Repeat After Me (43 page)

“It’s for decorate the house with,” Xiao Wang explained later. I scolded her for not having warned me to bring gifts. She dug in her suitcase and came out with a stuffed penguin in a Central Park Zoo T-shirt.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“You can give to my mother when we arrive to Jinhong.”

“Perfect.”

On rides out to the Great Wall and Ming Tombs, I pressed my face to bus windows. Cotton-padded people filled the wide streets. Laundry waved out windows, surrendering to coal smoke. Traffic was flanked by a rush of bicycles, and everything seemed to me to be taking place on a screen, rather than in real time, just like Da Ge had described life in the United States. Grief is similar to being abroad. Everything’s changed, awkward, off, and unfamiliar. Of course the same thing can be said of falling in love.

We went to Tiananmen on our last day in Beijing. Maybe we had waited out of fear—that his ghost would be there. Or that it wouldn’t. Xiao Wang stopped talking when the cement square came into view from the cab. My throat went tight, as if sealed off by pollution. I studied the guards in green before we got out and walked from corner to corner, saw the history museum, Mao’s mausoleum, the Martyrs’ Monument, the Great Hall of the People. I fought my feeling of surprise and disappointment. It was a place, not a person, not a time. I could sit there forever and he’d never show up again. Xiao Wang read Mao’s calligraphy from the Martyrs’ Monument, identified uprisings for me.

“Maybe you even feel now you have Chinese history, too,” she said, kindly.

I laughed. “My own Chinese history.”

“Maybe Da Ge was teacher for you, too.”

On the way back to the hotel, we walked by a market. Fish eyed me, and Julia Too kicked in my stomach like a many-legged sea monster herself. A vendor arrived pulling a rollerbag. When he opened it, six ducks came quacking out in a mad parade. I had an out-of-body experience, thought maybe we were in a
Sesame Street
episode.

I needed grounding, told Xiao Wang I wanted to buy some vegetables.

She disapproved. “We can’t eat it,” she said. “Must be cooked.”

But I paid for some cilantro, only to put it on the nightstand back at the hotel. “I didn’t want to eat it,” I tried explaining. “I just wanted to buy it.”

She clucked her tongue. “Wasting that!”

“I wanted to buy the things Da Ge and his mother bought before she died,” I said.
Before he died
I did not say. Xiao Wang went into the bathroom and turned the water on.

The next morning when Xiao Wang and I packed up to head to the airport for Jinhong, I put my cilantro, still reasonably fresh, in my purse.

“Maybe I must teach your baby to be reasonable person,” she said, tucking Nai Nai’s urn under her arm.

“Or maybe I’ll teach yours to be impulsive and unreasonable,” I said.

She looked me over. “I like it if my baby learn from you. Even if she become like you, it’s okay for me.”

“Thanks.” I pulled my roller bag out in the hotel hallway, crumpling our complimentary
China Daily
. Xiao Wang held up Nai Nai.

“Time to go home,” she said. In English.

Jinhong was the first Chinese city that had ever existed in the landscape of my imagination, before Beijing,
even. It was the place Xiao Wang described at Embassy, and at dinner at her grandmother’s Chinatown place, home of the swimming Mekong, of palm trees and fruit trucks that spray papaya juice as they wind around mountain roads.

“Usually we have the whole person. This ashes is unusual,” Xiao Wang told me on the drive to Nai Nai’s memorial. Her parents and husband Jin were silent.

I was disoriented when we arrived, stumbled from the car into sunlight and a crowd of mourners. In a big, open room, shafts of white light divided the floor into rectangles and Nai Nai’s urn sat on a raised bed draped with red cloth, lilies, fruit, and three framed photographs of her: one young, one old, and one somewhere between, standing with her son, Xiao Wang’s father. He looked young and earnest in the photo, old and sad now, standing with his family. We mourners moved in a line, starting at the entrance, passing first the urn and then Xiao Wang’s family, exiting after having completed a full circle. Two old women were screaming with grief. Xiao Wang, her father, mother, and Jin shook each mourner’s hand and accepted red envelopes I guessed immediately must contain cash. Bewildered and nervous, I moved through the line, too.

When I reached Xiao Wang, I whispered, “I don’t have a red envelope—I didn’t realize. I’m so sorry about Nai Nai. I should have brought—I can still—”

“Calm down,” she said. She pulled me from the line. “Stand here. Be my family.”

Xiao Wang’s mother was my mother reinterpreted, a burst of energy and chatter, force feeder, happy family-running hen. If she was grief-stricken over her mother-in-law’s American death, she nursed herself back to emotional health by taking care of Xiao Wang and me while Xiao Wang’s father watched her with a combination of amusement and sorrow. I wondered whether she reminded him of his mother. He was a quietly busy person, moving about the house in a precise and committed
way, feeding the two birds they called Po and Bo, weeding in the garden, fixing the table a neighbor’s child had sat upon and broken. He wore glasses and drank tea from a jar. Her mother was noisily busy and clucked an endless list of questions about America, including what Xiao Wang had worn every day to my class, whether she’d eaten porridge for breakfast, why I’d allowed her to get so skinny, even pregnant, and why I wasn’t married. I said I was married, that my husband had been killed in a tragic accident, and Xiao Wang’s mother suggested I marry a new man; perhaps she could introduce a local one I might like. She asked how much money I made, only to exclaim over how little it was. She asked after my classes, my books, my haircut, my eyebrows, whether I wore long underwear, why not, why I whistled, how my skin stayed so white. She kept the conversation alive every minute of every day I spent there, bustling around, shoving bowls of “crossing the bridge” noodles into our hands every twenty minutes, stuffing moon dumplings with sesame paste, seeping tea, feeding us marrow soup, tucking us in. When I presented her with the stuffed penguin, she said she would call it Aysha. Xiao Wang barely stopped translating long enough to take breaths.

