A Free Life (55 page)

A full hour passed, and still there was no word about Pingping. Nan asked the old woman at the information desk how his wife was doing, but she had heard nothing from the operating room yet. He got so tensed up that he couldn't stop walking back and forth at the end of the waiting lounge. People sitting in the scooped plastic seats glanced at him from time to time. Something stirred in his gorge and set him hiccupping. He pressed his fist against his solar plexus, but the visceral spasms wouldn't stop. If only his parents-in-law were here. That would have made Pingping feel protected. When she had given birth to Taotao, her parents, both retired then, had taken care of her during her two months' maternity leave because Nan had to stay at school attending seminars. Her father, a skinny chain-smoker despite his hacking cough, cooked special meals for her every day so that she could have enough milk for Taotao. Her parents nursed her so well that most of her small illnesses, such as a weak bladder and occasional light-headedness, were cured when her leave was over. In addition, her hair had grown thick and abundant. Never had she felt so healthy as when she rejoined her husband in Harbin. Recently Pingping and Nan had talked about asking her parents to come and stay a few months, but they dared not invite them, afraid Nan 's parents would be jealous and make trouble, at least wanting to come as well. It would be impossible for Pingping to get along with Nan 's mother, who was too manipulative and would boss her around.

As Nan was pacing up and down the floor, the old woman at the information desk came up to him and said, "Hey, your wife's coming out of the operation momentarily. Go to the front door of the medical building and pick her up there."

"How is she?" he asked.

"She's doing all right. Bring your car there quickly."

Before Nan could leave, Dr. Walker appeared, his eyes shifty: he looked rather shaken. He told Nan that Pingping was safe, but the operation had taken longer than anticipated. He didn't mention the baby's body and Nan was so worried about his wife that he forgot to ask about the aborted fetus. Handing him his card, the obstetrician said, "Feel free to call anytime you need me. I'll call this afternoon to check on Pingping."

The instant Nan took the card, Dr. Walker turned around and strode away.

Nan rushed out of the lobby through the side door. He gave the numbered brass tag to a gangly black valet, who hurried away to fetch his car. Several people were waiting for their vehicles at the side entrance too. A bony middle-aged man told everybody excitedly that his wife had just given birth to a healthy boy. He turned to Nan and beamed. Nan managed to say, "Congratulations."

"How about you? Gonna be a father?" the man asked. "We just lawst a baby girl."

"I'm sorry, really sorry." The man looked a bit abashed. He turned away and gave a tip to a short black fellow who handed over his key. "Thank you, sir," the valet said cheerfully.

A moment later Nan got his car key from the other valet and tipped him a dollar. He drove to the front entrance of the medical building, where Pingping was sitting in a wheelchair, a young nurse standing behind her with both hands on the back of the chair. Seeing his wife empty-handed, Nan knew Dr. Walker hadn't let her have their baby's body, but he didn't ask her about it. He opened his car door and helped her get in. "She's very weak. Be careful," said the nurse, still wearing a pale blue cap.

Pingping seemed half paralyzed and could hardly move her head and limbs. Nan buckled her up. Without delay he pulled out of the driveway, as there were many cars waiting behind to pick up other patients. He drove out of the hospital and got onto I-285. On the way home he observed his wife now and again. Her eyes were closed, the lids twitching. Apparently she hadn't fully come out of the anesthesia yet. Her cheeks were swollen with a ghastly pallor and her mouth seemed flabby, reminding him of rising dough. Yet the expression of pain and suffering on her face touched him and made him want to weep. He kept taking his eyes off the road and peering at her. He felt a sudden onrush of emotion, his heart aching. Never had he found her face so ugly yet so moving; he was sure her sorrowful features would be embedded in his mind as one of those images that could always unloose a flood of tenderness and compassion in his heart. He remained silent for a long while lest he might let out the sobs gathering in his throat.

Having turned onto I-85, he finally asked her, "How do you feel, dear?"

"I almost died. I've never felt so awful, so like death."

"Did they let you have our baby's body?"

"I don't remember anything. The drug knocked me out."

