Across a Green Ocean (26 page)

Deep down, that is all I have ever wished for him, ever since we were both boys sitting by the lake at the Summer Palace.

T
he three of them sit quietly in the Liaos’ living room. The sounds of a fussing baby come from the bedroom, and Ben excuses himself, leaving Liao and Michael alone together. The bottle of grain liquor is almost empty.

“So that’s why you wrote my father?” Michael asks.

“I wrote that letter because I was afraid,” Liao replies. “If your father was the same boy I once knew so well, he would always remember and feel regret for what he did. But perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps he had completely forgotten about me and no longer cared.”

“No,” Michael says quietly. “He may not have talked about you to me, or anyone else in my family, but trust me, he didn’t forget you.” He pauses. “I can’t believe you were able to forgive him.”

Liao shrugs. “Much time has passed. Perhaps if I had not become a teacher, if I had no family, then I would feel badly toward him. Perhaps if your father was here now instead of you, I would feel that way. But I don’t think so. I think I would be happy to see him, and he would be happy to see me.”

Michael isn’t sure if he understands Liao’s reasoning. How can this elderly man, whose life has been ruined by Michael’s father, find it in his heart to forgive what had been done to him? Michael himself still can’t forgive his own father, and the man has been dead for a year.

“Besides,” Liao adds, “I know your father must have suffered too, when he was sent down to the countryside. He must have had to forget about what happened, just as I had.”

“He never told me about being sent down,” Michael says. “He never told me anything.”

Liao glances toward the bedroom, where the fussing seems to have calmed down. “To be truthful, I have not told my son this story before either.”

“But why not? What’s the point of keeping it all a secret?”

“What is the point of passing something like that on to your children? No, that is not a good parent. A good parent is one who gives his children a bright future, not burdens them with the past.” Liao waits a moment. “I do not suppose young people like my son would understand this. They are only interested in making money, in new cell phones and computers and things like that. They do not know what their parents sacrificed in order for them to live so well. But maybe that is for the best. If you knew these things, it would be too heavy of a burden to carry.”

The old man could be onto something, Michael thinks. Maybe the people who had the most to forget were better off doing just that. Maybe that was what Michael’s father had done, forced himself to ignore the circumstances of his previous life and the unsavory things he had done in it, so that he could go on. Only, Michael didn’t know how that could change how he felt about his father.

“I just wish,” he says, “that my father would have told me
something
.”

“Your father always was—how do you say it?—a man of action and not words. But the fact that you are here today, and that you are the person you are, says much about the kind of man he was. That he was a good son, and a good father.”

Michael winces. “I guess.”

“You find this hard to believe.”

“I mean, look at what he did to you.”

“Your father did what he had to, back then, to keep his family together.”

A family, Michael thinks, that he was soon sent away from, and whom he eventually abandoned, even if it was through circumstances beyond his control. A family that he never spoke of, not even when he had a wife and children of his own. After everything his father did, the only person who remains from his past is this elderly man in front of Michael, and it’s almost by pure chance that Michael has met him at all.

“But
you,
” he says to Liao. “You were like a brother to him.”

Liao takes off his glasses and wipes them before responding, “Perhaps he knew that I would never try to hurt him or his family in return, that instead I would take my sentence and serve it well. Perhaps he knew that I would forgive him one day, even if he couldn’t forgive himself for what he had done.”

Looking at Liao’s wrinkled face, upon which is written so much, Michael wonders if in the end it is Liao who is the lucky one. After all, he’s the one who became the teacher he wanted to be, who is surrounded by his family in his old age, who is able to put the past behind him. He’s the one who survived.

“Thank you,” Michael finally says.

Liao replaces his glasses and then blinks. “For what?”

“For telling your story and, I guess, for helping me understand who my father was.”

Liao nods. “It is his story too.”

And now it is his own, Michael realizes, to pass on to whom he chooses. For now, though, he likes that it wholly belongs to him, something he can stick in his back pocket, like the letter that started him on this journey.

