Repeat After Me (35 page)

“Once I break a bottle over someone’s head,” Da Ge said.

“You what?”

“I am angry, so I hit a bottle on someone’s head.”

“A girl?” I asked. I don’t know why I asked him this. Perhaps I wanted to see where the line was. I found it right away; he was furious.

He put his hands on the table, hard, as if he were steadying himself. Some thick soup sloshed over the sides of its bowl. My stomach turned. “You think I hurt women?” he asked, through his teeth. “Why? Because American propaganda tell you this?”

“I just think you have a bad temper,” I said.

“It wasn’t woman,” he said, “but you already knew that.”

“Who then?” I asked. I cut a square of watermelon into two with a chopstick.

“Another student at Beida.”

“Why?” I cut each of the two watermelon pieces into two more.

“He says this stupid thing about my mother.”

“Did he know you?”

“Yes. We were in a meeting together.”

“What kind of meeting?” The hot pink smell of watermelon bothered me, so I pushed my plate away.

“A political meeting,” Da Ge said.

“What did he say about your mother?”

“A rude thing.”

“Did he know your mother?”

Anger flashed across his face. “What, my mother? How is it possible for this?”

“If he doesn’t know your mother, why do you give a shit what he says about her?”

“Nobody say this about my mother.”

“Tell me what he said.” I was punishing him. For bringing Zhen Ming, for ignoring me, for keeping secrets, for not knowing about the baby, not guessing, not asking. I wanted to provoke him out of himself.

“He say she is a whore. He say fuck her.”

“That’s all?”

“What if someone say these things about your mother?”

“I wouldn’t break a bottle over anyone’s head.”

He looked down at the table. “Maybe people have been easy to you in your life.”

“You’re not easy to me.”

He picked at two grains of rice with his chopsticks and refused to meet my eyes.

“You’re not easy, either,” he said.

“So maybe we’re good for each other.”

I reached across the table to touch his hand, and he set his chopsticks down, laced his fingers in mine. Electricity moved up through my arm to my neck. I flew the circle of my mind, looking for the right question to land on, the thing I could ask that would provide a real reveal. I wanted to peel Da Ge’s skin and see underneath. I wanted to be inside him. I wanted to be him.

“Are you going to be okay?” I asked.

He glanced nervously around the restaurant and eventually looked at me and sighed. I remember feeling like he was looking down from the top of the restaurant, thinking I understood nothing. He was right.

“Sometime, I feel so bad I cannot leave the bed,” he said.

“I know,” I told him.

“For many weeks.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Maybe I will be like it forever.”

“No, you won’t,” I said. “Forever is—”

“Nobody can know this things about anybody else.” His voice picked up. “Let’s go to my apartment and watch movie and sleep.”

He reached for my hand and led me out, past the fish tanks displayed against the restaurant’s windows. Lobsters flicked the glass with their eyestalks, walking in a forward and backward trap. They were about to be boiled to firecracker effect, electrified red. Eating lobsters was so specific, two-handing them while their meat-packed shells clacked against white plates. What would it be like to be dead, staring out of a hot shell at a plastic bib and cartoon of your living self?

Da Ge and I walked along Mott Street. There were open-air stalls crammed together, selling replicas of purses, electronic toys, and watches. I wanted to ask Da Ge if it felt anything like China, but was afraid he’d be offended. Maybe if he were in China, I thought, he could be repairing damage he felt he’d done, rather than suffering from afar. In a window we passed, glazed ducks hung by their necks, and Da Ge noticed me flinch.

“Next time we have Beijing duck, okay? It’s not like these Cantonese barbecue ducks. You have to order it the day before.” He paused and looked over, as if remembering again that I was there.

“You are thin,” he said, “sad girl.”

But I was pregnant, fattening up to insulate his baby. I should have told him how much I hoped the baby would look like him.

“I’m happy to be with you, not sad,” I said.

