wrangler started talking.

"When we get to the checkpoint, I will say you are my cousin. If they ask you, say you are working in Beijing and now come to see your aunt. She is sick." The wrangler instructed, then he reached out his arm so Lily could hold it and get off the horse.

“Better take that off,” the wrangler gestured at Lily's sunglasses, “you look too touristy with that on.”

Taking off the sunglasses, Lily saw the wrangler clearer. He had already mastered the

Chinese masculine way of bargaining and bantering, but his eyes betrayed his age and core. The moments of sheer curiosity and genuine care, no matter how brief they appeared, revealed gentleness the world hadn’t toughened with coarse aloofness.

Standing next to her horse, Lily kicked her numbing legs alternatively. The booth stood in the middle of the road, efficiently blocking traffic in both ways. Signs reading No Hunting, No

Trespassing, and No Tourism were followed with bold exclamation marks. People coming out of the village were required to open their trunks and their luggage to reveal the contents. People who wished to enter had to show their documentation, proving that they were residents of the village. The air was tense. Lily fixed her eyes on the wrangler and listened intently. She had nothing with her except for an electronic copy of all her documents for travel, stored in her

phone, to prove the purpose of the visit. She wished that she had some vestigial evidence from her birth parents: some rumpled notes with illegible words on it, some amulets, or baby swaddling with special sewing pattern. She had none of those, but a registration card from the

Dashan bun village orphanage, on which was hand-written the time when she discovered at the bottom of the stairs and brought in. She was naked, according to what Jane and Charles told her, a sign of hasty decision. Whoever threw her away did not even have cloth to wrap her up. Lily thought about what the wrangler told her, and she could see his mother, young and scared, rushed into labor in some toilets and then discarded the baby right away.

“I will go to the checkpoint first.” The wrangler combed the horse's hair, but his focus was on instructing Lily. "You stay here. Don't come over until I ask you to." He whistled a long tune. The horse scampered away.

The wrangler strode to the booth and patted the window.

Soon a head stuck out. The man had a big, black mole underneath his left nostril. “My friend, don’t you think I see enough of your cousins?” He crossed his arms in front of his chest, then reached out to close the window.

“Look,” the wrangler stopped him. “Have a cigarette to chill.” The wrangler slid his pack of cigarettes to the officer’s hand. He lowered his voice. “Come on, just do me a small favor."

“Brother, my hands are really tied. I need to keep a clean record of visitors for the higher- ups. Their asses are smarter than both of our heads combined.” The staff nudged the pack back to the wrangler, showing his determination of resistance.

“To be honest with you, older brother, you see the woman standing there?” The wrangler straightened up and pointed at Lily.

Lily stepped forward, smiling a courteous smile. Was it the cue the wrangler had asked her to wait for?

“I need to take her to see my mother before marrying her.”

Then the two men both looked at Lily, like two sets of gun barrels focusing on the target.

“You son-of-bitch,” the staff remarked, biting off his pen cap and jotting down Lily’s information. “I know you married some time ago.”

“But if you don’t write that part down, the higher-up won’t know it, right?” The wrangler shot him an understanding look.

“Fine you bastard,” the staff pulled open the drawer and took one thin permit out. “Don’t marry a thousand times.”

After they crossed the checkpoint, the view broadened. The edgy cliff that squeezed the road now reclined and revealed an ample grassland. Further away, an oval-shaped lake glistened.

The view was so good that even the wrangler could not resist sighing in awe.

“This is where the black-necked cranes stay during the winter.” The wrangler pointed at the lake. “When they come in waves and settle on the iced lake, they lay eggs in the bushes.

They fly in the snow like noble kings. When the ice melts, little cranes will be born just in time to have their first stretch in their lifetime. My father used to fetch one of the baby birds back home and hoped to domesticize it. Its parents knew and kept cawing outside our home and eating our corns. We finally had to give it back.”

Perhaps the teamwork effort to cross the check point had made Lily cheerful, and maybe what the wrangler just shared with Lily warmed her up. She felt a kinship with the wrangler. She

thought her previous comparison of the wrangler and Kevin, that both of them exuded unswerving determination when challenged, and that what she was attracted to, was absurd, and almost incestuous. The wrangler's lips opened and closed, but all sounds deteriorated to humming in Lily's ears. It was still a boy who stood in front of her, and he should have reminded her of Lucas, the fourteen-year-old boy at her home, her dear brother. They used to play tennis on sunny days, and after that, they ate ice-cream. She wondered what she would have done with the wrangler when they were young, if this man might be her brother. Maybe they would have taken care of the horses together, and competed over who tilled more fields in one day; probably, they would have tricked tourists into take their ride. Is this plain-looking man her brother, no matter a half or a wholesome one? She had undoubtedly thought about the possibility of having siblings, but of course, she fancied better versions. Now the authentic version unfolded itself in front of her. If she had grown up here, she might as well have become an expert in fooling tourists and shooing away competitors. She would definitely have ample time in nature, in a way not so different from William Blake's, Wordsworth's, or a suburban mid-class American. But there would be no romance involved, only raw life. A transplanted tree will grow roots in the new soil and cannot recognize winds blown from the old direction. Lily did not receive the instinctive solace that she expected an exiled soul would feel upon returning home--something like an immense excitement mixed up with sorrowful longing when they first stepped on the old land. The tantalizing belongingness.

Lily found herself entertain the thought of meeting the wrangler’s mother.

“Where is your mother?” What if the wrangler’s mother was, in fact, her mother?

The wrangler seemed surprised at Lily’s request, and he scratched his head.

“What?” Lily was amused, by his hesitation and her insistence on chasing down a questionable source. “Now you are going to tell me that your mother never abandoned a girl before? You just made up stories to get money?”

“Of course not,” the wrangler’s face burned. “I am thinking where she might be at this time.” He seemed to be thinking, and Lily, for a second wildly guessed, that he did not even have a mother, and was now thinking where to find an appropriate village woman to be his temporary mother to act in front of her, and how they would ration her money between them. The wrangler said “how about first giving me the money for the ride.”

Lily handed the money to the wrangler, and the wrangler, gratified and intrigued, said almost in a pitiful tone, “come this way, little sister, follow me. Probably you can talk to more than one woman who have abandoned their unwanted girls before.” He started striding to the lake, where tilled lands cascading down from the crest of the mountain.

Unwanted. Abandoned. These were words Lily had cautiously circumvented in her life, which her gentle parents replaced with “replaced" whenever they needed to talk about the issue with her. At age three, she already knew she looked different from her mom and dad, and their family was different from others. Once she learned that she was adopted, she imagined the woman who gave her flesh and a heartbeat had decided to sever the connection between them by leaving her behind, in a bamboo basket, or a heavy-duty, durable packing box. Throughout her life, people's inquisitive eyes and epiphanic smiles made her want to flee. Be grateful, her fate whispered to her. However, gratitude was such a cruel word. It demanded that she denied all unfairness she received at the beginning of her life for the forthcoming good she received later from her adoptive parents. She had imagined how this foreign land, which she had no recollection of at all, held something she had been searching for all her life, but it had nothing.

The wrangler's talk made all her helpless frustration resurface. At this moment, she blamed herself for coming back, to be humiliated again by her effort to reconnect.

“Do you know where you were abandoned? Just want to remind you that no one abandoned their kids at local orphanage, not unless they are dumb. They normally travel and leave their kids in orphanage in another town, or another city. You know, once you made that decision, you don’t expect to reconnect. So if you know the specific location where you were discarded, it might help.” He whipped the grass around him and breathed heavily.

Lily was almost running to catch up the wrangler’s fast pace. Her mouth dry, and her tongue touched all the wrong corners in her mouth. The tall grass brushed against her pants, as if trying to hold her back. The sun a giant silver ball hanging above her head. At the end of the winding road, there were several women, in bright red and yellow shirts, bending their waist at neat rows of grapes. Their chat and laughter felt loud in the serene village, but Lily understood nothing. Her heart was beating fast, but her legs slowed.

