The Love Wife (13 page)

Every now and then, someone proved kind. At the end of the Cultural Revolution, a man even asked me to marry him. An old man with a VCR. Later he got a
DVD
player. I used to go watch movies at his place, and probably I should have said yes. The neighbors, at least, agreed I had no choice. Who was I to be picky? Who was I to be proud? They said I was used up, spent—an arrow at the end of its flight. A worn shoe. Only my great-aunt said I should follow my heart. And in my heart, I felt he was too old and too short. Of course, many people feel there is nothing the matter with that, so long as he is rich. But anyway, in the end he married somebody else.

Shandong was
mantou
country—Northerners ate steamed buns with their vegetables. Such rice as my great-aunt and I got was gray and full of stones. I had to bring it outside, into the daylight, to pick the stones out. I ate in small mouthfuls, worried with every bite about cracking my teeth, not to say what were left of my great-aunt’s teeth too. The air stank of night soil. Everywhere there were flies. Even in the winter there would be a few staggering around, looking drunk.

Still, I was alive.

Besides work in the shoe factory, there were the neighbors, the chickens, the weather, and a set of English-language cassettes the Red Guards had somehow missed. Also my father’s cassette deck. No batteries, though. Often I snuck into the factory early in the morning to use the electrical outlets.

I studied, practiced, studied, practiced. I knew I would never be allowed to go to college. They called class enemies ‘black families.’ We would never be red revolutionaries. Still, I knew someone in another factory, a line worker, who had placed high enough on a provincial exam that she now gave factory tours. People said she came from a black family too. So I studied, practiced, studied, practiced. Not hoping, exactly, but listening to the English broadcasts on the radio anyway. People said no one was ever going to want to see our factory, but who knew where I might be one day reassigned. When
‘Follow Me’
started on TV, I tried to find opportunities to watch.

I was not reassigned. Instead the factory closed and I became a migrant worker. I stopped practicing my English then. It was everything I could do to find work enough to survive, and I had my great-aunt to take care of too, don’t forget. I worked in all kinds of factories. Making toys, fertilizer, rubber mats. Anything. I was working as a karaoke
xiaojie
—a karaoke miss—when one day I heard that some distant relative had somehow heard of me.

An American relative! I had not known I had any such relative. And what could have moved this person to take an interest in me? My great-aunt looked me up and down. Then in the same voice she used for chickens she hoped would lay eggs, she said:
 
—
 
Fortune has come to you like a mother looking for her child.

Outside our one window, the squash vines flowered. The light outside was blinding, but inside it was dark and cool.

I had hung a few magazine pictures on the wall—mostly of movie stars, with big eyes and beautiful clothes—arranged in a little grouping. These were placed so that the morning sun shone on them. Of course the light only lasted for twenty minutes because of the building next door. But how beautiful the pictures at breakfast! There was another grouping, across the room, for supper. The light then didn’t last quite as long, but almost, depending on the season. I particularly loved the moment when the pictures were losing their color and only one still glowed, a picture of a young girl with bright pink cheeks and laughing eyes. This was an old picture—the kind of picture you didn’t see much anymore. But I liked it because it reminded me of simpler times, when a bumper harvest was something to celebrate and people were more genuine. It reminded me of the time before people started talking so much about money. Before anyone knew that the next generation would have opportunities we wouldn’t, and that my generation had been left out of the new China.

Those old pictures usually looked completely fake. But in this light, for these few seconds, this picture seemed to be of a genuinely happy girl. Like myself! I was leaving! Of course I would have to come back unless I found someone to marry there, people said. They said, Watch, this time even if the man has no legs, she’ll let him poke her. Do it right in his wheelchair.

Anyway, I thought there might be fewer flies in America, and less dust in the spring. All spring my hands and face and hair were gritty here. Shandong was terrible that way.

— Buy some clothes, said my great-aunt. Go to the city. I will give you money. Buy everything new. You don’t want them to look down on you.

Of course. They would look down on me.

