The Love Wife (12 page)

BLONDIE / 
Eight weeks after moving in, she still had done nothing to decorate her room. She did use the refrigerator, but only for two or three items; they seemed to huddle together on the main shelf, as if in need of one another’s company. She seemed reluctant too to take anything out of the family refrigerator.

— Thank you, she said when we told her yet once again to help herself.
 
—You are too kind.

But when asked why she never did take anything, she sang softly,
Noth-ing’s plenty for me.

Her ESL course at the local community college was a full-time, intensive program, five nights a week. We had hoped she would make friends there.

But so far, nothing.

LAN / 
All the jokes were in Spanish.

BLONDIE / 
The Chinese community center was reopening after a renovation. We hoped that might be a source of friends for her too.

CARNEGIE / 
The center did picnics, newsletters, dragon-boat races. Calligraphy clinics. Karaoke fund-raisers. T-shirts, mugs, mouse pads. You could tell the
echt
Chinese from the not-so-
echt
by how much they talked about self-esteem. Also by their piety level.

— You know what my mother used to say about customs inspectors in Hawaii? I said one day to one of the parents, who had just returned from Hong Kong. — She used to say,
Chinese inspectors are the worst. Only an idiot go through customs in Hawaii. Anybody with sense stop in Chicago or Denver.

The parent clutched her flash cards for dear life.

BLONDIE / 
Still I loved belonging to the center, especially since the two couples who had traveled with us to China had both moved away—the Clarks to Maine after they inherited a house on the coast, and the Fonarovs to Ohio, to escape the East Coast rat race.

CARNEGIE / 
Owners, now, of a yoga franchise, the Fonarovs reported that their inner balance had come back.

BLONDIE / 
It didn’t seem to matter, at the center, that we had two adopted children, and one half half—
hapa,
they tended to say there, thanks to the Hawaiian director. It didn’t seem to matter that I was a
haole.
Some families had no Chinese connection at all. Some were only there because early language training was hard to find.

How excited they were to meet Lan. A native speaker! They begged her to teach a class. She politely refused, though. When she wasn’t working, she wanted to study, she said.

Later it came out that she felt uncomfortable being the only one from the Mainland.

— Didn’t you like Kelly? we asked. Didn’t you like Michelle?

— I don’t think they are real Chinese, said Lan.

There might have been more community in the city, but she didn’t drive, and the T didn’t make it out to our town.

CARNEGIE / 
Lan’s primary attachment remained to her tape machine.

BLONDIE / 
She showed no interest in shopping, but was careful with the few clothes she had, most of which she had apparently bought on a shopping trip in Jinan, the capital of her province. Blue jean bellbottoms with a bleached-out stripe down the middle, for example. T-shirts, some of them with messages.

CARNEGIE / 
Our number one all-time favorite:
ROCKS NEVER DIE.

BLONDIE / 
Yet no matter how casual the outfit, she did not treat it casually. She was reluctant to do anything that might get her clothes dirty, and she folded them as beautifully as she folded paper.

Our wash, too. She folded the shirts to exactly the size of a shirt cardboard.

I loved this.

CARNEGIE / 
Our recycling became an art form. Mitch and the minx made a point of routing their Sunday-evening walk by our curb, that they might behold it.

— What does it say? Mitchell would ask, stroking his new facial growth. — What does it mean?

BLONDIE / 
Her English was improving by leaps and bounds now.

CARNEGIE / 
We were unsurprised to learn, eventually, that she was a language teacher’s daughter.

LAN / 
My father was, before Liberation, an English and French and Russian teacher, as well as the principal of a small high school his parents had bought for him to run. My mother was a Communist who left him for an officer in the People’s Army. After all, she was beautiful and young. Why should she stay with trouble? She left me then, too—like Lizzy’s mother, and Wendy’s. That’s why I understand those girls. She left sorrowfully, my father always said, though she did not leave so much as a picture of herself. I never asked her name. There were so many stories like this, back then. It was not unusual at all, people breaking up because of their backgrounds, and prospects. Later she died, my father said, of a brain tumor.