“It’s here, this video store I like.” He opened the door, and a bell rang. The owner waved to him and said something in Chinese. Da Ge walked over and leaned on the counter, forgetting or failing to introduce me. I studied the
bindings of Chinese movies, the characters crawling up the spines like hieroglyphics.

Da Ge came over, holding up a tape. “I want for you to see this new movie,
Ju Dou
. It’s a thing you don’t know, Chinese peasants.”

“It’s good?” I asked.

“The peasant?”

“No, the movie.”

“The end is stupid,” he said, “but that’s true.”

“What’s true? The stupid end?”

“No,” he said, “every end is stupid.” He walked with the movie over to the counter. The manager asked him something and he answered while looking down.

“What did he ask?” I asked.

“He asked why I want to show you this movie of backwards, peasant China.”

“Why do you?”

“I think you would like this movie. It’s not his business.”

Da Ge lived a block from the store, less than a mile from Xiao Wang’s Nai Nai. His apartment was a fifth-floor walk-up studio, and I trailed behind him, sniffing the air, which smelled of garlic and oil. Everywhere the clatter of pots, chairs, sizzling, laughter, foreign conversation. The windows in the stairwells were all open. It was hot.

“This building is mostly family from South China, you know, Guangzhou,” Da Ge told me. “They speak Cantonese and eat everything with four leg except the table.”

When we reached the door marked 5-I, he touched the brass number and letter. “Five is like ‘wu’ in Chinese,” he said. “Sometimes this means none of something. So this means ‘None of I.’”

“None of I?”

“The first time I call you, I am nervous,” he said, opening the door.

“Why?” I asked, thinking he’d tell me he’d had a crush.

“Because your phone number,” he said.

“What about it?”

“It’s one-four-one-four at the end,” he told me.

“And?” I have always liked the symmetry of those last four digits. I traced a finger up the back of his neck.

“It’s bad news,” he said. “This one and four, for Chinese, it mean bad things.”

“Like what?”

“Number one means to want,” he said.

“What’s wrong with that?”

“But four mean death.”

When he opened the door, cool air rushed into the hallway. He gestured for me to walk in first, then followed me. On the wall was an oil painting done in angry yellows, oranges, and reds. It was of four boxes, filled with a fish bone, a black bird, a distorted portrait of Marx, and a calendar. The calendar was made of more boxes, and in each of those was a small head with its eyes X’ed out.

Da Ge was watching me fall into the calendar boxes. “It’s by my old friend Hong Yue,” he said. “Red Moon. That’s his artist name, not his real name.”

“Are they supposed to be dead?” I asked.

“Who?”

“The people in the calendar.”

“I don’t know,” Da Ge said.

“I like the painting.”

Da Ge looked skeptical. He had taken his shoes off and set them carefully on a wicker rack that had several other pairs resting on it. He put plaid slippers on.

“Would you like me to take these off?” I asked.

“It’s okay.” I added my sandals to the collection, and he handed me some white cotton hotel slippers. “Come,” he
said. I followed him into an open room off the entrance. “This is it,” he said, “It small to yours.”

“It’s nice,” I said.

His bed was in the far corner, propped with two pillows and an army green sleeping bag. Facing that were a television and a shelf so full of books that half were stacked horizontally. A bare bulb hung from the middle of the room. He had a wooden table with one chair. I felt sick.

“Do you want to sit?” he asked.

“Can I look around first?”

“Nothing to look around, really.”

I was hoping to find photographs, but there weren’t any. Four scrolls hung in a row on the far wall next to the bed. Each had a different kind of flower growing up it, and a block of characters. I was relieved to see them hanging so neatly; the thought that he had measured before putting nails in place pleased me. H-e-’s u-n-h-a-p-p-y, I spelled out. He saw me looking at the scrolls. “Seasons,” he said, “Tang poems for them.”

“Tang poems?”

“Poems from the Tang dynasty.”

“Will you read me one?” I asked.

He looked at the scrolls. “This one is a poem by poet named Wang Wei,” he said. “He’s quite famous in China. It says, ‘I get off my horse, ask where you are going. You say you have trouble. And go to be alone in the hills of the South. Go then. I will ask you nothing else. White clouds forever.’”

