A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories (18 page)

“I’m divorced, so certainly I’m not a good woman according to your standard.”

Mr. Shi, thinking his daughter is unfairly sarcastic, ignores her. “Your mother was an example of a good woman.”

“Did she succeed in making you talk?” his daughter asks, and her eyes, looking directly into his, are fiercer than he knows.

“Your mother wouldn’t be so confrontational.”

“Baba, first you accused me of being too quiet. I start to talk, and you are saying I’m talking in a wrong way.”

“Talking is not only asking questions. Talking is you telling people how you feel about them, and inviting them to tell you how they feel about you.”

“Baba, since when did you become a therapist?”

“I’m here to help you, and I’m trying my best,” Mr. Shi says. “I need to know why you ended up in a divorce. I need to know what went wrong and help you to find the right person the next time. You’re my daughter and I want you to be happy. I don’t want you to fall twice.”

“Baba, I didn’t ask you before, but how long do you plan to stay in America?” his daughter says.

“Until you recover.”

His daughter stands up, the legs of the chair scraping the floor.

“We’re the only family for each other now,” Mr. Shi says, almost pleading, but his daughter closes her bedroom door before he says more. Mr. Shi looks at the dishes that are barely touched by his daughter, the fried tofu cubes stuffed with chopped mushrooms, shrimps, and ginger, the collage of bamboo shoots, red peppers, and snow peas. Even though his daughter admires his cooking every evening, he senses the halfheartedness in her praise; she does not know the cooking has become his praying, and she leaves the prayers unanswered.

“THE WIFE WOULD’VE done a better job of cheering the
daughter up,
” Mr. Shi says to Madam the next morning. He feels more at ease speaking to her in Chinese now.
“They
were closer to each other. Wasn’t that I was not close to them.
I loved them dearly. It’s what happened when you were a
rocket scientist. I worked hard during the day, and at night I
couldn’t stop thinking about my work. Everything was confidential so I couldn’t talk to my family about what I was thinking about. But the wife, she was the most understanding
woman in the world. She knew I was so occupied with my
work, and she wouldn’t interrupt my thoughts, and wouldn’t
let the daughter, either. I know now that it was not healthy for
the daughter. I should’ve left my working self in the office. I
was too young to understand that. Now the daughter, she
doesn’t have anything to say to me.”

Truly it was his mistake, never establishing a habit of talking to his daughter. But then, he argues for himself—in his time, a man like him, among the few chosen to work for a grand cause, he had to bear more duties toward his work than his family. Honorable and sad, but honorable more than sad.

At the dinner table that evening, Mr. Shi’s daughter informs him that she’s found a Chinese-speaking travel agency that runs tours both on the East Coast and the West. “You’re here to take a look at America. I think it’s best you take a couple of tours before winter comes.”

“Are they expensive?”

“I’ll pay, Baba. It’s what you wanted for your birthday, no?”

She is his daughter after all; she remembers his wish and she honors it. But what she does not understand is that the America he wants to see is the country where she is happily married. He scoops vegetables and fish into her bowl. “You should eat more,” he says in a gentle voice.

“So, I’m going to call them tomorrow and book the tours,” his daughter says.

“You know, staying here probably does more good for me. I’m an old man now, not very good for traveling.”

“But there’s not much to see here.”

“Why not? This is the America I wanted to see. Don’t worry. I have my friends here. I won’t be too much of an annoyance to you.”

The phone rings before his daughter replies. She picks up the phone and automatically goes into her bedroom. He waits for the bang of the door. She never takes a call in front of him, even with strangers trying to sell her something on the phone. A few evenings when she talked longer and talked in a hushed voice, he had to struggle not to put his ear on the door and listen. This evening, however, she seems to have a second thought, and leaves the bedroom door open.

He listens to her speak English on the phone, her voice shriller than he has ever known it to be. She speaks fast and laughs often. He does not understand her words, but even more, he does not understand her manner. Her voice, too sharp, too loud, too immodest, is so unpleasant to his ears that for a moment he feels as if he had accidentally caught a glimpse of her naked body, a total stranger, not the daughter he knows.

