The Love Wife (5 page)

What was man, that he had brought forth this apparatus to be shined upon? What was Sears?

BLONDIE / 
— Oh, Carnegie, I sighed finally, pouring. — Was it always this difficult to communicate? Tell me and I’ll give you your coffee.

— Of course not, he said, moving on to the sports section. — You have to know someone very well to have this much trouble.

He put out his hand.

I closed my eyes.

Happiness. If every life embodied a great mistake, as Carnegie claimed, a defensive passion designed to distract its owner from the abyss, this was mine. I was like my mother that way. I desired to be happy, and that my children should be happy. I desired to be whatever it was given to me to be, and that my children should likewise have that chance. Carnegie, I tried to accept, was neither happy nor unhappy. For much more than he cared about happiness, Carnegie cared about a certain small vengeance. I had never tried to write a song for Carnegie such as my siblings and I used to write for one another, when we were growing up. But if I had time to write one about Carnegie now, in his middle years, I knew what its chorus would be.

Right! Right! I, Carnegie Wong, am right!

My mother is wrong.

She’ll never know how wrong.

Whereas I am right, right, right.

3

Automatica

WENDY / 
Lanlan is in love with our bathrooms. So beautiful, she says, so clean and shiny and with no smell at all, there being no drain in the floor—I guess in China they have like these stinky drain holes. And so big! She thinks my parents’ bathroom especially is the size of a living room. And how convenient that you can just drink the water right out of the faucet, and don’t have to boil it.

LAN / 
The towels were so thick and fluffy. There was a big open window with clean white curtains, just like in the American movies. There was even a wicker armchair in the corner, and flowers in a vase on a little table. A jar full of shells too, and a stack of magazines.

WENDY / 
— Wow, she says.

Quiet like, she says it, and of course she wouldn’t say it to Mom and Dad, she barely talks to Mom especially. But to me and Lizzy she does, especially me.
You are Chinese people,
she says sometimes, so I guess that’s why, not that anything she says is so secret. She is amazed by how bright our lights are, and how much room there is everywhere, not just in the bathroom but in all the rooms, in our whole house, and our whole yard. Is this whole place really ours? Just for our family?
Wow.
She can’t believe how empty the town is, how you can walk on the street and not see anybody at all. And those lawns everywhere! She can’t get over how everybody has one, and how green and cushy they are in general, it’s too bad ours got messed up by the goat. One day we find her a good patch and make her take off her shoes and Peds and walk barefoot in it.

— Wow, she says, wiggling her toes.

We take her to the grocery store.

LAN / 
Of course, I had seen American everything in the movies, and there were supermarkets everywhere in China now. I was hardly so ignorant as to be amazed by a grocery store.

WENDY / 
In a way the stores are not as beautiful as she thought, in the movies they’re even more beautiful. Still she says it’s like walking into a movie, and that’s amazing, to be in a movie. Though how expensive everything is! Who can afford to pay such prices? American money amazes her, all those big bills—fifty-dollar bills, even hundred-dollar bills, and checks, and credit cards besides, she can’t believe how everyone uses checks and credit cards, but now she sees why they need them. With everything so expensive! She goes up and down the aisles like she’s doing an inspection. She doesn’t stand right next to the counters like a lot of people, piling stuff into their plastic bags. She stands a little way off and reaches for the faraway fruit as if her arm is this very nice crane, or as if there’s something about the fruit she doesn’t trust, as if it looks like fruit but is actually something else.

LAN / 
Of course, that kind of fruit was completely flavorless. If you picked up a peach, you noticed immediately that it had no smell.

WENDY / 
She says she’s from this place called Suzhou, but that she lives in Shandong Province, in a town near this city called Jinan, where I guess she got stuck because her great-aunt was from there or something.

LIZZY / 
For a long time she worked in a shoe factory. Like she used to have to sew the tops of the shoes onto the bottoms. Top to bottom, top to bottom. These were the ugliest shoes you ever saw, she said, just the sort of shoe you got when the state did the design. That’s what she thought, and sure enough one day the world agreed.