“What?” The wrangler asked, impatiently.

“I don’t know if I should continue,” Lily blurted out. She had been thinking of the scene many times, and even packed up the gifts she was going to give. A clay mug she hand made when she was five, her college graduation photo with Jane, Charles, Lucas and Kevin in it, and her calligraph of the Chinese word mother. However, nothing was on plan. She did not anticipate that she would rush to a farmland, in thick sweat and itchy sunburn, to meet her potential mother.

There was also fear. Unreasonable fear. She was afraid that disappointment would take hold of her, or the woman she was going to see. Would she be the daughter that the woman wanted? Lily wanted to retreat from her quest and, perhaps, do it another day? Then she sensed her wayward behaviors childlike. She had made all the effort to reconnect and there was no reason to

withhold. So she looked at her dusty and ruffled grey nylon pants, and stretched her soaked long- sleeved, black boatneck T-shirt, and asked herself “do I look right enough?”

Lily all tensed up, when the wrangler galloped to the women. He first said something very fast and eager, and many women laughed out loud. Perhaps the wrangler told them something funny, not that a girl was looking for her birth mother. They paused their work and turned their heads to Lily, and Lily had no idea where she should stand, or if she should proceed.

She was once again the timid, awkward Lily at heart.

Then the wrangler walked ahead to a woman at the farthest row of the grape yard, who was squatting with her back to Lily. She was far enough to be unfazed about the chaos on the other side. The wrangler said something to her, and Lily yearned but also dreaded to see her turning around. Then the last rock fell, quietly but irrevocably. The woman, stood up and patted her hands clean on her pants. Under her wide-brimmed bamboo hat, she had a lighter glow, which made her face seem soft enough to be her mother. However, her eyes were alert, like an eagle searching for food. She murmured something back to the wrangler, and the wrangler nodded. The woman walked to Lily, almost limped, because of her long squat. Upon closer, Lily realized that the woman looked way too young to be her mother. Her skin was starting to crease but no noticeable wrinkles had formed around her eyes, and her eyes, curious and bemused, without a trace of recognition. Lily did not feel fooled, rather, she was relieved. She even felt apologetic for being intrusive, for invading others’ peaceful life after years of entire divide. She thought about the relationship with her birth parents: to them she was a near daughter, probably occasionally thought of but never missed, and to her they were near parents, much sought after

but nothing other than biological affinity tied them together. A permanent pity, just like the crack on her five year old clumsily-made mug.

“Who are you?” The woman asked. In a melodic but accented Mandarin, with polite distance.

“I am,” in a panic Lily nearly forgot all Mandarin she had learned. She recalled a poster on which black-necked cranes were ambling in the snow. She finally said “probably a crane coming back at the wrong season.

ONE MISSING HEART

In short, I was assigned to get married.

The instruction arrived two days ago in a brown envelope, delivered by one of those garrulous neighborhood patrol guards, whose greasy fingerprints had already torn apart the seal and smeared the red, elegant fonts of the letter that detailed my future husband: Lin Bao. Thirty- two, five feet ten, slim build. Earthian. Divorced twice. Fathered zero.

“Ready for this,” I called Yiyi, my girlfriend of nine years, “I will be a married woman. To a much wanted ’n discarded Earthian dude.”

“Need some prenuptial counsel?” she said, “for an outcast Earthian groom and a low-key mid-airy bride.” Her voice was already too cheerful for a newly widowed. Her late husband, a charming blue-eyed with affectionate manners in public but a devil in practice when alone, died a brutal murder earlier this year. Yiyi, as his legitimate wife, had worked quite hard to maintain an image of blissful housewife when he was alive, should at least feign her grief longer.

“Hey,” I said, examining a low-resolution portrait of Lin Bao pinned with the letter, in which his glasses dangling almost at the tip of his nose, and his thin, jaunty chin jutted proudly. “I wasn’t bitter like this when you got married.”

“Oh, you weren’t? You vanished from my life like a drop of dew after I told you.” I did not vanish, but kept a distance from her after her wedding to avoid troubles, and I even made up my mind back then that if the nice-looking man would truly provide for Yiyi, if they were the ideal match as the system indicated, I would have vanished, and only cared for her in private and when necessary. After I learned his core, I returned. I knocked their door, in wigs and high-heels, introducing myself as Yiyi’s best friend in high school who lost contact because of my early emigration to the mid-air, much to Yiyi’s widened eyes and the man’s furrowed brows.

However, my acting was effective. Soon he trusted me enough to allow me to hang out with Yiyi alone, and at least he did not suspect anything between Yiyi and me until his death.

“Then I reappeared with the thunderstorm,” I lowered my voice, and cleared my throat, “may this new marriage bring peace and love.” I cautioned, trying to use my tone to revive for Yiyi the secret ritual we had starting back in high school, when we looked out for each other but were too intimidated to disclose our feelings. In every coded note we exchanged, we ended with “peace

and love,” and the ordinary phrase became our magical three words. We used them to much effect that only two of us could detect. Sometimes it was an expression of love, or sarcasm, or contempt, and today I meant warning. She could not say too much on the recorded phone, and I hoped that my use of the old phrase would bring an undertone alarming enough for her to notice.

“It sure will be an amazing match,” Yiyi dropped off all her playfulness and added a rueful longing to her voice. She feigned a friendly warning, “he sure will be an awesome one, just like my late husband.”

On the phone and under surveillance, we could only share much and leave the rest to dangle in the air. The conversation always carried on in riddles and camouflage. So naturally, I had no clue whether she meant that I would soon be a married woman or a merry widow, and yet I enjoyed our daily brief and coded chat. Seeing each other every day was too risky, so several minutes talk over phone was a much safer alternative. It anchored me. Yiyi was otherworldly: beautiful with an artistic heart, unlike me who was always practical and guarded. I was her armor, and she was my north star.

After signing off from my private line, I looked out: the sky still shone soft blue light.

Full of summer potential and yet reserved shades of spring tenderness. Below the sky, the human world broiled with steam and sweat. Air-motorcycles rolled midair carrying around the laughter of new couples, stirring clouds to swamp the lower area of the artificial lands. Kids screamed and scampered to a higher area to avoid the cloud wind while their mothers pointed out for them the differences between a real cloud and a safe stepper. Seen from afar, people were blurry dots, but any of them might contain within themselves an invisible, deep sea of secrets.

I walked to my refrigeration room and took out two eggs and a tomato to make scrambled eggs for breakfast. When summer started and daylights dragged long, mid-air residents began to stay indoors rather than going out. It became unbearably hot and, unpleasantly crowded thanks to many Earthian parents who would take their kids up during the summer break. Many years ago, it was only socially outcast who settled in mid-air, where water and food a scarce necessity, as a punishment for their failure in obeying government reproductive rules. However, Earthian’s colonial efforts backfired. In making their new homeland more habitable, mid-air residents worked collectively to make the most of atmospheric fluid and sunlight. Gradually mid-air residents formed their own identity and now because of its distinctive mid-air landscape, and their spirits of resilience and innovation, the land of exile ironically earned itself a trendy touristy destination for Earthians. Mid-airies had a long tradition of storing food, and we were wont to store food at home and prepare for the long reprieve in the heated days. I remodeled my floor plan so I could own an entire freezing room of leafy greens and fresh-cut meat. If not for this sudden marriage plan, I would be hibernating and nibbling away my pleasurable summer. Today when I touched those smooth and misty okras, and stacks of neatly packed eggs, sorrow precipitated as I thought the room would soon be shared with a stranger man called Lin Bao.