— You will be their
ayi,
said my great-aunt. But you will be able to study too. And who knows? Maybe you will find someone to marry you. But first you must try to find out what they want from you. What are they trying to arrange?

— Who will take care of you if I go? I asked.

The picture of the girl fell, like the others, into shadow. My great-aunt allowed a fly to walk clear across her wrinkled cheek. All her clothes were fastened with buttons and ties—she had never owned anything with a zipper. Her skin was thick and scarred and brown. Her toenails were thick too, and yellow with fungus.

— I will die, my great-aunt answered simply, when the fly took off.

And a week later, flat on her back, her arms by her sides, in her sleep, she did.

6

Wendy

CARNEGIE / 
— Baby crazy, said Mama Wong, if we boasted about Lizzy.

Of course, we did boast about her unconscionably, as you could with a child who was not yours biologically. She lines her animals up! She unscrews the dresser knobs! She knows absolutely all her animal sounds! Et cetera.

Said Mama Wong: — I am not baby-sitter.

And: — What’s so special? A million babies like that. You go to China, can just pick one off the street.

When Mama Wong saw Lizzy, she softened and cooed and gave her nice things to eat. No sooner did Lizzy go down for a nap, though, than Mama Wong hardened.

— Lizzy think whole world revolve around her.

— Lizzy do not listen to reason.

— Lizzy temper no good, you wait and see.

Mama Wong had become more ornery than ever since I reneged on my promise to go into business with her.

— I’m sorry, I said. I promised more than I could deliver.

— I don’t know what you talking, she insisted proudly. —I give a million dollars to Blondie? For what?

She said: — Why should I hire Blondie work for me? She have job already.

And: — As if I have a million dollars! A million headaches, that’s what I have.

Being busy with Lizzy, we could not visit Mama Wong as often as we used to. And how sobering, when we did, to confront my mother alone in her house with her teacups everywhere; she seemed to pour and abandon them at the rate of one per hour. Sometimes I spent my entire visit on a cup hunt.

Of course, in time-honored fashion, I vowed every time to visit more often, like a proper filial son. But how could I? With a baby in the house?

The cups multiplied with each visit. They lay in wait; some with little pools of tea, some with the barest bit of sediment, the liquid having long since evaporated. Sometimes you could see, in the sediment, faint rings, irregularly spaced. Evidence of something, you felt. A record someone else could no doubt read about the temperature of the room, the rate of evaporation, the relative hope of the drinker. The relative length of the long, long day. As for me, though; how to begin to guess what went on in the house? And where did she get all those cups anyway? And wouldn’t it have been only grandmotherly of her to come visit us?

BLONDIE / 
My mother would have come. My mother would have realized that a woman needs her mother all over again once there’s a baby in the house.

Everywhere I looked there seemed to be a mother with a grandmother helping out.

CARNEGIE / 
— Since when mother go visit son, you tell me, said Mama Wong. Son should pay respect to mother. You pay me a million dollars, I’m not go.

She said: — If I had a million dollars to give somebody, I am give it to that National Basketball Association.

I sighed.

— Lizzy knows her whole alphabet, Ma, I said. You should come see. She is so amazing.

— Oh really. What time is it?

Blondie thought there might be something the matter with Mama Wong, but I thought my mother was just my mother. She did wear the two watches, and sometimes three or four rings to a finger now, but was there something the matter with Renata and Ariela, that they had made Lizzy seven hats and four sweaters between them?

— We’re just woolly, they explained, laughing.

— Bitten by the big bad craft bug, commented Doc Bailey. Dedicated to keeping young women in glue sticks.

How we wished her sisters lived closer to us! Or at least visited more often. But the suburbs exhausted them. Lawn care exhausted them. Shopping bags, especially the bags made of coated stock, with ribbon handles, exhausted them. Excess packaging exhausted them. Lap dogs exhausted them.

