The Opposite of Fate (18 page)

“When was it built?” Robert asks. “In the 1920s or 1930s?” He’s being sincere.

“No!” my mother says. “Brand-new! Yes, can you imagine?” She throws him a secret smile.

Xiao-dong asks me in painful English, “Auntie, soon you will like to see my horse?”

“Horse?” I ask. Have conditions improved so much that my nephew can now afford to play polo in his spare time? I ask him in Mandarin, “You have a horse?” It turns out he meant “house.” He adds the burr of Shanghainese to his English.

“Correct him,” my mother tells me. “How he can go Canada, speak English like that?”

“Howww-sss,” I say for him.

“Harrwww-sss,” he says back for me.

“Bu-shr
har
!”
my mother says to him. “Don’t say ‘har.’ How. How, how, how—like
hau, hau, hau.
” Good, good, good.

“How, how, how,” Xiao-dong whispers.

I know my mother is not trying to intimidate Xiao-dong. She is only doing for her grandson what no one did for her: teaching him correct English so that he does not have to suffer the same pain she has had to endure—being misunderstood at banks, mis-diagnosed by doctors, ignored by her teenage children. Poor service, bad treatment, no respect—that’s the penalty for not speaking English well in America.

I
t is now five a.m. After a half-hour struggle, I have given up. I can no longer sleep. My mother and I lie wrapped in our quilts, encased like two mummies. It is still dark, but I can see my mother’s eyes are open too.

“Already awake?” I ask.

“How can I sleep?” she grumbles.

We are listening to peddlers shouting to one another on the street. Bicyclists ring their bells every few seconds. One would think it was already the middle of a busy market day.

Once we are up, we find Aiyi engaged in an efficient buzz of activity. She has heated water in the kitchen to drain into the bathroom tub. She has filled the thermos with freshly boiled water for our instant coffee. I’ve been told Shanghai has one of the most polluted water systems in the world: hepatitis and industrial toxins right out of the tap.

Aiyi is cleaning out the tub in preparation for our fragile American skins. When it’s my turn to bathe, it takes ten minutes to fill the tub with about an inch of hot water, mixed with a little cold. It does not seem wise to wait another hour for the tub to fill. So I crouch in it, using my washcloth to swipe myself clean.

At six a.m., we are ready to go to the market to shop for our breakfast. Robert has loaded himself down with three cameras draped over his photo jacket. Ma has elected to stay in the apartment, in case Yuhang arrives. She stuffs my hand with a fifty-yuan note, telling me to make sure I pay for the groceries. Aiyi is smiling broadly, waiting for us. She clutches a plastic bag and a food saver. Just as we are about to leave, a small argument in Shanghainese erupts between Aiyi and Ma. Ma is insisting that we pay for everything. Aiyi is assuring her that she will keep track of all expenses and can wait to be reimbursed later. At least that’s what it seems like they’re saying, to judge from the hand gestures, the shoving of money back and forth. These fights are for the sake of politeness.

Outside we find the air is cool but not cold. The sky is bluish-gray, as if the outdoors too were lit by fluorescent bulbs. As
soon as we cross the street—which is devoid of cars—we see people streaming by on bicycles and turning around to stare. We are not in a part of town that caters to tourists. It is a sure bet that no Westerners have vacationed in this part of Shanghai before. I tell Aiyi in Mandarin that the weather seems quite nice, not too cold, not too hot, although maybe it looks like rain. Thank God for my colloquial Chinese handbook and its vacuous phrases. Aiyi answers me in rapid Shanghainese. After a few more polite exchanges like this, I turn to Robert. “Aiyi speaks only Shanghainese,” I inform him. “I don’t speak Shanghainese. We’re in trouble.”

But in fact, we are not. Aiyi, like my relatives, is adept at sign language and facial expressions, as well as speech intonations that make crystal-clear what she means to tell us: “This way,” “That way,” and “Sure, it’s okay to stop and take a photo—if it’s quick.”

We cut through a large apartment complex to a growing path of vendors huddled near their vegetables. Robert begins snapping pictures, motioning for permission with his eyebrows. The vendors grin. As we walk along, he continues to attract a crowd, an amiable group of people who seem perfectly at ease posing or simply carrying on with their business.

