The Natural Laws of Good Luck (11 page)

Zhong-hua's favorite color was an unearthly blue, the blue of plastic cemetery flowers. Mine was brown. He replaced the handmade crazy quilt on our bed that my sister had labored over for three years with a green plaid comforter from Wal-Mart. He found a gigantic framed painting of the Swiss Alps in someone's curbside garbage and put that up in the bedroom. He would take it outside sometimes, lean it on a tree, and sit on a milk crate, leisurely observing it through a cloud of cigarette smoke.

Da Jie's aesthetic also migrated into our home. Every time she cleaned house, she loaded her car with things she no longer wanted: an eight-by-eleven white rug stained with dog poop, an old kitchen table with loose legs, a large blue and white porcelain urn, four mattresses, and all the old food in the freezer. It was taboo to refuse these offerings and, with the exception of the expired food, taboo to dispose of them; however, with them came a smaller rug, all wool with only a tiny spot of dog poop; two sturdy kitchen chairs; one good mattress; and eleven boxes of chocolates, each one opened with only a few pieces missing.

By our second winter together, my sculpture studio had become Zhong-hua's late-night study grotto, where he would torture himself with
Speak English As You Wish
. My chisels, planes, and files I found angling out helter-skelter between the slats of an apple crate. I protested that I needed to have a workspace. “No problem. You need do something, just do. I move.” I pictured him moving the study grotto into our tiny kitchen, where the headlight of the car was being reassembled, or the cramped living room, where he was growing tomatoes and peppers from seed sent from China. Nothing was sacred anymore. No, that wasn't it: nothing was more sacred than anything else. As Zhong-hua passed through space, he changed it to a chartless no-man's-land where anything could happen.

My old surroundings winked and shifted as Zhong-hua made himself comfortable. I did a double take at the unexpected sight of a big garish purple poster on the wall called “Iris Joy.” I did another when the ceramic mask of Obatala, an African god of creativity and wisdom, on our living room wall began wearing a woven Chinese hat. I removed it several times and placed it respectfully on the table, but always the next day Obatala's mouth remained serene under the straw brim. Since this recurrent placement was obviously deliberate and Obatala seemed unperturbed, I decided to leave it alone.

I was poking around an antiques store where Zhong-hua and I sold some of our teapots when my eye caught a dirty little wooden statue. Being a sculptor, I recognized that the maker had succeeded in creating a piece in which the spirit of the subject had agreed to reside. I loved the vitality of the full-bellied immortal sitting on a tiger, one foot firmly on the ground and one foot jauntily subduing the tiger's head. I asked the owner how much. He said it was $375. He saw my face fall and, to my surprise, handed me the statue. “Make me a very excellent teapot for my wife. You can scrub that thing off with soapy water and make the colors shiny again.” I promised to do this and took my treasure home, where I proudly unwrapped it for my husband to admire. He looked troubled. He
said ordinary people should not have such things in their home. This was a very sacred statue to live in a community shrine. People could go there to offer their prayers and incense, but this energy was too great to live in the home. “You need take this back to another man. We cannot keep this statue. Also, you must not wash. The dirt needs to stay. Dirt protect power.” I was disappointed, but I understood. The home is not a shrine.

Meanwhile, our native speech patterns jarred each other's nervous systems. My usually quiet husband spoke English in harshly sectioned and powerfully expelled monosyllables. This is the sound of northern Chinese. Americans listening in on a conversation between a Chinese couple might assume they are angrily berating each other when in fact they are saying something like “I think the flyswatter is over there behind the door.” Zhong-hua used this frightening tone of voice to say things like “You can go to the garage and find the jumper cables!” The way he commandeered words alarmed me. Why was he so emotional and bossy about the jumper cables?

“Why are you mad?”

“What?”

“Are you mad at me?”

“Mad what? Not mad.”

“I don't know. You were yelling.”

“Not yelling. Just talk. Just think maybe find jump cables very good. Maybe need these things today.
Should be
find.” This machine-gun talk was used for definite communications about things that needed to be done the right way—like how to cut squid, how to pick out the right length screws at Home Depot, or how to clean out a dog's nose.

