A Collection of Short Stories Wei Xiong

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2012 High Test: A Collection of Short Stories Wei Xiong

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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

HIGH TEST:

A COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES

WEI XIONG

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2012

Wei Xiong defended this dissertation on October 29, 2012. The members of the supervisory committee were:

Elizabeth Stuckey-French Professor Directing Dissertation

Feng Lan University Representative

Robert Olen Butler Committee Member

Daniel Vitkus Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

To my mother and stepfather

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My sincere gratitude to Elizabeth Stuckey-French for all her perceptive counsel and steadfast encouragement, to Robert Olen Butler for his prescient advice, to Dan Vitkus for his inspiring commitment to the precision of expression, and to Feng Lan for his invaluable perspective. Thanks also to Diane Roberts, Julianna Baggott, and Mark Winegardner for their feedback and guidance in these past years. Lastly, thanks to my family and friends for their support.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT……………………………………………..……………………………………… vi

1. BOTH WOMEN……………………………………………………………………………..... 1

2. LITTLE GRASS…………………………………………………………………………….. 20

3. FUNI……………………………………………………………………………………....… 50

4. HIGH TEST…………………………………………………………………………………. 81

5. INFINITY…………………………………………………………………………………... 117

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH………………………………...... ……………………………… 156

ABSTRACT

HIGH TEST: A COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES features five linked stories of lives in flux in the fast-changing landscape of contemporary China. From migrant workers in coastal factory towns to a nouveau-riche millionaire immigrating to the West, this collection presents a mosaic portrait of characters teetering in the wake of China’s sweeping economic and social transformations of the past three decades. Through closely focused first-person points of view and crisis-inducing circumstances that fragment the individual identity, these characters negotiate the understood boundaries of culture, gender, and class. Their grappling with the changing rules of familial relations, the complications of money, the expectations of gender, and the ever-shifting social definitions converge to make this collection a portrayal of the universal search for individual identity and equilibrium.

Both Women

“I have money now. Please come back.” Even though I’d never met him. Even though my daughter-in-law hadn’t mentioned this ex-boyfriend of hers for a year. I knew immediately the text message was from him. My first impulse was to delete it. But the keypad of the Nokia phone was a grid of incomprehensible buttons. To a sixty-something woman like me, used to steaming tea and cool abacus, the beeps and chimes of electronics these days were like squawks from alien birds. Would I leave a trail if I went in pushing buttons trial-and-error style? And then it was too late. Keke came out from the inner chamber where she was getting a facial, her hair wrapped in a white towel. In my panic, I tossed the phone back in her bag with the text message still front and center. She extended her hand toward me and I handed her the bag. She took out her shiny crocodile wallet and headed toward the cashier counter.

Sometime during dinner, I knew that she knew. She hadn’t looked me in the eye since before Gan’er got home from work, when she’d brushed past me cutting eggplants during the commercial of the evening news to toss away her soymilk carton. “Remember you’d agreed to only make one dish,” she’d said. “The rest is my duty.” She used to smile obsequiously when she said things like this, but now she’s comfortable enough with me to forego it. I felt a little pinched about this development in spite of myself. What else was she going to forego in the future? And she was not even pregnant. When Gan’er praised Keke’s spicy tofu over my sautéed eggplant, she’d hardly reacted. Then, she took longer than usual washing the dishes. After she’d gone into the master bedroom and shut the door, I checked the dish rack. Trails of bubbling suds laced the idle bowls. She never did this. Something was on her mind. In the living room, Gan’er laughed along with the audience on a game show. Outside, the dogs of two neighbors called to each other in long wails. I pressed my nose to the window screen and inhaled the scent of garlic and propane on the evening chill. This was the unchanging smell of ordinary life: hot food shared amongst family, absentmindedly needling each other

1 while gazing off into a darkening sky. In all my life here in this mid-sized inland city, I’d been comforted by the rhythms of the meals, the predictability of the conversations. Even through the worst zigzags of changes during the Cultural Revolution, my mother, father, and two brothers kept these basic daily routines intact. By the time I had my own family, meat dishes on the table became more frequent and the sound of car horns instead of bicycle bells came from the window, but the routines remained the same. Now that the air had grown permanently hazy and a shut window could not mute the noise from the stores and restaurants downstairs, we still cooked and ate together. The only things that’d changed were the people. Briefly, for a few months after Keke had moved in and before Gan’er’s father passed away, mealtimes had been a bundle of nerves. Keke’s high-strung vivacity had us all teetering. Gan’er sat straighter and ate more daintily, one minute grinning adoringly at his wife’s chatter and the next peering sheepishly at his father and me. My husband, who I knew was embarrassed rather than displeased under the solicitousness of his young daughter-in-law, answered her questions with mumbles, scowling to preserve his gravity. And me, I knew well what I was. I was the keeper of the peace, the smoother of the waves, the one whose face everyone checked for the right times to frown and smile until we tided into routine again. In the dark hall, I pasted my ear against Keke and Gan’er’s bedroom. Nothing. But I knew her phone’s keypad was noiseless, and for a second I envisioned her texting away, tears of passion rolling down her cheeks. She was a Hunanese girl, hotheaded but tenacious. When Gan’er first took me to meet her at a neighborhood noodle joint, she behaved liked an overeager kindergarten teacher, attempting to flood me with overfamiliar vivacity. I was conscious that I was setting a tone. Gan’er’s choice of restaurant and his waiting until his father was on his daily walk should have meant that things were casual enough for me to veto. But then he’d handed a cup of tea to me across the scarred table with both hands like it was a formal occasion, and I looked at the girl more carefully. She was small and provincial looking: single-lid eyes, flat nose, too-long hair that bristled at the tips. Her accent was murky but her enunciations forced, like she was straining to keep her tones straight, like she was a foreigner learning Mandarin. She caught me looking at her despite my trying to be discreet, held my gaze with hers, and nodded. It was a nod of understanding: I submit myself to be judged. Her presumption agitated me. Later, after Gan’er had paid the bill, he asked me how the meal was. “Alright, but too expensive,” I said, and Keke chuckled.

“That’s what my parents say too. It seems like something everyone from the old generation says,” she said, looking to my son for commiseration. He obliged her, matching his laugh to hers and squeezing her hand like I wasn’t even there. As soon as Gan’er and I were out of her earshot, I’d quickened my pace. He understood my displeasure and sighed loudly. When I had to be the one to speak first, I knew that his mind was already made up about her. “What kind of school did she go to?” I asked finally. “It’s a night training program over at the PingAn Center,” he said. “That place above the vegetable market that always smells?” “Some businessmen from Shenzhen bought the upper stories. It’s a technical college now.” His tone took on the same whine from his childhood, when he made excuses about why his test scores were so low. “And she’s training to be a what?” “An impressions coach,” he mumbled. “A what?” I stopped in place under a sycamore tree. The sidewalk was cracked under my heels. “I’ve been with her for almost nine month already, Ma. If it wasn’t for her, I would never have gotten the vice manager position last month. She came over to my apartment in the evenings with winter melon soup. She did my laundry when I was out.” “Does she know you own that apartment?” I was thoroughly alarmed now and felt my cheeks inflame. “Yes, she knows.” He planted his feet shoulder-width apart and clasped his hands. “She wants to get married.” In the two months that followed I filled in the blanks with information gleaned from her more than from him. He must have told Keke all straightaway, because the next day, she knocked on my door in late afternoon, carrying a bamboo cooking cage full of lotus leaf- wrapped ribs. She called me bomu, something that old-fashioned scholars used to address their future mothers-in-law. She must’ve been watching period soap operas, I thought, but at that point, what could I’ve done but let her in. She told me that she was the eldest daughter in a walnuts-and-crayfish farming family. She’d worked in factory towns for two years before coming to Hefei, moving up from the assembly line to secretary-to-the-boss and saving up

3 enough money to come here for two years looking for what she called a “city life.” She knew she was unmatched to Gan’er, she said, her face earnest, but she was willing to work twice as hard as him to pursue their mutual happiness. She would study and work and do all the household chores, she promised, and in her stirred-up hopefulness I saw how a boy like Gan’er might’ve been moved. She wasn’t phlegmatic or depressing—that I saw plainly. In Hefei, which did not even make the list of the top-ten biggest cities in China, the practical-minded and tepid-hearted abounded. Keke was like an electrified eel swimming through porridge. And Gan’er, whose temperament had never been adamant or enterprising, was getting to be the age where he longed to be a little extraordinary. After we’d finished eating, Keke hurried to clear the dishes. The ribs had been pungent and tender. I didn’t lie when I told her she was a good cook. “The apartment. His father and I loaned Gan’er the initial down payment,” I said, finally broaching the subject that was weighing on my mind. She understood right away. “I would work hard with Gan’er to pay it off as soon as possible. And after our baby is born, I would love to have three generations under one roof. My own parents are too unused to life in the city, of course,” she added quickly. “And…” I hesitated. This was the only topic I would hesitate at with a woman like her, and I knew that if I’d asked my son, he’d huff off and stay silent for days. “Feel free to ask me anything,” she said, sensing that she was on the edge of success. “When you said that you became the boss’s secretary from the assembly line very quickly…you were a very young woman, after all, and you had not been to secretarial school. So I just wonder about the relationship between you and him…” I stopped when I saw her expression change from eager to cloudy, her neck, jutting forward before, now shrank back like a turtle’s. “Please speak plainly with me,” I said. “We are both women.” “I am a self-respecting woman,” she said carefully. “I was promoted because I worked overtime all the time, and then became line foreman, and then group leader, and then order manager, and finally secretary. But the black-and-white truth is that I am not worthy of Gan’er. I’m not a virgin.” She looked at me pleadingly as I cringed at her slash through my attempt at subtlety.

“I had a boyfriend, you see,” she continued piteously. “He was from the countryside too. I met him at the factory. I loved him. I thought I was going to marry him. I thought love was all it took.”

At close to 2 a.m, I gave up trying to sleep and peeled back the cover to expose my skin to the cold October air. The contours of my bedroom were stark: a mammoth armoire, a sagging sofa, an old gutted sewing machine whose cavities now held my stacks of accounting ledgers. In my present state of mind, these black shapes stared like cloaked menaces. I had to do something. I desired only a quiet, stable life. Yet to be an old woman was to be tethered to the choices of her children. My time for clear action was long over. Now, I could only toss and turn in the dark. I was whittling a plan to get my hands on Keke’s phone again when I heard soft clatters from the living room. I knew instantly it was Keke. Gan’er, when he went for midnight snacks, reveled in his lark with reverberating footsteps and ringing cups. I pulled a sweater over my flannel pajamas and opened my bedroom door. The hallway air was even cooler. Keke, ever vigilant, turned the heat down to 10 degrees at night. When Keke saw me appearing out of the mouth of the hallway, her silhouette started so violently that I started in response. “Ma?” she ventured, and a brief tenderness swelled in spite of myself. I’d wanted a daughter. When I was pregnant with Gan’er, amidst the general clamoring for a boy, a boy, from all my friends and colleagues, my mother had pulled me aside. “A daughter is better than a son,” she’d said, voice lowered. “A daughter is plastered to a mother’s heart. Sons? They follow their wives after getting married. Look at your brothers.” “What are you doing up at this hour?” I asked, my hands on my hips. “I can’t sleep.” I decided to start with a decoy. “Is something bothering you? Are you nervous about your job interview in a few days?” Keke taught a newfangled subject called colorology twice a week to country-turned-city-girls like herself. She explained how red made people excited, how blue symbolized trustworthiness. The girls all took this down like she was Buddha. They used this information to select outfits for dates, for home visits, for interviews. But the class only lasted two months at a time with long hiatuses in-between. Keke wanted a more permanent position and a harder subject. She wanted to teach body language, held four days a week in the biggest room in the PingAn Center.

“No, Boss Liu sat with me at lunch yesterday. The job is all but in my hands,” she said. “Why did you waste your money on a fancy face treatment today if you’re so confident?” “You don’t understand, Ma,” she said indulgingly. “When I teach body language, the students’ eyeballs will be glued to my face all the time. Their lines of vision will be completely connected to my face, not on the blackboard as with colorology. And from a psychological point of view, what we humans register as visually positive we unconsciously judge to be positive overall. So, if the students like my face, they’ll be halfway to thinking that I’m a good teacher.” “Lucky we have such a talented psychology professor in our home,” I said, feeling ugly. She kept quiet at this and got up to go in the kitchen. When she returned, she sat down next to me on the sofa, wringing her hands in a way that looked painful. “It’s not easy for me all these years in the city,” she said after a minute. “Sometimes I get so tired that when I sit down, I dread having to get up again.” “What are you trying to say?” I willed myself not to turn to face her, though I was grinding with worry about the path she was starting down. “Are you cold, Ma? Shall I get you something warm?” “Yes, okay.” I was comforted to know that we were planting down for the long haul tonight. At least I wouldn’t have to go back to bed without breaking this worry open. She brought over a knitted blanket and tucked it under my shoulders and thighs as if I were a baby. I smelled her hair. It was a homey scent. Soap and cooking oil. “Are you happy here?” I said when sat back down. She seemed to weigh her words. “Sometimes I think I’ve found my footing. I know lots of people. I have more and more to do each day. I can see where I will be next year, even next decade. But sometimes, Ma, don’t you get exhausted sometimes?” She reached over to squeeze my hand. “This is how everybody feels,” I said, retreating from her grasp. “Look at two floors below. They say the husband’s salary was slashed after his company got sued for putting dirty chemicals in their sunflower oil. And now they both go sell egg crepes on the street corner after work. They come up the elevator at ten o’clock with their propane burner and their plastic stools. Seven months ago they looked embarrassed and move their gear against the wall when they see me come in. Now they’re too exhausted for embarrassment and frown at me for holding the

6 elevator up. Their little son, only five years old, went crazy from being left alone so much and threw all their dishes out the window.” She said nothing to this. I knew I should stop but couldn’t help myself. “Dr. Hu beside us has let his ferns on the balcony die while he plays internet games all day. Last time I asked him about his daughter, he forgot he didn’t smoke anymore and swung his arm down like he’s throwing his cigarette to the floor. All my colleagues have either moved away to be nannies to their grandchildren or take free-lance jobs for back-alley companies to help their children buy their apartments. And while all this is happening, real estate prices keep climbing higher. Soon no one would be able to afford one anymore. I read that an apartment in Paris is now cheaper than an apartment in some parts of Shanghai. This is the world we live in today. Everyone is racing with everyone else though nobody likes it. Nobody is especially set on torturing you.” I was rambling, scared that if I’d stopped, she would tell me something that couldn’t be taken back. It was easy as a wink to divorce these days. What was hard was nailing down the heart of a girl with outsized fantasies. Her hand-wringing grew more agitated but she still kept silent. I tried another tactic. “You can’t be afraid of obstacles,” I said, softening my voice. “Things are changing so fast and we old folks can’t keep up. It’s a good thing they make everyone retire at fifty-five. But you are so young and can adapt so fast. You can gain so much in your lifetime if you’d only harden your skull and push forward. Don’t think that a life with no pressures would be better. Look at your parents. They are away from all the pressures in the countryside. Do you want a life like theirs?” “No!” she straightened up at this and I remembered how she’d worked for years to make it out of her hometown and then out of the factory town. “No is right,” I said. And then I decided to touch the subject. “And it’s not an issue of having more or less money.” She clutched my hand again. I wondered if this really was a gesture that came naturally to her and not a trick she’d learned in her classes. She was a girl of straight arteries, really. She drank beer and laughed with her lips peeled all the way back, showing her imperfect teeth. She kissed Gan’er even when he was gruff and impatient, kissed him until his mood changed and he kissed her back. She bought all her underwear in pomegranate red and never hesitated when she

7 hung them out to dry from the balcony. I was heartened. She must’ve been truly coming around. She’ll probably have forgotten about the text by morning. I went for one last nudge. “You are young and think that because if you have disappointments, you must have made a wrong choice somewhere,” I said, patting her hand. “But this isn’t true. Everyone I know is disappointed. But they also have hope for the future, if not their future, then their children’s future.” She slipped her hand out from under mine and covered her face. Here it comes, I thought. It was the first time I’ve seen her make such a gesture. “I’m pregnant,” she said. “What?” I was so surprised that I was almost angry, like I’d just been made a fool. “I took a test in the bathroom after dinner. I think it’s two months already.” She was talking fast now, like her thoughts have broken free. “Are you sure that’s what it is?” “It’s a baby. I’m only twenty. I’m only making twelve hundred a month. I made more than that at the factory.” “So this talk of exhaustion, it’s all because you’re pregnant?” My head was a jumble of hot thoughts. Her mentioning of money pushed me to the edge again. “I’m wondering if this is even the time I should have it,” she said. “What?” “Ma, I see how you worry about Gan’er and me and I know how you’ve done everything for Gan’er all his life. How can I do that for a child? How can I do that when nothing is right yet?” She sounded tearful. I couldn’t see her eyes in her dark. “What isn’t right? You have an apartment, a good husband, a job with opportunities. There are women who work their entire lives and still not have those things.” “Don’t comfort me, Ma. I know you think I caught Gan’er by luck and that my job’s a joke. But Everything I’ve done so far was on the right path. If I just persevere—another three years, five years—I’ll make it.” At this, she stood up as if a coil had sprung and turned to disappear into the dark of the hallway.

The city of Hefei was not what I imagined a country girl dreamed about. Yes, the streets were clotted with cars and at night the shopping district pulsed in a neon stupor, but the high

8 rises were expressionless blocks, the sky the color of cataracts, and the horizon loomed with neither mountains nor sea. Having lived here my whole life, I’ve long since charted my own small plot: morning treks through the park to watch the rows of silk fan dancers, chatting with neighbors in the intestinal alleyways too narrow for cars, trips to the illegal street vendors under the pedestrian bridge, spreading books and scarves and radishes on torn-open burlap bags, sweeping it all up in clanging strokes and sprinting off with flapping jackets when the police approached. I wondered if this was exciting to Keke—the neighborhoods razed and rebuilt in seizures of dust and din, the mutating expansion bridges and freeways. Is all this speed and motion warm to her blood? This ex-boyfriend of hers was moody and a musician on the side, she’d said. Maybe he was a real musician now. Maybe he’d won the lottery. He didn’t get promoted at a job or start a business, of that I was sure. If he’d been that kind of seed, Keke never would have left, having invested her virginity in him. Yet now, I wondered who she had rooted in more—him or us. The baby would be the deciding factor. She could no longer change paths once she’d made her choice.

On most weekdays, I made breakfast for Gan’er and Keke before returning to bed for another hour. The next morning, however, I was waiting with my scarf knotted and my bag in the crook of my elbow when Keke came out from the bathroom. She looked charged and polished in her pencil skirt and mid-height heels. Anyone who saw her on the streets would believe that she was a bona-fide city dame. “I want to walk with you to work today. I’ve got a check-up at the hospital in a half-hour anyway,” I said. She looked at me with benign doubt for a second, and then her features hardened. “You don’t need to keep me under surveillance, Ma. I won’t do anything until I’ve made a decision about whether to keep it,” she said with a quiver of resentment. I took a step back. In her testy state she could storm out, call that boy, flip the whole game board over. “Don’t misunderstand. I just thought these few days before your interview will be hard on you. Your body’s in a more precarious state than usual right now and I’m old with nothing to do anyway. I want to be of comfort to you.” Keke look around the room as if for escape routes, and then sighed and gave in.

“It’s going to be a tedious day for you,” she warned. “I’m giving a demonstration lesson in body language this afternoon and before that, I’m the tea-attendant at a meeting.”

It wasn’t tedious. When we got to the PingAn Center, as soon as the automatic doors swooshed shut behind us, I could feel Keke’s prickly nerves calm down. Her footsteps slowed and she surveyed the burgundy-carpeted floors and ambient lighting regally, like she’d installed it all. She pressed her palm to the small of my back and I realized how short I was compared to her. On the stairs, a stocky, frenzied-looking man rushed toward her with a binder. “Keke, you don’t have to accompany guests for more than an hour, could you look at these billing records quickly?” He stood two steps above us. Despite his demand, his tone and expression were supplicating. Keke was nonplussed. “Of course. Mr. Liu, this is my mother-in-law. Ma, this is my boss.” She made palm-up hand gestures like air hostesses in TV commercials. Mr. Liu’s face took on an official-looking sincerity and he took my hand between both of his. “Mrs. Li. I’ve long since heard about you. Keke’s an indispensible girl. Really, I hope we’re not taking her away from home too much. What is your venerable age?” “I’m already sixty-some,” I said. “Ah, you have a hardy, fortuitous countenance,” he said, patting my hand. I smiled politely. “Forgive me for being forward,” he continued, stepping down one-two steps so that his eyes were level to mine. “But these past few years Keke’s felt like my own daughter, her being so clever and energetic and trusting and only twenty years old. So having listened to her talk so much about you and Gan’er, I feel like I know you a little.” “You flatter us,” I tried to muster up warmth, but felt merely like the wire transmitting their signaling. Beside me, as I’d expected, Keke beamed with pleasure. “Please make yourself at home here. It’s no fancy place, but we have a few conference rooms with TVs and comfortable sofas—Little San, get Mrs. Li some tea—if you need anything, come find me, I’m just up there,” he pointed, gave my hand two pats, and trotted off.

“Looks like everybody serves tea,” I said. I knew enough about how things worked today to know that middle-aged bossmen didn’t flatter their young women underlings unless they wanted to wring more out of them. Keke was all innocence. “Boss Liu’s father passed away in the Great Famine,” she whispered to me. “He has a lot of respect for people from the older generation.”

Before I retired, I was one of the highest ranked accountants at the Hefei Center of Governmental Services. Compared to this place, to the luxuries of today, everything we had then was shabby. I shared a plain-walled office with three other colleagues. All our desks were old with handicapped legs and gutted drawers. The ledgers overflowed the shelves, pilling horizontal upon vertical, their onion-skin papers undulating from the humidity of too many summers. The hot-water thermoses lined against the wall on the floor and the four of us—two men, two women—bent over our work in our proletariat-blue broadcloth jackets. During the winter months, we’d set up a stout furnace in the middle of the floor and take turns trekking across the iced-over courtyard to the coal storage hut in an old, full-length Moscow coat we’d kept just for that purpose. We’d load up the crumbly blocks with cast iron tongs and then sprint back with the sooty basket like conquering heroes. Everyone would take a tea break and lament good-naturedly about the sad state of the provincial budget then. We’d pull our chairs up to the furnace, chat about our spouses and children, and rub our hands together like children in the emanating warmth. Twenty-three years of shoulder-to-shoulder toils, meetings, work unit trips and potlucks, and now where were they all? Minding drooling grand babies or installed in old folks homes. Shuttled off in yearly trips to Hong Kong or Hainan and plied with shopping money by their yuppie children in demonstrations of filial piety. Old Ying, who I still visited from time to time, seemed frozen in an acid mood since his wife’s death. Shuffling around in foam slippers, his hair uncombed for days, he’d chain smoke while watching the dark Audi sedans roll up and down the alleyway below. “See that one with the tassels on the antenna? “ He’d yank open the curtains and stick his pointing arm so far out that I’d tug on his sleeves. “I’ve only seen the big-shot’s leg, but it’s so fat it looks like someone sprinkled it with yeast and steamed it. He drops off skinny-as-twigs high school girls. Two of them at first. Now three. Interchangeable. These girls walk home to

11 eat dinner with their parents like nothing happened. And see that three-wheeled trolley with the plastic barrels? The peddler waters down his fermented-rice soup from that community spigot in plain sight. See that motorcycle—“ “Worry about your health before you worry about strangers,” I chided like his wife used to. He stared at me with the sagging eyes of a bloodhound dog, shook his head, and sighed. “Women,” he said. “Always parsing the minor points when the world is going to hell.”

I kept one carefully measured step away from the double doors to the conference room and peered in through the square windows at the top. Keke, in her glorified-waitress vest with embroidered phoenixes, teetered on her tiptoes to gauge the water margin inside Boss Liu’s cup. She stood behind Boss Liu’s armchair, a tea thermos at ready on the pedestal beside her. When she did lean in to refill their cups, Boss Liu and his guest stared into off into space, turning their faces away from her. They could easily have poured their own tea, I thought, yet having her there at their beck and call elevated them both. Their tempers became milder and their gestures more courtly with a rapt young woman at their service, yet they kept her in her place by not paying her any attention. What happened to all the flattery from earlier? Gradually, the two men relaxed, throwing their heads back in laughter and splaying their legs wider in a groaning stretch. I paced in the hall and tried to work out my thoughts. I didn’t seriously suspect Keke of any involvement with this boss of hers. I admit I was surprised when he’d rattled off her exact age and Gan’er’s name so naturally on the stairs, but Keke wasn’t reckless enough to do something so unthinkable, with such avalanching consequences. Yet anything could happen these days. All over the country, the wind was blowing tales of country girls who become mistresses to foreign millionaires, of workers wielding meat cleavers in factory wage disputes. I thought of Keke and her dismay about her pregnancy. Why did she reveal that to me and yet concealed the news of the text message? Perhaps she wasn’t the endlessly energetic woman of new millennium. Perhaps she was just as crazed as everyone else, a skyscraper built too quickly, just one strong wind away from toppling. ____

Keke looked exhausted when she followed the men out of the conference room. She slipped out of the vest and wiped her brow, the half-empty thermos and cups hooked in her fingers and rattled in rhythm with each step. She perked up when she saw me. “Ma! What are you doing standing here?” She skipped over to me. “That was a consultant from a charter school. They are going to start giving English classes here!” I didn’t know what provoked me—maybe that the two suited men had walked out empty- handed and here she stood, her fingers wet with tea water, the thermos dripping onto her skirt, and still happy as a clam. “I don’t know who you think you’re fooling. You know I saw the text message,” I said, the speed of the words hitting me like someone else had said it. She paused for a tiny second—anything shorter and this accountant’s certainty would have wavered—and then bent down to wipe the trail of tea that’d stopped at the bulb of her anklebone. When she rose up, her gaze flitted from the walls to the floor, refusing to alight. “Don’t you know that I want what’s best for you?” I asked. “As soon as you married Gan’er, you and I threw our lots into the same boat.” My words seemed to reverberate in the air. When she spoke, her voice was small. “I didn’t even know that it was real. I deleted it. I thought I imagined it.” I could feel the curdling contortions of my own face. “Do you think I’m an idiot? Even I know that nothing is ever deleted. You can fish it out of the electronic rubbish bin.” “No you can’t. Not with my phone’s set up.” “Oh dear venerable ancestress in heaven, what is the point of lying to me? You stand in high heels for two hours while you’re pregnant in exchange for twelve hundred yuan a month from that warlord. You all but faint at the mention of this vagrant who proposes to redeem you back with cash. Yet you hedge against me?” I wanted to continue, say: I want exactly what you want. But even caught in the moment, I knew this was not true. My road at my age narrowed as I walked; hers widened. I didn’t know what she thought let alone what she wanted. She stood still in the face of my blitz for several seconds and then suddenly looked at her watch. I looked at my own. It was nearly time for her class. When I looked up, she was already on her way, her back rigid, her arms bent at unnatural angles as she strained to keep the tea service set from jangling.

“Who here is busy with life? Who here had to make time to come to this class?” Keke asked, scanning her students. The classroom upon first glance was respectable, even luxurious. The carpet was peach and jade green, swirling in a pattern of a peony unfurling from the center, where Keke’s podium stood. The lights were embedded deep into the ceiling, and a chestnut colored piano was tucked into a corner. Sitting upon the cushioned chairs arranged in a semicircle, the dozen-or-so students all seemed to be young women with nondescript hair in acrylic sweaters. They’d shuffled self-consciously when they trickled into the room, scanning each other from head to toe for reassurance. I took a seat in the back of the room, my eyes picking out the unfinished baseboard, the loose threads of carpet at the seams. When Keke had approached the podium, the women looked at her with reverent eyes. They straightened up eagerly and clasped their hands neatly in their laps. “Okay, even though you’re all a little shy, I can tell that you are all here because you want to get ahead, you want to be busy with life, to improve it each day, to not let even a minute go to waste,” Keke said, her voice soaring easily and her accent clearer than it’d been when I last listened to it carefully. “Please raise your hand if this is true. Come on, it’s a long time since we were in school, but really, it’s easy. Raise your hands.” The girls tittered, looked left and right for clearance, and then, one by one, raised their hands. Keke clapped her hands together and gave a little hop of delight. “Good. I’m so happy to have a participatory crowd. To tell everyone the truth, this is my first night teaching this course and I was nervous about whether I’d do a good job. But here, now, looking at everyone’s open faces, I believe I will. Because body language is all about influencing each other, you see. Your attitude betrayed through your body language influences me, and I can in turn use my performance as a teacher to influence you.” In her earnestness, her hands flapped and flailed, now pressed hotly to her heart, now spread open toward the ceiling. I looked around and sensed the girls’ uncertainty. One of them, a teenage-looking thing with candy pink lipstick and a plastic headband, surreptitiously flipped open her cell phone. She saw me looking, shot me a sly, mischievous grin, and quickly glanced

14 toward Keke and made a face. How lame, the look said. I picked up my bag as quietly as I could and left the classroom. In the hall, I unclenched my fists. My nails had dug crescents into my palms. Then I saw the alligator loafers on the floor. I looked up. It was Boss Liu. “How’s it going in there?” he asked. “Well,” I said. His rear end was leaning against a windowsill directly across the hall from the door to the classroom, the spy window was right at his eye level. “I’m observing Keke for the new job. She told you this is an observation period, yes?” “You don’t need to hear what she’s saying?” He tapped his cigarette against a crystal ashtray on the windowsill and shook his head. “She all but has the job. I just need to put my mind at ease that she is energetic enough in her state for multiple classes.” He gestured toward me with his cigarette. “I would offer you one, but Keke said you quit smoking years ago. Please don’t think I’m being rude.” “What do you mean ‘in her state’?” I was stunned. Had Keke had a chance to be alone with him today? “I don’t want to tire her out, given her pregnancy,” he said, as placid as a sage. “You don’t have to worry, I’ll be good to her. We may be a small place, but all government mandated policies apply when it comes to maternal leave. And she’s such a worker, I may have to convince her to use it all.” “She hasn’t even told her husband, did you know that?” I was reeling. Did this mean that she had made up her mind to have the baby? He turned sober, the half-hearted mustache on his lips falling to frame a cartoonish frown. “Well, she’s thinking about what’s best for him.” “Best for him? Gan’er has always wanted a child.” “But he’s not where he wants to be with work, is he? And she’s afraid that she can’t handle everything if she….well, nevermind It’s the same reasoning as the last time. Only this time she’ll have the incoming from this new class.” I stood very still, retracing what he’d said to make sure that I heard correctly. The last time, he’d said. How long ago could that have been? How had she marshaled up the strength to go through it alone?

I realized my shock was showing and collected myself. “Why do you think she really did it?” I asked quickly. He grinned and put down his cigarette, happy that I was asking for his counsel. Someone as taken by flattery as he was wouldn’t make a good manager, I thought idly. Perhaps someday Keke would fill his chair, and a younger, more energetic girl would stand guard behind them with the tea thermos. “I think it’s a woman’s dilemma.” He sighed to show sympathy. “A child means your lives are not for yourselves anymore. Look at my mother, for one. Even at eighty-something, she worries about my health more than her own. Look at my wife, to enroll our boy in enrichment math class, she bought out the entire skin care department at Oriental Plaza to butter up that woman principal. And look at you, coming here to keep Keke company though it’s still early in her pregnancy. Keke said you gave your life’s savings to buy their apartment. Now, I suspect I will do the same for my child, and Gan’er would too, but in the end, it’s the woman who has to block off all paths of retreat.” He chuckled. “I’m talking like a general here. But that’s what it feels like to fight to give your kids advantages these days.” “But Keke isn’t afraid of sacrifice. You weren’t in the room a minute ago. She would rather fish out her heart, cut it up into portions, and feed it to these students than not do her best,” I said, realizing perhaps for the first time that it was true. For all the manic, inscrutable unseemliness that I’d faulted her for, she had never pushed less than her hardest at anything. “No, she’s not.” He shook his head in amusement. “You know that she’s been here almost since the start of this school—from when she was a student herself. She said to me on the day that we hired her that she’d work hard to make us a success. I laughed at her. I said neither she nor I were the owners and the money would go into someone else’s pocket. But—“ he took out a fresh cigarette from the pack and gestured toward the classroom door, “Look at her in there. It’s like she’d never heard me.”

When I stepped back inside the body language class, the air was different—bubbling with chatter and unrestrained laughter. The neat semicircle was now a looser spill, and the girls, huddled in front of the podium and watching something on the floor, had taken off their jackets and rolled up their sleeves. No one noticed my entrance. I edged up to the crowd and peeked

16 through the heads. Lying face-up on the carpet was the pink lipsticked girl. Her eyes were closed, her mouth pursed hard against laughter. “Now, calm yourself down as you feel the environment calm down,” instructed Keke, getting down on her knees and motioning for us to be quiet. “Try not to think about us. Relax your face like you’re asleep.” Somebody giggled, Keke shushed her with a look. “Good. Now everyone, does she look like she’s without emotions?” Someone started the nodding. Tided by the bobbing heads, I started to nod too. “Really? Look more carefully. Imagine her eyes are open.” “She looks sad. The corners of her mouth are drooping,” someone said. “Yes,” Keke agreed. “Now don’t smile, Wang Tianyong, keep your mouth natural. See, this is the point I wanted to make to all of you—our natural faces are not empty faces. We may think they betray nothing because we intend nothing, but our faces and our bodies betray more than what we intend. Now Miss Li, think of something truly sad. Take your time.” The crowd stared, mesmerized. The change in the face was so miniscule that it seemed like the tint of skin has shifted rather than the contour of muscles. “Does this look like sadness to us?” Keke asked, her voice soft and insinuating. We looked at each other, uncertain. “What were you thinking about, Miss Wang— no, don’t open your eyes,” asked Keke. “For a week last year, I thought I would not get to buy a ticket back home for the Lunar New Year. I thought about being in the factory dorms all alone listening to all the firecrackers. I was remembering that time.” “I really didn’t get tickets,” said a plump girl with a dull-tongued accent. “The scalpers got them all. But my face was a lot less sad. I drank beer all night with the owner of the karaoke bar.” Everyone laughed. The face on the floor burst open to reveal small, uneven teeth. Keke smiled. “Now Miss Wang. Calm yourself and think of something hopeful, something that makes you look forward to the future.” The brows seemed to lift. The shoulder shifted as if to announce the change of scene. A hum of accord spread through us.

“And from what do we see the hopefulness?” Keke asked. “The forehead is smoother,” said Miss Karaoke. “Was it furrowed before? During sadness?” Keke asked. Miss Karaoke looked off into space, trying to remember. “No, it was smooth too,” said someone else. “Her eyebrows are higher now,” said a girl in a green cardigan. “Are you sure?” asked Keke. “Her face is too smooth for this activity. We need a few wrinkles to keep track of the changes,” said Miss Karaoke. A hearty round of laughter broke out. Miss Wang sat up and covered her face with both hands, suddenly aware of how closely she’d been examined. Her belly rumbling with giggles. Keke put her hand on Miss Wang’s shoulder and told us to go back to our seats. As the commotion settled, Miss Karaoke piped up again. “Teacher, is this how they train at the big film acting schools in Beijing?” “Why? Is that your ambition? Are you going to be the next breakout star?” Keke teased. The girls laughed at this. Miss Karaoke chuckled, delighted that Keke had poked back. “No, none of us in here can catch the fate of a movie star, I’m afraid. But we’re all young, we all have ambitions, and we all want to be higher in a year than where we are today. This is why we need to be focused. We may think we are already focused, but that is what everyone thinks. To move ahead of most people, we need to be more focused than what ordinary, complacent people think is normal. We need to be focused enough so that when we believe we are showing nothing on our faces, we really are showing nothing. When we think we are showing something, we are clearly showing it.” She’d balled her hands into fists, thumping down on the podium with each point. Miss Wang, who’d returned to her seat next to mine, raised her hand inch by inch. Keke acknowledged her. “But what if…we don’t want to clearly show something?” she asked. “Then show nothing.” “But what if we don’t want to show nothing either, what if we don’t feel strong enough either way?”

