Repeat After Me (14 page)

Last week, the Saturday before Christmas, Yang Tao took me to a restaurant called Bitterness and Happiness, a place with two menus. One is meant to represent excess, and
features meats, soups, and stir-fries. The other is a list of weeds and roots, reminders of scarcity. Portraits of Mao adorn the walls, and the furniture is a mix of kitsch and antique nuanced enough to suggest the owners have both irony and genuine nostalgia. Our first date was given an additional surreal kick by waitresses decked out in Santa hats, red with flashing lights and white braids.

“Happy Christmas!” said our waitress.

“You too, Santa!” I said.

Yang Tao ordered from both menus, slabs of meat from one and bark and leaves from the other. I like dichotomies, liked him.

“What do you think?” Yang Tao asked, gesturing around to the room.

“I like it. Very hip.”

He sipped some tea. “I’m glad,” he said.

“So, where were you during the Cultural Revolution?” I asked, picking a little Red Guard chopstick rest off the table and turning it over in my hand.

“Wow. Well, I was here. In Beijing.”

“Your parents?”

“They were here, too.”

“Were they party members?”

“Yes. My parents were very private. And they had good records, came from farm families. They mostly hid in our house until it was over. Why do you ask?”

There was a clipped quality to his English, a kind of accent unlike any I had heard. If I had met him on the telephone, I wouldn’t have been able to tell he was Chinese. But I might have thought he was reading out loud from a book, rather than talking. His speaking, so crisp and studied, contrasted his soft, expressive face.

“I was thinking of Julia Too’s dad—of something he once told me.”

“Do you want to tell me about him?”

I was struck by the shrink-wording of this question, wondered what he thought of my directness. Bringing up Da Ge on a date was a rare gesture for me, so I must have wanted to tell Yang Tao about him. But I didn’t really like being called out on it.

“Yeah, I guess so. Do you want to know anything about it?”

“It’s up to you,” he said.

“He died.”

“I’m sorry.”

I smiled, perhaps meanly. “I’m a widow.”

“So you are,” he said, in Chinese. It was the first thing he’d said in Chinese.

I switched to Chinese, too, said, “He was my student in New York right after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. He was extremely, uh, disturbed. But I loved him.”

I braced myself, but Yang Tao just nodded as if he had been expecting this news, and in the context of where we were and what we were doing, it made perfect sense.

“Of course you did,” he said, in English. “That was a disastrous time.”

A waiter brought a plate of weeds to the table. “This is from the bitterness menu,” Yang Tao grinned, putting some on my plate. I picked at them with my chopsticks, trying for delicacy and failing.

“How is it?” Yang Tao asked, taking a bite of weeds for himself.

“Good. Did they have access to sesame oil and sugar and what else is in here—plums—during the bitterness era?”

“No. That’s—how should I say it—the tasty sauce of modernization.”

Tasty sauce of modernization! I decided right then that I would show him off to Xiao Wang. They hadn’t had a
chance to speak at Thanksgiving, and I wanted to know what she thought. She would no doubt tell me he was “very Chinese.”

As Xiao Wang once put it when she was still my student at Embassy in New York, “When a Chinese man falls in love, instead of judging her, he would become the fan and love whatever the girlfriend is. Though, after marriage it could be another story.”

     
January 1990, New York, NY

Dear Teacher,

When my parents are gone for the Cultural Revolution I live with my fat grandmother and my grandfather. My grandmother smoke cigarettes and die because of this. Or maybe because she is fat. Sometimes the heart stops for all that fat. My grandfather very thin, almost like a tree. Before she die, my grandmother tell me a story of my mother, of what she say when I’m arrive to the world—at least it’s a son. My Grandmother tell me other thing, too, like go get her tobacco because she roll cigarette herself. And even though her finger are also fat, she can roll it perfectly. Maybe because she roll so many dumpling. She say do not marry a person like your Grandfather who only read all day because they don’t help with the practical life. But she is proud that my Grandfather is intellectual. I never saw them fight even one time. During those years I asked my grandfather what he was doing sitting in his chair, eyes close, but not asleep. He whisper to me I am reading in my mind. And I said what? And he tell me he read his books so many times before that he have pages already in his memory. All he have to do to read them forever, is close his eyes to look inside his head.

My only friend then are some children, and I spent all the time to play games with them. Once, we are so hungry that we thief a bag of sugar from our house and eat sugar sugar sugar from our hands. That was the sugar for everyone to use for more than two months and we eat all of it. I am the leader and the other kid call me big brother. I am strong and handsome and popular, even with my sugar teeth and hooligan habit. Maybe to American girl like you, this seem like the bad time for China, but to me it is also the charming time, before my own bad time come.

Da Ge

B
Y
J
ANUARY OF
1990,
THE WORD
“C
HINA
”
HAD BEGUN TO LEAP
from the page at me, the way misspellings and mistakes would later turn red after Microsoft took over parts of my mind. In 1990, I learned to read the papers carefully.

The world can shift quickly. I had never considered China; it had always been a faraway place with its own literature and way of folding the world into compartments. Anything outside of the English alphabet had always existed only outside of me.