"I asked Dr. Walker before the operation. He said he'd see to it."

"They just tried to keep me alive, I guess."

Now Nan understood why the obstetrician had looked so nervous when he handed Nan his card.

That afternoon Dr. Walker called and asked if Pingping was still bleeding. Nan told him she was not. "Thank God, she's strong. She lost a lot of blood," said the doctor. He ordered her to eat a lot of chicken soup and rest in bed for at least two days.

THE WUS kept candles burning on the bar table in the living room for a whole month. A bunch of flowers, mums or roses or daisies, constantly stood in the vase between the two tiny halos of candle flames. Physically, Pingping was recovering rapidly, but she often looked absentminded. Sometimes she heard their baby calling her in a cry, "Mommy, Mommy, take me home." When she stood at the glass door of the living room, she often caught sight of a red-cheeked girl toddling on the deck, as if her daughter, May, were frolicking there. Even the flickering of the surface of the lake in the sunlight would remind her of the blinking star, the baby's heartbeat in the sonogram. Every night she'd sleep with the empty casket beside her pillow, and at times she woke up hearing the baby prattle to her mysteriously. It would take more than two years for her to outgrow most of the grief and to stop talking to her husband about the child.

Nan grieved in his own way. He didn't hear any voices or see any images, but he was depressed. For months after the loss of the baby, he couldn't pull himself together to do anything other than run the restaurant. A numbing pain was sinking deeper and deeper in him. He felt deceived by fate. Originally he had thought that the arrival of his daughter would bring him a lot of joy and solace and would open a new page of his life. Even though his life had been truncated and enervated by the immigration, even though he had accomplished nothing here, even though he was a total failure in others' eyes, he'd still have a lovely daughter to raise, to love, and to be proud of. How often he had pictured the girl as good-looking as her mother. He imagined teaching her how to read and write, how to ride a bike, and how to drive, then seeing her dress up for her high school prom, taking her to college, and eventually walking her down the aisle and handing her to a fine young man. Having her would have made his life more bearable and lessened his misery and loneliness in this place. She could have become his American dream.

Now all the figments of his imagination were gone and he was thrown back to the hard reality again. He realized that he had been selfish in a way, eager to make his daughter's life a part of his own; that's to say he wanted her to come into this world for his sake, so that he wouldn't have to live his life fully or wage the fight against adversity. In other words, subconsciously he wished to use her as a pretext for wasting his life. The truth was that he had been frightened by the overwhelming odds against writing in English artistically, against claiming his existence in this new land, and against becoming a truly independent man who followed nothing but his own heart. To date he had tried every way to wriggle out of the struggle. For several years he had devoted all his energy and passion to the restaurant business and gotten the mortgage paid, but the disappearance of the debt had also ended his excuse for not writing, for not doing something his heart desired. Then he was obsessed with his unborn daughter so as to have his energy and life consumed in another way. Not until now did he understand his mind-set. What a shirker he had been! How disgusted he was with himself!

His self-hatred paralyzed his will to do anything other than his routine business. For months he was in despair and acted like a robot moving between the Gold Wok and his house. At times he felt the urge to write something, but whenever he took up his pen, his mind remained numb and vacant, a coldness still permeating his being. He knew he had to get out of this lethargic state before long. No matter what kind of destiny awaited him, he'd have to put up a fight. He must resume working on his poetry. By now it was clear that he should write exclusively in English, which was the only way to go. He had been shilly-shallying for too long; it was the radical beginning that had intimidated him. This realization made him loathe himself more, but it still couldn't motivate him enough for a wholehearted start. These days he thought a lot about writing as if it were a new subject to him.

"Have you read the novella Good-bye, My American Boss?" Niyan asked Nan one afternoon. The waitress liked reading popular magazines, and her husband would write short articles for some Chinese-language newspapers every now and then. "No, who wrote it?" asked Nan.

"Danning Meng. It's a very interesting story that shows how badly some Americans treated the Chinese in Philadelphia. You should read it. It's in the last issue of October Quarterly."

"I know the author. We're friends."