“Show either nothing or something always—at least in public. If you waste your time showing uncertainty, your bosses, coworkers will think of you as a wishy-washy person. Trust me, if you strive to show certainty, after a while, you’d feel certain a lot more often, wishy- washy a lot less.” Nobody said anything. Beside me, Miss Wang shot me a quizzical look. “I can demonstrate,” Keke offered, smiling. “Here, I won’t lie down in my skirt, but I’ll close my eyes. You call out an emotion, I’ll show you.” She stepped out from behind the podium, braced one forearm on a corner, and shut her eyes. “Sadness,” someone called out. Keke’s shoulders lowered, her lips and jaws seemed to both loosen and tighten. It was a convincing picture. I expected hopefulness next, I think we all did, but here, Miss Karaoke cut in. “Love,” she said. I forgot the pose that Keke finally took. I was as surprised as she was by the command. Love. So quickly that I could almost see the blur, she raised her hands from her sides toward her belly, her palms curved as if to catch a ball, a water jug. She opened her eyes quickly and darted a look at me. Her face was red. I didn’t know what my face said—her lesson was wasted on me. But then she looked back at me. This time with peace.

Little Grass

Bo the assembly line overseer told me to stop singing. I was only making do with humming, and knew instantly that if I’d been a girl, he wouldn’t have minded if I’d sang an entire aria of Peking opera. No, he was’t a sex wolf. Even he knew he was too short for that. Rather, he was bottled up because I refused to work the driving job that he tried to shovel me into. “Just steering a forklift around the warehouse. You’d make two hundred more per month just to start,” he’d said, pulling me out of my station in the middle of a shift with a two-fingered beckon. “No thanks.” I knew this would make him dislike me. He had looked so serious when he beckoned, planting his feet wide and stopping meters away from my station so that the whole floor could appreciate the scene. He took one step away from me and looked me over from head to toe. “Why not? Have you got a handicap?” “I’m fine punching the bra wires, I’m getting good at it.” “Pssh. Your average is sixty-three per minute. The two girls they hired three days ago are already doing sixty-seven. Your hands are too big for precision work. Go to packing. They need young men like you.” I kept my head down, shook it, and returned to my station. The truth was I liked punching the wires because I didn’t have to focus. Twelve hours could be unberable when you concentrated on taking a new order every few minutes. But when you only had a single task from morning to night and your body memorized it, your mind could swing free. I bit my lips to show my commitment to silence amidst the whirring of machines. He shook his head in black satisfaction, like he’d just won a bet with himself, and shuffled away. Two tables down, Sujuan from Fuzhou started humming “Our Troops are Marching Toward the Sun.” ____

Girls got away with rebellion with men like Bo because he could imagine that their minds are different, that when they threw a grenade, it was only for the sparks. Besides, they seldom threw much. The whole factory city of Dongguan operated by this idea— women were easier to manage. They didn’t drink, didn’t let their laundry pile up, didn’t get into fights, and didn’t complain. On the other hand, us men needed to be wrung dry of vigor at work so that there was nothing left to catch fire. When I returned to my eight-person dorm each day, the seven others were draped like dishrags on chairs and bunks, holding cigarettes and fans of playing cards with limp wrists. When we chatted, the conversations were filled with numbers. How many boxes did you move? How many containers would those fill? How many days until the Lunar New Year. How much was one square meter of real estate in Shanghai? In closer-and-cheaper Shenzhen? In your hometown? Sujuan was a girly girl, short and round. But her eyes were alert and her mind quick. When the lunch bell rang, she was the first one off the floor and into the canteen. “You’ve done that trick again where you wash your hands by the sink next to the door to wait for the bell, haven’t you?” I asked at the lunch table. She grinned. “The cook told me there’s going to be double-cooked pork and eggplant today,” she said. Long ago, she had set her watch to the same exact second as the factory bells. “Want to take me to the movies after work?” I chuckled. She had her eyes set on me because I was the nearest male in a factory where there were nine girls for every guy. I wasn’t a bigshot like the ones from the shipping department, the ones who played basketball in singlets even after fourteen-hour shifts, the ones who went home for the month-long New Year’s vacation and took temporary jobs as miners, the ones who got gigs as show-muscle behind factory CEOs when they went to negotiate contracts, getting paid in genuine Maotai and knock-off iPhones. Yet Sujuan came after me because she was plenty full of ideas already. Anyone would do. “My ma’s waiting for me to call tonight. Another day,” I told her. “Oh, you’re such a filial son,” she teased, her lips shiny with the oily broth. “I haven’t called my parents in over a month. I told them the phone service here is too expensive and they backed off like kittens.” “Why?” “ All they know is saving money.”

“Why don’t you like to talk to them?” “Same reason—all they know is saving money. I tell them I am going to the job fair to look for a place at a foreign-run factory, and they cluck at me like chickens. ‘Oh no, a girl like you is too inexperienced for such shuffling around. Just stay where you are and bury your head into work for a few years. When you’ve made enough for us to build a new house, come home to raise hogs and get married.’ They don’t see how things work here. You need to scout around for the best deals. I’ve jumped factories four times since this time last year. What about you?” “Just once.” I’d finished eating now and had stacked the tin bowls and cup together. “Are you done already? All you had was a bun and the eggplants. What, you don’t eat meat? What a waste! With all that they skim off our pay, this is the one place we can make it back. Why did you stay on at your former factory for so long? How much did they pay?” She was eyeing the remaining slivers of pork in my top bowl, wondering whether we were close enough friends. “Not much higher than here.” I wanted to push the bowl to her, but sometimes girls hissed if you showed that you knew their bad traits too well. “What?” she was looking at me with wide eyes now. “You jumped to a lower paying place? Why? Did you get fired?” “Why would a nice guy like me get fired?” I smiled, knowing how goofy I looked with my crooked front teeth. When my adult teeth were growing and my ma saw that they were coming in crooked, she took to forcing them straight with her thumb every night. She’d lie against the pillows while I sat on the wedge of bed between her legs. Two hours, three. She’d turn the light off and turn on the radio. Sometimes I’d wake up and realize that we’d both been asleep for hours, and despite my efforts not to stir, she’d startle awake. “How can a poor male child ever find a wife if he’s not at least presentable,” she’d mumble. Sujuan narrowed her eyes. “Answer straight,” she said, and I was irritated by her bossiness. At twenty-five, I was at least five years older than her and had never done anything with her except chat during meals. “I wasn’t fired,” I said, deciding to let it go. “I just wanted a change in routine.” It wasn’t completely false. I’d left that factory after my girlfriend Keke left me. The whole factory had known that we were together. After she’d left, I couldn’t take their knowing. Sujuan unscrunched her brows and slapped the back of my hand.

“I know what you are, you’re a romantic. Take me to the movies then. I’m a romantic too.” She laughed toward the ceiling and then leaned forward to grab the front of my shirt, miming a loud kiss inches before her puckered mouth touched mine.

My cell phone was a pink Nokia knockoff that used to belong to Keke. Because I didn’t talk much, none of the guys in my dorm room said anything when I took it out, even though I’ve caught them eyeing it. The room was empty. Flip flops, washing basins and a plastic alarm clock littered the cement floor. I dialed Ningxia, my home province more than a thousand kilometers to the northwest. My second uncle, the only one who owned a cell phone in our family, answered. “Mm, Shan-ah, your ma’s was just here a minute ago and now she’s run off,” he said, breathless and agitated. “What’s happening?” I asked. He didn’t pay attention to me. In the background, I heard my aunt’s sandy voice yelling, “Control that stinky mouth of yours. Don’t tell him that.” “Aiya, this cannot be kept in the dark,” my uncle raised his voice. And then to me, he said, “Shan-ah, you’ve left home for more or less five or six years now. If things change around here, you would understand, yes?” He wasn’t used to speaking in circles. When he did it, his accent almost changed to sound like a news reader’s on TV. “Is anyone sick?” Both my mother and father were sixty-something farmers living in clay-roofed houses all their lives. “Yes, just as you say, your ma is sick. A blood sickness. Since all her nosebleeds last summer we knew something was wrong, but she wouldn’t let anyone tell you. She says she doesn’t want to worry you, but the real reason is she doesn’t want to be forced to spend money. The county hospital doctor said it is a kind of cancer. Shan-ah, are you understanding this all?” “Mm, mm,” I was relieved that I didn’t have to move my mouth to make that sound. Throughout all of our family gatherings, my second uncle had always been the one to tease us children, hiding our playthings and then calling us little pigs when we cried. I couldn’t break down in front of him now. There was a bustle and then my aunt came on.

“Shan, your ma got into a fight with your uncle about telling you and it looks like she headed up the hill to your house. I’ll go after her now with the phone. She’ll call you back in fifteen minutes.” “What is her condition, Second Aunt?” I knew I couldn’t wait fifteen minutes. My mind was like a beehive and my lungs hurt. If someone were to come in at this moment, I would have picked up a shoe and thrown it at him. “Ai,” she sighed like she was bone tired. “They say she waited too long to have a blood change. We’re lucky we got a comparably honestly doctor—sometimes they take your money even when they know treatment is no use anymore.” I kicked a washing basin. It flipped and rolled on its rim for a few wobbly circles before falling rim-first into a clanging rotation. I stood up and kicked it again to shut it up. It slid out the door and banged against the chalky rails of the open-air platform outside. The chatter from below stopped. On the phone, my aunt was yelling my name. “Take the phone to her. I’ve no more to say now, okay?” I clipped shut the phone just as Long Hair Meng—I never learned his full name—came in, looking hesitant. He wedged a bag of shoe inserts looted from his factory under his mattress and glanced at the basin outside, uncertain. “A serious vendetta against that basin,” he said, trying to be light. “If it’s broken, I’ll pay,” I said. “It’s not mine,” he said, stooping to pick it up, and brought it back inside. “Did you and that chick have a tiff?” he asked, braver with something solid in his hands. He must have been talking about Sujuan. “There’s no chick,” I said. Long Hair Meng was a quiet guy too. He kept his hair long to save on haircuts. In the mornings, when all of us workers brushed our teeth at the trough-shaped sink, I’d always unthinkingly shared his spigot. “The one you eat with, the chatty one.” I knew he knew that wasn’t it. If it were, he wouldn’t have been concerned enough to press. My mind swept the grounds for a spot where I could be alone. Nowhere. The bathroom stalls had no doors. This dorm building was surrounded by other dorm buildings—all with girls protruding from the railings, chattering or staring at the horizon to wear off the after-work stupor.

“My mother may be in bad shape,” I finally said. “She’s calling back in a minute.” He looked to the floor, went to the door, and nudged loose the brick that was holding it open with his foot. “The others are buying beer for a card session. They’ll make too much noise if they come in here. I’ll keep them out,” he said before pulling the door shut behind him. When my ma called back she pretended nothing has happened. She asked me how I was, and when I said unthinkingly said fine, she said good, because she was humming my song all day, the one that I’d written last, but it sounded best from me. And could I sing it for her now? I said I didn’t have my guitar. It was with the music shop owner for safekeeping. She said sing it without the guitar, that I’d always had this problem. The singers on TV used the guitar to add to the song but I’d used it to hide my voice. And remember how she sang to me when I was little? Even though she was always out of tune, she’d managed to teach me all those songs. I asked if my father was with her. I wanted to know that someone had her in his sight. I couldn’t picture her face. She said no, he was at my uncle’s house, talking about money. They’d been at the county hospital today and the talk with the doctors was mostly about money. And then she said she was sorry. “Son, I’m sorry,” she said, “Mama has used up almost all of the money set aside so that you could marry. If Mama hadn’t gotten sick, you could go so much more smoothly in life.” There I stopped her. It didn’t seem fair that I would be the first to cry.

No one was out on the platform when I opened the door and re-lodged the brick. I went down the stairs, past the noisy basketball courts, past identical rows of dormitory buildings until I reached the main road. When a taxi stopped, I realized I had only a ten-yuan note. I got in anyway. One block from the music shop, when we stopped at a red light, I jumped out, slammed the door, and dashed headlong into an alleyway. I ran from the driver’s enraged screams, ran past the shirtless street vendors with their propane stoves, past tussling children, past the flashing neon signs of karaoke bars and throngs of young couples walking slow. I opened the door to the music shop, slapped the ten yuans on the counter in front of Mr. Cai, and grabbed two bottles of beer out of the cooler. “Hey, hey—“ he called, but I ignored him and went straight to the back

25 room. There, I took down my guitar from the top shelf, locked the door, and turned off the lights. In the dark, I twisted off a bottle cap with my hand, the jagged burn on my skin felt a little like relief. “Ay,” came a knock on the door. “It’s kind of late, I’m closing in an hour,” said Mr. Cai. I ignored him. I paid him two hundred yuans a month for the storage of my guitar and the usage of this room after work. I made seventeen hundred yuans a month for running the underwires of women’s brassieres through a machine that punched grooves to lodge a future strap. I did this twelve hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and twenty-nine days a year so that someday, I could breathe easy. I sent most of the money home, where my ma kept half in the bank and half in the underground vegetable cellar. My second uncle, with both his sons working in construction in Shanghai, had a refurbished house, a motorcycle, and a corner convenience shop. I avoided doing the accounting in my head, but it was impossible to fog out the numbers altogether. Even in Dongguan, the price of an apartment was eight thousand yuans per square meter. And I didn’t want to live in Dongguan. It was a town built for temporary passers-through, for laborers and big bosses, both eager to suck up their fortunes for a few sacrificed years and then leave. Factories filled entire blocks and roads were four lanes each way. At night, freight trucks whooshed by like cars on a never-ending train. In the plazas and markets, everyone was rushed and short-tempered. Though most of us were under twenty-five here, the expressions of the faces in the crowd showed only different degrees of tiredness. I was twenty when I had decided to come to Dongguan five years ago. The government had bought up so much farmland in my village that there was nothing for me to do anymore, and with only a ninth-grade education, it would’ve been foolhardy to try my luck in a real city. When I announced that I would go to a coastal factory town, my uncle had laughed over-loudly across the dinner table. “A weasel is creeping into the hen house,” he said, winking at my ma and ba. “No need to worry about catching yourselves a daughter-in-law now.” Everyone knew Dongguan was filled with girls—humble, untainted girls from countryside villages who didn’t demand too much, who would work alongside you to earn money for the future—worlds apart from the city girls who expected the man to cushion all the rough edges in life. “Lock one down while she’s young,” my uncle teased and poked me with his elbow. “Any older than twenty and she’ll learn the ways of the world, and then you’d need an apartment and a car before they’d close the deal.” He’d said this like he didn’t believe I had it in me. I’d been a quiet kid all my

26 life—in grade school, I’d never been a leader with the boys, let alone the girls. Yet when did I bring Keke home for New Year’s that year, she’d smiled so readily, helped my ma in the kitchen so enthusiastically, that for once he’d shut up. I held the guitar in my arms and strummed it. But no tune immediately came to me. I didn’t know why I was thinking of Keke now except that that New Year’s with her at my hometown was the last time that I remembered my ma being happy. She’d stopped worrying about me then, thinking that I’d finally found someone to lean on in life. I guzzled my beer, wishing it was something harder. There in the dark, Keke’s memory flooded over me.

Keke

It’s been three years since we met. She was seventeen then—too young to be legally hired at the shoe factory where I was working. She had bought a fake age certificate off an expert forger who’d spotted her at the train station and immediately guessed her need. When the factory boss looked her askance after seeing the signature of her village head, she gave him the most effective smile. It was the smile of a little girl who knew she’d been caught, yet believed that all would be forgiven if she just admitted to her mistake. When she saw me watching she gave me a smile too. It was sheepish, but also trusting. My uncle was right about one thing: I didn’t like to stick my neck out for anything. Though there had been girls who’d sought me out since I got here, who giggled and asked personal questions in ways that could only be taken as making designs, their nasty complaints about everything around us depressed me. I’d expected this girl to glare at me for catching her deceit, but her smile made her seem warm at the core, trusting that the world isn’t set against her. At first she was an inspector, sticking her hands into each pair of shoes and flexing her fingers to feel the proper resistance before checking the stitches and then packing them head-to- tail into boxes. In a month, she’d wiggled into a better position, fitting the lids onto the boxes and stacking them onto the huge wheeled carts. By that time, she was someone to watch for. Before the boss made any announcement about overtime, or vacations, or inspections, she was the one he beckoned into his office in plain sight.

She was always surrounded by loud, high-spirited girls at lunch, and my hopes about approaching her were declining when one day, all the heads in her group turned toward me at once. They were discussing pop singers, and someone said that I sang. The guys at my table shoved my shoulders until I went over to her table. Her look as I approached was one of recognition, and her smiling face, surrounded by the faces of others, looked like the heart of an open flower. She made it easy for me, said she wanted to see my guitar, and I took her to the music store after work. When Mr. Cai saw her, his eyes flitted between our faces. He’d never seen me with a buddy, let alone a girl. When we went to the back storage room, she was the one who closed the door after I’d made it a point to leave it open. I told her about my village, about my two years in Dongguan, and how I’d learned to play the guitar from the street performers in the shopping district. They were young guys like me and worked shortened shifts at factories and played everywhere they could. The money they earned they didn’t send home, but pooled together so that they could one day go to Beijing or Shanghai and become real musicians. When they’d encouraged me to do the same I’d considered it for only a moment. But it was a dangerous moment. Of course I declined in the end. Everyone I knew sent their money home, and no one I’ve ever heard of had ever become successful in something like music. Keke nodded at my reasoning and said it was better to learn things that would get us jobs. She herself was learning Cantonese so she might move to better-paying Shenzhen. She said wanted to save up her money and move to the city, to be able to take the subway to work and carry a briefcase. Weeks later, when she took me to tour her dorm room, I found language cassettes that she listened to with a Walkman and a notebook filled with English. She hadn’t wanted to seem bigheaded to me, that’s why she’d told me Cantonese. Her roommates whined good-naturedly when they saw me looking. “She turns the volume low at night but we can still hear the buzzing,” they said. “We’d all wake up speaking English too. ‘How are you?’ ‘I’m fine. How are you?’ ‘Just great’.” We talked that afternoon until I agreed accompany her wavering rendition of “The Moon Represents my Heart” on my guitar, until Mr. Cai’s footsteps outside grew pointedly noisier. The next day, she didn’t fill up a tray at lunch, but only got a cup of sugary drink and then stepped out into the sun. I followed suit. With our backs against the hot wall, squinting in the sun, she entwined her arm through mine and rested her head against my shoulder. “Lin Rushan,”

28 she said, testing my name to see how it held up in her mouth. I felt hot and light, sensing for the first that that my life was about to pull onto an incautious track. But it was me who became freer, not her. She only tilled harder at the original plot. If we were to have a future together, then she would work harder than ever. At work she asked for extra hours, extra hours upon extra hours. She got headaches from the smell of shoe glue and her fingernails split from the nail beds despite her buying cotton gloves to wear. Me? I took the guitar into the dorms, ignoring the risk of getting it stolen. While Keke worked her extra shifts, I went home to my guitar and belted out big booming rock-and-roll songs. “Angry Blooming Life,” “Nothing to My Name.” My dorm mates meandered in and out of the room, hesitating at the sudden curing of my stage fright. I balanced the chair on its back legs and aimed my throat toward the ceiling so no one saw my face. Against my closed eyelids, I saw Keke coming closer, smiling coyly, turning away. I knew it was about sex, yes. When I thought about my ma, or Mr. Cai, or the factory boss, I saw a smudge of a face. When I thought of Keke, the outline of her body became clearer and clearer until I felt it on my skin. The first time it happened, we were in a park after midnight. Though of course I’d wanted it, neither of us knew it was really happening until it was too late. The park was filled with other couples with no place else to be alone, and when I realized that we’d out-waited them all, my heart beat faster. We were sitting on a concrete ledge with our backs to a pruned hedge. Threads of fog snaked up the columns of the decorative pavilion. I felt some restraint break lose in me, a force that blotted out the night, the upcoming day, the fatigue, and all the shy talks and fumbles. She looked wild-eyed when we reeled onto the damp grass behind the hedge, but in the tilt of her mouth, the points of her teeth, I thought I saw a confused eagerness that matched my own. Tiny worries twitched in my mind: what would happen if someone saw us? I’d been too embarrassed to buy the condoms at the store, and this was how women got pregnant, wasn’t it? Yet the slippery warmth of her mouth, the solid heft of her thighs in my hands shuttered all possibilities of exit. When I entered her, it was as if a fizzing radio has finally been tuned clean. Yet in the next beat, I felt a hot shame, like I’d torn off a piece of fat meat with my bare teeth and was now glutting myself. The painful twist of our bodies, the rising sweat-smelling heat, chased me to a frenzied finish. Afterwards she wouldn’t look me in the eye, moving jerkily like she was a newborn calf trying out her limbs. I mustered all my good will, shaking out her jacket, walking in exact pace

29 beside her though I dared not touch her. When we separated in front of our dorm buildings, she turned to me with a resolve. “My mother told me before I left for Dongguan that as soon as a girl did that, she loses her value,” she said, her voice high and wavering. “Nothing will happen,” I said stupidly, thinking in a panic about the bits of conversation I’d heard between my dorm mates, and how the guy always pushed, and how the girl frequently acted put out afterwards, and this was all normal, right? She launched toward me like an enraged bull and shoved me backwards hard. I staggered, straining my hamstrings so I wouldn’t fall. When I looked up, she was marching away, I forced myself to stop watching, to get myself out of the burning line of her gaze if she were to look back.

I tossed and turned all night, envisioning options. I could never speak to her again. There were nine girls to every guy at this and every other factory. What was that good for if not some callousness on my part? I could pretend that nothing happened, wait for her by the crooked street light on our way to work as always, and maybe my own casualness would tide her into the same conclusion that it was all as it should be. I could ask one of the other girls for advice. But then, that sounded like a dumb move even to me. To disclose what happened tonight was to set the factories on fire with gossip. Keke is not a virgin anymore. She would walk each day as a cripple. Another girl may turn to me for shelter from the smirks, but not her. She would hate me silently, find energy each day from hating me. Of course there was another option, the one hovering in front of all the others. I could go to her, lower myself and say, please forgive me. I am so confused, but I know the fault is mine. Yet we are here together, familiar with each other and leaning on each other in this sea of foreignness. You are what I think about each day. I don’t want to go back to before I met you. I went to work the next morning with my mind foggy from the lack of sleep. At lunch, Keke was nowhere to be seen. One of her friends came over to me. She was sick with fever, the girl said. They’d tried to pull her out of bed that morning but she’d only moaned.

I made the ten-minute trek to the dorms knowing that I would never make it back to the factory on time. None of us had a stable footing at the factory. Job seekers circled the hiring offices daily. We were fired for being even five minutes late. Because of this, I knew that Keke was seriously sick. It was only when I broke into a run in the dirt-packed courtyard that I felt what a mess my mind was in. I wasn’t running to make time, I was running toward the heat of her. She lay in a lower bunk, wrapped in blankets like a sausage. When she opened her eyes and saw me she pulled the blanket over her head. I sat down at the edge of the bed and touched my palm down. She was on her side. Through the layer of stuffed cotton, I felt the exaggerated curve of her hip bone. She didn’t move. In my bleary mind, I felt again last night’s madness, only this time clouded with tenderness. I pulled the blanket down from her face slowly, giving her a chance to stop me. When her whole face was revealed, she lay as still as a thousand-year- old statue. Her lips were parted and cracked, her hair a tangled mess. In all these weeks that I’d known her, I’d never seen her motionless, and now that I have, things seemed so plain, so possible: when she flares, I’d yield; if she runs off, I’d come find her. Her natural vehemence would make up for my chronic uncertainties. I raised my legs up onto the bed and lay beside her on my side, my hand on her stomach, possessive. She opened her eyes. “Everything is too bright,” she whispered. “Shhh. Rest,” I said, and covered her eyes. Her skin was burning up. I could feel the vein in her forehead pulsing. “I feeling like I’m floating. Come weigh me down,” she whispered, pulling me by the wrist toward her. I hesitated. The room was so threadbare. No awning to shield the sun, no curtains to block the window. But then she kicked the blanket to her feet and the long, hot stretch of her body pulled me in. My mind emptied and my hands filled with the give of her flesh, the flow of her skin. Above the constant heat of her fever, I wanted both to sooth her and to squeeze her dry, utterly exhaust her. Later, after she’d left me and moved away, I would think back to that afternoon and wonder at how few images I could remember. The crinkle of her nipple, perhaps. The turnip curve of her calf. When these visions came, they made me neither happy nor sad, but another, more breathless feeling. The same feeling I got as a child when I saw our old tractor in the winter, frozen to the earth with a spill of molten ice—when I heard belly moans of the ship fleets in the harbor, carrying away all the fruits of labor of this transient town.

But for now, she locked her legs around my hips and we rocked for what seemed like hours, an entire train journey. When we lay in a heap afterwards, the room looked edged in gold. The dust motes hovered idly in the air. The plastic of the windowsill reflected the afternoon sun. “If I get pregnant, I’ll get a second job as a cyber café attendant,” she said, her head in the crook of my shoulder. “By the time I have the baby, we could afford a little room in town.” “If you get pregnant, I’ll bring you home to my village and my ma will cook us all the dishes you can dream of,” I said, smiling. She propped herself up on her elbow above me. “I will never go back to the countryside,” she said. “I’d get an abortion first, or die.”

When Keke’s fever faded the next morning, the boss took her back. When I went to see him, he dragged down his face into the shape of a bitter melon and sighed loudly. “Ay, what can a old man like me do to keep my head above water? I try to be a good guy, but if you don’t show up, then I can’t fulfill the order. If I can’t fulfill the order, then the foreigners order from someone else. If they order from someone else, then I’d get less money. And if that happens, then I’d have to let more people go, and then pretty soon my factory will be so small that I’d have to move inland. You’re lucky compare to me, young man. All you need to do is show up, sweat a little, and that’s it—no more to worry about. The way the economy keeps growing, you could probably end up where I am just by doing exactly what you do now and no more. Look at your girlfriend, battering her head against walls just to make a few extra bucks—she’s probably the foolish one.” Of course his sarcasm wasn’t lost on me. I was older than Keke, I’d been there longer, and never in all this time had I been ambitious enough to be promoted or even to talked to the boss in private. The only reason he’d known that keke and I were together was because she’d pleaded my case when he took her back. She was welded to me now, it was like we married ourselves that afternoon in the empty dorm room. Though the boss had cut me loose, that evening, I heard Keke on her cell. “Ma, don’t worry, he’s a good guy, he’ll find something else…yes, I can depend on him. All the girls here said he’d never chased anyone else.” A week later, after Keke begged him, the boss took me back. In return, she took a basic accounting class for two weeks’ worth of evenings at the public library. He then promoted her to the position of his secretary so that he didn’t have to splurge on a real one. Nights, just before

32 we’d return to our respective dorms, when we could not keep our eyes open for another minute, we’d crawl out from under whatever bower that’d kept us hidden in the park and she’d ask me two questions: Have you called your mother and father today? And, how many more months before we can leave for a real city? For the first question, I’d answer, no, not yet. Or: my mother doesn’t have a cell phone, she has to hike over to my uncle’s to wait for my call. And then, later: you know I don’t call home unless something is wrong. It’s different for guys. I knew what she wanted. She wanted to hear that I’d told my parents about her, that they couldn’t wait to meet her. Yet some instinct in me decided to hold out. It wasn’t that she’d fallen short of any standards set in my mind. Yet for couples like us—migrant workers, they called us—to involve the parents meant more than just that we were in love, more, even, than that we would marry soon. It’d meant that we had a practical plan for a good life together. And this led to her second question: by leaving, she meant Dongguan, and by the number of months, she’d meant money. She had a running tally in her head: how many months’ worth of salary equaled the down payment on an apartment in a third- tier city, a second-tier—even she did not dare dream of the first-tiers—of the ring roads of Beijing, the skyline of Shanghai. I didn’t answer because I couldn’t bear to tell her that even a fourth-tier city was a dream. A yellow-sky fragrant dream. A pipe dream. Yes, with our labor, we could amass enough for a down payment and a few months’ rent. Yet what happens after that? Nobody would buy her shaky accounting certificate in a real city. And me, as soon as I opened my mouth, my accent would give me away. I couldn’t even be a security guard or a waiter in a big city. They all wanted tall men with straight teeth. The only thing I could be is an old-school coolie, mixing cement at a construction site or pedaling a three-wheeler loaded down with electronics that I could never afford. And at the end of the month, we’d have the rent, a few serviceable meals, and not much else. Then, not too far into the future, when the housing prices rose again, we wouldn’t even be able to afford that. And all this while, through age and wear and tear, our bodily strength would wear away though it was the only thing people like us had to sell. Just thinking about a life like that made me want to go to sleep and never wake up again. At first, when she pressed me, she would do so playfully. “C’mon big brother, how much loot do you have stashed away?” she’d ask. Yet even then, when I handed over my monthly two hundred-yuan fee to Mr. Cai, she turned stony-faced and silent.

The worst part wasn’t when she refused to kiss me, to let me touch her, it was when she crossed her arms and looked at the floor when I strummed the intro to a song. My throat felt caked with gunk when she got that way. Several times, a wild urge shot through me and I wanted to smash her face with my guitar. Two birds with one stone. Be gone, the torments of my life. Yet the next minute, she’d scoot close to me, close her eyes, and my fingertips were light again. We would go on like this, I comforted myself—turn away and turn back again, just like the up-and-down notes of a song. One thing about her, she never turned against me publically. When her friends asked what I was doing the nights that they went to job fairs, or to the English conversation corners, she’d say that I was writing songs, that I had friends in Beijing and Shanghai who might get me a record deal. She must have been thinking about the guys that I’d learned to play guitar from. It was true that they did finally save enough money for Shanghai. They’d left months ago, leaving me their phone numbers prior to their departure and egging me to join them, but I could only marvel at the risk they were taking. What I heard the tales Keke told her friends, I thought she was smart to lie only a little. But now, sitting in Mr. Cai’s storage room with my mother’s impending death poisoning my body, I knew that it was much worse: she was to herself. But we went on. When I took her back to my village for the month-long Lunar New Year break, she’d gone to the cheapest beauty parlor in town to have her hair streaked with a tortoise- shell pattern. “It’s what all the city girls are doing,” she said when I laughed at the effect. And then, “I may not be as pretty as you are handsome, but I want your parents to know that I will not drag you down in life.” After nineteen hours of squatting in the train aisle, when we’d finally reached my village squeezed in the sidecar of my uncle’s motorcycle, my mother’s first fierce whisper to me after sizing up Keke was, “You’ve been had. Who is this fake fox-seductress you’ve brought home? Yet as the days passed and Keke’s shoddy dye job washed out in the heated-up well water, Ma softened at the sight of the calluses on Keke’s hand, the soundlessness of her early-morning risings. Several times, I caught her smiling at the steadiness of Keke’s chopping in the kitchen, the way she always handed the heaviest blanket to me, and then the next heaviest to my father.

One evening, Ma asked for my help selecting heads of yellow cabbage in the underground cellar and I knew the time as come to ask me about the future.

“Has the raw rice been cooked, then?” She asked, her breath visible in the cold air. It was the age-old euphemism about girl-virgins being deflowered on their wedding nights. As old as I was, I blushed. “Ma,” I said, mustering up dignity. “Don’t worry about what doesn’t concern you.” “Your dad wouldn’t let me sleep last night, he was muttering so endlessly about your future plans.” She’d taken me by the elbow led me to the corner farthest from the hatch, not out of fear of being overheard as much as out of embarrassment for starting such a conversation. “Baba’s old and confused,” I said, but she was undeterred. “Don’t be a don’t-know-what’s-good-for-you. I’m talking serious things here. This girl seems like a good one. If she is cooked rice now, so much the better—she can’t run off now.” “I can run off,” I said, teasing. “I told you not to be a don’t-know-what’s-good-for-yourself. Has she done anything undeserving of you?” “No.” “What’s the worst thing about her? Tell Mama. I’ll judge for you.” “She wants to make money like crazy,” I said, not knowing how else to explain it. Several times now, Keke had asked questions that had backed me into a corner. Do you want to stay in Dongguan for the rest of your life? Why don’t you think of some ideas if all mine are no good? What is wrong with you? “Tsss.” Ma rolled her eyes at me as her tongue sizzled like oil dropped into a hot pan. “That’s a good thing, child. The bad thing would be if she wanted to spend money like crazy.” She laughed. “But she wants to make money like a bottomless hole…” I didn’t continue. Even I knew that in today’s society, it was the ones who didn’t want that who were deficient. For the first time, there was disgust in her face. “Rushan, you’re a grown-up child now and I shouldn’t say this, but you’ve always been one to while time away while opportunity after opportunity pass you by. It’s been like this since you were little—it’s about time you had someone like her to pressure you.” She put one swollen, wrinkled hand on my back and pressed with the quiet weight of snow. “Listen to me. Choose her,” she said, her chin low.

After the midway stop on the train back to Dongguan, Keke put on her high heeled boots and wrangled us hardseats by planting herself with perfect ticket-holder’s confidence in an empty seat. We watched the snow covered crop rows slide past in the window and Keke sighed. “Your mother told me, ‘I’m entrusting Rushan to you,’” she said, her chin in her hand, her eyes unfocused. “Was she the one who named you?” she said when I didn’t answer. “Ru-shan.” Like the mountain. “It was my father. My mother wanted to name me “Daqiang.” Big and Strong. “A classic country boy name,” she commented absently. “That’s what we are. No need to gamble with a shaky hand by aspiring higher.” I was sarcastic. “Don’t pick a fight,” she said shortly, and then turned to the window and let a curtain of hair cover her face from my sight. A field of dry, thorny weeds spiked up in my chest. I grabbed her shoulder and turned her forced her to face me. “Don’t act like you’re higher than everyone,” I said. The look of surprise on her face turned to hurt and then anger. “What is your problem? I treated your parents as my own parents during this month.” I paused for a moment because this is true, but then remembered her original comment. “My mother said that to you to flatter you. No one expects you to take care of me. No one expects you to support them in their old age.” She said nothing for several minutes. With a childish exhilaration, I thought I’d won. Then, the train attendant in her olive-green uniform appeared. As soon as her gaze landed on our foam-stuffed parkas, I knew there’d be trouble. “Let me see your tickets,” she said coldly. Usually, in situations like this, Keke knew she had the lower hand backed off quickly with her dignity still intact. She wasn’t like those bitter-faced townie matrons who’d littered melon rinds and pistachio shells all over the floor. She still had some dignity to lose. I expected her to stay silent and shuffle out of the booth quickly. Instead, she only yawned exaggeratedly. “You deaf?” The attendant was looking at me of the two of us. I looked at Keke, who refused to look back. “Sorry, we lost the ticket stubs,” I said, trying to tamp down my instinct to smile.

