A Free Life (50 page)

The following Thursday when Dick came for lunch, Nan asked his friend to give him a list of books of contemporary poetry in English that he should know. Without hesitation Dick wrote eleven titles on the notepad Nan had placed before him. They included:

Darker, Mark Strand

Scream! Sam Fisher

The Fortunate Traveller, Derek Walcott

Descending Figure, Louise Gluck

The Book of the Body, Frank Bidart

An Explanation of America, Robert Pinsky

North, Seamus Heaney

Elsewhere, Linda Dewit

The Ether Dome and Other Poems, Allen Grossman

Dien Cai Dau, Yusef Komunyakaa

An Appointment in the Afternoon, Richard Harrison

"Thanks, thanks," Nan said. He tore off the sheet and folded it carefully. "I've made up my mind to write in English." "Good. You've been dillydallying too long," Dick said. "Do you sink I can make it eventually?" "Depends on what you mean by 'make it.' "

"I mean whezzer I can become a decent poet in English eef I persevere."

"No doubt about that, Nan. You'll be a fine poet." "I may also mess up my life."

"That's common. I've already ruined a good part of mine." Dick laughed and blinked. "Why did you say zat?"

"My parents wanted me to be a lawyer. I even went to law school at Columbia for a year, then I quit. My dad was mad at me for wasting so much money. In my parents' eyes I was a loser."

"But you're a success now. You have an excellent jawb."

"I may lose it anytime. If Emory doesn't give me tenure, I don't know where I'll go. Look, you have your wife and kid and you have a home. That's already a success. I have nothing but myself. Most poets in America are worse off than I am. I knew a middle-aged poet who died of pneumonia because he had no health insurance and couldn't go to the doctor when he was ill. To tell the truth, in a way you're lucky, Nan. Whatever happens to you, your family will be with you and love you. To top it all, you have your own home and business, a solid base."

Dick's words surprised Nan. Never had he thought his family could play such a vital role in the writer's life he tried to imagine for himself. Indeed, even if he ruined himself totally, his wife and son would remain with him. Without question, to Dick he was a kind of success, at least domestically. This realization gave him some confidence, now that he knew he had little to lose. All he could do was try.

He drove to three local libraries and found seven of the eleven poetry books Dick had listed for him. To get the other four titles, he went to Borders at Gwinnett Mall and bought two of them. He also ordered Linda Dewit's Elsewhere at the bookstore. But they couldn't find Richard Harrison's An Appointment in the Afternoon. The young saleswoman searched in the computer, but to no avail. "Are you sure this is the right title?" she asked Nan, biting the corner of her mouth, beside which a pair of thin lines emerged. Nan wondered whether they were wrinkles or scars.

"Yes. Do you carry ozzer books by zis author?"

"No, I don't see any here." She kept her eyes on the monitor.

"Have you ever stocked zis title?"

"No, we haven't."

Nan didn't try further, since the nine poetry books already in his hands would occupy him for two or three months. Besides, he was sure that Dick had a copy he could borrow.

When Dick came to the Gold Wok the next time, Nan mentioned his inability to get hold of Richard Harrison's book. Dick reddened, lowering his eyes while slurping seaweed soup. "What's zer matter?" Nan asked. "Don't you have a volume of his poetry?"

"Of course I do. I wrote it."

"What? But your name is Dick, not Richard. Your new book has 'Dick Harrison' as zee author."

Dick laughed nervously, his face puckering a little. "You don't know Dick is a nickname for Richard."

"Oh, I really don't know. You mean it's like Bob for Robert or Bill for William?"

"Exactly. From now on I go by Dick for my author's name."

"My, I never thought you would be on zer list."

"Why? You think I'm unqualified?"

"No, I don't mean zat. We Chinese would never do that!"

"Do what?"

"To put down your own name on such a list. I didn't imagine it was you. Hey, I don't mean to hurt your feelings. I'm just telling zer truth."

"I'm not that fragile. But I have to assert myself, even to pat myself on the back. A lot of poets just write dreck, but still they have everything-fame, money, and women."

"So you write for those?" asked Nan, half joshingly.

"Why not? Poets are not saints. We have to make our way in the world too."

"But poetry seems useless to me."

"You have to take it as a matter of life or death if you want to write well," Dick said in earnest, and unconsciously put down his spoon.

