The Third Son (20 page)

How odd, then, to see an old yellow Volkswagen Beetle come chugging down the street. Who would buy a German vehicle in this area? As it came closer, I saw that the driver was Chinese, and then the car stopped, slightly away from the curb, just in front of me. It idled loudly, obviously lacking a muffler, and the air filled with the stench of burning petroleum.

The Beetle’s passenger door opened, and out jumped a plump young man who straightened the collar of his leather jacket with a familiar movement.

I stared into his small eyes and realized it was Li-wen.

He laughed. “Professor!” he said. “Get this man some smelling salts. He didn’t know his brother sent him halfway around the world to see me!”

And there was Li-wen’s emaciated friend with the horn-rimmed glasses, leaning against the car and nodding nervously at the pavement. I realized he had been the driver. “It has been a long time . . . ,” he said.

How had I not known? I had simply not recognized the family name on the package.

I felt anger flash up from my feet to my neck. “How did you get here?” I said to Li-wen. And I meant it in more than one sense, for I distinctly remembered that no name like his had been announced on the radio with those who had passed the entrance exam.

He raised his finger. “How does one get anywhere? It’s all in who you know.” He tapped his finger to his head. I recalled his position with the Anti-Communist Youth Corps. No doubt some Nationalist official had helped waive some requirements for him. “Come, we’re in America now. Let’s let bygones be bygones and beat these American bastards at their own game.”

I had little choice, and I went with them.

T
HEY WERE NOT
yet degree candidates but merely took courses in the graduate department of electrical engineering; this much I gleaned from their elliptical speech. They were sharing the dorm room of a true graduate student who was also an alumnus of Taiwan University. The square, cramped room smelled of sesame oil and stale fish—such a contrast to the ivy-covered facade of the building, the broad walkways through campus shaded by oak and redbud trees. I had little desire to stay and urged Li-wen to open his present as soon as possible so I could venture out.

Li-wen sat on a couch between piles of magazines, pillows, and packages of dried seaweed. He pulled lazily at the brown package, talking to the Professor and his host.

“This is damn heavy. What shall we have for dinner? That pork loin?”

Finally the brown paper was gone, revealing a large glass vase.

A
vase
!

We all sat staring at this thing I had lugged, day in and day out, gritting my teeth as pain shot down from my back all the way to the sole of my foot, through bus terminals halfway across North America. It was a perfectly ordinary vase with some etched flowers around the rim; there must have been similar ones all over the world. Even across the world, my brother played me for a fool.

Even Li-wen was embarrassed. “The bastard! He thinks by torturing you with this he can make up for insulting me. You wouldn’t believe what he called me when he found out I was coming here. Talk about a sore loser.”

I said nothing. If not for Ni Wen-chong, I would have smashed that vase.

Li-wen glanced at me, setting the vase on a leather trunk that functioned as a coffee table. “Well, there’s not a scratch on it. For all that, little brother, we at least owe you first dibs on choosing what’s for dinner.”

“You may cook whatever you choose,” I said, “but perhaps you can help me find someone I’m looking for.”

“And who is that?”

“A postdoctoral fellow.”

“In what?”

“Double E.”

His little eyes looked up. “What is his name?”

“Ni Wen-chong.”

“And how do you know him?”

“He’s a friend of a friend,” I said evasively. Despite Li-wen’s sympathizing with me about the vase, I did not trust him. “How do I find him?”

“Here.” He tossed me a stapled booklet. “There’s the directory. But it’s dinnertime now, so no one is in the labs at the moment. At least none of the Chinese.” He laughed, patting his belly.

Reluctantly I hung my suit on the back of a door to wait for the morning. Dinner was as could be expected from three bachelors in a foreign country, though after so many days of eating hamburgers and mashed potatoes, I was glad to have rice again, and to be able to examine another refrigerator; even in this nearly squalid dormitory they had one. I opened and closed it several times, admiring the clever design, the feeling of suction on its closure. To think that even students in America had refrigerators, while in Taiwan, middle-class families had just started to buy iceboxes! Yoshiko’s eldest uncle had just started a new ice company.

I opened and closed the refrigerator once more and noticed some notebook paper held to the front of the refrigerator with a magnet. On the paper was an address: Bryn Mawr Country Club, 6600 North Crawford Avenue, Lincolnwood.

The Professor, whose name was actually Sun-kwei, was filling a teakettle at the sink.

“What’s this?” I indicated the address.

“They pay well for dishwashers,” Sun-kwei replied. “That’s how everyone makes money in the summer.”

“Washing dishes?”

“
Hyo
. That’s how it works.”

They cleared a space for me on the couch, which smelled of mildew and soy sauce. I slept, dreaming I was sleeping on my futon in the northern countryside during the war, Yoshiko at my side. And then I was fishing, a carp swimming at my feet, but when I bent to reach for it, I couldn’t move my arm. It was in one of Toru’s splints, a large-bore needle sticking out of my vein and dripping blood.

I cried out. As I rose into consciousness, I reached for Yoshiko but found only the rough back cushions of the couch, and my arm jammed beneath.

18

N
I
W
EN-CHONG’S LABORATORY WAS
locked. I stood in the linoleum hallway knocking on the door and trying to peer into the lab between the posters taped to the window. The poster on top had an emblem I would come to see everywhere—a blue gridded globe orbited by a satellite:
SYMPOSIUM ON SCIENTIFIC ASPECTS OF THE INTERNATIONAL GEOPHYSICAL YEAR, APRIL 1957
. . .

I stepped onto a low molding and pulled on the locked door handle to boost myself up. And in that moment of pulling my chin up to the top edge of the poster, I was again a schoolchild, standing atop piles of broken desks to watch the Nationalist soldiers scavenge the very outlets off the wall.