But once Da Ge and Xiao Wang were in a conversation with me about China, everyone else seemed to be, too, from random Chinese people on the subway to the
New York Time
s. China rejected criticism of its human rights record. Ten thousand students had been executed or imprisoned following Da Ge’s protest, all of them, I imagined, his best friends. Chinese officials called the uprising “counterrevolutionary,” but the
Times
implied that the students were revolutionary heroes, and for me, they were embodied in Da Ge and, later, in Xiao Wang. Even though he was crazy and she claimed not to be interested in politics. The government believed that the students had tried to overthrow a legitimate government, one that was itself “revolutionary.” The students believed they were leading a revolution and
were true patriots. I believed Da Ge had been delivered to me fresh from the battlefield. One Chinese official said that there was “no such thing as political prosecution in China,” and that “therefore there is no such thing as political prisoners.” This seemed to me to be a clean, linguistic kind of logic. I wondered if Da Ge resisted such clauses or fell prey to them himself. Of course the answer was both, and that’s true of me as well.

Old Chen likes to take Julia Too to the neighborhood where Da Ge grew up. He’s proud of the staggering progress that has transformed Beijing from historic to space age in a single decade. Their old courtyard house is gone; in its place is a towering skyscraper. Our favorite sushi bar is less than a mile from the old-school alley where Da Ge was born. His street has been expanded into a wide boulevard down which privately owned Mercedes, including Old Chen’s, speed remorselessly. Gone are the donkey carts piled with pig innards, as well as houses without heat or running water. Even Beijing’s poorest citizens, migrant workers who crack their spines under the weight of modernization’s worst work shifts—constructing, sewing, cleaning, massaging—say they’re better off than they were in the 1980s or ’90s.

I know better than to wish for a return to Da Ge’s China. But I can’t help being nostalgic for what I’ll never get to see or know: what his neighborhood and house looked and smelled like then. Where he walked, played, carried his book bag to school. Who his mother was. Who he was.

Shannon complains good-naturedly about her Chinese mother-in-law, says the old woman snatched Sophie from the hospital and has spent every second of Sophie’s life hovering over them since the instant Sophie was conceived. I would love a Chinese mom-in-law, bossing me about not bathing Julia Too until she’s old enough to tolerate the water, feeding her the right balance of hot- and cold-inducing foods,
and advising about nursing, weaning, even bringing up a twelve-year-old. I’d love Zhang Sun’s mom. Or Da Ge’s mom. She might have been another Naomi. A lasagna-making, Zabar’s-shopping, teaching, interrupting, bowling-you-over grandma like my mom. Of the dumpling, noodle, drunken chicken, Sunday morning tai-chi-chuan variety instead. Maybe she’d have taught Julia Too to fan-dance in Ritan Park. Julia Too would have had a name for her, like Nomi.

At least she has Old Chen to draw out the zodiac, fly kites, teach her
cheng yu
, four-character Chinese maxims. Last time we visited the place where Da Ge grew up, Old Chen said proudly to Julia Too, “
Yi ri qian qiu
,” or “One day, a thousand autumns,” meaning look how fast and brilliantly China is changing. It’s among his favorite sayings, and usually Julia Too just repeats it back obediently. But that day she responded, “
Yi ri san qiu
,” or “One day, three autumns,” and Old Chen’s mouth opened but no more words came out. His hands, which had been gesturing enthusiastically, fell to his sides. Julia Too took one of them and held it in hers, walked that way for a while. I asked her later what “One day, three autumns” means, and she said, “It’s like when you love someone but they’re gone from your life, so you miss them a lot. Then one day feels like three years. Or something.”

“Where did you learn that?” I asked.

Julia Too shrugged. “At school.”

“What made you say it today?”

“I thought Old Chen would be proud I knew it.”

It seems ironic now, from this glistening city, that just as China began its lift and fix after Tiananmen, Da Ge started spiraling. By January of 1990, intellectuals were on their way back to Beijing, less concerned with getting arrested than they were with getting jobs. Nixon visited. Kissinger
visited. China stamped out “six evils,” including prostitution, pornography, the sale of women and children, drugs, gambling, and “profiteering from superstition.” I wondered what the last one meant.

I pored over articles that winter in New York, searching for clues into his inner landscape. I needed a project, found him fascinating, couldn’t wait to see him back at Embassy the first week of class in January. I hoped to joke about my discovery that China had identified five “great loves” for its citizens: “the motherland, the Communist Party, the socialist system, the capital city, and work.” I loved that China counted, was reminded of myself. I even wrote a card for Da Ge in which I proposed a sixth love, but I never sent it.

“Welcome,” I said our first day back in class. Everyone was seated; he was there. I forced myself not to stare.

“Welcome,” my students said.

“Vacation,” I said. “Last week I was on vacation.”

“Vacation,” they said. “Last week I was on vacation.”

“Let’s warm up before we talk about our vacations—with a quick dictation,” I said. “Everyone take out a piece of paper.” Some of them took out paper. The others watched and realized that they were supposed to take out paper. Eventually, everyone had a sheet. When they were all looking down, poised like track stars to write fast once I spoke, I had my first chance to look at Da Ge. He was wearing jeans and a blue zip-up sweatshirt with his usual shiny black shoes. He wasn’t exactly how I had pictured the love of my life, a furious beanstalk of a Chinese student with whom I shared a vocabulary of five hundred words. Yet in spite of the distance between him and a dream boyfriend, seeing him again did not make me want him less.