The Price of Silence (7 page)

I introduced An-ling. “She’s one of my new students.”The lie came out before I thought it. “I invited her to dinner,” I added, opening drawers, getting flatware, a napkin, a plate. I turned the radio off. I forgot to set a glass.

I added a place setting in front of An-ling and offered to take her jacket, to put the flowers in water. She stood up and extended the many bouquets to Tom with a deep bow. Later, she told me that she’d brought peonies because they are flowers of riches and honors.Twenty-five peonies—five times five, five a lucky number. An-ling wanted Tom to like her, but Tom was resistant to any intrusion in his domestic life, even one as innocuous as a dinner interruption.

An-ling’s dyed hair was in stiff braids that didn’t reach her shoulders and her face was clean of make-up. “Good fortune for your family,” she said in a small voice, her accent deeper from shyness.“You have a beautiful home.”

While I filled four vases with the flowers, Tom asked questions in a tone that wanted to convey that he was being friendly, but it was an interrogation, pure and simple.

“How long have you been in this country?” he asked.

“Seven months.”

I thought that Tom must have been making her nervous because she had walked into my classroom almost a year and a half before.

“New York right away?”Tom asked.

“Before, two weeks in San Francisco.”

“Why did you leave California?”

“Tom, stop. Please,” I interrupted, sitting down.“Let’s eat.”

She did not eat. Instead, she stared at the grouping of pill containers Tom keeps in the center of the table between the salt and pepper shakers. Multivitamins, Echinacea for when he feels a cold coming on. She fingered the container of Ginkgo Biloba he’d bought the previous year after his fifty-fifth birthday.

“There is a story that tells how it happened that Ginkgo nuts are so good for you. Do you want to know?”

“Of course we do,” I said.

“I tell you.” She beamed.

I put down my fork and elbowed Josh to do the same.

Tom kept on eating.

“A mean monk lived in a monastery where there was also a bell tower and three Ginkgo trees. Outside the monastery was a field of herbs that could cure the sick, but the mean monk will not let the poor people of the province pick the herbs. He wants them for himself and many people die. The three trees and the bell tower are angry about this and want to help the poor people.With their magic they change into three maidens and an old man and go to the field to pick the herbs.When the monk sees what they are doing, he complains to his boss, the Jade Emperor, who sends down generals to beat the maidens and the old man.

The maidens see the generals, swallow the herbs, and turn themselves back into trees. From now on, the nuts of the Ginkgo trees are full of herbs that cure.”

“That’s a sweet fable,” I said.

“China has many stories to explain many things.”

“What happened to the old man?” Josh asked.

“He is only decoration. Men have too many stories.”

Tom wiped his mouth, his eyes steady on An-ling.“You speak very well after such a short time. I have Asian students who have been here for many years.They have the vocabulary, but half the time I can’t understand them. I should send them to you, Emma.You’re obviously good.”

“How about giving her the credit?” Josh pointed a fork at An-ling.“I mean, nothing against you, Mom, but she’s the one who did the work.”

“You’re right. It is all to An-ling’s credit. I did nothing.” The truth of it made me laugh.

An-ling giggled and put a string bean in her mouth.

“Credit to both of you, then.”Tom smiled and shot Josh a glance of parental pride.Then he reverted back to his role as inquisitor.“Do you live with your parents?”

“My parents are dead. My aunt brought me here. She lives in San Francisco.”

“I’m so sorry.” I stretched a hand across the table, but didn’t touch her. At the school, she had only said they’d stayed behind.

“When Baba, my father, died I was two. Mama, I was twelve. I lived with Nyah-Nyah, my father’s mother, until Goo-Goo Chai sent for me—that is my father’s sister. I do not love my aunt. She wants to bind my brain so it will be as small as hers.” An-ling punctuated the end of each sentence with a bob of her head. A smile appeared on Josh’s face, like the sudden bright flash of a fish in a pond. I grasped that smile as a sign that he liked An-ling.

Tom too, I thought, let his diffidence soften, for he said, “Well, good luck to you.” He fell into silence as he finished his meal. An-ling ate nothing after the one string bean. Josh cleaned his plate twice while his sneakers made little mouse sounds against the rubber tile floor. I reached below the table to steady his knee while I reiterated the beauty of her flowers, chatted about school and the students An-ling had met only once, whom she probably didn’t remember. I avoided asking questions.

