The Cooked Seed (43 page)

“Who went in first?” Lauryann asked.

“Qigu went in first. Ten minutes later, I saw him run out of the office as one would from a fire. Wiping his bloody mouth, he told me that he slipped down in the chair inch by inch as the dentist drilled. Finally he was on the floor. He said that the pain was absolutely unbearable. He wondered how Americans could go through this every six months.

“I didn’t want to go through the same pain. But leaving would mean wasting the money. Perhaps my teeth were better than Qigu’s, I thought. Perhaps the dentist would go easier on me since I was a female.”

“Were you right?” Lauryann asked.

“I was wrong. I endured the pain but just couldn’t stick to it. I came running after Qigu. He was in the waiting area holding his mouth.
‘You’ve got a bloody mouth too!’ he said. ‘I told you not to go in!’ ‘It’s for the thirty dollars!’ I mumbled back. ‘We’ll never come again!’ Qigu vowed. ‘What did the dentist say about your teeth anyway?’ ‘He said that I had thirty-four years of scum built like a fortress along my gum line. He said that I’d be toothless in my old age!’ ”

Although cultural differences and language barriers still caused misunderstandings, Lloyd and I tried to sing harmonious tunes to each other.

A typical conversation would go like this: Lloyd would be heading for Home Depot, and I would ask, “Would you get me the swap killers?”

“Oh, right, wasp killer.” He no longer bothered to correct me because he understood exactly what I wanted.

I miscarried twice after we were married. My body had not recovered from the trauma of giving birth to Lauryann. Considering my health, Lloyd suggested that we give up. I felt sad that I couldn’t give Lloyd a child.

“We have Lauryann,” he said.

Lloyd had a different parenting philosophy from Qigu. Lloyd described himself as “not a typical American parent” just as Qigu considered himself “not a typical Chinese parent.”

Qigu, who is now a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, told Lauryann that the meaning of life was to “discover, explore, and understand the self.” Lloyd, on the other hand, believed that Americans had become carried away with the self. Lloyd said, “In the US, life is about nothing else but pleasing the self!”

“Lauryann is entitled to express herself!” Qigu insisted over the phone. “She must be given the freedom and the opportunity!”

Lloyd refused to yield. “Parasites shouldn’t be given the right to express themselves or to live the way they want at the cost of the taxpayers’ money!”

It might have been California’s dry air that caused the skin on my feet to crack along the old labor-camp scars. When I looked at my feet at night and saw the crooked nails and cracked skin, I remembered the days in the labor camp when my feet had been soaked in manure-, fungicide-,
and pesticide-saturated mud for months at a time during rice-planting season.

Lloyd said that my old life was haunting me. I said I didn’t feel bothered. I now took pleasure in recalling my past. In my mind’s eye, I could see the rain, misty, penetrating to the bone. I remembered when my comrades and I took off our dirty, mud-caked work clothes at the end of each day. We hung them on strings across the room to dry. Then we stopped bothering. The clothes wouldn’t dry, and we had no energy left to wash them. There was little point, because in a few hours we had to be wearing them again. So we stayed wet the entire planting season. I felt so blessed that such a life was behind me.

Lloyd bought me vitamins and skin lotion and insisted that I use the lotion every night to rub on my feet. “We were taught to take care of our feet as marines,” he said. “Before anything else, you have to be able to walk and run.”

I mended Lloyd’s jeans while he slept soundly beside me. Under the lamplight, I sewed cloth patches on the knees. I was entertained by a thought:
How stupid that in the labor camp I hadn’t thought to sew a thick cloth patch under my work clothes to protect my shoulder?
Instead the blisters on my shoulder from the bamboo pole were constant and at times became infected. “If I knew then what I know now,” I said to myself.

“Sorry,” Lloyd muttered in his sleep, “the translation didn’t go through.”

Lloyd witnessed the struggles I had with my writing. I knew what I wanted, but I had a hard time coming up with words that matched what I saw in my mind’s eye and felt in my heart. “Dead writing” was what I called what I produced when it had no poetry, no magic, no life. I had to produce a lot of those passages to get something I felt I could use. Sometimes it could take weeks or even months before I could find the right flow of words. Lloyd believed that a better writing environment would help. “Why don’t you convert the tool shed on the slope into a writing shack?” he suggested. “That way you can have your solitude.” Lloyd spent the entire summer building a meandering staircase and paved
path leading to the shack. It reminded me of the winding stairs in the hills behind China’s Imperial Forbidden City. I now had a view of the Northern California mountains. I was surrounded by oak trees, camellias, magnolias, and the deer, birds, turkeys, and squirrels. In the morning and evenings geese flew by from a nearby lake. My writing blossomed.