The rest of the time my husband spoke very softly. According to Chinese etiquette, I was told, the woman should always talk in a soft voice. I had trouble remembering this. My uninhibited squealing and bellowing frequently caused my husband to flinch. “Zhong-hua, Zhong-hua, quickly come. Oh my God. Hurry up!
There's a hummingbird!” My husband came, but looking stricken, as if I had just streaked naked across the road and he needed to throw a blanket over me. “No need loudly. Softly is OK.”

My husband found the word
ardent
in the English-Chinese dictionary and said, “You are very this word.” He did not seem entirely displeased. The paradox of my husband's loyalty to four-thousand-year-old standards was that he took their correctness for granted even as he embraced contrary standards. He thought it best for me to talk little and in low volume but found it refreshing not to have to guess what I was thinking or feeling. My husband did, however, take strong exception to my unconscious habit of deeply sighing.

“I think this for lady not good.”

“Sighing is not good?”

“For lady not good. For man maybe OK.”

“Oh.” This one made no sense to me. I could not control my sighs. Then I told myself, “Be yourself.” But clearly myself was cloaked in layers of culturally woven clothing. Take “good morning,” for instance. In my family, this was acknowledgment of the other person, a form of respect. To my husband, it was an irksome, unnecessary, stupid utterance. In place of the signposts of respect, a familial forbearance reigned that was, I had to admit, comforting. Within a family, many times a person feels tired, disagreeable, or disinclined to socialize, and having to perpetuate niceties can be a strain. I appreciated being able to be out of sorts without someone's trying to cheer me up. When I became locked in petulant affect, my husband never judged or took offense. He either totally ignored this or commented neutrally, “You looks not happy.” Having to claim ownership of a bad mood or justify it with explanation usually felt undignified enough for me to either chase it away or corral it for private reflection. “Family just like this. Let time. Person's bad weather will pass over.”

Involuntarily loyal to my inborn nature, I never resembled a suitable Chinese wife, except when we were actually in China—and that was only because I couldn't have spoken my mind if I
wanted to. By now I had torpedoed that resemblance by talking too loudly, expressing too much, complaining, crying, and emoting in ten thousand other ways.

Once, while backing up to the shed in the car to unload some wood, Zhong-hua ran over some masks that I had drying on the grass and crushed them. I ran around gathering the remains and shrieking, “I hate you. I hate you. This is money, don't you know? My work is not real to you? You just drive over it?” His calm non-response allowed my hysteria to play itself out at a pitch so high that Dave and Flippy probably thought I had run the lawn mower into a hornets' nest. He observed my fuming face with absolutely no visible response, then turned slowly and walked more slowly toward the corner of the house. Once he was safely out of sight, my deranged mind rearranged itself. Of course he hadn't known that the masks were drying on the ground. I should not have screamed at him. What a shrew. What a bitch. I felt terrible. Ten minutes later my husband reappeared and asked me where the Phillips-head screwdriver was. The whole incident was erased by that question.

He performed this magic erasing trick countless times, whenever I was escalating into argument or had let slip an inexcusable comment that we both knew I would prefer to retract. “Zhong-hua, I think your sister wants to be in charge here. Why don't we just marry her?”

A long, electric pause as my husband attempted to process this insult, which he took literally. He said only, “How about beans? You today want to eat beans, not?”

“OK. Let's eat beans.”

This timely intervention obviated the need for saying “I'm sorry.” I'm not sure, but it seemed this phrase offended my husband's familial sensibilities because he considered husband and wife as one being and the family one organism. So besides the obvious silliness of apologizing or excusing part of yourself to yourself, decreasing the number of obligatory words eased the everyday
tension of knowing you were to spend the rest of your life with someone. Unsavory moments were treated like foul breezes that would soon be gone and did not deserve notice. A few days after my territorial remark, he took time to clear up any misconceptions I might have. “In the China,” he said, “you should know, sister and brother cannot marry.”

My husband was also averse to all habitual perfunctory inquiries such as “How did you sleep?” and “How was your day?” as well as remarks such as “You look nice.” He said he did not like to say these things because they were “not from the heart.”