LAN / 
Then came the market economy and the factory got closed. Our whole production unit got put out of work. But we did all receive free shoes, three pairs each. You see? I showed them mine. Of course they were not as comfortable as the cloth shoes my great-aunt used to make. She made them with liners you could change if they got wet.

WENDY / 
We thought she should wear those cloth shoes, why doesn’t she wear them? But she says no, they’re not appropriate. Too old-fashioned, she says.

Anyway, the factory closed.

LIZZY / 
After that she became a migrant worker with a job in this factory and that. For a while, she was the hostess of a karaoke bar in the city, which I thought sounded like fun. But Lan said it most definitely was not.

LAN / 
It was no different than hanging around Friendship Stores, which lots of women did. There was no shame in it. What else were we going to do? We were
huang fei de yi dai
—the wasted generation—our lives wrecked by the Cultural Revolution. Once the state factories closed, we couldn’t even get jobs as waitresses or saleswomen. Too old. For that sort of work it was better to be right out of high school.

WENDY / 
We show Lanlan all the Chinese food our grocery store carries, and she is surprised how much there is. Bean curd, and bean sprouts, and ginger, and all kinds of noodles, and Chinese cabbage, and Chinese mushrooms, and bamboo shoots, and water chestnuts, and hoisin sauce, and soy sauce, and sesame oil. You can even get frozen dumplings, and frozen wonton, and frozen shao mai. There’s sushi too we tell her, but she says she doesn’t eat Japanese food, she’s just not used to it.

LAN / 
In China, we have frozen dumplings too.

WENDY / 
Lanlan is proud that her family comes from this Suzhou, which is near Shanghai and has all these beautiful gardens. Her family once owned one of those gardens, she says, and she’s proud of that, in fact that’s why she was named Lan, which means orchid. Because her family had a greenhouse in their garden and grew all kinds of orchids in it. Which were very delicate and refined, she said, there was nothing common about them, they were not like the fruit in the grocery store. She inspects the mounds of fruit and asks if the supermarket is fuller during the harvest season.

— Now is the harvest season, she points out, as if she is teaching us something.

But of course we know that because of harvest festivals, pretty much our whole lives Mom’s dragged us to press apples and watch sheep shearing, once she made us go in the pouring rain.

— No, we tell her. The grocery store is like that even in the winter.

— In the winter too! she says.

LIZZY / 
It’s like she’s surprised but embarrassed that she’s surprised.

LAN / 
I did not go to university, but I was not ignorant.

WENDY / 
It’s hard to explain how we always thought growing up in the countryside was great because of Mom, if we could we’d all go back to the farm. Lanlan doesn’t think the countryside is so great. Of course it has some good points, she says, blue sky and clean air and no pollution. Also the government has less to say, she says. But there’s no work, and isn’t that a problem?

She looks at the fruit as if it could eat her, or make her sick. It’s like if the food doesn’t, the air around it will. She thinks you have to wear a sweater in the grocery store or else you will catch cold, also you have to be careful about catching cold through your feet. She believes in socks in general, but especially in the grocery store, and even for us, which is why Lizzy and I wear socks now, to make her feel better. And how powerful the cash registers, says Lanlan.
Wow.
She watches the scanner, how it sends out that little red line and
beep!
Her new big word is ‘automatic,’ which she pronounces ‘awma-ic.’

— America should not be call ‘America,’ she says. It should be call ‘Awma-ica.’

— Land of the free, and home of the beep! laughs Lizzy.

LIZZY / 
Lanlan discovered coupons, which she thought in the beginning meant you could buy something there wasn’t enough of. Like cooking oil, she said, or sugar. How could there not be enough sugar? we asked, but she just said it was hard to explain. Like these coupons were hard for us to explain to her. She said she was sure there were coupons in China, in the big cities they had everything, but was it really free money? I told her it was all just a way for corporate America to get you to buy more of their brand, and Lanlan nodded and said she knew about American corporations.

LAN / 
We heard about it on TV. How American companies wanted to control the whole world. How they sold everyone American things on purpose. It was actually a kind of weapon.

