The Cooked Seed (25 page)

It was getting late. The conversation quieted down. Pointing his chopsticks at the various plates, Qigu gave eloquent critiques of the dishes. I, on the other hand, could only think of the bill.

It came. One hundred and forty dollars. Our budget for two months of food.

I glanced at Qigu.

He smiled and pretended that he didn’t see the bill.

The discussion continued on ancient philosophers. Laozi and Zhuangzi and his butterfly.

Qigu didn’t look at the bill. He let it sit on the tray.

The friends kept on. There were jokes and laughter.

The restaurant was empty of customers, but Qigu continued to talk. He was animated.

What’s the game?
I wondered.
It’s supposed to be his treat.

The waiter flipped the light switch, hinting for us to wrap up.

Qigu sipped more wine and laughed loudly at his own jokes.

He pretended not to notice the waiter’s impatience.

The waiter came to the table. He stood next to Qigu with a long face.

“Is there anything else I can help you with?” the waiter asked, visibly upset.

Qigu did not move. “A couple more minutes, okay?” he said to the waiter, smiling.

Finally, one of the guests took out his credit card.

“No, please!” Qigu cried, throwing up his hands. “I said it was my treat, didn’t I? Please, let me pay.”

But it was too late. The waiter took the friend’s credit card.

Qigu shook his head and made an expression of disappointment. “You shouldn’t have!” he said to the friend.

After we returned to our apartment, I told Qigu that I felt ashamed as his girlfriend. “You are pathetic, stingy, and low!”

“Why such rage?” Qigu kicked off his shoes and went to turn on the TV.

“It might not be a big deal to you, but it is to me. You are my man.”

“Here you go again, being dramatic,” Qigu said. “Didn’t you see how well my friends were entertained? You are wrong to think that I didn’t contribute. I offered laugher, the best medicine. I enhanced everybody’s longevity. I am the best gift money can’t buy.”

I sat in front of the Ph.D. program committee at the University of Chicago. I was given a chance to convince the committee. It was an interview and an evaluation. They didn’t think I understood what I was getting myself into. “We need to know what you want to do with a Ph.D. degree. Your goal, Miss Min.”

I couldn’t tell the truth. I couldn’t say that my goal was to earn American citizenship. I told them that I had a great thesis in mind. The title would be, “The Psychological Impact of Madame Mao’s Brain-Washing Propaganda over 1.5 Billion Chinese people.”

“Indeed, that would be an excellent topic,” the head of the committee responded. “China is on its way to becoming a major player in the world’s economy and a rival to America. We are interested in China. However, Miss Min, that is not the issue we’re concerned with here.”

“I can sing Madame Mao’s operas from beginning to end, every one of them,” I said eagerly. “I can recite the lyrics and the melodies! Test me if you wish.”

“This is not a Broadway audition, Miss Min,” the woman smiled. “We need to know how you plan to survive the academic program. Before you get to work on your thesis, you have to complete the basic academic requirements. You must be fluent in a foreign language, Greek, for example …”

I was barely fluent in English.

The woman read my mind. “That’s our point. Your background seems to be studio art. What would be the purpose of pursuing a Ph.D.? Do you see yourself as a professor, researcher, or an artist?”

Qigu had no sympathy for my rejection. “You presented yourself as a headless fly,” he commented. “It might be a good thing that they turned
you down. A Ph.D. does not suit you. You are an original. Your talent is inborn. Unfortunately, you refuse to see it my way.”

I looked at him and blinked. “What kind of talent are you talking about? Fixing toilets? Tiling a floor? Mixing concrete, or carrying dry-wall?”

Qigu spoke as if he knew me better than I knew myself. I disbelieved him, and yet I desperately relied on his encouragement. I was dying to hold on to the belief that I had potential, that I’d be good at something, that I could make my life a success.

“My friends call me Eagle Eye for a reason,” Qigu said as he opened the door and headed toward the basement. He had built a makeshift table and installed carpeting that he’d found in the Dumpster. The space had been turned into his painting studio. Pulling sketches out of a pile, he tried to convince me that he was serious about my talent.