After she left, my father and I were forced to move from our beautiful Suzhou compound to a much smaller rental house we owned, in a town nearby. Then we moved to just one room of that house. He raised me with the help of an older woman who was not a servant—there were no servants anymore—but whose family had worked for our family for many years. Not that he even needed that much help from
ayi.
He was good with children, as Suzhou men often were. He was a gentle man, like a woman, not abrupt like men in the North. I can still hear his voice. How he loved to quote from the ancient philosophers in his beautiful Chinese! His
Suzhouhua
was like music. When people said they’d rather listen to Suzhou people call each other names than to a Ningbonese singing, they were thinking of people like my father.

It was not an altogether unhappy time. My father rode me around town on his bicycle. He taught me badminton. We watched the long lines of boats in the canals; we watched the fishermen on Lake Tai. We bought
tang zhou
—a kind of sweet porridge—from the local peddlers; their stoves looked like camels. In the summer, we cooled watermelons in a well. There were thousands of wells in and around Suzhou, more than anywhere else. We lowered the melons in a net bag by day, hauling them up in the evening. How delicious they were after supper!

— The Communists will never be able to take everything away, my father used to say. Always you will have nothing.

He liked to say that kind of thing and then laugh. He loved many Chinese things—crickets, for example. He would travel every fall to Shandong, where his maternal aunt lived, to get first-class fighters. Always he came back laughing at the way people talked up there, though in one way he liked them. So unpretentious, he said. So natural. Also he loved Chinese gardens, especially his own family garden, which was neglected but not physically destroyed during the Cultural Revolution; even the Red Guards stopped short of wrecking Suzhou. Seven families did move into our family house, though, destroying its serenity. What sort of painting could go on by a pond in which peasants washed their laundry? What kind of calligraphy? Our family garden had been a marvel, with all of nature—hills and water and trees—brought together within its walls. There were many viewing points and hiding places. My earliest memory was of climbing in and around the rock grottoes, with their endless twisting corridors and damp secret rooms. I remember the ancient trees too, planted long long ago, so full of beauty and spirit—so removed from everything petty and common. And, of course, there was a greenhouse. That’s where the orchids grew.

Now the greenhouse flapped with shirts hung to dry.

We went back to visit, not so often, but every once in a while.

My father loved Chinese music. If he came upon a street musician playing the
erhu,
he’d often stop and sing along. The songs were mostly
pingtan
—folk songs in Suzhou dialect—or else songs from
Kunqu
opera, which are famous all over China—very graceful and slow and touching. Very gentle, very soft. Of course, all this was before the Cultural Revolution, when people still played these things.

It was true he loved Western music too, especially
Tchaikovsky
and Western opera. I grew up humming arias my father remembered, working them out on the violin. It gave him such pleasure to hear me play them on the violin. I grew up listening to the stories too, the big sad stories. Yet it was not fair to say my father worshipped Western ideas. Once when I criticized the father in
La Traviata,
saying that he had stood in the way of true love and wronged the heroine, my own father stiffened.

— She would have died anyway, he said. Those young people should have had more consideration for the father.

What’s more, he was anti-imperialist. He completely believed that the West was out to destroy China. They talk so nice, he said, but does not every weasel standing at the gate of a farmyard talk nice? In the morning, he would go to the tiger kitchen in our alley to get hot water, but also to talk with the neighbors about how to strengthen China.

Still he was struggled against during the Cultural Revolution. For his laugh, I always felt. Also because he weakly applauded model Beijing operas like ‘Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy.’ He claimed he was clapping loudly. Other members of his unit, though, maintained that his hands were not flat when he clapped, but loosely cupped. His hands were moving like summer ducks, they said. Sometimes his palms did not even meet. Neither was he looking at the cast as he moved his hands, but apparently at the sky.

