Repeat After Me (26 page)

I assigned Xiao Wang to read
Forever
, knowing she’d be shocked. Her report read like a book-banning pamphlet, and
I couldn’t stifle my laughter in class when she read it out loud. “This book is inappropriate for any children under the college age,” was her first sentence. She went on to say that it was full of “details of the act of sexual relations,” and that it was no wonder America has so much violence and the children here have sexual relations instead of studying. According to her book report, that was why test scores were lower in the United States than in China.

“Do you think Chinese teenagers don’t have sex?” I asked her in class.

Everyone else was surprised and delighted that the conversation had taken this turn, except perhaps Da Ge, who made a point of looking away.

“Chinese teenagers are quite innocent,” Xiao Wang said.

“Don’t you think it depends on who the teenager is?” I asked. “I mean, isn’t it possible that
some
Chinese teenagers have sex?”

“Maybe possible,” she said, “but we do not have books like this that tell them they should think all day about sexual relations.”

“I’m not sure that’s the point of the book, but good job on the report,” I said.

Ingyum had read
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing
, and wrote that it helped her understand her own fourth-grader, a self-proclaimed Yankees fan who preferred painting pictures of dogs and building intricate Lego spaceships to playing baseball.

Da Ge alone opted not to borrow a book from me. He came to class carrying a shriveled copy of Kafka stories, its pages covered with Chinese characters. He had translated almost every word. When he stood in front of the class in his gray cargo pants, my pulse galloped. We’re getting married, I thought. Married! I had a surge of his body in my bed, his arms around my waist, his face against my neck. My stomach somersaulted.
He belongs to me in some way
, I thought,
even if it’s a small way
. My adrenaline was mixed with wrongheaded relief, a feeling that nothing could ever be off again. Because I was in love with him, the teenage kind of love that’s both so idiotic and naive that it’s not the real thing, and so idiotic and naïve that it’s the only real thing.

“In the story,” Da Ge was saying, “the prisoner is killed by needles that spell out what he do. He bleed until he die. He live in police society, where whatever you do you are killed by authority.” He put his paper down. “I learn a new word from this book,” he said. “That is transfiguration.’”

He was looking at me. “It mean change. After the man die, Kafka say his dead body show no sign of that ‘transfiguration.’ So maybe the point is that it’s waste. Or maybe the point is there is not difference from being alive and being dead. For me, the point is it doesn’t matter what the point is. Because we are punishing ourselves.”

I only heard the lilting grammar, the surface. I wish I’d been ten years older then, that I could have been the person I am now, without having sacrificed Da Ge to become her. I would have said no, that he was wrong, that there were countless other points and ways to read that story and the world, possibilities for how a live plot could work out. I might have loved him out of it. But maybe it took that failure to grow me up. And now the best I can do is try to save Julia Too from her genes, her father’s genes, her grandmother’s genes. And to be perfectly fair, from my genes, too.

At dumplings this Saturday, Julia Too gave the book she’s been working on to Old Chen. He had just finished eating, and his maid, wearing not only a surgical mask but also a hospital-issue gown and hairnet, was clearing his chopsticks and vinegar dish.

Julia Too grabbed her bag, carried it around the table to Old Chen, and unzipped it. She looked so much like Da Ge
that I stared. She’s growing out her bangs, and her dark hair flopped over her eyes and she smoothed it behind her ears before it immediately fell onto her face again. I walked over, stood behind her, twisted her hair into a little bun and secured it by poking a chopstick through.

“Thanks, Mom,” she said. She pulled her project out and placed it on the table.

“
Gei ni zuo de
,” she said to Old Chen. “I made this for you.” She stayed behind him, peering over his shoulder. He held the book for a moment as if steeling himself. Then he opened it up and took a full minute per page. When he had finished, he passed it to me. Each page had a single photo of Da Ge in its center, secured by four silver corners. They were surrounded by Julia Too’s designs: black ink flowers, twirling vines, fish, butterflies. Against the maroon pages and around the old photos, her doodles looked avant-garde and foreign. On the final page, underneath Da Ge as a teenager, she had written out two lines from a Wang Wei poem Da Ge once read me and that I now sometimes read to her: “I’ll ask you nothing else. White clouds forever.”

Old Chen hadn’t said anything, and I felt nervous for Julia Too.

“The book is beautiful,” I said. “How’d you choose those two lines?”

“It’s all I could fit,” she said. She rested her hand on Old Chen’s shoulder.

“
Xihuan ma
?” she asked Old Chen. Do you like it? “I made it for you.”

“It’s a thoughtful thing you made, Zhu-Lia,” he said, “the calligraphy is especially good. It must have taken you a long time.” He reached around and pulled her in. “Thank you,
baober,
Little Treasure. But I meant for you and your mama to keep the pictures.”

“I know,” said Julia Too, “but we can share if we keep them here. I thought you might want them. They look nice with the drawings, don’t you think?”

“
Zhen shi de
,” he said. They really do. Then he stood up and wandered past the couch, a modern yellow leather thing with metal feet and a plastic cover still on, to a dresser sitting atop an oppressively patterned silk rug. Old Chen insists on staying in a renovated courtyard house, either his way of staying true to tradition or close to the memory of the house he lived in with his wife and son.

He looked old and fragile, walking across the room. His wrinkles seemed singed into his face suddenly as he hunched to pull out the Go table. I was too paralyzed with sorrow to offer help, just watched him bend and set the game up on his overstated antique coffee table. It was more than just his age. The grief became visible, physical in that moment, as if a rock a day had been stacked on his back for three decades. I hated Da Ge. Old Chen leaned down and began organizing shiny black and white half marbles, looking like he might collapse. I looked away.

