Repeat After Me (4 page)

T
HE FIRST TIME
D
A
G
E SHOWED UP AT MY APARTMENT IN
N
EW
York, Nixon was in China, dining with the premier, alternating between “Don’t let China sink into a backwater of oppression and stagnation,” and “Please pass the shark fin soup.” Da Ge was sitting on my stoop 6,847 miles away, reading newspaper reports of the visit. He had a giant cardboard tube on his lap.

I had come home from a Halloween party with my neighbor and best friend, Julia, when I saw him, his moped, the crumpled
Times
, and the cardboard tube. I wondered what the tube was—some sort of piping? Julia was dressed as a wizard, and I as a witch. I deliberately avoided looking at Da Ge, and he appeared not to see me either. I didn’t know how I’d manage to introduce Julia, especially since she was wearing a beard and carrying a stick. Julia, who would not have cared whether Da Ge found her manly, was nevertheless not likely to approve of my students stopping by in the middle of the night. But maybe he guessed I wouldn’t like to introduce them, since he didn’t approach me. Julia and I rode the elevator up together.

“Call me if you’re unhappy or can’t sleep,” she said.

I spelled out “Da Ge is here,” on my right hand. D-a Ge i-s h-e-r-e. Perfect. He had barely been to class in the weeks
since he’d joined, and the few times he’d shown up, he had remained quiet. He hadn’t mentioned our lunch once; I had almost come to think I’d imagined the entire interaction.

I unlocked my door and turned the lights on. The downstairs intercom rang and I said hello into the grid.

“I am Da Ge.” His voice rose up through the walls of the building.

“I’m in 8-A,” I said. “Come on up.”

I buzzed him in, knowing I had roughly one minute if he noticed the elevator, and four if he took the stairs. I frantically threw my witch hat off as I raced to the bathroom, smoothing my straight bangs down with my hand. In the bathroom mirror, I saw that I had returned from looking witchedy to looking like Popeye’s Olive Oyl, zero to sixty. Why was I, even out of costume, so absurd?

I flicked off the bathroom light and went to get Da Ge’s helmet from my closet, where it had shifted the impossibly tight balance of objects only realizable in New York apartments. A roller skate fell from the top shelf, and I dodged it and then stuffed it back in on the floor with two suitcases, an air conditioner, and blankets and pillows. I threw the witch hat on top. My mom had rented the place for me when I dropped out of college during my senior year. Her only criteria were that I be close to her place on 97th and even closer to Julia and Columbia. She hoped Julia’s sanity might inspire me to develop some of my own and that having Columbia in my line of sight no matter where I turned would remind me that I needed to finish school there.

Da Ge knocked, and I opened the door; he was wearing a black jacket and his shiny shoes. He reminded me of my older brother Benj as a teenager, stuffed into dress clothes, buttoned up and miserable at choral cavalcades or bar mitzvahs. The tube in Da Ge’s hands was almost three feet long, extending past his shoulder and down to his knee. His hands
looked knotted on the sides of it. He glanced at the helmet and then at me.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“To see you,” he said.

I contemplated what a professional response would be, and settled on, “Uh, you can see me in class.”

“That’s not you,” he said.

This was weird enough to make me a little nervous. He was still standing in the hallway. I didn’t know whether to invite him in. His voice sped up.

“Anyway, it’s just to bring you this and say sorry for I miss so many class.” He handed me the tube gingerly. I set the helmet down, but he didn’t take it.

“What is this?”

“It’s a language. You’re interested in this.”

“A language?”

He darkened. “A thing of language. Here,” he said.

He reached into the hallway and took the tube back. It occurred to me that he would hit me with it, but once he didn’t, I couldn’t believe I’d thought it. Inevitability is like that. Once things happen the way they happen, there’s no chance anymore that they could have happened any other way. And once there’s no chance anymore, there was never any chance. His feet were outside the door. Setting the bottom of the tube on the floor in front of him, he pried the top off and laid the thing down, forcing me to take a step back. Then he crouched down and his shoulder blades spread out over his knees. He slid a scroll out slowly and stood up as he unraveled it. H-e-s i-n l-o-v-e w-i-t-h m-e spelled itself out on my right hand, fitting neatly.