But I was no longer that provincial child spying on a force that I was helpless to resist, and the room before me now was empty of people, soldiers or otherwise. It shone, laboratory benches beckoning with piles of shining steel equipment—capacitors, battery testers, and a large machine with round glass screens and a reel-to-reel tape standing at the ready. Above, on the wall, hung a framed picture of three men in a barren, windy landscape, flanking a rocket. The images from my past slipped away, and I saw that my future was here, in this room.

“You see?” Li-wen said behind me. “There’s no one here, I’m telling you. Let’s go have lunch. We have some
shio mai
from Chicago.”

“They’ll take a long time to defrost,” Sun-kwei said. “What about the leftover pork chops?”

I had been putting up with them all morning. First, they had said Ni Wen-chong did not exist. Then, after I found his name listed in the University of Michigan telephone book and found his building in a brochure about North Campus, they said that the Aeronautical Engineering Department was too far away, that it required a car, that North Campus hadn’t even been built yet . . .

A door opened at the end of the hallway, and a group of young men appeared, carrying clipboards, their shadows flitting across the pool of reflected light on the linoleum. I jumped down from the window when I saw that one of the men was Chinese. How many Chinese guys could there be in this department?

I ran down the hallway, feet clattering. “Ni Wen-chong! Ni Wen-chong!” My voice echoed.

The man stopped, propping the door open with his shoulder. He was slim, compact, holding his clipboard under his arm. He looked at me in annoyance as the rest of the group galloped down the stairs. “Please,” he said. “We’re late for the launch.” He spoke, to my surprise, with a Hong Kong accent.

“The launch?”

He started hurrying down the stairs, the tapping of his shoes against the concrete stairs echoing in the stairwell. I ran down after him.

“I’ll be back in the lab at one thirty,” he called. “You want help with class, Rodney can help you. He’s in the student lounge.”

His head bobbed up and down, disappearing from view.

“I have something for you,” I called out, my voice bouncing from wall to wall. “From Professor Hong, in San Francisco.”

His footsteps stopped. “Professor Hong?”

I caught up to him and handed him the letter. He glanced at me, his eyes sharp and appraising.

He tucked the letter into his shirt pocket and turned to go downstairs again.

“Wait!” I called out. “I want to see the launch!”

He glanced up at me. “Then hurry.” And he ran down the stairs.

I hurried after him down the stairs and outside.

It was a brilliant day, cool and calm, and the drizzly skies of the day before had cleared to a crystalline blue. As I rushed after Wen-chong, my feet swished in the grass, its smell so sweetly pure compared to the complexity of the earth around my parents’ house. In the distance a large group of people clustered around a pickup truck. All around them was such a display of nature’s indolence, of fields turning blade by blade from brown to green, of trees slowly awakening from their winter’s slumber to unfurl their tiny buds, that it was difficult to imagine the human industry that was planned here—the new engineering buildings, the music building, and now the . . . launch.

This did not look anything like the barren land I had seen in the lab photograph.

“You launch rockets here?” I said.

Wen-chong laughed briefly. “No, no. We do not destroy the campus. Model rocket,” he said. “Real launches are at Fort Churchill. Manitoba. This is just for fun.”

He laughed at my expression. “Partly to test our design. We want to make sure our recovery system works.”

The door banged far behind us, and I glanced over my shoulder to see Li-wen and the Professor stumble out into the light, shielding their eyes.

“How do you know Professor Hong?” Wen-chong asked.

“I met him in San Francisco.”

We approached the group surrounding the truck. A man with gray hair stood with his hand on his hip, looking down at a radio receiver attached to the top shelf of a metal cart in the grass. As we drew close, Wen-chong hailed him. “Professor Gleason!”

He glanced up at Wen-chong. “You have a schematic?”

“What?”

“Hear that?”

A loud hum came from the receiver.

“It’ll cover up our transmission.”

They unscrewed the back plate of the receiver and gazed at the tangle of capacitors. It looked to be a unit dating from the war. I had rescued similar ones from the trash during my college days.

“Who put this thing together? Les? Didn’t he leave for White Sands?”

“Hm. Where he put the schematic . . . ,” Wen-chong said. “What model number?” They turned the receiver back around.

I leaned over the gray-haired man’s shoulder and turned the volume down all the way.

The hum remained. All this American higher education and they couldn’t diagnose the simplest radio problem in the world!

The gray-haired man squinted back at me in surprise. “That’s right. Still humming. Wen-chong, tell me what that means.”

Wen-chong looked down at the radio and then sideways at me.

“Capacitor,” I said.

“Who is this guy, Wen-chong?”

“Friend of Peter Hong’s.”

The professor straightened up and looked me in the eye. He was taller than me, with a broad forehead and kind eyes. He took a pair of horn-rimmed glasses out of his pocket and put them on.

“I’m Chia-lin,” I said.

“John Gleason.” He shook my hand. “Fix this in an hour and I’ll take you out to dinner.”

I smiled. “Twenty minutes.”

Professor Gleason laughed. “I’ll time you,” he said.

W
EN-CHONG AND
I pushed the receiver back into the building and took it up the elevator. In the lab he rummaged through little metal drawers. I glanced at the photograph of the rocket at Fort Churchill, and at the gleaming equipment around me. My heart raced, but I sat down to examine the receiver’s circuitry, following the flow of electrons—zipping through wires, handing off the charge inside each capacitor in a kind of molecular relay race.

“Here!” Wen-chong threw a new capacitor and a roll of solder onto the counter beside me. He laughed. “I know Gleason. If you’re one minute late, he won’t take you to dinner.”