For years, the government assigned marriage among adults over twenty-two for optimizing future generations. They sampled each newborn, and tracked their growth, and when babies reached reproductive age, the system would find the ideal match that would offset the genetic shortcomings and enhance the rest, procreating a new beating heart that proved much more efficient than natural selections. It was said only during the ancient times, when our primitive ancestors lacked the technology, that they mated based on their intuitions, and often they faltered and failed, because intuitions were very much unreliable. However, I disliked the system. If the

scientific method worked so well, how come they matched my gentle Yiyi with a beast, because the system predicted that the combination would beget a, what, gentler beast? How come they matched my alcoholic father with my ascetic mother, who spent the rest of their life hating each other, until she died in sheer despondence? How come, if the system proved to be godlike, creating someone like me, so plain, so ordinary, a lesbian against the very system that gave life to me? No one dared to ask those questions.

The system kept assigning, though rarely assigned marriage out of ecospheres, namely, earthy residents never wished to abandon their traditional life for a mid-air outlook, and mid- airers hated to fall for earthy beings—to them it was a disgraceful descend from Olympia. I had been escaping the fated duty in disguise of illness. At first, I claimed that I had noticed onset symptoms of lupus that had taken my late father’s life. Then I asked for a thorough genetic check-up that took years for the lab to determine if I would be a suitable candidate future childbearing. When all my results indicated that my uterus was fertile and any baby seeds would love to take a residence, I was already thirty-two, ten years later than legitimate marriage age. In contrast, Lin Bao, my husband-to-be, who was the same age as me, had already stormed through two failed marriages, now being assigned to a third one outside of Earthian, which was not a good sign. It was a subtle exile to dispel him from his former social circle. In other words, he was deemed no longer biological fit in Earthian atmosphere, and the system tried to expel him, and in all mystifying calculation, it chose me.

The longer I stared at Lin Bao’s face, the more I panicked. I had a sorry way of handling men. In elementary school, I always fought with them and there were couple of times my mother had to come to school and apologize for my mischievous behaviors. In order to save my mother from trouble, I stopped being violent, but bickering became the synonym with getting along with

them. Warm feelings never came even after puberty, when boys all of a sudden appeared perfumed and groomed in front of girls.

Lin Bao, seemed proper and conventional in ways that I was not, unnerved me. I played all scenario about who he might be and concluded that unless he was a chronic criminal who murdered his first two sweethearts, or he spectacularly failed to impregnate his earthy companions, he might be, as I boldly wished, another pathetic soul crushed by the system who would understand me. I was not expecting him to be a knockout and simply wished that he would not knock me out with some woeful venereal infections or, even worse, expected me to be a docile, abiding wife.

Truth be told, I already had my eggs saved at the top level of the freezing cabinet for my future pregnancy. Yiyi did not have child from her marriage, and at her husband’s funeral six months ago, we realized that it was a good thing but also bad. Certainly, a kid would impose more difficulties for keeping our relationship secret, but kids were the best camouflage for people like us, because with a kid, the system marked single moms as caregivers and became ten times slower in matching them with a new prospect.

After the funeral, I had a doctor extract twenty eggs from me, and provide thorough guidance on egg storage. I purchased a small fridge, the size of a cooler, that neatly fit into the top level of my freezing cabinet, along with a lock. After several months, a thick ice-patch had already formed around the lock. I tapped the ice, and only a thin layer of newly formed frosts fell off.

The lock inadvertently hit the fridge, and a muffled sound ricocheted.

In detecting some noise coming from the storage, the surveillance installed above my door rebooted, and hummed to recalibrate while the built-in microphone that was invariably hooked to

the national news station, at eight am sharp, broadcasted ladies and gentlemen, today is the last spring day on the New World Calendar.

Lin Bao and I had our first tryst at a café on Earth. After exchanging initial pleasantries, we had nothing else to say but stared into one another’s face like a real couple. His was pale with powders and his hands were too delicate and slender to be able to wield any deadly weapon.

While fixing his eyes on the bulging muscles of my arms, he seemed to be searching for words.

“Thanks for coming all the way down to meet me,” he said. “I am glad they finally assigned me a Chinese.” Nationality was an old-world concept that our mid-airers had long abandoned.

But his old fashion sensibility made him feel classical instead of rigid.

“Obviously,” I spread my hair to hide my mandarin tattoo “Me, the Chinese” on my upper arm, and said “May nostalgia brew romantic concoctions for us.”

“You should be able to tell,” he giggled, and paused when the server came to bring his zero- cal, Metropolitan BBB (Beauty-Beauty Boosting) ice-cream. After the server left, he said in a low voice, “I like men.”

I was taken by his honesty and had to pretend to sip from my non-caffeinated, Urban MATE

(Male Alpha Total Enhancement), to give me more time to weigh my decision. Finally I said, “I don’t like men.”

While a kinship started to form, we joked about how the system worked: they wanted me to use my overflowing masculinity to cure Lin Bao’s unnecessary female disposition. We agreed to register our marriage within mid-air jurisdiction, and not to hold a wedding. I had my place up mid-air, and he had his down on Earth. In comparing the different laws regulating marriages, we both thought Mid-air gave more leeway to couples like us: The Earth required newly wedded to produce two children in the first three years, otherwise, their marriages would be deemed as

ineffective, and they would be reassigned with new partners. Mid-air, because of its tighter population control, encouraged a couple to enjoy their free time as much as possible before contemplating parenthood.

However, both regulations demanded that three days after the registration, if nothing out of line occurred, a couple should consummate the marriage. The process would be under the supervision of one of the neighborhood patrol guards.

On the third day, at seven-thirty am, Lin Bao and I already sat back-to-back on my working table. He wore a tight, dark blue tuxedo which, from the bottom of my heart, gave his plump belly nowhere to hide. I knew I looked even worse. I hadn’t been able to sleep for nights and binged eating fried sausages for days to desensitize my dread of male bodies. We needed to spice it up—I went ahead for drinks, and he followed me to the storage.

“Just try to clarify,” I wrapped myself tighter as the cold air swirled. “I have never done this before. You’ve done it twice, so I will look up to your counsel, agreed?”

“I also wanted to clarify,” he eyed that surveillance. “I was counting on you to have certain props for the optimal theatric effect. This is not my home court, so as to speak, my ability was…”

“Just spit it out.” His way of talking reminded me that he was earning money by word counts. “In the shortest syllabus you can find.”

“I need a dildo and a wig.”

Until this moment I hadn't fully believed that Lin Bao would conveniently be gay. I suspected that he might be working for the government to detect people “uncooperative in reproductive process” and then report back, so the government could then institutionalize us for

various treatments. I slid open the cabinets, and under my neatly sorted stock, I pushed aside a pair of ostrich legs that I purchased from a visit to Earthian farmer’s market, and doled out among miscellaneous stockpiles what Lin Bao demanded.

“Excuse me, but” his eyes widened at my assorted collections. “We have very similar tastes.”

I shot Lin Bao an endorsing smirk, and I hoped my upbeat toughness hid my trembling legs that resulted from the cold or the arising excitement, perhaps in a way so close to a traditional wedding night when a bride’s anticipation for her first adventure exceeded the trepidation for baring herself. It was horrifyingly intimate to reveal that, under thorough protections and deceiving layers, I was timid and frail: defying the procreative law was too ambitious a scheme to be executed by an individual alone.

“I know what you have been worrying about.” He fondled those wigs to find the one that matched the length and color of my hair. “I am safe. A hundred percent. I don’t work for the system, and I was afraid that you were one until you ushered me into this.” He jovially put on a wig.

I handed him one Red Bull.

"For our debut," I said.

“For our marriage,” he said. “I got a feeling you will be my most compatible wife. You already won me over with this extraordinary foreplay.”

In order to fool the canny, little red dots on the camera, we carefully cross-dressed in the freezing storage. After measuring angles and turning off the lights, we rolled to the corner of the room where the camera could only register blurry shapes of us. I climbed on top, while he

dildoed himself beneath me. Of course, I acted as if there was in fact something branching out from my crotch. The good thing was that the government highly respected individual privacy, so they muted audios on the surveillance.

