The Train to Lo Wu (17 page)

I was wrong,
he thinks. After she has removed the cap and tucked it into her evening bag men at other tables turn to look at her, glancing away as soon as he sees them. In the corner of his eye a line of staring faces at the bar. For a moment he feels the sweat running into the small of his back, the temptation to take her arm and hail the nearest taxi, but no, he decides.
The
bodhisattva lives in the world.
Staring out at the street, she seems totally unaware; the corners of her mouth lift in a puzzled smile.

Excuse me.

A man sitting at the next table has risen and placed one hand on the back of her chair. Would you care to dance, his mouth says. He turns to Curtis. If you don’t mind, sir, he shouts, with a heavy German accent. I see you are—

They look at each other across the table. Go, Curtis says. Try it.

She places her hand over his.

Don’t be afraid, he says, mouthing the words.

After they have left he waits a full minute, counting the seconds by thousands, then takes up his cane and walks back toward the bar. An older couple moves away from the corner, giving him an unobstructed view of the dancers. Colored spotlights play at random over them, increasing in speed, then disappearing; for a few moments she disappears among the bobbing heads of the crowd. But she is there in the far corner, waving her hands awkwardly as if conducting an orchestra, grinning fiercely. He sits heavily on a stool and shouts an order into the ear of the bartender. On impulse he takes the sketchbook from his jacket pocket and drops it on the counter beside his sweating glass.

An upraised hand, a woman’s ear, a snagged stocking, a sweat-darkened shirt, Ana’s face, gold chains against a hairy chest. The images glow and fade imprecisely, like sunlight etched on the retina. He has been drawing furiously for an hour, filling pages with outlines that flow into one another like cursive script. They refuse to fix, he cannot see them whole; so he presses on to the next, unconcerned. Every few minutes he stops to shake the cramps from his drawing hand.
You’re so out of practice,
a voice is telling him,
it’s
as if you’re in high school again, drawing faces in a coffeehouse,
but he ignores it, gripping the edge of the table with his free hand, as if he might be dragged from his chair at any moment.

She emerges alone and stops in front of him. I have finished, she shouts over the din, would you like to—and then she sees the pen and the book open in front of him and stops, raising her hands, pressing the palms together, closing her mouth with her fingertips.

Now for the first time as they make love she moves around him, fluid and sly, slipping in and out of his grasp.
There,
she whispers to him,
that way.
And when they finish, all at once her head falls back as if pulled from behind and she cries out and pulls away, weeping.

Tell me what it is, he says, a cold knot of fear in his throat.

Do not worry, she whispers. She covers his face with her hand, passing her fingers over his eyes, the hollows of his cheeks, his lips, his chin. It is wonderful. You have begun again.

Only if it makes you happy, he says. It’s because of you. It’s
for
you.

Not only for me. For everyone.

No, he says, no, no. I’m allowed to be selfish this once.
Only
for you.

All right, she whispers.

In the morning he finds a note on the kitchen table, written in a shaky hand, on a blank page torn from his notebook.

To my friend,
Thank you for my happiness.
Ana

A week later an unfamiliar voice buzzes him from downstairs. When the elevator door opens he sees it is a monk, an American, in the familiar gray robes. Myong Gok Sunim, the monk says, grinning and extending his hand like a car salesman from Michigan. Are you Curtis? I’ve come with a message from Ji Shan Sunim.

Yes?

How are you feeling? You’ve gone back to the
center,
right?

That’s correct. Fine, he adds. Fine.

That’s good. She is very concerned about you.

Likewise, Curtis says. I hope she has made the right decision. Funny American, he thinks, face as wide as a side of beef; feelings seem hardly to register, like tiny ripples around the edges of a pond. Then he thinks,
look in a mirror sometime.

She wanted to let you know that she’s leaving for Korea in a few days.

She’ll be accepted back in?

Anyone can take refuge, the monk says. No matter what they’ve done. Coming and going—that’s how life is, right?

Wonderful, he says, but his voice breaks in mid-syllable; Myong Gok Sunim looks at his hands. Tell her I’ve been painting, he says. He turns and limps back into the lobby.

