A Free Life (60 page)

By now he honestly loved his wife, but in a steady and mundane way. With Pingping he felt peaceful. He took care of the restaurant and the yard work while she spent more time with Taotao, cooking breakfast for the boy and supervising him in his study. What's more, she kept their books, wrote checks, went to the bank to deposit or transfer money every day, and paid taxes by the end of each season. Their solitary life had strengthened their mutual dependence and emotional attachment, which had ripened into love and trust. Still, the marriage didn't offer the kind of excitement that Nan hoped could spur him into song. He imagined that what he needed was an overpowering emotion that could become an inspiration.

His desire for poetic stimulation often made him think of those women in literature who inspired poets and even became the subject of poetry, such as Petrarch's Laura, Dante's Beatrice, and Yuri Zhivago's Lara. If only there had been such a woman in his life! A woman just the thought of whom would set his soul on fire. He believed that if he had met such a woman, he might have written like a possessed devil and his mind could have turned into a fountain-head from which lyrical lines would overflow. Sometimes he realized this was silly, but he couldn't help himself and kept indulging in the illusion.

Out of this secret sentiment he rented the film Doctor Zhivago. He and Pingping watched the movie until two a.m. The picture touched them so deeply that they both felt sick for several days. They recommended it to Niyan and Shubo, who also enjoyed it. It reminded all of them of the life they had led in China, where, similar to the turbulent Russia, human lives had been worthless, where hatred and blind rage had run amok, and where the gun ruled the law. For days Pingping had a stuffy nose, and whenever they talked about the scenes in the movie the Wus would mist up a little.

Yet they were also moved by the beauty and strength of the film. Nan wished it had shown how Dr. Zhivago managed to write poetry when forced to serve the Bolsheviks. The poet in the story wasn't shown trying hard to develop his art. Once, in a deserted ice-clad mansion, he did take up his pen and write while Lara was sleeping and wolves were howling. Still, that couldn't explain how he became an accomplished poet.

Nan borrowed the novel from the town library. Fifteen years ago he had read it in the Chinese translation and had been underwhelmed, mainly because he couldn't grasp it structurally. This time he worked through it carefully and found it magnificent. Pasternak wrote as if no novels had existed before. The loose structure of the book seemed improvident, yet after finishing the last page, Nan felt everything hung together, uncannily unified. What an amazing book! Still, he wished it had shown how the protagonist struggled to write poetry, the development of which was hardly mentioned in the novel. He pondered over the poems at the back of the book and couldn't see how they were related to the content of the prose. He recommended the novel to Pingping. She read a few pages, then gave up. She didn't like the way the story was told, and preferred Steinbeck, whose books she would read whenever she had spare time. Sometimes even if she didn't understand a paragraph fully, she still loved to be lulled by that great author's natural, colloquial voice, just like listening to a wise friend talking.

Over the years Janet, a big fan of Stephen King and Anne Rice, had tried to persuade Pingping to join her book club, but Pingping wouldn't participate. She had very little time, and besides, she liked reading older books.

BOTH Nan and Pingping had gingivitis, a problem common among Asian immigrants because there was little dental care in their native countries. Without dental insurance, the Wus couldn't go to the dentist regularly. Ever since Taotao came to America, they'd had at most one dental cleaning a year. Recently two molars bothered Nan a lot, and the gums in the back of his mouth were inflamed, giving him a sore throat, though he'd had his tonsils out sixteen years before. He went to see Dr. Morell at Sunrise Square near the Lilburn public library, and the dentist suggested Nan have his four wisdom teeth extracted, or he might lose them and some other molars in the near future. The doctor told him, "They won't last, to be sure. All have deep pockets, seven or eight. We should take steps to save your other teeth."

"I don't have dental insurance."

"I'll charge you only two hundred dollars for it."

"Let me talk wiz my wife."

"Sure. Give me a call if you want to do it."

Nan didn't agree on the spot because Pingping disliked Dr. Morell, a pudgy man in his mid-thirties. In the beginning the dentist hadn't been good to the Wus. Once, right before he performed a minor surgery on Pingping's gum, he had said, "So, thirty-seven, eh?" He smirked, his face rippling with flesh. Apparently he'd gotten the information from the form she had just filled out. She angled her head in disgust but said nothing. Throughout the procedure she shut her eyes so she wouldn't have to see his ugly face. Despite that bad experience, she admitted that Morell was skilled, so she would let her family see him once a year.