An-ling listened, head cocked, giving my chit-chat importance.

Tom folded his paper napkin, as always. “When exactly did you start studying with my wife?”

An-ling straightened her neck, gave me a look. I returned her gaze.Tell him if you want, I thought, as if she could read my mind.Tell him the truth.You and I barely know each other.There are no connections between us except for the red peony you painted on my blouse.

“Maybe one or two weeks after I come to New York,”

An-ling said.

Her complicity encouraged me. “An-ling is my best student.”

Josh

All those flowers. It was over the top. She was trying to butter up Mom; that’s what popped in my head then.Now I think she was scared, maybe. She wanted us to like her right away.

At first,An-ling was just someone Mom knew, one of her students. Three or four times before Mom had invited her students home for a party.They came with CDs, tapes from their countries, and they danced. It was fun. One woman tried to teach me how to samba. She wouldn’t give up. I’ve got some beat in my arms, but I’m lousy with my feet. It was at one of those parties that I learned about Tito Puente.

What a great drummer!

Last time, I couldn’t find my Discman after a party and Dad was sure one of Mom’s students took it. Mom got real upset with him for thinking that. I felt really bad because a few days later she found my Discman in the laundry basket. I must have thrown it in there with my sweatshirt, I guess. She never had another party.

The first time An-ling came over, Dad, right off the bat, started rapping out questions like he was Jerry Orbach. Dad doesn’t know it, but he can be pretty intimidating. It didn’t faze her for a second. She answered and bounced her head up and down like she was having such a good time she was going to start dancing. I tapped a counter beat with my feet. I wanted to laugh, but that wouldn’t have gone over real well.

Later I found out from An-ling that the Chinese don’t talk while they’re eating. And when you ask questions, they don’t always tell you how it is. If you ask if they’re hungry, they’ll say no even if they’re starving. “Saving face,” she said. For a while I thought being Chinese is about keeping secrets. An-ling sure had enough of them, but so did Mom and Dad.Then I started keeping some of my own.

She came over a lot after that night. I’d come home from school and she’d be in the kitchen with Mom, chopping up vegetables. An-ling wanted me to help her. “Learn how to cook, you will have many girlfriends.” She asked what year I was born. I told her and she said I was born the year of the rabbit. According to her, it meant I had a lot of talent and could be trusted, which I guess is nice, but I didn’t believe it.

The afternoons she was there, I’d get a Coke and go to my room or to the basement until dinnertime. I’ve always done that. Gone off by myself, I mean. Even when she wasn’t there. I had nothing against her.

Mom thinks I’m shy. I don’t get into conversations when I’m not interested, that’s all. There’s no point to it unless there’s something really neat going on.

One time I saw Mom reading to An-ling in the park across the street from our building. Riverside Park. I stopped to listen to a guy playing Jimi Hendrix on his guitar— “Purple Haze”—what I’d just been playing in the basement.

The guitar player was really good, but Mom’s voice kept covering the notes, like she had no clue she should stop making noise and just listen to the music. She went on reading from this little book she had in her hands. An-ling was sitting in front of her, facing me, both of them on an old knit blanket full of holes from me poking at it when it was on my bed when I was little. Grams gave it to me when I was born. She told me she knitted it especially for me, which I know isn’t true because I overheard her tell Mom she wouldn’t be caught dead knitting like some old Italian peasant.

How can you tell what’s real? We all lied—Mom, Dad, Grams, An-ling, me. Whatever we were trying to save, it didn’t work.

An-ling saw me that day in the park and winked at me. I pretended I didn’t see her. I didn’t want Mom to turn around. She was always asking me to stay with them, sit in on their talk.After An-ling left I would get,“Isn’t she nice?”

“Don’t you like her?”“Please try to make her feel welcome.

She has no family. Her home is far away.”

“What about the Goo-Goo in San Francisco? She’s got her.”

Why did she wink at me in the park? I wanted to ask her, but I knew I never would.Was she making fun of me or making fun of Mom? And Mom reading poetry to her? I thought that was weird.

