A Free Life (40 page)

"It's awful!" Dave shook his head and blew his large nose into a tissue, his eyes moist and glistening.

Pingping said, "Officials in China don't care about your feeling, so you should make yourself happy. Maybe you can use this time to study Chinese or learn how to be parent."

"That's an interesting thought," said Janet. "Maybe I can attend a parenting class in the evenings. But we're afraid that if Hailee is not an orphan, we might lose her."

"Don't worry too much," Pingping said. "The delay is just excuse for officials. If she's not orphan, how can she stay in orphanage? Officials never care who is the girl. They just want to create trouble for you. Don't let them torture you. Remember, in China, officials' job is to make people suffer."

"Our agent didn't think this had anything to do with our baby's identity either. She said it was just bureaucracy."

"Zere will be a lawt of heartaches once you become parents," Nan put in, "so don't get distressed too easily."

"Well," Dave said, "I guess this is just the beginning."

They all smiled. Dave lifted the teapot in front of him and refilled his cup. A black woman holding a toddler stepped in and ordered two panfried noodles, so Nan went back into the kitchen after giving a lollipop to the baby girl, who clutched a nub of carrot.

A few days later, Janet enrolled in a parenting class and went to Atlanta to take the lessons two evenings a week. Whenever there was news about Hailee, she'd share it with Pingping.

"TURN your heel toward me," Pingping told Nan, holding a pair of large scissors in her hand, which was sheathed in a latex glove. She was scraping his feet for him. Both of them were sitting on low stools, a stainless-steel bowl between them. His left foot was steeped in the warm water while his right one rested on her lap covered with a khaki apron. It was early morning and their son had just left for school. A cuckoo cried from the depths of the woods across the lake and set the air throbbing. Between the pulsing calls surged a scatter of birdsong. A flock of mallards was quacking in the backyard, waddling around, and some flapped their wings so vigorously that they sent out a faint whistle. Two ducks had been hatching eggs in the monkey grass along the lakeside, so these days the Wus didn't go there for fear of disturbing them. On the dogwood tree near their deck two squirrels were chasing each other, shaking dewdrops off the branches in full flower.

"Your athlete's foot looks better than last time," Pingping said. "Be careful. It can easily get worse in the spring."

Nan nodded, still immersed in a volume of selected poems by Auden, whose photo appeared on both the front cover and the spine of the book. He loved Auden and had learned some of his lines by heart when he was in China. Yesterday morning he had chanced on this copy of poetry at the Goodwill store on his way to work and had bought it for a quarter. To his delight, he found the poem "September 1, 1939" within, a poem Auden himself had excluded from most of his collections. Nan was still happy about the bargain. In Gwinnett County, the public libraries would discard all the books that hadn't been checked out for more than a year and would sell them dirt cheap, so Nan, now that he had his own house, had started collecting books again. He'd rummage through the book sections in thrift stores and go to libraries' book sales whenever he could. Sometimes Pingping complained that the house would soon be cluttered up with books, but he simply couldn't stop.

Since they had married, Pingping had scraped Nan 's feet five or six times a year, because he couldn't do it thoroughly by himself. In the beginning she had been frightened by his feet, the heels and the skin between the toes gnawed by fungi, and she had wanted to have them cured so that she and their baby wouldn't catch the ringworm. She'd soaked his feet in warm water, then cut the calluses with scissors, rubbed away the dead skin with a chunk of emery wheel, and applied antifungal cream to them. This gradually developed into a habit, and Nan enjoyed being treated by her. Although his athlete's foot was never cured, she had managed to keep it under control. Still, Nan wore socks all the time, even in bed. He liked taking a hot bath, which she urged him not to do, afraid the fungi might be spread to the other parts of his body. But a bath was so relaxing that he couldn't help running one every few days. To date, his body had never been affected by fungi. Ever since moving to Georgia, the Wus had noticed that many people here suffered from skin diseases, probably on account of the humid climate. Sometimes at supermarkets they came upon cashiers whose hands and forearms were scaly with scabs and running sores.

"Ouch!" Nan cried.