In the open market square, we stare at the array of vegetables piled high in perfect mounds. I had expected this part of Shanghai to be drab. And in a way it is. The clothing of all but the young children is a monotonous gray or blue, dyed in the same vat. But the drab clothes are the perfect accompaniment to the sharp colors of the morning market. There are clean-white turnips with purple-green tops, chartreuse-green-and-white cabbages, and tin buckets of bloody eels.

We watch a young man with dusty hair grab a wriggling black eel. The eel’s mouth is wide open, its tongue moving back and forth. I cannot hide my anthropomorphic sentimentality. It looks as if the creature is crying for help. And then—
whack!—
the head is sliced off with the short knife. The eel’s mouth continues to open and close, and the body writhes as the young man slowly slices it open—straight down the back, causing chills to run up mine. Robert clicks off pictures. The bucket is now a mass of eels swirling in their own bright blood. I can’t help it: my lips spread out in disgust. And the young man, sensing I am a judgmental foreigner, shouts and waves Robert and me away.

When Aiyi points to the eels and asks me whether I want to eat them, I answer, “They taste good, but look ugly.” She takes this as my enthusiasm to eat eels tonight. Upon trying to bargain with this free-market vendor, she discovers he has jacked his prices up. She argues with him a bit, and he grunts and motions his thumb toward me. She gives up and, grabbing my elbow, directs me toward one of the enclosed government markets where the prices are fixed.

Here the vendors sell steamed baskets of
xiao loong bao,
the dumplings Shanghai is famous for—delicately flavored rounds of meat and vegetables encased in a thin rice-flour pastry. Aiyi motions for me to stand off to the side, encouraging me to disappear the best I can with a roomful of people staring at me from my red lipstick to my cowboy-style boots.

I get the sense this place sells food only to bona fide workers. As the interloper, I’m reminded of the children’s story “The Little Red Hen.” “And who will help me make this bread?” the Little Red Hen asked her fellow commune animals. “Not I,” said
the pig. I’m the lazy capitalist pig who did no work and now wants to eat up the bread.

Aiyi stands in line, pretending she doesn’t know me. At the head of the line is a lectern that towers over the customers. Behind that, a woman dispenses little pieces of paper. As much as I can gather from our limited means of discourse, Aiyi is going to buy chits for some
xiao loong bao.

Customers sit on stools, hunched over round tables. A grandmother tosses dumplings into her grandson’s mouth. Workers down huge bowls filled with dumplings; once they are finished, they stand up and push away from the table. Their places are immediately taken by other customers, one of whom pours a basketful of dumplings into an abandoned bowl and begins to eat with used chopsticks. Ma would not approve. According to her, such dirty habits are not Chinese, they are Communist—sharing everything, including germs.

At a window, women wearing round white caps take our order for dumplings, and after five minutes our number is called and we walk away with two baskets. Aiyi goes to a table, picks up a pair of chopsticks perched on a used bowl, and with them heaves the steaming dumplings into the food saver. This done, she motions for Robert and me to follow, although not too closely. There are bargains still to be found, and she won’t have us interfering with her superb shopping skills.

We are outside again, only this time on the other side of the market square. Here we find long stalls covered with awnings, where we can buy all manner of assorted breakfast goodies—a fried version of
xiao loong bao,
various noodle soups cooked in broth, bean curd soup, and
da bing,
“big bread.” It smells
and looks wonderful, I’m instantly starved, and I want to taste everything.

It is now six-thirty a.m., and the stalls are jammed with customers. The outdoor eating tables are full, every bench space taken. More people are lined up to buy breakfast, and they turn and stare as we approach, this curious entourage of short sixty-year-old Chinese lady, younger Chinese-American woman wearing black Lycra stretch clothes, and silver-haired man wearing thousands of dollars’ worth of photography equipment around his neck. Supertourist. Out here, people stare but also smile. A woman wearing pajamas stares at my boots. A young man comes up to Robert and says, “Hello.”

“American,” Robert says, pointing to his chest.

“Meigwo-ren,”
I translate.
“Jyou jin-shan.”
Old Gold Mountain, the name still used in China to refer to San Francisco. The man asks me if I’m American too. I nod, then add that my mother is Shanghainese. He nods and smiles.