I think it was after seeing them in Riverside Park that I gave An-ling some space in my head.She was coming over for dinner two or three times a week, always on school nights. Dad said no to weekends. I thought it was because of the food.She and Mom always made Chinese food which Dad doesn’t like. It wasn’t as good as what you get at Ollie’s over on 116th and Broadway, but it was better than takeout stews and meatloaf, which is what we eat most of the time.

During dinner,An-ling told stories about her life in a small village.Pretty grim ones.No running water, no heat.An outhouse. Her parents used to live in a big city—I forget the name. Her father was a well-known painter and her mother a doctor. During the Cultural Revolution, her mother was lucky to get work in a shoe factory,but her father was sent away to build dikes or something, and she said that when he came back after Mao died, his hands were bleeding stumps.

“Too much water.” She made circles in the air with her arms.

“You mean a flood?” I said.

“Yes, a flood take his tools and the Red Guards make him dig with his hands.”

Mom was drinking this stuff up, her face getting all soggy.

Dad put his fork down, chewed on his food real slow like he wasn’t liking it a whole lot, swallowed, all the time keeping his eyes on a spot above An-ling’s head. “The Cultural Revolution ended over thirty years ago,” he said.

An-ling straightened up tall in her chair, her neck getting long, like she was trying to reach that spot Dad kept looking at. “This happen before me. My parents old when I come.”

“I see.”

When she left, he didn’t wait long to say,“That girl made that whole story up.”

Mom slapped the pot she was cleaning down on the counter. I was standing right next to her, drying, and got a big splash of dishwater all over me.“Hey, watch it!”

But she was only paying attention to Dad.“Why are you being so unpleasant? What has that sweet girl done to you?”

Dad walked out.That’s when it hit me that Dad might be jealous.

An-ling had the strangest mouth. Most of us have a dip in the middle of the top lip.Hers was an arc, with no break. It was kinda cool. Her hair was yellow at first, the color of the legal pads Dad keeps on his desk. She hated her hair because it was thick and stiff.When she didn’t have any money, she used to cut her own hair off to make paint brushes.That’s what she said, but I think she made that one up too. It looked much prettier when Mom dyed it back to black.

Sometimes, when I was little, I’d dream that Mom wasn’t my real mother, that Dad had an affair and I was the result.

That my real mother was killed by a drunk driver, or Dad wouldn’t let her keep me. Sometimes she died giving birth to me. I hated those dreams, but they kept coming.

The time I got my first drum set—that was Mom’s doing. I’d wanted it forever, but Dad kept bringing up the oboe, what a rich sound it had, how easy it was to carry around. I stopped asking after a while. Then on my tenth birthday, when I came home from school, sitting on top of my bed was a Tama Rockstar drum kit. “From Mom and Dad,” the card said, but from the look on Dad’s face, I knew it was all Mom’s doing. Before An-ling came along, that was the best moment in my life.

I can help Mom. I want to help. I really do, but it’s too hard.

Emma

It was late June.We had both taken the day off from work and ridden the ferry to visit Staten Island’s botanical gardens.

“We are as close to ancient intellectual China as we can be in this country,” An-ling said as I followed her to the Chinese Scholar’s Garden. She was wearing a flowered cotton sundress and soft black Chinese slippers that reminded me of Mary Janes. Her dyed yellow hair was loose, thick against her cheeks.

“The scholar was on top of the heap in ancient China,” she said.“A very big deal.”

We walked up a few steps and stopped just inside the entrance in front of a large mahogany screen which hid the view beyond.“Steps stop the evil spirits.”An-ling’s face was serious, concentrated, filled with pride. Our roles reversed here, I was the foreigner, her student.

“Also the screen stops them.You will see.The garden path we follow waves like the tail of a tiger because evil spirits can only go in a straight line.The scholars had great good fortune, but if their performance was poor, ooh,”—she grimaced in mock pain—“very bad things happen to them.”

We walked to the right, beyond the screen.To my surprise the garden was set up like a living space, a winding walled structure made up of enclosed rooms, pavilions and small courtyards surrounding a long pond.

“There were lotus blossoms once, but they died.” Clusters of limestone and granite rocks, what the Chinese think of as the bones of the earth, rose out of the water like miniature mountains.