The scroll was longer than Da Ge was tall; it stretched out past his feet on the floor between us. It was made of rough cream-colored fabric and had a huge Chinese character at its center. Circling that character were dozens of little ones.

“It’s dragons,” he said. “Ninety-nine of that word and one other.”

I was quiet.

“It’s for you,” he said.

“Um,” I said, “it’s amazing. I mean, thank you. Maybe we should, um—”

I bent down to lift the bottom half of the scroll from the floor and felt his eyes on my back as I did it. I rose again, and he was holding his two corners and looking at me. When our eyes met, I imagined we were folding sheets together. We would move into the center, fold over each other, pull back out, and fold again. Then one of us would take the remaining square of a sheet and finish the project. I’d probably be the one, I thought. He would watch. We lifted the dragon scroll onto the table, and I spread it like a cloth.

“It’s okay for you,” he said when I finished, and then he turned to go. “It’s a thing belonged to my mother. That old kind of writing . . .” He shrugged.

I waited.

“Well,” he said, noncommittal now, perhaps embarrassed. “It’s old. Then, China have hope.”

“And now?”

“Today they take the army out of the city. Now your old president Nixon are there. Used to be he visit happily in the 1970. Maybe because he is there, so there are no more soldier on the corners. Maybe he will talk to the leaders. But Chinese people do not get to talk this story. Only leaders.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” I said.

“The time of thing getting better, moving up, moving forward—that hope time is over,” he clarified. “For me, New York is the final place. But here I am stranger.”

He turned to the scroll. “Those characters—it’s different way to write ‘dragon.’”

“You said there was one other one. What is it?” I hoped for something, but couldn’t have put my finger on what it was.

“Long life,” he said. His voice didn’t move over the words; they came out flat, painted on. I spelled them out. Lo-n-g l-i-f-e, two extra fingers. N-o l-o-n-g l-i-f-e, I tried. Or “Yes, very,” and it fit, too. Y-e-s, v-e-r-y l-o-n-g l-i-f-e.

He walked to the door, which I now regretted having left open.

“Wait, Da Ge?”

“Yeah?”

I wanted to know what he meant, for him to come back in and tell me something, to say or do something. I wanted to ask where he’d gotten the scar on his face, why he was in the city with his mother’s dragon scroll in my apartment. I wanted him to stay.

“Um. Thanks again for the—”

“It’s nothing,” he said, walking to the elevator.

“Wait, Da Ge?”

He turned again, patient. “Yeah?”

I felt the blood rushing into my limbs. “I read your assignment.”

“What?”

“The essay about your birth.”

He smiled. “It’s great event for China,” he said.

“What was Beijing like then? I mean, when it was still hopeful.”

He moved back toward my doorway for a minute, looking me over as if to determine whether I could be serious. Then he shrugged. The elevator arrived.

“1966?” he asked.

“Is that when you were born?”

“It’s the Cultural Revolution begin,” he said. “People are suffer then.” He thought for a moment, perhaps imagining
my perspective, remembering he was talking to an American girl. “Maybe for you China is like photograph with no color. Mao is leader before your McDonalds makes the promise to arrive. When I am born in Beijing, it is totally different place. I think you cannot imagine.” The elevator left.

“
My
McDonalds?”

“This McDonalds of your country. Very tasty.”

“Is there a McDonald’s in China?”

“Next year it will arrive like VIP American guest who come to China.”

“An American VIP guest?”

“All American who come to China are VIP. Like Nixon. They come like world police and tell China—okay do this, not okay do that.” He moved back toward the elevator, pushed the button again.

“Does China listen?”

“Of course China like to
pai
the
ma pi
of America, your beautiful country.”

“Pay the what?”

“Pat the ass of a horse.”