"Really? He's famous."

"I got a letter from him two weeks ago."

Nan had noticed several new titles by Danning in the World Bookstore. He had read two of them, but was underwhelmed. Danning, despite his fame as the leading figure in the overseas student literature, pandered too much to the Chinese readers' taste and depended too heavily on exotic details and on nationalistic sentiment to make his stories work. That in effect made his fiction simplistic, glib, and even clunky in places. Nan didn't mention to Niyan that he disliked his friend's work. If he went on to write, he'd emphasize similarity instead of difference. He imagined a kind of poetry that could speak directly to the readers' hearts regardless of their cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Above all, his work should possess more strength than beauty, which he believed often belied truth. He wanted to produce literature, or else he ought never to bother about writing at all.

THE WUS didn't go to the Olympic games because of the traffic in downtown Atlanta, but they watched TV and followed the news. It was so hot that some athletes fainted during competitions. The local Chinese-language newspapers carried articles on how the American staff at the Olympic Village based at Georgia Tech had inconvenienced the Chinese athletes to ensure they couldn't perform at their best. One night the fire alarm in the dorm building housing the Chinese women swimmers went off, and the police came and ordered everybody out. The athletes stayed in the damp night air a whole hour, and few of them could sleep well afterward. As a result, they did poorly in the events the following day. What's worse, the schedules and maps provided by the Olympic Headquarters were often inaccurate, and some people missed their events or arrived so late that they had to forfeit their games. The Chinese officials lodged a complaint; so did some other countries.

The Wus half believed those reports, but Shubo and Niyan were convinced of them all. There was also a long protest letter in the local newspapers, condemning the NBC commentator's remarks on China at the opening ceremony. The protesters were soliciting more signatures. True, the commentator had criticized China 's human rights record, its military threat to Taiwan, its athletes' doping, and its tolerance of counterfeiting intellectual property. Many Chinese here resented his comments, believing this was another case of China-bashing. These days torrents of angry words had poured in to the Olympic Headquarters, demanding an apology from NBC and from Robert Coleman, the commentator. Some Chinese students urged people to fax more letters to the media company so as to "jam their machines." Funds were being raised for a full-page protest in the New York Times.

Nan said to Shubo, "If China is so sensitive to criticism and public opinion, why doesn't it apologize to its people for the Tiananmen massacre? Compared with the Chinese government, this NBC man is completely innocent. I don't see why people are so furious and even want to have him fired."

"This isn't just politics. It's about national pride," said Shubo. He had come in to watch the games on the TV hung in the corner, which had a larger screen than the one in his home.

"National pride, my butt," Nan said. "What can the Chinese be proud of nowadays? The largest population and cheap labor?"

"Still, that anchorman had no right to condemn China at the opening ceremony."

"How come? Only because he's an American, not entitled to criticize China? I don't understand why the Chinese here also believe that domestic shame mustn't be made public."

"Our athletes were guests of the United States. You can't invite them over and then humiliate them publicly. It's the host's responsibility to make the guests feel welcome.'"

" The reason every country is here is to win medals. Who cares about friendship or politeness or hospitality? That's just Chinese idiosyncrasy and hypocrisy."

"You have a heck of a mouth, Nan. So hard to please."

Shubo held a full-time job in a marble quarry now, so he could no longer always fill in for Nan when his help was needed. Nan found an old chef, Mr. Mu, who was good at Hunan cuisine but didn't have a work permit, so Nan couldn't use this sleepy-eyed man regularly. If the INS caught Mr. Mu working they could fine Nan $5,000. These days Shubo would come in the evenings, mainly to watch TV. Also, he wanted to keep his wife company whenever he could. Pingping often said to Niyan, "I wish Nan were as sticky as Shubo." By "sticky" she meant "attached." Niyan would smile without speaking.

Then one day the same woman who had solicited a donation for the flood victims in China from the Wus four years earlier turned up at the Gold Wok again. Nan remembered her name, Mei Hong. This time she said pleasantly to him while patting his forearm, " Nan Wu, we need you to help feed the Chinese athletes."