Shortly after, one of the guards came to inspect, and exuberantly praised my husband's performance while Lin Bao and I stood side-by-side, fish-eyed, and hands gripping. Circling around in our room, the guard sniffed for contrabands, and, after a while, he nodded at the remaining bodily liquid. Clapping his hands several times, and pulling a wedding postcard from his bag, he left. I sighed in relief; the freezing storage had saved me once again.

We collapsed on the sofa. The postcard read “wish your marriage will last a hundred years.”

“Now we look like those real in-loves,” Lin Bao laughed. “We braced our first storm together.”

“We may work much better than any model couples,” I added. “Our marriage a reliable and endurable one.”

I wasn’t joking. We were in the same boat and needed to rely on each other to fare the ridiculous game and we had just triumphed, uncomfortably but skillfully, the first round. In the coming years, who knew, how many more shocking, vicious, and tiring moments for us to go through if we still wanted to enjoy a beer, breathe under a sunset like today? We worked through our wedding night fine, but how about endless days and nights to come, with eyes to see through our life everywhere?

Lin Bao well reciprocated my feelings and opened up. He talked about how his two previous marriages ended. How the first one learned that he was gay and turned him in, and how he received reforming education, which was shock treatment, in an institution, followed by a

conditional release that required him to perform well in another assigned marriage. Sadly, a year into his new marriage and he hadn’t touched his new wife. The second wife, more understanding and soft-hearted than the first one, agreed not to file a divorce claim upon his questionable sexual preferences but as unreconcilable personalities.

I popped another beer for him without saying anything. Those institutions were notorious in taming even the toughest soul. They used everything from injecting hormones to shock treatments to cure one’s inappropriate sexual arousals. I could only guess what an iron mind he possessed underneath his small physique, but no matter what, I would not allow him to go through that a second time.

“Man,” I said, reassuringly. “You are too good to get divorced a third time.”

“A broken heart finally meets Ms. Right,” he joked. “How did it take you so long?”

I told him about Yiyi and how she and I got back together after her husband died.

“Lucky for you,” Lin Bao said. “His convenient death set you two off the hook easy.”

“Off the hook, maybe. Convenient, not so much,” I corrected, and then hearing the buzz of the fridge resumed, I hesitated about to what extent that I could safely share my past with Lin

Bao, without potentially harming him, harming both of us. I decided to withhold the death cause of Yiyi’s husband. “Pet peeves for my place: you are free to do anything but, please, leave the fridge alone.”

“What’s coming, blue beard?” he made a face. “Am I going to excavate bodies of your former lovers there and count myself the next?”

“My smart bride,” I teased, but I hoped my warning conveyed, nonetheless. “Don’t become the next one adding to the pile then. There is always something you don’t want to know from your spouse. Not knowing is a blessing.”

Lin Bao shrugged and looked away. The sun was slowly descending. The rim of it glowed tenderly and tomorrow it would become blazing again. Life went on, but with someone like Lin Bao as a husband, Yiyi and I were freer to meet up without stirring any rumors, and Lin

Bao gained two reliable aides who would offer opinions about his decisions, which ranged from long-term romantic consultations to daily kale consumptions.

In the second year of our marriage, my husband fell in love. He found a man, Truman, who did not mind he was married. Life was once again full of hopes. Truman was, in fact, too good to be true. At six feet and two, he looked way too sculpted and handsome. He could get by being an asshole, but he was a heavenly sweetheart. If this guy was sent by a higher, unknown entity to salvage Lin Bao, Lin Bao should have possessed some value amount to a mine of gold to be redeemed, for which both I and Yiyi doubted.

“You will need to cook tonight, and don’t forget to pick up Yiyi at five. I’m leaving.” Lin bao proclaimed one afternoon on his way to meet his Truman.

“How do you possibly strike such a good deal?” I flipped him a bird. We had this type of relationship. Lin Bao was the first man I had ever gotten along with, and he and I bonded by our continued banter. “Don’t you think you are too lame to fuck him?”

“People say your spouse is the one who constantly underestimate you, my dear wife,” he sprayed cologne under his armpit on his way swiveling out. “Just want to say that your eyes,” he circled his fingers around my face, “have terribly missed what a great soul co-living under the same roof with you.” Lin Bao and I talked like this when we were in good days, when we thought life was too good to be real. Probably I was too pessimistic and had been persistently speculating every change happened to us, and distrusted even the most benign gesture from

strangers. Perhaps, this Truman was a good one, but it did not hurt to be cautious before it was late.

The three of us, namely, my husband, my girlfriend, and me, now paddled the boat of life narrowly on the treacherous current of unforeseen waters, all because we added a guest to our already precarious itinerary. My legitimate husband started calling his boyfriend every day and his boyfriend nicknamed him Baobao, a name aptly captured Lin Bao’s name with a touch of sick sweetness of babe. Sometimes we four would have a hot pot double dates, during which Lin

Bao and his love almost melted together, while Yiyi and I observing and solemn like two rounded rocks on the sandy riverbank. Yiyi and I had long past the stage when we wanted nothing but each other. It was not that our affections wore off over time, but that those years being together chiseled a deep undercurrent for our emotions and we no longer expressed them outwardly. We relaxed in each other’s presence, as if one had already grafted onto the other.

When her husband was murdered at home, Yiyi was off at a nearby shopping mall. It was said that the crime scene was too wrecking to inflict upon another innocent soul. The police simply withheld much of the information from us and only grimly divulged that his right hand was still missing. I relished in knowing more about his right hand than the police did. A thick hand with bulbous knuckles exerting no restrains when beating up his wife. Till today, the murderer still got away in the murky waters while the government started preparing a new match for Yiyi to remarry.

One day after our hotpot double dates, Lin Bao and I waited long in the traffic on the way back to our place, Lin Bao proposed a bold idea: Before the government stepped in and arranged a second marriage for Yiyi, we should intervene—she should marry Truman. In that way, our double dates could save one stop as we would no longer need to drop them off separately. While

Lin Bao contemplated how to petition the request, unfortunately, the plan went south because

Lin Bao broke up with his boyfriend a month later.

It happened on Valentine’s Day. Lin Bao got ready to surprise his boyfriend who was on a business trip, at the time, in another city. While Lin Bao skittered in anticipation with roses in arms, his beloved Truman, in the hotel room, was preoccupied in reporting Lin Bao’s misbehaviors to the government, totally ignorant of Lin Bao’s approaching steps. As Lin Bao was about to knock, broken sentences gently flowed into his ears through the closed door:

…solid evidence…two women and one man…not real marriage…. arrest next week

Lin Bao sobbed when he finished his part of the story, and he left it to us to console him.

I patted his shoulders and Yiyi wiped away his tears. Lin Bao cursed, “How come he did this to me? He does not have a heart.”

Perhaps the best way to soothe one’s pain is to share the more outrageous afflictions you have endured. Yiyi, usually taciturn about her fleeing marriage and hiding all her scars, lifted her

T-shirt. It worked. Lin Bao was so shocked to see what was on Yiyi's body that his dangling snot retreated all the way back to his nostrils. There was a scar extending from Yiyi’s breasts to her bony pelvis.

“The asshole did this to me,” said she. “We went to the court and the verdict said that fight between husband and wife was a flirt went awry, but harmless in the nature. My poor Lin

Bao, we cannot always ask others to do us a favor. We can only rely on our own.”

Lin Bao cried louder, and pulled Yiyi into his arms.

I had seen a similar scene when Yiyi was the one weeping, and I the one who pulled her to my arms.

My girlfriend and Lin Bao were the tenderest breeds among the tender, the best type of human beings which I never was part of. Their hands should be touching piano keys, tending white roses or waving at morning clouds, and I would take care of the nasty parts: wiping away the dust from the piano lid, getting rid of annoying pesticides, and making sure everything neat and tidy in our fridge.

Lin Bao’s boyfriend had no heart, so likely he should not have one.

Soon at one night, the door of my storage buzzed open, and more ice flakes flowed, the drawer was opened, and then firmly locked again. Summer ended as police sirens came and went and eventually disappeared like crickets. Rumors had that Lin Bao’s boyfriend had defected to

Earth and was choked to death on a smuggling truck.