“I have been trying to copy your wild energy, but without luck. I wish I could untrain myself. Everything is too set for me. For example, see here …” He pointed to a large drawing. “I can no longer think outside of the box, so to speak. When I draw a figure, the head must be on the neck, the shoulders must be connected to arms, and hips to legs … I mean, my training has disabled me. It has killed my imagination.”

Qigu showed me another pile of his sketches. “I did these with my eyes closed. I wanted to break old habits. But still, look, I paint the human figure with a realist’s precision! Look at you—poetry comes with you. You hear the music, and your eye sees beauty. There is no fighting yourself, no struggle …”

I was touched, strangely, when Qigu told me that he was frustrated that I’d let getting a green card dictate my life. “You are doing yourself injustice,” he said. “You are burying your talent.”

This man, I thought, with all his heart, believed that I was born to be extraordinary, but he had never said that he loved me. He was never shy about cracking sex jokes with his friends, but he had to turn off lights when getting into bed. There was no pretension in his voice. He wanted me to know the truth about myself.

I looked at Qigu. His face and his funny haircut—my work, to save money. His bangs covered half of his forehead. There was a spot of paint under his chin.

“I’d hate to see you give up,” he said quietly.

“I have finished reading my English teacher’s book,” I said.

“Which one?” he asked.

“The one who told me that I was a lousy writer but had excellent material.”

“The one who has published three novels?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think of him?”

“He is a fine writer, but his material is pale. I didn’t understand what he meant by calling me a ‘lousy writer with excellent material’ until I read his book.”

Qigu beamed. “Wow! This is the best thing I have heard you say. Do you think you can make a better writer given your material?”

“I can try. It doesn’t hurt. In fact, I have been thinking about where to start.”

“The piece about your labor camp experience is something,” Qigu said.

“You mean my paper for English 101?”

“A piece of art, in my judgment.”

I stood by the shore of Lake Michigan and inhaled a mouthful of cold air. The water made me think of the Yangtze River. I missed China. I continued to have dreams about my mother getting sicker. I wished that I could visit her. Instead Qigu and I frequented lumberyards and plumbing stores. The repair job had turned into a nightmare. Qigu and I were not good at working together as a team. I liked to get things done as soon as possible, while Qigu preferred to take his time. It drove me crazy when we installed a tub without a level. Qigu didn’t want to spend the money buying a level. He wanted to wait until we could find a secondhand level at the flea market. I worried that we wouldn’t be able to get the tub in properly.

Qigu said, “My eyes can measure with precision. That’s the benefit of being an artist.”

We connected the plumbing fixtures around the tub, closed the drywall, taped, spackled, sanded, and painted.

After the tenants moved in, the bathtub began to leak. When the calls came reporting the trouble, I discovered that it was due to the un-leveled bathtub. Qigu tried to use sealers and caulking to stop the problem, but the leak continued. We had to cut open the walls, relevel the tub, and redo the plumbing.

The mortgage and property tax worried me when the tenants fell behind in their rent. It felt strange to be called “owners” when we were really servants and laborers. We were the ones who smelled like sewage while our tenants smelled clean and fresh.

Our lives were harder than our tenants’. We lived in the attic, slept on the floor, and peed in a bucket. We couldn’t afford to buy gifts during Christmas. We watched our tenants Bruno and Helen, sitting on their sofa and watching TV, or outside under the sun drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. They entertained their friends and never seemed to worry about anything. When Helen got drunk, she called us “Chinamen” and told us to “go home.”

Qigu took a day off once a week. He insisted that it was necessary to “keep his sanity.” During his time off, he visited the Chicago Public Library. He brought back art books by successful artists. He studied them. His latest favorites were a modern Italian painter named Francesco Clemente and the American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Qigu said it would do me good to look at the works by Clemente and Basquiat, because he believed that I spoke a similar language.

In retrospect, Qigu did me a big favor. He led me to an important self-discovery. I fell in love with Clemente and Basquiat. Qigu was right that I understood their language. I was inspired. Memories became so alive that my past flooded my mind. I could hear voices and remember the long-lost feelings even as I worked on fixing a toilet or dug up a broken section of the sewage line. I realized that I could be “the book.” I wanted to write.

