The Natural Laws of Good Luck (7 page)

“What are you doing? Are you coming with me to the dinner party?”

“Coming.”

“What are you doing?”

“Need eat some rice. Some fish.”

After Zhong-hua's meal, which he ate as solemnly as if preparing to go off to battle, we set out for the party, where he ate daintily. Clearly, Zhong-hua dreaded American cuisine. For many months following that incident, although we occasionally invited others to our house for Chinese food, we avoided dinner invitations or any social functions involving food.

I gradually learned to prepare many Chinese dishes that my husband found edible, if not as hot or salty as he preferred. So I was puzzled why, when friends came over to eat and the conversation turned to food, my husband would rudely disparage my cooking: “Ellen cooks everything not very good. Ellen's sister is good cook, but Ellen not. One time Ellen cooked rice, squash, onion, all mixed together—tastes very, very terrible.” He put great emphasis on the
very
. I was not immediately offended, because I knew that my husband greatly preferred Chinese cuisine. However, my sister cooks American food, so that comparison put a different slant on things. He was insulting me, not American food.

When we were with people outside the family, he made blunt, unflattering comments about my ability to cook, clean, dance, and practice Tai Chi. Eventually, I learned that these negative compliments were intended to discourage jealousy and repel wife-snatchers. It worked very well. The friends were stopped short. They opened
their mouths but said nothing. They looked at me sympathetically. I shrugged and smiled to reassure them. “It's a Chinese tradition,” I said, “to say your wife is not good at various things.” They nodded rapidly, smiling tentatively, not sure if they should be smiling or frowning or how to exit the conversation.

From time to time, the older kids came home to visit, Eula, Mavis, and Athan. Zhong-hua put his vocabulary into high gear to entertain them with stories—like the one about ordering noodles in Guangzhou while waiting for a visa. “You want another one, sir? Whaaa, you already had five bowls.” The story went on for many bowls but had no point other than that his hunger was very big and made the waitress's eyes big. I think it took great effort for him to tell these stories because he still knew so few words.

Zhong-hua cooked mounds of vegetables, cut hair, massaged shoulders, and hung out on the porch with the kids. He wanted them to know they came first. Children always came first, though the proof of this may not always have been to their liking. Mavis, home visiting from college and whimpering about her aching muscles and clogged nose, promptly received Zhong-hua's super-treatment. It was a kind of death and rebirth: a total-body hand chopping, followed by rigorous stomach kneading. He was especially solicitous of Eula, the oldest, because of her delicate constitution. He taught her Qigong exercises and massaged her back. When she lay in bed with a bad sore throat, he boiled fresh ginger in a saucepan with sesame oil and maple syrup, filled a bowl to the brim, commanded her to drink it, and left the room. After a few swallows, she gagged and thought to hide the bowl under the bed, but just then Zhong-hua returned to check on her progress. He stood over her until the bowl was empty.

Once, after Athan visited for a weekend, he needed to catch a six o'clock bus to get back to college. Zhong-hua rose at four thirty, drove to Price Chopper for hot peppers and chicken, and prepared a breakfast stir-fry with a side of dumplings for Athan, who does not like red-hot food. My son sucked air between every
bite. He grinned at Zhong-hua, allowing that he was getting used to the spices and now actually preferred not to be able to feel his tongue while eating. With time he was honest and asked if we could serve Chinese
and
American food—how about pancakes and syrup?

In the summer our food troubles vanished as our beautiful Chinese-American vegetable garden flourished. I had erected an eight-foot fence around my quarter-acre garden and divided it into raised beds mulched heavily with old hay from the neighboring farmer. I came home from a job one day to smoldering fires around the circumference of my beloved garden. “Burning all this junk. This junk no good,” my husband said. That junk was all my mulch. He had raked half of the raised beds into one large square and was sifting the soil of nine hundred square feet through a screen of hardware cloth shovelful by shovelful, a job for a small village. Along with the mulch, the border of German chamomile was up in flames. I was horrified and started screeching at him, but my husband just chuckled and shook his head, saying that this chamomile would all come quickly back. It did.