Lin Bao was still recovering from his love fever. At one minute, he would announce that

“he was better off dead,” and at next he would glance over his silent phone, wishing that a familiar profile would pop on the screen. When realizing that his love was gone but his feelings hadn’t, he griped, “Why can’t I steal men’s hearts!”

“You have,” I said, rinsing one of the frozen carrots we stored in the fridge and throwing it into a bamboo basket, “You already have one.”

UNTIL IT RAINED

In Guangzhou, summer was usually sultry, but in 2010, it went without a drop for three months. That May, I graduated from Emerson and returned home, empty-handed, my head full of silly things. Days in, I visited museums and institutes that had anything to do with arts with my portfolio, which was three loathsome paintings and some dried soil, stashed into two stale French baguettes. My sandwich proved to be futile, because all I received was polite but firm headshaking, as one of the old-school Chinese staff referred to my work, behind my back when he did not think I was listening, as “sour stick thing”; my confidence waned. In afternoons, stray dogs woke up and fought to lick melting Guilinggao jelly that was spilled over pavements, their hind parts red like fire hydrants. At a local gallery, a string of young college kids, fresh out of big-name art schools, nudged each other for one opening. None of us spoke, which was quite artsy. At that moment, I realized I did not fight like a wild stray because I could still afford a flimsy dignity, an amateur recreation to be a cool artist. Now I saw that it was because of Ashley.

She kept me out of the stray dog circle, as she adopted me. She was the highlight of my college, the sturdy investment that my mother’s lifelong savings of selling pieces of women’s garments could make. My invaluable Ashley, who believed in love enough to marry me, and her invaluable dad, who loved her daughter enough to believe in me. After our graduation, Ashley busied herself with our wedding planning and invitations. Sometimes, after she had afternoon tea with her other girl friends, after taking a sufficient number of selfies to be almost tipsy, she would say she loved me and would assure me not to worry about those job things. Be chill. She consoled. I nodded with piety, but I was not chilling. I was busy falling in love with Nan.

That was yet the most harrowing part.

I met Nan at the engagement party, whose name was Chinese, nationality Chinese, education Chinses, and everything Chinese except for Chinese skin. In contrast, Ashley was born in Vancouver and got nothing Chinese but a Chinese face. Ashley loved to talk about Nan, about how her father was a shrewd Nigerian businessman who immigrated to China in the 80s to ride the economic upturns. How Nan was always the top student in class from elementary to high school. After all the good things she said about Nan, she would sigh and say in pity Only if she were not black, and then resume whatever she had been busy with. In the beginning, I was amused by how the conclusion always sounded firm and definite, and irredeemable, like a verified fact, and an inviolable truth, but very soon I realized that if I would continue living with

Ashely, I better think like her, and in her world, racial issues were second to pockets of generational wealth. The silver spoons were silver, and no more colors needed to differentiate them.

Nan arrived late, and alone. However, when she walked in the hall, none of those childhood tales about her mattered. She was simply too pretty to tag along or dwell in hearsay.

Ashely, for reasons unknown, concealed the most important trait of Nan: she was a beauty. In a clean-cut beige tunic and hazy blue dress, all ease and laid-back, Nan paced around with two dewy white roses in her long fingers, while the rest of us, bounded by tight suits and dresses, were only manicured shells. I looked at her the way the two hundred other people in the hall looked at her: we paused whatever we were doing for a bit, and then picked up the old string of conversations with a heart adding a new crease. One had to believe extraordinary beauties do not play by the rules. Nan was one of them, and traditional Chinese aesthetics bowed to her. She did not need lighter skin, willow waist, and cherry-sized mouth to stand out and steal hearts. Her

eyes were the cold stars that all of us wanted and feared. We kept our distance, but Ashely, my fearless Ashley, galloped to Nan in her velvet, swishing Givenchy.

Now since they stood in proximity, I motioned myself to their direction amicably without worry of justifying my approach to Nan.

“I take care of my muscles more thoroughly than you take care of your weddings.” Nan had a deep voice uncharacteristic of young Chinese girls. She peered at me, but not too intentional. It felt like a distant, unconscious glance, but it was also clearly directed at me: she had been paying attention to me.

“Hell yeah,” Ashley protested. In her soft, mellow voice, which she had been practicing to contain her naturally more hurried, and grating way of speech. “I simply wish to produce more testosterone to keep my tits stay with the chest muscle and not falling to kiss the fucking ground.” Ashley’s reply stunned me. She had been ladylike when I was with her. I had clearly never heard her curse or said anything in remote affinity to dirty words. Now as I heard a string of them, I started to think that Ashley might conceal other parts of herself from me as well.

“Look like my fiancée is full of surprising energy today. ” I intended to play it light. I tapped Ashley’s waist, and she turned around. Her smile grew larger, and there was no uncertainty or shock in her eyes when one normally would when their spouse caught them doing things they should not be doing.

“Oh dear,” she said and gave me a kiss on my cheek. She never called me dear when in private. Dear is for audience, and so was the flamboyant kiss. I did not particularly like public displayed affection, but I wouldn’t mind faking it today. “I should not have left you behind.”

“I know you,” Nan cut in. She now looked at me into my eyes. There was one brown mole right underneath her left eye. I later joked to Nan that it was her third eye that lured me in.

“You are the silly one she talked about.”

“But the dumb one knows how to work harder." Ashley burst into laughter, her elbow edging mine, pulling me closer. “So he earned his prize.”

Ashley loved to play the narrative of the coveted princess and I the lucky vagrant, and I always let her do so, over and over. The point I never got was her obsession with her value, status and fairy tale. In Ashley and Nan’s battering, I felt myself a reversed version of trophy girl.

I was among the most ordinary pursuers of Ashley, who was already renowned among international Chinese students at Emerson. A lovely face paired with wealth placed her at the tip of the pyramid. According to her, during her prime, she did not have one meal without a date sweet-talking at her side. However, those lunch pals had not mastered the art of love as they, slowly lost their dream girl to me, an art history no-gooder, who had no Ferrari or Jaguar to unintentionally flash a car key with but got a permanent frown carved on his forehead. Only a pretty face, they disdained, not even that good-looking. Annoyance flared when they lost to an ordinary boy like me. They overlooked that romance is an italicized luxury for a girl like Ashley, while affluence was already sustenance she had accustomed to and grown tired of. She had gold in her castle but yearned to see dew shining in the dawn. I, along with my pensive temperament, untamed pride, skulking posture, and old canvases, coaxed her wildest dream out. She salvaged me, and I salvaged her—one from an uncertain future and one from an uneventful past.

That night I almost triumphantly cheered when Ashely played the old game f putting me down. Nan gave out a very gentle laugh. A laugh later I learned only heard by me—an ivy sprig

of shared envy of Ashley’s entitlement, and flawed, dangerous offering to bond. When Ashley went away to greet her other friends, Nan kissed me like some kind of satyr, deep, wet, and fast, and before I knew it, she was halfway to the exit.

If I were truly ignorant and believed in love, I would say I did not know why a woman like Nan would hit on me and why I could not resist going out with her when she found my number and started texting me. But I was not stupid. I thought Nan initiated it because my relationship to Ashley. Perhaps just like me, Nan neverliked Ashley, and in her way, she could throw some stones to Ashley’s way, and conveniently found me her disposable and complicit aide.

I made excuses to spend time with Nan almost every day. Sometimes at Nan's place, where I peeled shrimp and she kneaded flour dough. Other times we drove a long, long time until four-line traffic diminished to sooty gravel that meandered through dried grape orchards and still-green rice paddies. Nothing except for a dim, dangling moon ahead of us. Neither of us spoke on those rides, then we parked and fucked in the back seat, waking up to the heat and mosquito bites all over our bodies. It was a shame to admit that with Nan, I became more me, and we did things that I had never done, and never wanted to do, with Ashley.

