Across a Green Ocean Read online

  “All couples fight,” Ling said vaguely, and then, taking this opportunity to deflect the question, asked, “Don’t you and Julian fight?”

  “Sure,” Emily replied easily.

  “What do you fight about?” She kept her tone carefully neutral.

  “Oh, nothing. How I’m working too hard, as usual.”

  “Are you working too hard?”

  “Actually, I’m thinking of taking some time off.”

  “That’s good,” Ling said. “Maybe you and Julian can go away together. Beatrice Ma’s son and daughter-in-law just went on a cruise to Mexico for a whole month.”

  “How come you and Dad never went on vacation?”

  “We did go on vacation.”

  “That doesn’t count.”

  Ling knew Emily meant the educational trips she and Michael had been taken on as children, to Williamsburg in Virginia and Cape Canaveral in Florida. The children had fought in the backseat of the car about who got to hold the map, who got to choose the radio station, who had the stinkier feet.

  “How come you and Dad never went anywhere by yourself, even after Michael and I left home?” Emily asked.

  “Your father didn’t like to take time off work unless it was for a good reason.” Ling smiled. “Kind of like you.”

  “I do not—” Emily stopped herself. “Maybe we will take a vacation,” she said. “Maybe all of us can take a vacation together. How does that sound, Mom? Want to go on a cruise?”

  “No.” Ling shuddered. “I think I will get seasick.” She tried again. “Did you tell Julian where you were going before you left?”

  “I left him a message. What did you and Dad fight about?”

  Ling sighed. “All sorts of things. Most of the time I wanted your father to say he was sorry. But he couldn’t do that.”

  “Why not? That’s the easiest thing in the world to do.”

  “Emily,” Ling said abruptly. “Do you remember what happened with Mr. Albertson’s cat?”

  Emily had been around twelve and in her animal-saving phase. She’d just done a pro-and-con paper on euthanasia in animal shelters for her debate class (why would youth in Asia be a bad thing? Ling had thought, mishearing), spotted a white cat padding across the street one day, and brought it back home. Ling had been at a loss as to what to do with it. Emily refused to call the animal shelter, saying that it would probably be put to sleep, so they had to keep it. Michael, who was six and had recently lost his goldfish, was excited at the prospect of a real pet.

  “That cat,” Emily said now, “had no collar.”

  It was what she had said when an irate Mr. Albertson had gone knocking on every door on the street, demanding if anyone had seen his cat, which was named Genevieve, after his dead wife. Ling remembered Mr. Albertson calling that name over the neighbors’ backyards at night, but she had not known he had been referring to a cat. The sound had been so plaintive that she had just assumed he was mourning the loss of his wife. Mr. Albertson had called Emily a “disingenuous little monkey,” and Ling had made her apologize.

  “Okay,” Emily amended. “Maybe I should have been more sincere when I apologized to Mr. Albertson. What happened to him, anyway?”

  “He passed away over ten years ago. He was still very much in love with his wife. Now he can finally be with her.”

  Emily rolled her eyes, which Ling chose to overlook.

  “I don’t know what happened to the cat,” Ling added.

  “What does the cat have to do with anything?”

  “What I mean, Emily, is that sometimes it is hard for you to say that you’re sorry.”

  “I say I’m sorry all the time.”

  “Not to the people who need to hear it, when they need to hear it the most.”

  Emily opened her mouth to say something and then closed it. Ling had never been so blunt with her daughter before. She decided to back off and let Emily tell her about her and Julian’s fight when she was ready.

  After dinner, Emily suggested they watch television, but Ling couldn’t concentrate on the late-night news, in which it seemed like death and destruction were around every corner. She looked sideways at her daughter. Emily seemed completely engrossed in the glowing screen, but Ling could see that the skin under her eyes was sallow, and her brows were drawn together, creating a hieroglyphic on her forehead. In a couple of years those lines would be permanent. Emily was also anxiously fingering a small rent in the knee of her jeans—pick, pick, pick. Ling wanted to put her hand on her daughter’s, to tell her that no matter what was going on at work or at home, it wasn’t worth it. But she couldn’t tell her. There was no space in their relationship for this kind of conversation, and Ling didn’t know how to change that.