I found myself listening to more Chinese music and operas. I began to allow myself to miss China, although I couldn’t pinpoint what I missed the most. It was an internal ache. I didn’t miss the old me. I suspected that it must be the trick of distance. Time heals all wounds. Plus the way memory preserved, reinvented, and represented itself. Over the years China had become my Shakespeare. My China was beautiful, tragic, and dramatic.

It was Lloyd’s daily anecdotes that made my life real. Through him I experienced the America I would never otherwise experience. We were in the yard fixing my broken garden tools, a rake and a pitchfork. Lloyd opened a package of JB Weld and watched me apply the paste to the tools. He said, “The fact that your garden tools repeatedly fall off their handles demonstrates how capitalism works. America has the ability to build spaceships that make trips around the Earth, to the moon and Mars. The manufacturers can fix the flawed designs of these simple tools. They just don’t want to. They want us to spend money and buy new tools every time one breaks. I’m glad that we have JB Weld. Its quick-setting cold weld bonds almost anything!”

I told Lloyd that this moment reminded me of a famous American painting.

“What painting? What’s the title?” Lloyd asked. “I’ll check it out for you.” He was good at checking information and digging up material for me, however difficult to find. I once needed information on the name of the cave where the Chinese emperor Qianlong (who reigned from 1735 to 1796) of the Qing dynasty was entombed. Lloyd found it for me.

“I don’t know the title,” I said. “
Gardener and Her Husband
? Anyway, it is a very famous painting.”

The painting Lloyd located for me was
American Gothic
by Grant Wood, painted in 1930. “Yes, it’s you and me,” I said. “Except we’d change the expression. We should take a picture posing just like that
after we fix the pitchfork. I want a big smile with your teeth showing. How about we dress up like the couple in the painting next Halloween?”

Lloyd’s PTSD was getting worse. We had fights. Lloyd insisted that he heard someone walking up the stairway in the middle of the night. He was no longer able to sleep peacefully. When I insisted that he was hallucinating, he lost his temper. He cursed and said he would find out who was sneaking up the outside staircase at night and shoot the person. I became fearful for him. I walked out and stopped talking to him for two days. On the third day, Lloyd went to the nearest VA clinic to see a counselor. After several appointments with doctors and evaluations conducted with three different counselors, the verdict was that Lloyd had a 30 percent disability due to PTSD. He came home with instructions to lock up his weapons and take medication.

“I don’t think you are that sick,” I said, taking the medicine away. “The side effects of these drugs are going to make you sick. Every Chinese has PTSD for surviving the Cultural Revolution. If you are thirty percent disabled, I’m sixty percent.”

“But you were mad at me,” Lloyd said. “I don’t want you mad at me.”

“You can cheer me up by buying me a bag of fertilizer.”

“Fertilizer? Why not flowers? I’d love to buy you flowers.”

“I need fertilizer for the garden.”

“Flowers are better.”

“A bag of fertilizer is better. I’ll think of it as your flowers.”

From then on, every time we fought, Lloyd drove off and returned with a bag of fertilizer. He would carry the bag up and place it on the deck against the rail facing the kitchen, where he was sure I would see it.

Lloyd would often start his advice in the middle of exercising, while he was either on a floor mat or on his exercise bike reading a magazine or looking through advertisements.

“Start out strict,” he said, offering Lauryann a tip on her future parenting. “Be as tough as possible even if you don’t enjoy being mean. Offer
tough love, as I do. Don’t let your kids choose what to eat, what to wear, or hand them money or gifts. Include house chores and yard work in their daily routine. Be fair but strict. Always follow through. Always. Never punish the child and then back down when they argue with you. When that happens, you will lose your authority—gee, look at that price! It’s only forty dollars! I’ve got to check the weather!”

