Repeat After Me (25 page)

“You told my mother that you fell?” I asked him. “You were in the lunatic ward because you fell? You knew my mother from the hospital? Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“We can meet after school to have some chat, okay, Aysha?”

Xiao Wang was staring at us, unblinking, as if she had always known it would come to this. I took an eight-second breath and walked to the front of the room to read Langston Hughes’s “I, Too, Sing America.” Its perfect fifteen-letter title fit on my fingers. No one noticed I was counting them over and over in my mind. Or that every sentence I uttered
fit in multiples of five. My right hand moved like a running spider on the side of my leg. I was spelling everything. I was in control. Then Ingyum was standing, describing how to knit a scarf for “hobby show and tell.” It felt interminable, even though I normally loved this sort of lesson. Xiao Wang had done a stir-fry demonstration, holding an imaginary wok and saying, “then you put the meat in, then you take the meat out,” and I thought I would teach her the hokey-pokey when she next came over to watch movies. Chase and Russ had done baseball, complete with bat and ball, although I asked them just to “mime” hitting the ball. They were brilliant, throwing around baseball words like pitch, strike, and slide, and ending with a rousing description of home runs. Everyone cheered. I wanted to be happy, to focus on the words and celebrate, correct, and clap, but I felt like a fly, buzzing above the room, my dozens of insect eyes all looking in different directions. When Ingyum finished, I dismissed the class, dying to clear them out and hear whatever lies Da Ge was going to use to comfort me.

On a payphone close to Embassy, I called Dr. Meyers to cancel my appointment with her—for the first time. I said I had a fever. Could she hear the traffic whipping by?

“Take care of yourself,” she said, the way Bonita had. The way Adam always did.

Da Ge was waiting outside the phone booth, his backpack slung over one shoulder, the muscles in his jaw moving. Maybe he was grinding his teeth. His eyes had sunk further into his head since I’d met him. I closed my eyes and told myself that when I opened them, if the first number on the phone I saw was even, everything would be okay. I didn’t even know what that meant. When I opened my eyes, I saw all the numbers at once. He hadn’t brought an extra helmet, but I rode on the back of his moped anyway, half-hoping we’d crash and never have to have the conversation. But we
survived and arrived at Tom’s Diner. Safe in our booth, I sat with my stomach grinding.

“I had a accident,” said Da Ge, eating fries with a fork. “I meet your mother in the hospital when you are there. I’m sorry I don’t tell you. I don’t want you to think I am—”

“What, insane?”

He raised an eyebrow, then tucked a paper napkin around his burger before picking it up and biting so tidily it reminded me of my mother.

“What kind of accident was it?” My words came out thick with dread, a dark mess of mixed paint. Da Ge spun a forkful of the spaghetti he had also ordered. I had never seen anyone order both a burger and spaghetti. He put the noodles in his mouth.

“Oh my motorbike,” he lied, chewing.

“Oh,” I said. “You crashed it?”

He finished chewing, swallowed. “Your mother is very worried for you then.”

“She told you that?”

“I can tell.”

“But what about you? Tell me about the accident.”

“I fell the bike.”

“You were thrown, you mean?” I couldn’t stop supplying him with excuses.

“Right.”

He looked so young and skinny, eating his two entrees. I wondered if he had envied me in the hospital. For the first time, I thought how grateful I should have been for my mother’s care. “Who took care of you at St. Luke’s?” I asked.

“The doctor.”

“No one else? Did anyone visit you?”

“I take care of myself around that time. Maybe my father’s brother, Zhen Ming.”

“What about your father? He didn’t come?”

“No. He doesn’t know this.”

“You didn’t tell him about the accident.”

“This will be too much trouble for him.”

“Maybe he would have come.” I said.

He said nothing, shook his head no.

“All right, maybe not. But why were you on the floor for mental patients?”

“I suffer mind thing,” he said.

I heard the echo of Xiao Wang’s words in his. Had she known about this all along? Or somehow guessed it?

“You mean, the accident was because of the mind thing? Or the mind thing was because of the accident?”

He was wrapping more noodles around his fork. I wanted to throw his plate at the wall, hear the porcelain shatter, spray the place with pasta sauce.

“The other thing you said,” he said calmly.

“What?”

“Because the accident, my mind become weak.”

I wanted to believe him so badly that I offered up the word. “Shock,” I said.

He nodded.

“You were in shock because of the accident?”

“Maybe,” he said.

“But did you plan the accident?”

“What does this mean, plan?”

“Did you want to crash the bike? Did you want to hurt yourself?”

“Who says I crash the motorbike? I just have an accident and fall. That’s all.”

We looked at each other, and the right side of his mouth edged up into a smile. I smiled back, agreed to let it go. Da Ge gulped some Coke, reached into his backpack.

“Maybe you can help me,” he said, pushing a fat folder across the table.

I opened it, found American citizenship application forms full of bizarre vocabulary. I recognized some from our marriage registration process: Petition For Alien Relative, Registering Permanent Residence, Supplement A to Form I-485, Application to Register Permanent Residence, USCIS Form G-325A—Biographic Information U.S. Citizen, Affidavit of Support Contract Between Sponsor and Household Member. He pointed to a practice booklet for a test about U.S. history. “You will help me with some study? It’s okay for you?”

“Of course,” I told him. “And I’ll fill out all the forms for you.”

“Thank you, Aysha,” he said. Hearing my name in his voice gave me the feeling of falling. Like in a dream. I jolted, caught myself, studied the tabletop: metallic patterns winding inside Formica.

“Can I ask you something, please?”

“Zhen Ming have a doctor to do the medical thing,” he said.

“That wasn’t the question. It’s not about your citizenship.”