“Get out of the seats. Get lost,” the attendant said, eyes already on the next passenger as if deciding not to waste any more breath on us. I looked at her. She was our age, her accent was southern, her hair a halfhearted perm beneath the policewoman cap. I took our tea thermos and screwed on the caps, waited for her to pass, and then muttered something about already-broken pots not fearing not fearing any more smashing. Keke sneered. “Say it to her face,” she said. “What?” “You’re so brave in private, so competitive when there’s no one to compete against. Go say that to her face.” “Control yourself. Save your tantrums for when we’re not in public,” I said, knowing and half-fearing that this would get to her. She stayed silent for a moment and then, as cool as an empress, she tilted the already- loosened tabletop—a linoleum board, so that the tea thermoses slid off. In my panic, I caught one. The other shattered against the floor, splashing hot water on the arm of my coat. “Ay, ay, ay, what are you doing?” The attendant came back, all her disdain turning into wrath. “Whose eyes are you making that ugly face for, your old ma’s?” she said at Keke’s impassive posture. “Miss, where are you from, if I may ask,” Keke said, her voice loaded with calm. “Clean up this mess and get out of these seats. I’m being kind here not throwing you off the train. I’m assuming you two have at least a standing ticket.” Keke was undeterred. “I’m guessing you’re from Fuzhou. You can’t have had this job long. But you’ve seen plenty of people like me, and plenty of people like him, so we’re all the same to you, isn’t that right?” I wasn’t sure how she’d plotted this one out, but from the clenching of the attendant’s jaw, I knew that there was no turning back. “Ay, why is it that a person like you don’t understand logic? You pay for a seat, you sit in it. You don’t pay for a seat, you don’t sit in it. Even if you’re the Emperor, it’s this way. Even if I’m from outside the country, it’s this way.” She has deliberately slowed her words and arched her accent. “That’s a joke,” Keke said with a bitter snicker. “If we looked like we had money you wouldn’t even ask to check our tickets. What I want to know is what does this gets you? If

37 someone has money, does that mean he’ll give it to you? If I don’t have money, does that mean my every move is putting you out?” For the first time, the attendant looked a bit uncomfortable. With a sigh, she took the broom held out to her by another attendant and started sweeping the broken glass with rough strokes. “Ay, people like you turn everything upside down. You’ve done wrong, and instead of admitting you’re caught, you twist all logic. Someone like you is destined to be an uncivilized small-towner all your life.” She looked around the car for support, but though everyone was clearly watching, no one had staked a side. And then her gaze fell on me, and I, in my nervousness, smiled. She pounced right away. “Look at your boyfriend here. There’s still hope for him. He knows what’s right and wrong. Pity for him that he’s thrown his lot in with someone like you.” She said this without looking Keke in the eye. “Here, help clean up the mess, brother,” she chided, handing the broom to me. I hesitated, knowing that to take it would mean something to all watching. Yet I thought that Keke would forgive me, she who’d endured all the boss’s misplaced anger when orders were coming in slow, she who’d been so happy that I invited her home for the holidays. I took the broom and got up to start sweeping. Of course later, I traced all that followed to that move. Yet the time, with my whole body straining with attention at the silence in Keke’s direction, I noted only that everything seemed to resolve at my giving in. The attendant left quietly after placing a rag on the corner of the table. The rubbernecking passengers went back to their own conversations. Keke said nothing, though I imagined her eyes on me. As I sopped up the last bit of teawater with the rag, she slid out of the booth, dragging her bag behind her, and wedged her slim body between a seatback and a vertical handrail. I found a similar space a few seats down, and sat down on my suitcase. For the next seven hours, she didn’t look in my direction. We still sought each other out after we got back to the factory, and even had sex a few times, our bodies like boats floating down memorized channels, but we talked less. At night, in the safe cocoon of everyone’s snores, I thought about how she might be awake too, wondering what I was thinking. How could this thing be so delicate when everyone expected it to turn into marriage? I didn’t take the guitar back to Mr. Cai’s, but didn’t play it in front of her, either. Instead, I strummed up melodies without lyrics. I’d always been a dumb lyricist. I used to think that this was because I hadn’t read many books. But now, I saw it as proof of my emptiness. I

38 started scanning the job ads on the bulletin boards lining the streets for something I could do on the side to keep from thinking too much. Maybe I could start the wheels turning down the path Keke wanted. Maybe all my misgivings about it were just excuses for laziness. But I was too late. At the end of the first quarter, she got an offer from a friend to share an apartment in Hefei, a no-tier city. When she told me, she told it plain in a no-name noodle joint. She would leave in a week so that she could train a new secretary for the boss. She didn’t want to burn any bridges. I said oh, like this was the expectation all along. With my fists clenched beneath the table, I stopped myself from asking if she wanted me to meet up with her later—one year, five years. But she said nothing. When she finished her last slurp of noodle, she looked at her watch and said that it was getting late, that she’d go now if I didn’t mind. “Take care of yourself,” she said, and left as lightly as if we were meeting later for a fuck. When I got up about an hour later to settle the bill, the waitress said it was taken care of. Keke never left loose ends. The bill was paid, the noodles finished, the first quarter’s contract satisfied.

“Ay, come out right now. I need to talk to you.” I stirred awake on the floor. It was dark all around me except for a slice of light coming from under the door. And then I remembered. Keke had been gone for two years now. My mother was dying. Mr. Cai banged on the door once more. “I’m warning you. Two hundred yuans a month doesn’t allow you to pull shit like this. I’m closing up. It’s already past closing time.” When I finally came out, he reached past me, flipped on the lights, and peered in with a disgusted look. When he didn’t see anything too disgusting, he looked almost disappointed. Finally, he took out a fifty-yuan note from his pocket and handed it to me. “Refund for the last week of this month. Take that thing and leave,” he said, picking up the empty beer bottles on the floor and then gesturing to my guitar on the shelf. I did as he said. It would be a long walk back to the dorms with the guitar case in hand, but I would manage. He looked deflated that it was so easy. “You can’t just lock up in there for hours and not explain what’s going on!” He shouted to my back as I went out the door.

When I woke up the next morning in my dorm bed, my legs were sore and the first thing on my mind was a train ticket home to Ningxia. I knew my presence wouldn’t change anything. But to stay in Dongguan, punch two bra wires per second for twelve hours, felt like a mockery. I washed my face and brushed my teeth with the rest of my dorm mates and made a decision to ask the boss about emergency leave. It would be a risk, I would probably be fired instead. The thought made me feel lightheaded. Through these five year at Dongguan, though I had no grand plan for the future, I’d always had at least a job. The guilt had always been bearable because I’d sent money home. But now, I thought, if I got fired, I could split open a burlap bag, laid it on a sidewalk corner, and fix bicycle chains for the rest of my life. After my mother died—and my father at his age would surely follow soon—who would care what I did for the rest of my life? Yet at the entrance of the factory, when my roommates headed for the loading zone, I started to joined the flood of girls to the assembly line and something dirty and jagged exploded in me. These were the sons whose mothers got well from illnesses and went on to live, I thought. These were the sons who didn’t keep their mothers worried about spending money at the doctor’s. When I had finally told my ma about Keke’s leaving me, she’d said nothing. But when I went home for the next New Years, my uncle told me that Ma had stopped eating meat and sold her pair of gold bangles. I knew what she was doing—my uncle didn’t need to spell it out. She was saving money so that the next girlfriend I got, I might keep. I whirled around looking for Bo. He would get his wish today. I would switch to packing and work with the guys and work overtime. From today on, I would batter my head against walls like Keke had.

“You cannot just yank on the lever, use your eyes!” Bo yelled, standing on his tiptoes to try to reach eye-level to me as he stood on the tin steps of the forklift. “These machines cost a fortune to repair, so when you feel the lever get stuck, look down, see where it’s stuck, and maneuver gently.” He looked funny trying to demonstrate “gentle,” his hand petting the air to illustrate his point. “If you want gentle, why didn’t you get a girl for this job?” “Girls can’t judge distance and pressure as well as guys,” he explained, not noticing my sarcasm. You’ve got to slide the lifting plate to the dead center of each box and you can’t lift too

40 suddenly. And then you’ve got to lift one side up very slowly depending on the weight of the box. And you’ve got to do all this fast. Girls get chaotic in the head too easily. Also, their forearms get sore.” I nodded, wishing he’d go away. My forearms were a little sore from wrestling with the rusted, greasy levers, but mostly, it was the constant interruptions that screeched through my brains. I was assigned to a forklift that moved along a track parallel to the shelves. The boxes of plastic cigarette lighters, metal cigarette lighters, shoe inserts, and brassiere accessories all went to their respective planks. The trucks headed for the shipping harbor came to load every two hours. Bo spotted one coming and panicked as it neared. “Little Shan, Little Fong! Hurry up! Bra clips to the left! All of them, now! The gate is opening in thirteen seconds.” The warehouse was about two stories high. When the loading gates opened, gears groaning, the smog-smelling air blew in and then the men shouted short commands to each other in their deepest voices. “Watch for overhang shelf three!” “Still on time, still on time.” “Sons of bitches are late. Extras on the second-tier shelf!” A morning’s worth of lifting and shouting in an echoing warehouse made my throat raw and my back sweaty. I hadn’t thought of my mother all day and by lunchtime, I was truly hungry. I walked to my usual table, marked by the sight of Sujuan, her long hair pulled back with a Hello Kitty clip. Immediately I felt that something was different. She eyed me slyly as I sat down and spread out my tin bowls. “We’ve got a good appetite today, do we?” Her voice was sarcastic. “I got switched to the packing warehouse. It’s a bit tiring,” I said. “Avoiding anyone?” I was confused. “No.” “Keeping it stupid, huh?” A few girls at the next table got quiet. I could tell that they wanted to turn their heads. Yet Sujuan wasn’t speaking at all loudly. “Did you take the wrong medicine today?” I tried to keep it light, yet inside, a familiar annoyance rose up. I should have sat somewhere else. I couldn’t take much of Sujuan today. Her eyes narrowed and she sighed dramatically. “Here I was thinking you were a decent guy. Sure, you linger in the girls side of the factory and you have no friends, but you were just a

41 bit slow, I thought. Turns out you’re just a weasel, and a lazy one at that.” She hiss the words out between her teeth. “I really don’t know what you want,” I said, trying to stay calm. She snickered. “I want you to tell your dorm mates that I am clean and honest.” “Clean and honest.” I couldn’t help but give a laugh. It was a bookish term meaning something like “not contaminated by sex.” Coming from Sujuan’s pudgy face, it seemed absurd. Her nostrils flared. I’d gone too far. “Laugh, yes laugh. Must seem funny to you, you with your village-whore girlfriend.” Her voice rose. The tables around us fell quiet. I could feel the my lips freeze into hard rubber. My ears heard only a quiet ringing as I got cold and then hot. She scoffed, pleased at her reaction. “Oh, I’m sorry. Ex-girlfriend,” she said with mock remorse. “Yeah, I’ve heard about her. Dongguan isn’t that big.” I scanned my spread of tin bowls. The mushroom and cabbage soup was steaming even in this muggy room. With a backhand from me, the boiled mess would fly at her face. The splash onto her skin, her eyes, would give me a deep pleasure. Taking my silence for victory, she continued. “I heard she’s in Shenzhen now, cleaning the house of a Swedish man, if you know what I mean.” I backhanded the bowl, yet even in my state, I couldn’t aim it at her face. She backpedaled her chair away from the table as the bowl flipped a leaky somersault and landed on the floor with a crash like cymbals. “Street rat!” she screamed, pointing like she wanted to impale me. The entire cafeteria was doused into silence. From the other side of the room, I could see Long Hair Meng scrambling toward us. Sujuan looked behind her at the tableful of girls, who hesitated for just a second before trickling in to crowd around her, daubing at her corduroy shirt with their napkins, flipping her wrists over and back again to check for burns. Long Hair Meng put his hand on my shoulder and angled me away from her. “Let it go. Don’t mind her,” he said. Shaking the girls off, Sujuan leapt to her feet.

“You are the dorm mate with the long hair who told his lie for him. Be the honest person here. I have never let that street rat touch me. If you have any seed, tell the truth now!” Long Hair Meng shot her a look of disgust and attempted to push me toward the exit. I ducked under his arm back toward Sujuan, who squealed like I was holding a gun. “Nobody touched you. Nobody wants to. Nobody wants to talk to you at lunch each day. Nobody cares especially how clean or dirty you are. Who are you? Who am I? We are all just workers in a factory town with our bodies to sell. If any of us died tomorrow no one would care.” Halfway through my speech I became strangely calm. The canteen had never been so quiet and I’d never been watched by so many faces. But it all came to me through a fog. My arms felt marrowless. I knew whatever she said next, I would not be able to match. She looked stunned for a moment by my speech, but quickly got back on track. “You know what you told everyone yesterday about me being in your dorm room. You told your buddies to keep out because you wanted to be alone with me, so stop denying it!” She sneered and crossed her arm, thinking she’d got me cornered. “Stop, stop, stop,” Long Hair Meng waved his palm at her. “He didn’t say anything. He wanted to be alone in the room yesterday and I made an excuse. I said he was in there with a girl,” he said sheepishly. “It was a misunderstanding. I apologize, okay?” He tried a smile. “It was no misunderstanding!” she yelled, her face flushed like she’d been slapped. I waited several seconds, but no fresh anger came. I patted Long Hair Meng on the back, took my jacket off the back of the chair, and walked out of the canteen into the dirt packed courtyard. Two years ago in a factory less than a kilometer away, I’d done a similar walk from factory to dorm at lunchtime toward Keke with the wind at my feet. Now, under the same blinding sun, it felt like the wind blew from all directions. I didn’t know where I was going to go.

I would forfeit my last week’s pay. Sitting on the subway train with my guitar case and suitcase on either side of me, this was the thought that first startled me. I had cleared out my dorm room in less than fifteen minutes before heading to the subway. But now, realizing that I’d just lost five hundred yuans made me want to go back—just explain the lunchtime argument to Bo, avoid everyone’s eyes for a few days, and keep working. Five hundred yuans could buy a person in the village an entire year’s seedlings, or cabbages for the whole winter. If I had five hundred yuans to spend without guilt, I could have bought a second-hand iPod, or a seafood-and-

43 karaoke session with the prettiest hostesses in town, or a good down jacket in the red color that was my ma’s favorite. That was the reason I was in Dongguan, after all, because every week, there was another five hundred, and though that would never add up to a life of luxuries, at least with each clutch of cash I sent home to Ningxia, a stretch of time didn’t go to waste. The automated voice announced the next stop in perfect Mandarin. I got out with uncertain steps. Subway tunnels were the best and worst place to be uncertain because no one paid attention to anyone else. I sat down on an uncomfortable wire bench and slumped against the wall, the parade of faces smeared against my eyeballs until I understood that I, too, was just a smear. The one person in the world who loved me was dying, and after that, I was but another body in a subway station. I’d seen crazy folks before. Numerous times on the pedestrian bridges or sidewalks of Dongguan, Keke and I would run into them: sobbing openly beside broken rice wine bottles, screaming in strange dialects wearing unseasonably light clothes. We’d sense them before we saw them. The crowd before us gradually hushed their talking and pushed a wide arc outward to give their craziness plenty of space. When I was six, I’d gone with my ma to a train station for the first time to pick up my uncle and there, sifting through a barrel-sized trash bin, was a woman wearing only a nylon bag as a skirt. Her hair fell in dirty strings over her breasts, and her skin was so sooty that it was only up close that Ma realized that she was half-naked, and covered my eyes. When she begged, she did not prostrate herself with both hands clasped together like other beggars I’d seen, but looked the passersby hard in the eye so that they either stood paralyzed or cowered back, and then unfurled her fingers like she was revealing a gem instead of asking for money. On our way home, I’d asked Ma about her and she gave me a scolding look. When we got home I asked again, and this time she said she was a witch. I took out my cell phone and found Keke’s number. Before I was going to go crazy myself, I needed to test this last attachment. It had been two years without a single contact. I didn’t even know which city she was in or even if she was still alive. Yet I knew by instinct that the suddenness of my message might trip her into honesty. “I still love you,” I typed, “Do you love me?” I sounded the words in my head and hurried to delete it. Only foreigners and people on TV talked like this. She wouldn’t believe that they were from me. “Where are you now? Do you miss me?” I typed. But then I remembered the careful way she’d looked at me in the weeks before she’d left and deleted this too. It was funny how I saw

44 her more clearly now than I ever had when we were together. She would see a message like that as beating a dead horse. I needed something different from anything she’d remembered about me. “I have money now,” I lied. “Please come back.” As soon as I hit “send,” panic shot up my spine. I knew I was killing any last chances at reconciliation with this lie. Yet I had to know. In these two years, I could never be rid of the thought that she would have stayed if I’d just earned more money. Other times I hated myself for finding excuses. I had to know for sure. It was nearing evening now and the crowds grew heavier and more hurried. People on cell phones sat on the bench near me and I got up and paced, restless in my waiting. Five minutes of back and forth, ten minutes, and I returned to my spot on the bench. A girl whose shopping bags now took up my spot gave me an annoyed look. “Singer?” she asked, a nasal whine in her tone. “You talking to me?” She looked a bit younger than me. I thought uneasily back to Sujuan. She rolled her eyes. “Yes, I’m talking to the person with a guitar case. Are you going to sing? Any later would be too late. The factory people getting off the late shift never give any money.” Her lower lip twitched as she said this, like she was putting me on. “Oh? Are you sure you’re not just wanting more space on the bench?” The benches faced the train tracks. The buskers, when there were any, stood in the entrance tunnel where the acoustics were fantastic but the footfalls echoed in unending waves. She broke out in a chuckle. “But it’s true too. See all the nicely dressed office people? They have the mood to enjoy music. The factory people just live for money,” she said. “Nah, the factory folks are just living day to day. It’s the office folks that have got their master plans laid out,” I said, grinning. “Exactly my point,” she said, her eyebrows lifting. “The factory crowd can’t appreciate anything that is not practical, but the higher-level people can see farther. They can see artistic subtlety.” She had struggled to finish her sentence. The last phrase didn’t come naturally to her. I didn’t answer, and held tighter to my cell phone in my pocket. “Come on. You’re not going to tell me you’ve gotten more money from the factory workers,” she pressed playfully.

I scanned her faded cloth jacket, her shopping bags filled with what looked like bottles of economy-size cooking oil, and thought I understood a thing or two. “How about I treat you to a beer and we chat a bit?” I wasn’t sure what I wanted to chat about, maybe just that she, too, was no higher-level person, and could see no farther than the end of this month. But I saw her lean away just slightly, and knew that she’d misunderstood. She must’ve thought I was making a move on her. And I must’ve appeared reckless and hopeless, a travelling busker carrying all his belongings in a plastic suitcase with only youth on his side and not for long. I forced my lip over my crooked teeth. “Another time.” I nodded, and caught the barest trace of regret on her face before I turned to throw the guitar case over my shoulder and walked away. I went to get a beer anyway. As soon as that girl had mistaken me for a busker, I knew I wanted to do it. But I couldn’t do it completely sober. I’d seen buskers here, sawing on erhus or violins with serious faces while the passersby, at first curious, quickly sped up their strides when they realized they might have to give money. I went to a magazine-and-cigarettes kiosk right beside the station and bought three green bottles of Tsingtao. The one I gulped down in minutes and then burped, making myself laugh. During the second one, I checked my phone once more: nothing. By the time I opened the third bottle, the beer had done its work and my thoughts were simple and fast: go sing a song, maybe two. See if I can make back my beer money. And if I could, maybe give those street performer guys in Shanghai a call. They were still in my phone. I knew their numbers hadn’t changed because I checked every month or so—calling and then hanging up to make sure that this option of joining them was still open. I pulled a black cap out of my suitcase and pulled the bill low over my forehead. Walking back into the subway tunnel, the echo was stronger and my stride looser. When dropped my suitcase against the wall and pulled the guitar strap over my head, the sneer that I caught from a gray suited man scraped my confidence a bit. I sat down against the wall and strummed idly. I pulled the bill down farther. All I saw were feet now. I played a mid-tempo folk song first, timing my chords with the rhythms of the footsteps. Yet when I went to start the second song, my throat still felt constricted. To let out my voice here felt as undoable as splashing a bucket of water toward the crowd. I was trying to feel the warmth of the alcohol when two pairs of feet slowed and stopped closed to me. One was a tiny pair of Velcro sneakers with big-eyed cartoon rabbits, the other, a sensible pair of brown leather

46 lace-ups. I looked up. The little girl had short hair and a face as round as an apple. Holding her hand was a middle-aged woman in a flowered blouse and slacks. Both of them had lollipops in their hands. Both of them were smiling. “What do you want to ask the shushu?” the woman asked her daughter, who bounced happily on the tips of her toes without answering, her smiling mouth a tight little pucker. God, I thought. I’m a shushu, an uncle, now. It seemed like only a few years ago that I was calling other adult men shushu. The woman crouched down to face-level with her daughter and steadied her legs. “Do you want to sing a song with shushu?” she prodded again, her voice mimicking a childish lisp. The girl looked at me, saw me smiling, and shook her head in a fit of giggles. “Now don’t be rude, tell shushu what you told me earlier.” The girl pulled her mother’s shoulder close and whispered into her ear. “Can shushu play many songs?” the woman asked, her voice still child-like. I cleared my throat. “Yes, I can play pretty much anything that’s popular right now. Anything you’d hear on the radio, or old stuff.” I might have been blushing. I couldn’t address the little girl. I had never used a baby voice in my life and didn’t know how to. “Shushu can play anything. Shushu is a musician,” the woman chirped to the little girl. “What should we ask him to play?” she pantomimed thinking about it, tapping her finger against her chin. “How about ‘Little Grass’?” Her daughter opened her eyes wide and said “yes yes yes yes.” It was a good suggestion. “Little Grass” was a children’s song with a simple melody. I nodded at the little girl and she smiled at me wide. I started strumming the intro, syncopating the beat so that I could rock to the rhythm while I played. Finally, I opened my mouth to sing. Not as fragrant as a flower Nor as tall as a tree I am a little grass that nobody knows. The little girl stood on her tiptoes and swayed from one foot to the other, her hands miming the gestures of a maestro using her lollipop as a pointer. Never am I lonely Never am I worried Look at all my companions spread out

To the edge of the world. I’d known the song since my childhood but hadn’t sang it in years. Now that I was, it felt like traveling down a familiar corridor. My voice went smoothly. I forgot to keep my lip over my crooked teeth like I always did when I sang in front of someone. Spring wind, ah spring wind, You have swept me green. Sunlight, yes sunlight, You have kept me warm. The girl’s movements were bigger now. She skipped in a wide circle, her arms swaying. Her mother looked on and smiled, making no attempts to reign her in though some people were starting to stare. Rivers and mountains, You have nourished me The earth, ah mother You are holding me tight. The girl’s dance ended in a self-embrace with her arms crossing her chest. I ended the chord with a flourish. She clapped and I clapped back. I must have been smiling too. “Thank you shushu,” she said, handing me two folded yuan notes that her mother gave her. By the time I splayed open my guitar case and dropped them in, they were already on their way, the girl chattering, the mother beaming down. I had a dumb urge to call out to them, to ask the girl’s name or at least say thanks back In their wake, the tide of people rushed in to swallow me again. The alcohol must have been affecting my mind. In a city full of ashen faces that blended into one another, the happiness of this mother and daughter made them seem from another planet. Finally I tore my eyes away from the direction of where they’d gone and took out my cell phone again. The screen flashed. “One message.” It was from Keke. I opened it before I could think too much. “Take care of yourself,” it said. After the ringing in my ears faded and I could hear the footsteps around me again, I strummed the intro to “Little Grass” again. It’d never been about money. I wished her well.

I would sing all night that night. Song after song. Even after the crowds grew sparse and the kiosks broke down for the night. Even after the cops came in and told me to scram. I would make fifty-two yuans. A twenty note given by a big shot in a business suit and an ugly pompadour. Spare change from factory kids. Tomorrow morning, I would buy two train tickets. One back home to see my mother, the other, departing three weeks later, to Shanghai. All through the train ride, I would think of these two women. My mother and Keke. I was still young, and my optimism came from them. The guitar was now warm and solid in my hands. Yes, I knew it was the alcohol. But I sang.

Funi

My cousin Keke was pregnant. My mother, who’d habitually begrudged the fifity-cent surcharge for each trans-Pacific text message, shot this one over just in time to coincide with my morning alarm. It was 6 p.m. in Niuyuan, Henan, and 6 a.m. in Parksville, West Virginia. I could picture her, sitting on nettles all day from the scalding news, counting the minutes until it was my wake-up time. My dad would probably speak up then. “She’s getting a foreign degree in a West-ocean country—don’t be insatiable,” I envisioned him chiding, one plastic flip flop dangling from the tip of his foot. “She’s twenty-two already and getting more foreign by the day. It’s not like she could ever marry a foreigner,” my mother would reply. I clamped shut the phone without responding. The last time I’d seen Keke, was at a New Year’s family reunion. I was sixteen and she, fourteen. We’d been playing cards for money behind our grandparents’ house, squatting on the winter-hardened ground littered with disemboweled firecrackers. She’d been a cheeky thing, asking me about cigarettes and boys and my period. When we were caught and I was invariably blamed because of my advanced age, she’d slinked off, suddenly filial, to help the adults with the chicken plucking in the kitchen. Years later, when I’d gotten the scholarship to the third-best university in Henan, her mother told my mother that Keke had reacted to the news by breaking into tears. Her family’s home had been too far out of the district for her to qualify for entrance to the charity school that’d conveyed me tuition-free all the way through twelfth grade. Yet now, six years later, I could imagine her mother’s beaming smugness. Her daughter had a city job, was married to a city- dweller and cementing her position with motherhood. In the sport of daughter-racing between country mothers, she’d won. I didn’t reply to the message, and instead turned to my laptop, left on from last night. I’d been waiting for replies to my Craigslist ad for housing. A few weeks ago, I’d learned from Renata, another foreign student on scholarship, that our housing allowance was refundable if we lived off campus. Yesterday, after a particularly bad programming class that’d made me feel like all my years of English classes in China had been an elaborate prank, I followed Renata’s

50 example and posted an ad offering to trade cooking and cleaning for a spare bedroom in a residence near campus. It assuaged my seasickness for the night—the notion of saving money. Yet now, in the light of day, Renata’s joking warning echoed wide: ninety percent of the time, someone who responded to an ad like mine was after sex. She must have been joking, since she quickly turned serious and told me her own experience. Replies to her ad had trickled in slowly, but she was patient, ignoring the overeager or undereager ones—ones that’d expected her to do all the work communicating—and deleted responses asking her for a photo. Finally, Renata, a chain-smoking physics major from Serbia, found her perfect match in a retired, wheelchair- bound policeman. He was impressed by her brains and refused to stress his handicap by overworking her. So now all she did was vacuumed the house weekly, shopped for groceries, and kept him company. I logged in to my email inbox and picked out two ad responses. The first one contained two sentences: “I want to help you. Do you have a pic?” The second one was more reassuringly ordinary. It was from a man, “a former pilot and current doctor doing his residency” with an unused room in his house. He was busy remodeling and needs someone to help “keep things under control.” He has two dogs that especially need looking after. There was no mentioning of a wife or kids. I put the computer aside and went to the communal dorm bathroom to brush my teeth. Rebecca, the tall, blonde journalism major from the end of the hall was leaning painfully against the commode, tracing black eyeliner with her nose an inch away from the mirror. At the sight of her, I let the heavy door push me back into the hall. Stupidly, I mumbled sorry, sorry. The word felt worn and shapeless in my mouth. In two days, I would’ve been in the United States for three months and would’ve said “sorry” ten thousand times. Changing classes at the registrar’s office: sorry to the front desk secretary for announcing the course numbers digit by digit with pauses for mental translation in-between. Crossing the street against the pedestrian light: sorry to the pinched-browed lady behind her leather-covered steering wheel. Holding up the lunch line scrutinizing the bright orange soup: sorry to the basketball jersey-wearing hordes behind me, who guffaw with a collective boom at my sorrys. Of course, for the deepest pangs, no sorrys could salve. On the midterm exam for programming, I’d gotten a fifty-six. My Pakistani professor held office hours every week, but I loitered in the seventh floor of the library amongst the Chinese literature collection, the familiar characters on the book spines a lifeline from his

51 potential tsunami of questions. What is your major? What is your background? What are your plans with your career? Who are you? Rebecca pushed the door past the radius and eyed me curiously. “Do you need the sink?” she asked. “No. Yes. I just want to brush my teeth,” I said, internally flinching over the “want.” It was “need,” not “want.” “Need” for routine things, “want” for desires—which had now all distilled to their simplest: to eat, to sleep, to watch children’s TV. “Well, it’s a double sink,” Rebecca said, her tone a quizzical drawl. “Yes, oh yes,” I pantomimed a quick check inside the bathroom and pushed past her. As I bent over the sink, my mouth full of minty suds, I could see Rebecca’s forearm braced against the door’s backswing, her gaze still trained upon me. She was in a tight long skirt and a perfectly tailored blouse. She must’ve been from a big city, some place like New York City, I thought. I didn’t know what I looked like to her, with my perpetual ponytail and my knockoff J’adore Dior sweatshirts. On the door of my room, a hand-made sign from the RA declared, “You’re a star!” and followed with my name and major. When I first saw it on move-in day, I’d torn it off in panic, thinking for sure that only the foreigners got one. After realizing that everyone else’s door had the same sign, I taped it back on. Rebecca saw me. And, with a degree of tact that had since then dissipated, pretended that she hadn’t. “I like your name. Funi. It sounds like ‘funny,” but cuter,” she said. “Thank you,” I said through the foaming toothpaste. “Does it mean anything in your language?” “It means ‘panda,’” I said sarcastically before I could stop myself. It must have been the first time that I was sarcastic to anyone here. In the mirror, Rebecca’s forehead furrowed and cleared and furrowed again. “Really?” she asked. In a minute, two journalism girls pushed past her into the bathroom and she started in surprise, her skinny limbs a skittering of acute angles. So this is what an American looks like flustered, I thought, my gaze still on the mirror seconds after she vanished.

I spent the morning at the library, a six-story brick building with protruding hexagonal gables located in the center of campus. I was in the foothill of the Appalachian Mountains here. All the footpaths on campus climbed either up or down. Through the cool fog, flowers on the

52 dogwood trees blushed pink through their powdered petals. This was the landscape of Chinese fairy tales, of heavenly peach orchards and misty cliff-top monasteries. My mother said as much when I described it to her during our weekly phone calls. When I added that the picture was dotted with bleary-eyed little foreigners toting neon colored backpacks clicking away on their cell phones, she ignored it like I’d said it in English. “Study hard and don’t learn to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes,” she’d drone whenever we hit a spot of silence, hitching a bridge of good intentions over the abyss of unknown dangers. Ever since fifth grade, when I started writing compositions with Chinese characters she didn’t recognize, she’d stopped asking questions and stuck with reinforcing the basics. She monitored me, making sure that I got at least seven hours of sleep on schooldays, two dishes and one soup to eat with rice at dinner, and only did homework under bright-enough lamps. “Never squint to see better because it’ll only warp your vision and give you wrinkles, “she said, “And then what would be your fallback if this scholar path isn’t unblocked after all?” In my favorite library cubicle on the sixth floor, I forced myself to open my laptop and click into the database design program. Usually I spent at least the first hour ciphering in a spiral notebook, copying and recopying the textbook explanations, my mouth contorting into the peculiar caverns that might produce the syllables of the English language, my eyes bracing for focus, willing my brain to crack open the shell of each black word and clench down upon the meaning. On a good day, I would feel the code give way after several hours of my persistence. The separate units of nouns, prepositions, and verbs would fit into each other like edges of a puzzle, light up into meaning, and my understanding of one sentence would smear over to two, and then three. Yet on a bad day, I’d already be panicked before I start, my mind racing to calculate the allotted credit hours that I’d let lie fallow, the scholarship dollars that I’d let burn. Another problem was that I could not read from a computer. Upon the still field of a lined paper, the lines of programming protocol just seemed difficult. Transferred onto the mother-of-pearl shimmer of the pixilated screen, my entire mind clamped shut. I did not, by myself, choose to major in electric engineering. All through high school, despite my conscientious yoking, I wallowed in the easy pleasures of literature and history. Yet there was no future in non-logistic-based fields. No reward for pleasure wallowers. So when the Christian missionary couple endowed my charity school with two scholarships to go study in America after two years at a local university, the principal and teachers unanimously decided

53 that the recipients must go into a field with a smoothly paved path toward returned investment “for all of society.” Of course I was grateful. The day that Principal Xie announced me as one of the two winners was the first time in my life that my father spent money on American cigarettes and passed them out door to door. My mother for once didn’t bother putting up the mosquito net over the bed and instead stayed up until mid-morning talking excitedly to the aunts and uncles that’d gathered, bouncing from the bed to the kitchen and back again to fetch cakes and sunflower seeds and rice wine for the guests. “I thought you said that a girl as floaty-minded as her needs to be kept close to home,” my brother, married with a son in the next village, teased her when she broke the news. “She’ll be tied tight,” our mother replied, patting my shoulder with fond satisfaction. “She would have fifty thousand American dollars’ worth of millstone weighing her down to earth.” The two intervening years I spent taking intensive English classes and passing the TOEFL exam proving my English aptitude. And then came the flurry of preparations for my departure. The physical check ups for my visa had to be performed at a registered hospital two hours away by car. A Xinhua bookstore in the nearest town gifted me with ten random books on the U.S. My aunts and sisters-in-law brought by trendy-looking clothes that used to belong to their daughters that they’d tailored by hand to fit me. Rhinestone studded bellbottom jeans, a pink cropped sweater, a gold parka with a fur-trimmed hood. My dad traveled to Zhengzhou to visit the friend of an uncle who’d worked for a year in New York ‘s Chinatown to glean advice about the United States. When he returned, he had with him a knockoff iPhone, iPod, and a fake crocodile wallet. “This guy said everyone in America has these, and females especially like to show them off,” he explained. “He also said everyone drinks but not many people smoke. I said to him, ‘that’s good, because my daughter may be tempted to smoke to relax herself, but she wouldn’t go as low as drinking.’” He gave me a leaden look. “Don’t make me eat my words.” Later, my mother leaned close and whispered, “he doesn’t just mean drinking, he means sex. He’s just too embarrassed to say it.”

After a lunch of a microwaved hotdog in the library snack bar, I went out to the smoking terrace and dialed the number of the almost-doctor. When he answered, his voice sounded deep and calm.

“Hello, I am the person who wrote you about renting a room in your house,” I said, praying that he would speak slowly. “Yes,” he said after a pause. “You wanted to provide assistance in exchange for rent, if I remember correctly.” “Yes.” The twists of big words threw me a bit, but I got the gist. “Tell me a little about you. Are you a student?” “Yes,” I said, glad to be given this title of respectability. Saying yes to the previous question, I’d felt like a beggar. “Uh huh. How old are you?” “Twenty-five,” I lied. What if he didn’t trust the commitment of a twenty-two-year-old? “Okay.” He groaned as if savoring a stretch. “Why don’t you come on by and take a look at the place. Three-three-oh-seven Beechwood. It’s a brick house. Close to Premiere Video.” “Uh…” I hated addresses. In Niuyuan, none of the streets had names. If you wanted to visit someone and you didn’t know where he lived, you walked in the general direction of his home and then asked directions when you had to have specific. Usually, the neighbor would just point to a streetlamp or catty corner and tell you to stand there and call his name—he’ll hear you. Here, with all the meandering streets and hidden number, I’d spent my first weeks sorefooted and panicked. Spending sweaty half-hours circling the same block. “Oh, you don’t have a car?” He offered. “No,” I was glad to have a reasonable impediment to hold on to. “I’m at the university library right now, I don’t know if it is far away from you…” I fished. “No problem. I just got to finish up some work here. I’ll be there in an hour or so. I’ll be in a green jeep.”

The fact that he hung up without waiting for my response disturbed me a little. An hour was a long time to wait, and the vagueness meant that I had to wait the entire time. I took my backpack and went outside to sit on the last stair of the library entrance so that I would be sure not to miss him. It was a Saturday in November. The cement beneath me was icy and rigid. I dialed my mother’s number with my calling card. She picked up on the second ring. “Why are you calling now?” she asked.

It was true that we usually talked on Wednesday afternoons. I was distracting my mind from the cold now, but I couldn’t tell her about my scheme of moving out of the dorm. I could explain and explain about my panicked guilt and she wouldn’t understand, wailing instead about oversexed men and greedy fate-tempting girls. “It’s Saturday. I’m off,” I said. “You have no Saturdays until you learn English,” she said briskly. “I know English. I’ve learned English. I’ve using English very well.” “Really?” The pleasure in her voice made my chest sour with guilt. She was fifty-three years old and could read only street signs. When I tested into the charity high school, she told my aunt that I sure didn’t get my brains from her. “Really. I got one of the highest scores in class on the last test,” I lied again, pacing around to diffuse my shame. “How many tests have there been total?” “Two.” “What did you get on the first one?” “Not as high as this last one, but I’d just got here, you know.” How quickly I was sinking. I should have known her. “How come you didn’t tell me at the time that you’ve had a test?” she pressed. I was going to be swallowed up. If I cracked and told her about my failing my classes, about waking up in the middle of the night with my heart pumping wild, the entire reservoir of her worry would burst. Already, my father had said that ever since I left, she’d taken to burning incense in front of the cobwebby pewter Buddha figurine. I changed the subject to the only thing that could have diverted her. “So what is this about Keke?” I asked. I could hear her pause of surprise at my bringing it up. “What do you want to say?” she asked suspiciously. “You were the one who took special trouble to let me know.” “She’s not prettier than you, she’s not smarter than you, and yet her parents can stop worrying about her life before yours can about yours.” she said this drily. It used to be that I took comfort in her unsentimental appraisal. It’d given me a solid footing, an impartial judge on my

56 side. Yet now, it only made me feel scooped out, like a gourd, and the leftover husk tipping the scale at a mark far below satisfactory. “What do you want me to do? Drop out and fly back to Niuyuan and marry a farmer?” I regretted it immediately after it left my mouth. Of all her fears, ranked first was that I would come to look down on her. I backtracked. “Maybe my fate’s not as good as Keke’s, that’s all,” I said. “Your father and I didn’t drag you up this far for you to blame things on fate,” she said huffily. “Nobody in the whole country has been resigned to fate since the nineteen-eighties.”