In the late afternoon of my last day there, Xiao Wang and I took a walk alone and watched women with babies wrapped to their backs in brightly colored cloths.

“Will you carry your baby like that?” I asked.

“Of course I do!” she said, and then, as if sensing my desolation, she said, “I’ll send you some this cloth for New York. You can be like Chinese peasant woman at the Upper West Side.” Then she threw her head back and laughed. I’ve never seen her cover her mouth when she laughs in China; here she’s free.

We sat on the bank of the Mekong, its water so dark brown it looked almost black, and Xiao Wang chattered uncharacteristically about how she was going to find a job as an environmental specialist and help China.

We walked out onto a handmade bamboo bridge over the water. The planks shivered enough to make us catch our breath.

“Tomorrow you will go home,” Xiao Wang pointed out. “That make me miss New York.” I thought of my new students at Embassy, who had only known me pregnant, who, if they knew anything of the year before, had said nothing. I thought of the courses I had signed up to finish that spring at Columbia. I reached my hand out and felt the breeze while my mind zoomed back to the city, which seemed now like a board game: Broadway, Amsterdam, campus, downtown, uptown. Plastic hotels and miniature skyscrapers. Students and classmates. I wondered what it would feel like to be pregnant at Columbia, whether I would mind. I wasn’t looking forward to anything.

“I don’t miss New York,” I said. “I want to stay here, far away from everything.”

“No, no,” she said. “You have your baby in America where your mama live and finish your teaching and your study. That’s the business you must do. I will stay here, and sometime we will see each other again.”

The light changed, turning the fields and river from green and gray to black. Then the sun set and everything began to disappear. Xiao Wang and I walked back out ragged paths, chickens clucking and scattering as we went.

The night Julia Too was born, there was a sliver of white moon over New York. I saw it above buildings on the way to St. Luke’s, and again from the window of a twelfth-floor labor and delivery room. It was the same moon Xiao Wang would see when Lili was born at midnight in China three months later. My mother, Julia One, and I breathed, sang, jumped, stretched, shouted and chewed ice chips. Long after the sun had taken over, we had our baby.

My mother was bionic with excitement, taking pictures so graphic I almost can’t look at them myself, running
through the hospital halls telling everyone
7 lbs 10 ounces, 21 inches
, even though they were all having babies, too. When the nurses handed Julia Too to me, I realized immediately that she was a whole person—with eyelashes and toes and a personality. I had been expecting a vaguely defined cartoon character of some sort. But she was crisp and detailed. They waited before slicking her eyes with gelatinous antibiotic so we could see each other. We looked for eleven seconds, and I recognized her in a way so wordless it was as if I had fallen asleep and was dreaming. I wondered what she saw. I thought of my grandmother, her mother, and hers, our entire line having this identical experience, each unable to believe it wasn’t singular.

“She’s fantastic,” said Julia One.

“She looks just like him,” I said.

“No. To me, she looks like you,” Julia One said.

My mother had come back in. “She looks just like herself,” she said. “Give her here.”

Once, when she was three, Julia Too described death to me.

“Today I pretended you were dead!” she said when I picked her up at day care. “Because I was such a big, big girl that I didn’t need a mommy anymore. And Emma played that her daddy was dead, because she was such a big, big girl that she didn’t need a daddy.” She laughed.

“No kidding,” I said, my voice impressively even. “But everyone needs mommies and daddies, even when they’re grown-ups. Do you remember who my mommy is?”

She grinned, triumphant. “Nomi!” she said.

“Yes!” I waited for what I thought was a calm interval. “So, Julia, what does it mean to be dead?”

She said, “You just fall over. You fall right over!”

“That sounds about right. What else?”

She scrunched up her face. “You have no eyes and no mouth and no head,” she said. She began pointing at her limbs. “No arms and no legs, your body just goes away! And you stop having days.” She brushed her hands against each other as if she had just finished the task of putting away some blocks.

“Where did you hear all those things about being dead?” I asked.

“I learned them up in my mind.”

“You know what, though? Even though you stop having days when you’re dead, all the people who love you still remember you.”

She looked up at me. “Mommy?”

I collected myself. “Yes?”

“Did you bring me a purple Fruit Roll-up?”

Sometimes I take inventory of the memories Da Ge didn’t get to have: Julia Too riding my restored yellow wooden giraffe through Riverside Park, toddling up to leaves, twigs, dogs, and strangers. He never saw the stretch of mornings that made up her babyhood, or lazed away New York afternoons in the sandbox when she was two. He never pulled on or off her plastic rain boots, the ones with butterflies on the toes, wiggly antennae preceding her into puddles. Those boots are in Da Ge’s backpack, but he never held her, never slipped off the leather crib slippers with “dad” tattoos on them, an unfortunate gift from my mother’s daft second cousin. He never smelled her bald head, washed the scrumptious creases in her neck, or cut grapes into eighths. He never counted her new, mini-teeth. I collected her and her things alone or with my mother at the ends of those days: diapers, bibs, spoons, rattles, pacifiers, balls, bears, ducks, dolls, and all the nouns in a baby’s collection. Later, sparkling wands, the black stuffed cat she mysteriously named “Binderlutie,” plastic beads, water colors, ballet slippers, alphabet letters, cardboard books, rubber animals, little
people, bright buses. He missed every texture, stopped having days just as Julia Too and I learned to make them.