Repeat After Me (18 page)

“I don’t like cold water. Thank you.” He took a sip and continued, “My Yeye, my grandfather. He was old, maybe like ninety-one years. He leave certain things he want to give me, but those are in Beijing. Maybe when he’s alive he always want me to marry a nice Chinese girl and give him grandson. Maybe if he knew I would never do that, then he won’t leave me his things.” A great-grandson, I thought, although I resisted correcting him. Da Ge’s glance shifted around the room, as if he were looking for his grandfather.

“What would be wrong with marrying a nice Chinese girl and having a baby?”

“I do not want these old-fashioned marriage idea. I want to have democratic marriage, what is my free choice, and anyway, I don’t deserve to be back to China.”

“What do you mean,
deserve
?”

He ignored this. “My Yeye have a lot of old books. Used to be we read these together, but now I don’t want to think of it. Maybe he left it for me. He wish I will get married.” He tilted his head up, a question.

“I’ll marry you if you want,” I said. I had considered us in love for weeks; he might as well, too. Marrying Da Ge would be sinister and safe at the same time, a sexy combination. And since I had never seen a good marriage, I had the wild notion that this might lead to one.

“Are you sure it’s okay you can do that for me?” Da Ge asked. His eyes were glittering with excitement.

“Yes, I’m sure.” I felt a rush of adrenaline, “It’ll be like an extension of teaching English. Extra credit.”

Da Ge stood up. “Thank you,” he said. He walked over, and I thought he might pick up my hand or kiss me, but he did neither. “I will make it easy. So no work for you. And I can pay if you—”

“I’m not interested in your money.”

What did he believe motivated me? Generosity? Stupidity? Or did he simply have better perspective than I did and choose me because he knew I’d do it?

In exchange for my vows and the bonus green card that would come with them, I asked if he would teach me Chinese. He laughed. Happily, I want to think. And then, right there, he began writing out characters, starting with numbers, because they were easiest. The number one was only a short horizontal line. “Should be okay for you, this one!” he said. “Two” was two lines. “Person” was also two lines, like a tepee.

“No,” said Da Ge when told him it looked like a house. “It look like a person. Chinese language make sense, unlike your English. Each thing look like the thing it is.” He drew a box with a line through it. “See?” he told me. “Sun!”

“That looks like a sun?”

He drew a box with no line in it. “Mouth,” he said. “Like your big mouth.”

He left that night as usual, and I continued to hide him from everyone who mattered: my mom, Julia, even Dr. Meyers, who did well with truth. Da Ge was my trump card; I would bring him out last, I thought, shoot the moon.

Yesterday was warmish for February in Beijing. Julia Too and I went shopping in Sanlitun, where we bought her fake “Miss Sixty” shirts, Diesel corduroys, and some new sneakers. My mother had sent Julia Too home from New York with red, pointy shoes of the sort that I forbid. I’m too mean to buy her such shoes myself, but not mean enough to take them away from her, so Julia Too wore them every single day of January, even though it was so cold I worried we’d have to amputate her feet.

At the market, she climbed out from behind a sheet that doubles as a dressing room, wearing a striped, hooded sweaterdress. She looked like an old-fashioned candy stick, and I wanted to gobble her up like I used to when she was a baby.

“How does it look?” she asked me.

“Delicious,” I said. “You’re the love of my life.”

She grinned, pulled the hood over her head. “You’re still mine, too,” she said. We have an agreement that as soon as I’m not the love of her life anymore, we’ll have a bottle of champagne in honor of the new love, even if she’s only eleven.

For lunch, Julia Too chose Pure Lotus, and Yang Tao came to meet us. I had seen him a dozen times, for coffee by his office at Beijing University, for lunches during my breaks at Global Beijing, and for two sleepovers when Julia Too was sleeping at Lili’s and Phoebe’s. When he walked into Pure Lotus, I stood up and kissed him on each cheek. Julia Too was busily ordering for the table: sweet and sour tofu fish wrapped in a seaweed approximation of skin; fake Peking duck with pancakes, scallions, and sweet dark sauce; spareribs with bones made of bamboo shoots. Then she sipped ginger apple juice while Yang Tao asked her, in English, about school. She replied in Chinese. This was both a forgivable choice and a gesture of subtle hostility. All the bilingual children I know have the ability to divide the world up instantly and with astonishing accuracy—they know immediately who speaks native English and who speaks native Chinese. But Yang Tao also knows both that Julia Too considers herself American, and that in the teenage world of Global Beijing, English is “cooler” than Chinese. She was making the unfriendly point that Yang Tao is not in the inner circle of our family, that she and I speak an English so fluent and intimate that he’s not welcome even to try to participate. I disliked this undercurrent, but hoped Yang Tao would accommodate her and speak Chinese if she preferred that.

As if reading my mind, he switched. “What are you reading in English class?” he asked in Chinese.

“Nothing,” she said in English. Then she excused herself, left for the bathroom. I saw her take her cell phone out, wondered who she was calling.

“I have something for you to read,” I told Yang Tao, hoping to make up for Julia Too. I handed him the treasure I’d been saving, an article I had clipped from China Air’s in-flight magazine, entitled “Custom of Wedding.” It described a ceremony in rural Anhui province, in which, it said, “in accordance with local custom, the bride shall be screwed off the fine hair on the forehead on wedding day.”

“You win,” he said. Our contest was for who could provide the other with the worst translation copy. It started when I showed him Julia’s “dog-end cast from high” flyer and he, perhaps in a quiet protest, brought me a photo of an American basketball player with the Chinese character for broccoli tattooed on his neck.