He stares at her when she comes out of the room. She puts the receiver back, and sits down at the table without saying anything. He watches her face for a moment, and asks, “Who was it on the phone?”

“A friend.”

“A male friend, or a female?”

“A male.”

He waits for her to give further explanation, but she seems to have no such intention. After a while, he says, “Is this man—is he a special friend?”

“Special? Sure.”

“How special is he?”

“Baba, maybe this’ll make you worry less about me—yes, he is a very special one. More than a friend,” his daughter says. “A lover. Do you feel better now that you know my life isn’t as miserable as you thought?”

“Is he American?”

“An American now, yes, but he came from Romania.” At least the man grew up in a communist country, Mr. Shi thinks, trying to be positive. “Do you know him well? Does he understand you—where you were from, and your culture—well? Remember, you can’t make the same mistakes twice. You have to be really careful.”

“We’ve known each other for a long time.”

“A long time? A month is not a long time!”

“Longer than that, Baba.”

“One and half months at most, right? Listen, I know you are in pain, but a woman shouldn’t rush, especially in your situation. Abandoned women—they make mistakes in loneliness!”

His daughter looks up. “Baba, my marriage wasn’t what you thought. I wasn’t abandoned.”

Mr. Shi looks at his daughter, her eyes candid with resolve and relief. For a moment he almost wants her to spare him any further detail, but like all people, once she starts talking, he cannot stop her. “Baba, we were divorced because of this man. I was the abandoner, if you want to use the term.”

“But why?”

“Things go wrong in a marriage, Baba.”

“One night of being husband and wife in bed makes them
in love for a hundred days.
You were married for seven years! How could you do this to your husband? What was the problem, anyway, besides your little extramarital affair?” Mr. Shi says. A disloyal woman is the last thing he raised his daughter to be.

“There’s no point talking about it now.”

“I’m your father. I have a right to know,” Mr. Shi says, banging on the table with a hand.

“Our problem was I never talked enough for my husband. He always suspected that I was hiding something from him because I was quiet.”

“You were hiding a lover from him.”

Mr. Shi’s daughter ignores his words. “The more he asked me to talk, the more I wanted to be quiet and alone. I’m not good at talking, as you’ve pointed out.”

“But that’s a lie. You just talked over the phone with such immodesty! You talked, you laughed, like a prostitute!”

Mr. Shi’s daughter, startled by the vehemence of his words, looks at him for a long moment before she replies in a softer voice. “It’s different, Baba. We talk in English, and it’s easier. I don’t talk well in Chinese.”

“That’s a ridiculous excuse!”

“Baba, if you grew up in a language that you never used to express your feelings, it would be easier to take up another language and talk more in the new language. It makes you a new person.”

“Are you blaming your mother and me for your adultery?”

“That’s not what I’m saying, Baba!”

“But isn’t it what you meant? We didn’t do a good job bringing you up in Chinese so you decided to find a new language and a new lover when you couldn’t talk to your husband honestly about your marriage.”

“You never talked, and Mama never talked, when you both knew there was a problem in your marriage. I learned not to talk.”

“Your mother and I never had a problem. We were just quiet people.”

“But it’s a lie!”

“No, it’s not. I know I made the mistake of being too preoccupied with my work, but you have to understand I was quiet because of my profession.”

“Baba,” Mr. Shi’s daughter said, pity in her eyes. “You know it’s a lie, too. You were never a rocket scientist. Mama knew. I knew. Everybody knew.”

Mr. Shi stares at his daughter for a long time. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

“But you know, Baba. You never talked about what you did at work, true, but other people—they talked about you.”

Mr. Shi tries to find some words to defend himself, but his lips quiver without making a sound.

His daughter says, “I’m sorry, Baba. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Mr. Shi takes long breaths and tries to maintain his dignity. It is not hard to do so, after all, as he has, for all his life, remained calm about disasters. “You didn’t hurt me. Like you said, you were only talking about truth,” he says, and stands up. Before he retreats to the guest bedroom, she says quietly behind him, “Baba, I’ll book the tours for you tomorrow.”