Nan never asked a thing about me and Ashley and never once told me her feelings for me.

“I won’t marry a Chinese,” she once said, leaning on the ledge, smoking a real foul- smelling cigarette, leaving me relieved that she would not pose a risk to my forthcoming marriage, but sad for the same reason.

I knew that I could not fall in love with her, but I also knew when one started warning oneself not to do something, one was already headlong in it. So I decided to let the enchantment with a new beautiful woman, or the delusion of love, to run its own course. I became intrigued by wondering whether she might be seeing other men, and admittedly, once the thought took roots, I craved for more about them, with a mixture of curiosity and jealousy. Nan, who never shied away from talking about her dating life, only hurt me more. It was said that one should cherish the person who lied to you, because they still cared enough not want to hurt you. In that case, Nan never cared for me.

Nan’s love life was never tethered to one man, and she gave them equal curiosity and contempt like a queen. Sometimes we sat in the teahouse where foreigners loved to visit in

Shisan Hang, while watching for the tea professional pouring the steaming water from the long, slender-necked pot into our blue porcelain cups, she would lower her voice and point out which man in the table next to us used to court her. She had been with so many men that in no way I would think she truly felt for me. I was some of her leisure pastime, a hors d’oeuvre before main dishes. There was one Swiss man who orbited around her a while, and then he slipped away. “He was a living testimony of hypocrisy”— according to Nan, this Swiss Sinophile, who declared a lifelong devotion for China, and proposed to Nan and promised a life in rarefied Europe. “Hence he abandoned his love for China, retreating back to his homeland with a black girl.” That’s just

Nan. Dating was her way of exploring the world. Sometimes she got fazed about this older, wiser retired hedge fund manager where she met when she was waiting to get her wisdom tooth pulled out, another time she talked about that wayward, buzzy haired band musician all day long, but none of them stayed. They were merely doors to her, once she opened and saw what was on the

other side, she left. I liked the way Nan talked about them, lazy and careless, as if all of them, all of us, were a whiff she could just wave off.

Recently, a Nigerian man started occupying her mind, which deeply destabilized me. In the beginning, I did not really care. Soon the name Archibong became a constant in Nan’s talk, I started to be more alert when the name was brought up. In fact, Archibong was his last name, and Nan often spoke of his first name in such an exotic way that I would not be able to capture.

Or probably in an attempt to maintain my nonchalant manners and already shriveled dignity, I resisted to acknowledge his first name. I pieced up Archibong through fragmented speech from

Nan: Archibong played basketball when in college, taller and more athlete than me. Awful. I thought to myself. Harvard educated. The second blow. However only Harvard MBA, not undergraduate. His undergraduate was done in Nigeria. Already an established businessman before his MBA degree. Damn him being older and wealthier.

“He will get his son transferred to Guangzhou Tianren elementary school,” Nan said one day, and as if I did not know yet, she added, “where I studied and met Ashley.”

“Sending the little boy to your alma mater did not convert him to your son,” I cautioned.

Then I tried to lower the amount of my enmity in my attitude, so I mediated my words. “Red flag here is that he is married, and has a kid, and probably more on the way.”

“That’s not my business.” Nan said, piercing one ripe, pink leechee and popping it into her mouth. Leechee was one of the most famed summer fruits in Guangzhou, and Chinese girls loved to eat it with certain elegance. Nan ate it in a boyish way that made the fruit felt different to me.

“All I am saying is that he might be seeing other women, probably he is with one at this very moment.” I significantly raised my voice.

“What’s the difference between you and him, then?” Nan seemed amused by my righteousness. “You will be married, absolutely with another woman, and kids on the way.”

Moments like this were bittersweet. They reassured me that Nan somehow cared for me, though in a joking and deprecating way, and that she was not entirely committed to anyone else, yet. I relished in those rare but joyful exchanges, no matter how short and unreal they were.

“Did you tell him about me?”

“You?” She raised one of her brows. “Why do I tell him about you? A boy who thinks himself rebellious but still plays by rules.”

I was mad at her answer, but I laughed it off to disguise my feelings. Any boys at twenty- two wanted to be men, or at least man enough for girls he liked to admire. He first seeing me a childlike boy and then seeing through me. Nan was right about me playing by rules, but she was the one who knew the rules better. Although we knew every inch of each other’s body, but we were cautious about any digital records together, and our texts looked clean like two friendly colleagues who secretly disliked each other. We always met at night, at her place, or in the wilds.

I oftentimes wondered, if I walked with her hand in hand under the sunlight in a city of more than fifteen million people, how visible would that be and how slim the chance that people who spotted us also knew I was a husband-to-be with someone else, and yet I was intimidated.

"Come on," Nan teased. "You may enjoy the attention. People stare at me more when I walk with Chinese guys."

When I lied, saying that we would wait until the summer cooling off, after the first rain,

Nan would always look into my eyes, speaking in a way that could be understood as a joke or threatening. “One day I will break your heart.”

"You better break it fast then." I tried to make it light but, in fact, make myself talk like a complete asshole. “I will fully belong to your friend in two months.”

After that night, I felt closer to her, but Nan went out more with the Nigerian guy

Archibong. I sometimes went through her sporadic texts, and thought about when she would shut me out, like how she did to others before. Then I received her invitation to visit the Chocolate

City that nestled between the expanse of Xiangjiang, Fragment River, to the north and impenetrable sloping land of Lingnan hills by the south. I had never been to this area despite living in Guangzhou for my first 18 years, but tales I had heard about this place were tantalizing enough to pay a visit. Since the early 80s, there first came Nigerian traders who were soon followed by other tribes and countries from west Africa. Before the time I was born, the neighborhood had already earned its name.

Nan first brought me to an African restaurant that was more like an underground dancing hall in disguise, hidden in one of the archways that brimmed with fresh produce from nearby farms during the daytime. When we arrived at the restaurant, it was already fully operating in dance mode, with only one uncle-aged guy tending a stove with beef chops. Others pushed chairs aside, singing and dancing to the latest Chinese Hip-pop in a circle. Nan shouted some words which I could not understand, but I felt the jovial spirit. Everyone stopped and laughed. She joined the ring and held my clumsy hands, so I had to follow her. Now their eyes fell on me.

“I can’t dance.” My voice limped in, traveling varied timbres of sounds. “And there are too many people."

“First time to be with this many blacks?” She read my mind. “I thought America had trained you better.”

“But here is here,” I said. Reflecting upon the moment, I wanted to say watch out because neither of us had the courage and ability to be a lonely outlier. Still, I didn't say anything at the time.

Nan went ahead and was already dancing her way through a throng of young men. She had a way of dancing that wooed people: her body a conduit to unending energy. Life came through her. I followed her hair throughout the dance, trying to catch her while greeting each person brushing my shoulder. It might have been the loud music or the ginger ale I poured down.

I grew elated and emboldened. I did not see any reasons that one would not love Nan, but I also knew the very reason why she would not like Ashley. Nan and I were the same people. We tried so hard to be cherished and even harder to maintain the very thin affection we received, which was different from Ashley, who was born to be loved without trying.

“Let’s have some food.” Nan, all of a sudden, stopped and turned to me. “A proper farewell dinner.”

After we headed out, it was already two in the morning.

The chocolate city was already quiet. It felt boundless like a maze at night, but in fact, it was a small neighborhood of no more than four blocks. I felt surreal to be in the area that once hosted decent boarding houses to all Nigerian expatriates. Chocolate City provided Halal food that was rarely found in elsewhere in Guangzhou. Chocolate City handled your money from

China to your wife back home, and even Chocolate City helped you realize your dream of having two wives: one in Nigeria counting on your money to take care of your parents and your growing son, while the Chinese one who tended your business at day and warmed your bed at night. My face burned when Nan told me the two wives' tale, and she did not even look suggestive or sarcastic, merely telling. I dipped my head down, herding the cold jollof rice to one side of my

plate, while a little boy nearby observed his dad butchering a lamb. Faraway, several black men squatted under a pink flashlight smoking cigarette. Even further away, the blurred traffic lights and stream of cars reclaimed the boundary: it was in China, massive and domineering over the cornered Chocolate City.