They were always needing to go home. To see working barns again, to buy oilcloth at the cooperative. To buy yarn. Their whole lives were tied up, so to speak, with yarn. And babies, of course. Renata had five children, Ariela had four.

— Have more children, said Ariela, daisies in her graying braid.

BLONDIE / 
We tried and tried.

WENDY / 
Nobody wanted me exactly. Really they wanted their own baby, I was their second choice.

BLONDIE / 
Oh, but that’s just not true!

CARNEGIE / 
Second choice didn’t mean second best.

We were stupid. We were tired. Our strategy was to try things. Drugs, procedures, acupuncture. We tried to relax, as if it was possible for two people with jobs and a child and fertility issues to relax. We meditated. Accepted our fate. Got in touch with our anger. Embraced our helplessness. Moved past our disappointment.

Still no Wendy.

How many years did this go on?

By the time of the adoption, Mama Wong had been in assisted living for a goodish while. We tried to explain to her our game plan. The tremendous leap in the dark this was. The act of faith.

— Probably we are out of our minds, I said.

That at least occasioned some teeth grinding.

As did: — I won’t be able to visit you for a couple of weeks.

Overall we had better luck with Lizzy, who was, confoundingly, six and a half already. Our newborn, six and a half!

BLONDIE / 
Old enough to bring to Wuji to meet her new sister. An exciting prospect and a chance to reconnect, we thought, with something important. Never mind that her heritage might not be Chinese.

CARNEGIE / 
Was she part Japanese? Part Korean? Part Vietnamese? Was she any part Chinese at all? Who knew?

— That baby is mutt, Mama Wong had genially announced, shortly after Lizzy’s adoption. — You want to know who her father is? Her grandfather?

— No thank you, we said.

She did not look precisely Han, it was true, what with her long torso and short legs.

— You know why her mother give her away? said Mama Wong. I tell you why. Because you look at her, you see war.

Anyway, there was no harm, we thought, in Lizzy connecting with Asia.

BLONDIE / 
Or in knowing what adoption meant. We had tried to shelter her from my miscarrying and miscarrying. Still she had witnessed much too much. Now we wanted her to know something else—what a joy adoption was!

CARNEGIE / 
This was parenting, a mighty campaign.

BLONDIE / 
— Why did you keep going to the hospital for a baby then? Lizzy asked.

— We thought it would be more convenient to get a baby there, I said.

CARNEGIE / 
The spinmeisters, a-spinning.

— How come it didn’t work? Lizzy asked.

Earnestly, creatively Blondie explained.

— But I saw lots of babies in the hospital, Lizzy said.

And: — Why did yours keep dying?

And: — I don’t want to go to China.

BLONDIE / 
Lizzy was in on the adoption from the moment we knew we had a child. Uruguay was closed, Romania was closed, but China was open! Our first choice anyway—we’d heard such stories about those Eastern European orphanages. And how nice to have the children match.

CARNEGIE / 
A year later we would have had to take a child with a handicap, this being our second child. But in the pioneer days, before adopting from China became an industry, things were looser. Everything was case by case, practically do-it-yourself.

BLONDIE / 
We showed Lizzy the paperwork. The maps. An adoption video. We talked about the birth mother, and why she might have had to give the baby up. Was that why Lizzy’s biological mother had given her up? We told her what the adoption guide said to tell her, that her biological mother gave her up out of love, that she might have the best life possible.

Not that we knew that, really. And of course later she would ask us why we said that, if we didn’t know. But how could I tell her that I’d imagined her birth mother a thousand times; and that some of the thousand women were loving and heartbroken and desperate, but some of them were callous and uninterested in her. Some were career women; some were criminals. Some were raped; some surprised to find themselves in a family way. And how could I have told her that some of them, some of them, one day returned—to claim their children, or just watch them? Could I have, should I have told her that? Could I have told her—even worse, perhaps—that some did not?

CARNEGIE / 
No one thought much about that cad, the birth father, except Mama Wong.