"Did I hurt you?" Pingping stopped the scissors. "Don't scrape too hard."

"All right, but I won't be able to scrub your feet again this spring. We'll be weak until summer."

Indeed, pollen had already set in and had begun to torment them. From now on they had to conserve their energy and keep all the doors and windows shut. These days they each carried a bottle of nasal spray in a pocket to prevent their allergies from becoming fullblown. The miserable season enervated and even pacified them-they became more gentle to each other, as if too tired to raise their voices.

On top of that, Pingping was no longer worried about Nan 's obsession with his first love. Seldom did she see the woeful clouds that used to darken his face. She was right: Nan had indeed mellowed a lot. He hadn't often thought of Beina in the past two years, although she'd appear in his dreams now and then. The numb pain still lingered in his chest, but it was no longer as acute as before. Every day he was too occupied to indulge in fantasies. When he got home at night, he'd go to sleep within an hour after taking a shower and reading a few poems. He felt that physically he was strong now, but his mind was empty. He simply didn't have the energy to think of ideas, much less write anything.

To some extent he was pleased by this state of affairs. In his mind would rise the lines by the ancient poet Tao Chien: "Human life runs the same course, / Whose end is to secure shelter and food." Nan was peaceful, determined to stand on his own ground and willing to be a devoted family man.

SHUBO GAO had received his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia the previous fall. He was still looking for a teaching position in sociology, but so far without success. He often talked with Nan about job hunting and would joke that he was ready to "turn a new leaf," meaning to abandon his sociology specialty. The past winter he had gone to six interviews at a convention held in San Francisco, but the interviewers had all found that he spoke English with a grating accent, so despite his impressive resume that boasted a book published in Chinese, none of the schools invited him over for a campus visit. Afterward, Shubo mailed out more than a hundred applications. He would receive a batch of refusal letters every week, which didn't bother him much, though Niyan couldn't stand it anymore. During the day she would not check the mail for fear of spoiling her appetite.

Despite his bad English, Shubo was fond of cliches. He'd use all kinds of sayings, some of which were Chinese expressions he translated into English, such as "one hill cannot be inhabited by two tigers," "search for a needle in the ocean," "pour oil on fire," "kill two eagles with one arrow." He had a little notebook in which he'd collected more than a thousand English idiomatic expressions. Nan would tease him, calling him a social linguist. He also told Shubo, "If you really want to master English idioms, get a good dictionary, a Longman or Collins, and learn the real thing." He explained that unlike the Chinese, who respected a person knowing a great many sayings and proverbs, a good English speaker wouldn't repeat cliches, but Shubo continued filling his notebook with hackneyed expressions and tossing them out right and left.

Though a Ph.D., Shubo respected Nan and often bantered with him, saying that Nan was a sad case and shouldn't waste his talent by running a small restaurant. He once read Nan 's palms and said with a straight face, "You were born to be an official, deciding the fates of thousands. You know, you should've risen to prominence long ago. But now you're a phoenix grounded and stripped of its wings, inferior to a chicken."

Nan rejoined, "Why don't you go back to Szechuan? With your Ph.D. from UGA, I'm sure you can get a professorship at a Party school or a police academy."

"I'd prefer to be my own boss." Shubo's face fell.

In fact, Shubo often said he'd never return to China, because when he was applying for his passport so that he could go to the University of Georgia to do graduate work, all the officials had treated him like a semicriminal and wouldn't issue the papers to him until a whole year had passed, after the school had withdrawn its financial aid. He told Nan that not a single Chinese had ever said a good word to him when he went to their offices, and that only a young American woman of Indian descent at the U.S. embassy in Beijing, noted for her record of turning down most visa applications, had beamed at him, saying, "Congratulations!" when she handed him his visa.

Although Shubo could joke about his situation, his wife had lost her peace of mind. Now that it was unlikely that he would find a teaching position, what should he do? Niyan often spoke to Pingping and Nan about him. Recently his cousin, Yafang Gao, had promised that if he went to New York, she could help him find a job at Ding's Dumplings; but he'd have to work there at least a whole year because her former boss, Howard, wouldn't hire a temporary hand. Niyan told the Wus that Yafang herself had left Ding's Dumplings a few months earlier to attend business school at NYU.

