Repeat After Me (41 page)

“I’d like the time with you and Julia Too in the car,” he said. He hadn’t been over in a while, hadn’t pressed it. I said he could take us there, but we’d go back with Anne.

So Yang Tao picked us up and we drove three hours to the “wild wall,” a lesser-known access site, listening to a painful CD Julia Too had burned of Beyoncé, Ludacris, Avril Lavigne, and Nelly. Yang Tao asked polite questions about the MTV music awards, and she lectured him Old Chen–style, happily. When we arrived at the wall, he unloaded sleeping bags, then kissed Julia Too once on each cheek before kissing me. She smiled, kissed his cheeks back, and ran to greet Phoebe and Lili.

“Thank you for schlepping us out here,” I said, looking up at Yang Tao.

“It was nice for me,” he said. “I’m glad she’s giving me another chance.”

He got into the car, rolled the window down. “Have a good night on the wall.”

“Will I see you tomorrow when we get back?” I asked.

“Do you want to?”

“Terribly,” I said.

He smiled, turned the key in the ignition.

“Mom!” Julia Too called. “Look at this!”

I walked over to where Julia Too, Lili, and Phoebe were crouched over a dead snake.

“That’s odd,” Anne was saying. “It’s a water snake.” She flipped it over with her hand, shocking me with her un-squeamishness. “A tiger-striped neck groove snake.”

“A what?!” I asked.

“A tiger-striped neck groove snake. They’re common in Beijing,” she said.

“You’re a freak,” I told her. “How do you know esoteric snake names?”

She smiled, pleased. “It’s not esoteric. We had one in our garden once.”

Weeds as tall as the girls rose up, and we swashbuckled our ways through them. Unlike at Simatai or Mutianyu, the tourist sites on the wall, there was no cable car, no slide, and nobody following us up the wall. I somewhat missed the chatter of the old women who climbed the wall with us when we went to Simatai, hoping to sell water or postcards at the top. We stopped in a fortress for lunch, ate mozzarella and basil sandwiches from the Kerry Center deli, and looked at the dozens of miles of sky visible in every direction. It was so hot that the air felt thick and supportive, as if we could collapse and still be held up by humidity. There was the slow drone of insects so utterly absent in the city, and after I finished my lunch, I leaned back against a stone wall and listened. Julia Too and the girls were talking about seventh grade, who had moved, whether Kevin and Phoebe would continue to be in love, whether they’d be allowed to go to the Glay concert in October, since we moms had waffled and agreed to let them go unchaperoned to the Beijing jazz festival the last week of August. Xiao Wang was sitting next to me, fanning herself.

“I am reading this book called
Kitchen
,” she said, “a Japanese book.”

“In Chinese?”

“Yes. They have it in English. Maybe you can read it so we can discuss.”

“Okay. Is it good?”

“I think it’s good, yes. The story has some nice feeling, but it’s a little bit soft, maybe inexperienced.”

“Inexperienced?”

“Young, I mean. The author was young when she wrote it.”

“How old?”

“Maybe in her middle thirties.”

“Our age, you mean.”

“Yeah. Maybe there are experiences you must have before you can be maturity or perspective. Especially to write
a story or book about life experiences like love or death.”

“I agree.” I smiled, accepted with salt her warning that I should wait to write.

We hiked the rest of the afternoon until it began to get dark. Then Anne flaunted her Girl Scout résumé by making a voluptuous illegal fire. We sat around it, ate our second batch of Kerry Center sandwiches and roasted marshmallows before unrolling sleeping bags and staring up at a billion stars invisible in the city. When everyone else was asleep, Julia Too rolled her little burritoed self over to me. “See those stars?” she whispered.

I woke myself up enough to say, “Of course. They’re beautiful.”

“You can see the same ones from New York and China,” she said, so quietly I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. “Don’t you think that’s weird?”

“Weird how?”

“How they’re everywhere and nowhere.”

“They’re not nowhere, exactly. Just far away.”