Thin, she thinks, but not too thin; he’s eaten the lentils I left in the refrigerator, used my sauce on his noodles. I should have written out recipes, and told him how to order the proper vegetables from the supermarket: all he knows to cook are things that will burn his insides away. She tilts her head so both eyes can see around the doorway. As he talks to Sunim he balances himself against his cane with both hands, like a picture of an old master leaning on his staff and talking to a frog. What a teacher he will be someday, to someone, she thinks. She closes her eyes. They are asleep again, his broad forearms locked around her waist, and in her dream a swallow veers above a golden wheatfield and lights on a fence post, preening in the morning sun.
There are no swallows there,
she thinks,
not in midsummer.
Tears spatter the rain-blackened pavement. She looks up to see him and he is gone.

Heaven Lake

My daughters are almost grown: sixteen and twelve. Mei-ling, the elder, makes her own cup of coffee, and twists her hair into a careless rope at the breakfast table; Mei-po, tall and slender as a rice shoot, carries a backpack that weighs thirty pounds, as if at any moment she could be summoned to climb Mount Everest. They move through the apartment beginning at dawn: I open my eyes to the sound of the shower running, bare heels knocking along the hallway, a burst of music, a door slammed shut. When I walk into the kitchen, their eyes slide from the table to the floor to the television without looking up.
Zao,
I say, morning, and they stiffen, as if I’ve dropped a glass, or scraped my nails against a chalkboard. Sometimes I imagine I’ve stumbled into an opera at the pause between the overture and the aria, and at any moment their voices will twine together in lament.
Our father keeps us captive in his castle,
I can hear them sing.
Rescue us!

Of course there’s nothing wrong with them. They are sensitive, untouchable things—like butterflies that have just broken their cocoons. If their mother were alive, she would say,
Let
them be. Enjoy the silence.
And perhaps I should. In the six years since she left this world I’ve learned to make French braids and instant noodles, and memorized the names of a hundred pop singers. I imagine I am the only teacher of comparative philosophy who has ever shaken hands with the Backstreet Boys. How hard can it be, after all that, to learn to be ignored? But when I sit next to them, bent over a cup of tea and the
Ming
Pao,
and no one says a word, I have a feeling I can’t easily describe. It’s as if my heart has puffed up inside my chest like a balloon, and every beat presses against my ribs, like the thump of a muffled drum. It’s nothing, my doctor says, but he’s wrong. That beat is the sound of time passing. I stare down at my newspaper and think,
No, it’s not so easy. Silence is not a luxury
for me.

Look, Mei-ling tells her sister, flipping the pages of a fashion magazine. In July she will go to Paris, to finish her last year of high school at the American University there. She stabs a finger at a picture. It’s where all the models live, she says. In the fifth arrondissement.

Mei-po looks curiously over her shoulder. I thought you said Monaco, she says.

That’s for the
winter.
In the spring you have to be in Paris. Everyone knows that.

I raise my head. Don’t get any ideas, I say. You’re going there to study. Not to have men taking pictures of you.

I know that, she says. I
know
. Her eyes flicker across my face and she turns her head away. Old man, I hear her thinking, what more do you have to say to me? Tell me something I haven’t heard before.

And I have an answer for her, too. That’s the worst of it.

After they’ve left, in the pale morning light, I put on my favorite CD—Rostropovich, the Bach unaccompanied cello suites—and pace the floor in my socks, soundless. Outside my windows the March sun burns away the mist, and if I wanted to, I could look out all the way across Tolo Harbor to the eight peaks, the Eight Immortals, their broad green slopes dappled with cloud shadows. But I don’t. I’ve lived in Hong Kong for thirteen years, and it has always seemed unreal to me, so clean and bright, like a picture postcard some clever photographer has retouched. In my study there are stacks of papers to grade, books I should have read and reviewed months ago, but I have no concentration: the time slips through my fingers like water. I whisper my daughters’ names to the air and say,
Listen. Listen to me.

