The Natural Laws of Good Luck (5 page)

While we recovered from the meal, Zhong-hua rummaged around in the bathroom until he found the mop, bucket, and Murphy Oil Soap. He then proceeded to methodically scrub all the floors, upstairs and down. Afterward he went outside and stood on the snowy porch in the shiny business shoes and baggy long johns. He looked up at the starry sky and had a smoke.

I wasn't yet used to the poker face that I had become comfortable with in China as the normal and correct facial expression. There were no random smiles, no effort at small talk, no hand squeezing or patting on the shoulder. My husband would no sooner pat my hand or kiss my cheek than pat his own hand or kiss his own image in the mirror. I had to feel the airwaves to know whether everything was OK or not OK. I decided it was OK and went to bed, leaving my husband out in the snow. When he came to bed, he held me as if I were something long lost and precious that might not live until morning. Words became necessary:
“Wo bu neng huxi!”
(I can't breathe!)

After the first night of floor mopping had come the much more rigorous second night of filling in holes between the foundation stones with mortar. The crawl space of our cellar slanted upward to the far end under the kitchen; we had to hunker down more
and more and then waddle on our haunches to complete inspection with the flashlight. Cobwebs clung to our faces, and a chill rose like well water from the clammy bedrock up our pant legs. Zhong-hua mixed small batches of mason's mortar in a dishpan and troweled it into the crevices. It was very dark, so first he held his wrist close to the wall to feel the stream of cold air, then aimed the laden trowel. This subterraneous boundary set apart a ten- by twenty-foot space in the middle of a windy pasture where successive hearty souls had improvised lives. Zhong-hua remained silent and focused throughout the somber ritual, communicating with a turn of the shoulder or by holding the trowel out to his side without looking. I kept the trowel full of mortar and held the flashlight. By dawn the two bags of mortar were empty shreds of brown paper. Cold had turned my fingertips white. Cement dust had turned his eyes red. He said,
“Wanle,”
meaning “finished,” and we went to sleep.

This was just the first of many “concrete solutions” to daily problems. My husband put great store in concrete, a material that, though at first solid and unyielding, could be flowed around, over, and under; quaked from below; smashed from above; and exploded in slow motion by delicate crystals of frost, proving the fundamental Tai Chi principle that soft overcomes hard by turning, retreating, infiltrating, waiting, and shape-shifting.

Shortly after arriving, Zhong-hua suggested we sell the refrigerator. “Just three people—no need.” In China many people do not own a refrigerator. They shop daily for fresh meat and vegetables and after a meal leave leftover food uncovered on the table until it is consumed. The first time Zhong-hua and Paroda went shopping together, she reported, laughing, that instead of getting a cart, Zhong-hua had just transferred each item to her arms until piled-up stuff hid her face. After more trips and more looking around, my husband noticed that other men were not loading their merchandise onto their female companions and switched to using the cart.

I found four dozen eggs in the cupboard, and Zhong-hua said that was “no problem” because in China eggs are kept unrefrigerated for up to two months. I said the eggs were different here and convinced him to wait on selling the refrigerator. It soon became a hazard. His sister, whom we both now called
Da Jie
, “Big Sister,” showed up once a month with poppy-colored plastic bags from the Chinese grocery bursting with Chinese cabbage, bok choy, spinach, and daikon resembling short, pale baseball bats. She brought cases of mangoes and stacks of eggs six dozen high. Every time the refrigerator door was opened, a Chinese cabbage or two tumbled to the floor and sharp-clawed chicken feet startled me from under bunches of cilantro and watercress. Bags of frozen cuttlefish stacked in the freezer had a way of sliding out like bobsleds and hitting me in the chest.

I had never eaten giant sea slugs or sheep's stomach. I tried them, once. He had never eaten cheese or mashed potatoes. He tried them, once. He tasted small, tentative half spoonfuls of ice cream. He stirred it vigorously to warm it up and, when that didn't work, poured hot tea over it. We both went hungry or suffered indigestion when the other made supper. We endured this food trauma for six months. He lost fifteen pounds. I lost ten. After that, he still would not touch cheese or homemade chicken potpie but could devour an entire half gallon of chocolate ice cream in one sitting and eat the entire crust off the top of a cherry pie. He seemed surprised at my indignance. “You make this crust is very good. I like!”