When the sun poured heat over us in the morning, we awoke, drank Cokes for breakfast, brushed our teeth over the edge of the Great Wall, and climbed down.

Then Julia Too and I picked up my mother and went straight to Old Chen’s. He was sitting under a tree in his courtyard, with a thermos of tea and a book. Dressed in khakis and a button-down shirt, he looked oddly Western to me. Maybe my father looks like Old Chen now, now that he’s old. I looked over at my mom, to see what she was thinking. But I couldn’t tell. Her eyes were on Julia Too, hugging Old Chen.

“Sit, sit,” he said to us. He stood and got a chair ready for Naomi. She thanked him and the maid went to get more tea.

“Thank you for doing today instead of yesterday,” I said.

“No problem. How was the Great Wall?” He used English for Naomi’s benefit.

“Fun,” Julia Too said. “I brought you this.” She held out a rock she’d found, perhaps part of the wall, but ground down enough to have a glassy affect.

Old Chen turned it over in his palm. “You know,” he said to Julia Too, “your father loved to sleep outside. It’s not common. Maybe you get this hobby from him.”

Naomi and I looked at each other, surprised.

“He was a lively person, like you. When he was little,” Old Chen continued in English, glancing over at Naomi, who had folded her hands in her lap. Old Chen turned back to Julia Too. “Maybe there are things you’d like to know about what happened? If there are, of course you may ask me.”

“What
did
happen?” Julia Too asked.

I think she asked it faster than Old Chen was expecting, and that it was a bigger question than he had anticipated. Julia Too was usually so specific.

But maybe he’d been practicing, because he only paused for a breath before responding in Chinese: “Your
baba
died from heartbreak, a real illness. First it infects your heart and organs, and then your mind. In your mind, it can kill you. Just like his mother, your grandmother.”

He continued in Chinese. “This kind of disease can be inherited. But you don’t have this kind of constitution.”

Julia Too was looking at Old Chen as if she’d always known they’d eventually get to this point.

“I know,” she said, in Chinese. “I know I don’t.”

“This is the anniversary month of his death,” Old Chen said.

“I know,” said Julia Too again.

Old Chen took a rumbling breath and looked over at Naomi. He switched back to English. “Maybe he would like if we talk about him. Maybe we can remember some things about him now that you’re older. It’s okay for you?”

“Of course,” Julia Too said. “It would be great.”

“Once,” Old Chen said, smiling, “he burned our house with a cigarette.” He stopped smiling and looked at Julia Too seriously. “You should never smoke cigarettes. They’re bad for you. In spite of what everyone says.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t.”

“Or once, when he was small, he tried to cook dinner for his mother and me. He made rice, but he added so much water, we called it congee. We said it was the best thing we had ever eaten. He was so little, maybe only seven years old, and proud when we joked that it was breakfast for dinner. His mother loved congee.”

“Why did he go to New York?” Julia Too asked.

I stared at the tree in Old Chen’s courtyard, wondered how old it was. It looked thousands of years old, petrified. I thought how small we all are anyway, how short-lived. I braced myself.

“Da Ge moved to New York when Beijing was dangerous,” Old Chen said, this time both to me and Julia Too, in Chinese. I took my eyes off the tree, tried looking back at him. “I thought it would be better for him with Zhen Ming in America. Now of course I . . . Well, I thought it would be safer. I didn’t realize—” Here, he faltered. “I was busy; perhaps I didn’t pay enough attention. Perhaps he even thought it was for convenience—”

Julia Too scratched at an imaginary fleck on her chair.

“No,” I said in Chinese, “he knew you sent him to be safe. He told me that once.”

Old Chen’s face lifted. “
Zhende ma
?” Really?

I nodded, looked toward my mom to see if she wanted a translation, but she waved me quiet.

“Maybe I should have let him stay here, be in the square that week, even that day,” Old Chen continued. “But you know, he might have died there. He could have died there, too.”

“Of course,” I said in English, honoring my mom. “It could have happened here, too.” Old Chen looked ancient in the harsh sunlight, shadows of leaves over his skin. “You made the right decision—it’s what any parent with the resources would have done.”