After sifting soil Chinese-style for several hours, he conceded that half of the garden should, in fairness, be tended according to American methods and the other half by Chinese methods. I believe he was confident that I would not be able to ignore the difference in productivity between those plants tended by the ancestral wisdom of forty centuries and those tended by a few decades of New Age foolishness.

By midsummer my end of the garden orgied around a centerpiece of black hollyhocks and purple coneflowers. Outside of that sprang bright fountains of corn in a circle. Another circle of every kind of bristly virulent weed grew up around the corn in a thriving hedge attractive to bees. From the outer circle, red raspberries flung their thorny arms this way and that, and then America ended in compromise with one raised bed of Chinese tomatoes and one tepee of Chinese string beans.

Zhong-hua's side of the garden was neat and regimented. There were no weeds and no rocks. Tall trellises of saplings supported Chinese cucumbers with their foot-long thorny fruit hanging straight down. He had hoed trenches for little waterways between each trellis and every night stood outside spraying into the moonlit vines, holding the hose in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The long-legged shadows cast from the cucumber trellises angled eighty feet across the field, as if they intended to walk back to China, ten thousand leagues at each step. Water beads clung to the darkened jewels of hot peppers, and the patch of Chinese cabbage and lettuce was lush and curly, iridescent green. In the American night, the plants revived, intensified, and shared themselves—human beings could relax without having to justify their existence beyond being waterers of plants. In China the morning watering was already finished, and thousands of simple waterers had gone dutifully into the complications of daylight.

*
Written by Cynthia Weil, Barry Mann, and Phil Galdston.

Hustling

M
Y HUSBAND
was having such a hard time with English that we enrolled him in a summer English program at the university. The grocer gave him time off, anticipating a more fluent fellow and greater return on his investment in him. But Zhong-hua and many other students from around the world struggled to understand basic directions and read the blackboard. The immense strain was evident on their faces as they emerged from the building. He said the teacher's explanations sounded like “Wha, wha, wha, wha.” I gave him a ride the first few times, and then he drove himself. How to drive to Albany and back was the main thing he learned that summer, and in the process he discovered that many promising streets ended in factory yards by the river and that Interstate 90 West would carry him closer to Buffalo and far from home. I continued to piece together income from sculpture commissions and part-time jobs such as scrubbing frat toilets, frying burgers, and the endless pulling of self-justifying weeds.

Before Zhong-hua arrived I had found myself sweating one Monday up the Statue of Liberty as chaperone to a busload of French teenagers (I don't speak French), and sweating the next Monday in a chair opposite an Episcopal priest to interview for a job choreographing a dance of death and resurrection. The latter task suited me perfectly, and the congregation loved Jesus and the
two Marys emoting up the aisles in spandex, but it was a onetime deal. Everyone deserves the satisfaction once of being equal to the task at hand.

Zhong-hua had brought nothing from his business career in China except a business suit, the black shoes, and two meat grinders still in the box from his friend's meat-grinder company. Da Jie was visiting our house with her daughter when Zhong-hua announced that he wished to sell meat grinders at the mall. The admonishing words of my Chinese friend Fanwei came back to me as I perched on the arm of Da Jie's chair:
If your husband has an idea, you should say it is a very good idea, even if you think it is not good. If he has two ideas and wants to know which is the better, you should say both are very good ideas. If your brother-in-law has an idea about what your husband should do, just say, “Very good idea.” If your husband has an idea for something he wants to accomplish, even if you know he cannot do it, you should say, “I'll help you!” After two years you can tell your husband what you really think
. I opened my mouth, but nothing came. Da Jie chimed in for me, “Yes, yes, good idea. Try, try, try!”

Da Jie's daughter had come to America at age thirteen and at twenty did not follow traditional etiquette on not contradicting an elder. She said, “Uncle. This is stupid idea. Americans buy their meat already ground up. They don't need this kind of thing.” I was both shocked and relieved by my niece's impertinence. Actually, I wanted to hug her.