It is getting late, and Michael figures he should take his leave. Liao invites him to come back and visit the next time he is in China, and perhaps then he could stay in their house as a guest? Michael wonders where he would sleep in that small apartment with so many occupants already, but thanks Liao for his hospitality. He expresses the same sentiment in return, that Liao and his family are welcome to visit him in the States, before realizing that it would be near impossible for any of the Liaos to get a travel visa. But Liao only smiles and agrees. Both of them know that even though there may be letters exchanged in the future, they are probably never going to see each other again.

“The best thing would have been for me to see your father,” Liao says in parting. “But seeing you is next best. You remind me very much of him.”

Michael ducks his head, not knowing how to respond to the old man’s graciousness.

He thanks Liao’s wife and Mary for dinner and declines Ben’s offer to drive him back to his hotel. Ben insists on walking him to the front gate of the campus, where white tents are set up by the sides of the streets. Inside these tents, Muslim men in white hats roast skewers of mutton over braziers while customers sit on small stools nearby. The smell of cooking meat is intoxicating, and, despite the lavish meal earlier, Michael’s stomach rumbles.

“Would you like to try it?” Ben asks.

Michael holds up a hand. “I’m still full, thanks.” But even as he says that, he realizes dinner was several hours—and what feels like several lifetimes—ago.

“Come.” Ben gestures toward a stool. “You can’t visit Xining without trying this.”

They sit down, and a man serves each of them several skewers of meat along with round flat white pieces of bread to soak up the juices. The seasoned chunks of meat are succulent and tender, not at all gamey. It’s unlike any mutton Michael has ever tasted before.

“Good, yes?” Ben asks.

“Very good,” Michael confirms, and they spend the next few minutes in silence, chewing. He looks around the tent at the other customers, all of whom are men, and blinks when he notices that one of them appears to be digging into a piece of mutton with the fluffy tail still attached. A few of the men sit in pairs, as if they could be couples, although Michael knows they can’t be. He remembers how Liao described
tongxinglian
as meaning “the same hearts together.” It’s an awfully poetic phrase for something that he guesses is still very much forbidden in China.

“This
tongxinglian
.” He hopes he’s pronouncing it correctly. “How is it viewed here?”

Ben does not blink an eye. “It is still, how do you call it, a taboo. It is thought to be more of a Western idea. It is different in larger cities like Beijing and Shanghai. I have heard of nightclubs there where these people go and nobody bothers them. What are these people called in English?”

“Homosexual. Or gay. And there are other words too. Slang words.” Michael decides not to elaborate.

“There are slang words for it here, too. These men, they call one another
tongzhi
. Comrade.”

“As in what the Communists called one another?”

“Yes, people here used to call one another comrade too. It is, how do you say—”

“Ironic,” Michael supplies.

“Yes,” Ben says, smiling.

Looking at the other man in the flickering light from the braziers, Michael wonders how Ben felt earlier, hearing his father tell such personal, incriminating things about himself. He feels prompted to make a confession in return. “The reason I’m asking, why I’m curious, is because I’m that way too.
Tongxinglian
.” The phrase is beginning to sound more natural on his tongue, almost musical. “Do you know what my father said when he found out? He said, ‘You are my punishment. You are what I deserve.’ ”

Michael swallows and sits back, waiting for Ben’s reaction. He’s never repeated these exact words to anyone, not to Amy the night his father said them, to his sister or mother, or to David. It’s as though if he refused to repeat them, they’d lose their power and eventually fade away, like a bruise that turns different shades before vanishing. But it’s easy saying them to Ben, who’s a virtual stranger to him and whom he’ll probably never see again after this night.

Contrary to what he expected, Ben doesn’t appear shocked or even surprised. Instead, he says, “Your father meant more than you thought when he said that.”