My ears still ringing from my mother’s vehemence, I was not on the look out when the dusty Jeep pulled up. The man inside leaned out to check me out. “Hey, did you call about the room?” he called out like he was speaking into a high wind. “Yes.” I stood up. He had orange colored hair and skin the color of fish bellies. He was handsome in the open-faced, wide-striding way that so many American men are. “Hop on in.” He beckoned, his forearm a loose curling wave. He did not say much during the ride. His hairy hand’s steady turning of the steering wheel was as reassuring to me as polite conversation. At an intersection onto a cul-de-sac, he pointed at the stop sign. “You have to stop every time you see one of these, even if there’s no one around,” he said, glancing at me authoritatively. I nodded. “I don’t yet know how to drive.” “Well, I’ll teach you, if you’re good.” His smile was curved deep. “After that I can drive for you,” I offered. “Oh no.” He frowned in exaggerated consternation and then chuckled. “But you’re a nice girl.” We arrived at a two-story brick house obscured by trees. When he thudded up the porch steps, two big brown dogs pressed their muzzles against the screen door and barked so ferociously that I envisioned steam coming out of their mouths. He pushed them back by their muzzles, clearing a path for me into the sitting room, shut me inside it, and excused himself. I inhaled deeply. The air had a mellow stink. It was probably the dogs. This was the second time I’d been inside an American house. The first time was a thank-you visit to the home of the Christian husband and wife who’d funded my scholarship. In that house, all the furniture

57 matched and the walls were studded with framed poems and stuffed dolls wearing gingham dressed. I surveyed the walls here: a handful of commemorative plates bearing the seals of different states, some framed certificates, and a pair of deer antlers. The floor was scarred hardwood. A long, saggy couch lined one wall and a desktop computer perched on the coffee table. He’s probably been single for a long time, I thought. “Had to let the boys out,” he said as he came back in. He was tall and not very fat. When he closed the door behind him, I felt a twinge of nervousness. I remembered the night before I flew to the States. In a dank hotel room, after my father had fallen asleep, my mother scooted over to me and gave me her last bit of practical warning: “remember this one thing— never be alone with a strange man in a room with the door closed. If he has already come in and shut the door, then make sure you sit closer to the door than he does. Many unpleasant things can be prevented if you don’t give them opportunities to happen in the first place.” I moved to the corner of the sofa next to the door and sat down. He sat down in the swivel chair in front of the computer. “So.” He stretched with a groan. “Tell me a little bit about yourself.” He was the master of this domain. I relaxed a bit. “I am majoring in electrical engineering. I don’t have much luggage. I can study how to cook American food and take care of your dogs,” I said. He smiled a twisty little smile. “Hey,” he slashed a rigid hand in the air between us. “You don’t have to be my servant. I want to help you as much as I want you to help me.” “Oh, well thank you very much,” I said awkwardly. This wasn’t new to me, after all. The missionary couple prepared me for American largess. Yet in my mind, I fretted a little. When someone wanted nothing from you in return, the only appropriate response was gushing gratitude, and in a way, that was hard work too. He leaned toward me and placed a hand on mine, the heat of it startled me. I remembered my mother’s observation about Westerners: they grew up eating meat—we grew up eating vegetables. They were naturally more volatile than us in both body and emotions. I held very still. “Be comfortable,” he said. “This is your home too now.”

We came to my bedroom last on the tour of the house. It was upstairs, farthest away from the stairway with blue bird wallpapers and sloping ceilings like a garret. Inside were a scarred dresser, a coy-legged writing desk, and a single bed with white, spindled frames. Below the open window on the wooden floor was a pile of dried brown leaves blown in from outside. It was a girl’s room, aged and intimate, a room that I could make warm and unforeign. In that moment I made my decision to stay. “The leaves look very pretty there,” I said. He was leaning against the doorframe, surveying me surveying the room. “Yes, I open the window every morning to let in fresh air. Close it every evening to keep warm,” he said. I nodded. “My name is Dave,” he said. “Dr. Dave.” He seemed pleased by this. “And you are…” He tilted his chin downward and peered up at me from under heavy eyelids. “Funi,” I said, proud of the way I caught his drift. “Funi,” he said with a chuckle, like he was sharing a joke with himself. “Funi.”

Rebecca was curious when Dr. Dave helped me move out of my dorm room. First she opened her door a crack to peer out at the two of us and then closed it, deliberated, and finally came out and headed to the bathroom. When she walked by Dave, I saw her eyes riveted to the belly bulge under his gray tee shirt. When I picked up my toothbrush from the bathroom, she pulled me by the elbow to the farthest wall. “Who is that?” she whispered urgently. “I will live at his house now,” I said, rather touched that she cared. “Oh my god, he’s not your boyfriend, is he?” “No, he’s too old for me,” I said. She got even more agitated at this, her eyes bulging out of their sockets. “Exactly. So what are you doing living at his house?” “I help him do work. He asks for no rent.” “What kind of work?”

“Keep house, walk his dog.” She sighed in agitation. “Do you really think that’s all he wants?” I shrugged. But inwardly my thoughts swerved wildly. What did it mean that an American girl was saying this about American men? I’d taken Renata’s jokes as Eastern European paranoia, a symptom of being from a part of the world with a pessimistic future. “He is a doctor,” I protested. “Why would a doctor hire an eighteen-year-old girl to live at his house? He has plenty of money to hire a maid if he wants help.” I considered this, trying to keep still in the blast of worry. “Look, maybe in your country this is normal…” she said uncertainly. I felt a spike of something like shame. An image of how I must appear to her flashed in my eyes: dark and skinny, easily duped and dazed by wads of cash. “I am twenty-two. And my country is not as poor as you think,” I said before pushing past her out the door.

When I called my mother that night from my new bedroom, it was mostly to hear a familiar voice. I’d been in West Virginia for four months, and I still didn’t have a friend that I could call. “Ma, why do you think those missionaries gave us the scholarships?” She was immediately suspicious. “Why? Did they contact you? Do they want you to do something for them?” “Why do you say that?” “Because you’re calling now even though we talked only a couple of days ago,” she said, and I was relieved. But then she continued, “and it’s just reasonable.” “How is it reasonable?” She scoffed. “This is wasting time. Why don’t you go practice your English a bit?” “I’m trying to understand their culture here,” I said. She sighed. “Stop acting like you just dropped out of the sky. People think the same everywhere. They give something, they expect something back. The missionaries gave you the scholarships because they knew we could never afford it ourselves and would be extra appreciative.”

“So, appreciation is all they want?” “Are you sure they didn’t call you?” I could envision her furrowed brow. “They didn’t call me. I’m just wondering if they did it because they felt sorry for me,” I mumbled. “Of course they felt sorry for you. You can’t have it both ways.” She sounded exasperated. “You can’t accept help and then say you never needed help in the first place.”

“I think I will get better grades now,” I said to Renata after class the next day. She was smoking a Monarch cigarette, her orange-painted fingers hooked inside a silver two-fingered ring. I’d seen such rings on the American girls in the dorms before I moved out. Why was Renata so good at noticing such things? How did she squirm into the tide so quickly? She looked me up and down as if for me to declare such a thing, the change must be physical. I giggled, embarrassed. “I took your advice. I am living at a doctor’s house now. So I can stop worrying about wasting money,” I said. She nodded wisely. “Doctors have money. And they’re busy all the time,” she said. “They have rules about life. They are good people. Everyone believes they are good people.” Saying it out loud reassured myself too. I still felt awkward around Dr. Dave. The way he stood in the doorway to my room and watched me refold my clothes before putting them into the dresser, it was like I was a goldfish, and the room was my bowl. Renata tapped her cigarette against the back of the stone bench. The ashes fell to the ground. Nearby, a redheaded American girl glanced at us with a mixture of annoyance and uncertainty. “How much he pays you?” Renata asked, impervious to the look. I was confused, and was going to answer truthfully until I saw the sly squint of her green eyes. “I am not telling you, ‘have sex with him,’” she said loudly enough for me to check the position of the redhead. “I am telling you, ‘let him think you maybe will.’” She drew back to survey the effect of her advice.

I tried not to give her the satisfaction. “I don’t need to do that. I don’t need his money. I just want to live in his house for free,” I said. “Really? He wouldn’t have let you in unless he liked you.” She pursed her lips tight to muffle a smirk. I could feel my face warming. “Don’t talk about this to people,” I whispered before faking a look at my watch and heading to my next class.

When I returned to Dr. Dave’s house, I knocked at the front door just to be polite. He bounded downstairs with stampeding footsteps. “Geez, I thought it was my ex-wife.” He opened the door. “You don’t need to knock. It’s your house too, now,” he said, which startled me. “C’mere,” he beckoned with what I thought was a disco dance move, and led me to the kitchen. “7Up? Coke? Apple juice?” he called out, drumming his fingers against the door of the open refrigerator. “7Up,” I said, and he tossed it to me over his hunched shoulders without turning to face me. I ducked at the can, not knowing what it was, and it hit the floor. “Sorry, sorry,” I repeated the familiar chant and picked it up with a hot face. His hands were on his hips. I thought I saw in his face something like the look of the redheaded girl earlier: disgust and something tender at the same time. He walked over and cupped my elbow. “Take it easy. No one is going to hurt you,” he said. I nodded. I didn’t understand why Americans had to exaggerate everything. When I’d told the missionary couple that my mother had never gone to school, the woman had clasped my hands and lowered her voice as if I’d told her that she’d died. “That’s horrible, horrible,” she’d said, her voice quivering with emphasis. In the hallways during the rush between classes, the boys, dressed as always in their sport jerseys, slapped each other on the back and called out, “Awesome, dude,” “Are you serious? That’s amazing.” The first few times I heard them, I thought there must have been school-wide good news. Was there going to be an extra holiday? An exam delayed? But when I prodded Renata to go ask, she came back with an eye-roll so deep

62 that her entire eyes were white. “One boy asked another if it still rains. Other boy said no,” she reported faithfully. He gestured for me to sit down at the dining table and I took out a pen and notebook from my schoolbag. “What I can do today?” I asked. It took a second for him to understand what I meant. “Well, you can look through the fridge there, make something for dinner if you want, “he said, his arm slack when he pointed. I put down my pen and made a move toward the refrigerator. He caught me by the elbow again. “Hold on. I haven’t been shopping this week. To tell you the truth, I’m an eat-out and take-out kind of guy. And I’d have to show you all the pots and pans. Aww.” He swatted as if at a fly. “Tell you what, why don’t I show you my project.” I stood and followed him at the repeat of the disco-dance beckon. We went out the back door, where he extended his arm across my collarbones and blocked me. “Watch out for the sinkhole,” he said with a grin. And I saw that the wooden deck dropped off a meter or so out. Scaffolding like a corral framed the area of the planned deck. “You are very….” I sought to tweeze out a word that would mean nenggan, capable and enterprising. “Very smart,” I finished, frustrating myself. He smiled quizzically. “Thank you,” he said, then steered me by the shoulder down a folding aluminum ladder to the grass. I tried to keep interested as he gestured to the stubby wooden skeleton and talked about base, support, and grade of wood. He reminded me of my father, gesturing toward our several mus of land in the winter and talking with grand gesticulations about irrigation ditches and fertilizers. Talk like that used to burn me with worry. How did he know what to do to wring out more from the soil? Why hadn’t I picked up the knowledge along the way? How could the prospect of doing all of it make him happy when all it made me was tired? How could I take over the farming someday when it felt that way? It was only later, after my teachers at school started talking about me testing into higher and higher school levels that I’d felt easier about this talk. Then, I felt securely small watching the sweeping strokes of his hands. Dr. Dave lifted a dirty cloth belt lined with tool-filled pockets off the grass. After he buckled it around his hips, his walk became springier, his knees bent like frog legs with each step

63 and his toes pointed outward. A kind of calm came over me. All he expected was that I listened, I thought, and I could give him that. He taught me the names of the tools. Drill, pliers, tape measure—and hammer I already knew. After he’d shimmied inward so that his entire torso was under the wooden surface, I could relax except for when he asked for a tool. I fed each one slowly through an opening in the planks until I felt his grip on it. He said, “thank you,” at first, and I said, “you’re welcome,” feeling happy that I was of use. Soon, we didn’t need words anymore. I knew perfectly where to feed the tools down to him without jabbing him, and when he fed them back up through the planks, he would hold tight to a tool once in a while and snicker while I pulled at it, letting go only after he heard me giggle. When he called out a tool, his voice was gruff, as if speaking more elaborately would break his concentration. Yet when he gave a loud grunt and cursed, I knew it would disappoint him if I didn’t react but tax him to answer if I’d asked if he was okay, so I just said “ow” like I was feeling his pains too, as if by letting the sound echo in my body, I’d diffused it. We went on like this for about an hour, falling into an effortless rhythm of cooperation. The afternoon sun warmed the wood. A kind of peace settled over me. My cell phone rang suddenly in my pocket. Startled, Dr. Dave muttered, “damn it,” and started to shimmy himself out. I looked at the phone. Mother. I looked around for a place to go, but I didn’t feel free enough to go back inside the house. I answered quickly. “Why are you calling now?” I asked. “What’s the matter? It’s not your sleeping time.” She sounded like she’d always sounded. Yet here, and now, I was annoyed by her tone, how she’d assumed that sleep was the only thing that I needed privacy for. She didn’t wait for my answer. “Listen, you have the internet there, don’t you?” “Yes.” “Keke’s mom heard from her today. She has the internet too.” She paused for reaction. In front of me on the grass, Dr. Dave’s neck looked painfully raised as he peered over his nose bridge to watch me. I wanted to turn my back, but knew that that would be rude. “What do you want to say to me?” I asked, impatient. This had a reaction immediately. “Aiya. Did you take the wrong medicine today? Nobody owes you anything for you to talk like that, understand?”

I was caught between her temper and Dr. Dave’s gaze. I stopped myself from saying anything. “So, Keke said she is on the internet now. I don’t mean just going online, mind you. Her picture and position at her job are on a specific place on the internet. If you want to see it, you can find it at PingAn Technical College web address.” “Okay. So I know now.” “When you find it, I want you to remember what she looks like—whether she looks fatter now that she’s pregnant—whether she looks fashionable now—and then report to me.” It was all the old routine. Every detail about people we knew was fodder for gossip. “Okay, I know now,” I said. “Is that all?” She paused. I thought she would try to put me in my place again when she said, “Funi- ah.” She rarely called me by my name. “Hmm?” I prodded. “Ever heard of JiaYuan?” “No.” It sounded like the name of a karaoke bar, or restaurant. “It’s an internet place.” “Okay?” “A place where young people find companions.” For a second, I thought about prostitutes. Then the recognition came to me. I’d read about it in a magazine on the flight over. It was an internet dating site, the biggest one in China. In the corner of my eye, I saw Dr. Dave shake his head to himself. “I don’t want this,” I said, my voice low. “Just to see what kinds of men you’d catch.” “No.” I wasn’t sure why, but I was getting angry. “Why? Are you planning to stay over there?” she mocked. Yet there was also uncertainty in her voice. I saw my chance to get to her. “If you keep pushing me to get married, why shouldn’t I? If I married an American man, I’d get a green card and be allowed to stay forever.” In her silence, what I said hung in the air like an overripe cloud. I knew that she knew that many girls did this. Not girls close enough to know, but close enough to have heard about. Some of them breezily sent back expensive skin cream and photos of coffee-haired children as if

65 good fortune really were that easy, and others came back ashen-faced and poison-eyed, wordlessly daring anyone to utter a word about them having been abroad in the first place. For a moment I trembled in the knowledge that I really could do it—take my gamble, aim for easy luck and fortune. In the next second, I was contrite. I had never even touched hands with a boy. The thought of anything in that direction filled me with inadequacy. “Are you saying what’s been in your heart all along?” she hissed. “Think what you will.” My heartbeat accelerated. “Ai. I always knew you were weak to something like this,” she said softly after a pause. “Why?” I sounded plaintive. I couldn’t help it. “As soon as I heard your reaction to Keke’s news, I knew you would try to take a shortcut.” “I don’t care about Keke,” I protested. She paid me no mind. “You were always smarter than her, but she always did more than you. Now that she’s climbing higher, you don’t have the fuel in you to overtake her and so you take a shortcut.” She sounded cold and resigned. I would have preferred anger. I felt a crush of tears in my eyes and turned away from Dr. Dave’s line of view. “Ma…” I began, but knew that she hardened rather than softened at signs of weakness. I held the phone away from my face and looked at the screen. The character “mother” blinked at me for one second, two seconds, before the words “call disconnected” replaced it.

At first, I thought I was going to blow it with Dr. Dave. When I put the phone away, he walked past me, tool belt jingling, with an annoyed sidelong glance. I stood rooted. This was his house. There was nowhere to go. He sat down with his legs splayed on the half-built deck steps and wiped his face with a patterned cloth. “How can anyone understand gibberish like that?” he said. I didn’t know “gibberish.” But I could feel my cheeks burn up. I went into the house, up the stairs with the animal-smelling carpet and stood at the door to my bedroom, surveying my things. If I called Renata, she wouldn’t be hard-faced enough not to come. She had a car, an American hatchback from the 1980s. I could probably sleep in it until I figured out my next step. I turned at the sound of Dr. Dave’s footsteps. He stopped at the landing, considering me. “Look, did something upset you?” he finally said.

His voice was softer than before and his words clearer. I thought of what I’d told Renata only that morning. If I called her for help, she would laugh at me for weeks afterwards. “My mother wants me to come home,” I said. “To China?” I nodded. He said “China,” like he was on a teeter-totter. To him, China was like Zimbabwe, or Uruguay, or any of the other exotic countries that had to be designated with more than two characters in Chinese, I realized. “Well, you can’t let your mother run your life,” he said. “Yes,” I agreed. It was simple the way he looked at it. “Yes?” he asked, confused. “No, I mean no.” I laughed. I always made this mistake in English. Yes, I agree with what you say. No, I agree with your disagreement. He laughed with me. The sound of his chuckles burbling through his broad masculine larynx comforted me. “Tell you what. What do you think of this. Why don’t you and me go blow off some steam somewhere?” he asked, slapping the banister with resolve. “Go where? “Anywhere you want. We just get in my truck and take off. We can go to this little place by the lake for some beers.” I shook my head. “I don’t know how to drink beer,” I said. He was amused. “I’ll teach ya.”

We went to The Oasis, a campus bar that I walked past everyday but never entered. I suggested it in the truck. Maybe I would see some familiar faces there. As soon as we entered, I saw Rebecca through the smoky air. She was sitting at the bar reading a newspaper. I looked at Dr. Dave in his faded jeans and shoe oil-black leather jacket. Oh no, I thought. But it was too late to leave without annoying him. Dr. Dave clapped the back of a man at the bar. They made surprised noises at each other and then Dr. Dave beckoned me forward.

“This is a new renter at my place,” he said, slipping onto the stool beside the man and motioning for me to take the one beside him. “Yeah?” the man looked me over and then grinned at Dr. Dave. “What’s your name, ma’am?” he ask, leaning low over the bar to get a clear view of me. “My name is Funi, thank you.” I felt myself blush from the attention. “Funi. Hey! That’s my uncle’s name,” he said. Dr. Dave shoved him playfully. “What brings you to the great state of West Virginia, Funi?” the man asked. “I am studying at the university.” “Funi here’s going to be a computer scientist,” Dr. Dave said, giving my forearm a squeeze. “Is that right?” the man said, taking out a cigarette from his pack of Marlboros and offering one to Dr. Dave. The bartender came over then, and Dr. Dave ordered two beers. I looked across the bar. Rebecca shook her newspaper to block her face, but I’d caught her looking. The bottles of beer were bigger than the ones I usually saw. A wedge of lemon was stuck in the opening and Dr. Dave showed me how to suck on the lemon, and then take a drink. Nervous with the two of them watching me, I didn’t concentrate on the bitter taste of the beer. They seemed pleased that I took a second sip without prompting. “Alright Funi!” The man leaned over Dr. Dave’s back and shook my shoulder. Dr. Dave shifted. A few heads turned toward us. “She’s a tough gal. She helped me build the deck all afternoon,” Dr. Dave said. “Is that right?” the man said again with the up-and-down look and the sideways look at Dr. Dave. “What’s your name?” I asked. “Ooh, hear that? She wants to know my name.” He prodded Dr. Dave, his elbow poking gingerly with a rhythmic, two-step dance move. “My name’s Peter. Like Peter Cottontail. You heard of Peter Cottontail, Funi?” I gave him a small smile and slipped off the stool to go to the bathroom. It was the dirtiest American bathroom I’d seen. The wooden door felt sticky with humidity and the floor tiles were cracked, their crevices caked with dirt. It smelled of urine.

I looked in the clouded mirror above the sink. At home, no one has said much about whether I was ugly or pretty. When I was young, the adults remarked on how unpleasantly quiet I was, what a waste it was that such an unsmiling child had long Buddha earlobes that signaled great fortune in life. By the time we were in middle school and our faces evaluated jokingly on how marriageable they were, I was already deemed smart enough to make it out into the city by my own merit. Marriage standards were different there, they laughed, and stopped short of any specifics lest they betrayed their ignorance. And so now when I looked at myself I had no guidelines. All I saw was that my hair could use a combing, that the collar of my blouse should have been refolded, and that I looked nothing like the faces I saw around me. I refolded my collar and turned away before more unpleasant thoughts could occur to me. When I went back to the bar, Rebecca was in my seat. She was in her tight trumpet- legged jeans and sitting with her legs crossed. Dr. Dave and Peter were looking straight ahead and chuckling uneasily into their beers. I hesitated before closing the last few steps. Dr. Dave nodded to acknowledge me. Peter looked at me with wariness, saying nothing. Finally, Rebecca spoke. “Hey girl, I hope you don’t mind me joining you,” she said, smiling. “Yes. No. I don’t mind” “I didn’t know you were twenty-one, even,” she said, gesturing toward my bottle of beer. “Yes, I am twenty-two,” I said, “much older than you.” I wanted her to go away. Dr. Dave turned to look at me. I remembered my lie to him and cringed. “Wow, twenty-two.” Rebecca ignored my tone, sounding genuinely surprised. No one said anything for a while. I got onto the stool next to Rebecca. I thought about sitting beside Peter, but sensed that that would have made him uncomfortable with Rebecca watching. She swiveled her chair toward me but I didn’t reciprocate. I wanted my beer to hold, to sip from. “Listen,” she said, her hesitation diluting my annoyance a little. “I wanted to apologize for yesterday. I didn’t mean to insult your country. I actually have been wanting to go to China for a while,” she said.

“Why?” The idea of anyone I met here going to China startled me. It was strange: in China, all I’d wanted was to remove myself to somewhere better, but here, I felt like the entirety of China belonged to me. “Why? Because it’s the new land of opportunity, if you believe what all the newspapers say.” She laughed, running her hand through her hair and shaking it. “Opportunity for what?” I knew of course that the business school types wanted to buy and sell and make money, but she wanted to be a reporter, she would actually have to move to China long term in order to report from there. “For change. Real change, you know. The people are so hopeful and hardworking while the government is so corrupt and repressive. It’s a place where you can really make a difference.” “I mean,” she continued after seeing my incomprehension, “look how those rich Chinese kids in Stanley House are. Everyone knows that they’re all but buying their degrees. And now that that mayor’s daughter has been expelled, the whole lot of them are packing up and going back to China. It’s like they know they can’t hack it here without some rich powerful douche behind them willing to push people around.” “Rich Chinese kids in Stanley?” I had never heard of this. Occasionally I see other Asian faces on campus, but by their haircuts and clothes, I’d always thought that they were Japanese or Korean. Rebecca pulled out her newspaper from her bag and shook it open to the correct page. I smoothened it. “Student Busted for Drug Use,” read the headline. Below it were two photos, one a long shot of a row of cars with artful, undulating bodies parked in a student parking lot, the other the ID photo of an unsmiling girl with dyed blonde hair. I glanced at the article, but knew I would not be able to read English with her watching me. “And look at you. Always studying in your room. Always polite. You’re the last person I wanted to offend,” she said. I looked at her. She was leaning toward me, the panels of hair on either sides of her face draped forward, almost touching my arm. “I can’t read English,” I said. “I can’t study. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. Can’t do anything.” She drew back in confusion, and then placed a comforting hand on my shoulder.

“You just got here. Give it time,” she said. The kindness in her voice made my throat constrict. “All I can do is spend money. I don’t want to do that, so I now live with Dr. Dave. But I still can’t read, can’t eat, can’t sleep—“ I stopped myself, the speed and lilt of my words alarming me. Often I didn’t feel the shape and weight of what I’m saying when I spoke English. The words felt encased in packages, their definitions labeled on the boxes. Behind me, I could hear the conversation between Dr. Dave and Peter trail off. “Hey.” Dr. Dave’s hand was on my shoulder where Rebecca had taken hers off. “Why don’t you polish this off—“ he slid over my beer—“and then we can call it a day.” Rebecca glared at him. He ignored her, keeping his hand on my shoulder while I took a big gulp. “Don’t drink too much if you don’t want to,” Rebecca said when I winced at the taste. And then she, too, put a hand on my back. Dr. Dave refused to take his off. Hunched over the bar, I felt the heat of their hands. Just inches apart. I slipped off my stool and mumbled about the bathroom. Peter called after me, “hurry up. Doctor Dave has patients waiting,” before slapping his friend on the back with a chortle. When I came out after splashing water on my face, Dr. Dave was waiting by the door with my jacket. “You wanna go? Let’s go,” he said, trying to sound casual. I heard high heeled footsteps approaching and saw his face twitch. It was Rebecca. “Here’s my phone number. Call me anytime if you ever need anything,” she said, tucking a slip of paper into my pocket and not looking at Dr. Dave. I nodded. She started to say something else, changed her mind, and went back to her seat to gather her bag. Dr. Dave held my jacket open and I slipped my arms in. His hand in the middle of my back steered me through the crowd and then out the door.

“You know, that friend of yours is a bit kooky,” Dr. Dave said as he started the engine of his truck. “Mm.” I didn’t know what “kooky” meant, but I was only half listening. “She came over, sat herself down, and started in on this weird story about your name meaning ‘panda,’—how she looked it up on the internet and some panda really was named Funi.”

“Do you know Stanley House?” I asked. I’d never drunk beer before so it must have been the half-a-bottle frothing in my blood, but suddenly, I had to see it. If he didn’t take me, I would have walked over myself. “That dorm that she was going on about? What about it?” “I want to go there. Will you take me there?” His gaze flitted between me and the road. “What for?” He didn’t sound annoyed, only puzzled. “You don’t know any of those kids, do you?” “No. I just want to see it.” I wasn’t sure myself why. Only that with something of China so within reach, to not go would pull and pull at me until I couldn’t do anything else. He swerved into the turn lane and made toward campus at the next stop light. When I thanked him, he patted my knee.

Stanley Hall was the very last one in a column of brick dorm buildings that lined a downward-sloping street. By the time we reached it, the enveloping droning of insects and the thickening of trees made me feel like I was on the edge of a forest. This was one of the magical things about West Virginia—nature was everywhere. I got out of the truck and surveyed the building from across the road. It looked identical to the one I had lived in: four stories, surrounded by tall oaks that reach the third floor, navy shutters lining the windows. In the descending dark, I scanned the dozen or so lit, open-curtained windows for signs of life. Through a second-floor window, I spotted a stereo and a row of perfume bottles on a table. Through another, I could see the corner of a poster. I was just about to crane over for a better look when Dr. Dave grabbed my shoulder. “Look.” He pointed straight ahead. “Look at that.” I followed his finger but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. “The dumpster,” he prodded, and I saw that it was true. A huge brown dumpster, four times the size of the ones usually kept in the basements of dorm buildings, stood just outside the rear double doors. “You think—“ he began, when one of the double doors swooshed open. Two Asian girls shuffled out carrying a large coffee table. Both of them had their hair up in messy buns and their sleeves rolled up. I breathed in deep at the familiar cadence of their chatter. When they counted

72 to three in amused unison before lobbing the table over the dumpster’s edge, I glanced at Dr. Dave beside me. “Jesus,” he said softly. “They’re tossing out a bonanza.” “They said, “one, two, three,’” I said. “I understand it.” “Did they say they’re bringing out the plasma TV next?” He chuckled. The silhouette of one of the girls halted while facing the two of us. She said something to her friend, who turned to look at us. I couldn’t make out what they said as they went back inside. “Go ask them if they need help,” Dr. Dave said with a jut of his chin. I slouched back toward the truck. “No. Too late. The door is locked when they go in.” “Well, do it when they come back down, then.” “No.” My heart sped up at the prospect. In their dark postures I’d seen at best suspicion and at worst contempt. Who the hell are they? Why are they watching us? “Christ, you were the one who wanted to come find your people.” “I just want to see.” I could hear my voice trail into a whine, a plead. But I couldn’t explain what else I’d wanted. I didn’t know myself. “Let’s go then,” I said, giving up on persuading him to stay. “Now hold on a minute.” He pressed down on my shoulder as if to anchor me to the ground. “What if we waited until they’re done, and then go check out what we can salvage.” “Check out for what?” My confusion irritated him. “I don’t know. You have a whole room to furnish. Maybe you can find something you can use. A chest of drawers, a stereo, hell, even some school books.” I was aghast. The dumpster was in the loading zone, under bright lights. Anyone could look straight into it from the windows above. “Just go up, introduce yourself. Help them out. I bet they’ll be glad to have you take some stuff off their hands.” “You go,” I retorted. He snorted. “You heard them. I don’t know how to speak that.” The door swung open again. The same two girls came out carrying heavy, clinking garbage bags. They were silent this time, darting wary looks across the street at the two of us. The first girl planted her feet apart, bent her back leg, and swung her two bags into the dumpster

73 in two wide arcs. The second girl didn’t immediately follow suit, but stood facing us with squared shoulders. Finally, with her face still bent in our direction, she pulled out a handful of things from the bag, held them high tauntingly over the dumpster’s edge, and let them fall like the wind had blown them out of her hand. “Son of a bitch,” Dr. Dave whispered acidly. Beside him, I couldn’t move. The girl pulled out another handful. Something small and boxlike fell and cracked on the ground. She picked it up, looked at it, and hurled it into the dumpster so hard that the metal reverberated. It had looked like a picture frame. She didn’t reenact her previous routine after that, just dropped the bag over the edge. Giving us a last look, they swiped their cards to open the door and disappeared inside. I could feel Dr. Dave getting restless beside me. He rotated one foot deliberately, crunching pebbles under his hiking boot. “Okay, let’s go,” I said, something about the clinking bags and familiar language tugged at me. I wanted to see what was in them. He didn’t move. I looked at him and he nodded, head down, and opened the door to his truck. It was as though the girl’s wordless dare had cowed him. “I need a cigarette,” he said to me before shutting the door. “You go see what we have first.” I relaxed a little at that. Whatever unpleasantness may ensue, it would sink into oblivion more quickly if he didn’t witness it. I made my way across the street. The ledge of the dumpster felt cool to my touch as I peered over the edge on my tiptoes. Through the thatch of black plastic bags, I saw lampshades, sofa cushions, a red high-heeled pump, a scatter of neon colored highlighters. I jumped up hard, holding onto the rusted metal edge and straightening my arm upon the peak of my leap. When I landed inside, I looked up at the walls of windows. No one was looking. I mentally noted a silver DVD player and a stack of DVDs in a laundry basket. A speaker as big as my torso was unfortunately ruined with a smear of a banana peel. From a bulging bag at my feet, I pulled out a cream cable-knit sweater. The material felt as delicate as snow under my fingers. I held it up, front, back, and saw no blemishes. The smell of perfume wafted from it. How could someone throw this out when it took up so little space? An image of myself wearing it ignited a feeling like hunger in me. I tucked it under one arm and dug deeper into the bag.

By the time I heard the rumble of the truck, I clutched a half-filled bag of clothes, makeup, and Chinese magazines. I ran to the edge, my ankles wobbling from stepping on light bulbs and soda cans. Dr. Dave’s approaching swagger looked like he was stepping on springs again. “Boo!” he said, poking his face close to mine, breaking into a grin when he spotted my bag. “Well, well, what have we got here?” “Be quieter,” I whispered, pointing up toward the windows. “Fuck ‘em,” he said, hoisting himself up and bracing a calf inside, the sole of his boot clanging against the metal side. “Little brats come over here and sell drugs. What are they going to do?” I kept quiet. I thought I saw a curtain move in a second story window. Dr. Dave didn’t look up, but strode with purpose toward the DVD player. His movements were surprisingly nimble. In a few minutes, he’d made two trips out of the dumpster to his truck, using only the tips of his fingers to clamp onto the dumpster ridge as he swung his jean-clad legs over and then landed on both feet with his arms full. He took all the electronics he found, ignoring stuffed animals, vases, pillows. I tore through the clothes-filled bags with small movements, hoping that he’d get all that he wanted soon. “Give me a hand with this,” he finally said, holding up one side of a stereo cabinet. The thing was huge—as big as a washer with its glass door cracked in a spiderweb pattern. “But it’s broken,” I said. “I got a buddy who’ll refit another pane of glass. It’ll look brand new,” he said, not letting go. “You have the player already. You don’t need this,” I said, thinking there was no way we would be able to get it over the edge without attracting attention. “C’mon, it’ll sell for much higher if it’s got this display box,” he said, his leg shaking with impatience. I paused. “Who do you sell it to?” “I don’t know. You put an ad up on Craigslist,” he mumbled, looking away from me toward the truck. “You do things like this? I thought you are a doctor.” I mused on how no one here kept to his station. Professors wore flip-flops and doctors sold stereos salvaged from the dumpster.

“Resident! Haven’t you ever heard of residency?” he shouted. I looked up instinctively. Two dark figures huddled at the second story window. They were backlit. I couldn’t see their faces. Dr. Dave followed my gaze, and I thought I saw one of them start. “What the hell are you looking at?” Dr. Dave yelled. One of the figures left right away, her arm tugging at the other. But the other remained. “Aiya, jian polan hai bu gei kan, shi ma?” came the clear, tart voice. You pick rags but we’re forbidden to look, right? “Speak English! This isn’t China anymore! You’ll be back in China real soon. Buh- bye!” Dr. Dave said, draping his arm around my shoulders. The figure left. He kicked at the cabinet. “Piece of junk,” he said, and then beckoned for us to flip out of the container for the last time. In the truck, after revving the engine, he held up his palm to me. “High five!” he said. I slapped my hand against his and tried to ride his euphoria. But I wanted to vanish, to melt into the night. We peeled out with the wheels squeaking.

In Dr. Dave’s den, he shut out the whining dogs and we spread out our loot on the sofa and carpet. He’d opened us bottles of beer to celebrate. I gulped it down, eager for the warm sleepiness that’d come over me earlier. Dr. Dave plugged each electrical gadget into a power strip on the floor and clapped loudly every time something worked, chimed, lit up. I sat on the floor, wiping down the surfaces with cleaner sprayed on paper towels. Twice, surveying the layout, he’d said, “not bad, not bad,” and bobbed his head like a chicken. Finally, he sat down on the carpet beside me, pulling his legs into a lotus position. “Let’s see what you got,” he said, grinning toward my bag. I didn’t want to show him. If I was going to wear any of it, I couldn’t let anyone know of its origins. But he was smiling with such camaraderie. To refuse would’ve turned the night’s mood, and it was getting too late to be turned back around. I pulled out a plastic palette of lip colors, a packet of Sharpie markers, a braided belt, a pair of dark jeans. The magazines seemed to be at least a year old. The pumps were a size too

76 small for me. The grin never left his face as he looked at the lineup. “Nice,” he said, holding up the lip palette and inspecting the colors. “That’d look nice on you.” I pulled out the cream sweater. Even in this bright light from an unshaded lamp on the floor, it looked pristine. I ran my palm over it, brought it close to smell the perfume, and then pressed a cheek against it. It smelled like an orange grove and felt like a cloud. It was from a different world. A hand landed on my back. “You’re very tactile,” he said, his thumb rubbing slow circles along my spine. I flexed my shoulder blades. He stopped moving, but his hand remained. “This is what she broke,” I said, reaching for a gold woven picture frame from the bottom of the bag. His hand slipped off during my lean and I was relieved. He frowned. “What did you take that for?” I looked at the photo inside through the cracked glass. Four Chinese girls in short-skirted costumes. Nurse, policewoman, and the other two in black rabbit ears. They had their arms around each other and smiles so big that you saw all eight of their front teeth. “I want to see what they look like,” I said. He scooted next to me and brought the frame close to his face. “They’re alright. But they don’t hold a candle to you.” I could smell his smell. It smelled like the air of this house: wood shavings and something old and still, like a room with outdated furniture and no wind. I kept my eyes focused on the picture frame. From the corner of my eyes, I could see his chest, his unbuttoned shirt, his chest hair peeking out, light brown mixed with gray, impossibly long and curly. When he placed a flat hand on my stomach, I jumped. He made a move toward me. I crawled backwards, crablike, until my shoe slipped on the plastic bag. Through my short- breathed daze, I managed to catch my beer bottle before it fell to the floor. I pretended that it spilled anyway, tearing off a square of paper towel and wiping at my lap. I heard his tone before his words, it was calm, face-saving. “You know, you’re very tactile, you like to touch, but you don’t like to be touched,” he said. I smiled stupidly. “Yes. It’s my custom, but I maybe can change,” I said. “C’mere,” he said gently, an arm out toward me. The peaceable look on his face told me that this was his gesture of trust building. I crawled over, knowing that if I’d wanted to stay for

77 even one more night, I had to. His arm went around me, strong and solid. I went limp and tried to shut down my mind. The day had been tiring. The seconds passed while I kept my eyes shut. I could hear him take sips from his beer. I thought of tomorrow, how even if went to bed now, I would be bleary minded in class, and my usual late afternoon panic when facing the textbook would rock me harder than normal, how once my mother sets her mind on something, she would not give up unless it blew up, how even if I finished my degree and went back to China and got a good job, I could never ever afford to throw out the cream sweater I lifted. I opened my eyes. Beside me, Dr. Dave swiveled his head to look at me. “Can I use the internet?” I asked.