“White clouds forever?”

“Eternal-ity, is this the right word?”

“Yes.”

“China look like this,” he said, pointing to an ink smudge behind one of the flowers. “There is more in the air and the ground there, even for the cities.”

“More what?”

He thought. “Fog,” he said. “That hide the buildings.”

He slipped the movie out of its plastic case and into a VCR.

“Sit down with me,” he said.

He turned the TV on and reclined backward onto the bed. I lay down next to him, and he put his arm under my neck. On the screen, rural China fanned out, dusty and expansive, and an old man kept a stunning woman from her true love. I turned toward Da Ge and rested my hand on his chest, felt his pulse. I turned to ask what town the movie was in, but he was asleep. I watched him for a long time—the way I now watch Julia Too.

My mother has arrived for the summer, equipped with gas masks, six best-selling books for me (even though I dislike bestsellers and can now get books easily in Beijing), and unacceptably fashionable clothes for Julia Too. Nothing about her ever changes, and neither does our chemistry. Her husband, Jack, loves her summer trips, although he doesn’t come with her; he delights in what he considers her “international” lifestyle. Naomi still thinks of our lives here as hardship posts. Until Julia Too and I moved to Beijing, my mother was a quintessential New Yorker, worldly in the freakishly agoraphobic way you can be if you read the
Times
and the
New Yorker
and know every art gallery in New York but can’t bear to leave the city. She could hardly tolerate traveling as far as Connecticut or New Jersey. But now she has all sorts of accessories and frequent-flier miles banked with every airline that flies to China. Jack travels on business, and she brags charmingly that she jets about with him, using her own miles to buy tickets.

Julia Too and I went to pick her up at Capital Airport, where she came down the ramp in a suit cut so precisely she
looked like an origami version of herself. Her pearls weighed her collarbones down. She had almost no makeup on, and skin so thin her veins showed through. She smothered Julia Too with kisses, and then she did the same to me.

“Your hair is short.”

“You love it, right?”

“It’s cute,” she said. “It’s fine.”

I had put lipstick on for the occasion, and was wearing a simple sundress and sandals. My mother held me out for a moment and continued to look at me. I tried to imagine what it will feel like when Julia Too isn’t my little baby-faced girl anymore. How I’ll feel about her neck once it loses the still recognizable creases I once plumbed for stray rice cereal, her silky feet that kicked my stomach while I nursed her. Julia Too is still little enough to belong to me, to live in my house. I still pack her pink lunch box with pretzels and sandwiches, and make her favorite dinners: hot pot, tacos,
yu xiang
spicy eggplant, and lasagna. Maybe looking at me that way made my mother want to see her baby. Or herself. What could she see and not see about me, who had I become to her once I wasn’t hers anymore? She sighed. “You’re really quite skinny,” she concluded.

I smiled. “So are you, Mom.”

Then we went home, where she and Julia Too sneaked off to gossip and try on whatever illegal outfits Naomi had brought.

For dinner, we met Shannon and Xiao Wang and their girls at
Yu Xiang Ren Jia
, Xiao Wang’s favorite Sichuan restaurant. As soon as we arrived and she and Naomi had hugged their American hugs, Xiao Wang directed the waiter to bring a fish out because she wanted
shui zhuyu
, a giant cauldron of boiling oil with fish and bean sprouts and hot peppers bubbling to the surface. Julia Too and I love
shui zhuyu
, but I saw Naomi’s eyes widen at the words. The first
time she ever had it, also out with Xiao Wang, Xiao Wang took my mother into the kitchen to help pick the fish, and then they watched the waiter put it in a plastic bag and beat it to death with a bat. Maybe that’s why
shui zhuyu
was the first Chinese expression Naomi ever effortlessly committed to memory. Now whenever we order it, Xiao Wang has the waiter bring the fish out to the table so we can judge that it’s big enough and fresh with life, but the execution takes place in the kitchen.