Across a Green Ocean (12 page)

She wanted to start having children immediately, but Han had just received his biochemistry degree and was looking for a job. Ling understood the need for the delay, but by the time he announced that he had been offered a job in New Jersey, she had an announcement of her own—she was pregnant with their first child. Although she had been upset to leave her friends, Ling looked forward to a new life in which she could live in a house and drive a car as large as a boat, and in which she and her husband would have no one else but each other to depend on.

The house they had moved into, located in a recently developed suburb, was nothing like their apartment. Everything they did here was like taking the first steps in a foreign country. The lawn, which had been transported piece by piece and patched together like a quilt, was so fresh that their shoes left dimples on the surface. The bushes barely made indentations against the walls, and there were paint flecks on the windows that looked next door and onto the raw beams of another house in early stages of construction. Inside, the water gushing from the faucets unexpectedly turned reddish brown and an earthy smell would fill the bathroom.

The first thing the Tangs discovered about their house was that it was plagued with mice, due to the new houses constantly springing up around them. The mice left what Ling liked to think of as
little presents
behind the toaster, and at night when she padded awkwardly downstairs to the kitchen, she would find half a dozen of them scurrying away into the corners when she flipped on the light. Determined to get rid of them, Han bought traps baited with peanut butter, because he said it had been scientifically proven that mice preferred peanut butter to cheese. One night when Ling had gone to the kitchen to get a glass of water, she discovered a mouse caught in a trap, its eyes bulging like grains of black rice. It had managed to pull itself a few inches across the linoleum, and its right hind leg paddled uselessly.
I know how you feel,
she wanted to tell it. Then she decided to let her husband deal with it in the morning, turned off the light, and went back to bed.

Ling knew no one in this town, if it could be called a town; the houses were situated so far apart from the shops. While her husband was at work, she learned how to drive the maroon Buick that Han had purchased for her. She was terrible at it. When she pulled out of the driveway, she often ran over their mailbox, flattening it as if it were a pin and her car, a bowling ball. She practiced in empty parking lots, worrying about jolting the baby as she awkwardly shifted gears. She was also concerned that she and Han were arguing too much and that this would also hurt the baby, that the emotions that surged through her would make the baby anxious. She could feel the baby restlessly turning somersaults in her stomach, giving fretful little kicks. The sensitivity with which it seemed to pick up on all her moods indicated to her that it would be a girl.

Ling and Han seemed to argue about everything and nothing: the mice that continued to wreak havoc in the kitchen; the cost of gasoline since Ling practiced driving so much; the fact that even though she practiced she could still not drive on the highway, so that she was limited to buying groceries from the local stores and could not easily make a trip into the city to get the Chinese vegetables to make the dishes that he wanted. They also argued about church. Han had grown up considering religion to be a liability, something that could cause you to be thrown into jail if so much as a Bible, given to you years before by a well-meaning missionary, was discovered in your house. So Ling often ended up going to church alone, especially after arguments with her husband.

Then one evening they had a particularly bad fight, something that had started innocently enough, with Han faulting her for buying an old piece of meat, slimy and inedible, from the butcher’s. Ling had known this from the moment the butcher had placed it on the scale, but she had not trusted her English enough to demand something different. She had meant it to be a funny story, and an explanation why they were having eggs-and-tomato for dinner again instead of a dish with meat. But Han turned it into an accusation:
Don’t you know you have to stand up for yourself in this country? Can’t you even learn that?

Ling spun around and left the house. She didn’t trust herself to drive, so instead she walked down the street, turned the corner, and continued to walk without being aware of where she was going. She knew she must look odd, an eight-months’ pregnant woman on foot. Gradually, the houses on either side, with their trim front yards and neatly cornered gables, thinned out. The street sign she came to was unfamiliar, and when she looked behind her, it was as if the landscape she had passed through had magically rearranged itself. To her dismay, the sidewalk ended altogether, and beyond it stretched fields that she had never seen before. Then a strange sense of calm spread through her body at the sight, the unending greenness in the waning light. Even on all her drives around town, she had never known she’d been so close to escape.

She stood on the concrete that made up the edge of the sidewalk and let the warm summer wind ruffle her hair. If she closed her eyes, it was almost as if she were floating in an amniotic sac, not unlike what her own baby must be experiencing. By now her stomach was so big that she carried it like a basket of laundry in front of her. Ling wondered what would happen if she went into labor at that very moment. Would she give birth in the fields like a cow? The baby kicked gently, as if to reassure her that everything was going to be okay. Then it kicked harder, against her bladder.

Ling looked around her to make sure no cars were approaching. Usually, the idea of urinating in public would be enough to make her face heat up with shame, but now she stepped a few feet into the grass, squatted, and relieved herself without even hiding behind a tree. When she was done, she smoothed down her maternity smock and turned around. She must have been gone at least a half hour by now, and Han would be worried. But finding her way back was more difficult than she’d thought. When she got to an unfamiliar intersection, she hesitated. She could knock on someone’s door, but she didn’t know how to ask for directions. So, for the first time in her life, she decided to let a higher power—God, or whatever you wanted to call it—take over. She continued to walk, and within ten minutes saw a street sign that she recognized. Along with her relief was a slight tinge of disappointment. She couldn’t have gotten lost even if she’d wanted to.

It was dark by the time she got back, and the dinner she’d prepared earlier lay cold and congealed on the table, even more unappetizing. Ling sank into a chair, suddenly aware of how tired she was.

I was just about to go look for you,
Han said.
Where did you go?

Nowhere,
Ling replied.

I knew you couldn’t have gone very far.
Han’s words made him appear unconcerned, but Ling caught the tone in his voice. This was the closest he would come to apologizing for what he’d said.

