Repeat After Me (42 page)

“Did you guys ever talk about it?” He sounded hopeful that we had.

“Not really,” I admitted. “I don’t know if we ever talked
about anything, really.” No one better understands the decision not to talk about things than the members of my family. But I apologized for it anyway.

“I should have asked him more, Benj. I should have—”

He cut me off. “That’s not what I meant.”

“I know, but it’s true nonetheless.”

“But you didn’t really have access to each other, right?”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s hard to know much about someone whose language you don’t speak.”

I didn’t argue. Maybe Da Ge believed that even pale ink trumps memory. He robbed me of himself and left some illegible books as a way to spend time with his ghost. I hated him. Repeat after me, I used to think: My name is Da Ge. I am a newly made and dead American, my family is crippled with loss, and my fake wife rich with pages she can’t read. I am a tragic, hideous waste.

And then there was my dictation, composed by and for the crazy teacher-wife:
what am I?
I am your English teacher, Chinese student, lucky benefactress of access, martyr status, and your father’s treasure, heartbreak. The one you took because you knew I’d do it.

I asked Benj whether Da Ge would have been able to become a citizen without marrying me.

“No.” He sounded sorry to say so. “And as you know, he wasn’t a citizen yet anyway, when he—It would have taken—”

“I knew that.” I shrugged, but a sharp feeling in my chest had taken over my voice. “It was just a point he was making. A statement.” I thought of China again, of becoming Chinese. Replacing him. Or trading places.

“Maybe you could talk about some of this with Da Ge’s father,” Benj said.

“Da Ge’s father? What are you talking about?”

“It might make you feel better.”

“Da Ge hated his father. They were estranged. And anyway, I’d have no idea how to find him even if I wanted to, which I don’t.”

“He’s here,” Benj said. “Maybe it wasn’t mutual, because he came to get his son.”

Old Chen and I met for the first time at my apartment on 115th. I opened the door and saw him see the scroll, saw his face collapse and regroup before he spoke. I had agreed to see him half because I was livid and wanted to betray Da Ge, and half because I wanted to keep the case open, wanted anything left of him.

“You are my son’s friend?” Old Chen asked, and we shook hands.

“Yes,” I said, “please come in.” I blinked up at him, unable to believe that Da Ge could have been that angry. His father just looked like a person, stunned and ruined, not powerful or big the way Da Ge had described him.

It’s sometimes still that first meeting, when I’m at dumplings on a Saturday morning with Julia Too and Old Chen, when I’m teaching, when I’m sleeping or watching Julia Too sleep, when I’m wishing things had gone a different way. It’s not, in my memories or dreams, usually the day I found Da Ge. It’s always the day Old Chen walked into my house, looking like a scrubbed, taut version of his son.

“I mean you are his wife,” he said, as if testing that new word
wife
, or maybe just worried that I wouldn’t like to be described as Da Ge’s friend. His eyes moved to my stomach, and back up, but didn’t meet mine. He cleared his throat and there was a swinging noise in the background of my mind, rope on pipes. I squeezed my eyes shut.

“I made tea,” I said, turning.

In my living room, I gestured to the futon. Benj had asked if I wanted him present for this meeting, and I’d said
no. I didn’t want a lawyer or even a brother, just to be reminded of Da Ge. To be alone with his father. It didn’t occur to me then that Da Ge had left me his father on purpose. Because I needed one. But maybe he had. Maybe Old Chen in my life was Da Ge’s thank-you. For the citizenship, the language lessons, or for having loved him.

I poured two cups of jasmine tea De Ge had bought me in Chinatown and sat at my table. Old Chen looked at me from the futon. I could think of nothing to say.

“You are the wife of my son, Chen Da Xing,” he said again, this time without clearing his throat. I looked up.

“Da Ge,” I said, baffled, waiting for whatever unbearable realization awaited me. Old Chen’s mouth was a straight line across his face. I thought of Da Ge’s scar. He set the tea down and crossed his arms across his chest. He looked stern, but I thought if he moved, each working, breathing part of him might be in discord, that they’d revolt against each other and turn him into a broken puppet. My arms ached. Da Ge’s neck flashed through my mind, snapped by the weight of the cord. I couldn’t swallow. I wondered if Da Ge’s dad would ask me what had happened. I didn’t know what I would say if he did: I tried to take him down, put him back together again?

“Da Ge is a nickname,” Old Chen said. “It means big brother in Chinese. His real name is Chen Da Xing. Big Star.”

“Dah Shing,” I repeated. I hadn’t even known his name. What would his father make of this? I thought of the days ahead of me, weeks, months, years. How long would it take to recover from each new secret grief that revealed itself?

“Da Xing is dead,” his father said, incredulous, no doubt imagining his own relentless future. “My father dies just—my wife, my father—my son.” He waited for a minute. “My son,” he said again. He sat back, seemed to swoon against the futon.

My limbs were so heavy now that I could barely lift myself up. But I did. And once I’d stood, I walked over to
the futon and sat next to Da Ge’s father. Up close, his face was dark; its lines looked like they had been carved with a chisel only several hours earlier. I half expected him to bleed from his wrinkles. He lit a cigarette, and the fire smelled sharp and lively. I wanted to press the burning end into my hand, to feel anything other than what I felt.

“I didn’t even know his name,” I confessed, my voice so low I thought maybe the old man hadn’t heard me. I said it again. Old Chen closed his eyes, and I reached out to touch his face. I couldn’t guess which of us this surprised more. But he didn’t move. I dragged my fingers down his cheek, stunned that he was warm and human. Unable to resist, I moved toward him and rested against his side. My face was somewhere between his shoulder and chest; my hair was matted against the fabric, fresh with pinstripes and dry cleaning. He patted me awkwardly.