  Emily got ready for bed, putting on an old shirt that barely covered the tops of her thighs. With her hair pulled back in a ponytail, her daughter looked like she was a teenager again. Then, as she had often done at that age, she disappeared into her bedroom without saying anything to her mother and closed the door firmly behind her.

  Ling went about preparing the house for the night, putting the leftovers into Tupperware containers, taking out the garbage, securing the trash cans against raccoons. After she was done, she walked out onto the lawn, where she’d prayed so many years ago that she’d have a son. The grass tickled her legs, the blades rustling in the night breeze, almost sounding like the murmur of voices. She imagined Michael in Qinghai Province, standing in a similar field, the green stalks reaching up to his waist. Whatever he was looking for out there, she hoped he would find it.

  CHAPTER 6

  When Michael wakes up, he senses that something is very wrong. It’s not that he’s in another country, as he’d gotten over that after his first couple of nights in China—was forced to, what with the constant onslaught of noise and lights and smells. As he swings his legs over the side of the bed and his feet touch the steady floor, he realizes what it is: He’s no longer on a train. He looks out the window to see the early morning sun shining weakly through a layer of smog that is punctuated by various high-rises, many in the middle of being built. He opens the window a crack, and the sounds of construction and traffic waft upward, along with the ubiquitous smell of burning trash.

  After taking a shower with the lowest water pressure ever—barely more than a trickle—Michael goes downstairs into the lobby. The same clerk from the day before is there, his suit only slightly wilted. Michael wonders if he’s stayed there overnight, maybe slept somewhere in the back. The telephone calls from last night, from the woman offering a massage and who knows what else, come back to him. How did she know what room he was in? Could the clerk have had something to do with it? Michael can’t tell from the young man’s impassive face as he walks up to him. He wonders if the man’s bland expression would change if Michael explained to him exactly why these calls from women were misdirected.

  Instead, Michael asks the clerk if anyone has left a message. No, there has been no message. Yes, he will let Michael know if there is a call. Yes, if he leaves, he will inform the new clerk. In the meantime, can he call Michael a car, so that he can see the sights that this fine city has to offer?

  Although he’s already seen a few sights from the day before, Michael thinks this isn’t a bad idea. He knows he can’t stay in the hotel all day waiting for Liao Weishu to contact him. He figures the best way to distract himself is to see some more of the city. Maybe he’ll go in the opposite direction than he went the day before, as if the farther he gets from his father’s friend, the more likely it is the man will call him; a form of reverse psychology. The clerk suggests the Muslim market and, thinking that it sounds like an appropriately exotic and exciting destination, Michael sets off on foot.

  He feels like he blends in the crowd a little better today. He’s wearing long pants that partially obscure his tennis shoes, ditched the baseball cap and the backpack so that the only thing he’s carrying is his wallet in his pocket. Cutting through the air is the acrid smoke from makes
hift food stalls set up along the side of the road, sometimes no more than a couple of wooden benches and a table alongside a brazier. It’s almost uniformly men sitting at these benches, shoveling the contents of the bowls into their mouths with disposable chopsticks. Some of them, with their mud-spattered shoes and pants, are obviously construction workers, while others, dressed in thin rayon suits, appear to be more business types. No matter their vocation, they’re all consuming bowls of noodles in clear broth flecked with cilantro, or hot bowls of soy milk accompanied by fried dough sticks that Michael knows by reputation, if not experience. He remembers his mother describing these airy golden batons as part of her childhood breakfasts, where they took on the sheen of a fairy tale, as well as oil. But here they are, years and miles away from where his mother grew up in Taiwan. Maybe his father and Liao Weishu ate these things as children too, in Beijing. Just thinking about it makes Michael feel strangely homesick; not for his own home but for places he has never seen.

