The Third Son (23 page)

Dear Saburo,

I am so happy for you! I received a letter from Professor Beck’s wife, Rose, telling me about your dinner and how impressed she was with you. I told you the Americans would like you, because you’re so smart and your English is so good.

Everyone is very impressed by the picture of you in front of your refrigerator, though they all comment that it is empty. Do you have enough money to buy food?

I cannot believe that one phone call could cost as much as your rent. Is that really true? Perhaps you heard your friends wrong and it actually costs five dollars, not fifty?

I went to the market with your mother today. She was so nice, holding my hand. Everyone at the market thought I was her daughter. So I told her about your visit with the Becks. I thought she would be proud.

And she said, “If he’s doing so well, tell him to send us back one hundred and fifty.”

I’m so sorry to have to tell you! I tried to reason with her, but she believes this nonsense about there being gold in the streets there. Don’t even think about it. Of course you can’t spare it. You have no income. Don’t worry, just study, and everything will all come out all right.

I miss you all the time, and so does Kai-ming.

Love,

Yoshiko

I shared my cavernous refrigerator and the rest of my apartment with two Mainland Chinese bachelors—one who cooked everything with tomatoes, and one who cooked everything in pure soy sauce. Many dinners, I washed the sauce off my food in the sink while my roommates watched, one with lips stained permanently pink, the other bald and sweaty-palmed. They kept to themselves and remained within the Chinese community, and I avoided them as much as I could. I had come to America to meet Americans, not people steeped in the old culture and ways of thought. If Yoshiko were here, she would be out in the world with me. She wouldn’t hole up like these men. I knew that.

I studied hard, trying to rectify the deficiencies of my education. What Li-wen had said to Professor Gleason was true. I had had vocational, not academic, courses. I knew circuitry, not theory. I was many years behind.

But all of America lay outside my door. And so, when Professor Beck invited me to go for a hike with him and his friends in the Black Hills, I said yes without hesitation.

His friend, a geology professor, picked me up that Saturday, pulling up in front of my apartment in a beautiful white Buick. He hopped out wearing shorts, sunglasses, hiking boots, and a special hat with snapped-up flaps. He pulled down his sunglasses, and his eyes traveled from my Japanese broadcloth shirt to my freshly shined dress shoes. “You’re going hiking like
that
?” he said.

I was not about to spend my family’s money to buy an outfit just for a day hike. I had visited Yangmingshan with Yoshiko many times in dress clothes. Not everyone was rich enough to have special clothes for every situation.

A couple of hours later, though, as my leather soles slipped on the rocks with every step along the trail, I thought it might have been worth splurging at least on a pair of sneakers. I hurried to keep up with Beck and his friends as they disappeared up the mountainside—and slipped, jamming my toes. Branches of pine swiped me in the mouth and brushed against my button-down shirt. It was April, and I had thought myself warmly dressed, but as we climbed higher up, it was cooler, and the sweat from my exertion evaporated quickly in the wind.

I wished they would wait for me, but no one waited in America, it seemed. I was forever chasing people—Ni Wen-chong, Gleason, Beck.

I scrambled up a low rock face on my hands and knees to a path overhung by birch branches that glowed in the afternoon sun.

And then I was in the open. The sheer beauty of it stopped me short: the cool, mirrored surface of a lake, reflecting the surrounding cliffs, the tiered green branches of pines, and the sky above. Three bighorn sheep, their horns curled round their ears like decorative finials, stood in the water at the far end of the lake. I breathed in the American air.

Beck approached me, swishing through the tall, wheat-like grass in his hiking boots, and handed me his canteen to share, as I had none. The rest of his party sat on a cluster of rocks by the lake’s shore, pulling snacks and drinks out of packs stuffed full of equipment.

“You brought nothing?” Beck said as he drew near.

“This is how I hike in Taiwan,” I said.

“Think you can make it to Harney Peak?” He looked at me, his expression unreadable, shaded by his khaki hat.

I wiggled my toes. They felt black and blue. “Sure,” I said. I had no map or compass to guide me back. I indicated the lake, the bighorn sheep. “It’s very beautiful.”

He nodded and turned to the lake, his profile silhouetted against the glittering surface of the water.

He looked back at me. “I can lend you a blanket. It’ll get cold.”

I imagined clambering over the rocks with a blanket over my shoulders. “I’m fine,” I said. “Have you heard from Senator Dickey?”

“I have not. You’d best write him yourself.”

I nodded. I had been thinking of suggesting this myself. “My wife was very glad to receive a letter from Rose,” I said.

“Yes. She likes you.”

“My wife was so happy that she told my mother about it and my—” I caught myself before I told Beck what my mother had actually said. “Unfortunately my parents still want me to go to pharmacy school.”

“Well, that would be a shame,” Beck said. “Since you’re a good engineer.”

“I have no interest in pharmacy,” I said. “But it’s my family’s business, and they are the ones who paid for my year here.”

“I understand,” Beck said. “But it’s your life.”

I smiled. “This is the American point of view.”

He shrugged. “Isn’t it yours?”

“Maybe,” I said. “But you told me I couldn’t get my master’s in one year, and I have no scholarship, so—”

“I didn’t say that, Chia-lin.”

One of his friends called to him and he turned to wave back to the group. They were getting up from the rocks, screwing shut their canteens and brushing off their shorts.

“Chia-lin, I said no foreigner’s ever done it. That doesn’t mean you can’t.”

“But I don’t even—”

“You don’t even what?”

I fell silent. I had never told him I did not have a bachelor’s degree. He was kind to me, in his gruff way, but I couldn’t be sure that expelling me for misrepresentation would be beyond him.