On Keke’s bio page on the PingAn Technical School website, the “chat with this instructor” button flashed green. Her photo was full-length, showing a slim, smiling young woman in an outfit that reminded me of a flight attendant’s. Her list of courses included “The Art of Physical Self-Expression,” “Colorology,” and “Social Psychology.” “Though Instructor Fan will be out for maternity leave next semester, she will return in the spring as a new mother,” concluded her bio. She was twenty and set for life. I almost didn’t want to know anymore. I clicked on the “chat” button and waited. When Dr. Dave told me the wireless password earlier, he’d been curt, like he thought I was taking things for granted. When I went upstairs, I realized that I didn’t know whether his bedroom was upstairs or downstairs. When I closed the door to my bedroom, I realized that there was no lock on it. A chat window popped up. “Hello!” it said. I hesitated, thought about not revealing myself, but decided against it. I had no more energy for deception. At least not tonight. “Hello Keke, this is your cousin Funi,” I typed. The answer came quickly. “Cousin Funi! Are you in America?” “Yes, it’s 11:00 at night here.” “How is it over there? Very difficult?” I was taken aback. According to my mother, most people congratulated her when they heard about my studying in the U.S. “She must be having a great time,” they’d said. “It is difficult at times,” I typed, “but overall I’m very grateful to have this opportunity.” “I wish I had your brains,” she wrote.

I was flattered. I hadn’t expected this from her. “I wish I had your strength,” I wrote. There was a pause. I turned off the lamp and opened the window. There was the smell of burnt leaves on the air that breezed in. The only light I see came from the laptop screen. “So it has been difficult,” the screen read. At that, my heart gave an aching, futile little leap. In the cool dark, it was like I was the only person on this side of the earth and she the only person on the other. I let my fingers hover above the keys for one second, two, to taste the possibility of telling her everything, of letting it all go. Yet we were both adults now. I looked at her photo again and thought of our eventual meeting at some family reunion. To offer full sprawl to one another meant never standing straight in the other’s presence again. “Have you experienced difficulty?” I asked. “Yes,” she answered readily. “Sometimes I think I’ll never get to a steady shore again.” I remembered hearing about her travails—the going off to the Southern coast factory towns alone as a teenager, the irrational love-relationship with a no-future boy. “Yes, but you have found your peace now, haven’t you? I am about to be an aunt?” “Yes, we just found out that it will be a girl. Mother is disappointed but I’m optimistic. Girls in the city these days have futures just as bright as boys’.” “I see.” I pictured a miniature Keke toddling around. By the time I got to meet her, she’d probably be in school already. “But this means I’ll have to work harder. No one at my school thinks I can take more than two classes after the baby is born and I’ve already spent so much on doctor’s bills. My husband’s company may be downsizing because of the recession. And my mother-in-law is fighting with her work unit for insurance coverage. We may have to hire a lawyer. I don’t know where we are going to get the money.” “I’m sorry,” I wrote. All this was a surprise. “Ai. Mei banfa,” she wrote. There are no solutions. “Everyone’s sharpening their heads like pencils and squirming upwards. But the passage gets narrower the higher up we are.” “That’s the truth.” “And you? It must be horribly lonely sometimes.” I felt the rushing tide feeling again, and sat on my hands for the seconds it took for the temptation to pass.

“I’d thought that the hardest part was the language barrier. But tonight some Chinese kids called me a trash-picker, and that was worse,” I finally allowed, adding a smiley at the end. “Everybody is struggling,” she wrote, and I somehow knew that she would not tell her mother, and so didn’t ask her to. “Mei banfa.” No solutions. “Yidian ye meiyou.” Not even a little bit. “There’s no edge to the sea of suffering.” There was a lightness in the air now. “Amitbha Buddha.” I breathed in deeply, smiling. When we were little we’d often egged each other on like this. “Our parents are being unfair.” “That’s because being unfair is what makes them happy.” “They think too much happiness in children spoils them.” “They don’t think a New Year’s holiday is complete unless they tamped down our glee with a little bit of disappointment.” “It’s getting late here,” I typed. “I better go soon.” We exchanged email addresses. From the vantage of this moment, I thought I’d write her often. “Funi, before you go, did you know that your name is the same name as the panda that China is sending off to Australia?” “What?” I recalled what Dr. Dave said that Rebecca said. Was she talking of the same thing? “Yes, two panda ambassadors are now in an Australian zoo. The female one is named Funi. Same exact characters as yours.” “Funny.” Fu Ni. Lucky Little Girl. I’d always been embarrassed by my name. Such typical peasant backwardness—courting luck. Yet having heard it repeated today, hearing it now felt magical. A special talisman given by the universe to me. “Take care,” she typed, signing off. I followed suit, moving mechanically to shut off the computer, pack my backpack for tomorrow, undress for bed. Drawing my blanket up to my chin, I couldn’t help glancing at the doorknob without a lock again. But the worry dissipated after a second. Just one more night, I promised myself. Rebecca’s number was still in my pocket. It was just life, I thought as my mind sank into the soft dark. Just night, and then day, and then night.

High Test

Siqi wanted to be called Angela now. She did not come straight back to China after she’d been expelled by that middle-of-nowhere American university, but had gone to Toronto to visit her aunt. There, she dawdled for six months, smoking cigarettes on the quays of the lake they have there, making friends with short, dark boys from Fujian who worked at her aunt’s grocery store. Sometimes she called me in the middle of the night, paying no mind to the time difference. I’d taken to putting my cell phone on vibrate under my pillow so that my parents wouldn’t catch wind. “I like ‘Angela,’ but it’s a bit flowery. It sounds a bit like some newly-in-the-city peasant chick trying too hard,” she mused. “At least it’s not ‘Angelina,’” I said, wanting to ask her about the expulsion, the Fujian boys, the shopping, and the skyline in Toronto. But she only called me when she was in her high- fizzy moods, when she would bat away distractions like flies. She’s been this way since we were children, and neighbors, and our parents colleagues at the same Academy of Science compounds where they fiddled with test tubes and sneaked out early to shop for dinner and fibbed on reports to the government to ensure next year’s research grant. Now that her dad’s the secretary general of the Wuchang prefecture, my parents couldn’t outright forbid me to talk to her. But they exchanged looks whenever her name was mentioned. “If you don’t do well on the Gaokao, you’ll end up like her,” they’d say. But she didn’t seem sad. She had plenty of money and snorted at the mention of the pan-national college qualification exam, held over a three-day period for all high school seniors and studied-for since the first day of first grade. “I should be so lucky,” I’d say under my breath, and mom would glare and look pitiably at dad, and dad would look above-it-all and intellectual and Confucian-gentleman and walk head-down to the balcony to prune his succulents. When Siqi-Angela’s dad forced his sister to cut off the money, she finally gave in and bought a ticket back to Wuhan. She was in town a week before showing up in my high school’s courtyard during the break of our evening study session. When I saw her emerge from the shadows of the buzzing sycamore trees, I jumped.

“How did you get in?” I asked stupidly. Now that we were less than two months from the Gaokao, the gate guard had been given emphatic instructions to bar anyone not wearing the blue-and-white school uniform. In her metallic miniskirt and ankle boots, she looked ten years older—a young executive ready for a night out bar-hopping in the swankiest districts of Shanghai. She smiled her sly, sharing-a-secret smile. “How do you think I got in?” she asked, and turned to blow a kiss in the direction of Old Li, the guard, who looked down in embarrassment. Of course he’d let her in. She was the daughter of the prefect head, and just a year ago she’d walked past him every day in her uniform, her jacket’s zipper pulled down to her belly button to show off her Armani blouses. “I brought you something from New York,” she said, pressing a small box into my hands. It was an oblong bottle with clean edges filled with a green liquid. “Chanel Number 19,” she announced, taking the bottle from me and spraying it on my captured wrist. It smelled the way I’d imagined the insides of a leaf would smell—sharp and utterly without sweetness “Chanel Number 5 is more famous, but it’s too big and effusive for you. This one suits you better. It reminds me of a slim horsewoman,” she said, tucking the flaps back into the box and then inserting the box in the inside pocket of my anorak. “New York? I thought you were in West-what-was-it-mountainous-state.” She rolled her eyes. “Mountains and rusty bridges and fat people,” she said. “I was so bored that I went to New York every other week.” Now she was showing off. “What are you going to do now?” I changed the subject. “Kill some time at an internet bar, maybe. I’m not going home until the elders fall asleep,” she said, trilling her fingers at me in goodbye and walking away before I’d had a chance to ask more.

Back in the classroom, Teacher Ouyang curled his index finger at me. I went up to him amidst a sea of bent heads. He frowned at the curious, unbent one. “What are you looking at? A month and a half to go to the biggest test of your lives and you still make time for gossip collecting,” he scolded. The heads bent down again. Of course they knew what he wanted to talk to me about. Angela had never flown under the radar. “Do your parents know that Dou Siqi is back?” he asked.

“Yes, no. They know she’s back in the country, but they don’t know she’d planned to come here tonight.” There was no point in lying. He’d known my parents since he became our class’ head teacher in our freshman year. Copious New Year’s gifts from them have gotten me comfortably high on his priority list. And of course, he would tell them everything during the weekly parent-teacher conference. He adjusted his heavy black glasses, looking uncomfortable. “You’re eighteen years old, and I’m not your father. But do you really want to go back to that bad era in fifth grade again?” he asked in the lowest of whispers. I looked down at the floor, my face felt like it was crawling with hornets. “No,” I mumbled. “And with your physics and math scores consistently in the top three of the class, it would be a shame to let anything trip you up now.” His voice modulated to a comforting caress. I nodded. I didn’t dislike Teacher Ouyang. He never shamed the boys in the last row about their low test scores like other head teachers. And when he’d opened our gift box last New Year’s and discovered a Tag Heuer watch, he’d snapped it shut like he’d seen a viper and tried to give it back. At my desk, hiding my face behind the towers of workbooks, I mentally polished the perfectly withering sentence to say to my parents when I got home. I suspected mom—she of the laboriously cooked seven-course meals and hundred thousand friends. She couldn’t keep her mouth shut. She’d probably run into Teacher Ouyang at the supermarket, invited him to some fancy tea pavilion, and bludgeoned him with the entire history of my life. “Liling is a good child. Smart and nimble with no sign of straying from the correct path, but she’s got a recalcitrant streak,” she’d begin in her confidential voice after some minutes of small talk. And then, after Teacher Ouyang prodded gently at her pregnant pause, she’d tell the entire story: how in fifth grade, the three of us—Angela and Yuanyuan and I—hatched a plan to go down to the docks and buy knick knacks from the whole-selling vendors and then sell them at a profit to our classmates. It was merely for fun at first, for the tingle of tension when a pack of playing cards passed from hand to hand when the teacher was turned toward the blackboard, and then the folded five-yuan note passed back. But soon we graduated to selling our wares in parks and on street corners, wearing our school uniforms to attract customers and then feeding them a story about a school fundraiser when they asked questions. By the time we’d saved enough money for

83 a pleasure boat trip to Yellow Crane Tower, all of our grades had slipped so decidedly that my parents were talking of hiring a tutor. On the day of our trip, Yuanyuan’s mom had called Angela’s dad to verify whether she should pick up Yuanyuan after the zoo trip or whether he would bring her straight home. When Angela’s dad confusedly replied that Angela was at the zoo with my family, the conspiracy was breached. I still remember the scene when I unlocked the front door. Both mom and dad were sitting with the arms crossed, still as statues in the dark room. “How could you have done something like this when you are only eleven years old? What kind of criminal acts are you going to commit when you’re old enough to do real damage?” Dad had asked, his voice low and trembling. I was panicked by the horror on their faces and shut myself in my room, doubling over in sobs. None of us were allowed to play with the others for a while. On the middle school entrance exam, Yuanyuan hadn’t scored high enough to get into the key school that Angela and I entered. By eighth grade, Angela’s dad’s promotion had made bygones bygones, and neither of our families had mentioned the incident in each other’s company again. When it became clear two years ago that Angela’s grades did not augur well for the Gaokao, her parents started pulling strings about her attending college overseas. By then she’d taken to smoking and charging five hundred-yuan meals at hotpot restaurants for the entire class. They pulled her out a year early to minimize the damages and picked a middle-of-nowhere American college to subdue her. But they had not anticipated the Chinese student population at such an out-of-the-way place. And when she’d called them, waxing tearful and crazed about the loneliness and competition, all they could do was send even more money. It was a blow when news reached them that she was expelled. Her mom had clutched at her chest when she met my mom for tea. When my mom came home, her face had been grave with sympathy. “She wouldn’t have told me if it was something she could bear to keep inside—you know how she’s always comparing with us about everything,” my mom said. “But something like this they can never keep under wraps. Also, if that girl really has no future except to eat their rice for the rest of her life, then facing up to reality now may save her mother more grief in the long run.” There was a grim satisfaction in her voice, but a second later, she focused on me and put on her stern face. “Eight more months to go until the Gaokao,” she said, her index finger wagging. “Eight more months and all the doubts will be settled about your future too.”

But I didn’t confront my parents about tattling to Teacher Ouyang that night. Number one, I realized that to tell them would mean to tell them about Angela’s appearance. Number two, my mom went to bed uncharacteristically early that night, leaving the customary bowl of lotus root soup in the still-warm steamer in the kitchen rather than carrying it to me in my room. I hid my perfume under my bed with my old sheet music and then joined my dad on the balcony. He wasn’t smoking or taking care of his plants by the electric lamp, but sitting in the rattan chair and staring off into space, his hands a latticed hammock behind his head. When I let the screen door slam, he started. “You’re back,” he said. “Mmm.” I had not been alone with my dad much in the last few years. It was only when I caught myself in the circumstance that I was reminded of how little we had to talk about. “Gaokao’s getting closer,” he mumbled, gazing into the horizon, where the gentle spine of the Luojia Mountains curved barely discernible against a black sky. “Why’s mom asleep so early?” I asked. He sighed. “You’re still very young,” he said. “There are many things that you still don’t understand.” That irritated me. Yes, I knew she was tired, probably as much from worrying about me as from her job. Yet the pressure of all of their worry smothered down on me with nowhere to divert to. I wondered if they ever thought about that. “I don’t want to hear a lecture right now. I’ve just done three hours of chemistry practice problems and I’ve got another practice test tomorrow,” I said. “Yes, yes, get some rest,” he said, relieved. “Just take care of yourself. Eat well, rest well, study hard. Everything else we’ll take care of for you.” It was a refrain that I’d known for as long as I could remember. I barely heard it as I went to my room with the lukewarm bowl of lotus root soup.

I was half asleep, the headphones conveying the English grammar CD digging into my ears with the familiar ache, when I felt the dipping of my mattress. Mom sat in her flowered robe, her back to me, the empty bowl and spoon gripped in her hand. I turned to face the wall. “What is it?” I asked.

I could feel her shifting, and then her hand was in my hair, nipping tufts at their root with her nails and tracing them gently to the tip. My spine relaxed. In my ear, the British-accented voice droned on. If I had arrived at the station on time, then I would have caught the bus. If I will arrive at the station on time, I will catch the bus…. English was one of my weakest subjects. Memorizing vocabulary words was no problem, yet when fitted into sentences, the slippery suckers shape-shifted this way and that with no conjugation rules absolute enough to mould them into sense. “I don’t know why you can’t abide by exceptions to rules in the subject of English,” Teacher Ouyang had said in a conference session, exasperated. “Aren’t they comparable to the law of the Doppler Effect in physics? Or the indivisibility of prime numbers in math?” But I couldn’t explain it to him, who’d never tried to learn English. The Doppler Effect and prime numbers you could understand by swimming counter to the currents of logic until you’ve suddenly aligned with a hidden stream of intuition. Yet English was something I couldn’t touch, let along swim in. Mom’s psychologist friend told her that I should listen to it in a half-awake state so that it would bleed into my unconscious. I’d been doing so for close to a year now. “How was today?” Mom asked. I stopped the CD. “Fine. What are you doing back up? Are you sick?” She ignored my question. “I talked to Auntie Liu today. Siqi is back in Wuhan.” She said this casually. I turned around to look at her. “Really?” She nodded only once, snapping her head down without bobbing it up again. “She’s even harder to handle than before, she said. They tried reasoning with her, pleading, and then finally threatening her. Finally she agreed to take an English class at an adult studies place where nobody knows her.” She sighed. “Not easy for anybody. You spend your life making money and gathering power, but if your child is no good, what is the use?” I tried to appraise her objectively. At forty-something, she was at the top of her division at the Institute of Geological Physics. Most of the projects she worked on she proposed and headed. And whenever she came back from a conference, her chief complaint was always that nobody could make any decisions without consulting her. In her shapeless robe, I could see that her ankles were bloated and her heels dry. Her hair, having grown out of a perm years ago after it went out of fashion, is now a wavy mass around her shoulders and threaded with gray. Yet her figure was still thin and her skin almost translucent. Back in college, even after she was already

86 with dad, she was considered the school flower—the school beauty. The one time we’d gone to a reunion banquet with their former classmates, they all scanned me from head to toe and then congratulated me on not frittering away her good genes. As if sensing my gaze, she finally turned toward me. I squinted for focus without my contacts. Her eyes were swollen and drooping at the corners. Did I just never notice, or was this what she looked like every night, I wondered. “Stop making that face or you’ll get wrinkles.” She snapped back into her usual tone. “Everything I just said—not your concern,” she stood up. “Just take care of your own concerns. That is more than enough.”

The next day started off teetering. First, I woke up to the sound of dishes clattering. For a moment I was reminded of my childhood, where we’d lived in a government-issued apartment with cement floors and an industrial-sized cement sink. Once every few weekends, I’d wake up with my parents barking good-natured orders at each other in the kitchen, all the ceramic wash basins spread on the floor filled with squirming fish, and the sink filled to the brim with icky- crawly lobsters. It’d meant a whole day filled with steam and chaotic excitement. Now, if we wanted seafood, we bought it already cooked in Styrofoam boxes from the supermarket. By the time I washed my face and made it to the kitchen, Dad was out smoking on the balcony. Mom sat at the table, still in her robe from last night, and stared into her bowl of porridge without touching it. “Here, don’t burn your hand,” she overtook me heading to the rice cooker and ladled a bowl for me. I sat at the table beside her. The porridge was much too dry and the lychees not sweet enough, but I said nothing. Driving me to school, Dad said nothing the whole way and sped off with the gears screeching after I’d closed the door. When Teacher Ouyang stopped me in the hall, I was in a sullen mood. “Did your mom or your dad bring you today?” “Dad,” I answered, wanting but not daring to walk around him the way brook water rounded a rock. “Is your mom or dad going to pick you up?” “I’ll probably walk.” “Not safe for a girl your age to be walking after dark.”

“Then I’ll take the bus. Why do you want to know all this?” He stiffened his spine at my tone, started to say something, and sniffed the air in front of him. “Are you wearing perfume?” I rounded him for real, more to get out of sniffing range than as a gesture of effrontery. Perfume, along with makeup, nail polish, and high heels, were forbidden. He didn’t pursue the matter, but all throughout his morning encouragement speech, he shot me looks humming with warning. I skipped lunch. The practice test that morning was no more difficult than the ones we’d taken bi-weekly for seven months, but I couldn’t concentrate and knew that I would have to face Teacher Ouyang one-on-one soon. In the deserted courtyard, I paced the mildewed, cement tiles, nudging pebbles from square to square with my toe, contemplating a solitary game of hopscotch. When I saw Old Li check over both his shoulders before beckoning me over, I should have been alarmed. Yet I was cheered when I saw his bent figure in the booth. He was the one person that wouldn’t say anything about the Gaokao. “What did that-one, that-one tell you that I did last night?” he asked without preamble, his dialect neither upright Mandarin nor the slick, mocking Wuhanese, but rather a ginger- tongued staccato of some loess plateau region to the west. “Which one?” I drawled, smiling. Of course I knew he meant Angela, but I’d wanted to warm him up. He was piqued rather than soothed by this. “There’s nothing to smile about! The big leader’s daughter in her that-kind, that-kind of clothes! Next time you see her, tell her she cannot come here anymore! I cannot do this kind of thing. She shouldn’t even ask!” He’d gripped my forearm painfully and pulled me closer so that his voice would not attract attention. I felt my face twitch at the sight of his face at close range, his deeply wrinkled skin was like a walnut shell, his yellow-green teeth like broken bits dredged up from a well. The tiny spurt of spittle that landed on my uniform electrified me. I snatched my arm back so hard that I staggered. “Do what? What are you doing now?” I yelled. He frantically looked around and held up both palms to placate me. This infuriated me further.

“You think you can bully me just because I’m not the big leader’s daughter? Let me tell you something, my dad has been friends with her dad since I was born. If you really care about not getting in trouble, then keep your nose down and your hands on the gate lever where they belong!” I was trembling with exhilaration. But his face, curdling into a wretched desperation, suddenly sent guilt gushing up in me and I turned around and ran all the way to the bathroom.

When I turned at the tap on my shoulder during evening study break, the sight of Angela’s face made my mind go boom. I looked wildly at the entrance booth, Old Li’s silhouette looked shrunken and remote. I looked back at Angela. She was in form-fitting jeans and a leather jacket today. Her hair was crimped and her lips coral red. She saw my unease, and smoothened her tendril of a grin. “You smell nice,” she said dryly. I managed a smile. “Did you get in here okay?” Her forehead crinkled in a split-second of confusion. But then she dismissed it as so much small talk and her slow grin came back. “The elders think I’m in English class, but I withdrew from the roster as soon as they left.” She sat down beside me on the bench like she intended to stay for a while. I could see the kids around us tighten inward in their clusters and dart quick looks at us over their shoulders. It was funny, though Angela had never lacked friends from the school when she was here a year ago, the flash of her reappearance seemed to have stunned everyone into hesitation. She didn’t seem to notice this, busying herself digging through her shoulder bag and pulling out an Apple iPhone. “Look at this place. It’s over on Taibei Road in Hankou. Can you imagine if I’d actually stayed?” She clicked through the screens until a photo of a dingy building paved with blue bathroom tiles appeared. A plain shingle declaring “Everyday Conversation English Class” dangled from the first floor ceiling. Below the row of protruding air conditioners, dark stains lengthened like shadows. “Hmm,” I wrinkled my nose in disgust, rotating the phone to see the famous realignment function. “Why don’t your parents just get a private tutor for you?” “They’re afraid I’d be kidnapped and held for ransom,” she said, taking the phone and fiddling away.

“Are you serious?” She scoffed. “Or that he’ll steal their secret documents and blackmail them. Or that he’ll see the imported wine collection and take to Weibo to tweet about corruption in government officials. There are no moorings in the sea of possibilities.” I laughed. “And so now you stroll the streets of world-famous Wuhan and shoot pictures instead?” She lowered her head toward me and I responded in kind. In our huddle, I smelled her different, bolder perfume. “I’ve rented a room at the Novotel Hotel close to Zhongshan Park,” she announced. “Why?” She shrugged. “There’s internet in my room. And I can do what I want there without worrying about the elders plotting to drag me out for another interrogation. I still go home to sleep at night to keep them happy.” I was confused. “But…do they give you the money?” Her conspiratory glee faltered at this. “I’ve got money,” she said without further explanation. “Novotel looks really nice,” I said, trying to push through the bit of unpleasantness. “Yes,” she said offhandedly, “if you want someone to talk to about your dad, you can send me a text and then come find me there.” I started to nod at this, searching the lit window of the classroom for Teacher Ouyang’s dark shape, when I realized what she’d said. “My dad?” I asked. “Yes, your mom told my mom and my mom told me,” she said quietly. “Told you what?” A kind of echoing clarity came over my hearing. Yet I seemed to have grasped her answer by watching the movements of her mouth. “That your dad is leaving with his little—with his woman,” she said. It felt as though she’d slapped me. My cheeks stung and my ears rang. I looked overhead at the sky with its pinprick of stars. It was the only sight infinite enough to slow the drum of horse hooves on my heart. “Little what? Little three” I asked, still eyeing upward. It was a newfangled word meaning “third party”—crude enough that if I’d said it in front of either parent, I would have

90 gotten a death stare. I laughed. The thought was absurd. “That’s Xu Wenjing’s dad. Everyone knows about it,” I said. She clenched her phone, looking uncomfortable. Nevertheless, she insisted, “no, it’s your dad.” “My dad is not interested in that kind of thing. All he does is read and work in his garden.” I realized she would never let the subject rest at this, and stood up in a hurry. She remained sitting, her head down. Finally she looked up. “You know, if there’s anything I learned overseas, it’s that nothing is reliable except yourself,” she said bitterly. “The sooner we all get used to this concept, the sooner life can really begin.”

Twice on my walk home, I stumbled by a sycamore tree to retch. The spicy string bean and tofu dish from lunch burbled up my esophagus and then breached my lungs, oozing from cell to cell until my entire body was marinated in the stink. When my mom opened the door at my fumbling, her expression was one that I could imagine mirrored my own. “Lingling. Why are you home so early? You’ve got a fever!” She spread her arms wide and low, ready to catch any fall. “Dou Siqi said that dad has a little three,” I said, carefully lowering myself to the floor. Behind her, my dad approached without hearing our conversation. Mom turned around sharply like an animal sensing a predator. “She’s heard about your ugly affair,” she hissed at him, “she’s heard of your little three.” “Where did you hear a word like that?” he asked me calmly, crouching down beside me and placing his hand on my back. “Is it true or not?” My mathematical mind was calculating urgently. He didn’t flare with shock at what Mom said, which meant that it could be true, but then again, he was calm by nature. He took offense at my language, which could only happen if he were innocent—unless he was stalling for time, and he often stalled for time. “You’re still so young,” he said. I wanted to fling his arm off, but couldn’t muster the strength. Behind him, Mom stalked toward me with a mug and two pink pills.

“How could Siqi have done something like this? Doesn’t she know that you have to take the Gaokao in a month?” she said. “Ai, to grumble about that is too late now,” Dad said. “Now we have to talk to her so that she understands.” Mom sniggered bitterly. “That’s something for you to accomplish then.” “You told that woman,” Dad said with resignation. “I knew you would.” “So I did, so what? You can do it but no one can speak of it, is that it?” I started to cry then. Something loosened in me and I couldn’t hear their voices anymore. Once, in third grade, we’d all had to line up under the scalding midday sun on the soccer field to hear the Principal’s new school year speech. By the fifteen minute mark, I’d felt the shrivel in my stomach, the encroaching blindness in my eyes from the dehydration, but all around me the others stood firm, so I did nothing. The moment that I fell, I felt nothing. When I came to and saw the circlet of faces above me, I thought it was magical how consciousness could be plucked from me so lightly. One moment I was standing, the next it was as if I had died. For a while afterwards I sought out stories about communist revolutionary martyrs, daydreaming that I, too, could stare down death with a righteous sneer. It was so easy. I couldn’t understand what everyone was afraid of. Just close your eyes and the world disappeared.

I woke in my bed still in my school uniform. The clock on my nightstand flashed 2:34 a.m. The apartment was quiet. I allowed myself several seconds, savoring the leadenness of my limbs, the mold of my weight against the mattress, before the memory of the day came back and I knew what I had to do. I got up and peeled back the curtains. By the light of the moon, I opened the smoothest-pulling drawer, tugged out two handfuls of clothes, and stuffed them into my school bag. No one was in the living room, though the door to the study, usually ajar, was shut. The night noises when I got out to the streets sounded haunted. The swoosh of cars sliced through the misty air with an echo. The wind in the leaves, drowned out by the commotion during the day, now murmured low and sentient. I started walking. It was like a locomotive had been fired up in me and I could direct my legs but couldn’t feel them. The bleary light from the streetlamps guided me on for li after li, all the way to the edge of the river. There was no ferry at this hour, so I walked crossed the bridge under the interminable parade of glaring klieg lights. The figures of several thin, unclean-looking men loomed along the way, the shiftiness in their

92 glances convinced me that each turned to do a full appraisal of me the second that I passed. By the time I’d reached the Novotel, my face felt numb from the cold and the skin over my Achilles tendons was rubbed raw. It was hours yet until Angela would arrive. I loitered at a phone kiosk, counting the minutes until the noodle stalls opened. The street cleaners in white caps stared at me openly while they swept the sidewalks with long, practiced strokes. Finally, just to look purposeful, I took out my phone. “I’m waiting in front of your hotel. You’ll see me when you come here today. Hurry,” my message said. I didn’t get an answer, but I hadn’t expected to. Several minutes later, a girl about my age shuffled through the hotel’s revolving door. She wore a yellow corduroy jacket, a pair of pink velveteen pants, and worn bedroom slippers. I was just thinking how out of place she looked in a business hotel when I saw that she was headed straight toward me. “Liling,” she said, beaming. It was Yuanyuan.

By the time that Angela showed up, all that remained of our morning feast of scallion pancakes, fried dough, tea eggs, and soy milk were crumpled cardboard containers in an overstuffed trash can. I watched from the couch as Chris, Yuanyuan’s American boyfriend, helped Angela with her duffle bags. “Hey girl, you moving in?” he asked Angela in English, the muscles in his monkey-hairy forearm bulging as he set the bags on the couch. “Yes. I am running away from home,” she chirped. “Right on, give me a five.” He extended his hand and she slapped it. “So you didn’t tell your parents at all?” Instead of answering, Angela pointed at me. “Lily didn’t tell her parents,” she announced. Yuanyuan glanced at me. “You got an English name now?” she asked in Chinese, her Wuhan accent syrupy and lilting. “I thought of it just now. It’s very close to ‘Liling,’ isn’t it?” Angela said. “Yuanyuan, your name is the only one that’s hard to translate. Why don’t you ask Chris to name you?”

Yuanyuan grinned coquettishly over her shoulder at Chris and then went over to sit on his lap. “Hey,” he said softly, like she was a cat or a baby or something else with inscrutable reasons for choosing his lap to sit on. I wondered how they communicated with one another. Yuanyuan couldn’t have spoken much English. The last time I knew of her, she was a middling student in a middle school for mostly children of out-of-towners. She’d always been skinny, her stick-like limbs fitting niftily inside our clutches when we’d pulled her up the trunks of trees when we were little. Even now, she remained fashion-model slim, her thin-lidded eyes under the even fringe of bangs giving her a kewpie doll look. On her ponytail, she wore the same double- beaded hair ornament that she wore five years ago. It was like she’d only grown taller, not older. “Your name sounds nothing like your English name,” I said to Angela over the happy couple’s heads. I wanted to get her alone. All through breakfast, I’d been too shy to ask Yuanyuan what she was doing here. “Hey, hey, English please,” said Chris, mock bowing with his hands clasped together. “She’s not good in English. You should teach her,” said Angela, taking out a bottle with a red-and-gold label from her bag. Chris’s eyes fell upon it and he whistled. “Chris’s teaching English here in China,” Angela said to me in English. “Wo shi Jian lao shi,” he said in clunky Chinese. I am Teacher Jian. He took the bottle from Angela and bounced it slightly in his palm. “Is this the genuine article?” “Yes, my father only buy real Maotai,” Angela said, going over to the kitchenette and fetching back four stout teacups. After filling each one to the rim, she held my eye as she lifted her cup. “To freedom,” she said, before tossing the fiery liquid down her skyward throat.

Yuanyuan and Chris moved their things out of the bedroom to the sitting room, setting up the pull-out bed and pinning up a sheet between two floor lamps for privacy. In the bedroom, brushing food crumbs off the bed, Angela laughed at my heap of clothes. “No underwear, no tee shirts, just three sweaters and a change of pants,” she tallied. “Even Yuanyuan and Chris are better packers, and they could go home and fetch more stuff anytime.” I waited until she looked at me. “How long did your mom say my dad’s had this woman?” I asked.

She kept on with her cleaning, snapping the sheet up to air out the wrinkles. “I heard more than a year.” The Maotai and lack of sleep had dulled my reaction. All I felt was a bleak disgust. I had expected it. “Who is she?” “His colleague. Someone divorced with a child.” This surprised me. From browsing all the “society news” headlines on Baidu.com, I’d expect it to be someone younger, maybe a girl from the countryside. “And you said he was leaving?” I tugged at the sheet from my side of the bed, pulling it smooth and anchoring it under the weight of the mattress. She hesitated. “Something about waiting until after your Gaokao…” She stopped. “But I’m not sure whether that was something my mom added or something your dad said,” she finished quickly. I lay down on the smoothened sheets, staring at the pristine white ceiling. “They are probably worried about me,” I said. She rounded the corners to my side. I thought she was going to lie next to me but she only sat down. “Where’s your phone?” she said. “I know what to do.”

After she sent off the text message, Angela tucked my phone away and fended off my questions by asking Chris’s help moving the dining table. Yuanyuan brought out a boom box from the corner of the room, plugged it in, and squatted down on the carpeted floor. She braced her spread palms upon two carefully chosen spots and then, with a kick, raised herself into a handstand against the wall. Both Angela and Chris watched me, and Chris winked, smug at my surprise. Angela pressed a button on the boom box and a rhythmic track began. Yuanyuan sprung back onto her feet and began a hair-swinging, hip swiveling dance routine. Chris whooped and Angela jounced her shoulders to the beat. I felt my cheeks redden. I could only catch clumps of words in the English lyrics. Touch me there, baby…keep your body close to mine…this side of paradise. It seems that Yuanyuan had memorized the song. She mouthed the words exaggeratedly, the stretch and pucker of her mouth absurd on her childlike face. But then she closed her eyes and her movements became trance-like. It was like her joints locked into gear. Each jerk and twist and swing eased into the next movement as if directed spontaneously by the music. I watched the flexing of sinews in her calves, her forearms, the way that they

95 tensed up under her skin like piano wires. When she rotated her torso on the floor and scissored her legs in a circle, her tee shirt lifted and I could see the muscles on her stomach—smooth, gently arched contours that reminded me of magazine photos of the desert. When she finished, she giggled into her hands at our applause. “Am I good?” she asked me. “Very good,” I said. “Where did you learn it?” “I watched people on TV at first, and then I showed my classmates, and they made me dance on stage at a dance club,” she said happily. “Then I joined a class at the exercise club and that’s where I met Chris.” I scanned Chris. He had the classic foreigner features of a high nose and sunken eye sockets. The pale eyes that peered out from underneath the furry yellow brows were like a lion’s. It would scare me if I awoke to it in the dark, I thought. I looked back at Yuanyuan and thought back to her lip-synching. Of course they slept together. “Yuanyuan is going to be a dancer soon,” Angela said in English. “I tell her she doesn’t even need the Gaokao, but she still want to take it.” “The Gaokao,” Chris said with a sniff. “Gao-kao, gao-kao, gao-kao.” Yuanyuan wrinkled her nose at him. “You are drunk,” she said in English. He grinned at her, slipping a hand up her back under her shirt and the leaned back to balance his chair on its back legs. “Nah, I can hold my Maotai,” he said. “I’ve been to many many many banquets with many many Chinese men.” “You are taking Gaokao?” I said to Yuanyuan, embarrassed that I was giving in to English. “Yes,” she said. And then, in Chinese, “My mom and dad said I had to at least try. If don’t get into any place good, then I can go with Chris. If I do, then I can dance while going to college.” “Go with Chris where?” “Whoa whoa, I heard my name.” Chris dropped the front legs of the chair. “What’s up girls?” “Yuanyuan is explaining to Lily that she will go with you to the U.S,” Angela said, impatient.