He said if food could not be eaten until it was all gone, then it was no good. “One time, eat all gone” was the rule. He was also fond of repeating his father's maxim that a craving is your body telling you what it needs to be healthy. I still hated slugs but became accustomed to my lips burning while eating his hot Shandong Province cuisine. I enjoyed wood ears, a kind of fungus that feeds on dead branches. Dried wood ears soaked in water were slippery and crunchy and not exactly tasty, but not bad either. I also came to relish squid and what I called “smelly fish.” This salted fish, when deep-fried, “smells very bad but tastes very good,” just
as Zhong-hua said. Its smell filled the house with an odor like that of a men's wrestling team locker room. In early spring, Zhong-hua purchased a large package of tripe but was disgusted by how dirty it was, unlike the clean tripe he could buy in China. Scrubbing the gritty sheets of intestines under running water took more than an hour. While the huge open pot bubbled on the stove, Zhong-hua again reassured me, “Smells very bad but tastes very good.”

Later the same day I was outside hanging laundry when I heard my daughter screech, “MOM, MOM, the house is on fire!” I ran up from the garden. Green, foul-smelling smoke poured out of the windows. The electric burner glowed fiery red, and the water had boiled from the pot, leaving smoking cinders of pig's bowels. The house was not on fire, just the tripe. We threw open all the doors and windows. This only chilled the hideous smell without decreasing it.

When Zhong-hua reappeared, he broke his rule of “never say sorry to your wife.” “Sorry! Sorry!” he said, grinning, though technically the apology was directed at my daughter. This ban on “sorry” is part of a cultural model that considers it not only unnecessary but also inappropriate and offensive to extend certain polite or conciliatory gestures to one's spouse. It is as if doing so would identify him or her as “other.” Additional forbiddances include “thank you,” “hello,” “good-bye,” “excuse me,” and “please.” Whenever he used one of these phrases, he said it as if on stage, with great gusto and enunciation. It struck him as so funny that he burst into uncharacteristic laughter, especially with “excuse me.”

He routinely bumped into me in a deliberate manner if I was in his path. The collisions usually happened in the kitchen while we both prepared food. He pushed me along, using his ample stomach as a snowplow, until he had enough counter space. I didn't realize that bodily rudeness was a privilege of intimacy, and I made a point of being offended. When I tried to explain the concept of “excuse me,” my husband looked at me with impatient disbelief. He said, “This kind of thing in our home no need, because this is
family.
Family
no need these kind of words.” Understanding that he was operating out of a belief system and not out of rudeness, I tried his way. Pushing him out of the way with a forceful thrust of the hip was fun, though he was very solid and removing him to another location took several tries.

As the weather warmed, Zhong-hua loved to sit on a purple plastic milk crate at the edge of the pond smoking and studying the food chain. Within the pond were grassy islands where painted turtles sunned themselves and deeper parts where blacksnakes preyed. Birds also loved this food bowl, full of bugs and catfish. The great blue herons ruled over kingfishers, orioles, woodpeckers, swallows, finches, jays, and hummingbirds.

A dove flew over our heads. “This is a very good bird.”

“Yes, their call is lovely. We call this a mourning dove. To mourn is to be sad about someone, and this bird sounds sad.”

He seemed not to be listening to me. “This bird is very, very good! In China people love to eat this one.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Very delicious! Gooder than chicken. Also free.” When he purchased a cheap air gun at the Elks' tool sale, I didn't make the connection. I suppose I thought he was going to shoot at outdated cans of beans, as my son Athan had done with high school friends. He shot dead one bird, a downy woodpecker. I panicked. “Zhong-hua, our neighbor Flippy fills five feeders every day for those birds. You can't shoot them. You just can't!”

Zhong-hua had a way of not reacting to shrill utterances, as if they were outside his auditory frequency range. This made me all the more strident, “No, Zhong-hua, I mean it. You just can't!”