“Have confidence in yourself,” Beck said. He took back his canteen, from which I would have liked to drink more, and went back to his friends. He waved to me over his shoulder. “Come,” he said.

T
HE WIND, SMELLING
of pine and wildflowers, swept across Harney Peak.

I shivered as the wind penetrated the damp fibers of my shirt. I stumbled along after Beck’s group on the bare granite. My feet throbbed and pain shot down my leg, my toes slipping into every crevice and depression on the path. I tore my eyes away from my feet to see the others enter a stone tower at the top of the peak, and I crawled to a spot just below the entrance so I would see them when they exited. I could go no farther. I sat down to rest and look out at the panorama.

The world lay below, an ocean of ponderosa pine punctuated with granite peaks, sloping down to pale green valleys where houses clustered, tiny and brave. In the distance, mountaintops marched to the horizon—pale, misty, infinitely layered. I could see the curvature of the earth. And up above: the sky, its vast cauldron of swirling atoms tinged golden by light shot from our star’s fiery surface, past Mercury and Venus and all their moons, through the black nothingness of space, to reach us.

The earth turned. On the other side of it, the sun’s rays would soon reach the horizon and filter through the red curtain by our rosewood bed. Kai-ming, lying by his sleeping mother’s side, would stretch his tiny arms and, eyelids fluttering, turn his head toward his mother, his shock of hair squished flat against the underside of her arm.

I took Yoshiko’s latest letter from my breast pocket. It flapped loudly in the wind. I hadn’t had a chance to read it before we left. I so longed for Yoshiko’s presence, for her laugh, for her touch, and this piece of thin, fluttering blue paper was a poor substitute.

Dear Saburo,

I have some bad news.

My sister Leh-hwa was hit by a truck. She is still alive, but as my mother says, she might have been better off dying and coming back as an ant or a catfish or some other animal that knows no pain. She has several broken bones and bleeding inside her body. Her husband is so busy drinking and fooling around that he doesn’t even visit her in the hospital. I’m sure it was because of worrying about him that Leh-hwa failed to watch her step in the street.

I went to visit, and my mother said I was dressed like a doctor’s wife.

I was wearing that red dress with white polka dots and that swingy skirt. I bought it with my own money from my old job.

And then my brother Kun-ji, who didn’t even come to the hospital right away, came into the room and pulled out a chair for my mother, and they turned their backs to me. They were jealous, I suppose, and it made me sad. I have had people ask if you’re sending me money, and it’s possible my family assumes you do and they wish they had a bit of it, too.

It’s because of that hundred fifty dollars you sent to your mother. I told you not to send it. Your sister used it to buy six pairs of black shoes from New Rose. No wonder everyone thinks you’re rich.

I folded the letter back up and put it into my pocket, looking glumly at the vista at my feet. The sunlight deepened to orange, setting a lake afire in the valley below, and here, on the highest peak in the United States east of the Rockies, I was not John Wayne, not some genius electrical engineer. I was the stupidly obedient son of parents who knew no end of greed, the buffoon who didn’t know to wear proper shoes for a hike, the lone boy at sundown, stepping between the sunlit rice paddies toward home.

I heard Beck’s voice and stood up, toes throbbing, pain shooting down the side of my leg. He walked toward me from the tower. As he drew near, he looked out at the panorama. “Nice view.”

“The sun is setting,” I said. “Shouldn’t we get home quickly?”

He looked at me for a moment, his hat flapping in the wind. “I thought you knew,” he said. “We’re camping.”

I
HAD NEVER
known how hard the ground could be. Beck gave me his blanket and a plastic sheet, explaining that he was already the third man in his friend’s two-man tent and had no space to offer me. I hesitated, not knowing whether to put the blanket and sheet over me for warmth or under me to protect me from the hard rock. In the end, I put the plastic between me and the rocks, the blanket between my face and the bugs.

I swatted bugs that buzzed in my ear, and fuzzy moths that landed on my neck, and I sat bolt upright, hearing the rustling and cracking that might mean moose or bears or whatever large creatures roamed the American woods. The moon was out, and it shone on the pointed roofs of all the little tents in the clearing around me. Inside those tents, I knew, everyone was laughing. I was nothing but an amusement for these people, all snug in their tents, laughing at the funny Japanese, Korean, Indian, or whatever they thought I was. One of them could easily have let me into their tent. But that would have meant snuggling right next to me, and how could they do that if they couldn’t even use the same urinal as a black man? How could they ever scrub off my germs?

Who was I fooling? I was never going to belong here.

21

Y
OU’RE MAKING A MISTAKE,”
Beck said.

“Perhaps.”

“No—to the side . . .”

We were knee-deep in the cool, swirling waters of Rapid Creek. Evergreens dotted the grassy banks rising on either side of the water. Beck pulled my arm down from over my shoulder.

“This isn’t tennis, Chia-lin. Now, cast.”

I flung the rod awkwardly to the side. The line whirred out and landed with a little plop in the rippling water. I lost my balance in the current for a moment and stumbled, my waders squeaking as the legs rubbed against each other. I had borrowed the waders from one of the American graduate students after asking, this time, what equipment I needed. Harney Peak had been two weeks ago, and I was still sore from head to toe.

“You’re not a pharmacist,” Beck said.

“I’m not American.” I reeled in my line, still bitter from spending that night under a bush. I still played along, though. Played the part of the funny Chinaman making a fool of himself in the South Dakotan outdoors. “I borrowed the money, I need to pay back. I have a full scholarship to Baylor, and it’s useful to my family.”