“Ah, yes,” Chris said, placing his elbows on his knees and leaning toward me. “I know some people in L.A., you see—singers, dancers, choreographers. But back to the Gaokao, before I came to China, I thought that Chinese people were smart. But now, all I can say is that they’re maybe book smart—or maybe the grassroots people are smart—but the system is really, really stupid,” he enunciated his words, his middle finger stubbing his knees for emphasis. “I agree,” Angela said. “You see—I don’t want to offend you, you seem like a very smart girl—but I teach smart students just like you day in and day out, and they are completely burned out. You can’t have a real conversation with them. They never challenge you on anything you have to say. All they want is to practice English with you. There’s nothing behind their eyes. No passion, no originality, no opinions about the world. Every single thought in their heads is about passing the Gaokao.” “We are not as lucky as you in your country,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “There is several million students but very few colleges. China is not as rich as the U.S.” He slapped his knee with glee and pointed at me. “You see? Right there. Every time I say this to my students, this is what they say. It’s always some version of the same thing.” I could feel my jaw clenching. Frustrated that I couldn’t find the perfect words to say what I meant, I looked to Angela for help. She sat frowning slightly at Chris, but said nothing. “It’s not about how rich a country is,” Chris continued. “America could be destitute and the people still wouldn’t be as intense as you are about one single test. It’s the mentality. What would a seventeen-year-old kid do with genius-level calculus and quantum physics and a perfectly memorized periodic table? What would they do with it if they can’t be cre-a-tive? Creativity is the key. Einstein invented the light bulb because he had a creative mind, not because he memorized the periodic table.” “Aidisen,” I muttered. Angela shifted, making the coils in the sofa groan. “What?” Chris said. “Aidisen discover electricity,” I said. He was stumped for a second, and then smirked in recognition. “Yes, Ai-di-sen discover electricity. I stand corrected.” He chuckled in amusement and then turned subdued.

“Seriously though, I feel for the kids. Last June, I was headed downtown when the Gaokao hordes were moving in to the test sites. The traffic police blocked off the intersections and let all the cars with a Gaokao permit go first. I was stuck in traffic for an hour. And all the parents who wait outside the buildings—standing around for eight hours just to greet their kids when they come out—if I were a Chinese kid, I don’t think I could handle it. No wonder the suicide rate is the highest in June every year.” I nodded. It was true that many of my classmates were on medication. Headache pills, fish oil supplements, Chinese medicine broths to improve concentration. “It is very difficult for us, but it is only way to be fair to everybody,” I said. Chris wrinkled his brow. “No it’s not. You can make the colleges consider more than just the score from one single test. Entrance essays, high school grades, extracurricular activities. It’s what we do stateside.” I looked over at Angela, who seemed to be considering this. I understood enough of what he said to know that I could never express myself clearly. How could I explain that if colleges looked at other factors, kids like Angela with their powerful parents could buy documents, bribe teachers, fake everything? Yet he seemed to lose interest in the debate, stretched his arms, and then pivoted toward Angela. “What’s for lunch, mama?” he asked, rubbing his stomach in illustration. Angela said nothing, but went to the mini fridge and opened it. Behind him, Yuanyuan’s smile when she looked at him was one of unadulterated adoration.

No one left the hotel room that day. After a lunch of frozen dumplings and imported beer, Yuanyuan and Chris adjourned behind their tacked-up sheet for siesta while Angela and I slept in the bedroom. She lay with her back to me, lying still until my exhaustion swamped me into a viscous sleep. Yet when I startled awake half an hour later, she was at the computer, clicking intently. I examined her from the back. She was in a white sequins blouse, her arms seemed thinner than a year ago. The crimps in her hair had faded from last night, and her haircut seemed asymmetrical, the tuft on the left side was chin-length while the rest fell to the middle of her back. “Shit,” she muttered in English under her breath. I closed my eyes again. Chris was in an affable mood in the afternoon, telling stories about his childhood in California filled irresistibly with beaches and dogs, mimicking Yuanyuan’s dance moves with

98 lip-biting concentration. Angela and I sat on the couch and laughed until we collapsed in breathless heaps onto each other. Angela ordered room service for dinner: Wuhan specialties of noodles with sesame paste. And we ate at the table, toasting with beer and Maotai. By the time the sun hovered languorously over the horizon, a warm drowsiness had spread over all of us. When Chris took out a pack of Marlboros and offered one to Angela, Yuanyuan strolled out idly to the balcony in her bare feet. I went to join her. She leaned her forearms on the railing, her ponytail half-untucked and blowing in the breeze. Below us, young families and hand-holding couples meandered around Zhongshan Park toward the riverfront. A small girl in a blue dress looked up and waved, Yuanyuan waved back happily, hopping on her feet. “If I have a child, I want it to be a girl. What do you think?” she asked, turning to me. “That’s still so far into the future,” I said, something cold and confining fitting over my thoughts at the mention of the future. Teacher Ouyang likely knew about my being missing now, and probably so did all my classmates. “I just turned eighteen last week. I’m an adult now,” she announced, the grin on her face belying the gravity of her claim. “How old is Chris?” I asked. Her grin faltered a bit. “Twenty-five,” she said, and then propped an elbow on my shoulder and cupped her hand over her mouth. “Don’t tell my parents, but I told them that he was only twenty,” she whispered hotly into my ear, her face pinched in mischief when she pulled away. “I’ve missed you,” I said impulsively. “I was just thinking of you yesterday. And to think, if I hadn’t come here, we would’ve all moved away and parted forever.” She was unfazed, her face an unblemished sky in the fading sun. “You’ll get into Bejing or Tsinghua University and I’ll become a backup dancer for Beyonce,” she said, her head touching mine. “Angela will become the richest woman in all of China.”

“How come her parents don’t care that she’s not going home to sleep?” I asked Angela as I squeezed toothpaste onto the electric toothbrush. “I told her mom that I’d rented a quiet hotel room to study for the Gaokao. Their family has moved close to the long-distance bus station now, you know. Nobody could get a moment’s

99 quiet with all that engine noise.” Angela was turning down the bedcovers in her red silk pajamas, her jagged hair dangling with each tug. “Don’t they know that she’s not going to school?” I said through the suds. She shot me a look in the mirror. “Why do you think she never tested into our middle school in the first place? They’re refinery workers. They don’t set the standards too high for her.”

In the middle of the night, I startled awake again, my heart pounding painfully. The unfamiliar pattern of light on the ceiling and the old-ex boat horns from the river reminded me of where I was. I slipped off the bed and crouched on the floor. Finally, I made up my mind to look for my phone, reached under the bed, and pulled out Angela’s duffle bag. My hand swam through the soft cloth until it closed upon a fist-sized lump. I pulled it out. Even in the dark, I could see it was a clutch of yuan notes, folded into fourths and wrapped with a rubber band. The top one was a hundred. The stack was thick. Probably good for many more nights at the hotel. The thought comforted me. I found my phone when I put the money back. When it didn’t light up at my touch I slid open the back. The battery was there, but the SIM card was gone. I looked at Angela asleep in bed. It was probably just as well. There in the dark, if I’d been swarmed with despairing messages from my mom and dad, I probably would have folded. I tiptoed out of the bedroom with my backpack in tow. In the sitting room, soft snoring hummed from behind the sheet. I opened the shut the front door incrementally, being as quiet as possible. In the carpeted hallway, I sat down cross-legged against the wall and took out my chemistry textbook. It was my weakest subject in the sciences. I looked at the clock at the top of the elevators as I flipped to the problems in the back. There were only four more hours until morning.

When Yuanyuan and Chris came back in the morning with breakfast, they had a copy of the Yangtze Daily with them. “Look at this. The city government is rerouting all planes on the day of the Gaokao,” Chris said, spreading the paper out on the table.

100

I said nothing. Angela busied herself dishing out the doupi. When I’d gotten back into bed at 6 a.m., she had shifted. When she saw my backpack on the coffee table in the sitting room, she’d paused but didn’t turn around to face me. “They’re doing it all over the country. It’s going to cost the aviation industry millions of dollars, but God forbid the kiddies be disturbed by overhead noise when they’re working quadratic equations,” Chris continued. “You can read Chinese?” Angela asked, circling the table and setting down bowls of steaming sticky rice and diced mushrooms. “I know ‘Gaokao,’ and the rest my baby here translates for me,” Chris said, circling Yuanyuan with his arm and squeezing her hip. “Why do Americans say ‘baby’ all the time. Baby this, baby that?” Angela asked, looking at the mound of change that Chris had placed on the table like it was a slimy slug “It’s like ‘honey,’ you know, like, ‘my sweetheart.” “It’s like ‘little child.’ And you only use it for your lovers. It’s kind of weird,” Angela said, spreading the coins apart with her fingers. “How much is the doupi?” “I don’t know. Thirty-something.” “Thirty kuai? Where did you go, the Rose Café?” she said this with a hard chuckle, like she didn’t expect a response. Chris looked up from the newspaper. Yuanyuan stood up uncomfortably and went to the kitchenette. “Angela, what do you want to drink?” she called. “Whatever is there,” she answered in Chinese after a pause. Yuanyuan opened the mini fridge door and started reporting out loud, “We have a bit of orange soda, some beer—but of course that won’t do—some milk that I can heat up, and some leftover soymilk enough for two people—you two can have it if you want.” “Water will do,” Angela said, picking up a half-empty bottle on the table and shaking it at Yuanyuan. She split the wooden clump of chopsticks into two and ate her food in slow, deliberate mouthfuls. Chris split his chopsticks gingerly and Yuanyuan sat down beside him, fiddling with hers. I pulled the newspaper to me and read the Gaokao story. Parents were beginning to book hotel rooms near all schools and testing sites in Wuhan so that their kids could lunch, study, and nap without disturbance. “Are we near any Gaokao sites?” I asked without looking up.

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“Nah, too close to the river. They’d have to reroute all the boats too,” Chris said. “What is ‘reroute’?” asked Yuanyuan. Chris smiled at her pronunciation. “It’s re-route, baby. You gotta put your lips like this to say the ‘r.’” He clamped her jaw with his fingertips and tweaked her puckered lips with his other hand. “Baby again,” said Angela between mouthfuls. Chris ignored her. Yuanyuan hesitated, and then gently moved back out of his grasp. I saw Chris clench his hand as if in self-restraint, but then he picked up his bowl and shoveled in a huge mouthful. Angela looked across the table at Yuanyuan. “Does he ever call you by your name?” she asked in Chinese. Yuanyuan suppressed a wince and looked quickly at Chris. When he continued to eat, she smiled weakly at Angela and shook her head barely perceptibly. Angela sniggered. Around the table, we ate our food without a word.

When Angela went out after breakfast, it was as though the walls heaved a sigh of relief. No one asked where she was going. Chris spread out on the floor and let out a drawn-out groan. “Women!” he wailed in mock exasperation. Yuanyuan giggled, but went to clear the table instead of going to him. I went into the bedroom and closed the door. I flipped through Angela’s duffle bag. The roll of cash was gone. In one of the smaller pockets, I found a SIM card and inserted it into my phone. It chimed awake. “23 Messages,” the screen read. Crouching small, I listened to the first one. “Liling! Liling! What do you mean you need to be alone to think? What do you mean don’t try to find you?” came my father’s voice. “Do you know what you’re doing to your mother? Think about it carefully: in all of your life, when have father and mother ever done you wrong? And now, at the most crucial time, you upend all. It’s a waste to have raised you for eighteen years!” He seemed to have worked himself into a rage by the end. He was pathetic, I thought, feeling a dour relief at the renewal of my anger. The second one, left an hour after the first, was from my mom. “Liling, I know you’re angry. I am too. But upending it all now means all the hard work of everyone these eighteen years would be for nothing. Don’t make a ruinous decision while your mind is overheated. Come home and let’s all have a heart to heart talk. If you come home now, have a good sleep

102 tonight, and go back to school tomorrow, no one at school would even know of this…” I cut her voice off and pounded the floor in frustration. They were acting like I’d run off to pout about my study load. I tucked the phone into the back pocket of my jeans and headed out. In the sitting room, Yuanyuan and Chris lounged on the couch watching a singing contest on TV. She had her legs over his lap, he rubbed her knees like twin worrying stones. “Hey Lily, where are you going?” he called to me on my way out the door. I must have looked forbidding. Yuanyuan grabbed his chin, tilted it toward her, and vibrated her head discreetly. I went down the elevator. At the front desk in the lobby, the desk clerk gave me a curious look and leaned over to whisper to her colleague. I went out the revolving door and the hubbub mixed with the scent of spring onions engulfed me. It was in the middle of the afternoon. The street vendors were wailing their advertising cries. Commerce was in full swing. I stood in the center of the park square and looked in all directions. From behind me, the cool river wind scented the air with a brackish tang. Toward the north, a gaggle of plexie-glass skyscrapers etched jagged against a gray sky. And behind them, spates of small, shallow storefronts lined the streets. Further back, protruding balconies strewn with drying laundry honeycombed the gray stucco apartment blocks. Angela could be anywhere. I crossed the street and went into the corner grocery store. After fifteen minutes of futile searching for her, I was back on the sidewalk, toying with my phone and contemplating reading the rest of my messages when a new text message appeared. “What are you looking for?” It was from Angela. I swirled around, searching for her face among the throng of pedestrians. “Straight to your left,” came the next message. I turned and saw the “Internet Bar” sign. I went in. She was sitting at a computer by the window, smoking. On her screen was a smiling photo of a Chinese girl. The surrounding print was in English. “Look at this,” she said by way of greeting, gesturing toward the screen with her cigarette.

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I squinted, trying to make out the words. The page wasn’t scrolled to the top. I reached for the mouse. “This peasant girl from a charity school in Henan is going to the school that I’d gone to in the U.S., and they’re singing about how her scholarship will be renewed for another year,” she said dryly. I pulled my hand back. “Did you know her or something?” I asked, wishing she would look at me. She sputtered into lurching, mirthless laughter. The boy across from us put on his clunky headphones. When she finally straightened up, her cigarette had fallen onto the carpet. She didn’t seem to notice. “No, no I don’t know her. But my sweater does,” she said, starting up again. I looked at the screen. The girl wore an off-white sweater. I didn’t recall seeing Angela wear it. But then, she had lots of clothes. “I caught her and her townie American sugar daddy digging through my trash last fall. It says here that she’s been poor all her life. It actually says that, look, ‘Though Funi has been poor all her life, growing up in the remote Henan Province of China, she sees her scholarship to the U.S. as an opportunity to change her fate,’” she read, her fingernail tracing the lines of print. “I really wish people like these would stop embarrassing China overseas just to court foreigners’ pity.” I said nothing, thinking pointed thoughts about her expulsion. She met my eyes, and as though she’d guessed my thoughts, her gaze narrowed. “You don’t have any idea what it’s like over there,” she said bitterly. “They admit you without a hitch, then make you enroll in these endless ESL classes while charging you double tuition. When you petition for anything, like to be assigned to a dorm with a kitchen with people you know, they ask how many cars you own and how many cars your dad owns and then write newspaper stories about a dorm building becoming a ‘Chinese ghetto.’ The professors pretend not to see you in class. If you go to them after class for help, they tell you you are hanging around with too many Chinese kids and that’s why you have trouble understanding. Even if you know the language, they will never let you be right because they never wanted you there in the first place—just your money.” She’d leaned back in her chair and crossed her ankles atop the table, as if none of the mistreatment she’d recounted could affect her now. A young male

104 attendant meandered over casually. Angela took her feet off and placed one high-heeled boot over the cigarette stub on the floor. “So you’re not going back over?” I asked after the attendant left. Last fall, when the news broke about her expulsion, my parents had speculated that her parents would keep her under observation for a time, and then send her back out. None of the good Chinese universities would take her, obviously. She’d missed a year of school and could not possibly score well on the Gaokao. She stretch out in her chair. “Maybe I can start a business. My aunt did, and she’d only gone to technical school. Or I can buy up some property over there and play the market.” She smirked. “Or maybe I’ll follow the honeymooners to L.A. and fund Yuanyuan’s entertainment career—God knows that’s what I’m good for—to that boyfriend of hers, anyway. The good thing about having money is that you can get up and go where no one is keeping track and change courses,” she said. “There’s no such thing as a gaokao, a high test to determine the rest of your life.” She looked at me meaningfully. “But I don’t have money,” I whispered. “And my parents are worried sick.” She took out her pack of Marlboros and tapped out another cigarette. “You can come with me,” she said casually, her eyes never leaving her hands. The suggestion was so fanciful that at first I didn’t react. She lit the cigarette. Her fingers were trembling. “Siqi…” I began. The occasion called for the gravity of her real name. “I would break my mom and dad’s heart. They would never be able to face anyone again.” I stopped and kicked myself inwardly, thinking about what that’d meant for her own parents. She nodded coolly and took a long drag on her cigarette. From the counter, the attendant angled his neck for a view. She took another drag, the vehemence of it hollowing her cheeks down along her sharp cheekbones, and then blew out the saffron tip like a candle. “So you want to go back?” she asked simply. I thought about my parents’ messages. “No,” I said. “Eventually, but not yet.” “What do you want to do? You couldn’t even sleep last night.” I nodded, feeling the white-eyed lightheadedness from my exhaustion. “I can’t go to school or they’ll nab me and make me go back home,” I said. “But I need to get the workbooks from my desk at school. I need to keep studying.”

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She thought about it, and then with a decisive nod, started to pack up her purse. “We’ll go tonight,” she said.

When Angela handed Yuanyuan the minidress, she exclaimed in delight. It was black with gold studding at the shoulders, the double layer of silk tapering into a cinched waist and then flaring out to just skim the curves of the hips before stopping an inch above the knee. When Angela picked it out at the fifth floor of the Wuhan Plaza, I’d looked at the price tag and gasped. “What are you giving her something this steep for?” I’d asked. “Trust me,” was all that she would say as she took out her roll of cash. “And anyway, she needs something that Chris would never be able to afford. Maybe she’ll know her own worth around him then.” When Yuanyuan came back into the living room after changing, all of us mouthed our appreciation. Chris whistled and Yuanyuan jackknifed at the midriff with giggles, wobbly on her too-big ankle boots borrowed from Angela. “Now, young miss, I need you to play the part of a professional city dame tonight,” said Angela, tugging at her hems. “The gatekeeper knows both Liling and me, so you are the only one who can get past him into the classroom.” “Wait.” I could see Angela’s plan in my head and felt dizzy. “Even if she gets in, everyone will see her take the books from my desk and go tell my parents. Some of them may even remember her face from six years ago.” Angela smiled coyly. “She’s going to go after the study session is over and everyone has left, just before Old Li locks up. The dress alone is bound to scare him into compliance. Why do you think I didn’t pick something more conservative?” From the couch, Chris shifted with a sigh, annoyed that no one was translating. Yuanyuan didn’t notice, smiling nervously. Angela said nothing more, and led Yuanyuan by the hand to the bathroom mirror.

A block from the school, Yuanyuan balked. “I think I’m getting a blister from these shoes,” she said. “The whole thing will take fifteen minutes. Then we can switch shoes if you want,” said Angela. “Besides, what’s a little blister? If you want to be a dancer, they’d be common enough.”

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“So many people have stared at me already on the way. I think some of them have even recognized me.” “You’re wearing Diane Von Furstenberg, not a hooker outfit.” Angela sounded exasperated. “Look,” she sighed, attempting patience. “I would go. But then if Old Li tells anyone tomorrow, someone may put two and two together and realize that Liling is with me.” “Look,” Chris cut in, “why don’t I go instead? I don’t want to brag, but usually I can walk into a situation, act real friendly, and Chinese people don’t ask many questions, you know what I mean?” “If Mister Li see a foreigner, he will call the Principal right away,” Angela said in English. I reached for Yuanyuan’s hand and squeezed it. Chris was holding her other hand. “Maybe I’m not understanding,” Chris said again. “But why does she need to be dressed like that?” Angela sped up her steps. “So Mister Li would be embarrassed.” “Wait. Why would…?” “If you don’t understand you don’t understand,” Angela interrupted, rounding behind him and putting an arm around Yuanyuan. “We’re almost there now,” she said, rubbing Yuanyuan’s shoulder. “We’ll go across the street and watch from inside that music store. When you go up to the booth, be ingratiating and sweet and say that your sister needs her workbooks for the weekend. He’s a decent guy. He won’t touch you. But the more flirtatious you are, the more he will be embarrassed that he can’t flirt back, and he’ll hurry you along just to be rid of you. Do you understand?” Yuanyuan’s lips quivered slightly, but she nodded, her head down as though steeling herself. “Third floor, third door from the stairwell, fourth column from the door, third desk back. Three-three-four-three,” Angela prompted. “Take all the blue-covered books. There should be six.” “Maybe there’s another way,” I interjected, thinking about my run-in with Old Li and feeling a sense of foreboding. “Maybe we can stop one of my classmates on the way to school and ask her to bring the books out.”

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Angela gave me a look of impatience. “Then we’ll have to wait until Monday, and it’ll be all over school by lunch, and chances are, all of them know of your little adventure by now and are just waiting for a sighting so they can blab.” I had no answer for that. We’d reached the intersection and spotted the school walls. The sycamore trees with their pockmarked trunks stood sentry on the sidewalks, their full bowers of leaves buzzing with cicadas and filtering the glow of the streetlamps into a soft green. “Relax. Don’t make this too complicated,” said Angela as she clasped Yuanyuan in a hug, shaking her like she was trying to budge a stubborn tree. Yuanyuan tittered uncertainly. The three of us crossed the street, dodging honking cars, and rushed into the music shop. We waited at the plate glass window until we saw Yuanyuan sauntering up to the booth, her slim figure looking knock-kneed in the heels. She looked toward us before reaching up to knock on the booth window. I turned my back and picked up a C.D., hoping to quiet the gonging of blood in my ears. “What’s he doing there so late anyway?” I heard Chris ask. “The teachers work in their offices until ten o’clock right before the Gaokao,” Angela said. “That’s insane.” And then, after a pause, “What’s the big deal about not letting anybody in anyway? It’s not like it’s a nuclear base.” “It’s before the Gaokao. All books and practice tests is top secret. What if another school come steal everything?” Angela’s English seemed to deteriorate in her distracted state. Chris scoffed. “Wow,” he said, the word stretching like a rubber band in his mouth. “Wow.” “Traditional Erhu Songs about Heart-wrenching Love,” my C.D. read. When I was little, I’d taken erhu lessons for a few months before my parents decided to switch to violin. “Western instruments have a future,” they’d said. The violin was still in my room, reclining imperiously on a wall shelf, though I hadn’t touched it in years. “What’s she doing?” Angela muttered in Chinese. I turned around. The stooped figure of Old Li is outside the booth now. Yuanyuan stood with her arms crossed, cringing like she was cold.

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“This doesn’t look good, does it?” said Chris. Old Li was waving his arms around now, gesticulating expansively. Yuanyuan’s head tilted toward us. “Shit!” Chris said, looking openly at Angela. She refused to look at him. I put the C.D. back and drew closer to the window. A passerby glanced with trepidation at Yuanyuan and Old Li and then skirted around them to give them a wide berth. Suddenly, we heard him yell out. “Tramp!” Angela’s nostrils flared. “What’s—“ Chris began. Angela cut him off. “Shut up,” she said quietly, pushing me aside and sprinting headlong across the street toward the two figures, setting off a cacophony of bleating horns in her wake. Chris and I followed more cautiously. By the time we reached them, Yuanyuan was squatting on the ground, her back heaving with muffled sobs and Angela stood facing Old Li, who had retreated back to the doorway of the booth. “Let me in now and I won’t tell anyone,” Angela was saying. Old Li’s eyes darted from Angela to Chris and me. “Little rabbit spawns,” he sputtered, his eyes narrowing at the sight of me. “I don’t know what trouble you’re planning—“ “You just called a girl your granddaughter’s age a tramp, you old peasant! Do you understand a concept called proportion?” Angela yelled, eyes blazing. Old Li looked uncertain for a split second, but then placed his arms akimbo and rose up on his tiptoes. “Bah! You should have heard what she said to me. And you—you think you can threaten me. But I heard people talking about your father, mister big-shot prefecture head. All the black- hearted deeds he’s racking up in order to put money away. You’ll be lucky if he lasts through to next year.” Angela didn’t move. The remark hung in the air. Yuanyuan stopped crying and shrugged off Chris’s embrace to look at the scene. Old Li’s shoulder began to tic in the silence, but he raised his voice again in bravado. “I heard about you too—how you took all your dad’s money and flushed it away on drugs and then came back without even a degree!” Angela still did nothing. I reached my hand out toward her. She flinched at my touch.

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“Get out of here now. Stop embarrassing your parents,” Old Li said, his voice streaky with relief, flicking his fingers toward us as if brushing off dust. He thinks he’d won, I thought. From the corner of my eyes, I saw Angela unzip her red shoulder bag. When I saw the silver scissors she’d fished out, I gasped. In agile steps, she dashed past me and caught Old Li with a firm grasp on the crook of his elbow. He whirled around in surprise. Angela let go of him, lifted up a section of her hair and snipped through it with the scissors. The tuft of black fell noiselessly to the ground. She lifted another section. The slitting sound of the blade sawing through the hair struck all of us into shock. It was Chris who reacted first. “Stop!” he shouted. Angela lifted up a clump of hair for the third time and then slowly slid open the scissors. “Don’t,” Old Li said, his voice disembodied and croaking. Angela pressed the blades once more. The hair fell so lightly that my skin prickled with goose bumps as I tracked its drifting. Old Li reached out and grabbed Angela’s wrist. They stared at each other, he was breathing audibly, she absolutely silent. Finally, she tore her arm from his grasp, and then, holding his gaze in challenge, she backed toward the school building step by step until her figure was swallowed by its shadow.

None of us said much on the walk home to the hotel. I carried the workbooks with limp arms, wishing that I’d taken a bag with me so that I could whisk them out of sight. As we waited for the elevator, a hotel receptionist approached hesitantly. “I just wanted to remind you that we are being booked up quickly by Gaokao families,” she said, looking from one face to another. “So if you’re planning to stay with us past tomorrow, you should let us know soon.” We looked at Angela, who acted like she hadn’t heard. Finally Yuanyuan spoke up. “Thank you. We’ll let you know soon,” she said, and the woman left. Yuanyuan had walked the entire way back in the heels without complaint. When we filed into the elevator, she took them off and stood in her bare feet. “What was it that you said to him?” Angela asked. We all turned to her, surprised that she was speaking. Yuanyuan grinned sheepishly

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“Just some stuff that I heard on TV,” she said. “I called him ‘handsome older brother,’” she mumbled, blushing. I laughed, imagining Old Li’s confusion. Angela smiled. Chris for once didn’t ask for translation, but only chirped an “after you, ladies,” when the elevator door opened. Angela headed straight for the balcony when we got in. From the crisp slam of the door, we knew not to join her. In the bedroom, I threw myself on the bed and burrowed my face into the pillows, wishing that sleep would spontaneously overtake me. When it didn’t, I sat up and willed myself to flip open the workbooks. It was only nine o’clock, but the blue of the covers looked as untouchable as arsenic. What would have happened if Old Li had not grabbed her? I took out my phone and turned it on. “6 new messages,” said the screen. I started the first one and held it to my ear with a trembling arm. It was my mother’s voice. “Lingling….” In the pause I could hear her breathing. It sped up and turned ragged and I felt my own heart swerve off track. “Please come back. Please, please come back. Mama can’t keep on living like this not knowing where you are. Please come home…” There was more, but I stopped it, my heart thumping. In all of my life, I’d never seen my mother resigned, let alone pleading. When I was still in elementary school, before we’d remodeled our bathroom and installed a bathtub, she used to soak her feet in a basin of hot water every evening—her eyes downcast, her spine slack—for longer than I could understand. Was she just tired then? I realized I’d never seen her in such a slumped pose again. I paced barefoot in the room, tapping the phone against my palm. If I called, any resolve would crumple, and I would be home before morning. I went to the window for some fresh air, but the glass was welded down. At the corner of the dark pane, I saw the glowing tip of Angela’s cigarette. She was sitting balanced on the railing of the balcony, her back to the night. Her ankles were wrapped around the thin wrought iron spindles. When she saw me, she switched her cigarette to her other hand and gave me a military salute. I let the curtain fall, slipped out of the bedroom, and traversed the dim sitting room as indifferently as I could so that I wouldn’t alarm Yuanyuan and Chris. When I slid open the balcony door, Angela smirked at me. “Get down. You could fall,” I said, trying to keep my voice even.

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In response, she leaned back. It was just a few inches, but the vertigo stabbed into me. I could see her tattered hair swing into the starry sky like a torn crow’s wing and then her silent fall nine stories down. For a while afterwards, before anyone else discovered her, nothing would happen. I would be the only person in the universe who knew that Dou Siqi was dead. And if I just followed her, I, too, would never have to face anything again. I plastered my back against the wall and slid down to the ground. Everything around me was swirling. My air passage felt blocked. My lungs could burst. She hopped off the railing and came over to me, putting her hand on my forehead. “Calm down,” she said. “I’m sorry.” I gripped the corner of her shirt to keep her from leaping away again. Slowly, my vision cleared again. “This is my fault,” I said. She rocked back on the heels of her feet and sat down heavily on the floor. “Don’t be a martyr,” she said, rolling her eyes. I picked up the half-smoked cigarette that’d fallen to the floor and placed it between my lips. I sucked in, but when the smoke filled my mouth, I puffed it out, coughing. “How many times have they called?” she asked with an edge in her voice. “Twenty-nine.” “Twenty-nine,” she repeated, “Twenty-nine times in two days.” “That’s just the number of messages. They might have called more.” “Do you know how many times my parents called?” I said nothing. Her voice was bone-bitter. It was the tone I’d expected her to take from the beginning, during all those months of her phone calls from Toronto. “Zero. Oh, except for a text message. ‘After you have calmed down. We should sit down for a serious talk.’” “Do they even know that you are here?” She lay back with a groan, stretching out on the cool cement. “All they cared about was the money. All anybody cares about is money. Money and face. Money and face. They spend money to save face. They sacrifice face to rake in money. Do they know I’m here? Probably. They have contacts everywhere—you saw how that woman downstairs looked at us. But they

112 pretend that they don’t so that they wouldn’t be expected to do anything about it. Now your parents—would they do something if they knew you were here?” I nodded. “What?” “Come here. Ask at the counter for the key if we refuse to open the door.” “And if you refuse to budge?” I chuckled. “They’d drag me. They’d carry me down by the arms and legs and stuff me in a taxi.” Of this I had no doubt. She nodded. “Then you should go home.” I searched her face for more bitterness, but it was empty. “What about you?” I finally said. She shrugged. “Got to let my hair grow out before I can cut it again,” she said. I gave her a quizzical look. “How do you think I get money out of the elders?” she asked, her lips curled. The image of her hard, deadly face when she’d slid the scissors open in front of Old Li floated before me. She was smiling now. The world was a big joke. I wanted to smile along, but couldn’t. A tinny crash resounded from inside then, followed by Chris’s bellowing. We rushed inside. In the kitchen, Yuanyuan and Chris stood in their sleeping clothes shuddering. An iron pot lay on the tiled floor. Water was everywhere. “Sorry, sorry,” Yuanyuan was saying, rubbing Chris’s arms. He snatched his elbow from her. “Why the hell did you do that?” he asked. “I cook the water to kill the bugs. I saw bugs last night, so I cook water tonight.” I looked at the floor again. Two cockroaches lay lifeless amidst the steaming puddles. “Christ! Haven’t you ever heard of bug spray?” Yuanyuan looked at him, cowed. “My mother teach me,” she said. “Your mother teach you. Your mother lived in the Cultural Revolution, honey. Isn’t this supposed to be the next superpower now? Hell, isn’t this supposed to be a five-star hotel? Of course it is China, where there’s a catch to everything, right?”

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Angela shouldered her way in front of Yuanyuan, who looked about to cry again. This set Chris off once more. “What? Now you’re her big protector? You doll her up, send her to some security goon like a whore, and somehow you’re her protector?” “Shut up. You are not the boss here. Angela pays for everything,” I said, my wooden English frustrating me. “Pays for everything? Because that’s the point here? Why do you people always make such a big deal about who pays for shit?” His voiced became shrill. I was about to ask him why he was hanging around thick-skinned at a place he hated so much when Angela gripped my shoulder. “Go now. I can handle this,” she said. Chris began again. “And why the hell are you here anyway? If you’re so perfect, why aren’t you home studying for the Gaokao like a good little robot? Oh, you mean mommy and daddy fucked up? Grow up, little girl. Shit happens no matter how well you score on the Gaokao. You can’t just run away blubbering whenever things don’t go your way.” Angela pushed me into the bedroom. When I only stood fuming, she gathered up my things and crammed them into my backpack. “Take a taxi home. It’s late,” she said, pushing a hundred-yuan note into my hand. I couldn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to Yuanyuan as she led me by the hand out the front door. “Goodbye,” she said lightly in the hall. “Good luck on the Gaokao.” I held her shirt to keep her from disappearing and tried to press the crumbled bill back into her hand. “Thank you, but I have money,” I said. She smiled and cupped her hand around mine, pressing it back to me. “Don’t worry. I know,” she said. And then she was gone.

When I opened the front door, I heard a string of ruckus from the bedroom and then my mom and dad stood in front of me, staring at me as if I were a ghost. “Liling,” my dad said, testing. I unstuck my key, closed the door, and leaned against it.

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My mom bounded forward and clasped my hand. I smelt her familiar scent of jasmine soap. She pulled me close and gripped my head in both her hands, ruffling my hair as if checking to see that my skull was intact. I closed my eyes, feeling small and pliant in her hands. When I opened them again, my dad was by her side, his shoulder touching hers. “Are you hungry?” he asked simply. I nodded and both of them went into the kitchen without another word. Within minutes, sounds of extravagant clatter and the scent of peanut oil filled the apartment.

We ate at the table as if it were day, not night. We ate chopped winter melon and shredded potatoes and red-cooked pork, tomatoes and eggs and lotus root soup. Everything they asked me they asked offhandedly. And when I answered, they only nodded and made clucking noises. By the time all the dishes were washed, my chest tensed again. “Are you really going to leave?” I said to my dad’s back. He froze for an infinitesimal instant, but continued drying his hands. “Come,” he said after he was finished. “I want to tell you a story.”

He’d met my mom when they were sent down from the city to work in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Though it was dangerous to disclose any romantic attachment when everyone’s every move was tracked by one another and reported to the higher ups, she had pursued him bravely, doing his laundry without his consent, leaving revolutionary pamphlets in the basket with her favorite passages underlined. He’d always been rather passive, and he could find nothing wrong with her, and so they tided into marriage and parenthood and the small eddies and currents of daily life. Only now he’d met someone, and… “You’ve fallen in love,” I ventured. It was a familiar story, one that I’d read many times in magazines, in novels, on the internet. He looked at the floor. To him, “love” was a word reserved for potboiler books and TV miniseries. My mom sighed. “I know Little Chen. She’s a nice woman,” she said. My dad sighed as if in echo. “Your mom is a good woman,” he said.

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I looked at them, sitting on the couch in matching blue striped pajamas. For eighteen years, they’d fussed and scolded and hustled and seldom fought. It was impossible to imagine them as separated. “What is going to happen from here?” I asked. “That’s nothing you need to worry about,” my mom spoke up. “This last month, all you need to do is focus on your studies.” “Listen to your mother,” Dad said. I felt frustration bristling again. “And after the Gaokao? What would happen then?” They sat in motionless silence. “It’s up to you,” Dad finally said. “If you say stay, I will stay. If you can understand, then …” he trailed off. “There were so few choices back then,” he mused. “You don’t even realize when you’ve made a choice. But once it’s made, twenty years pass in the blink of an eye.” “Go then,” I said, trying it out, my voice sounding like it was coming from far away. Any second now I could take it back, I thought. “Go?” He had a slight frown, but his eyes were big and childlike. “You love her, you don’t love Mom, so go,” I spun the possibility further. Yet I recognized the truth in it in spite of myself. So much had happened in the past few days, yet this logic seemed simple and inevitable. “No!” my mom screamed, scurrying over to my chair and hugging my legs like a supplicant. “How would I live then? I don’t know how.” On the couch, my dad dropped his head into his hands. I think he was crying. To this day, I’m not sure. I touched the top of my mother’s head and ran my palm down the smooth slope of her hair. “Don’t worry,” I whispered to her. “If he realizes he’s made a mistake, he can always come back.”