BLONDIE / 
At least with babies from China, you knew the mother wanted to have the child. You could say that. For how very much easier for Chinese women to have an abortion than to go on with the pregnancy. You had to fight to go on with the pregnancy.

Lizzy and I talked about the difference between birthing and parenting—between having a baby and bringing it up. We talked about what it was going to be like, having a baby sister.

— What’s so great about two children instead of one? she said. What’s so great about company?

Were we adopting another child so that Lizzy would have a sibling? And what if we did not love the new baby as much as we loved Lizzy? Not that we wouldn’t love her—we assumed it would be a her. We would love her. But as much as Lizzy? Our walls were covered with pictures of Lizzy splashing, swinging, running. Watering plants, hanging upside down, mummifying stuffed animals. Where was there space for more pictures?

Everyone worried about making a mistake. That’s what the counselors said. It was normal.

CARNEGIE / 
When our phone call came, we jumped on a plane post-haste. In those days you didn’t even get a picture, or a name, or a medical history.

BLONDIE / 
It was a new thing even for adoptive parents to stop in Beijing on the way to wherever—in our case, Wuji. The Forbidden Palace, the Temple of Heaven, the Great Wall! Fantastic places, hard to absorb—so enormous with history, so inconceivably ancient.

CARNEGIE / 
We had never been so jet-lagged.

BLONDIE / 
In an alleyway we bought a cage full of pigeons and released them, Buddhist-style, with a wish.

— I wish for health, I said. For all four of us.

CARNEGIE / 
That was code. Actually she hoped for a healthy baby but didn’t want Lizzy to feel excluded from the proceedings.

— To health, I agreed reasonably. And to no surprises.

Blondie, I noticed, had an antiseptic hand wipe at the ready. Ever since we got off the plane she had been wiping Lizzy’s hands several times an hour.

— I wish we would get to Wuji soon, said Lizzy.

Hear, hear!

BLONDIE / 
The birds crowded out of their bamboo-cage door—flapping, frantic, but then turning, in a wink, unutterably graceful—immediately forgetful, it seemed, of having ever been caged up. At once they separated from one other; at once they began to soar with joy—each beating its own strong way to heaven.

CARNEGIE / 
Or at least to the closest perch. Only one flapped about a bit, circling once or twice as if enjoying the use of its wings. The others were content with a hop of no great altitude.
Freedom!
we wanted to shout at them.
You have your freedom!
But they longed only, apparently, to roost.

Pigeons.

We knew what a pigeon was. And yet being, like them, irremediably ourselves, we stood there anyway, watching. Hoping. Cage full of pigeon feathers in one hand; hand wipes at the ready.

How enormous the specific gravity of Beijing! The center of the world, indeed, the middle of the Middle Kingdom. How insubstantial we felt there, with our plastic cameras. Three ephemera, under the spell of our autofocus.

We were headed, every moment, for Wuji.

It was hot.

It was noisy.

Everyone, everyone smoked.

Our hair smelled of smoke. Our clothes smelled of smoke. We worried about the baby in Wuji. Was she inhaling smoke?

BLONDIE / 
We saw what relatives of Carnegie’s we could see. Carnegie had managed to contact a cousin of his father’s, now living in Toronto, before we left; through him we were able to reach three other relatives, all male and living in Beijing.

CARNEGIE / 
One was a Party member interested in refrigerators.

BLONDIE / 
One was a student interested in Gandhi, and in talking about the Cultural Revolution. In remarkable English he told us how he had grown up in a building full of children and old people—with his parents, like the other parents, simply gone. As seemed normal enough, at the time. The only strange thing, he said—the thing that he still remembered—was that during lightning storms, when he could see down into the dark courtyard, there were often people being put into burlap bags. He remembered too that—their building being relatively tall—people jumped from the roof all the time.

Had not the people at the next table seemed to be openly listening, he might have said more. As it was, though, we never did discuss Gandhi. Instead we praised the Beijing duck, which was served with mini-
mantou
in place of the pancakes we were used to in the States. Was that typical?