“Only, I didn’t know that then.” Michael considers that this is probably more than Ben wants to hear, but he continues. “I was sixteen years old, no one else in my life knew this about me. The way my father found out”—okay, Ben doesn’t need to know the exact details—“was humiliating and shameful, and on top of that, this is what my father says.”

“It is not so bad,” Ben says at last.

Michael starts to laugh. “You’re right. I could have been put in prison for fifteen years, like
your
father. That puts it all into perspective, doesn’t it? But I’ve spent the past ten years thinking that I was my father’s punishment in life, just because of who I am.”

“But he is dead—”

“That doesn’t make any difference. He’ll always be here, in my head, in some way. But I guess I understand more about him now.”

That, Michael supposes, is what matters. He may never know exactly what his father was thinking, what emotions he was feeling, that night when he was sixteen. But this explanation is the closest he may ever come to the truth, and, as Ben says, maybe it’s not so bad. Maybe it isn’t, after all, his fault.

After they finish their midnight snack, Michael and Ben walk out to the road, where Ben flags down a taxi. Ben offers his hand and Michael shakes it, and as the taxi pulls away, he looks back to see Ben waving. He feels a certain affinity for the young man, as if they aren’t people who met that morning, or even friends, but somehow related.

As the taxi takes him across town, Michael looks out the window at a city he feels like he knows much better after the past three days. At night it looks more modern, transformed by the lit-up buildings and the bright tents by the side of the road. If he watches the reflection of the red and yellow lights streaming down the inside of the windowpane, he can almost imagine that he’s home.

Michael thinks about Liao and his father as teenagers, such close friends they were like brothers, until they were sixteen, and then his father sent his friend to prison. He thinks about how different his own life had been at that age.

 

A few months after his father had discovered Michael’s secret, things appeared to have gone back to normal, at least on the surface. Aside from lecturing him on the importance of applying to the right colleges, his father didn’t have much to say to him. He also had a new job that required a longer commute, so Michael was easily able to time it so that they didn’t see each other much at all.

Having decided where he wanted to go to college, Michael began to push his boundaries. He stayed out late, smoked pot with Amy, got a fake ID—things he should have done years ago had it not been out of deference to his parents. The one thing he couldn’t do with Amy—or in this town, even—was to find someone who would alleviate the frustration that had been building up in him ever since that night his parents had gone out. It was pathetic that the only person he had kissed was his next-door neighbor, and she was a girl.

Then an opportunity presented itself when Emily called to see if Michael was planning to do anything for their parents’ anniversary (
Do
they
even know when it is?
he’d replied) and inadvertently revealed that she and Julian were going to be out of town that weekend. Michael tried to convince her to let him stay in their apartment in the West Village.

“I don’t understand why you’re offering to house-sit,” Emily said. “We’re only going to be gone overnight.”

“Fine, can I please just crash at your place?” Michael pleaded. “There’s a party in the city that everyone’s going to, and the trains don’t run that late.”

“What did you tell Mom and Dad?”

“That I needed to go to a friend’s house to work on a school project.”

“And they’re okay with it?”

“Sure.” Lying to his sister was as easy as lying to a stranger.

“All right,” Emily said. “Just get here by noon on Saturday.”

Michael ended up missing his train, so that he was barely able to get the keys from Emily before she and Julian got into their rental car. They appeared to have a lot of luggage for just one night away at a bed-and-breakfast upstate. His sister had always been boring, Michael thought, but this seemed like something a couple who had been married for years would do. Maybe couple’s years were like dog’s years and aged you before you knew it.

He realized, upon entering their dark, claustrophobic studio apartment, why Emily had sounded so skeptical when he had mentioned house-sitting. There wasn’t much to house-sit, not even a plant. The walls where the paint was peeling looked like they had leprosy, and there was a stain vaguely in the shape of Africa above the center of the room. Emily’s clothes, in various shades of black and gray, were strewn everywhere, along with Julian’s video equipment. They had just moved in earlier that year, but it looked like they had thoroughly entrenched themselves.