The Natural Laws of Good Luck (15 page)

“Ellen-ah, father all the time not happy. Zhong-hua talk about he remember time he head only high as tabletop. He say father call him come, then hit his head with wood. Father say, ‘Hurt, not hurt?' Zhong-hua say, ‘Not.' Father hit harder. ‘Hurt, not hurt?' ‘Not.' father hit again and again until Zhong-hua say, ‘Hurt!' Then father say, ‘Good. You can go.' Father mean because father not happy. Now I want stop talk terrible things. Talk about happy things.”

Da Jie slapped my leg extrahard. “OK, Ellen-ah, I tell you what. Zhong-hua and I say probably gas station for you very nice job. Sit down on chair, take some people's money, very easy for you. You early come, work half day. Three o'clock my brother come, twelve o'clock come home.”

I was caught off guard, but my instinct for self-preservation prompted me to say, “Da Jie, I don't know. I'm an artist. That's a job.”

“Really? You have job? Artist? Okaaaaay. No problem. You can change. Artist no good for money.”

“I know, Da Jie, but money is not the only thing important.”

“Really? I think important. Ellen-ah, you listen me. You need change. Wintertime again, need eat, buy a lot of food. This time Zhong-hua already come America two year. You need quickly change.”

I loved my sister-in-law and would let her do almost anything to me—except completely change who I was. In the beginning, she thought I was good enough for her beloved only brother, but now I sensed she was doubtful of my intellect and meant to have a try at fixing me. According to Confucian family hierarchy and its implicit obligations, it was her duty to take charge of her younger brother's life and his place not to openly oppose her. The implications of this for our future set me on edge. I said, “Zhong-hua? How do you feel? Do you want a gas station?”

“Very love gas station. Really, really want!” He was serious.
Really
came rumbling up from deep in his throat. “I just think whole family can every day eat at gas station. No need go home eat. Also, I think maybe sell my wife's teapots, my wife's art. A lot of stuff can sell in gas station, like Tai Chi shoes.”

I knew this was my cue to say “Good idea!” like a good Chinese wife. I wasn't practiced at repressing what I really thought; and besides, I had a poor Chinese poker face, and mine was already betraying alarm at the prospect of selling Lucky Strikes and Lotto tickets and breathing gasoline vapors for the rest of my working days. I wanted to give a hysterical, impassioned rebuttal to this stupid idea, but I knew they would only think me touched in the head. So I played along.

“I'll look into it. We can check in the paper and see if there are any gas stations for sale.” I did this and reported to looks of thoughtful consternation that the price of a gas station was upward of $160,000. I spent hours more elaborating on the concept of franchising, but when I answered negatively the question of whether the owner of a Stewart's convenience store franchise could sell Chinese dumplings and handmade teapots, my husband frowned and said, “No good.” I was not confident that I had killed the gas station idea, but the immediate threat to my well-being had passed.

There was nothing Da Jie wouldn't try to do. She got her driver's license after two hours' practice in a parking lot. She drove for two
years believing that the correct positioning of the car was astraddle the centerline. She bought an electric drill and a screwdriver set and put in shelving all over her house. She said, “Very easy. I can do. Everything I can do.” She was genuinely shocked when the brackets fell out of the wall. She had power-drilled the screws effortlessly into the chalk wallboard without hitting one solid stud. Da Jie also landscaped her own yard. The soil was pure sand, and only a few tufts of crabgrass thrived. Not to be defeated, Da Jie went out and bought full-grown flowering plants and lined them up staggered at equal distance along the top of the bank sloping toward the house. They looked like garish nomads about to charge the house. She looked out the back window clapping in satisfaction at her blooming militia. “Red one. White one. Blue one. Yellow one. Pretty!”

For someone who could throw most large men across the room, Da Jie had a tender, vulnerable heart. She wanted everyone around her to be contented and happy. I was visiting her house when her mother-in-law called from China, and I watched Da Jie grow pale. Her eye twitched and her hands shook as she hung up the phone and sank into a kitchen chair. “Now I get big trouble. Mother-in-law want to come live here with my husband and me. Ellen-ah, I a-fraid. Her voice make my heart want to stop. I cannot breathe. She want to control my husband, my family. She want be number one boss. I think she want kill me. I a-fraid this lady.” This was a very difficult problem for Da Jie because she came from a traditional family, and for them the Cultural Revolution's slandering of Confucius had not toppled the sacred edifice of family ethics. A wife was the keeper of harmony in the family.