This time Pingping urged Nan to have his wisdom teeth drawn without postponement. She feared he might fall ill, since the bad teeth often gave him a low fever. He went to the dentist a week later. The extraction wasn't very painful and took less than an hour. Dr. Morell told Nan that his teeth had unusually deep roots. That was why the last tooth alone had taken him almost twenty minutes to pull. Gingerly the tip of Nan 's tongue probed the holes left in the back of his mouth, each of which reminded him of a smoldering bomb crater or volcano. Before leaving the dentist's, he asked for his teeth, which a nurse wrapped for him in a wad of gauze.

Coming out of the office and still in a haze, he looked at his four molars, each of which was ringed with tartar and stained with blood. One still had a tiny piece of flesh attached to it, and another had split in two along the middle, thanks to the force used to extract it. As Nan 's tongue searched the cliffs and valleys in the back of his mouth, a warm pain filled his mind with a strange sensation, which reminded him of a passage in Nabokov's Pnin. Pnin did the same after his dental surgery. The author described his tongue as a fat, sleek seal "plunging from cave to cove" under icy water. In an end-note to the novel provided by the Chinese translator, Nan had read that this passage reflected Nabokov's own experience of having his teeth pulled. Somehow the memory of that passage distressed Nan and made him feel more wretched.

Having parked his car behind the Gold Wok, he unwrapped the gauze and observed the teeth again. Should he keep them? What for? To show them to his wife and son and later to his grandchildren?

Strangely enough, his mind went off on a tangent. He remembered the hearsay that Sakyamuni, the founder of Buddhism, had left two of his teeth on earth. In fact, their whereabouts were still discussed and disputed today. Every few years someone in Asia would proclaim a new discovery of the relic. In China some pagodas were erected to store the sacred teeth said to be Sakyamuni's.

Then Nan 's anesthetic-inspired reverie ran wilder. He envisaged that teeth left by Nabokov, Joyce, Yeats, Frost had all become relics displayed in libraries together with their manuscripts and letters. How precious would their teeth be? How many visitors would pay homage to those tiny things? Some might even touch them in hope that the divine inspiration might rub off on them. This bizarre vision brought tears to Nan 's eyes. He remembered that Keats died at twenty-five, but his gorgeous poetry was still read today. By comparison, he himself had lived only in the flesh. Why should he live like this? What was the meaning of an existence that was altogether bodily?

The more he thought, the giddier he got, something hammering his temples without letup. He looked pale and ill, and he leaned his shoulder against a bit of graffiti on the back wall of the restaurant, a circle of red hearts with a huge lip print in the middle. How valueless his rotten teeth were, because he had accomplished nothing in his life! How ludicrous and megalomaniacal he was to think of the value of his teeth!

Beside him a black lizard with a blue tail zigzagged down the wall and got into a hole beneath the back door of the Gold Wok. A moment later, Nan curbed his teeming mind and warned himself, "This is crazy. Stop this self-pity! These teeth are no different from a dog's." He walked across to the Dumpster and tossed them into it, then went into the restaurant.

At the sight of him Pingping asked, "How do you feel, Nan?"

"All right, a little woozy."

"Your face is narrower now. My God, let me look at you. You're more handsome now!"

Niyan put in, " Nan, you really look better."

He observed himself in the mirror in the men's room. Indeed, with the four big molars gone, his jawline was less squarish than before, and the new smooth contour gave a touch of maturity to his face. Even his chin had a clear angle now. How extraordinary this was! As if he had just received cosmetic surgery-a chin job. He scrunched up his face, then gave himself a mocking grin.

HAILEE suffered a relapse and was hospitalized again. This time the doctor said chemotherapy might not be effective, because after three months' treatment, the cancer cells would have developed resistance to the medicines. Indeed, despite the use of combined drugs, the sign of remission had diminished and then stopped. Instead, a large number of leukemic blasts, young and immature white blood cells, were found in Hailee's blood. The group of doctors in charge of her case recommended a bone marrow transplant, which would have to be done at a larger hospital.

