Repeat After Me (44 page)

I pined for China. That gave me a measure of cool control; China was still possible even if he was not. I could always fly back to Xiao Wang and live the movie
Ju Dou
. Even though Xiao Wang had long since moved to Beijing, in my dreams were dusty village houses, bolts of silk unraveling from rafters. And Da Ge; we would find him and be three people. He and Julia Too would fly kites, ride bikes, scratch characters in the sand. She and I would come in from sunlight outside to find him cooking dinner.

Two months before I graduated, I called Xiao Wang. “My business in America is finished,” I said in Chinese. I had been practicing that phrase like an Olympic athlete.

She laughed, asked in English, “You like to visit me and Jin and Lili in Beijing?”

“Can we please?”

“Of course! For as long as you like. You are welcome forever, if you still like it.”

It was Old Chen who picked us up at Capital Airport. He was so polished he shone like a lamp, nervous and sad and ecstatic, clutching a sign that read “Ai-sha and Zhu Lia!! Warmly Welcome Home to Beijing.”

It was the second time I had ever seen him, three years after our encounter in New York. Julia Too was asleep when we came down the ramp, and Old Chen insisted on carrying her out to the car, leaving the luggage to his driver and me. On the way to the hotel he had arranged in case his courtyard house was too old-fashioned or uncomfortable, Old Chen told me shyly that he hoped even if we didn’t decide to live with him, that we’d come “home” for dumplings every Saturday.

Sometimes in the early fall, when I’m walking though an outdoor market, I can hear Da Ge’s voice in the
collected chatter. Sometimes I see teenagers on the street, nerdy with backpacks or rebellious with tattoos and earrings, and I smile. My Global Beijing students, with their often broken speaking and the earth’s most earnest essays, give him back to me, and so does the city.

Beijing wakes up in the mornings, pavement alive with the smell of sun. Vendors call out their offerings: fried dough, soy milk, steamed buns, fresh fruit. The vowels float up, wake Julia Too and me and we shower, eat pancakes or
mantou
, steamed buns, take our places in the spaces we call days. I imitate the voices from the street, try to turn my Chinese fluent, pack lunches, take my girl to school, read, teach, eat, sleep. Buy bean sprouts, fish with cheeks and eyes. Write this for her. Make tiger food. These are the patterns, and they somehow need less counting, stepping over cracks, or spelling out than they once did. There’s comfort in forever unfamiliar things: split pigs on the backs of bikes, Chinese TV, my life between two languages. I couldn’t have known when I lost Da Ge what he would give me. Permanence.

I arrived home Monday night from the first parent-teacher conferences of the fall, found our apartment warm. My mother was back in New York, but a mist of her perfume remained. I set my book bag down, the delicious list of my new students’ names inside, and walked in my socks to Julia Too’s room. Something made me quiet. I peered in, saw her and Yang Tao under the light of a reading lamp. They sat cross-legged on her bed, hunched over an old Chinese book. He traced his fingers vertically down a row of characters, perhaps right where Da Ge’s grandfather had once moved his. Yang Tao watched Julia Too and the words alternately, listened to her translations. The words she didn’t know yet, he filled in. He looked up, saw me in the doorway, smiled. Julia Too had her head bent down over the page. Before she could see me, I tiptoed back to the kitchen to make them dinner.

T
HANK
YOU
TO
R
OBERT
P
INSKY
FOR
YOUR
BRILLIANCE
AND
FOR
a decade of feedback, support and generosity. To Derek Walcott for reading and commenting thoughtfully so many times on this book and my poems, and for all the geography, landscape and meter. Thank you to Anne Carson for improving my own and my students’ lines and imaginations, and for letting me use your beautiful stanzas to begin this book. To my agent Jill Grinberg—I so appreciate your wisdom, extra -ordinary level of engagement, and friendship. To Juliet Grames for the detail with which you read and edit, and for our conversations about writing, China, women, and the world. Thank you to Lesley Thorne for your time and energy and enthusiasm, and to Deborah Landau for making me part of your fabulous writing community at NYU.

To my readers: Julia Hollinger, for multiple reads, sharp eyes, and 30 years. Lara Phillips, for unflappable encouragement and a life I love to live vicariously. Donna Eis for dozens of pages of red-ink. How did you possibly find the time? Heidi Schumacher, for shrink knowledge that served both this book and me. Bear Korngold and Willow Schrager for teaching me something important about how to listen. Greg Lalas, for all the early reads and stark rejections of worse titles. Molly Smith Metzler for reading a 500-page draft of
this and still being my friend. Harry Kellerman and Thai Jones, for your straight-to-the-point-of-what insights.

Kirun Kapur and Fred Speers, thank you for my poetry life; you are its center. Erika Helms for
pinyin
, for living Beijing with me and then forever, and for being
the
demographic for everything I write. Chen Shanying, for your perspective on China, America, politics and parenting, and your beautiful English. Chen Daming for your movies and memories and inimitable ways of talking and thinking about art and the world. Thank you Alex Xie, Cui Jian and Hei Yang—for so many chats about this book, and for continuing to share drafts of your work with me. Martina Dapra for the story of your marriage and citizenship interview; and Susanna Rosenstock and Philipp Angermeyer for yours. To Christine Jones for your genius art and friendship; I cherish you. Thank you to the Basic Trust community for caring about this book and my family. To my writing students at NYU; and to Teachers & Writers and the 9th and 10th grade ESL students at ASE in the Bronx. Thank you so much, Bess Miller.

Kathy, thank you for covering hundreds of hours that let me write and think, and for so much love and engagement with our girls. Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, thank you for years of full-tilt feedback, for your uniquely wide perspectives, for caring genuinely and passionately about the world, and for providing a model of how to live graciously and fully as artists, activists, parents and grandparents. Malik Dohrn and Chesa Boudin, my monkeys’ uncles: thank you for taking us to see revolutions, translating in mission hospitals, visiting and loving Beijing, and reading my books and so many books to my babies.

Thank you to the amazing Naomi and Saul Silvermintz, for your genes, names, inspiration, and 65-year marriage. To my Aunt Gail, for everything from Avanglavish to lip liner
and dance lessons. Thank you to the beautiful, inspirational Lee and Bob Greenberg. To my mom and dad, Judith and Kenneth, who together read no fewer than ten drafts of this, who flew thousands of miles, revised, babysat, helped translate poems, organized flights, meals, and an entire working life for me in Beijing so I could research and write. Who came up with hundreds of titles, including the one I used. Who are brilliant, giving, ever-present, and tremendously fun. To my hilarious, loving brothers Jacob and Aaron, for thanklessly providing encouragement, humor, stories, and a sister for me—Melissa. Thank you for Adam and McKenna. Absolute sunshine.

To my brave and lovely girls Dalin Alexi and Light Ayli, for your singular, beautiful Dalin and Lightness, for teaching me the present tense, and for saying and doing things that crack the world open freshly again and again, often hourly.

Finally, thank you, Zayd. You’re the intro, body and conclusion, my first and final reader, one love. I’ll forever take your every edit.