I developed the feelings of a budding athlete, with a green card as a gold medal. I dared not dream that I would ever be successful as a writer. But if I did manage to publish something, I would have a better chance of being awarded a green card, for there was an immigration law that recruited “international talents.”

After working myself to exhaustion, I sat in the attic and studied
Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre
in its original English. I read it three times. First I looked up every word that I didn’t know in my dictionary. I marked the translation next to the words. Second I read it with the eye of a reader, and then finally with the eye of a writer. It was not unusual for me to understand the individual words but still not get the sentence. I went back and forth trying to figure out the meaning. I would try different approaches and think of the equivalent in Chinese. Often I was forced to abandon the sentence for the moment; then I would return after a few paragraphs or pages. On a good day I would get to crack the nut. I found good sleep a key to unlocking a hard phrase. I lived for those moments, and it thrilled me more than anything. It made me feel that I might actually be smart.

I tried to compose, but got stuck. What I produced didn’t match my imagination. My writing didn’t sound awful, but it didn’t sound bright either. The elements I had expected were not there: the grace, the emotion, the poetry, not to mention the style. In order to beat my disappointment and stay positive, I told myself to consider it a blessing that I was able to recognize my shortcomings. It took talent to notice that I lacked talent. I stood on American soil, and there was no reason not to try harder. If nothing came of it, my English would improve. It would help me land a job as an office receptionist. I would get to answer the phone and take messages in English.

All my life I had been a soldier whose job was to kill pain. I was proud of being strong. It became my second nature to pull the plug as soon as I sensed an undercurrent stirring inside me. I locked up memories and allowed no place in my heart for feelings, because I believed that I could not afford to be weak. I told myself that I didn’t have a legitimate reason to complain about anything. I had survived China and was now living in America, a place people risk their lives to come to.

And yet as I struggled to write, I discovered that my soul had a mind of its own. It wandered to the wrong neighborhoods as I followed a memory I was trying to capture. There, as the hidden pain came to the surface, I was disarmed. When I felt as if I had been shot, I ordered my soldier self to take over. In darkness, silent and wounded, I watched myself flat on the ground enduring the internal bleeding.

Writing made me feel vulnerable. The soldier inside me surrendered. I didn’t know what to do.

I continued to write for the sake of improving my English and to see if my memories would become a story. The process was difficult and unpleasant. I composed my writing first in Chinese, then translated into English. This helped me catch the memories and also to exercise the translator in my head. My English did seem to improve, and this was important if my goal was to get a job as an office secretary. Finding the story was harder. I was borrowing from some of my old writing that I’d done for Dr. Guenther, and I had new stories and lots of not-quite stories. Finally, I brought my mess of pages to a new independent study with Dr. Guenther and asked her for help. The tutorial went by in a flash and Dr. Guenther had to kick me out. I begged her for more time and she sympathetically arranged for me to meet with her colleague Mrs. Watson. Both of them asked me lots of questions about my characters.
And they wanted to know what would happen next, and this encouraged me.

Before I knew what was happening, I couldn’t escape my memories. I might be listening to a professor lecturing on contemporary American art while seeing myself carrying a hundred-pound load of manure to the rice paddy. I would be on a Chicago rapid-transit train hearing the pounding of Chinese drums along with shouted Cultural Revolution slogans. Memories flooded my mind and dominated my waking hours and even my dreams. I began to write like a mad person. There became no day or night. Qigu moved downstairs to get away. He slept in the hallway, which we closed for an extra room. It was extremely cold, but at least he was undisturbed.

I had never tasted the bitterness of guilt, regret, and remorse until then. I was haunted by those whom I had left behind, those who were part of my life, and those who were dead or as good as dead. I thought that I had long buried them, but writing brought them back. They were with me every day. We began to have conversations. Among them were my labor camp comrades Little Green and Yan. Little Green died when she was eighteen. I was the one who discovered her drowned body. No one was held responsible for her death. Nothing about her was spoken or written.