For weeks the Mitchells looked in vain for a donor, who would have to have the same white blood cell proteins as their daughter did. Dr. Caruth at Emory Hospital faxed the description of Hailee's tissue details to the National Bone Marrow Donor Registry in St. Paul, Minnesota, which kept a list of more than a million potential donors, but the center couldn't find a match, partly because only a very small percentage of the registered donors were Asians. According to the literature Dr. Caruth had given the Mitchells, the match rate was much higher among people of the same ethnicity, so Janet asked the Wus if China might also have a program that listed potential bone marrow donors. Pingping called around and even talked with an official at the Chinese consulate in Houston, but nobody had ever heard of such a registry in China. If only the Mitchells could find Hailee's biological parents. They were certain that one of her siblings or cousins might have the tissue type that matched hers.

Both Nan and Pingping volunteered to have their blood drawn to see if they could be a donor, and later Taotao did the same, but none of them was a match. The Mitchells were quite touched nonetheless. Dave said to Nan, "We appreciate you trying to help her. You're a good man."

"Sure. Eef you or Janet had leukemia, we'd do the same. Don't sink I volunteered only because Hailee's a Chinese girl." "I understand."

Then Nan hit on an idea. Why not contact the local Chinese community and see if they could help? Both Janet and Dave liked the suggestion, but they didn't know many people except the few whose children attended the Sunday Chinese classes at Emory. Nan didn't have a lot of contacts either, yet he nerved himself to call Mei Hong and ask her to help, though he believed she must still hate his guts. To his surprise, she eagerly agreed to spread the word among the Chinese students and the people in Chinatown. Also, she was going to contact all the Chinese churches in the Atlanta area and plead with them for help. She even said she'd go to Emory Hospital and have her own blood drawn.

As it turned out, she didn't need to go there, because after the local Chinese-language newspapers wrote about Hailee's case and published the Mitchells' plea for help, so many people offered to have their blood tested that a temporary clinic was set up at the Chinatown Plaza in Chamblee. A week later, to everyone's amazement, a thirteen-year-old girl in Duluth, named Moli, was found to be a match. At first, Moli's parents were unsure if they should let their daughter donate her bone marrow, but Mei Hong convinced them, saying that if they didn't help to save Hailee, they'd be despised by all the Chinese here. She also told them that a bone marrow transplant was similar to a blood transfusion, with no harm done to the donor's health. So the girl's parents, both recent immigrants working at Peace Supermarket, yielded and even let Mei Hong take their daughter to an interview with a reporter.

When the good news came, the Mitchells were overjoyed and broke into tears. Dave hugged Nan and wept like a little boy. With trepidation he and Janet spoke with Mei Hong on the phone and were reassured that the girl's parents wouldn't go back on their promise. In fact, Mei Hong had become the spokeswoman for the girl's family, since her parents couldn't speak a word of English. To

Nan, that woman had simply taken the whole thing into her own hands as if she were Moli's aunt.

Nan was puzzled. To him Mei Hong was just a jingoistic firebrand who couldn't think straight. He wondered whether she'd have let her own daughter be a donor if her child had been a match. When he talked with her about Moli, she said with her eyes fixed on him, "You think I'm a hypocrite, huh? Let me tell you, if Moli were my daughter, I would let her do the same. Every member of my family had our blood tested. Hailee is a Chinese girl, so we must do whatever we can to save her. Wouldn't you donate your bone marrow if you were a match? No?"

"Of course I would. I had my blood drawn too," Nan said.

After a thorough exam, which ascertained that Moli was healthy, Dr. Caruth explained to the girl's parents the process of marrow donation through Mei Hong's interpretation. The couple was fully convinced that it wouldn't impair their daughter's health, and they signed the paperwork. Nan and Pingping wondered why the girl herself hadn't said a word about the decision made for her by others. Did she want to donate her bone marrow or not? Wasn't she scared? Pingping asked Moli once, but the pumpkin-faced girl just replied, "Aunt Hong says I should help save Hailee, and if I were sick, others would do the same for me." Asked further, she'd say no more. Pingping felt for her so much that she packed a box of assorted appetizers for her, but Moli wouldn't accept it, not until Mei Hong told her to take it home and let her parents know it came from the Gold Wok.