The tedium of earning money was spiced with spurts of industry that saved money. Zhong-hua showed thrift in unexpected ways. During the Cultural Revolution in China, when Zhong-hua was the village schoolteacher, he did double duty as village barber. With a sharpened wedge of wood, he swiftly shaved each male child's head, leaving only a shock of black hair at the forehead. When I complained that I wished I could visit a beauty parlor because my hair was growing wild and bothering my eyes, Zhong-hua said, “I can do,” and sat me down on a stool outdoors. It was all over in less than two minutes. He left roughly an inch of hair
everywhere on my head, which, because of its coarse nature, stood straight up like wire. Fortunately, I am not in the habit of looking in the mirror very often.

Zhong-hua looked through the lenses of possibility at everything others had cast by the side of the road. I would have been annoyed had I not associated my husband with Hermes, the Greek god who found a turtle shell on the ground and fashioned it into a lute. Some things Zhong-hua created were not as exotic as a lute, such as the shoe tree he made out of the discarded vitamin display rack found in an alley behind the grocery store. There was also the treadmill with handlebars just right for hanging up the garden hoses. Some of his finds were not as useful, such as the four VCR players dysfunctional for reasons mysterious even when the wiry insides were taken out and splayed on the workbench, or the twelve random hubcaps with no matching wheels. There were microwave ovens, televisions, lawn mowers, electric knives, and computers that refused to work despite the fact that they had “seemed very, very good” sitting on the curb. We soon had a VCR that did sometimes work, a porch glider that glided but clicked loudly and had no cushions, and a moldy office chair that wet the bottom of whoever sat on it from a spongy upholstered reservoir.

Garage sales were exciting to Zhong-hua for the bargaining opportunities. Once, among the hemp rope, sump pumps, and jigsaw puzzles, Zhong-hua found a small black Chinese teapot with gold dragons swimming through blue clouds. In China, an item priced at two hundred yuan can be bargained down to twenty yuan. The teapot with four cups was two dollars.

“One dollar OK, not?”

“No, it's two dollars. The price is marked, sir.”

“I think one dollar maybe enough. This teapot small.”

“No, I said two dollars.”

“This teapot very old. I give you one dollar.”

“It's a pretty teapot, and it costs two dollars.” The woman stood with her hands on her hips, glaring at him.

“Too expensive! I don't need.” Zhong-hua turned and strode decisively back to the car. As we drove away, he said, “Very good teapot. I really want, but price no good.” He lost out on great deals because he was sure he could cut the already fair price in half with the psychological warfare of skillful bargaining. Just as often he was successful and sped away waving to the bewildered seller, who had just sold a fifty-dollar refrigerator for six dollars or a hundred-dollar table saw for sixteen. One day he picked up a tiny gold pin from the table marked “Free Stuff.” I thought it was an angel but on closer inspection saw it was a chubby Cupid aiming his arrow, a flying baby. From then on, he fastened this gold Cupid to his collar before leaving home for any reason.

Zhong-hua said that in China a wife is a man's “left hand.” He adjusted to having a willing but unreliable left hand. It washed clothes but didn't fold them, planted seeds but didn't weed, put tools away but not in the right place, crushed garlic but to a lumpy rather than a creamy paste, and strained against big wrenches but rarely could budge them. He was my right hand. When my husband arrived from China, I was working on a commissioned burial urn of solid black wonderstone with a sculpture on the top of the lid. When I agreed to take the job, I had not thought through how I would carve the inside of the bowl without expensive electric tools. So far, I had succeeded only in creating a shallow impression big enough to hold a few cigarette ashes, not the ashes of an important person's bones.

Zhong-hua watched me sitting on the ground holding the stone globe clamped between my feet. I flaked off black slivers with a one-inch chisel. He wore that versatile poker face. There were gradations of the poker face: the don't-bother-me-or-talk-to-me poker face, the irritated poker face, the exhausted poker face, the I-have-no-idea-what-you-just-said poker face, and so forth. This one was the I-think-you-are-in-big-trouble-and-really-needsome-help-from-someone-a-little-smarter poker face. That night he didn't come to bed until three in the morning. I awoke to a
Stone Age bowl just deep enough to inspire a vision of true containment. He had done it with willpower and a regular half-inch electric drill bit, a mallet, and a stone chisel. Tedious hours of chipping and boring remained—and one wrong move could split the thing asunder—but the method had been discovered and proved humanly possible.