The mother-in-law arrived from China. She had a huge color photo of herself framed and marched it right into her son's bedroom, where she set it on the shelf facing her son's bed. Da Jie complained to me that she could not sleep with her mother-in-law staring at her like Chairman Mao. She said her heart beat too fast and her throat closed up. “I told my husband, ‘Your mommy cannot
be in this room. How about the living room, OK?' He very angry and ask me, ‘Why Mommy cannot be in our bedroom?'” When her husband went out of town, Da Jie put the picture in the hamper under the dirty clothes. Da Jie said, “Happy family always same way happy. Unhappy family have own unhappy. This traditional Chinese saying.” Tolstoy, actually, and I hope he took the compliment.

Da Jie tried to do her duty by her mother-in-law, cooking for her, cleaning up after her, driving her around to sales, and doling out a generous allowance, but the woman always wanted more. The mother-in-law trundled about with a benign smile on her face preparing herbal remedies for her granddaughter while conspiring to divert the family bank account into a secret one. One especially brazen cash transfer emboldened Da Jie to threaten divorce if the mother-in-law were not transferred out of the house. The missing money reappeared, and the mother-in-law was removed to her daughter's house a few miles away. At the New Year's dinner, she was back, presiding at the head of the table, a diminutive autocrat, toasting everyone and saying how happy it made her to see everyone together. Then everybody drove to Montreal, ate together in Chinatown, and lost the disputed money at the casino.

The old woman resided in exile at her daughter's house but managed to trouble Da Jie's life from there. Da Jie's protest ranged from not answering the old woman's telephone calls to disappearing for a few days, usually reappearing by the third day, rumpled and listing, having sacrificed a few hundred dollars to a marathon game of mah-jongg in the back room of the Chinese grocery store. She dragged us to a casino with her. As she hustled us along like children across the parking lot, her black eyes got blacker and her high voice got higher. Inside the door, she thrust ten-dollar bills at us and careened limping around the corner alone, her big black pocketbook bouncing off her hip. We lost our seed money in the first five minutes and retreated to the car, where we huddled together and waited for her to come out. She did not
come out. She never came out. We had to go back in and escort her forcibly, one of us at each elbow. That summer, she took us to the racetracks and gave us each a twenty-dollar bill. There were thirteen horses in the first race. Zhong-hua bet on twelve. The thirteenth horse won.

Nice, and Loving

I
OFTEN WISHED
Sweet Sweet could have grown up with the rest of my kids—in a small herd instead of alone. Besides pulling one another's hair, punching, biting, and stabbing with pencils, the four of them did a good job of chastising one another for not doing chores, not being nice to Mom, eating someone else's share of chicken tenders, and not doing homework. They taught one another a lot of the hard lessons of life. I recall Mavis pushing Athan up against the wall and saying between locked teeth “Don't you
ever
call me a bitch again!” He never did.

According to Zhong-hua, there were three kinds of children. The first kind were smart and did not need to be taught anything. They looked around and figured everything out. The second kind could be reasoned with. You could tell them “If this, then that.” The third kind had to hit their head against the wall until the pain made them stop. He said it was no use to tell this third kind anything at all. For them, the best rule is no rule, he said. The world will teach this kind of person. “My daughter is third kind. Let her do herself. She will sometime think, ‘Oh, this way no good. Let me change.'”

If I had gazed into her newborn face and had the privilege of viewing her undisguised nature, would that memory help me now? I could have fallen back on honest infant revelations. As it
was, the past was shrouded, and so my mother's path. I reminded myself of what I had learned from raising children: to grant others authority over their experience and over their own kind of reason. Growing up, my son wanted to listen only to mythic tales and at breakfast insisted his dead grandpa was standing behind his chair. Mavis requested only “true” stories but left notes for fairies in the potted plants and kept Kleenexes in her pocket into which she had twisted waists and appendages and to which she had given names. The oldest, Eula, determined the existence of God by throwing her ring into a wild meadow. “I'll pray to God to help me find it.” She did and concluded, “Yep, there's a god.” Paroda was the most materially grounded, and her room was full of pinecones, rocks, and dollies. But at four and feeling unhappy, she had stood in front of her trinket shelf and lamented, “What good is it to have all these things when you feel like this?” I have found it impossible to sum up other people, as each abides by a private, fantastical configuring of living and logic, his or her own sovereign sense.