When I was your age, I was just like you. I thought that everythingin my life had happened by accident. I decided that when I
was old enough I’d go to the other side of the world. Everyone said
that it was impossible, but I worked hard, and waited, and finally
my chance came. And then—

And then?

Why should it be so difficult to explain?

In the fall of 1982, when I was nineteen, I went to New York City from Wuhan, China; I had won a government competition and received a special scholarship to study at Columbia University. It’s hard for me to imagine, now, how innocent I was. New York then was not like those television shows my daughters watch, where young people stroll the streets, laughing and making jokes. At that time muggings were so common that no one went outside unless they had to, even during the day. After sunset the shop owners pulled grates over their storefronts to keep robbers from breaking the windows; even in the dormitories we locked ourselves into our rooms three times over. On warm nights that September I stuck my head out my window in the International House and looked up and down Claremont Avenue, searching for a single person in the street. The buildings were as faceless as prisons. I knew New York was the biggest city in the world, that there were twelve million people hidden behind those walls, and yet I felt as if I had been locked in an isolation chamber. I thought,
Either I’ll go insane in here or I’ll be killed by a madman
on the street. How can anyone live this way?

The problem was that I had to make money. Even with my tuition and my books and my room paid for I didn’t have enough to eat three meals a day. Though it rained all through that first October, I couldn’t buy an umbrella, or new shoes to replace the ones I’d brought with me from home. I wore the same ragged suit to class every day, and the other students stared at me. I was humiliated. In China my family was not poor; my father had survived the Cultural Revolution, and had been reinstated to his post in the history department at Huizhong University. But then, of course, in China everyone wore the same clothes day after day, unless they were fabulously wealthy. There were many times that term when I looked out the windows of my classroom at the American students in their fashionable ragged shirts and jeans worn through at the knees, and wished I could go to the scholarship office and ask for a ticket back to Beijing, where at least they didn’t make promises they couldn’t keep.

But the answer was much closer at hand. One day on the bulletin board in the International House lobby I saw an index card of scribbled characters.
Make Money Now Without A Work Visa.
Just Call Wu,
it said, and gave a telephone number.

You’re a student? he asked in Chinese, as soon as he heard my voice.

I live in the International House—

Come to Fifty-sixth and Broadway, he said. Look for the Lucky Dragon.

Yes—

He slammed down the phone.

The Lucky Dragon was a Chinese restaurant on a busy corner in midtown, with enormous dark windows that reflected the street. I stood on the sidewalk for a moment, trying to comb my hair with my fingers, and then cupped my hands to the glass. I was astonished. There were no Chinese there, only Americans, whites and blacks and Latins, eating on enormous American plates, with forks and knives, drinking cocktails and Coca-Cola. The woman at the register saw me and shouted something, and an enormously fat man came out of the kitchen and opened the door. He wore a white jacket that looked as if someone had vomited on it. Speak English? he barked at me in Mandarin, with a thick Cantonese accent.

Yes.

Do sums without an abacus?

Of course.

Ride a bicycle?

I burst out laughing, despite myself. Asking a person from China whether he can ride a bicycle is like asking a fish if he can swim. Only in Hong Kong do Chinese people ride bicycles for exercise.

Good, Wu said. I’ll give you a map. The bicycle is down in the basement.

Uncle, I said, what will I be doing?

Chinese food delivery! he shouted at me in English, his eyes nearly popping out of his head. Twenty minutes or less! What did you think, Mr. Peking Duck?

At first I was always afraid. I studied the map that Wu gave me until I could reproduce every cross-street in my mind, so that I’d never have to stop, never ask directions. I rode with the heavy bicycle chain looped around my shoulder, the lock undone; if someone grabbed me from behind, I told myself, I would swing it around and strike. Another delivery boy showed me how to tie a white cloth across my forehead so I would look like the
gongfu
actor Bruce Lee. If someone tries to mug you, he said, just wave your arms and make a face and shout a lot. They’ll leave you alone. But really I knew I’d never have the courage to fight. I was a fast bicycle rider, and that was what I relied on. Each delivery was like a mission into enemy territory, and I returned at the edge of panic, whipping between delivery trucks and taxis, as if fox ghosts and ox demons pursued me.

