The Natural Laws of Good Luck (28 page)

When Professor Tom asked Zhong-hua to evaluate the performance of the E-Z Grind students, Zhong-hua told them they had done a very good job but later admitted to me that they had done a very bad job. They leaned too far forward and pressured the Changshi meat-grinder team too aggressively. They talked too loud and too fast. They didn't listen. They sat directly across from the Changshi team leader, which was taboo. Zhong-hua explained his opinions, and I translated them into a compilation we called “Thoughts on the Art of Negotiation.” He said things like: “At some point in every negotiation, you will find things are not as you wish them. You need to take a step back from your own interests. If you take more than your share, then nobody will want to do business with you.” He emphasized the need to include “vivid” discussions of how to endure prolonged periods of misfortune and loss.

Both Tom and Zhong-hua played this game with great heart and humanity. Maybe this was the point—that business has to have a human heart. Zhong-hua was worried that Triscari wasn't safe because he wore his heart on his sleeve, and conniving people hurt his feelings. There he sat in the open, like a sitting duck, incandescently sincere and exceptional.

Shortly after Zhong-hua came to America, while reflecting on how to do business here, he had said, “I think maybe I need to get a gun.” I told him that was really not necessary, but I understood why he was jumpy: Back in China, companies had what he called “knife men.” These were hired thugs who hung around outside the
buildings where important negotiations were under way. Their job was to make sure the end result was advantageous to their employer. If not, the knife men prevented the visiting negotiators from leaving. Zhong-hua often had to contact his boss and strongly suggest that he cave in to the demands being made. He said he felt in constant danger.

Professor Triscari had to argue with the university to get a modest onetime consultant's fee for Zhong-hua's collaboration in the meat-grinder enterprise, but that only covered about a week of work that spanned a month. The professor had high hopes that the administration would jump at the opportunity to have more mock negotiation classes once they had a chance to see how exciting and effective this one had been. He said they would have to be blind not to realize what a rare resource my husband could be for the school. To this end, we asked Da Jie to videotape the negotiation class.

She showed up in a sweat suit and, after setting up the camera in one corner, spent the rest of the time in animated zigzagging of the room, as if looking for a hidden panel in the wall. Then she inserted herself into the discussions: “Oh, you talk about China? Ask me, I know. I was Red Guard. This is true—I had red armband.” The negotiators of both teams, dressed in formal attire and seated at the long table, looked confused. Who was this shrill person? Zhong-hua, being the younger brother, could only suggest behind his hand that his sister stay in the shadows with the camera, perhaps behind that big plant. She brushed him off. “Really? I don't think need. Other people all talking, why not me talk? I am real Chinese person. They need to ask me!” Later we tried to edit her out of the video, but she was everywhere.

Soon after that, a delegation of nineteen engineers from the Three Gorges Company, the biggest hydroelectric power corporation in China, came to study environmental technology at the university. I remembered, when we were in China, gazing up at the painted line on the sheer cliff high above the Yangtze River. The line marked where the new water level would be once the dam was
completed. Many farms, villages, and ancient works of art have since disappeared underwater, and submerged factories, garbage dumps, and mines contributed to the toxic soup behind the dam.

Professor Tom paid Zhong-hua out of his own pocket to prepare landscapes of China and large banners of welcoming calligraphy for the classroom. They met the delegation at the airport in the middle of the night, and Zhong-hua helped serve them catered food from the Chinese restaurant on the corner. They asked if there was any decent Chinese food to be had in America and wondered aloud how Americans could eat the most disgusting and dirty animal—chicken. Zhong-hua said he was glad Professor Tom could not understand Mandarin. Tom gave, as always, his whole heart to teaching these people. My husband was very quiet about the Three Gorges delegation, saying only that these elite, top-level engineers had too much power. “Seems very nice, but not. We are just ordinary, so we don't need to spend time with very special people. For us not useful.”