Shubo talked with Nan about the restaurant work in New York; he wasn't sure if he should go, reluctant to be away from his wife. Nan was uncertain whether Shubo still meant to remain in academia, but his friend assured him that he wouldn't think twice about leaving his field if he could find a full-time job. Shubo hated teaching and had once taught an introduction to sociology course to more than thirty students, some of whom wouldn't turn in their homework on time and would frown at his accent, a few even pretending they couldn't understand him. During the first few weeks of teaching, he felt sick and often knelt on the floor of the bathroom at home and vomited into the toilet, his guts twinging while his wife slapped his back to ease his pain. Later, he attempted to make a joke or tell an amusing story from time to time in class. Once he even compared Americans to turkeys (fat) and the Chinese to cranes (thin), but only one big black woman laughed besides himself. The whole course was sheer torture to him, yet he had to get the teaching experience so that he could find employment in the future. In the course evaluations one student wrote "Bathetic amp; pathetic!" Now, still haunted by that class, Shubo wouldn't hesitate to leave academia. On hearing that he really wouldn't mind abandoning his field, Nan suggested he go to a bartending school. Once Shubo knew how to mix drinks, he could always find work at a Chinese restaurant. Niyan and Shubo thought this was a good idea, so Shubo paid $3,000 and enrolled in a bartending class in downtown Atlanta.

Different from the Wus, Niyan and Shubo were still like newly-weds, seeking each other's company whenever they could. They loved Georgia for its low cost of living and warm climate, which resembled that of their home province, and they didn't think about moving elsewhere. Yet they had been so busy struggling to survive ever since they landed here that they wouldn't dare to have children. Some of their friends had given birth to babies and then sent them back to China, to farm them out to the grandparents. But both Niyan's and Shubo's parents were in poor health and couldn't look after a child, and neither could they come here to help them if Niyan had a baby. As a result, she was still wearing an intrauterine ring. "Look, I'm already thirty," she said to Pingping one afternoon. "How many years do you think I can wait?"

"I know how you feel. Back in China I was never worried about bringing a child into the world."

"Maybe Shubo and I will end up adopting a baby like the Mitchells," quipped Niyan with a grimace.

"You're too young to think like that."

Since it was impossible to have their own child now, Shubo and Niyan had grown very fond of Taotao. They'd tell Pingping and Nan that they envied them their fine son. Whenever Taotao's report card arrived, they'd look at it and sing his praises. Many times Shubo said Nan was a lucky man who had everything-a devoted wife, a smart son, a lakeside house, and a business of his own. His words would put Nan in a reflective mood and make him wonder why he himself didn't feel as content as he should.

IN LATE SPRING Taotao, with the help of his friend Zach, who was an eighth grader, assembled a large computer. The machine was so powerful, he told his parents, it worked like a small station. With the new computer, he spent a lot of time surfing the Internet and chatting with his friends-they mainly let off steam by bad-mouthing their teachers. He also played games with some children in Europe and Asia. Because his parents were always busy working at the restaurant, they couldn't supervise him. Once he was online, he'd enter cyberspace unknown to his parents, who would accept whatever he told them about it.

Both Pingping and Nan tried to curb him from surfing the Internet, warning him over and over again not to waste too much time. The boy promised not to use the computer very often when his parents weren't home. At work, every evening Pingping would call back at least twice to check on him, but most times the line was busy. Evidently Taotao was using the Internet. Whenever this happened, Nan and Pingping would get angry and take their son to task when they came back at night.

Taotao had never been really close to Nan, perhaps because Nan hadn't spent enough time with him and had left for America when the boy was merely two. In recent years Nan had worked constantly and tended to confine himself to his business and books. As a result, father and son didn't talk much. If Nan spoke to him harshly, Taotao would ignore him or mutter "Shut up," at which Nan would lose his temper, calling his son a heartless ingrate. Yet the boy always listened to his mother, who knew how to make him behave. Sometimes she called him "Little Donkey," meaning that as long as she coaxed him, he'd be obedient.