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Infinity

The plan had always been simple: kill myself for a time making as much money as possible in China, take the investment immigration route to a Western country, and settle in for the easy life with the wife and the kid. I’d enjoy the fresh air, buy a BMW, watch my daughter get one university degree then another and then another, and finally wait to bounce grandbabies on my lap. Seven years ago, when my wife passed away, the plan was temporarily stymied. We’d just opened a new branch of the bread factory then—expanding the business after the successful push from the shallows of supplying local corner shops into the fat currents of making sandwich buns for KFC. We thought we’d made it then, that the previous decade of accruing workers, borrowing heart-weakening sums of money, and rushing around Qingdao knocking on the doors of big and small officials had all paid off. Throughout all of it, we made sure our books were presentable and got our daughter Zhuzhu into a good high school. Neither of us had a spare minute to take a deep breath, let alone get a physical check up. One day, my wife went to the hospital to check out a lingering sore throat to discover it was cancer of the esophagus. They told her she had less than a year, but even then she didn’t stop working. I’d always handled the outside things: scheduling pickups and deliveries, negotiating with customers, keeping happy the sesame-sized officials who could piss our heads at will. Inside, my wife kept the factory going: supervising workers, inspecting the equipment, and doing the bookkeeping. Neither of us trusted anyone else and so, even when she was doing chemotherapy, she would be back in the factory office in the afternoons. We kept her cancer a secret from Zhuzhu. We also kept from her the plan to go to Canada. We didn’t want her telling her classmates, who might’ve then told their parents, who might’ve then tipped off an official. Like with any person with a bit of money these days, any casual audit into our accounts and they could have made us wear any hat they chose. “Tax evader,” “unlawful employer,” and, if they found our Canadian accounts and guessed our plan to split, even “unpatriotic defector.” Never mind that they were doing it themselves. By the time her mother went into the hospital full time, Zhuzhu had taken four years of extra English classes thinking they were just double-safe preparations for the Gaokao. I sent her off to Toronto just a

117 few weeks after her ma’s funeral. I could arrange for a high school diploma for her later. She could stay with a host family near Chinatown while she took TOEFL classes and buy whatever expensive toys or clothes she wanted. Me, I knew it would have taken my all just to hold up the business without her ma, and I wouldn’t have given her much attention anyway. By the time the funds were in the coffers, the business sold, and the visa completed, I was forty-four and Zhuzhu, twenty-two. I flew over to Toronto to join her in a lakefront condo in a twenty-three-story building with a doorman. She’d taken the master bedroom with the attached bathroom and left me the smaller one overlooking the elevated highway. This alone wouldn’t have bothered me. After all, she’d come over at fifteen and cleaved this world open by herself. She’d learned English, almost finished college, bought the apartment, and allocated our money to all the wisest investment funds. Back in Qingdao, I’d bragged to all my buddies about her—how capable and independent she was, how unlike all the other kids her age who couldn’t even boil an egg and sent their laundry home to their parents. Yet from the minute she was late to pick me up from the Toronto Airport, I’d realized I might have the opposite problem. Now, it’s been three weeks of the two of us living together and she’d yet to ask me a single question about my life these last seven years. When I asked her about hers, she muttered only short answers. But she was looking for a job and finishing up her business administration degree. Maybe she would have more time soon. I myself had all the time in the world. In Toronto, I had no obligation, no contacts. I could get up and go to sleep whenever I wanted. All I had to worry about was to keep from getting fat. One look at the cat was enough to get me out of my slippers and into my sneakers for a jog around the block. It was a shorthaired tabby whose size quadrupled when it sprawled out on its side. All day, while Zhuzhu was out, it perched on the window ledge and licked itself all over. Then it closed its eyes for one of its many naps, bored by the world. The only times it ever stirred with alertness were in the evenings, when Zhuzhu came home.

Zhuzhu was a young woman now. Toting a complicated-looking purse everywhere instead of a backpack, her cell phone attached to her hand wherever she went. I didn’t know who she talked to, but through the bits I heard through the wall of her bedroom door, I concluded that they were Chinese and not boys. If she were prettier I suspected I would have been more

118 worried. As it stood, she’d taken after the unfortunate features of her ma and me and had a face like flatbread and eyes like minnows She usually came home in the late evenings. At first I’d waited so that we could eat together, but her return got later and later until finally I snapped back to eating at my usual time, leaving her portion in the kitchen. Sometimes she didn’t even touch it, bringing home take-out instead. I’d asked her to let me know ahead of time so that I didn’t waste food, but she laughed at the quaint notion. She was right, these days, we hardly needed to worry about any of the sky- high maintenance fee of a luxury condo, let alone food. I must’ve been grasping at the straws for something to manage. When she came home at noon, I was making lunch in the slow cooker while watching a Chinese drama on satellite TV and quickly changed the channel. She kicked off her sneakers and sat down on the couch beside me with a groan. I was surprised. The few times she’d come home at midday, she’d picked up something and headed right back out. “Are you done for the day?” I asked. I didn’t know how universities worked in Canada. Zhuzhu had mentioned internships and group projects and other fussy hoops students needed to jump through apart from classes. She shook her head. “I’m headed back to campus. I just went to a jobs fair.” She said “jobs fair” in English though she knew I wouldn’t understand. Before I’d left Qingdao, folks had warned me that kids who lived out of the country for a long time would only be able to speak in this kind of a jumble after a while. “What is that?” “It’s a place where companies set up tables and talk to students about hiring them,” she said. “Oh? Did you get any interest?” I’d always wanted her to get a PhD so that she could be called doctor, but she’d said that for business, that was a waste of time. She pulled out a clutch of business cards from her bag. “Maybe,” she said, spreading them out like a fan in her hand. I slapped my leg. “Good going,” I said. “Do you want some lunch?” She nodded and I went to the kitchen to make up a bowl for her. Rice and potatoes and beef tips.

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“When you’re a real business woman, your old Ba will be in charge of all your meals,” I said handing the steaming bowl to her. “I’ll be the little man behind the power woman.” She ate in small mouthfuls, her head down. “No need,” she said finally. I made up a bowl for myself and ate beside her. After a few more bits, she put the bowl down on the coffee table and lay her chopsticks across it. “Not hungry?” I asked. It was still half full. She picked up the remote control and flipped through the channels. “Did the ayi teach you how to make this?” she asked offhandedly. I froze for a minute. Four years ago, Zhuzhu had come home to Qingdao for a week for the Lunar New Year and my secretary from the factory had cooked a few too many meals for us for Zhuzhu to get suspicions. She had taken to faking stomachaches at dinnertime and referring to her as my ayi when she was within earshot. Of course, the woman didn’t relish being called a maid and wisely stayed away for the rest of Zhuzhu’s stay. Ever since then, whenever Zhuzhu said the word ayi, her voice went all no-good-intentions vinegary. “How about some soup then?” I asked finally. In response, she nudged her bowl at me. Like I was her servant. I picked up the bowl. By the time I carried back a fresh bowl of egg flower soup, a fan of pamphlets laid spread out on the coffee table. I gave her the soup and scanned them. On the glossy pages were photos of swimming pools and tall buildings. Real estate listings. “Is that a good investment right now?” I asked. Zhuzhu had bought up a couple units of unoccupied storefront in Chinatown and the word was good that renters were coming soon. She didn’t respond, busying herself blowing on the surface of the soup and taking a small sip. When the cat appeared at her ankle, she put her bowl down and picked it up into her lap. It half-closed its eyes and tipped its chin up for her to scratch, purring as she cooed to it in English. I decided to go for a swim.

I didn’t know what Zhuzhu’s problem was. It was true that I’d paid the Qingdao secretary well and kept her for more than just secretarial work, but her ma had been gone for three years already, and I’d kept the relationship tastefully discreet. She was the simple and quiet type—all comfort and no flash. If my business buddies had met her, they probably would have passed me the fliers of several karaoke lounges with high hostess turnover rates.

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The pool was on the twenty-second floor. On its far side where the water was the deepest, the water margin aligned so exactly with the edge that when I first saw it—emailed as a photo by Zhuzhu—I’d believed that any vigorous strokes must have sent water splashing down at the pedestrians below. When I saw it in person, the first thing I did was paddle over to perch on the edge. Then, I saw that there was another ledge below—about five meters wide—to catch the overflow. And I saw that there were hardly any pedestrians compared to a Chinese street, only dark sedans zooming about silent as funeral crows. I admit I’d largely approved of Zhuzhu’s choice of the condo because of the pool. When I flashed the pictures, none of the bigwigs that I rubbed elbows with had seen one like it before, yet when they glimpsed the bristling skyscrapers in the background, the way the water margin seemed to drop off the precipice, none of them could keep from exclaiming in awe. It was called an infinity pool, Zhuzhu said. And every time I went swimming, I’d always kicked toward the far edge with exhilaration, imagining what it would be like to really rush down some no-return waterfall. Though it was the most popular pool of the three in the building, there weren’t many people there on a weekday afternoon. An old couple lay on the lounge chairs, their eyes hidden behind sunglasses and their pink cocktails sweating on the tables beside them. I saw them at the pool often, their soft bodies the same shade of pink. They used the same grocery delivery service that we used. Once, when the delivery boy had mistakenly given them our order, both of them came to our door loaded with the boxes. Though I couldn’t say a word to them beyond “hello” and “thank you,” the whole thing went smoothly enough. I smiled wide and nodded my gratitude. They talked slowly and loudly and craned their necks around me to peek into the doorway. Back in China people always said that Canadians were friendly. If my English were better, I would have invited them inside. I striped down to my swimming shorts and dove in. At my age, the muscles felt stiffer on my bones and the sinews creakier. Yet the first few strokes toward the horizon always reawakened the vigor of youth. After perching for a few minutes on the far edge, I paddled back freestyle and a figure caught my eye. It was a girl in a green bathing suit, walking barefoot to the edge of the pool and dipping a foot in. I finished swimming the length of the pool and climbed out, settling down on a lounge chair under an umbrella. The old couple turned to look my way

121 and then looked at the girl. It was true that though I came to swim almost every day, I never lounged. What if somebody were to ask me something? I didn’t speak English. The girl was slim, her hair twisted up in a bun. When she glanced over her shoulder at me, I saw that she had high cheekbones and a high forehead. It was a classic northerner’s face. I wanted to ask her if she was from near Qingdao, but I remembered how Zhuzhu had looked at me with disgust when I’d spoke Chinese to the woman at the seafood market. “Not everyone with an Asian face is Chinese,” she’d said. Truth be told, though I’d seen a handful of Asian faces in our building, I never figured out where they were from. In the elevators, everyone kept their head down and their mouth shut. At most, if it was just me and another Asian person, we’d exchange a nod. When I nudged Zhuzhu for information, she gave me a look. No one pried into one another’s business like nosey small-time townies here, I read in the frown. This was a first-world city now. The girl lowered herself into the pool and waded forward, swimming toward the far edge with slow breaststrokes. I considered her. She seemed about thirty—too young to own a unit here by herself and too old to be living with her parents. Before I’d left China, a few friends had clapped me on the back and congratulated me on a well-deserved comfortable life. The string of ingredients they rattled off was not unlike my own: house, car, freedom from the worries of running a business, money growing in the bank and a kid racking up accomplishments. Yet another thing they always mentioned: a new wife, younger and prettier this time, untainted by the hard knocks of the big bad world and, in exchange for all the comfort I could provide her, never would be. Perhaps we could even have a second child, a genetically Chinese but mentally Western child, prudent but sunny, the best of both worlds. I looked up when I heard the swiping of flip flops and saw the old man approaching. He pulled the edge of the adjacent lounge chair close to me and sat down. “How are you doing?” he said. “Want a drink?” “I am fine, thank you. How are you?” I said, flustered. He leaned back toward the bar counter and raised his hand. “Lenny, get this gentleman a margarita,” he called. In the pool, the girl looked over her shoulder at the commotion. “Thank you, thank you,” I said. I hadn’t brought my wallet. What would I do if he didn’t intend to pay for it? “What’s the matter? You don’t like margaritas?” he said at my frown.

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“No, I like, I like. I don’t know what, but I like,” I said, my eyebrows working in my attempt to explain myself. “That’s how I feel about my liquor too!” he said, and then guffawed. On the other side of the pool, though she couldn’t have heard what we were saying, his wife echoed his laugh. I envied these two. Though they were together all day with nothing to do, they enjoyed each other’s company. Perhaps this was what happened when two people had no pressures in life. “So, hey, where’re you from?” he asked, sipping his drink. “From China.” “Oh China.” He said it like it was an unexpected but pleasant answer. “I’ve been to China. Yeah, we took a river tour a few years back, before they built that dam. Nice place.” “Thank you. Canada is nice place too.” “Greatest untouched natural landmass in the world up north.” He nodded. “But you knew that, don’t you? How long have you been here?” “Three weeks.” I realized I was squinting at his mouth. His sentences were getting long and harder to understand. “Yeah, sounds about right. So what do you do, guy?” “I come to swim.” The waiter brought over the drink then and the old man took out his wallet. I wanted to protest, but remembered what Zhuzhu said about making a fuss over a check here. “Now that’s beautiful,” he said, admiring the glob of pink slush surrounded by the sprinkles on the rim. He patted the waiter on the arm and then stood up toward the pool. “Hey! Young lady!” He waved exaggeratedly at the girl in the green swimsuit. “Why don’t you come over and join us.” Though I didn’t know her either, I felt her unease. She waded toward us slowly, her arms folded across her chest. At the edge of the pool, the man’s wife waited to meet her. When she climbed out, the woman put a motherly arm around her and steered her over to us. She smiled at the two politely, but met my eyes warily, like she suspected that this was all my idea. “Let me make the introductions,” the man said, “I’m George Koontz and this is my wife Bernice. And you two are?” I opened my mouth to speak but remembered to always let females go first here. “I’m Libby,” she said in clear, unaccented English.

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“I’m Yi Jun,” I said, feeling ridiculous as no one called me that. Not my wife when she was living, not my parents before I’d put them into the nursing home. “How’s that?” the wife said, furrowing her brow. “Do you have an English name?” asked the girl. “Bob. You look like a Bob,” the wife said, and then burst into chuckles with her husband. “So Libby, are you from China too?” George asked. “Yes,” she said, and then gave me a smile. I nodded. “Ni hao, Libby. Ni hao, Bob,” Bernice said with two little bows of her head. “Hey, you speak good Chinese!” I said. This pleased George and Bernice. Libby smiled wanly. Bernice went over to the bar then, tying a large scarf around her hips and shuffling with her toes pointed outward like a duck. George motioned for Libby and me to sit down. I waited until she was seated and then planted myself a polite half-arm’s length from her on the lounge chair. “I myself have just met these two,” I whispered to her in Chinese. “I think Canadians are just this way.” She nodded discreetly. “Yes, I know,” she whispered back. “So, what do the both of you do?” George asked I waited, but Libby said nothing. “I like to swim,” I finally said. George arched his neck aback and laughed. Libby shook her head at me in amusement. “He’s asking what profession you’re in,” she said in Chinese. She was definitely a northerner. All the months that I’ve been here, the closest I’d gotten to a northern accent was the news anchors on the satellite TV. In the streets of Chinatown, Cantonese was king. Even Zhuzhu’s accent had atrophied from disuse and now veered to either slur or stutter. “I’m not doing much of anything these days,” Libby said. “Oh yeah?” George arched one eyebrow. “You on vacation?” Libby looked toward the pool. “It’s a nice place for that.” George nodded. “Yup. Best pool in the city, in my opinion. Bernice and myself are in real estate. But a lawyer takes care of all that now and all we do is fight and make up.” He grinned. I looked at Libby questioningly and she translated quickly.

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“Oh,” I pointed at him in recognition. “I want to buy and sell house too.” As soon as I’d caught on language-wise, I would help Zhuzhu with our investments. “Yeah? Hopping on board? It’s a good city for it.” Libby translated without my asking this time. George gave me a pat on the knee. “Your own personal interpreter. How smooth is that?” He turned to Libby. “You speak such great English, Libby. How long have you been in Canada?” Libby sighed and gazed at the horizon. “Nineteen years.” This surprised me. For someone who must have been just a child when she left China, her Chinese was remarkable. Bernice returned then with a margarita for Libby and one for herself. The four of us toasted to our health. “Now, us old foggies may need that toast, but you two don’t,” Bernice said. “How old are you, if I may ask?” she said toward Libby. “I’m thirty-one,” she replied. And then I realized it was my turn. “I’m forty-four,” I said to Libby in Chinese. “When you translate that, make me sound more presentable, will you?” “He’s twenty-nine too,” she said to Bernice, suppressing a smirk. “Oh.” Bernice looked taken aback and glanced quickly at George. “So…your wife looks very young too.” “Yeah,” George agreed, slapping my knee again. I shot Libby a conspiratory smile. Bernice must have been talking about Zhuzhu. It was strange how little memory I had of seeing the two of them around. In my memory, most foreign faces blended into one another. I hoped this syndrome would ease in time. “So, where are you from?” I asked Libby while George took a long sip of his drink. “Qingdao,” she said. Something must have shown on my face, because her eyes widened anticipating what I would say. But then George interrupted by smacking his lips. “That hits the spot, doesn’t it? Libby, how are you liking your drink?” “It’s good,” Libby said, and then took her first sip, a dainty one. “Come on, you can do better than that,” George teased. Libby drooped her lips apologetically. “I have to watch it. I’m…pregnant,” she said.

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“Oh, congratulations!” Bernice pressed her hand. “You don’t look it at all. When are you due?” “In February,” she said uneasily, and then looked at me. “I’m pregnant. I give birth in February,” she translated, her voice expressionless. I nodded, trying to keep my eyes from dropping below her face. “Yeah, I understood.”

I placed a personal ad in the Chinatown digital newspaper that night. I wrote it hastily and didn’t bother to re-read it before I submitted. I kept it simple, mentioning only my age, height, state of health, and “situation.” Because my wife was gone and my daughter all but grown up, my situation meant mainly wealth. I chose “comfortable” as the descriptor. In China, this would have been too bloated, but here, I sensed that less false modesty was needed. The next morning, before Zhuzhu got up, I went for a jog along the lake. Before I moved here, I hadn’t jogged since I was in high school. Though Qingdao was one of the of the cleaner cities in China, the bread factories had kept me so drained for so many years that I didn’t think my body was capable of it anymore. After we’d expanded to accommodate all the German-made machines that KFC had insisted we use, I rarely had a single good night’s sleep. The workers worked three shifts and production ran on at all hours. Anytime a machine broke down, I was the one to call. I’d lost count of the times I startled awake from a dream, heart pounding at the thought of late orders, cancelled contracts, obsolete broken machine parts that I’d have had to fly to Berlin to find. Even now, I couldn’t sleep through an entire night. The days, on the other hand, were much too placid. Even Zhuzhu, coming home for the hundredth time to my watching TV, suggested that I go out and make some friends. Chinatown was just a few miles away by foot, she said. Sometimes, when I turned off the TV after rounds of futile channel surfing, my ears rang with the silence and the very air in the room seemed to crystallize from the stillness. But I’d seen the Chinatown folks. They were low-class restaurateurs and grocers whose eyes would light up if they found out my background. One would tell ten, and ten would tell a hundred, and soon the phone calls and emails would begin from virtual strangers. They’d be invitations at first. We’re having a Moon Festival party. Come by! Meet people from home. Soon, though, requests would wag in the air like feelers on cockroaches, so miniscule that it would be obscene to say no. We have relatives from China visiting and we noticed that you live near the lake. Do you mind if they come up and take some

126 aerial view photos from the roof terrace? Of course, if they did see the condo, the requests would get bigger. Our son is starting up a terrific venture and we be honored if you’d consider investing. Nephews of nephews of people I’d met once would start calling at dinnertime. Stout middle-aged women wearing too much powder would casually let drop that they had sons my daughter’s age. This was how China worked—through networks so intricate that the lines strangled you. No, I’d come to get away from it all. This freedom was too precious to let slip away. Aching slivers spasmed across my lungs now and I slowed my stride, looking out over the lake at the gray morning sky. It was undeniably beautiful here. The lake water looked clean enough to drink and all but the most out-of-the-way storefronts kept their stretch of sidewalk hosed clean. When I’d first visited to deliver Zhuzhu to her host family, I’d strolled through the gleaming, sparsely crowded streets and felt my heart lurch up. How many decades of evolution would I leapfrog by moving my lot over the ocean and staking it with this civilization? Who but a dummy wouldn’t take the chance? With every breath of clean spring air, years of smoky banquet halls and bleating traffic jams and wild goose chases for official paperwork dissipated. Here, the faces in even the busiest intersections looked pure-mooded and self-contained. I thought of all the familiar faces in Qingdao, their smiles simpering or leering, their frowns frantic or despairing. What incredible stroke of luck to toss them all to the wind, rip loose the noose of feuds and obligations. I had enough money to live without having to anyone for anything for the rest of my life. Everyone in China envied me. I picked up the pace again and adjusted my path toward home. Three weeks of hibernation was enough. With the ad posted, now was the time to pave the final notch toward the future. Women like Libby were pregnant. Zhuzhu would have a job soon. And when she eventually met a boy, she’d be home even less. Yes, it was time I found a girlfriend.

Zhuzhu was crunching a bowl of milk-flooded wafers when I got home. A real estate pamphlet spread open in front of her. When she saw me, she nudged her chin at a card on the coffee table. “There,” she said. I picked it up, but the only words that I understood were “Dear Mr. Tang.” “What does it say?” I asked, laying it on the dining table in her line of sight.

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She glanced at it without touching it. “Saturday—this Saturday at 7:00. It’s an invitation to dinner. Apartment 13D.” “Oh yes,” I said, “I met a nice Canadian husband-and-wife at the infinity pool yesterday. Was it them?” “It was under the door.” I looked at the bottom of the card. “George + Bernice,” it said. “It’s probably dress up. Do you have something to wear?” I asked. “I have plans Saturday. And it doesn’t say me,” she said, slurping the cold milk. The one time that we ate together in the downstairs café, I’d slurped soup too loudly and she rapped my knuckles like a schoolteacher. “It doesn’t?” I looked at the card as though it would do me good. “It says ‘and your lovely wife,’” she repeated in English. “And what does that mean?” “Wife. You don’t even know ‘wife’?” her forehead furrowed. “How are you going to be able to do anything by yourself here? You should at least choose English shows when you watch TV.” I was pleased that she cared. “’Wife,” that’s ‘old lady’ isn’t it?” I ventured. She nodded, pushing the pamphlet toward me on the table. “What do you think of this one?” I glanced at the pictures. The bedroom window looked out onto a cityscape at night. The swimming pool was indoor with a pretty woman in a bikini climbing the ladder. “The buildings outside must be very ugly.” I pointed. “That’s why they show a picture of them at night. They use tricks like that all over the place in Qingdao. Your Uncle Nin almost fell for one.” She glanced at it. “Assume they’re decent looking.” “Then it’s alright.” “Is the pool good enough for your taste?” I smiled. “No, but I’ve got expensive tastes.” She sighed. I bopped her on the nose with the card. “If you come with your old Ba to this Canadian dinner party, I’ll buy a place three times as nice for you and your future boyfriend.”

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I thought she’d pout playfully at this, but she only glanced at me curiously for a long moment. I lay my cheek down on the table and tugged the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “I’m sure they meant ‘family.’ I won’t understand anything if you don’t go,” I whined. “I can’t. I have plans with a friend.” She pulled her arm away and my hand snapped back against my chest. Then, she washed out her bowl, took her bag, and left for school.

I cleaned the cat’s litter box. Tossing the smelly bits into a plastic bag and dumping it down the garbage chute. It was unnatural to live with an animal in a city apartment, I thought. In the countryside, cat caught mice, but here, what were they good for? Though I fed it just as often as Zhuzhu did, it didn’t even come to me when called. Zhuzhu had found the thing when it was a stray kitten. She had just bought the condo then, and brought it home to keep her company. When it started having seizures, she took it to the animal doctor and he said that it had some kind of condition, that it would need one pill a day for the rest of its life. When it came time each evening to give it the pill, the cat followed Zhuzhu to the kitchen and let her set it on the counter, tilt its head back, and pop the pink capsule in its mouth. I was searing tofu with sesame oil when I remembered the ad. I brought the laptop to the dinner table and logged in. Twenty had viewed my ad and three had responded. One didn’t say much about herself but asked for a photo. The second one was a graduate student in a medical field in the U.S. I dismissed it—too much distance. The third one described herself as thirty- four, someone who qualified for immigration under the “exceptional talent” visa, and attached a photo. I went back to my tofu while it loaded. Back in China, thirty-four was out of range for my buddies looking for female companionship. Women this age were too touchy, the conventional wisdom went—looking for insults everywhere and dropping hints at every turn about having a kid. I looked back to the screen. It was a typical glamour shot done in a studio where the skin was a nimbus of light, the hair a waterfall of black, and the eyes strained open in permanent surprise. But she was wearing a spandex aerobics costume instead of the usual frilly dress. There was clear muscle tone in her upper arm, a departure from the average Chinese woman, who dieted rather than exercised to keep their figure. And despite the usual manipulations, I could see that she was empirically pretty. I was curious despite myself. And she had included her phone number.

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She picked up on the second ring. “I knew you would call,” she said with a giggle after I identified myself. “Did you see my picture?” “Yes. Staggering. I felt guilty sitting on my behind eating even a simple dish of tofu after seeing it.” Giggles again. “Really? You don’t go to the gym, then?” “The gym? I’m just a country bumpkin. If I wanted to extend my expiration date, I drift down-river with my belly to the sky like our great leader Chairman Mao.” “Oh, I see. I know fake-modest men like you.” Her voice was thick with flirtation. “Fake modest? You overestimate me. Beggars can’t be braggarts, that’s all. Now what is this mysterious extraordinary talent of yours?” “What do you think?” Slowly drawn out. “Hmm. Well, how about this? I go sit in a coffee place or restaurant or bus stop of your choice in an hour, you stroll by and subtly scan me for potentials. If I ruffle the grain of your eyesight too much, you can just walk on by. If I pass, then I’ll deliver my conjecture of your special talent in person.” “One hour?” I could hear the momentum snag in her uncertainty and my interest level dropped. “Too soon? I’ve purposely designed a low-pressure situation where I relinquish all weapons at the gate.” She chuckled. “You’re trouble.” I smiled. “I get it. The thousand-taels-of-gold gentlelady doesn’t deign to give any consent except a silent one. Tell you what then. I’ll sit in the Starbucks at the North end of Chinatown in my old denim jacket. If you honor me, I’ll be honored. If not, the three cups of coffee won’t bankrupt me.” She didn’t answer except to groan and giggle some more. “So it’s set then,” I made as to hang up the phone. “Hey!” her voice emanated from the receiver. “The North end of Chinatown? Is that the place on Hanna Avenue?” ____

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She was good looking. Though the flesh flanking her nostrils had begun to sag a bit, her regular features and slim figure would peg her as youthful for quite a few years yet. She’d picked a long skirt and an office-looking blouse for the meeting. It was clearly an effortful outfit. I sat smiling in my jacket until she asked why I wasn’t drinking anything. “Here, get me one of whatever you’re drinking,” I said, taking out my American Express card and pushing it to her side of the table. Though I knew the Starbucks menu in Chinese backwards from all my trips there in Qingdao, the English names here looked long enough to trip me up. She looked at me skeptically. I put my hand together and bowed. “I wanted to wait for you first. After luring you out, the least I could do is offer a cup of posh foreign coffee.” She smirked and went to the counter. When she came back, the volume of foam on top of both drinks signaled her retaliation. I took a long, deep drink, wiping the foam off my nose afterwards. “You can have mine too if you want. This stuff isn’t good for me,” she said. I nodded. “A girl’s got to watch her figure.” She scoffed delicately, folding her napkin into tiny squares after wiping her mouth. “So, what is your answer?” she asked. “Ah. Your special talent. Judging by appearances, I’d say cosmetology. How did you make your eyebrows like that? You didn’t spring for one of those tattoo jobs, did you?” Her shove at my elbow was completely expected. I laughed, rubbing my palms down the length of my face as though wiping off a Peking opera mask. “Seriously for a minute, thank you for coming out and being on time. I hope I pass the first-glance test,” I said. She grinned. “My name is Tang Yijun. And your honorable name?” “Alana,” she said. “How do you spell that?” “A-l-a—wait, you still haven’t guessed seriously.” I surveyed her again. “Do you sing?” “Yes! I can sing all the Jay Chou songs. But that’s not it.” “You can cook? Hopefully? I would rather welcome a cook around the house.”

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She brightened at this. “I’m an aerobics pageant winner,” she finally announced. “Wah, really?” I was surprised. “So that’s how come the muscular arms.” She nodded. “I was Miss Asia two years ago.” I whistled. “If you disclosed that earlier, I would have picked a nicer place.” She smiled at this. “Your ad didn’t say much, but all the essentials are there. I like that.” “Well, there’s not much to say.” I shrugged. “I don’t have a special talent.” “Really?” She leaned her chin on the heel of her hand “What do you do?” I hesitated. Despite her playful balks, her motivations were straightforward enough. Like all women, she wanted a man of means. If I told the truth, I had no doubt the rest would be like pushing a boat into favorable currents. I decided on a half-truth. “I did fairly well inside the country in some business ventures. I’m looking to replicate that here, supplying food items to restaurants and parties,” I said. “Oh. Is that difficult work?” “Nothing can be more difficult than inside the country, where one day it’s an electric outage, another day, it’s an official troubling you about new permits, and the day after, it’s bribe- moochers pestering you about insuring your workers.” “Mmm.” She nodded. “It costs too much to insure the floating population.” “And no one will even do it. The new insurance companies just suck up the premiums and if a worker does get injured, you’d have to file a lawsuit just to get payment. You may as well use that lawsuit money to pay the guy’s medical costs yourself. Plus your competitors aren’t insuring. They’re in-laws with the officials overseeing this sector, so when they fudge with their bookkeeping the higher-ups open one eye and close the other so they slip through the cracks.” She nodded, her chin propped up on her hand. “It must have been very tiring to deal with such things all the time.” I could feel myself warming to her understanding. Inside the country, I had no one to complain to. Everyone was laboring under the same millstone. To put the unhappiness into words was to add to the aggravation. Yet here, now, recounting old frustrations to a pretty woman made me feel like it was all a long time ago. Could it all really be just three weeks in the past? I took a sip of my sugary drink and expanded further.

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“Take this instance of buying the land for our new factory. Do you know how many documents I’ve had to get stamped? There was the mayor’s office, the regional office, the district’s office, the special economics zone office. And at all these offices there are separate departments that also need to be consulted. At each step of the way, you’re expected to pay tribute. Cash, gifts, money, connections. Don’t misunderstand, I’m not naïve about the ways of the world. If these people just wanted some flesh off my back, I’d slice it off with my teeth clenched and be done with it. What’s unbearable is that they then go back on their word. Just when you think you had gotten stamps on every document you needed, they come and say that the original owners of the land had changed his mind, and that they could go talk to the guy as a favor to you if you’d agree to the travel expenses.” At this, my frustrations revved up again. “But this is all in the past. No need to get into it all again.” She nodded sympathetically. “You know what helps me when I feel like there’s no way out of life’s pressures? I go to church,” she said. “Oh. A Christian church?” I’d been handed pamphlets by groups banging on drums outside grocery stores and have glanced at them idly during TV commercials. The earnest tone had always turned me off. Nothing to me warranted such dramatics, not even the death of one’s birthmother. “Yes, I go every Sunday. This is one of the deficiencies amongst Chinese these days— the lack of a religion. It used to be that there’s plenty of faith and spirit but nothing to eat, but now, everything we want we can buy, but it’s all meaningless without something to believe in. Me, I believe in living an upright life, hurting no one and lying to no one.” “Sounds like Buddha, not Jesus,” I said with a chuckle. I wasn’t sure about women who fell face-first into foreign religions when they came abroad. Was it a kind of open-heartedness to be admired or just an empty head? But she was looking at me with a look of pique and I amended. “No no I admire a woman who approaches life with idealism. I can even accompany to you church, only I won’t kneel down and kowtow to any gold-coated statuettes. Now, if it were the 24-carat real thing, then we can talk.” She slapped the back of my hand with a grin and I caught her wrist. “Hey little girl, how did you get through school with your inability to keep your hands to yourself? No wonder you’re an aerobics queen. All that excess energy and no place to direct them.”

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She twisted out of my grasp, her cheeks flushed. “Did you go to school?” she changed the subject. “What a question.” “Did you go to a real recognizable university?” She was emboldened by my teasing. Otherwise, I knew, she wouldn’t have asked so directly. “Nope, just a technical college. But my sister and brother both went to a real university. I was the family shame.” “Really?” She didn’t know what to make of my lightness of tone. “And then, when my venture took off, guess who all changed their tune?” “Oh? And are you a filial son?” I must have let something show. She hurriedly talked over her own question. “I myself caused my parents some small disappointment because I never would focus on school. But then they saw that I was pretty and agreed that that capital was too good to waste. Now, they are comparatively content. I have a few more peaceful years before they find out that I am never going to have a child, that I don’t want children.” I nodded lightly. It was too big of an admission to make so casually so early. I waited her out. She watched me. “Do you have any children? You said that you were a widower, but…” I nodded. “Yes. She’s twenty-two. She’s a good girl.” “Ah. Does she live with you?” “Yes, or I live with her, I should say. She takes pity on her old Ba.” “What does that mean?” “It’s her condo.” I smiled. “You mean the condo is in her name?” She seemed to weigh her words. “Is that wise?” I was annoyed at this. “You’ve lived here for too long,” I said. “Are you saying that because I said I didn’t want to have a child?” I chuckled. “That’s a thief’s own guilty conscience talking.” She eyed me warily, and finally decided on a tactic of sincerity. “I like children. I really do. But I don’t think having one can realistically improve the quality of your life anymore. It’s too much responsibility. Too much risk.” I nodded. “A very enlightened woman,” I said dryly.

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She continued. “I watched my classmates become parents. And every one of them became ten times as stressed with no respite on the horizon. You hire the kids tutors, you cook them feasts, and when it comes for them to marry and have kids you even help them buy their apartment, and what do you get in return? The kids think they’re entitled to everything you give them and more. So do they really take care of you in your old age? Number one, no. Number two, you don’t need them to anymore. Not if you’re already doing well.” I sucked hard at my drink. My disappointment at this speech bothered me. Wasn’t she describing a life that I’d come here for? A life of lightness, living without entanglements or anchors? Perhaps it was only that it was bewildering coming from a woman. The man pushed toward lightness, the woman pulled back toward earth. It was like this in all the relationships I knew. Where would we drift off to if neither of us said stop? “I’m sure your daughter is not like that,” she said soothingly. “She’s old enough to be from an earlier generation compared today’s kids.” I finished my drink and put it down with a crisp bang. “Look, I’m already finished and you still have half left. How’s a guy suppose to lure you to lunch if you guard all advances so carefully?” She combed through her hair with her fingers, savoring her victory. When I went to throw my cup away, she retreated to the bathroom. She took her time freshening up.

