The Cooked Seed (11 page)

“One hundred dollars per month is my budget,” I said.

“Deal,” she said.

I left a note on Kate’s door saying good-bye and checked out of the dormitory at University of Illinois Circle Campus. Sharing housing with Stella would save two thirds of my expenses. I was glad and relieved. I moved into Stella’s storefront studio unit in Wicker Park. There were no windows and no separate rooms except a tiny makeshift bathroom. There was an old stove by the rear door and an old refrigerator standing next to the stove. There was no kitchen.

The room smelled of animal stink. It was dark inside. The space was cluttered with metal wear, machine parts, auto tires, used fabrics, wood blocks, tools, open paint cans, and wet brushes. On the wall was a large artwork in progress. There were also half-painted canvases and paper drawings. Hanging from the ceiling from a rope was an assembled metal sculpture with a wheel.

As I stared at the sculpture, two ratlike creatures jumped on me from the air.

“Rats!” I screamed.

“They’re not rats!” Stella laughed. “They’re ferrets, my pets. Sweet and friendly weasels.” Stella proudly showed me the home she had built for the ferrets. It was a weblike overhead series of tunnels connecting from ceiling to floor and corner to corner. Stella took me behind her pile of things to a large cage she had built out of wire. She treated the ferrets as if they were her babies. “Touch them,” she encouraged.

Carefully I touched the ferrets. They looked too much like the rats that had frightened me at the labor camp in China. I couldn’t help but associate them with disease and filth. To demonstrate her affection for the ferrets, Stella let them crawl through her clothes, in through her collar and out from her sleeve. “You’ll like them,” she said.

I asked where Stella slept. She pointed at a bare mattress on the floor in the middle of the room under the ferret tunnels. She said she had an extra mattress I could use.

I thanked her. I pulled the mattress over and laid it next to Stella’s. I put down my things and then visited the bathroom. It was difficult to enter. After I squeezed inside, the door wouldn’t close. As I sat on the toilet, I noticed that the sink was full of dirty dishes. A roll of toilet paper hung from the ceiling. Stella explained that it was to prevent the ferrets from tearing up the toilet paper. She warned me not to put food where the ferrets could reach.

In the middle of the night the ferrets came through my blanket. They entered by my feet and came up to my chest. I was horrified. I pulled open my blanket. The two ferrets popped out. They jumped into the tunnel above and disappeared.

Stella laughed and told me that the ferrets didn’t bite. “Stop thinking of them as rats,” she advised.

After dinner I prepared to share with Stella my former life as a Communist. Stella didn’t tell me when I should start. So I waited. Days passed. She was so busy that we barely saw each other. I felt like I was taking advantage of her generosity. One day I decided to bring up the subject. I told her that I was ready whenever she had the time. Stella smiled and said, “That’s okay.”

Did that mean I owed her, or was she no longer interested? Given a choice, I’d never tell my story. The last thing I wanted to do was to relive my experience. I avoided memories. I preferred that they stayed buried. Yet it was in America, alone, that my memories haunted me. They would come to me in my dreams, or while I sat in a classroom or on a subway train. Anything could trigger them: For example, a snowflake made of foam in the Marshall Field’s window display would remind me of the days when the icy earth was too hard to break at the labor camp. A naked mannequin in a clothing store would remind me of the youthful bodies we used to have that were deprived from human contact. A Victoria’s Secret underwear ad would remind me of a flower embroidered by my former camp comrade, a long-dead girl who paid her life for love. When I saw an advertisement with milk ringed around a female mouth, I was reminded of a salt ring on the backs of my comrades as we carried buckets of manure. The white-colored ring was formed by sweat after hundreds of rounds.

Stella wasn’t interested in my former life. I wanted to know if I
might ask her a few questions, and she said she would be happy to answer. “What do you think of Mao’s teaching that ‘American imperialism is a paper tiger’?” I asked.

“Who cares!” was her reply.

I was dumbfounded at first, and then awakened. I marveled that not one out of a billion Chinese would dare say what Stella had just said.

“What’s your next question?” Stella asked.

“Well,” I read from my notes. “How much money do you offer to your parents each month?”

“Are you kidding me?” Stella laughed.