A moment later, Lloyd continued, “One parent called last night asking when the party would finish. I heard the girl in the background say, ‘Soon!’ The mother goes, ‘When?’ The girl goes, ‘Soon!’ If she were mine, I would explode! Party animals! … Look, there’s forty percent off clearance at Target! … I mean you can raise a child, love him, but not let him go wild. Parents create monsters! For those spoiled brats, you need a marine corps drill instructor … Wait a minute, I still have to check the weather. Oh, my God, a guy lives alone on a ranch, is divorced, and has sixty-four dogs!”

We called those moments “Lloyd’s monologues.” Lauryann and I were his ardent fans. Lloyd fascinated me not only for his particular American mind, but also for his impact on Lauryann. He would influence the person she was to become. She would have a decade of training with Lloyd along with his explosions. I was a grateful wife who sang harmony to my husband’s out-of-tune song. I enjoyed every note.

“I feel so good that I get to wear real sunglasses,” Lloyd said after laser eye surgery corrected his nearsightedness. “I always wanted to wear sunglasses like General Douglas MacArthur’s—that asshole. Maybe I should put a couple of stars on my baseball cap. People will ask me if I am an officer. I’ll say yes, since so many people lie these days, although I’ll say no if they ask me to tell the truth.”

Lloyd made me laugh when he said something a Chinese man would never say. For example, “Look outside, your bamboo is having a hard-on!” or, “I don’t like to wear boxers, because I don’t like my balls flying around. I tried wearing a pair once because I read that it’s healthier, but my dick flopped around and took a beating while my balls hung down toward my knees.”

In Lloyd I saw what I would describe to Chinese as a “confident
American style.” At ease with oneself. “I am truly brain-dead. No doubt about it!” Lloyd said when he misplaced the TV remote control for the fifth time that day.

When Lauryann wanted to do something I disapproved of, she’d say, “Mom, you don’t understand. It’s the American way.” For example, one day Lauryann returned from her middle school excited about getting a facial. She had received a gift coupon from her best friend, whose mother owned a salon specializing in facial treatments. After I learned that the treatment would include the removal of Lauryann’s body hair, I was horrified. I had seen electronic shavers advertised on TV, and the female models made shaving seem sexy. No one warned the children that once you shaved, you could never stop shaving, because the hair grew back thicker and darker.

“Why do you need a facial?” I asked. “You are only eleven years old!”

“It’s the American way!” Lauryann replied.

I was so glad to be able to turn to Lloyd. He was an American and he could tell exactly what was on Lauryann’s mind. He beat her to the punch before she opened her mouth. He attacked the so-called “American way,” ending with the sentence, “Don’t worry about me going crazy, because I am already there!”

I wasn’t prepared to learn that Lauryann had scored below average on the national standardized test for middle school. When the report arrived in the mail, I stared at it in disbelief. Trying to puzzle it out, it occurred to me that my daughter might be too right-brained. She excelled at many things; I knew she was not dumb. She learned ballet moves effortlessly and was able to memorize the entire
Swan Lake
after watching one performance. She could sing pop songs after hearing them just a few times on the radio. She spoke Chinese fluently without ever attending a single Chinese class. My Chinese friends were amazed when she sang Chinese folk songs and peasant operas. She didn’t read music, but she taught herself to play piano by watching videos on You-Tube. She could do fantastic accents—the queen’s English, a cowboy accent, an Indian accent. She was good at drawing, painting, and even embroidery.

I would have encouraged my daughter to pursue the arts if she hadn’t had flatfeet, or if she had a greater vocal capacity, the ability to climb at least three octaves. I bought music tapes by Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, and other accomplished singers so that Lauryann and I could compare her range to theirs. Lauryann concluded that she was good, but she would never be truly good enough to conquer the world of music.

Lloyd, on the other hand, was impressed with Lauryann’s flashy improvisations in the living room. He believed that she was a natural world-class entertainer.

Lauryann said to Lloyd, “You are no different than the mother character in your own stories.”

“Which mother?” he asked.

“The one who buys self-published books written by her daughter.”

I expressed my views and delivered my comments carefully, making sure that Lauryann didn’t feel I was putting her down. I understood that this was a delicate matter and keeping a balance was the key. Nurturing Lauryann’s self-confidence had always been my priority, but I refused to offer, or lead on, a false one. I believed that cultivating Lauryann’s ability to see her strengths and accept her shortcomings was my duty. She must learn to redirect and reset the start button when she found herself in a situation in which she kept crashing into a wall.