I took out my phone. Blank screen. Ambivalent about whether I should feel relieved or tense. I had been too into Nan, who should have been just a fling, rather than a long vacation away from the role Asheley carved for me.

“She won’t stay up for you," Nan said, “but she wants you enough to let you get by.”

Nan said it calmly, as if she were not the one who had just danced with me minutes before. Her calm woke me up, from a long and sweet dream. In the misty night I felt so sad, and exhausted. I asked, “what should I do?”

“You think she doesn’t know?” Nan asked.

I was stunned. I habitually followed her to stand up from out table and walk away from the food vendor

“Shall we stop here?” Nan finally said. Her face was very calm. I knew it was the best decision for us both.

However, if I were prescient enough to learn it was the last genuine sentence we would exchange, I’d have told her that being an outlier would be unbearable, but we two would make a great bundle. I’d ask her to leave Guangzhou with me, or I could follow her to wherever we could go. It did not matter. Together we shall survive.

“If I got more money, or if I don’t have to care…” I heard my mumbling voice, but my brain empty.

“You are not fine with me being black,” Nan said, without giving me any time to refute.

She said. “You wanted to get accepted by mainstream Chinese, then if I am black, you shall never get in.”

In fact, I was a coward. I feigned a curt, cold and polite, “I am sorry.”

Chocolate City, Chocolate city. Like an old chant that people hummed, it would only originate here and die here.

After that, there were more nights that I was home with Ashley, who would still share with me the meetings her dad asked her to participate in and prepared what I needed to wear one day ahead, but more and more often she pulled all-nighters in the study. When I tried to see what she was up for, I could only see her staring at the blank computer screen. I knew I had broken her heart.

I played scenarios in my head to explain myself to whoever, may it be Nan or Ashley or anyone bold and conscientious enough to question my wrongdoing to two women and. I would shrug my shoulders and say with a remorseful grin that my entanglement with Nan perhaps a rebellious extension of my relationship with Ashley. The untamed part of me got so insecure and jealous of her perfection, so the other half reared its timid head and devour our perfect relationship by straying. If I defended myself in this way, I might easily get clean of tricky love triangle, say, emotional attachment to Nan, if accused. Or I could justify that my engagement to

Ashley a fancy but delusional episode in my life that led to the eventual realization of who I really was, an undisciplined soul who never fit into Nan’s family highly family, so falling in for

Nan seemed to be my inevitable fate, as she and I were both aberrant newcomers to the coarsely weaved, but uniformly fanatical Chinese upper-class world. In thinking through those scenarios,

I could almost feel assured enough to sleep without fright. It seemed that either way I would end up okay, and I could certainly sprinkle my rest of life with some necessary, fine guilt. People get away from wrongdoing all the time, and I was no better or worse than anyone one else, and I should fare well. To my surprise, none of the scenarios I practiced got a chance to emerge, and neither Nan nor Ashley showed any interest in claiming my faltering, readily submitted heart.

Nan was never committed to me, or if she did, she hid it well. On the other hand, Ashley was so certain that our forthcoming wedding would take place, and she exhibited a determination that anything came to its way would be cleaned out. These two women, instead of giving me a hard time, left me completely alone. Peacefully and dully, every day I waited for their messages to arrange my day around. I even felt being fooled and lonely.

And the next two months rolled like this:

My American self said love is no mistake. Marry for love, and let your heart decide.

Reality: love is a deceiving container where we also put in calculation, yearning, jealousy, hatred, and hurt. My heart chose Nan, but my brain chose Ashley, and which would you say mattered more, your heart or your brain? If Nan were me, she would do the same. Love is not at the moment when you choose, but living with various possibilities after a choice. I cannot imagine my kids being a black Chinese, who would lead a much more difficult life than their Chinese-skinned peers.

My American self said, pursue your dream, regardless of adversities.

Reality: Education taught me to stand taller but did not teach me how not to bend my waist to an empty stomach. I put away my canvas and bristles for a fashion advisor job at a luxury outfit brand, giving up my aesthetics in trade for favors from bored housewives who spent

a whole day getting the most ideal blow-dry and poked my chest with their long, red index fingernails, asking me to bring myself along with their outfits to their residence. In two months, I was in that role until Ashley offered to get an art studio in downtown Guangzhou so I could do what I wanted. My dream came true, and who cared how the dream was realized?

My American self said everyone was equal.

Reality: everyone was not equal, and everyone knew it. Even though Nan could rival

Ashley in almost every aspect: as the only daughter of a family-owned empire of jewelry, she got a college education from Peking University, the golden pass in China that could get her anywhere. Still, she would never win. Ashley was still the pearl on the crown and Nan the pricky rose in the wilds, alluring but never equal to a pearl's worth.

In the end, there were no debating voices because the American self said, respect local cultures.

The local culture said: You play by local rules that could be murmured by your mama, seen on the street.

"We have paid the price of a house," my mother said with her waist bending deep in the heap of new clothing stock in her garment shop that stood humbly amidst seas of other similar stores in Baima garment wholesale center, “not for you to come back and make yourself a fool.”

Pointing at a row of young, pretty Chinese girls in their early 20s, waving promotional flags to sell clothes. “If you love yourself enough, you’ll find your soulmates everywhere.”

I backed up step by step, learning that shouting what you wanted in inches meant nothing when a system only registered centimeter.

I stopped seeing Nan altogether. I told myself that I was amending a mistake I made by stopping the erroneous behaviors. I retreated from all Nan’s frequent whereabouts, and I became

Ashely’s shadows again: When Ashely chopsticked another shrimp bun to my bowl, I thought about Nan’s fingers when she kneaded the dough, and when I drove to send out invitations, I wondered if I should send one to Nan. To my surprise, Ashely delivered the invitation to Nan on her own.

“She will be my maid of honor,” Ashely said. “You know I always love sharing with her.”

Then she added, “She wants to see us, and she’s got a boyfriend. Finally we can double date.”

I did not have time to entertain the speculation and acted quickly to try to stop the proposal. I first called Nan, because I wanted to persuade her to drop the gathering, but she never picked up. Then I texted her, which got no replies.

While Nan ignored my phone call and texts, she continued making plans with Ashely.

Ashely soon informed me that the four of us would have a picnic in the riverside park on the coming Sunday.

I said apologetically that we should probably not to have the picnic, because the weather forecast had predicted heavy rain on the day, to which Ashley said we’d be done before the rain started to pour.

Then I clapped my forehead, as if I was too busy and something had just occurred to me, that I might not join them because I was planning a show, which would open on the same day, and Ashely clapped. “Great. Then let’s meet at your studio then, so we don’t have to worry about the weather and you won’t have to be away for work.”

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This is how I dug a trap for myself.

The Sunday arrived like one of those most dreadful Mondays.

I looked at the bizarre paintings and installations I pulled out at the last minute to accommodate my lie. So my debut show, was sloppily organized under a theme called Maze, which captured my state of mind at the moment. In a quite messy Studio, after all, I did not try very hard to achieve an ideal effect.

Ashley, ignorant of my misery, walked around my studio and commended my insight in every work. She wouldn’t stop asking me to tell her each story behind the art piece. I had to comply while trying to save my brain power, because I anticipated more stories should come as the day dragged on.

I made excuses to Nan about the need to inspect my photographs so I could pace around, pretending to adjust my photos but in fact trying to find anything I could put my hands on. I waited for them to come literally like a leaf searching for a shore before the storm. It would be the first time I saw Nan after the chocolate city night, after two months, after our tacit break-up. I hoped that I could handle the situation well enough not to give away my brokenness.