Nan thought about his friend's words afterward, but he was unconvinced. He couldn't see how poetry could be used as a means of getting fortune and fame, much less women. In the Chinese tradition, poets often celebrated poverty, believing their art could improve and mature with hardship and impoverishment. On the other hand, Nan remembered that Wallace Stevens once said money could become poetry. Yet that statement was mainly about the time and energy the poet needed for writing; it didn't bear on the fortune and fame Dick had in mind. Nan didn't agree with his friend, and neither would he believe in the principle upheld by traditional Chinese poets who had ritualized poverty. He felt that too much hardship could dull a poet's sensibility and smother his talent, just as in his own case the hard work over the years had stunted his growth as a poet. Now he had to keep his mind alert and clear and find his way.

IN MARCH, Mrs. Lodge bought eight ducklings, each already more than half a foot long, and kept them in the lake. They grew rapidly and in two months looked like adult ducks, waddling about with heavy asses. When swimming in the green water, they looked blaz-ingly white. Though they didn't fly away to other bodies of water, they took off occasionally, darting from one end of the lake to the other end and quacking gutturally. Because of their ability to fly, Nan often wondered whether they were a hybrid of some domestic and wild ducks. The eight of them always stayed together. When they paddled around, the largest drake would lead the flock, and together they resembled a miniature cruising fleet. Taotao called the head drake the bully, because the rascal would chase female ducks and even geese. If a goose was too large and too tall for it to tread, it would just sit on her back as she sailed around in the water, both of them shrieking like crazy.

One morning in May, Nan and Taotao returned from the supermarket with the Sunday Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The moment they got out of the car, the boy caught sight of the bully duck perching near the gate to the backyard and shuddering in silence. Taotao went up to it, but the drake wouldn't move or make any noise. He pushed it with his foot; still it wouldn't budge, trembling without pause. Nan came over too. They saw blood on its head and feathers. "He must have been injured," Nan thought aloud in English.

The boy ran into the house, flapping his hands above his waist like a pair of penguin flippers. He shouted, "Mom, we have the bully duck in our yard. He won't go away."

Mother and son came out together while Nan held up the drake and saw that it had been mangled by fishing lines and hooks, its tongue hanging out, slashed by a large fishhook that had gone through it from underneath. Several pieces of fishing line were twined around its neck, choking it. One of its wings had collapsed, unable to move. Stroking its feathers, Nan found another hook stuck in its good wing. He managed to dislodge this one and some other hooks, but he couldn't take off the one on its tongue, which, when he tried to remove it, hurt the duck more and made its mouth bleed again. The poor creature was so damaged that it couldn't make any noise.

Pingping cut the fishing lines with scissors, but they couldn't get rid of the fishhook without further injuring the drake's tongue. She went back into the house and returned with a pair of pliers, her apron pocket stuffed with a bottle and cotton balls. With both hands Nan severed the hook so that the barb wouldn't cut the tongue again when he pulled the shank out. The steel of the fishhook was so hard that it had even dented the edges of the pliers. "Open his mouth," Pingping said to Nan while taking an aspirin tablet out of her apron pocket.

Father and son pried the duck's bill apart. Pingping, who had worked on a poultry farm for two years back in China and knew how to treat sick chickens, broke the aspirin in half and inserted one piece into the drake's mouth. It swallowed the medicine, and she rubbed its throat to ensure that the aspirin sank into its craw. Next, with a pair of sticks she picked off the maggots from its wounds. Then she gingerly rubbed the gashes with a cotton ball soaked with hydrogen peroxide; the wounds kept foaming while the drake's legs twitched fitfully. After the treatment, Taotao and Nan carried the creature to the lakeside and released it. It paddled away listlessly, hardly able to keep its head above the water.

For the rest of the day, Nan and Pingping talked about the bully duck, which must have stayed in their yard for a whole night. The drake had been the strongest of the brood, but when it was injured, it had been left to die alone and none of the flock had accompanied it. All the other ducks perched in the shady bushes on the other shore, sleeping, feeding, and mating as usual. Once in a while they'd get into the water, frolicking or catching fish or insects. Their life wasn't in the least disrupted by their ex-leader's absence. Pingping sighed, "It's just like human beings-when you're weak, you're left to die alone."