“How much?”

“Nothing!”

Again I was dumbfounded. “Is that everybody, or just you?”

“Everybody.”

“You don’t support your parents? When I earn money, it is expected that one third of it will go to the care of my parents.”

“This is America! Parents owe their children,” Stella said. “Children didn’t ask to be born. Besides, my parents don’t need my help. They own an airport.”

“Own an airport?” I couldn’t believe what I heard.

“Do you have another question?” Stella said as if she was in a hurry.

“Well, I’d like to know what your goal is.”

“What goal?”

“A goal—for example, my goal is to become an American citizen.”

“I don’t know. I am working on getting a pilot’s license.”

I had to look in my dictionary for the word
pilot
. “Do you mean like a driver’s license for an airplane instead of a car?”

“Yep!” Stella made a flying motion with her hands.

I felt odd. Kind, warm, and generous as Stella was, we had nothing in common. I shared two classes with Stella. One was Poetry Writing, the other Art and Economics. I wouldn’t have signed up for either of these classes if they hadn’t been required for the degree. While Stella was the star of both, I could barely follow. I had never heard the word
economics
before, and I was unable to comprehend the concept. Stella told me that economics was the subject that her parents discussed over
dinner while she was growing up. I had never heard of the words
demand
and
supply
. When I asked Stella’s advice on how to survive the class, she suggested that I negotiate an exchange with the professor.

“You have something to offer, something we Americans don’t know about and would be interested in learning, and that’s China,” Stella said.

It turned out to be great advice. Instead of turning in a paper on American economics, I presented a paper on “Chinese Communist Economics.” With Stella’s help, I reported on how socialism worked, and failed to work, in China. I earned a passing grade.

I let Stella know that I needed to be with people who were on my own financial level. She said that she understood. After a semester, we parted on good terms. We remained friends. Once again I sought out the cheapest place to live. I looked in newspapers and searched bulletin boards at local community colleges.

Within a month, I found a group of Chinese students willing to share an apartment near Logan Square. It was a less desirable area farther from downtown Chicago. The five of us moved into a three-bedroom apartment. What made me happy was that my share of the rent was sixty dollars a month.

My temporary job was cleaning construction and event sites. I was not allowed to overwork or help other workers with their jobs. My boss told me that public restrooms and the cafeteria were not for students but for janitors who were union members. “Hard to explain to a foreigner,” he said.

My modeling job for fashion illustration classes was limited. The only other job available was to be a nude model for the painting and drawing department.

“Welcome back!” the clerk at the modeling office said. “The figure-drawing professors would love to have you. They never had a young female Asian model before.”

I was tempted by the pay. Fourteen dollars per hour! It was double what the fashion department paid. I signed up.

There was nothing wrong with being a nude model, I kept telling myself. Yet I didn’t believe myself. The next day my eyes were swollen
after a night of crying. I couldn’t stop visualizing removing my clothes in a classroom full of people. I was ashamed and wished that I had other choices. “It’s honest money!” I tried to convince myself.

At 8:30 A.M. I checked in with the lady at the modeling office. She offered me a heater. “You will need this,” she said. “The classroom is on the third floor.”

I burst into tears and my legs refused to move.

“Are you okay?” the lady asked. “Are you sick?”

I shook my head through my tears.

“You must be having your period! Are you? Don’t worry if so. Just go home. You don’t have to do it, you know. Trust me, this happens all the time. Girls having their period at the last minute. That’s why I always schedule a backup model. I can give the backup a call. No trouble at all. Would you like me to call the backup?”

I lost my courage and nodded.

The lady took back the heater. “It’s okay, honey. Call me when your period is over, and I’ll reschedule you.”

I never had the courage to go back.

Dr. Barbara Guenther was a walking impressionistic painting. She taught Essay Writing 101. She was dressed in a fashionable, brightly colored suit with a matching skirt. Part German and part British, she was a tall, slender, middle-aged white lady with brown hair and blue-green eyes. Her lipstick shade always matched the tone of her clothes. She said to us, “You may call me Dr. Guenther, or Barbara Guenther, or Barbara, but never Barb.”

