The Third Son (33 page)

I burst in on Li-wen and the Professor as they ate noodles in their dormitory room. They looked up at me in surprise. It smelled like stale sesame oil. On the counter behind their heads, Kazuo’s vase stood, filled with chopsticks and spatulas.

“Well, it’s Superman,” said Li-wen after a moment. He waved his cup of tea toward me. He wore a denim button-down shirt. “Coming to save the day. I’m so glad you found us.” He put some noodles in his mouth and chewed.

The Professor smiled and nodded.

“Why are you trying to ruin my life?” I said, heart pounding. “I have done nothing to you. I have a baby, you know.”

“He’s not a baby anymore, little brother,” he said. “He’s over two years old now. Clever little bugger. Tease him and he comes right back at you. Would you like some noo—”

“Stay away from my family,” I said. “If you continue to play games with me, I can always mention to the INS that you entered this country illegally.”

He chewed for a moment, looking down, and took a slurp of tea. “It’s not me you need to talk to,” he said finally. “Do you think I’m so soft? It’s your brother.”

“Kazuo?”

He shrugged. “Who else?”

“Why?”

He shrugged again. “He’s jealous. Your parents are pressing him to marry some ugly rich woman, and your lovely wife is right there under his nose. And you’re here in America, while he was too scared to even take the exam. It doesn’t seem fair, does it?”

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

He leaned over and reached for an airmail envelope that was on the counter and handed it to me. I recognized Kazuo’s handwriting.

I am grateful for your connections and all you’ve done, for I cannot abide the thought that he would have everything that should be mine. All my life I have done what I was asked. I have been the dutiful son, the diligent student. I have lived my whole life in fear of disappointing my parents. And for all that, I have earned nothing but a life of endless toil and a prospective bride who never smiles. While my little brother—the one who never cared, who talked back and flunked out of school—he is the hero, somehow.

“Are you all right?” Li-wen said.

I walked over to the bathroom, stuffing the letter into my pocket. I leaned over the sink and vomited. The edges of my vision began to darken, and I sat down on the toilet, head in my hands, panting. Towels hung on a rack just by my head, their stale mustiness reminding me of the futon in my parents’ country house, where I had lain during the war.

After a minute, my vision returned, and a pair of green leather slippers appeared in the bathroom doorway. I looked up to see Li-wen holding a wet paper towel and a glass of water. I took only the paper towel.

He held out the glass. “It’s not poisoned, my boy. We push papers. We’re not criminals.”

I took the glass, rinsed out my mouth, and spat the water into the sink. I used the rest of the water to rinse the vomit down the drain and wiped my face and neck with the paper towel.

He leaned against the doorframe, his mouth twisted. He put his hand in his pants pocket. “Your brother is a bit of a bastard,” he said. He shifted his feet.

“He had the advantage his whole life,” I said. “If he didn’t end up with what he wanted, it’s his own fault.” I squeezed past Li-wen out of the bathroom.

“What are you going to do?”

I said nothing. Because I didn’t know and wouldn’t have told him, anyway.

36

M
RS.
L
ARSSON HELD A
gingersnap in her teeth while she poured me a cup of coffee. She took the cookie out of her mouth and looked up, eyebrows arching. “What’s that, Chia-lin?”

“May I use your automatic copy machine?” I repeated.

“Oh, sure!” she said brightly. “You’ve been dying to use it for two years now, haven’t you?”

She gave me the cup of coffee, and I took a sip, the warm vapors opening up the vessels in my brain, calling things into focus. I’d been driving all night.

I handed her Kazuo’s letter.

“Which side?” she said. She looked blankly at the Chinese characters, which described not only my undeserving nature and Kazuo’s conversations with Tu Kuo-hong, the security general’s son, but also Kazuo’s favorite pulp novel series and his current infatuation with a certain well-endowed Taiwanese folksinger.

“Both.”

“One copy?”

“Three.”

“Three it is. Oh! There’s another letter from your wife. Have a seat. It’ll take me a couple of minutes, anyway.”

Dear Saburo,

My father is selling his house to join his brother’s ice company. My older brother and his wife are angry about it, but what choice does he have? My father is incapable of making it on his own, and his only chance at success is to join the ice company. His brother has made the price so steep. Imagine, making your own brother sell his house so that you can profit all the more! There’s something deeply amoral about it, but this is the same man, after all, who stood by and did nothing while my brother died.

What can we do? My uncle holds all the cards and he knows it. My mother keeps saying we should find out what significance my father’s name has, because she recalls my grandmother’s saying the name had some value, but my father waves this off as another one of my mother’s complaints.

“All done,” Mrs. Larsson said. She handed me the warm, curling sheets of paper.

“How are your children?” I said. I longed to hear news of a happy American life.

“Oh, they’re great,” she said. “Getting all geared up for the end of school. They do miss their father, though.”

“Where’s their father?”

“He’s passed on,” she said. She handed me the envelope, eyes down, and lifted her chin slightly. “Korea.”

T
WO WEEKS LATER,
I received a telegram from my father:

RECEIVED YOUR LETTER. WILL FIX.

It was hard for me not to read this as angry, both because of the stark format of the telegram and because I had always experienced him as angry. I wished I could see him face-to-face, for the one moment that he might be defending me against Kazuo. Did my father finally see my worth? Or was it simply the responsibility of a man for his underlings, like the time he had rescued me and
The Earth
from the Nationalist soldier? Was it just that he wanted so badly to visit my brother in Japan?