To their amazement, two days later, the bully drake led the flock swimming in the lake again, its head raised high, and it quacked as lustily as before. Again it would chase female waterfowl. These ducks and the mallards were very fond of the Wus' backyard. They'd bask in the sun on the shore and lay eggs in the clumps of monkey grass. The lake couldn't sustain too many of them, so Pingping left only ten of the duck eggs in the grass to be hatched. She took the rest home and salted them in a jar of brine.

TAOTAO had been on a Scholars Bowl team, but his parents made him quit because he'd miss classes, having to travel frequently for the tournaments, and because when they stayed at a motel, two boys would share one bed, which Taotao disliked. Furthermore, he didn't learn much from the answers to the questions-to win, all you needed was a strong memory and quick response. Still, he was unhappy about leaving the team and often threw a fit at home, yelling at his father.

He wrote an essay about the injured drake for his English class and got an A for it. Mrs. Ashby, his teacher, put "Super!" on his homework, which pleased him and his parents. Nan also wrote about the incident, but he couldn't complete the poem, whose ending simply didn't work no matter how hard he tried. By chance Taotao saw a draft of the poem Nan had thrown away. Outraged, he told his father, "That's my story. You shouldn't steal from me."

His parents were stumped. Nan said, "W-what do you mean?"

"I wrote about the duck already. If you did the same, you committed plagiarism."

"What's that?" asked his mother.

"Stealing ozzers' ideas," Nan explained, then turned to his son. "It's our story. We all took part in rescuing zer duck. And I didn't use any of your ideas or sentences and my speaker is zer duck. How can you accuse me of plagiarism?"

"But I've already written about it. You can't use it again."

"Who says I can't?" Nan was losing his temper, his eyeballs throbbing.

"The law says."

"Give me a break! You're not a lawyer."

"Fuck you!" The boy dropped his cereal bowl on the dining table and stood up.

"Say that again!" Nan jumped to his feet and grabbed at his son. Then he stopped and withdrew his hand, just glaring at him.

Pingping intervened, "Taotao, you apologize to Daddy. You curse him first, you must apologize."

Ignoring her order, the boy hoisted his book bag over his shoulder and tore out the door for the bus stop. These days he was often annoyed by Nan, who would in secret search his drawers and book bag every two or three days to make sure he was drug-free, and who would read his e-mail messages whenever he forgot to shut off his account. How many times had he told him not to invade his privacy? But his father just wouldn't mend his ways, treating him as if he were a culprit on parole. What a stupid asshole.

As Taotao was striding away, his mother caught up with him. She grasped his upper arm and stopped him, saying, "You must apologize to Daddy."

"He started it. Ow! Don't break my humerus!" "I don't care who start. You curse him, you apologize." She was still clutching his arm. "No, I won't!"

"He's your father. In whole world, if you can find another man who is better to you than Daddy, you don't need apologize. If you cannot find such man, you must apologize to him."

Taotao looked at her with a knotted brow, then ambled back to the house. Yanking open the screen door, he shouted, "I'm sorry, Daddy, okay?"

"That's fine," said Nan.

Although the exchange with his son spoiled Nan 's desire to work on his poem about the injured duck, he was amazed that during the whole altercation none of them had spoken a single Chinese word. He went out to the deck and swept away the pollen and dust, pleased he had contained his temper this time.

On occasion Taotao still showed animosity toward Nan. One sentence he often hurled at him was "You were never there." Nan knew what he meant-the boy still resented Nan 's absence from his early childhood. Yet Nan would reply, "Who said I wasn't there? I was the first person who saw you coming out of your mahther. Your head appeared first, with sleek hair." That would exasperate his son more.

Without doubt, Taotao viewed Nan as a kind of rival in the household. Whenever possible, he'd strive to monopolize his mother's attention and love, interrupting Nan's conversations with Pingping or sitting between his parents, or pinning blame on Nan whenever something went awry. Nan told him to act his age. The boy was almost thirteen, five feet tall, but he wouldn't change. "You have Oedipus complex and may end up a mama's boy," Nan often told him. That would make matters worse. Enraged, Taotao would call him "douche bag." Nan didn't know this word, nor could he find it in his dictionaries. He assumed that it must be a slang neologism, too recent for lexicographers to pick up. He once asked his son how to spell it, but the boy wouldn't tell him.