When I next saw Professor Tom, his eyes were puffy and his handsomeness obliterated by the bloated misery of spring allergies. His face looked gray and his head a little bald on top—not like his dashing image in my mind. My savior projection was coming home, and the feeling was not unlike finding something I had been sure someone else had taken—finding it right where I had forgotten it. Now maybe I could be Tom's friend. “Cheer up, things will get better,” I offered. He said he'd been meaning to call my husband but was feeling out of sorts due to some nasty political infighting at the university that he wanted nothing to do with.

“Tell your husband I'm thinking about him. I still very much want to work with him, but I can't get the university to support me in these cultural education projects. They just don't get it.” He had stood up, and his face was floating disembodied at the top of the starched shirt and tie. “Students can't just sit in a classroom reading a case study and expect that they will know how to do business with the Chinese. They have to live this. They have to
live it! That's the only way for them to learn that the Chinese have a different culture and they need to adjust themselves. I still want to work with your husband.”

“I'll tell him,” I said. Zhong-hua was a worthy match for the professor's passionate and kind intelligence, but Zhong-hua was—by choice or circumstance—unsuited, untitled, and autonomous, with his own unapparent destiny.

In the midst of Zhong-hua's brief career as president of Changshi Meat Grinder Company, we had to travel to Boston for a biopsy of his ampulla of Vater. Driving to Boston this time was different. We followed the friendly red taillights of trucks through a snow-flurried fog and listened to Elvis Presley. I looked up at the truck drivers' faces. Some of them grinned to themselves, and others just jowl-jiggled comfortably along. While Elvis sang “I'm all shook up,” I wondered aloud why great rock stars die young, and Zhong-hua said because this kind of life is very uneven, very hard, very hot.

Zhong-hua slept in the backseat, and I drove. A north wind blew and buffeted the car at a right angle to our direction. I looked straight ahead and tightened both hands on the steering wheel as we sped into the expanding company of stars. That was one way not to connect everything to everything else, to keep a single thought from exploding into instantaneous connect-the-dot lightning. I wanted to admit I had no idea about anything at all and be done with fixing. I thought of the time at work when I had driven to the art museum with Arthur. He raised the subject of the Catholic Church. “They're always talking about how you have to shine a light in the dark. No, you don't! Why can't they get that? No, you don't. Just leave it alone, and it will work itself out. You don't have to shine a light in dark places, all right? Jeez!” I would try to have Arthur's kind of faith.

Zhong-hua's procedure took most of the day; the doctor said he would call us with the results of the pathology report. We went from the hospital to Chinatown, just as always. Halfway home we
switched drivers, and I lay in the backseat under a blanket thinking about Arthur's words and chewing on fried squid and a duck head from a carton. I just couldn't understand how a person could sit back and go with the flow and also wrestle the octopus of everyday business. This question made me feel dim-witted, as if I were prying at a knot I myself had tied but could not untie no matter how long I studied it. There were layers and layers of emotion. The petty ones floated on top, like the dirty spume from boiling pork toes that had best be skimmed off. Those were emotions such as resentment, self-righteousness, and indignation. It's hard when you live with a chronically ill person not to think he or she is faking it sometimes. You want to shout, “Get up! Bustle around importantly like me!” At the deeper layers, gratitude and love lay aching like strained muscle on resolute bone. I knew my husband was not well, might never be well.

Suddenly, he said, “I don't want to think every day ‘I is sick, I is sick,' because I know this no good for family. I know I is sick, but I need try to do my best. One person not happy, whole family not happy. My happy is one-third of family happy.”

Interstate 90 was a long, humming ribbon, mostly out of range of the Elvis station, where we said things we never said at home. “Zhong-hua,” I asked from the backseat, “do you like me?”

“Like! Why you need talk about terrible things?”

“What if you hadn't liked me?”

“I never think about.”

“Hey, want me to tell you all about when I was little? Ask me something.”

“I never want to ask this kind of stupid question.”

“Don't you wish I had great big breasts?”

“Go to Price Chopper get some meat is OK. Put there on chest. When all done use, just eat.”

That night in bed Zhong-hua held me in his headlock embrace, wrapping the blanket over our heads as if protecting from fallout. I brought up the big-breast topic again. “What kind of meat?”