“Zhu-Lia,” he said in Chinese. “Come and play Go with me.” He straightened up.

“
Lai le
,” she said. I’m here.

She sat on the couch across from him, tucked her feet up under her, and lost game after game of Go. He instructed her patiently, and I sat on a Ming-inspired chair, flipping through a
China Daily
full of flu news, a “10-point battle plan” to contain cases, China’s soaring aquatic product exports, the unearthing of ancient bronze workshops by archaeologists, and a piece I tore out for Yang Tao about ethnic minority women discovering cameras, called “Hill Dwellers Climb Cultural Mountain.” I put the remainder of the paper down and sat watching as Old Chen and Julia Too clicked black and white glass
drops along the marble-inlaid table and laughed at each other’s strategies.

When Julia Too is around, Old Chen stops organizing his life until it gleams with precision—and plays. I remember when he taught Julia Too to ride a bike. She was four, and he held her up like human training wheels—for a year. Then she was five. The day she let him let go and sped away, I watched him watch her pedal into the distance laughing, her hair flying back. She moved so fast she was instantly a dot in the distance. At first he and I were clapping, but suddenly he ran as if she had fallen although she hadn’t, bolted across the park to bring her back—make her life-sized again.

During the Go game, Old Chen’s maid and cook, both dressed in flu scrubs, peeked over and over into the living room to glimpse their boss made grandfatherly by my little girl. Then each time they receded into the kitchen, disbelieving and gleeful, giggling behind their masks.

Da Ge’s and my wedding ceremony was an understated affair. We got married on a rainy day in the spring of 1990. We had known each other for less than a year. I meant to tell Julia One that we were going to have a city hall ceremony, to ask her to be our witness. But I wanted no part of reason, and I couldn’t risk giving her a chance to talk me out of Da Ge. So no one knew, and Julia wasn’t our witness. I regretted this that day at the municipal building, and still regret it a bit now. Da Ge’s uncle Zhen Ming was working, and I didn’t like him anyway. So no one was present except the slightly pregnant girl we asked to be our witness because she was standing there, and the justice of the peace.

Da Ge wore a trench coat over cargo pants on an elastic drawstring and a gray hooded sweatshirt. His scar looked blistering, and his eyes twitched. He looked more than three-dimensional to me, he was so agitated. I wanted to calm him
down. He didn’t mention my dress, even though I rarely taught in one and had bought a trim cream frock with buttons for the occasion. We sat on a bench, and I put my hands in my lap.

“My uncle Zhen Ming says we need to have it,” he said.

I looked around. “Have what?”

He took a box out of his pocket. In it was a plain set of gold bands.

I smiled. “I like them,” I said.

He looked surprised by this.

“Oh,” he said, “good.”

He handed me the little one.

“No,” I said, “You take this one and give it to me during the ceremony. I take the big one and give it to you. We can put them on each other’s fingers.”

“Okay,” he said, holding the smaller ring.

The justice called our names, and we went into a corner room. I wished we had invited Xiao Wang and Russ and Chase and Ingyum, that we were having a real wedding, with our whole ESL class. We could recite vows together. “In sickness and health,” we would say. No one would get the “th” sound right. “Health,” I would say again, “heal
th
.”

“Do you take this man,” the justice asked, “to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

I realized we were actually getting married. “Excuse me,” I said. “I’m sorry to do this, but can you wait one minute?” Da Ge looked at me, terror stripping across his face. “It’s okay, darling,” I said to him, tasting the fake word like grape-flavored candy. “I just need one second to catch my breath.”

“I will come?” he asked.

“No, no,” I said, “It’s okay.” I handed him my purse, as if I might come back for such pitiful collateral.

The hallway was cool and full of oxygen. I breathed wildly, drinking it up, found a payphone, called my mother.

“Are you okay?” She asked.

“I love you,” I said.

She paused. “I love you too, Aysh.”

“That’s all,” I said. “I just wanted you to know it.”

She shifted her weight; I felt it. “You sure you’re okay?” she asked.

“Never better.”

“Where are you? Are you taking your meds?”

I was annoyed. “I’m downtown. And yes, I’m taking my meds. Can’t I call you without seeming like a psychopath?”

“Of course,” she said, and blew me a kiss through the phone. We hung up, and I walked back into the room where Da Ge was waiting.

“Sorry about that,” I said. I looked at the justice of the peace. “I do,” I said. She nodded, annoyed that we had taken extra time. We put the rings on. Then we were lawful and wedded. She said nothing about
you may now kiss the bride
, but I stood on my tiptoes anyway and kissed Da Ge with so much force I hoped it would make the whole thing real. Exactly the way I wanted to. He stumbled back.

“
Tian
!” he said.
My God.
One of the few expressions I had already learned.

“Congratulations,” said our knocked-up witness.

Da Ge and I had to create a photo album of the life we’d need to prove we had together. I made him keys to my apartment, and we spent a few days sightseeing, making memories, taking pictures. We went to the Central Park Zoo, where sea lions darted under water like fat, slippery spears and polar bears slept, their toys floating pointlessly in a bright blue pool. Monkeys leapt and swung, stuck their tongues out at us. Da Ge stuck his tongue out back. I took a
picture. One monkey picked nits out of his friend’s fur.