For a month I worked this way, four nights a week; then I relaxed a little, and began to look around, reading the signs as I rode. Jake’s Deli. The Floral Arcade. Columbus Circle. The Sherry-Netherland. In the theater district I learned the network of alleys and side streets where the stage doors were, where men in black clothes snatched the bags and thrust wads of money into my hand: sometimes twenty dollars for a fifteen-dollar order, sometimes ten for thirteen fifty. On Central Park West, the doormen waved me inside impatiently, and old women living alone lectured me on staying warm and keeping safe. I interrupted arguments, let cats escape past my ankles, and held crying babies while their mothers counted out the last penny of their order, nothing extra.

The money was terrible—I know that now. But at the time it seemed like a fortune: enough for a winter coat and a pair of boots at Woolworth’s, and five shirts for fifty cents each at the Salvation Army. And when I glided into the alley behind the Lucky Dragon I felt very happy. To me it was a great adventure, the kind of thing I had never imagined in my parents’ apartment in Wuhan. Who would have thought that I would move freely and alone through the streets of New York City, speaking the language, handling the money, as if I belonged there, as if it was nothing extraordinary at all?

I wish that were the end of the story. I’d give anything for that.

At eleven o’clock on a Thursday night in late October, one last order came in from Tenth Avenue. Two bags of food, so heavy the kitchen boy grunted as he carried them out the door. I looked at the receipt—three orange chicken, two moo shu pork, six egg rolls—and raised my eyebrows when I came to the bottom. Forty-three dollars. Who had that kind of money to spend on Chinese food?

They said it’s a birthday party, Wu shouted at me from the doorway. He had a cleaver in one hand and a scalded chicken by the neck in the other; blood ran down the edge of the blade and dripped onto his shoes. Promised a big tip. Don’t worry.

I thought we didn’t deliver past Eighth Avenue at night.

If you don’t want it, anyone else will take it.
Daak m’daak a?

Daak,
I said. Fine. I pushed away from the curb carelessly, balancing on one pedal, as I’d seen the other delivery boys do. But when I passed the last lit bodega at the corner of Fifty-second and Ninth, I cursed my bravado. It was a neighborhood where the warehouses and garages didn’t even have windows, only blank walls and steel doors bolted shut. Most of the streetlights were broken: I sped from one small pool of light to the next, sometimes half a block away. When I turned onto Tenth I could feel the sweat pooling under my arms, on my chest, at the base of my throat. But here, at last, there was a light: a storefront, its windows covered with brown paper, glowing like a lantern at the Moon Festival. I checked the number: this was the place. There were no sounds coming from inside, but still, I was relieved. As long as the address was right—as long as no one stepped out of the shadows and brained me with a brick—the delivery was all right. By that time I had made hundreds of trips from the Lucky Dragon; perhaps I thought I was invincible.

The door opened a few inches when I knocked, and a face appeared in the crack: a nose, a thin mustache, and lips, the eyes hidden from view. Who is it?

You order Chinese food?

The face disappeared, and the door swung wide open. I took a step forward and all at once the lights switched off and two hands pushed me to the side; I dropped one of the bags and swung the other in front of me. It struck nothing, and flew from my fingers, and I heard it hit the floor with a heavy thud. The door slammed shut; I was sealed in darkness. The hands pushed me again, and my shoulders bumped against a wall. Hold still! the same voice said. I got a gun! Hold still!

OK! I said. OK! No problem! I put my hands up in the air. What you want?

Shut up for a second. A flashlight beam swept across the floor and into my face; I winced, and closed my eyes. Where’s the money?

I reached under my shirt and unbuckled the belt we used to carry change. I don’t see you, I said, holding it out. I don’t see you, you let me go, OK?

The light dropped from my face. I heard the pouch unzipping, coins tinkling on the floor. Fuck! he hissed. Fuck! This all you got? Ten bucks?

Delivery only carry ten.

Where’s your wallet?

I took it from my front pocket and held it out. I have nothing, I said. I am poor.