“Oh,” he said. “More that accident?”

“No. What happened on June fourth?”

He stared at me. “There was a student uprising in Tiananmen Square,” he said. “The People’s Liberation Army came into the square to kill the students.”

I wasn’t going for it.

“I mean what happened to you.”

His eyes had the red marble look. He waited a minute before he said, as if it were an attack on me, “I wasn’t there.”

“You weren’t there,” I repeated, hot parrot, confused.

“I am already in America because my father send me here earlier. He offer me a ticket to America and I take it.”

“When?”

“May twenty-eighth,” he said, looking down. Eight days
after the Chinese government declared martial law, a week before June 4. Two weeks after my own breakdown.

“Oh,” I said, the weight of it coming at me. “Oh.” I tried to remember when exactly I’d been hospitalized, to grasp the coincidence.

Da Ge’s head snapped back up. “So I am not your guy in front of the tank.”

I ignored this. “You had the ‘accident,’ and went to St. Luke’s in June? When?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “maybe sometime. June. I am far away and rich and safe, just like my father.”

“Did your father send you here because you were depressed? Or did he do it because he guessed what was going to happen?”

“He bought me,” Da Ge said, and dropped his voice an octave. “Here, Da Ge! Take this—money and ticket to
Mei Guo
, pretty country—there you will see your democracy! And you have to do nothing for it! Here, here!” He took his wallet out, grabbed a wad of cash, and threw it up so that the bills scattered. Other people looked over at us. I made no move to retrieve the money. Bills floated to the floor.

“I took it,” he said. “I took that ticket, those moneys. All those meetings, who was I? I was nothing! I put folding chairs. I print leaflet. I call myself strong fighter? Even my mother would be disappoint. Maybe if she’s alive she don’t want democracy. But of course she will want me to be hero. But I fly away safe to America because I am weak—”

“You’re not weak,” I said, “It’s not your fault—you didn’t know . . .”

“In America what do I do? I watch sport and meet pretty girl. Everything is for money in this nothing life. I will never be my mother, who believe in something. And I will never be my father, who don’t believe but live well and feel happy.”

“But you’ll be you. And you’re—” I don’t know if I could have put the words together to say what I meant even if he hadn’t interrupted. That I found him soulful and brave, that he was my favorite person. Or just that I loved him. That would have sufficed.

“Used to be I think I want China to be free,” he said, “but really I just want I myself am free. I realize that selfish thing but then it is too late. I am already here. I have what everyone in the world dream of—to come to America. But I don’t want to live here, once I know. America is too easy. You fight for nothing. You never have like June fourth.”

“That’s not true, actually. Have you ever heard of Kent State?”

“What state?”

“It’s a university where the American government killed protestors.”

“Students?”

“Yes.”

“Short time ago?”

“Unacceptably recently, yes.”

“How many students?”

“Four.”

“What was that protest?”

“The students were against the Vietnam War.”

“American government killed those students?”

“Yes.”

He took this in. “What happened from it?”

“Nothing.”

“What means nothing?”

“I mean nothing happened. The government didn’t learn its lesson.”

“How do you know?”

“Because ten days later they did it again at another school—two more students during a protest against racism.”

“Do you think they will do that now?”

“That American police would shoot at students, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Given the right context.”

He finished his last bite of spaghetti and pushed the plate into the dollar bills, still lying on the table like awkward, dead things.

I planned to tell the immigration officers that his favorite food was spaghetti, in case they asked during the test to see if we were in love.

“Students have hope,” he said, collecting the bills into a pile. “Governments crush hope so students can graduate and join the hopeless governments and run the countries.”

“That’s a bleak view.”

“Do you know anyone from that schools?”

“I was a baby when they happened.”

“I know the ones at Tiananmen. If I am not so weak and selfish, could be it’s me there with my friends.”

“Are your friends okay?”

“I don’t know. I’m not contact with them.”

“Couldn’t your father find out for you?”

“I don’t want to talk to him.”

I should have told Da Ge what my brother, Benj, had tried to tell me, that parents are too important, that it’s worth trying forever to forgive them, that making up and loving your mom and dad are worth any sacrifice. But I didn’t know it myself yet.

“Maybe things will get better,” I said. I hoped for both of us that this was a possibility.

“I remember I first meet your mother walking around the hall in the hospital,” Da Ge said. “And then I see you. You are so pretty, I think. Sad and so pretty. But you never see me. I don’t know why. I always watch you when you
walk on the hall with your mother, you with dark hair and big eyes and the light face and this—” he reached across the table and touched my mouth “—this small mouth.”

“Why didn’t you talk to me?” I asked.

He kept his fingers on my face. “I don’t know how,” he said.

“Did you talk to my mom?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ask her what was wrong with me?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

“She say you were terrible hurt by her and your father.”

When we stood up, Da Ge put his arm around me. Outside, he kept holding on, and I shut my eyes. We walked the three blocks to my apartment this way, slowly. I don’t know if he knew I had my eyes closed, but I didn’t hit anything or get run over. I heard traffic lights turning, cars blowing by, the bookseller closing his van stuffed with paperbacks. The clouds shifted into patterns I would never see. Walking this way, blindly, made me feel like there was all the time in the world.

After lying to me about his “accident,” Da Ge came to every class for the rest of the semester and participated as if he were my teaching assistant. Maybe he was atoning. That April, everyone had to read either an article or an entire book in English and write a summary of the piece they’d read. I brought in some books from my childhood.

Chase and Russ did book reports on
Ramona Quimby
, which Chase described as “the moving tale” of a young girl who makes many mistakes, “like forgetting to wear under-clothes to school.” Russ said he had not enjoyed the book because it was too silly.