Naomi nodded. Old Chen shaded his eyes with his hand as the sun shifted. “He tried to contact me before he—”

He stopped. Julia Too was watching Old Chen. Naomi was watching her.

“He tried to call me that week, you know, but I—he tried to call me, but I wasn’t—”

Now Julia Too stood quietly from her chair and walked over to Old Chen’s. She put her right hand on his arm. He sighed.

“I was traveling. I didn’t hear the message until, well—”

“Until it was too late,” Julia Too said. She said it gently, as if it were a shared regret, one for which she was also in some way responsible. She rested her head on Old Chen’s shoulder.

“Maybe next week, on our way to Beidaihe, we should stop by the cemetery and leave some dumplings,” Old Chen said. “I like to do that on Saturdays, after I see you two. I like to feed him some dumplings. Maybe—” He made no move to wipe his eyes. My mother stood up in a graceful sweep and handed him a handkerchief from her purse.

“Thank you,” he said in English.

“
Bu keqi
,” said my mom.

I have been to Da Ge’s grave, always alone. Julia Too has never been, because when I’ve asked, annually, whether she wants to see it, she has always said no. She says she prefers the monument in Tiananmen. Now, with her skinny arm still slung over the old man’s neck, she bravely said, “
Wo gen ni qu
.” I’ll go with you.

S
O THIS WAS IT
. T
HE LIFE THAT CIRCLED BACK AROUND INTO
itself. And, amazingly, produced other lives. I was impressed even before she was born by what I sensed was Julia Too’s resilience. I asked my doctor once whether my baby would be hurt by the tragedy of her dad. “Not until later,” she answered, honestly. I couldn’t bring myself to look at my mother, who had insisted on coming into the exam room.

“Fine and healthy,” the doctor said, measuring images of the baby’s miniature arms and legs. She looked like an unlikely revolutionary, my green ultrasound baby, with a strand of pearls holding up her face and one fist pumping angrily.

“A little girl,” the doctor added.

“A little girl!” my mother said, genuine bliss in her voice. My mom is a bright light, the only person I can imagine who could have beamed at that monitor, given the circumstances. I moved my eyes from my mom’s face to the monitor. I wanted to tell Da Ge about the experience of simultaneously watching something on a screen and feeling it in your stomach. He would have liked that idea: the movie of a life and that life, happening and experienced simultaneously. Maybe he would have loved our baby. This was just what Romeo and Juliet would have been like, except I wasn’t dead.

If Da Ge had been convicted for hurting Ben Rosenbaum,
he might have been deported or imprisoned, depending on what charges Ben had decided to press. For years I longed to rewind, end up with either of those endings. Ben recovered okay; maybe he would have been generous. I can’t know for sure, since I never spoke to him again. I always thought if Da Ge had just been in jail, I could at least have visited, brought cookies or tiger food. Waited for him to get out. I always thought I would have.

His death was confirmed a suicide. My brother, Benj, offered to help if I needed a lawyer, said Da Ge’s estate had to be turned over to someone and that there was usually tension over such matters.

“His estate?” I asked. “He was twenty-three. And aren’t you a copyright lawyer?”

He smiled. “If there’s any paperwork, I’ll be happy to help with you with it.”

“Paperwork?”

“There’s a will, apparently. And he left you something. Some thing of his grandfather’s, maybe? Papers, maybe? Or books?”

Books his Yeye had buried and dug up. He had hoped Da Ge would marry a nice girl, have a baby. Now I was the nice girl having a baby and the books were mine. It struck me as grotesque. Benj put a hand on my shoulder. “How’s your Chinese?”

I shrugged miserably. “Not good.”

“Well, maybe he wanted you to learn Chinese?”

“I have a textbook for that.”

“Maybe they had some specific meaning for his family?”

“His grandfather buried them during the Cultural Revolution. Da Ge’s father probably wants them. He’s punishing his father by giving them to me.”