I looked up the words Dr. Guenther had written on the board in my dictionary. As she began to explain the “roots” of
-cide
, she wrote
fungicide, pesticide,
and
suicide
. My mind took off instantly. I stared at the blackboard and copied Dr. Guenther’s writing, but the words did not register with me. As I spelled
suicide
, I saw Shanghai’s Huangpu River, where I had once contemplated drowning myself. My mind’s eye cast further: I saw the electric wires in my home, which I had planned to touch; the sleeping pills I had collected; the gas stove I almost lit but didn’t because my neighbor had had an asthma attack that night and
there was a big gap under her door where gas could travel and take her before me.

Suicide
remained the very first word I learned from Dr. Guenther.

Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, E. B. White, Lewis Thomas, James Baldwin, Edward Hoagland, Joan Didion, Alice Walker: I had never heard of these names, but I was fascinated. Dr. Guenther introduced them. I remembered Joan Didion the most, because Dr. Guenther said that Didion was her favorite. The book she used as text was entitled
Eight Modern Essayists
.

One of my fellow students complained about Dr. Guenther’s strictness. I didn’t understand her expectations. How could a teacher behave otherwise? Years later I concluded that the students regarded themselves as mature artists who needed no improvement, especially with their English writing skills.

The only times I ever missed lessons in Dr. Guenther’s class were when they conflicted with my job schedule. I had made paying off my debt my priority. My politeness and the fact that I was Dr. Guenther’s favorite international student didn’t count: She failed me. Dr. Guenther was determined to do her job. The students expected her to do what other professors did and “go easy” with grades. Dr. Guenther made it clear that everyone had to work for their grades in her class. She issued warning letters, made phone calls, and failed students.

Dr. Guenther didn’t care about being evaluated negatively by her students. She was passionate about teaching and was loved by her class. She didn’t hesitate to show her feelings toward those she considered lazy or spoiled. Open-minded and liberal as she was, she refused to put up with nonsense. “My job is to teach, not to please!” she said.

I never told Dr. Guenther that her failing me was the reason I so wanted to study under her. I respected her sense of responsibility toward her students. I signed up for more of her classes. By then I had received a scholarship grant from an Asia foundation that covered my tuition. Although I still had to earn living expenses, the tremendous pressure was lifted. I could now afford to focus on my studies. I was determined not to disappoint Dr. Guenther, since she was the one who admitted me without a passing TOEFL score. I felt that I owed her that decency.

Reading for me at this point was extremely difficult, if not impossible. Each page of my textbook had around twenty lines and about thirteen words per line. Yet ten out of the thirteen words I did not know. This meant I had to open up my dictionary two hundred times for each page. By the time I advanced to the third page, I was mentally exhausted.

I would cry on bad days. I sprayed ice water on my face, slapped my cheeks, and pinched my thighs in order to stay awake. By accident I found a good strategy. I would read the end of the story first so that I might be able to guess the plot and the words I didn’t know. My dictionary was so worn that the corners melted away and pages started to fall out.

Each day I survived in the classroom I regarded as a triumph. I dragged the composition topics into my own territory, against the backdrop of Chinese culture and history, where I could make comparisons and comment intelligently. One of my first successes was a reflection on Edward Hoagland’s “City Rat.” I described the lives of a different kind of “city rats,” the Chinese poor. I wrote slowly with my baby English, but it worked.

I began to repeat my success. When asked to copy the writing style of Virginia Woolf and convey a woman’s inner struggle, I wrote about my grandmother. She had had bound feet but still survived the Japanese invasion, China’s civil war, and the Communist liberation. To imitate Hemingway’s
Old Man and the Sea
, I told a story about my fellow comrade Little Green at the labor camp. She was driven mad and died because she fell in love with a boy, and the two paid a price for carrying out the affair. To echo George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant,” I described my experience being pressured to denounce my favorite teacher during the Cultural Revolution. For “Portrait of a Family Member,” I described how my mother survived under Mao’s dictatorship. For a character sketch, I used my father as a subject. I depicted his passion for astronomy and told the story of how he was denounced for teaching about sun spots. Mao was regarded as the brightest sun in the universe and my father was accused of attacking Mao by pointing out his “spots,” which might be interpreted as imperfections.