I heard nothing else for months except from Yoshiko.

Dear Saburo,

There has been a lot of strife here since you sent that letter to your father. I don’t know exactly what you said, but your father has been irritable as an old bear, growling and snapping at Kazuo. Kazuo finally agreed to marry So-lan, that scowling girl with three downtown Taipei apartment buildings as her dowry. He and your father have been in a terrible mood.

But the house is full of activity, as Jiro has also found a bride, a bank teller named Li-sing, who wears bright blue powder on her eyelids and has been plying your parents with beer. Plans are for a double wedding. The phone rings again and again and packages are piling up all over the great room. I couldn’t help noticing that two of the packages were very ornate and expensive wedding dresses for the brides . . . Well, expensive or not, my dress was much more beautiful.

I told Kai-ming he would have two new aunts by his next birthday, and he was quiet for a moment, then ran down the hall, shouting, “Oh no! I’m dead! New aunt! New aunt!”

Poor boy! His aunts were so cruel to him while I was in the hospital. For him these years have been very hard.

These years. My poor boy! And I didn’t even know him.

I knew only
of
him. And all that I knew was in the gossamer blue airmail envelopes I received from Yoshiko. I told myself that this was enough, that I knew just as well as any father how high my son could count, how well he could throw a ball. I knew, from pictures, his delicate face. A photograph of him on one foot was enough for me to divine his sense of balance, his confidence.

But I knew what I told myself wasn’t true. Yoshiko’s words on onionskin, a two-inch photograph—these were nothing real. As the year stretched on and I received more letters detailing Kai-ming’s larger shoes, his height, now thirty-six inches exactly, his hilariously bold comments (to a teasing uncle: “I’m the boss and you’d better listen to me!”), I felt more and more that I had made a mistake in leaving him. Probably Yoshiko alone was giving him more love than I had received from my whole family as a boy. But he wasn’t getting anything from me except for messages and the few small gifts I could afford to send. Between my studies in South Dakota, in Michigan, and in South Dakota again, I arranged my pictures of Kai-ming—once so tiny, now one, now two, now wearing a new birthday shirt with an orchid pinned to it, left over from my brothers’ wedding. Yoshiko’s father had abandoned his children for a year. Now I had abandoned Kai-ming for three.

“I
T’S A BIT
of a delicate situation,” Senator Dickey said.

It had taken some doing to get myself into his office. Some months earlier I had bumped into Bashir, the Lebanese student I had met at Mount Rushmore. He was indeed now pursuing a career in civil service and had been working summers as an intern with the South Dakota State Legislature. It was through his efforts that I had obtained fifteen valuable minutes with a United States senator.

The desk surface gleamed, reflecting light onto the double chin of this man who had been chosen free and clear by the people of South Dakota to represent them. He looked perfectly ordinary to me—a white man with trim gray hair and rectangular glasses. Did he have special skills of oratory, a special way of appearing as every man’s friend or father? Was his house filled with sycophants and operants, whispering and persuading, while his children cowered in the shadows?

Through the window behind him, snow fell, coating the pine branches and making them sag. Pheasant-hunting season had come and gone again.

“The government of your country, the Republic of China, has been allied with us against the Communists since the Sino-Japanese War.” He cleared his throat. “So on the one hand we don’t want to upset our allies. On the other hand, we want to discourage foreign governments from throwing their weight around in inappropriate ways within our borders—”

“That’s right,” I said. “Especially when some of their agents are not even here legally.”

He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Suddenly he seemed old and very weary. “Not here legally?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose I should ask you who.”

I was silent. Even after all the trouble they’d caused for me, I felt sorry for Li-wen and Sun-kwei. They were lightweights, really.

Dickey gave a little wave of his hand and sighed heavily. “Actually, I don’t want to know.” He sat back and fiddled with a golden letter file. “Any other reason why they should listen to me?”

“You’re an American senator,” I said. “They want to stay in the UN.”

He looked at his watch, scratched his head, and sighed. “You know, Chia-lin, I’ll tell you something. I really am not sure the US has any business meddling in Asia.”

I swallowed.

“I mean, look what happened in Korea. Fifty thousand American boys dead, in some country most Americans can’t even find on the map.”

“But—”

“And all this squabbling between the Nationalist Chinese and the Chinese Communists. Who is the real ruler of China? Well, who cares? How is that our problem?”

I said nothing.

“But you’re not asking me to fix that problem, are you, Chia-lin?”

“No,” I said.

“Give me your information.”

I handed him a stack of letters representing my odyssey through the United States. Pat O’Reilly, Ni Wen-chong, Professor Gleason, Professor Beck.

“You know,” Senator Dickey said, taking my papers, “the thing that gets me about this case is that your own brother did this to you. Now, that’s what makes me mad.”

“A
NY NEWS?” BECK
said.

We sat on folding chairs on a vast frozen lake in Custer State Park, watching our lines freeze in the fishing hole. Other fishing parties on the lake had huts—heated ones, even. We, of course, had none.

Beck wore a red parka and a mink hat he’d bought in Czechoslovakia. I wore the new parka I’d splurged on at Sears. It was so cold the air hurt my lungs when I breathed in. It reminded me of Fort Churchill.

“My son has measles,” I said.

“I thought he already had measles.”

“I thought so, too.”

“What about your wife?”

“They say the quota will be abolished soon. We just have to get me cleared of the political charges.”

“You said your father’s taking care of it?”