“Um,” he said, “you are pregnant, yes?”

“Yes.” I did not ask who had told him. Instead, I sat up and tried to visualize us from above: an old, handsome Chinese man and a pregnant twenty-something girl, in my living room. For some reason, I was glad to be wearing earrings. I reached up and touched them.

“He was nice to you?”

“He cooked a lot.”

His father’s eyes brightened. “Really?”

“Yes, he made tiger food.”

“
Lao hu cai
,” he said.

“Right. And fish, chicken, eggplant, noodles. We went to the zoo.”

“I live in Beijing,” he said, more to himself than to me. He was looking at me, with a question. “But if—” he stopped. “If—” he said again.

“Do you want to ask me something?” I asked.

“If I can know this baby,” he said, “your baby. If I can see the baby and tell him some things about China,
will that be okay? If I know this baby, is it okay?”

Old Chen glanced at my stomach longingly. I was wearing cotton overalls Julia had bought me, hoping to look more than four months pregnant. Tears followed one another down his cheeks. One dripped from his chin.

“Of course you can know her,” I said. “And be her
Yeye
.” He looked up at me, and I smiled, proud that I had been able to remember this word in Chinese. Grandpa. Then, as an afterthought, I added, “For us, it’s okay.”

I returned to Old Chen all but three of his father’s books. Those three, which I selected randomly, I kept for Julia Too in a trunk at the foot of my bed, with Da Ge’s and my citizenship album and all of his Embassy “Dear Teacher” essays. I don’t think she’s ever looked at the books. When she asks for them, I’ll show her. Now that she’s worked Old Chen into a frenzy of grandfatherly love, I imagine the rest will be hers someday as well. I have never wanted them myself, never planned to read them. If Julia Too ends up with that library, I’m glad it will have come directly from Old Chen. I consider it his legacy and property. Not to mention it’s as close as we’ll ever come to the presents Julia Too wishes her father would give her.

Nai Nai died in her sleep in New York City in the late fall of 1990. When Xiao Wang told me she would take Nai Nai’s ashes back to China, I asked if I could go with her. Maybe we could wait until the Embassy term was over and go together. We were in Central Park walking through red leaves, and she stopped when I asked, sat down on a bench and put her head in her hands.

“I cannot make this sacrifice of my Nai Nai,” she said, and started weeping.

I was horrified. “I didn’t mean to intrude. I’m sorry. Of course you shouldn’t wait, and I don’t have to come. I just thought since you mentioned—I just thought—” I debated
whether to put my arm around her.

“No, no, Aysha. This is not if you come or don’t come. I just cannot stay here anymore. I think I will not be back to New York after that trip.”

“But what would be wrong with that? I mean, other than my missing you.”

She looked up at me. “Maybe my family, even Nai Nai, would be disappoint.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “They’re going to want that baby around desperately.”

I remember the way we were then: young, shocked, freshly finished teaching and studying, six and three months pregnant. We waddled onto a plane east with our prenatal vitamins and Nai Nai’s ashes in an urn in the overheard compartment. It was almost comical, even then. Xiao Wang clucked about, feeding and bossing me endlessly about her theory that once we delivered our babies, we had to do something called “
zuo yuezi,
” which meant we weren’t to leave the house for a month.

“I will be home in Jinhong so for me this
zuo yuezi
will be convenient. Maybe you will have to find some friend to help you in New York. I know a Chinese girl who—”

“
Zuo yue
—what? Not leaving the house for a month sounds like clinical depression to me.”

“This why American women have so many wrinkle. You don’t rest after baby, so skin—how do you say?” She spread her hands as if she were making Jacob’s cradle out of lanyard.

“Stretch?”

“How do you spell?”

“S-t-r-e-t-c-h.” Seven fingers.

“Okay. You also get disease of this.” She pointed to her elbow.

“You’re telling me that to prevent arthritis and wrinkles, women should stay home for a month after their babies are born.”

“Yes. And no water into the body.” She opened a bag of dried cuttlefish and offered me some. It smelled so strong I thought I might go blind.

“No thanks,” I said. “What do you mean, no water into the body?”

“No shower.”

“No showering for a month after you have a baby?”

“Shower makes cold and easy to get sick.”

“Maybe this is a cultural thing, but I think I have to shower after I give birth.”

I should add here that Xiao Wang still looks identical to how she looked that day, and I, somehow, am twelve years older. I’m not saying I’m crippled with arthritis, but she could absolutely pass for twenty-five. So maybe I should have
zuo
’ed
yue zi.

When we arrived at the old Capital Airport with our dusty throats and eyes, we rode a moving floor past shops empty of customers and full of bored women in blue pinafores. I had the sensation of riding in a barrel over a waterfall, surrounded by the pouring sounds of a language I could not understand. I had expected China to be either as rural as a movie or as dark as in American accounts, so I was surprised to find Beijing neon even then, its streets a scatter of brilliant billboards and rainbow light displays on highway overpasses. The roads rippled out in rings around the city, as if a stone had been thrown into its center: second-ring, third-ring, fourth-ring roads. New decades will mean fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth. Beijing loves to count. Just like me.

Xiao Wang took me to dinners with her cousins, her classmates, her husband’s colleagues, her mother’s old friends, and what seemed to me to be thousands of people. They all exchanged gifts with her, and to my chagrin, with me, even though I hadn’t brought any. Xiao Wang’s presents for them included Levi’s jeans, “I love NYC” T-shirts, and ceramic miniatures of the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and hilariously, the Eiffel Tower. Her friends presented me
with oranges, cooking oil, a rubber moose, a poster of Whitney Houston from her
Body Guard
days, and a plate with a furry, marble-eyed cat between two layers of glass.