“China likes to pat the ass of an American horse?”

When he laughed, his missing tooth looked like a Halloween costume. I wanted to put my fingers in his mouth. But he left. He was still laughing when he turned back to look at me, then slid into the elevator out of sight. The doors closed, and he was gone, swallowed and digested by my building. I hung the dragons in my hallway. Now, as I write this, they’re in my Beijing bedroom, where Da Ge has never been and will never be. Where I’m more of an American than I ever was in New York, but less of a VIP guest than a Chinese horse-ass patter.

The day after Da Ge brought me the dragon scroll, Xiao Wang arrived at school early and stood next to my desk.

“Do you have a question for me?” I asked her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “Do you like to come to my grandmother’s house for dinner with me one night?”

“I would love that,” I told her, honestly. “When?”

“Maybe tonight,” she said.

“Really? Tonight? Of course. Perfect.”

“We can go together after class.”

“At three-thirty? Isn’t that early?”

“Maybe my grandmother like to eat quite early.”

After class, Xiao Wang took my arm and held it the entire way to her grandmother’s, as if I had never left Embassy alone. Or taken the subway. She hosted me from the moment she invited me until I left her grandmother’s apartment five hours later, in a string of polite gestures I found both bizarre and endearing. On the train that afternoon, Xiao Wang gave me a nervous look.

“Maybe I should tell you about my grandmother.”

“I would like that,” I said.

“My grandmother is very old lady. How do you say, ancient?”

“You can say ‘ancient,’ but probably not in front of her,” I suggested.

“She come from China many years ago. She is seventy-eight now, but she still don’t, you know, used to America.”

“I can understand that.”

“So sometime she say the rude thing about American. I hope it’s okay for you.”

“It’s definitely okay for me.”

“Also, maybe the food she make is too hot.”

“It should be fine. I’m sure it will be delicious.”

“Maybe she believe American are rich and lazy. Sometimes fat, too.”

“She’s not wrong.”

“Well, you’re not so fat.”

“Thank you.”

Chinatown was all Chinese signs, garlic, electronics, suitcases, pajamas, “I Love New York” souvenirs, and people rushing up and down, horizontal on sidewalks, vertical in building elevators and stairwells. Xiao Wang led me through the crowds to her Grandmother’s apartment, a sixth-floor walk-up next to a flophouse called the Eternity Hotel. The building was cramped and dingy; hot noise from the hotel spilled into the windows. Each of the six flights we climbed had twelve stairs. At the top, Xiao Wang unlocked a door marked 6-C. Xiao Wang’s grandmother padded over to greet us. She was wearing a cotton jacket and cloth shoes. Her features were soft with age but suggested a former birdlike clarity. She smiled and said something in Chinese.

“Welcome you warmly to our house,” said Xiao Wang.

“Thank you.” I looked around. Pipes hung low across the ceiling, which had intricate maps of water damage and looked like it might sag and fall through its own cracks. There was a gray-and-blue-flecked fold-out couch, a wicker rocking chair, a twelve-inch television, and several folding chairs around a plastic table. To the right was a kitchen that couldn’t have held more than one person at a time. A metal hood fanned out over the stove. To the left was a bedroom with a dresser and double bed visible through the open door. The bed appeared to have been made to military standards. I imagined bouncing coins on its quilt.

Xiao Wang’s grandmother gestured toward the couch and said something else. I nodded as she spoke, unsure of whether to look at her or Xiao Wang, when Xiao Wang began translating.

“Please sit,” Xiao Wang said, so I perched myself awkwardly on a folding chair. “My Nai Nai say we are grateful for the teaching English. She say I often talk about the class and that I like it. She do not say that when I come home, I
often give her the lesson of that day, so she can feel like to be a part of this class I take.”

“I’m so glad,” I said. I wondered if I should offer to come by and tutor the old woman, and I thought that I would like to. But maybe she and Xiao Wang cherished the recycled lessons. “I would be happy to help in any way I can.”