WENDY / 
Still she goes looking for the coupons that come with the newspaper. She clips coupons for stuff she thinks we need, plus stuff she needs herself. Hand lotion, toothpaste. Her clippings are like beautiful, she never just tears stuff out. Mom gives her money for these things on top of money for books and stuff because she says she knows she would want to pick her personal products herself, if she were Lan. And Lanlan does pick, even though she says she does not need to pick everything like an American. Like she buys a kind of toothpaste that comes out of a pump instead of a tube. She is excited about the bonus toothbrush. Land of the free!

She gives the toothbrush to Lizzy, who loves it.

Lanlan is amazed by how much people throw out, like how many napkins they use in restaurants, and how they take ketchup packets they don’t even use, but this is what’s amazing to us, that Lizzy takes the toothbrush and smiles like she never had a toothbrush before, or like she’s been dying her whole entire life for a blue one. When Lanlan walks with me or Lizzy she links her arm in ours. And Lizzy likes that too, no one can believe it.

How new everything is, says Lanlan, and no dust. She’s amazed at how clean her shoes stay on account of everything being paved or grass, there’s like no bare dirt anywhere. And is it true there’s no dust even in the spring? Even in the spring, we say.

— But what about pollen, she says.

She says she heard that on TV, on an English conversation program, how there is a big problem with pollen, you have to wash your hair every day to get it out. Only in some places, we say, like down South, up here we have some pollen but not that much. And no garbage almost anywhere, she says, and where do people spit? We tell her nobody spits, and she’s amazed.
Wow.
And how quiet it is! So peaceful and nice, she says, except for the goat.

LAN / 
I was surprised there were no slums, like I saw on TV and in the movies. I asked the children where the slums were. But they said there were no slums near where they lived, only far away, in the city. I told them how in China we heard a lot about the slums, and they were surprised. The slums and the violence, I told them. But they said there was no violence in their town. They said people got shot, but only in the news. In their town, no one got shot.

WENDY / 
She’s amazed that instead of slums there are churches all over the place, I guess you don’t realize from the movies how many of them there are. Do we go to church, she wants to know, and is amazed when we say we don’t even though our mom does sometimes, because that’s what we decided and our parents didn’t make us. Like they said it was our choice.

LAN / 
How could the parents let the child choose something so important? I could not understand it. Didn’t American parents care enough to control their children?

WENDY / 
— Not all parents do that, says Lizzy. Just some do. We’re lucky.

Lanlan gets quiet like for a sec.

— People can do whatever they want, nobody has anything to say, she says. Wow.

— Freedom, we say. America is about freedom.

— Freedom, she says, wow.

But then she says she thinks too much freedom is no good either, and that individualism is terrible, she hopes we don’t believe too much in individualism. I tell her I’m not sure what individualism even is, and she’s glad.

She is surprised how there are no Thermoses, instead lots of computers. Four just in our house! That’s because Dad’s in high tech, we say, and Mom has a home machine hooked up to work too, and we have some extra machines left over from whatever. It’s not typical.

— Wow, says Lanlan anyway.

We start to explain about the Internet, but it turns out she knows what that is already.

— In China, she begins.

And Lizzy says: — In China, big city have everything these days.

Then we all laugh. And how everyone crosses the street in the crosswalk downtown—Lanlan thinks that’s amazing, that people don’t just walk all over. Though how fast people walk here! Everyone in a hurry all the time.

LAN / 
Chinese people were much more relaxed. Everything was so easy in America, so convenient. And yet people were tense.

WENDY / 
And the bicyclists all wear helmets, and how many cars people had!

— In China, many people have car now, she says.

But still she is amazed that some families have two or three, and that even some kids have cars. And will Lizzy really be learning to drive soon? She is surprised that people drive one-handed, some of them, and talk on their cell phones at the same time, she thinks everyone in America talks and talks, especially the children are so curious. In China, kids do not ask
why why why,
she says. Then make everyone listen to them, as if they have something to say.