MR. SHISITS in the park and waits to say his farewell to Madam. He has asked his daughter to arrange for him to leave from San Francisco after his tour of America. There’ll still be a week before he leaves, but he has only the courage to talk to Madam one last time, to clarify all the lies he has told about himself. He was not a rocket scientist. He had had the training, and had been one for three years out of the thirty-eight years he worked for the Institute.
Hard for a
young man to remain quiet about his work,
Mr. Shi rehearses in his mind.
A young rocket scientist, such pride and glory.
You just wanted to share the excitement with someone.

That someone—twenty-five years old, forty-two years ago—was the girl working on the card-punching machine for Mr. Shi. Punchers they were called back then, a profession that has long been replaced by more advanced computers, but of all the things that have disappeared from his life, a card puncher is what he misses most.
His
card puncher. “
Name is Yilan,
” Mr. Shi says aloud to the air, and someone greets the name with a happy hello. Madam is walking toward him with basket of autumn leaves. She picks up one and hands it to Mr. Shi. “Beautiful,” she says.

Mr. Shi studies the leaf, its veins to the tiniest branches, the different shades of yellow and orange. Never before has he seen the world in such detail. He tries to remember the softened edges and dulled colors he was more used to, but like a patient with his cataracts taken away, he finds everything sharp and bright, appalling yet attractive. “I want to tell something to you,” Mr. Shi says, and Madam flashes an eager smile. Mr. Shi shifts on the bench, and says in English, “I was not a rocket scientist.”

Madam nods hard. Mr. Shi looks at her, and then looks away.
“I was not a rocket scientist because of a woman. The
only thing we did was talk. Nothing wrong with talking, you
would imagine, but no, talking between a married man and
an unmarried girl was not accepted. That’s how sad our time
was back then.”
Yes, sad is the word, not crazy as young people use to talk about that period.
“One would always want to
talk, even when not talking was part of our training.”
And talking, such a commonplace thing, but how people got addicted to it! Their talking started from five minutes of break in the office, and later they sat in the cafeteria and talked the whole lunch break. They talked about their hope and excitement in the grand history they were taking part in, of building the first rocket for their young communist mother.

“
Once you started talking, you talked more, and more. It
was different than going home and talking to your wife because you didn’t have to hide anything. We talked about our
own lives, of course. Talking is like riding with an unreined
horse, you don’t know where you end up and you don’t have to
think about it. That’s what our talking was like, but we weren’t
having an affair as they said. We were never in love,
” Mr. Shi says, and then, for a short moment, is confused by his own words. What kind of love is he talking about? Surely they were in love, not the love they were suspected of having—he always kept a respectful distance, their hands never touched. But a love in which they talked freely, a love in which their minds touched—wasn’t it love, too? Wasn’t it how his daughter ended her marriage, because of all the talking with another man? Mr. Shi shifts on the bench, and starts to sweat despite the cool breeze of October. He insisted they were innocent when they were accused of having an affair; he appealed for her when she was sent down to a provincial town. She was a good puncher, but a puncher was always easier to train. He was, however, promised to remain in the position on the condition that he publicly admitted his love affair and gave a self-criticism. He refused because he believed he was wronged.
“I stopped being a rocket scientist at thirty-two.
Never was I involved in any research after that, but everything
at work was confidential so the wife didn’t know.”
At least that was what he thought until the previous night. He was assigned to the lowest position that could happen to someone with his training—he decorated offices for the birthdays of Chairman Mao and the Party; he wheeled the notebooks and paperwork from one research group to the other; in the evening he collected his colleagues’ notebooks and paperwork, logged them in, and locked them in the file cabinet in the presence of two security guards. He maintained his dignity at work, and went home to his wife as a preoccupied and silent rocket scientist. He looked away from the questions in his wife’s eyes until the questions disappeared one day; he watched his daughter grow up, quiet and understanding as his wife was, a good girl, a good woman. Thirty-two guards he worked with during his career, young men in uniforms and carrying empty holsters on their belts, but the bayonets on their rifles were real.