Aiyi goes to stand in the
da bing
line. I stand behind her, watching the activity. A man sporting what I have come to identify as the official government cook’s cap rolls the
bing
out in fat doughy balls. He then smashes each of the balls down the middle in one motion, pats each out with a swirl of his palm, then slaps it against the side of a coal-fired oil drum. Using only his fingers, he peels off the
bing
that have turned golden-brown—never mind tongs or hot pads when your hands are as good as asbestos-coated from daily trials by fire. Each
bing
is tossed onto a board, brushed with a thin gloss of oil, then sprinkled with sesame seeds.

After four or five
bing
undergo this ritual, Aiyi is at the head of the line. I watch her order and pay with grime-coated slips of paper the size of stamps, the weight of tissue paper. The chits are
tossed into a plastic bowl, along with other colored stamps. Together they look like confetti. I cannot figure out this system of accounting, one that could be easily upset by a puff of wind.

And now Aiyi returns to us. Success! She displays the plastic sacks filled with steaming rounds of mouthwatering
da bing.

“Let’s go home!” she says.

A
iyi will not eat breakfast with us, despite Ma’s insistence. And so it’s just Robert, Ma, and I around the small Formica table, neighbors from the buildings next door pointing to us. Our very first breakfast in China: the wonderful treats Aiyi bought at the market, along with rice porridge, purloined airline peanuts, and Nescafé we bought, seasoned with airline dairy creamer. As we eat, we meticulously set aside portions for Aiyi, including airline peanuts.

Immediately after breakfast, Xiao-dong arrives and we leave for the market again, this time to buy ingredients for lunch. Aiyi, Yuhang, and Ma lead the way to the vegetable stalls and the tubs of fish and eels. I walk behind with Xiao-dong. We take turns pointing to things in the market. He names them for me in Mandarin, I name them in English. I have my videocamera resting on my shoulder, filming from a distance. Robert lags behind shooting pictures, waving to us to go on without him, he’ll catch up. He is doing his best not to be commandeered by four strong-willed Chinese women. We’ll see how long he can last.

Back home, the morning’s take is unwrapped in the kitchen. We have bought eel, small freshwater blue crabs, still alive, and all manner of vegetables. The crabs, Ma tells me, cost 165
renmenbi. There are eleven, so they cost fifteen renmenbi each, about four U.S. dollars, more than what an average Chinese worker makes in a day. Yuhang has paid for these herself, her tribute to our mother and to me, her little sister. I do not tell Yuhang that I do not like crab.

“Look here,” Ma says to me. “Two tastes. This one female, this one male.” For some reason my mother has selected this opportunity—in a cramped kitchen in Shanghai—to try to teach me how to cook. Perhaps this is for Yuhang’s benefit as well—the cooking lessons a mother would have taught her daughter.

“Female best,” she continues. She shows me how they are the ones with rounded bottoms, while the males are flat, so there is less to eat. “You eat all the juicy insides that pour out.”

Aiyi and Yuhang press the legs of the crabs inward and then tie them with white string. They are immobile, alive and awaiting their steam bath.

“The crabs,” Yuhang says, “have very bad tempers. Very fierce.”

All at once I hear loud explosions. I can’t help it, I think about guns, soldiers shooting. I head for the sitting room. “What’s that?” I ask Xiao-dong in Chinese. He looks up from a Time-Life picture book about China that I brought. He acts as if he hasn’t heard anything.

“That noise,” I say. The explosions continue.

“Ah,” he says.
“Pian pao.”
He pantomimes lighting something on the ground, watching it explode. Oh, firecracker.

I feel foolish. “Did someone get married?” I ask.

He stands up, looks out the window. “It may be a wedding,” he says in Mandarin. “Although probably it’s to congratulate someone who has finally moved into a new home in the neighborhood.”
I recall my niece’s telling me that the waiting list for individual apartments is very long, one has to wait for seventeen years.

A
nd now lunch is ready for serving. Aiyi brings the steaming crabs to the table. She sets down two bowls of dipping sauce: a dark soy sauce mixed with rice vinegar and ginger. The crabs are still bound in their ropes. Their bright blue has faded to gray. Yuhang picks a fat one for Ma, another fat one for me. Xiao-dong and Robert help themselves.

“Oyo! Lucky you, you got a female,” Yuhang tells me. “Look.” She taps the bottom of the crab, the rounded stomach. She snips off the strings. I feel like a child, fearful about eating the crab, unable to say no, completely at the mercy of my mother and Aiyi. Robert has no such qualms. He loves crab.