I had a scary vision of Sweet Sweet with gray hair and gallstones, sitting in her room on the same chair, staring at the computer. I made doctor and dentist appointments for her just to get her out. “We have to do something, Zhong-hua. She cannot stay in a room like a small lapdog, just coming out to be fed or have her back rubbed. You make it so comfy for her, she has no reason to come out.”

“You think room is comfortable? I don't think so. Just like jail. She will herself decide this way is no good. Not speak English—no good. Always very poor because not have job—no good. Not because you say no good. Let herself feel. She will sometime know—no good!”

“I am not as patient as you. If I were her real mother, I would hound her to clean the toilet and take out the compost. I'd swat her butt sometimes and kiss her on the cheek, but she would be washing the car and running the vacuum. That's how I got my kids out in the world. They couldn't wait to go. Well, except Paroda. She loves cleaning.”

“American way and Chinese way different. This is not urgent. You don't worry about this kind of thing. Urgent thing is our family have food to eat. Another thing not urgent. Let me do.”

I looked for signs that he was doing but could not detect any. Finally, I asked him what exactly he was doing and according to what plan. “I have no idea,” he said. He told me that in China, the parents banked on the world's being able to teach the child what the child had failed to learn at home. But I was not Chinese. I was unequipped with the level of patience needed for this long-term child-rearing strategy and unacquainted with the level of faith in the world needed to be reasonably sure that it would not crush a child as unprepared as she.

Sweet Sweet went with Zhong-hua, Da Jie, and her cousin Xiou Mei to a Tai Chi convention to sell Tai Chi clothes—a budding family business. Zhong-hua had been suffering pains in his stomach, which we attributed to too much heavy lifting at the grocery store. Friday they drove eight hours and arrived in Pennsylvania after midnight. Xiou Mei later told me: “Uncle was dead-tired. We all carry suitcases and heavy boxes of videotapes and Tai Chi swords to the car. Only Sweet Sweet carry nothing. When we return to hotel room, Uncle start rubbing her feet.” Xiou Mei turned her palms up and opened her eyes wide. “I could not believe! I said, ‘What? This so wrong! Right way is just the opposite: you need rub father's feet.'”

Da Jie chimed in: “Sweet Sweet don't care you, don't care me, don't care anyone. She not respect other people. I tell you, Ellen-ah, let she get job. She need get job, help family. Ellen-ah, this age girl you don't need care. Just let her care herself. Don't worry about. She have roof, that's enough. Let her learn: money not easy get.”

Sweet Sweet was on the Internet from morning until midnight. What I had assumed to be a reaction to the shock of a strange land turned out to be a long-established way of life. My husband described the closed bedroom door, the days and weeks and summer months of sedentary solitude, and her unpleasant snapping tone
when disturbed. Since many modern Chinese parents work seven days a week from early morning to late at night, Sweet Sweet, like many other children, had often been alone—neglected, in fact—when she wasn't being spoiled. Before she arrived, I asked my husband what his daughter liked to do. He said he didn't know—he had never asked her about her interests and likes. “No time,” he said.

“Do you think that is good?” I asked.

“I never think about good or not good. This is just ‘must-be' things. Everybody need work.”

The computer became a real problem. We had a dial-up Internet connection and only one phone line, so my husband was unable to receive calls from new Tai Chi students and I missed calls from customers, gallery owners, or art professors needing models. I firmly explained to my stepdaughter that she must not tie up the phone line like this. How about after 9:00
PM
? How about two or three hours a day? She nodded, looking into the distance, unsmiling and bored. My husband seemed paralyzed. He never said no to his daughter, made demands, or enforced a rule. Da Jie told me that as a baby and toddler, Sweet Sweet had suffered fever seizures. The seizures left her by the time she was five, but afterward the adults were afraid to deny her anything for fear her eyes might roll back in her head. They didn't, but when crossed, Sweet Sweet threw fits of rage, held her breath, and turned blue. The mystique of this historical drama subdued my approach from what it would have been had one of my own children thoughtlessly undermined the well-being of the family. I said softly, “You need to remember, you are part of a family. Everyone needs to think of the other people.”