“We are terribly late,” a voice boomed from the hallway. A bulky, tall man, in a white striped suit, strode in with Nan in his arms. Upon seeing Nan, my attention was immediately drawn away from him—Nan was in a matching white blouse and had tied her hair in a neat

French twist in the same color hairband. She looked refreshing and lovely. I was almost indignant to see her well-being, because I knew I did not look good. She still weighed on my heart. I wanted to hug her like some American men who greeted their female friends, in an intimate but boundaried armlock, but I heard a finger click from the man, who first scanned my

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studio and in my baseless conjecture, he perhaps was calculating the real estate value in his mind and thought I was a dumb.

“A nice place indeed,” he said. He said it in Cantonese, like all businessmen in

Guangzhou would do. Displaying their knowledge in Cantonese was a proof of their financial shrewdness. “I can see you as a boss sitting in this place.” By saying this he meant to belittle my artistic endeavor, which I was used to. Even Nan’s father would not necessarily endorse his future son-in-law only into arts, which to them, should only be an entertainment.

While Ashley nicely asked how everyone was doing today, Archibong clicked his fingers, and said “two cups of tea, traditional Chinese way, no sugar”. Ashley stood stunned, this man added a “please” unwillingly. Ashley did not dress to kill today, as she never did if there was press presence or photo opportunities. It was a gathering “off-social media” so she was in her shirt and jeans. It was not unusual to encounter a fresh-off-of boat Nigerian still talking condescendingly to women, or who mistook a woman at a household the maid. However,

Archibong should not have behaved like this because Nan should have briefed him well enough about the nature of our meeting, and the relationship status between us. I was shocked as how

Nan would tolerate a man like this this far into her life. I hastened to make tea for four of us, hoping my gesture would signal the right relationship dynamic here. However, it did not click.

For the rest of our time, he seemed to only address me when he talked, and each time when

Ashely asked a question, he would not look at her in her eyes, and I would have to repeat it so we would get an answer from him.

Nan seemed to be at ease with Archibong, but I noticed her decreased amount of talk during this gathering. She let him to lead the conversation, and in her quiet and understanding

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way, encouraged him to talk more. She said to us “so we finally meet up, my dear friends. This is amazing Archibong, who had just acquired the two jewelry stores on the waterfront.”

“I believe we have many things in common, Mr. Yang.” Beyond several lines of

Cantonese, Archibong fell short in Mandarin. He switched to English, which flowed like a deep river. It was what Harvard education sounded like, I told myself, even if it was just a one-year

MBA.

“I completed my MBA in Harvard.” Now Archibong looked at me like he was an older brother of mine. “If you want to sell your arts, maybe we can talk more.” He handed me a business card, and I hated him for him thinking he could help me.

“That was a fancy school you went to,” Ashley cut in, complimenting him but the way she put her words did not make it sound like a compliment. “Our company recently hired two

Harvard MBA graduates. He thinks highly of them.” Ashley had a habit of subtly sugarcoating her harsh remarks on people when others when her ego was pricked, and clearly Mr.

Archibong’s intentional exclusion bothered her. She was showing the hierarchy here by suggesting no matter how Archibong thought of himself, he was below her, below the cradle her father built for her.

Archibong sneezed and drew a napkin from his chest pocket to wipe his nose. I thought his actions had already spoken for him and glimpsed at Nan to see her reaction. Nan arched her eyebrows, a telling tale of being amused. Ashley tolerated the ensuing silence with a tall, tense posture. I put my hand on the small of her back, hoping my gesture could pacify her. Then this man, turned to me with a resumed smile, and asked, “it is interesting to see how many American educated Chinese come back to China, but if they don’t tell you they studied abroad, you cannot tell them apart from other Chinese.”

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“It is a reintegration process,” I said, trying to sound fun. “They may look alike, but deep inside their true selves vary, but they layer up to protect them from the outside scrutiny. Getting to know them is like hiking in the darkness. Fun but takes time.”

No one commented on what I just said, and I realized how racially awkward my smart talk was, and inappropriate.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Archibong said lightly, “I like the strong influence Chinese culture has on its people. American way does not work here, no matter how hard it tried.” He looked at Nan for a moment, and said. “The traditional ways of Chinese values still treat men and women differently, and I like it. We cannot defy biology and let men and women fulfill their respective duties.” He rumpled his napkin and threw it to the trash basket, which was not really a trash basket, but my improvised art object for today’s display.

“Excuse me,” Ashley interrupted. “This is not a trash can.” She fidgeted the cup of tea in her hand, but her voice was stable. “Please take it out.”

I did not want to dwell on this topic, and fearing an inevitable conflict coming, so I intervened, trying to divert the tension and find something that was less embarrassing to everyone to talk about. “It was my part of my art project, but I am glad it has found itself some practical usage here. A new destiny indeed. ”

“You need to apologize, sir.” Ashley did not appreciate my intervening effort and continued her take on Archibong. “You have downplayed my fiancé’s art.”

Archibong put down his tea. Slowly, he said. “ He said it is the art’s destiny. I hear what he said.” Again, Archibong persistently only listened to what I said.

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I could not react before Ashley flung herself to this man. She first splashed him with the remaining water in the teapot, which was, fortunately, no longer burning hot. Then she, unsatisfied with the attack, tried to leap over the low table and hit him. In her frantic jump, she tripped the table over so all utensils on the table collapsed. All those China teapots, teacups and spoons, when they hit the ground, made up an exciting prelude to an impromptu show.

“I am a man of culture,” he cried. “I won’t deal with this level of mess.”

I hurried to help Ashley get up. “Dear, can you get your senses back?” I urged. “Why do you need to do this?”

“You get your senses back, and tell me why you do this to me.” Ashley said with her teeth. “You and her? And now you want me to calm down?” With a swing of her arm, she timely and unexpectedly slapped my face. “You hypocrite.” The slap was not meant to pain me, but for one second, I did not know what to do.

“I have to leave” Archibong said with a cold face, “please excuse us.” He held Nan and strode out of the studio.

Ashely did not drop the matter. She pursued, shouting stop, don’t you dare leave without an apology, followed by many denigrating slurs that might bring shameful blush to her most boorish ancestors. Ashley chased after him down the block, with such a fury that someone who took extravagant care of her appearance would ignore all droopy eyes casting upon them.

“We have to really stop this,” I said to Nan. My first sentence to Nan in our stupid meeting, after all the mess. “This is going to look awful.” Not until that moment did I realize how distant Nan had been during this ridiculous scene. Her intention was to humiliate, to degrade Archibong, Ashley and me. She let Archibong and Ashely take over, attack each other like wild dogs, while observed me tortured by this.

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I ran after them, while Nan trailing behind. We each called out our spouse’s name.

When my sweat started to form, I got to stop Ashely from reaching Archibong, who immediately collapsed to the ground once he sensed Ashley no longer a threat.

Onlookers gathered, and their faces lit up with excitement. They were guessing the relationship between us, who’s who’s who.

Then it rained, first drizzling and then pouring. The gazing crowd finally gave in to the pelleting raindrops, only a cluster who had umbrellas lingered, their eyes focused on the bizarre confrontation: The four of us, Nan, Archibong, Ashley and I, two black people and two Chinese, stood side by side, soaked and inhaling heavily. Nan and I both met our promises. She said she would bring her Nigerian guy to meet me, and I said we would both stand in streets under the public eyes when it rained. Besides, I had never seen Ashley in such a frazzled manner, and part of me was scared, and the other part of me gratified in the wild liberation. We stood in the rain and stared one another, and no one knew what to say.

Nan left first, and so did Archibong. On separate way one ran away, and the other cursed while disappearing in a cab. I stayed longer because Ashley squatted in the rain like a statue, but finally her soul and senses trickled back down to her, and she let me hold her hands and take her home. I never saw Nan again in my life, neither did Ashley. On our wedding, Ashley and I both pretended not to take notice of the empty seat with Nan’s name assigned on it, just as how we tried not to answer what the prolonged silence between us meant. The word raining became a taboo between us, and sometimes we altogether avoided talking about weather at all.

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