“Pork, beef, chicken chest—any kind is OK. Use two balloons is cheap way. When done, just take one nail and pop balloon.”

“But you can't eat balloons.”

“Yeah. But not too expensive. Can buy a lot.”

He kissed me.

The Year of the Dog

I
T WAS THE YEAR OF THE DOG
. According to the Chinese lunisolar calendar, the Chinese New Year began on January 29 and spring on February 4, making 2006 a double-spring year, to follow the previous and unlucky “blind” year without a spring. Zhong-hua had been born in the Year of the Dog in 1958, and Chinese astrologers cautioned that for “dogs,” 2006 could be either an especially dangerous or an especially auspicious year. A good outcome required proceeding with care and caution. They noted that dog people are natural leaders but often make bad decisions. Warnings included watching out for falling debris and natural disasters, especially in areas whose names contained
center
and
middle
. My husband was himself one of these danger zones, bearing a name meaning “Middle Kingdom.”

Zhong-hua said this was silly and nobody smart believed in it. But then, after holding his chin and pushing out his lips pressed tightly together, as Da Jie did when considering
haochu
and
huaichu
—that is, good points and bad points—he said probably it was a smart idea anyway for dog people to wear red underwear for luck and protection. He then told me he had already found one pair in my drawer but was finding them a bit uncomfortable.

The art center education director asked my husband to teach a three-hour workshop in Chinese brush painting. She knew it
would be popular, because they had turned many people away from the overfilled class he had taught for free as part of his grant. Now she proposed charging eighty-five dollars per student for the three-hour intensive, signing up twenty students, and paying Zhong-hua twenty dollars an hour. Surely this woman could do math. Reading her e-mail, I began to rant loudly until Zhong-hua came in and laughed at my profanities. I typed what I knew Zhong-hua wanted me to say: “Thank you very much. You are nice person. I know my English is not good. I am sorry about this. I will try my best to teach this class.”

There was also a message on the answering machine from the secretary of the church where Zhong-hua taught his Wednesday night class: “Mr. Lu, we just had our board meeting and realized you haven't paid us for two years. Please return the key to the door with your back payment.”

I turned to him. “Zhong-hua, you haven't paid them any money?” I felt suddenly nauseated. “When you started the class back up, you never paid the fee?”

“Make ten dollars, spend ten dollars buy gas. No money pay church. I just think, what time I get—that time I pay.”

“It doesn't work that way here. You have to pay anyway.”

“Yes, I told the church lady I want to pay. She told me go figure out how much. Very difficult figure out, because first few months have no students. So many times I too sick, cannot teach. Also, sometimes I just have one ‘Over-the-Mountain-Old-Man,' cannot send him home. Because I remember, in my sick times, he worried. He call my home, say, ‘Hello.' I very appreciate. So I just think, let him stay—teach him. Other times just have one fireman. He very excited learn Chen-style Tai Chi. If I send fireman home, feel very sorry because fireman try hard. Church lady not like Chen style. She say, ‘God lives in here. This is God's house—you cannot make grunting noises in here.' You know, Chen-style Tai Chi need make this kind of noise; get old qi out of body. I tell her, ‘Church just want to help people. I teach Tai Chi,
just want help people, too. We is doing same work. When I say this, I make her look not happy.”

I had made a big mistake leaving Zhong-hua without my help to communicate and interpret protocol. After his surgery, it turned out he had signed “one piece of paper” months before he was well enough to actually resume teaching class. That was a new contract.

I wrote a letter to the church explaining the situation and asking if we could make monthly payments until the debt was paid. Zhong-hua told me to tell them he would clean the bathrooms and mop the floor. He said anyone in the church could come to class for free. He did not want to close this class. When Wednesday came around, he went to the church as usual. A man intercepted him at the end of the class and demanded the key. He said he represented the board of directors. The man said he did not need any money, just please give back the key. Zhong-hua fumbled for it, but it had migrated through a hole in his pocket into the lining of his jacket. When he came home that night, his glasses were smashed and one eyelid was bleeding. Upset and searching for the light switch in the church corridor, he had bumped into the wall corner. He said, “This maybe mean church people want me go away.”