The only other person who knew where Ling had gone that night was the baby, who did turn out to be a girl. When Ling discovered she hadn’t given birth to a boy, she turned away from her husband. She was afraid he would once again find fault with her. But Han held her and said not to worry, there was plenty of time, all the time in the world.

 

For much of Ling’s married life, her husband had been an enigma to her. Aside from the first outpouring of his family history, she didn’t know much about where he had come from, aside that his parents and siblings—two sisters and a brother—were city folks. He did not seem to have kept any connections from his previous life in China, unlike Ling, who received any number of letters from her friends and relatives. She remembered only one personal letter received by her husband in recent years, about a month before his death. It was on similar airmail paper as the letters that normally arrived for Ling, but it had been postmarked from mainland China, not Taiwan. That was all she could discern of it before Han whisked it away, the expression on his face preventing her from asking any questions.

Sure, she knew many things about her husband: how delicate his stomach was; how loud his snores at night; how his discarded socks looked like cow dung, not unlike the ones in the fields she drove past in the daytime, down that road she’d fled before Emily was born. She adjusted her habits accordingly over the years, making sure the dishes she cooked weren’t too spicy, waking him up when the snores got too loud, picking up after him. If knowing the most intimate details of someone’s life wasn’t really knowing that person, then what was?

Still, Ling couldn’t help feeling that a person’s family was their history. Certainly that was the way it had been thought of where her family originally came from, when people lived in their ancestral villages and you could look up the names of anyone’s great-grandparents on the tablets that hung next to the shrine at the center of every compound. The fact that you were expected to visit this shrine regularly, to burn incense and bow before your ancestors, guaranteed that you never forgot them. But war, famine, revolution, persecution, and other random elements did much to divide families from one another. Ling’s own family in Taiwan was far removed from its ancestral village near Shanghai, having been displaced by the Communists in 1949, but so many of their nationalist compatriots had also come over, and much of their former ways were able to be re-created. Han, she supposed, had not been so lucky. The ultimate break, she thought, must be moving to another country. The new language, the new customs, drove a wedge between the old life and the new that could never be removed.

Another mystery about her husband, Ling felt, was his lack of friends. He never associated with the husbands in the church congregation as she did with the wives. Sometimes a coworker would invite them to dinner, and on those rare occasions they would leave the children with a babysitter, later entrusting Emily to watch over Michael, until Michael was old enough to be left home by himself. Ling found these dinners to be awkward affairs, although she preferred it when the coworkers were Asian, as they often were. In the Indian or Malaysian households, she could taste something familiar in the foods, empathize with mothers’ concerns over their children’s schoolwork, recognize the way people displayed English magazines like
Time
and
Newsweek
on the coffee table, while the newspapers in the kitchen were in their native languages. She understood what it meant to try too hard.

One of the most awkward dinners she attended had been thrown by Han’s boss. This was when Han had been working in a nearby town, when Emily was in college and Michael was sixteen, before his most recent job in Trenton which, Ling was convinced, had contributed to his heart disease with its hour-long commute. Han had worked at this particular company for over twenty years; it was why he and Ling had moved to New Jersey, and he considered this boss a friend; the man had even attended Han’s funeral nine years later.

Ling had agonized over this event for days, whether she should get a new dress, what she should bring as a gift. She did not know how to choose wine, and it all seemed costly, so in the end she settled on what would traditionally be brought to a Chinese house, a box of clementines, tied with a bow. But the wife of Han’s boss had not known how to react, taking the box from Ling with a bemused smile.
Look at what a thoughtful gift Han’s wife has brought us,
she called out to her husband. She then made some comment on how you could never get enough vitamin C.

Indeed, Ling had felt drab next to this woman, who wore a bright floral dress that suggested a hothouse gone awry. Ling wore a black silk dress she had ended up buying specially for the occasion, thinking that black was sophisticated even though it was a color she did not usually wear. Since she did not drink, she sipped from a glass of water while the other wives spoke over and around her. They were all white, taller than her, and seemed to already know one another, and, as if they did not think she could speak English, they did not bother to include her in their conversations. During dinner, she kept her words to a minimum, praising the massive roast, which to her was too salty. She and Han ended up leaving early, the first out of all the guests.
Thank you for the oranges,
the boss’s wife had added when they left, reminding Ling again of her dreadful mistake.

She thought this was why Han was so quiet on the drive home. As each mile passed, she could feel something simmering just beneath the surface, and she steeled herself for the inevitable confrontation as soon as they pulled into the driveway. She only hoped that he would confine it to the car, so that their son couldn’t hear. But after he turned off the engine, he just got out of the car and went inside. Ling sat in the car for around ten minutes, glad for the reprieve. She collected herself and decided the evening hadn’t been so bad after all.

After waiting a good amount of time, she unbuckled her seat belt and went into the house. The air in the hallway felt disturbed, as if someone had just rushed through it. But the kitchen and living room were empty, the lights blazing. Upstairs, Michael wasn’t in his room, and in their room, Han was getting ready to go to bed.
He went out,
was all he said to Ling’s question about where their son had gone. Ling watched him for a moment. Something about the way he removed his shoes and lined them up inside the closet made her heart ache.

She waited downstairs in the kitchen for Michael to come home, watching the second hand of the clock make its slow, quiet revolution. Maybe he had gone to the Bradleys’ next door, to see that girl who wore what looked like safety pins in her ears. Finally, Ling went to bed, allowing herself to drift into an exhausted, restless sleep only after she heard the back door shut and footsteps come up the stairs. The next morning, after Han had left for work, and she was sitting across from her son at the kitchen table as he ate his breakfast, she did not ask Michael where he had gone. She didn’t want to know; for now she was simply glad that he was safe, that he hadn’t gotten into a car accident, or run away, or any of the number of things that could happen to a teenager these days.