Still gazing up at the sky, he nodded. “OK, OK. You right. Make neighbor happy is right way.” He didn't shoot any more birds at home, but every time we went to Troy, he eyed the plump pigeons waddling up and down on the sidewalks and asked if it was OK to shoot those birds. I said that would be a bad idea. He said there were a lot and nobody else was eating them.

Food gave us trouble, but words gave us more. Food presented itself to our bodies in unfamiliar packages that eventually broke down into universal molecules. Words presented themselves as the world and, undigested, made the world strange.

I had striven hard during our separation to master a conversational level of Chinese and assumed he had been in China wrestling with English. To my dismay, I learned that his English class had come after luncheons with company clients, during which he was obliged to drink competitive rounds until negotiations became optimal. He managed to find his way to English class, then promptly fell asleep. Dinner meetings followed, with more drinks to be downed and deals to be sealed. Finding his way home on his motorbike was not straightforward. He sometimes rode in wobbly circles until the policeman, a pal he had gone to high school with, pointed him home. Before he left, he gave the bike to his best friend. In America he almost never drank, deciding that one major vice—smoking—was enough, and citing the case of Deng Xiaoping, who smoked three packs a day and lived ninety-three years.

One of his English assignments dealt with daily schedules. He had sent me his: “Get up at four thirty, go to meet Tai Chi teacher in the park, eat something, go to work, after work go to English class, then go back to work until ten thirty.” He concluded with, “I'm tired, wanna sleep.” His English teacher, from the Philippines, was teaching them “American English” from a book called
Speak English As You Wish
. After he arrived, I looked over his class book. There were several pages of sentences that began “I wanna . . .” Another book called
A Trip to the United States
included a conversation between two erudite young men:

“I thought Jack went for the busty, well-padded types. What happened to his little broad?”

“What's he doing casting eyes at my girl?”

“Maybe he likes the way she swings—most of us do. . . .”

“It's not her fault she's stacked.”

His second month here, we enrolled Zhong-hua in the free
English classes in Troy, which included students from many parts of the world. One day Zhong-hua jumped into the car after class and said, “
Fuckyou
. What do you mean,
fuckyou
?” It turned out that rather than teach something useful, the teacher had spent the day teaching them expressions that he then told them never, ever to use. Between this teacher and the Filipino teacher, Zhong-hua had a very small vocabulary of appropriate things to say.

My husband had two degrees, one in Chinese cultural studies that he had paid for by working in a candy factory shortly after Mao's death, and one from a technical institute he attended while employed at a machine parts factory. At the factory, he wore protective clothing to tend a giant furnace. Hot metal tempered in a chemical solution hissed toxic fumes that affected the workers' lungs and sinuses. After thirteen years, the prolonged exposure to intense heat caused Zhong-hua's heart to beat irregularly. A friend helped him get reassigned to a management job at a steel building materials company, where he became chief manager of negotiations. Arriving in America, he said, “Now I need start from zero.” (
Xianzai wo dei cong ling kaishi
.) In Chinese, the verb phrase was inverted to “from nothing start,” which was locomotively more logical.

Early on, a friend's husband with kind intentions hired my husband to help him with a house painting job. I thought that would be a great job for him. I didn't know that in China houses are not painted. Walls are usually stone block, cement, or plastered wood. The two returned after dark, the rumble of the truck engine drowned out by the oldies station blasting “Wooly Bully,” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. Zhong-hua had white paint all over his hair. He looked wildly wretched. The friend's husband comported himself with shell-shocked dignity, managing a tight, haggard smile. They had gone into a convenience store for lunch, where Zhong-hua did not recognize anything as food. He had eaten a small amount of something sweet and alien and by evening was famished.

My friend's husband reported in a low voice that Zhong-hua was a disaster as a painter. He pushed the roller so vigorously that paint spattered everywhere, and then, after proper instruction, so slowly that the paint went on triple thick. He held one brush in each hand to paint trim and baseboards. As a last resort, my friend's husband had assigned Zhong-hua to the closet. The good man pressed two hundred dollars into my husband's hand, slapped him on the back, and said he didn't need a helper the next day.