— That was because I was contemplating the message of art, he said. So profound.

— There’s nothing profound about it! yelled the Red Guards in reply, and cut his throat to see if it had turned black with all the foreign words that had passed through it.

This sort of thing had happened to so so many people. But when it happened to my father, I only wished they had killed me too. It was a pain as long as the Yellow River. You could only hope one day to empty into the ocean. They left him lying on the ground, covered with nothing but a straw mat, for two days. In the sun. I was not allowed to move him; no one was allowed to move him. His body was black with flies. His head swelled. Children ran to his body and back, daring each other to touch him with a stick.

Not long after that, I was sent down to the countryside to be reeducated. If my father had been alive, he might have been able to keep me home. Families were usually allowed to keep one child home. Sometimes a boy would be kept, and a girl sent. Often the girls wanted to be sent, to help the family. But usually families with only one child could keep that child, so though I was a girl, I might have been spared. For a short time too it seemed that I might be able to use my violin to escape my fate. How gratefully I would have played the very revolutionary operas my father abhorred. How enthusiastically I would have toured with a troupe. I know my father would not have minded at all, quite the contrary. He would have done anything to keep me from being sent down. The sound of those operas was Chinese, of course, but Western instruments were needed for volume and projection; and I could play thanks to a friend of my father’s who had himself once studied with a White Russian. I got so far as to begin rehearsals in Shanghai.

But in the end a PLA soldier’s daughter who could barely rosin a bow was deemed to play louder than I. Moreover, my overuse of vibrato, it was said, betrayed my rightist leanings. And so like many other young people who did not have the connections to join a music troupe or the army, or to produce a medical affidavit of ill health, I was sent down to live with the common folk.

Or rather up, I should say, and not to the Subei countryside, with the Suzhou youth, to live among peasants. Instead I was sent with the Shanghai youth to a decomissioned army unit in frigid Heilongjiang, near the Russian border. There we lived in barracks and trained to defend China against aggressors. In between exercises, we also hacked at the frozen earth with pickaxes, sometimes, and of course denounced this one or that at mass rallies. That was hard for me. I shouted and leered like everyone else, but in my heart cried, still, for my father. How many of us were stuck there for six, eight, ten years? We cried to see the clouds drift in and out of sight, free. We cried to see buses come and go.

If I hadn’t developed TB, I would never have been allowed to leave. But sick as I was, so pale and thin people said they could see through me, I was transferred to my father’s aunt’s work unit in the Shandong countryside. That was lucky. By then things had loosened up enough for me to get
bing tui
—sick leave. If I’d gotten sick earlier, I would probably have been left in Heilongjiang to die.

My great-aunt was a spinster, and very old. She knew nothing about nursing. She tried herbs randomly, sometimes. If she forgot what something was for, she tried it anyway, to see what happened.

Yet she was fearless. She did not try to avoid getting sick too. Rather she sat next to me, for hour after hour after hour. She said she was not afraid of dying. How should an old woman like her be afraid of dying? It was time for her to die anyway, she said. And how long had it been since she had someone to sit next to? Too long. So she sat close by me, proffering herbs, monitoring acupuncturists, until slowly I got better—perhaps, I thought later, out of terror. My great-aunt might not have been afraid of dying. I, though, was terrified of making her sick.

Once I was better, I was beaten up once a week. That was what it meant to be a ‘class enemy’—the very worst category of social pests, worse even than being a ‘stinking intellectual.’ People eyed my bicycle enviously. Never mind that it had been my father’s and, if he were alive, would be his still. Back then it was unusual for a young person to have her own bike. I stood out. People predicted flats, then proved themselves right. I did my repairs secretly, at night. They made fun of my umbrella too. I put it away. They made fun of the condition of my lips—so soft and kissable, said one older cadre. I allowed them to chap, that they not be kissed. Still they were, of course.