I let her choose the restaurant and she sagely picked a midrange Chinese one. Both of us kept it light over three courses of soup, spicy pork and chestnuts, and shaved ice. She asked about childhood scrapes and I offered up movie reviews. By the time only a tea set littered the table, it was three in the afternoon. “Don’t you have work you need to do today?” she asked, a finger tracing the rim of her cup in restless circles. “I’d cleared a long swathe in my schedule for you,” I said. I’d let drop during lunch that I lived on the lake. If she didn’t suggest it herself, I was going to invite her on a walk. She surprised me by skipping the step altogether. “I want to see your place—the view, the swimming pool,” she announced. “That’s a good idea.” I kept my face composed. It was Wednesday, I’d forgotten Zhuzhu’s class schedule, but she rarely came home early. In the three weeks since I’d been here,

135 except for the courtesy dinner for her former host family, I’d never invited anyone over. I sneaked at look at Alana. She was taking out a makeup mirror from her purse. It was difficult to read her. She hailed a taxi, saying she couldn’t walk the twenty blocks in her high heels. The ease with which she communicated with the driver in English filled me with admiration. I envisioned wandering around Toronto with her by my side. We could take taxis everywhere then, and go into all types of restaurants and stores. Maybe I could even get a driver’s license instead of only sitting beside Zhuzhu. Though I had one in China, I’d thought it was best not to drive here. What if I got into an accident when I was out alone? The police can blame anything on me if I couldn’t even speak the language to defend myself. She was impressed at the building and let it show, smiling at the doorman, taking my arm through the lobby and up the elevator. I offered to take her up to the pool first but she declined. When I unlocked the door to the condo her eyes brightened. “This carpet is like snow,” she said, slipping off her shoes and taking a couple of swiping steps like she was skiing. I looked at her bare feet with dark red nail polish. She flexed her toes for my benefit, bracing her hand on the back of the couch and standing on the outer edge of each foot, her ankles twisting into a startling L. “Be careful,” I warned, stepping toward her. She held on to my arms and pulled herself to the flats of her feet again. Her grasp was firm and she didn’t let go. “I’ve danced for more than seventeen years,” she said. I felt a tiny fit of dizziness then. Though I’ve had several women while my wife was still alive and more after she’d passed, in each case there’d been understandings. The xiaojies in the massage parlors had wanted money and a brisk progression in silence, the personal secretary had wanted gifts, wheedling, and discretion, yet what this woman wanted could only be too much or too little, and the uncertainty made me nervous. I kept my hands on her shoulders and felt the weight of her lean. I wanted to ask something, just a small cinch of understanding. “Really? Like this?” I wanted to say. But she had already half-closed her eyes and her hand went up to the back of my neck and inched up into my hair. Before I could decide to, I was holding her by the small of her back and her hair swung in to brush the sides of my face and there was nothing else to do but close in.

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When I woke up, the room was dim. A square of light was emblazoned on the wall from the light outside the window. I sat up quickly. Beside me, Alana followed suit. She had the comforter pulled up to her chest and her hair was a dark torrent. “I think your daughter is here,” she said timidly. I looked under the door. The light in the living room was on. I cursed under my breath. I must have been sleeping for hours. I must’ve been getting old. Alana shifted off the bed and got dressed hunched over, her back toward me and the comforter still draped over her shoulders. I went to the door and opened it a crack, making sure to turn the knob silently. I could hear the TV on in the living room. Zhuzhu had a TV in her own room and usually watched it there. She must have known someone was here, I thought. I turned, Alana was standing in her clothes now, fidgeting with her hair. I looked at her bare feet. “You left your shoes out there,” I said, feeling my face fall. She flinched. “I didn’t think too much,” she said defensively. “No.” I rubbed my eyes. My foot shook faster and faster on the carpet as I thought hard in futile circles. “Fuck, just get this over with,” I said, opening the door and walking out. I must have walked fast, the cat darted away at my approach and Zhuzhu looked up from the couch. I looked toward the front door. The black heels stood unmistakable. Untouched. “Have you eaten?” I asked, picking up the shoes and heading back in. She didn’t answer and I didn’t expect her to. Back in the bedroom, I set the shoes before Alana. She stepped into them without touching me for balance. I fell back into bed and sighed. When I heard the front door open and the shut, I shut the bedroom door and went back to sleep.

The cat came out onto the balcony while I was watering the pepper plants the next day. It planted one gray paw out onto the cool cement, sniffed at the air, and then stalked over to an opening between two clay pots, leaning out between the railing and tilting its head left and right at the world below.

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“Jump,” I said, and it pulled its head back and looked at me. I laughed. In the morning, Zhuzhu had taken off before I got back from my run. The pool had been filled with strangers. Two more replies had trickled into my ad’s reply box. I called no one, and no one called me. The cat’s nose twitched as it smelled the perforated leaves of the pepper plant. In all the mornings that I’d watered the plants, it had never joined me, watching instead from behind the sliding door, rapt with attention at the birds that perched on the railing, the butterflies that flitted between the plants. “Guaiguai,” I said its name. It looked at me for the briefest of seconds and opened its furry mouth to take in the tip of a shriveled pepper bud. I crouched down and reached toward it. It started, but then, as if by instinct, arched up into my palm as I touched down on its back. I slid my hand down the slope of its spine. Its fur was smooth and soft, the pupils of its huge green eyes narrowed to pins in the sunlight. “What’s this? Your job is to ignore me, remember?” I reached under its neck and worried my fingertips into the soft fur of its chest. It blinked blearily and it ducked its head under the margin of my hand, crushing its soft ears against my palm and dragging its body through so that my hand sailed down its head, its neck, its back. It curled its tail around my calf. When the purring began, I lifted it up onto my lap. It lifted its chin to look at my face, trying to make up its mind about me. Suddenly the front door opened with a swoosh and Guaiguai jumped down, rounded the sliding door, and disappeared inside. I peered in. Zhuzhu was home, bending down to pet Guaiguai, who rubbed against her ankles. Beside her was the figure of another girl, probably a friend of hers from school, I thought. She was tall and pretty, wearing a leather jacket and high heels. I strode in, a bit embarrassed to be barefoot in my old broadcloth pants. I opened my mouth to say hi, but suddenly remembered Alana’s departure last evening and hesitated. Zhuzhu eyed me guardedly. “This is a classmate of mine,” she said, pointing slackly at the girl. “Welcome.” I said awkwardly. If she were older, I’d have offered to shake her hand. She seemed to be appraising me, nodding slightly and saying nothing. Casually she ran her fingers like a comb through her hair. She had a weird haircut. The front part looked shorter. It must’ve been some sort of fad. “What’s your name?” I asked.

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“This is Angela,” Zhuzhu said, heading into the hall and tugging at the girl’s sleeve. The two of them headed to Zhuzhu’s room and closed the door. I heard lock click. I tried to find something to do. I went into the kitchen and looked in the refrigerator, searching out ingredients to make lunch. But I wasn’t in the mood to make anything complicated. Finally, I dumped some of Zhuzhu’s wafers into a bowl and pour in some milk. I ate the dish on the couch. In all the time that I’d been here, Zhuzhu had never brought anyone home. Down the hall, I heard the cat scratching at Zhuzhu’s bedroom, wanting in. The door clicked open and I could hear her friend’s voice. “Right now. The bank next to the school library. It’d be very quick.” And then Zhuzhu shushed her, and the door shut again. I walked as lightly as I could down the hall. The low hums of conversation emanated from Zhuzhu’s room. I pasted my ear against the door. “I just don’t know if I can open my mouth,” Zhuzhu was saying, “he’s my Ba.” “Julia, Julia, Julia,” the other girl said, “there’s no way he doesn’t know already. He’s just playing dumb and counting on your not wanting to open your mouth.” For several seconds, there was only the sound of shuffling papers. I closed my hand around the doorknob and tested. They hadn’t locked it after letting in the cat. I pressed the door open. At the sight of me, Zhuzhu hurried to her feet and tried to push me out, but my foot was wedged against the door. Behind her on the floor, her friend shoved a clutch of papers back into an envelope. An open briefcase, apparently pulled out from under the bed, lay open next to her. “What are you doing?” I asked, peering into the briefcase. It seemed to be filled with brown envelopes. I could also make out a photo album. “Nothing.” Zhuzhu’s foot pushed against mine, trying to loosen my grip. Maybe it was the years of dodging potential traps from the officials in Qingdao, but the sight of documents alarmed me. I would have been less alarmed if the briefcase had been filled with cash. “I’m going to ask you again.” I looked hard into Zhuzhu’s eyes and lowering my voice. The last time I’d used this on her, she was just a little girl. She flinched, but gave the door one more push.

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I pushed past her and lunged at the briefcase. Her friend on the floor didn’t make a move to stop me. I pulled the papers out of the first envelope I grabbed and looked at them. Visa documents from Qingdao. Zhuzhu’s headshot was at the top. Was this all? I looked at her friend and she smirked at me. “We were just putting some documents in order,” she said, “I was telling Julia that it’s safer to keep them in a safe-deposit box in a bank.” I looked at the envelope she’d anchored under her palm and held out my hand. “Let me see,” I said. She didn’t move. Zhuzhu wedged herself between the two of us. “Stop embarrassing yourself,” she said acidly. I exploded. “I’m embarrassing myself? In front of who? Two rude kids who don’t know who’s big and who’s small?” Behind Zhuzhu came the deliberately drawl of her friend. “Tell us then, Mister Big Shot, who is big and who is small?” I pushed Zhuzhu aside and plopped down on the floor so that I was eye level to her. “What is it with kids like you? You think if you plug up your own ears to go steal a bell, the whole world goes deaf?” She yawned exaggeratedly. “Sorry, stupid kids like us can’t decode allegories.” Zhuzhu pulled at my shoulder, but I ignored her and leaned in closer to her friend. “You can drop the hooligan act. I’ve plenty of experience with people like you inside the country. Now, you two come home in the middle of the day, lock the door, and open up a briefcase full of documents. What have you got to hide?” This seemed to only amuse her. She sat still and smiling. I considered my options. Zhuzhu was standing behind me, but if I had the element of surprise on my side, I could dodged her and make it to the bathroom. I made a move to get up. “Well,” I said with a groan, “I’m not going to waste any more time—.” I leapt forward and snatched the envelope out from under the girl’s palm. She reeled back in surprise and Zhuzhu shouted. I whirled around and headed for the bathroom, locking myself in. The two of them banged on the door. “Open up! Open up!”

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I pulled the papers out. The words were all in English and the paper was heavy and embossed with an official watermark. I scanned it for words I’d recognize, but in my dread, all I understood was Zhuzhu’s name and our address. And then I understood. I caught sight of myself in the mirror. My face looked petrified and blue-green, the color of a vein. “What are you going to do with the condo?” I tried to keep my voice calm. The banging stopped. Finally, the friend’s voice came on, slick and placating. “Come out and we’ll tell you.” I clenched and unclenched my hand. The vision of my daughter’s face on the other side of the door filled me with a suffocating despair. “You are selfish and ungrateful and horrible,” I said through my teeth. Some buzzes of whispers sounded from the other side, then came Zhuzhu’s voice. “This isn’t inside the country anymore. You can’t push everyone around just because you have money.” They waited for my response. When there was only silence, the two of them whispered some more, and then walk down the hall. The front door closed a few seconds later.

As soon as I came out into the empty living room, I was panicked. In reality, it was irrational. The condo was in Zhuzhu’s name, yes, and so was much of my net worth—my accountant friend had advised me to split it into multiple accounts to avoid paying higher taxes. But I had more than enough to live comfortably for the rest of my life. Yet it was the idea that my own daughter would kick me out of the condo that I’d paid for that pushed me into the uncharted. It’s only been seven years. Was that all it took to change someone into an entirely different person? I rushed out the door after the two. They’d taken the elevator down. I watched the numbered lights descend and took the next one after them. By the time I was out on the street, I could only catch the barest glimpse of their backs about four blocks down. I sprinted after them, though there were few other pedestrians, in the cars that whizzed by, I could see necks craning toward me. I forced myself to slow down to a jog. But then it was too late, a taxicab stopped at their waving and they got in, taking off away from me. I walked on with my hands shoved in my pocket. I was wearing only a T-shirt and wrinkled pants. Normally when I went out, even if it was to the convenience store down the

141 block, I wore my loafers and the Prada sport coat. I shuffled past a staring woman with my head to the ground. They’d probably gone back to the school campus, I thought. Zhuzhu and I had driven past it once and she’d pointed out the library. She was probably in there now. Maybe I could catch her. The idea of her spending more time with this girl, plotting against me, made me walk faster. I plodded on past the plate glass buildings surrounded by trimmed bushes, past the fenced trees and potted geraniums lining the sidewalk. It was amazing how everything looked fresh here, like it had just dried off after a good rain. Yet it was also amazing how everything looked the same. The more intersections I passed, the more mixed-up in the head I became. All the logos on storefront shingles I knew I’d seen before, yet did I see them on this walk or a previous walk? Maybe in a different city? Or perhaps only on TV? I could only look toward the skyscrapers in the distance as guideposts. I zigzagged through the intersections, keeping tracking of the direction of my travels as if I were crossing a desert. Several tall business buildings that took up entire blocks tripped me up. I would round two sides, forget how many I’d rounded, and end up retracing my steps. It was like the all the neat cleanliness meant that nothing stuck to me, my mind slid through the streets gathering no friction, my feet strode upon ether. After about twenty blocks of meandering, I sat down on a bench. I was sweating on a cool day. I wanted a cup of tea. But a quick check of my pockets revealed that I hadn’t brought my wallet, only my phone. This wouldn’t do. What if someone at the university asked for identification? I didn’t know enough English to explain myself. Yet to head home meant that I had to retrace all the streets I’d meandered. I strained my eyes toward the horizon. I couldn’t see a single familiar building. I scrolled through the list of contacts on my phone. The only people I knew in Toronto were my immigration and tax attorneys and Zhuzhu’s old host family. Then the highlight bar fell upon Alana. I didn’t even know her last name. She answered the phone without saying anything. I had to check the screen to see that she had picked up. “Hey, how are you?” I asked, rolling out a smile to get myself in character. “Fine. What is it?” She was stony. I understood that only a big noisy gust could bust through it quickly.

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“Hey! I’m here sitting at the corner of… something-something street and something- something-else street—I can send you a snapshot of the signs. In this vast ocean of disorienting foreignness, you’re the only one I could think of to call. Like your favorite Buddhist sutra says: boundless is the bitter sea, but to find your landing, all you have to do is look back.” There was another second of nothing, and then soft giggling. Warmth flooded through me. I could almost believe in everything I said. “So, what, you’re lost somewhere?” she play-scolded. “Correct!” I tried to sound jovial. “And if you come rescue me, I have something very important to ask you.” I could hear her shift in the background. “I can do it in about an hour,” she said. “Why? Are you in the middle of an exercise routine? Put it off for a day. You’re fit enough—take it on good authority.” “Really, I’m in the middle of something right now. Either you wait an hour or I can’t do it at all.” Her voice was all business. Suddenly I felt my place. “Okay. An hour then. I’ll send you the photos.” “Fine.” “Thank you for agree to help,” I said, as if we were strangers.

When she showed up, she was in jeans and a white button-up shirt. “Is this Miss Asia?” I teased. “Today you look more like a Model Worker of the Year.” She was all smiles again. “What was it you wanted to ask me?” she asked as we headed back. “Oh. I was invited to dinner at my neighbors’ on Saturday night. Will you go with me?” I’d returned a note to George and Bernice this morning before my run, copying down the translated message from the computer and then slipping it under their door while it was still dark out. “Are these Canadians?” She was shrewd. “Yes.” I needed her to translate. “Alright.” she gave me a close-mouthed smile. Her eyelashes appeared unnaturally long. I wondered if they were fake. “You never told me what you did these days,” I nudged.

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She shrugged. “I have friends here. I keep them company.” I nodded. This was euphemism for doing nothing. I remembered something a buddy of mine from back home said about women like this: They were like potted flowers. If you decided on them, you installed them in your house and kept them watered and pruned. They are your responsibility thereafter. And what you got in return was that they would not be in anyone else’s house except your own. She was at the stage of browsing houses. “You were with a friend when I called?” So long as we were on this path, I might as well clear it to the horizon. She hesitated, but nodded. She was a good girl at heart, incapable of lying without blinking. In this situation, “friend” was a euphemism for “boyfriend.”

The doorman looked me askance when I came back in. I remembered the way I’d rushed out after the girls and cringed. Inside the country, I’d never even looked service people like these in the eye. The old blonde woman waiting for the elevator seemed to hesitate about stepping in when she saw me slumped against the handrail in the back. By the time I returned to my own home and locked the door, my temples were throbbing. I put on the TV and sank into the couch. It was late September now. In China, train stations would be swollen to bursting for the National Day holidays. All the mountains, beaches, historical pagodas in the country would be littered with kebab sticks and plastic bottles from the tourist hordes. I clicked over to the block of Chinese channels. An interview program with a snaggle-toothed young man was on. The pretty big-eyed interviewer asked him questions about his childhood. How he felt when his mother died. How that had led him to take solace in his music. When he went to answer, a sentimental tickling piano chimed in. I switched to the news and watched footage of queues swirling around a train station in Beijing, the dour-faced clerk in her olive cap glancing with contempt at the huddle of faces at her ticket window and plucked lazily at the brandished wads of cash. I felt a little better. The cat padded from the balcony curtains toward its food dish in the kitchen. I waited until the crunching stopped before I went it and scooped it up, taking it back to the couch with me. It’s fur felt good as I pet it, but it refused to sit down, nosing for escape. I tried to corral it with my arm, but it skipped out and jumped down onto the carpet and started licking its paw, its

144 eyes closed and its head bobbing vigorously. I reached out and scratched it on the head. It tolerated this for a few seconds before moving away. I grabbed hold of the skin on the back of its neck and lifted it back onto my lap, hoping it’d stay. But this time it hopped down right away, giving me a look of reproach. I stood up and it dashed away, worming into the crevice between the loveseat and the wall. I pushed the love seat away from the wall and the cat, seeing it was trapped, tried to hurtle out between my ankles. I moved my feet together and my ankles gripped it by its sides like a vise. It squirmed and shrieked in complaint. I reached down to grab its neck again and it scratched at me with its claws. I held each of its arms in my hands and it kicked up its back legs, trying to get at my arms. Finally it twisted its head to the side and sank its teeth into my wrist. I screamed, throwing it off. It landed on its feet, hissed at me, and ducked under the dining table. I examined my wound. Drops of blood left rust colored trails down my arm. I ducked my head under the tabletop, the cat flattened its ears back and hissed defiantly. My mind slid into a white space, then. I went into the utility closet in the hall and found a black duffle bag, went into the kitchen and put on rubber gloves, then ducked under the table and caught the grumbling cat by the torso. I stuffed it into the bag, unhooked its claws from the zipper, and zipped it shut. I removed my gloves, waiting until it calmed down a bit before slinging the bag over my shoulder and going out the door. I kept my head down in the lobby. Outside, I headed two blocks north, found an alleyway in between two clothing stores and headed in. I put the bag on its side on the ground, unzipped it, and shook the cat out. It looked around uncertainly, looking at me for a moment and then sniffed the ground. I turned on my heels and left.

Zhuzhu came home late that night. I’d hid away the deed of the condo in my bedroom and bandaged my wound. At 9:12, I heard her footsteps trail around the condo. At 9:44, she knocked on my door. Her knock startled me. The thumps sounded like a bout of iron hoofs. She’d never knocked on my door before. “Where has the cat gone?” she asked when I opened the door. I blinked at her. In the dim of the hall, her expression was hard to make out. “Did you and your little friend come up with some more good ideas?”

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She looked sheepish for a second, but then braced her feet apart. “Don’t change the subject. Where is the cat?” “The two of you left the door open in your wake, it ran out after you,” I said. Her face fell, but then her eye narrowed. “Why would it do that?” “I don’t know. It’s your cat.” “Even if it went out the door of the apartment, it would have been stuck on the floor.” “Maybe somebody took it.” “No one around here would do something like that.” “Why? You live here, and you would force your own father out of his home.” I didn’t have enough strength left for the night to face the fight that this remark would start, but I couldn’t help it. She took a step back, looking stricken. I felt a little bit of hope at this. Throughout the confrontation earlier, it was only her friend who’d spoken the sentences that haunted me, not her. “What did I ever do that has let you down?” I asked. It was a sign of weakness to enquire after your opponent’s motivations, I knew from countless insult matches with countless louts back home. But she was my daughter. I needed to know. Her eyes lost focus for a minute, and I could hear the list that she was compiling in her mind: I shipped her off to fend for herself when she was only fifteen; I visited only three times in seven years, each time spending more time with lawyers than with her; I sent her grandparents to an old folks home though they’d begged to live with us; I brought a strange woman home who lived off boyfriends; I’d been too busy making money to notice her mother’s cancer. But she seemed at a loss for words, her lips parted then closed, parted then closed. My instincts rose up again. Now was the time to harness her guilt. “What did I ever do to deserve to be turned out of my own home by my own daughter?” She started as if something popped. “You did something to Guaiguai. I know you did!” she cried, and then lunged at me. I closed my eyes, anticipating her nails, her hands choking my neck. But she’d only clumsily grasped my shoulders and shook them like some answer would tumble out. I braced against the doorframe so that I wouldn’t slip, but my teeth clattered.

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All day Friday I avoided Zhuzhu. When I went for my run in the morning, I saw that she had pasted fliers of the missing cat in the elevators and the lobby. They flapped in the morning wind from streetlights and electric poles and stopped just a few meters from the lakefront. I forced myself not to tear them off and ended my run early. Back home, I opened a bottle of Scotch Whiskey that I was saving for Zhuzhu’s graduation and sipped from it all day while I shopped online for English learning tapes, and then a leather jacket, and finally organic ginseng that claimed to help strengthen memory. Come night, I drifted into a muddled sleep. What Zhuzhu did all day I didn’t know. I woke up on Saturday afternoon feeling mired in mud. A tour of the living area showed that Zhuzhu had already left. I thought about pulling the briefcase case out from under her bed— see what other schemes she might be planning, but I didn’t have the strength. I would call my lawyer on Monday about the title of the condo. For tonight, I would seek to make some friends and put down some roots in this world. After a quick snack of pickled eggs in the late afternoon, I showered and put on gray slacks and a black silk shirt. At 7:30 Alana paged from downstairs. She was wearing a cream colored blouse and a metallic gold skirt. Her high heels looked unsturdy and her ankles wobbled with her steps. “Thanks for coming, You look very nice.” I said in the elevator. She smiled to herself, inching her hand over on the handrail and fondling the opening of my sleeve with her pinkie. I captured her hand and kissed it. Anyone who’d walked in then would no doubt have assumed that we were in pure, legitimate love. We were in my living room, having a glass of wine at the bar when the tumbler of the front door clicked. Oh no, I thought. Zhuzhu stopped in her tracks when she saw Alana. At least she was alone. Beside me, Alana slipped off her stool and half-hid behind me, gripping her wineglass tight. Zhuzhu walked into the kitchen slowly, opened the refrigerator door, and stood there for a long time. When she shut it without taking anything, I knew something had been decided in her head. She looked at the bottle of chardonnay on the counter and poured herself a glass. Then she walked over to the bar and joined us. “Hello,” she said to Alana in English, “I’m Julia.” I searched her face for clues, but found only calm. She didn’t look at me.

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“I’m Alana.” She finally said, putting her hand in Zhuzhu’s outstretched hand. For a second, I thought Zhuzhu might suddenly break—throw her drink on Alana, pull her hard and throw her to the floor. But she’d only smiled politely, her gaze spreading over to me like we too were strangers meeting for the first time. “Do you like this condo?” Zhuzhu switched to Chinese. “Yes, very beautiful.” Alana’s posture relaxed and she turned to beam at me. “Yes, I think so too.” Zhuzhu took a sip of her wine. “When I first found the place, I thought I’d wanted to live here for a long time. But it seems that my father likes it too,” she said, looking at me plainly now without irony or rancor. “You two have similar tastes then,” Alana said, leaning toward Zhuzhu confidentially, trying to warm her up. “Yes.” Zhuzhu smiled. “There are many things we have in common.” “You want to sit down for a bit?” Alana gestured toward the bar stools. Zhuzhu raised her glass toward the ceiling and finished her wine in one long gulp. “No need, I just came home to get my purse.” She put her empty glass on the bar and leaned in to touch my forearm. I had to keep myself from breathing in hard, it’s been so long since she’d touched me. “Stay as long as you want,” she said, looking me in the eye. “This is your home.” And then, turning to Alana like she was explaining a previous understanding between us, she said, “I’m twenty-two and almost finished with college, you see? It’s about time I got a place of my own.” Alana nodded and Zhuzhu headed out the door. “Goodbye Alana, goodbye Ba,” she called from the foyer when I couldn’t see her anymore.

George opened the door wearing tan pants and a red polo shirt. If he was surprised to see Alana, he didn’t let it show. “Hey, Bob!” He staggered back like our appearance was a complete surprise. “And Mrs. Bob. Welcome, welcome.” “Oh, I’m just a friend,” Alana said, flustered and looking to me for help. “I’m not married,” I said. “My wife is...is dead.” “Oh, I’m sorry,” George said, looking confused.

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“I have daughter,” I said by way of clearing it up. Bernice came over, her floor length print skirt almost skimming the floor. “So glad you could come,” she gushed, placing her hands on the crooks of my elbows and leaning in to kiss me cheek. I fought back an urge to retreat at her advance and stood rod-straight, getting a whiff of her flowery perfume. She exchanged cheek kisses with Alana next, who went through the delicate dance with enviable naturalness. “Now, who has a daughter?” Bernice asked. “Me,” I said. Bernice looked to Alana with the same confused look as her husband’s. Alana gave me an annoyed look and whispered so softly in Chinese that I had to incline my ear to her mouth and ask again. “What are you trying to say? What’s your daughter got to do with anything?” “They think my daughter is my wife, I think.” “Oh.” She smiled broadly at George and Bernice. “He has a daughter who lives with him who is quite grown-up,” she said. “Ah, so that’s who lives with you,” Bernice said. “Does she go to school?” “Yes.” She seemed to be expecting more. But I didn’t have the vocabulary to go on. George cut in. “Would you like some wine? Miss—“ “Alana.” “Alana. What a beautiful name.” “Thank you.” She tittered with pleasure. “Simple. Sophisticated,” Bernice agreed. “Yes, I picked many names before this one. But none of them feels like myself,” she said. “Oh yes.” Bernice nodded seriously. “That’s the most important thing of all. I envy you all the opportunity of picking your own name. That’s really neat.” “I think, new country, new me.” Her voice was taking on the sing-song quality of someone talking for the whole room to overhear. I could only half understand what she was saying, and so drifted off in my mind to survey the room. The carpet was an impractical white. The sofas and coffee all had legs curled into upside-down commas, and on the walls hung carved

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African masks. They’d turned off all the overhead lights even though they looked to be expensive chandeliers. The only light came from the pink shaded lamps on the side tables, giving the room an intimate feel. Atmosphere—that was what foreigners were good at that we Chinese just didn’t have the gut feeling for. Though Zhuzhu had taken pains to furnish our living room with an imposing stone carved coffee table and leather sofas, the place looked barren and artificial, like a furniture catalogue. I wondered if she would take them with her when she moved away. The thought made me wish that Bernice would hurry up with the wine. “So, what do you think of the place, Bob?” asked George. “Good, good,” I said, nodding with my whole body. “How much is this?” I pointed at a mask, chuckling. Alana made an impatient move with her arm and frowned. “Just kidding,” I said, ruffling the air with my hands. George and Bernice looked to each other and laughed confusedly. Bernice went into the kitchen then. George gestured for us to sit down. “Now this mask I got in Tanzania,” he said, launching into a story complete with hand gestures. I looked at Alana. She was backing him up fully, her soprano laugh harmonizing with his booming baritone one. She’d sat herself a good ruler’s length away from me. I stood up. “Bathroom?” I said. George pointed with his finger and Alana gave me a pursed mouthed look. When I was in the hall she caught up with me. “Don’t ask how much things cost. Don’t say ‘bathroom,’ say ‘restroom,’” she hissed all in a rush and then disappeared. I found my way to the bathroom and locked the door. Sitting down on the toilet and looking at my shoes, I tried to recall some meditation technique my father had tried to teach me. Alana’s English was better than I’d thought, but it wasn’t picking up the slack for me. In fact, her reactions were reminding me of the first days that I got here, going to the bank with Zhuzhu to set up my account and her flustered coldness: leaning her elbow on the counter to talk to the teller and blocking me from view with her hand, walking fast as if trying to lose me. I turned on the faucet and splashed some cold water on my face. All the towels in the room matched and were embossed with English letters. How much effort did it take to keep everything just so like this in a household, I wondered. There was a crescendo of excited voices from the living room and a sucking in of the walls. “Libby!” I heard George say, and a surprising lightness came over me. I went out to join

150 them. She looked as good as I remembered, standing tall in a camel colored sweater dress and flat shoes, smiling politely at George and Bernice. When she saw me she gave me a slight nod. Alana hung back a little from the huddle, looking uncertainly from my face to Libby’s. “Well, isn’t this something. We thought both of you were married and it turns out that neither of you are,” George said to me. I looked at Libby questioningly. Bernice rubbed her husband’s wrist. “George,” she chided. “Nothing wrong with it at all. Bernice and I were together for nearly ten years before we got married. Over in Europe no one gets married anymore and I think they’re onto something. Love is all we need. Cheers!” George gestured with his wineglass. Bernice hurried to hand me a glass of red wine and I took a long gulp after the toast, peering at Libby, who stood with a mild smile, her hands clasped behind her back. Bernice signaled for us to go to the table then. From the corner of my eye, I saw Alana’s eyes fixed meaningfully on mine. “What?” I whispered to her, hanging behind the others, who filed into the dining room. “Who is that?” she asked. “Another neighbor.” “Is she from China too.” “Yes. What’s the matter?” She ignored this. “What does she do?” “I don’t know. But she’s pregnant.” She seemed mollified by this, nodding slowly. I started toward the others, caught my wrist and leaned toward my ear. “Don’t drink so much in a single sip if it’s wine. If it’s harder liquor, you can. I’ll give you a signal then,” she whispered, and then moved to join the others before I could react. George and Bernice made most of the conversation then. Beside me, Alana chimed in often either in agreement or laughter. Twice she nudged me under the table with her foot. I tried to comply, watching for an entry to join in the laughter. Yet from across the table, Libby’s calm watchfulness was heating a slow embarrassment under my skin. She ate her salad deliberately, handling her fork and knife with soft-fingered agility. When George expansively asked her what in the world she did all day, she shrugged.

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“Just, hang out?” Bernice prodded. “I used to work in a bakery,” Libby said. “I love bakeries,” Alana said. “I love all kinds of cakes and pies. But I can’t eat too much because I would get fat.” “Hey, you don’t need to worry much about that,” George said, holding his stomach like a jug and laughed good-naturedly. I sneaked a look at Bernice, but she showed no sign of embarrassment. “You Asians all stay so slim, and look so young” she mused. Alana looked tentatively at Libby and then at me. Libby only smiled absently. I said, “no, no, thank you” to be modest about the compliment. Alana gave me a pinched look. “What are you going to name your baby?” Bernice asked Libby. Libby shifted uncomfortably at this. “I don’t know yet,” she said to her salad. “Because we were just discussing names—Alana and I—before you arrived,” Bernice said hurriedly. “Alana said she tried on several names before settling on hers. What about you?” Libby laughed as if sharing an inside joke with herself. “What?” Bernice asked, looking to the rest of us for help. George shifted awkwardly. Alana concentrated on her salad, stabbing several cucumbers onto her fork. Libby still said nothing. “Hey! You tell me I look like Bob, my lawyer say I look like Jackie Chan,” I unveiled the joke I’d prepared earlier, trying to break the silence. Both George and Bernice loudly at this. “Tell him I agree with him!” George said. I was feeling pleased until I caught Alana’s look. It was a look of unspeakable disdain. It wasn’t even aimed at me now. Instead, she stared at her hands clasped in her lap, one thumb worrying the other like she was digging for bone. “Leave if you want,” I hissed to her in Chinese before I could stop myself. She looked at me, startled, and then checked Bernice and George furtively. Her relief when she saw that they were still laughing was so visible that I excused myself. “Bathroom,” I announced loudly. George patted me on the arm as I passed. I walked blindly down the dark hall. The door to the kitchen was open and a cool wind blew in from the window. Years of being a smoker lured me to it by instinct. Outside, the city lights spread in celestial disarray. I pressed my nose against the screen, drawing a long breath.

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When I turned to go back, Libby was standing behind me, a stack of salad plates in her hands. “The chicken will take a while,” she said in Chinese. This confused me for a second before I registered the smell of roast chicken in the air. “Do you want to go back?” she asked, her voice so ghostly in the unlighted room that for a second, I thought she’d meant China. “No,” I said. “Let’s go outside for a bit,” she said.

I didn’t even realize that she’d pushed the elevator button for the twenty-second floor until the doors opened and I saw the pool. Though it was getting colder by the hour, she lay herself down on a lounge chair. I did the same on the one beside her, looking up at the starry sky and feeling the wine tiding warmly from my vitals to my limbs. “Don’t let me fall asleep. We should go back in fifteen minutes,” I said. I’d mimed a cigarette-holding gesture at George before we left. I figured any longer than that and the mess would be too big to clean up. She turned on her chair. “I didn’t want to come, but my host family saw the invitation and said that I should.” I turned toward her. “Host family? Are you here for school? Your accent speaking English is so pure.” “I came here when I was twelve years old.” The conversation from the other day came back to me. “Your Chinese is so good. And I’m from Qingdao too,” I said, thinking about Zhuzhu. What would she be like when she was Libby’s age? She didn’t seem surprised at this and stretched with a happy groan. “I want to go back again. See the mountains, the beaches.” “Planes take off and land every day.” I sniggered, thinking if was mountains and beaches she wanted, all she had to do was look to the horizon. “Yes,” she agreed. “After my host family pays me, I’m buying a ticket. I’m selling my egg,” she said with a laugh. “But don’t tell anyone.”

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“How does that work?” My mind was racing. So she wasn’t pregnant after all. She hadn’t drunk any wine, so that wasn’t an excuse for her unprompted revelation. Was this her roundabout way of broaching a loan? “I fill out a seventeen-page application and reveal everything about myself. Favorite color. Favorite book. They deem my genes to be worthy, and ask me to stay with them during the donation period so that they could keep an eye on me.” Her voice was dreamy. “Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say. “Even though I have no job, no directions, they want my egg because I went to McGill, because I did well on IQ tests.” “What’s McGill?” I asked “The best university in Canada.” “Oh,” I said again. If we’d been downstairs I never would have asked the next question, but because we were wrapped in the night wind and looking at the sky, the spaciousness made it okay. “Why do you have no direction?” She sighed. “My parents died. My boyfriend left. But those aren’t reasons, really. I just went to my job one day and couldn’t concentrate anymore.” “The bakery?” She laughed. “No, that was the job I got after I left my real job. I liked doing physical work. It kept my mind calm, but then I messed up a few orders and was fired from that too.” “So now you sell eggs,” I said, forcing a chuckle. I wanted to tell her to pull herself up, that she didn’t know how lucky she was, that there were a billion people in China with real pressures in life who would love to trade their lives for hers. She rubbed her hand over her stomach. “Just one. It’s strange to think that I will have a child out there in the world, another version of me.” “Is this a foreign family?” I asked, and then laughed at myself. We were the foreigners here, of course. “No, Chinese. Strange, isn’t it? We cross thousands of miles to arrive here and then we don’t let go.” I scoffed, “I’m letting go. All my family and property are here now. A good horse never turns back to graze upon old fields.”

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She said nothing for a long while. I maneuvered the angle of my head so that I could see the pool. It glowed incandescent from the underwater lights, the far edge dropping off into the black, weightless night. I was still young, I thought, Zhuzhu was still getting used to my presence after seven years apart, Alana’s unease was not unreasonable, my English tapes would arrive soon. “Do you know what my Chinese name is? It’s Li Bing. I was like your girlfriend—I picked a name when I first came here. At twelve years old, I was Tiffany. When I moved in high school, I thought Tiffany was too unserious, so I switched to Chloe. Now that I’m preparing to see China again, I’m Libby. Libby—Li Bing. I’m almost ready now. I’d never gone back all this time—I was so afraid that what I would find would ruin my perfect memory of it as a child. But it’s time now, I will find my way.” “Qingdao is completely different now,” I said, but she said, “shh,” and turned away from me, refusing to listen. I got up and paced toward the pool. The wind was picking up and my head was woozy. When I got to the edge, I perched on the thick, chest-high terrace border and looked down at the city. Where was Zhuzhu, I wondered? At twenty-two, she could drive, could drink, could be anywhere. And then an idea occurred to me. I would go find her cat and bring it back. She would be so happy. I would have to do it while the wine was still warm inside me, and before the disorientation I’d felt the last time close over me again. I was sure it wouldn’t. I could spot the alley that I’d left it in from here. I jogged toward the heavy doors. When I passed Libby, she glanced up. “Tell them I can’t go back. Say I’m sorry,” I called to her, pushing the door open and hitting the elevator button. “Where are you going?” came her voice before the door closed. But I was already in the elevator, and it was already going down. In a few more seconds, I would be past the doorman and in the streets, sprinting hard into the night.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Wei Xiong was born in Wuhan, China, and moved with her parents to the United States at age nine. She holds a BS in journalism from Ohio University, an MA in creative writing from Miami University of Ohio, and a PhD in creative writing from Florida State University. She currently lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

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