That unfortunate phrase clowned clumsily about in my mind in the face of every nice thing my husband did, causing me to suspect it was “not from the heart” and done only to placate expectation. I collected a miserable burden of words and gestures that had become suspect due to my pained awareness that they did not hold the same significance for my husband as they did for me. I would say something commonplace and natural to me, like “Thanks for the good dinner,” and he would look at me as if I had completely lost my mind.

I could not deny that overuse hollowed out daily platitudes and made insincerity inevitable, yet their omission wreaked havoc with my emotions. The utopia of our time together in China faded into a new landscape booby-trapped with blurry communications in the guise of familiar phrases. If I had remembered that we knew how to talk mind to mind in that perfect language of no words, I would have found peace again, but in the bright daylight, I could not remember this. Only at night, when my husband took me in his arms, did I feel the signifiers stop vying for position and recede to wherever they had come from. We had no use for them where we lay pressed together, my slow breaths and his quick ones mingling, thought and feeling passing back and forth, unaltered by expression.

In the morning I again insisted on making conversation. “Hi. Oooooh, it's very windy.”

“Uh.”

“Did you sleep well?”

“Um.”

“How about noodles?”

“Uh.” He did not open his mouth to make this sound.

We circled through recurring dawns to arrive at a third way: me trying out the silent method but feeling as if something was missing, him conceding a formal “Good morning,” definitely not from the heart; me brushing past his body as he dressed but not looking up, him mauling my face with his palm before getting out of bed in a gesture of tenderness disguised by comic affront. Through weeks of experimental morning rituals, a mutually acceptable exchange evolved: eye contact was made—just barely, no words, no grunts; he nodded imperceptibly, I smiled imperceptibly. Both creators were content to let the world start turning.

When words or words' absence confounded, I summoned the memory of our time in China, which had taught me another way of being based on letting things alone and paying attention. It was much easier to do this in China, where I had only to follow the leader, than it was now that I felt in charge of the universe. But if I reflected on our first days together, it usually helped me remember how to relax. Knowing that nothing was spoken for the sake of politeness allowed a calm silence at the dinner table within which we munched, letting out small Chinese monosyllables that meant, variously, “no thanks,” “yum,” “have some,” and “that's enough.” Conversation was simply absent or spontaneous, the air charged with tacit acknowledgment. By the time my husband had begun to pointedly sing out “good morning” and “thank you,” I had stopped even saying “hi.” I felt myself cringing from friends' booming hellos and Paroda's slobbery good-bye kisses.

Zhong-hua continued to observe the strict unwritten Chinese law against hugging, kissing, or holding hands with one's wife in public and stiffened in embarrassment if I moved to embrace him. In my husband's case, the embarrassment had more to do with daylight than with other people. He would glance around, as if the
walls had eyes. “No need. No need. Nighttime is OK. In the bed enough. Daytime no need.” He stoically tolerated my impulsive bursts of affection. It felt like hugging a tree.

My husband adapted good-naturedly to hugging my kids, my friends, my sisters, his coworkers, and any strangers who threw open their arms, as his homage to American culture. He always laughed while hugging. Massage, on the other hand, came naturally and carried with it no self-consciousness. Zhong-hua frequently rubbed Paroda's feet when she got home from school and would offer a deep pressure-point massage to anyone he came across who was in pain, including a used-car salesman in the middle of the hard sell. He had an aversion to overt expressiveness and affection, but invasive nonerotic physical contact for healing purposes raised no inhibitions.

It had been ten months since Zhong-hua arrived, and I still wasn't used to the omission of “hello” and “good-bye.” I stood there in the middle of the kitchen as if hit with a stun gun on many occasions because my husband had abruptly walked out without saying a word. Even after I knew that this behavior was the norm and signified that all was well, it stopped me short. The world was not right. This person whom I had waited so long for and summoned all my powers to bring here now appeared and disappeared at whim, according to private motivations. “Where's Zhong-hua?” became the most frequent question in the house: Paroda asked it nonchalantly; I asked anxiously. She said, “Mom, why do you even worry? He goes away, and he comes back.”