“So as a victory gift, maybe you can tell me what this means.” I was laughing.

“You have to rescind your victory if you ask the native person for a translation.”

“Wow.
Rescind
! Show off. Fine, I rescind.”

“I’m going to guess it either means tweeze or braid. Probably tweeze. Is this what you’ve been spending your time researching? Rural wedding customs in Anhui?”

Just then, a girl roughly Julia Too’s age came into the restaurant selling roses wrapped in individual plastic sleeves. She wore a man’s army green coat and shoes that looked like they had belonged to someone else first. She shuffled from table to table, looking at the floor, repeating “Buy a flower for her” to the men at each table. I was justifying in my mind why not to buy flowers: her boss was a tyrant who took her money anyway, working children are part of a despicable mafia, giving
money is giving in to the system, and so on. But before I had convinced myself, Yang Tao was beckoning her over.

“Buy a flower for her,” the girl said.

“How many do you have to sell?” he asked. She shrugged.

“How many to be done for today?” he asked.

She looked at him. “Buy a flower for her,” she said. She didn’t look at me, just nodded her head in the general direction of where someone might be sitting.

Yang Tao took three one hundred Yuan notes from his wallet, almost fifty dollars. “Here,” he said, “Please give them to me.”

“How many, mister?”

“All of them.” He handed her the bills. She paused for a moment, incredulous, then tossed the flowers onto our table and ran.

I looked up to see Julia Too standing there. She blew her bangs out of her eyes in a gesture that struck me as uniquely adolescent. She moved her eyes slowly from the roses, which now looked naked and grotesque to me, to Yang Tao.

“Show off,” she said.

That night at bedtime, Julia Too climbed under her tiger blanket. “Let’s tell the story,” she said. I sat on the edge of her bed, tickled her back.

“Which one, Bean?” I asked, because there are two.

“The one about my birth.”

“The night you were born, the moon in New York was a white sliver. I could see it from the cab on the way to St. Luke’s and again from the window in my room. Naomi and Julia were there, and we sang Xiao Wang’s Mekong River song, about the light over Lijiang. When you arrived, everybody said, ‘She’s perfect,’ and you were. I said you looked like your daddy, Julia One said you looked like me, and Nomi said you looked just like yourself, and ‘give her here.’”

“Did you?”

“Of course. She snuggled you half to death.”

“Now the other one,” Julia Too said.

“Your daddy was very sick.”

“Was I there?”

“I was pregnant with you.”

I sighed. We have had this conversation many times, and I don’t mind—it’s my retribution, I guess. But sometimes, even now, when I’m telling it, I can feel the two sections of my heart—one red and the other white, slide apart like a puzzle. Julia Too doesn’t like to vary the wording or the cadence.

“He didn’t know me.”

“Right. He didn’t know you. But he would have loved you. I am certain.”

She turned away from me. “Let’s stop there,” she said.

“Okay, sweetie.”

“It’s a pity, right, Mom?”

I leaned down and kissed her. “Yes. It’s a pity.”

After she had closed her eyes and started breathing sleepily, I took seventeen steps from her bedroom through the living room, past the roses Yang Tao had bought, now in a tall vase on the coffee table. I poured a glass of Dragon Seal wine and sat up alone, watching my favorite TV series,
Don’t Talk to Strangers
, about a doctor who flies into jealous rages over his schoolteacher wife.

I fell asleep hours later and dreamt of a wedding in Anhui. Julia Too and I rode horses side by side, our hairlines plucked, our matching taffeta dresses sounding like prom, looking whiter than an overexposed photo or a ghost. I woke glazed with fear and stumbled from the couch into Julia Too’s room. She was safe in her bed, one flannel pajama’ed leg sticking out from under the covers. I tucked it back in.

I used to wonder what it felt like to be as estranged as Da Ge was from the world, what it made nights like to have had a mother who couldn’t bear to stay alive. I didn’t have my dad anymore exactly, but I could always go home to my mom. The first time I started rereading Da Ge’s early essays was that February, and I made a conscious, stricken decision not to return them. How much did I already suspect about what I’d need to keep? Or what I’d lose? I never took notes on his work; he wrote in red ink, making my teacher pen redundant. And since I never gave him any feedback anyway, I began to read his essays over and over, and keep them. As soon as I’d admitted to myself that I was going to do it, I set about organizing his assignments into my journal.

It was one of many projects I created in the weeks after Julia and Adam betrayed me together, leaving me with the feeling that my life was a shallow sitcom and I had no friends. Alone in my apartment, I kept busy. I was too proud to call Julia and too annoyed to call Adam, so I made collages, typed up comments on student papers, wrote an essay to Columbia about why they should let me back in, and reread
Anna Karenina
,
Madame Bovary
,
Angle of Repose
, and
Gatsby
. I like reading books I’ve read before, because they remind me who I am. That February, I read Lu Xun, too, thought he might remind me who I was about to be. Reading someone new can make you someone new, I find.

But every time I closed a book, I landed hard on the same thought: Julia. Julia in her leotard and tights, Julia in primary school, hanging from the playground bars, Julia at fifteen, smudges of Kohl eyeliner shadowing her eyes, Julia eating Koronet Pizza, laughing, a dimple creasing her right cheek, Julia making tea in her studio, painting silver stars on my toe-nails, Julia asleep in her investment banker bed, Julia in the moment she made the conscious decision that selling me out
was worth a few minutes of guilty fun with Adam. Or worse, finding the guilt fun precisely because it was at my expense. Or worse yet, not thinking of me at all. Maybe they were in love.