  As tempting as all these dishes are, their savory steam curling in the air, Michael knows he has to resist. A single contaminated bite of food could send him to the closest restroom, if not the hospital. As he watches a vendor clean a bowl by swirling hot water in it and then overturning it on the ground, he thinks that hot water appears to be the panacea for everything here, not just to sterilize dishes. On the train, his seatmates took turns refilling the berth’s silver thermos from a spigot at the end of the car. They used it to make meals out of their instant noodles, fill their jars of tea, dampen their facecloths in the only gesture toward cleanliness during days of traveling. This morning at the hotel, Michael almost tripped over a similar thermos that was placed outside of the door, along with a Chinese newspaper that, since he couldn’t read it, he left where it was. Now he’s beginning to understand his parents’ almost fanatical attitude toward hot water, as well as their equally fervent distrust of water straight and cold from the tap; if water isn’t boiled, it’s deadly.

  As he walks, and the morning stretches toward noon, Michael examines the faces of the people he passes, but they’re even more alien to him than the people on the train. He encounters a few more of the Tibetan herdsmen he saw the day before, as well as apple-cheeked women wearing small white caps. He spies two old men, also wearing white caps, with round smoked glasses and grizzled beards, playing what appears to be a form of checkers on the sidewalk. Michael wonders if these are the thieving Uighur people that the hotel clerk mentioned the day before, although all they seem to be doing at the moment is stealing each other’s checker pieces.

  He realizes that he’s in the Muslim market only when he sees the green dome of a mosque rising above the walls at the end of a lane. Otherwise, the market does not look very Muslim to him. The tables and blankets spread out on the ground are covered with pirated DVDs, cell phone cases, plastic toys—anything you could get in New York City’s Chinatown, and probably originating from the same factories in China. Halfway down the street, the wares on display change from electronics and gadgets to produce and other food items. Every vendor seems to be selling a combination of the same things: perfectly round heads of cabbage; jewel-toned eggplants; brown eggs with feathers still stuck to them; blocks of bean curd in tubs of water, sleek and white as koi.

  Michael encounters more snack foods, like hard, fried braids of dough and sticks of what look like miniature candied apples drenched in a crimson glaze. He lingers by a table covered with trays of thick, round, dark-pink slabs, trying to figure out what they are. The seller offers Michael a sample piece, and despite the alarm bells of contamination ringing in his head, he takes it. The man is smiling and nodding at him so hard that Michael feels compelled to take a small, polite bite, and discovers that it’s tangy and crumbles like sugar. He knows this flavor; these slabs are like a larger version of the haw flakes he used to eat like candy as a child. The seller looks so expectant, his nodding so enthusiastic, that Michael has to buy a brown paper sack full of them. He continues to walk down to the end of the market and then back, nibbling on the huge haw flakes until he’s almost dizzy with the sweetness. He feels like Gulliver, or Alice in Wonderland, suddenly made small while the world around him has grown enormous.

  When he and Emily were children, their parents would take them into Chinatown for the afternoon. Rarely venturing above Canal Street, they’d eat lunch in one of the restaurants that were virtually interchangeable, with their pink tablecloths and laminated menus, and then they’d stock up on the foods they couldn’t get from the local grocery store, like barbecued pork, long beans, and dried shrimp. Michael was agog at everything, the live fish flopping in buckets, the twisted roots in the herbal medicine store. But then, he was only seven while Emily was thirteen, itching to come into the city with her friends and not with her lame parents and little brother. If they were good, Emily and Michael were allowed a treat; small cylinders of haw flakes, wrapped in pink paper with green lettering. Separated into disks they looked like pennies, or communion wafers. Later, at church, Michael would wonder if religion tasted a little bit like Chinatown.

  On the ride home in the car, Emily tried to teach Michael how to play poker with the haw flakes as chips, but he got frustrated and started throwing them at her, and then their father yelled at them to quit it. In the fading afternoon light, with his father at the wheel, his mother asleep, and Emily absorbed in a book, Michael would look out the car window and play a game in his head that was based partly on boredom and partly on the desire to scare the shit out of himself. He’d place a haw flake on his tongue and slowly start counting, and if the flake didn’t disintegrate before he reached a hundred, the car would crash.

  There was one occasion when Michael counted up to a terrifying one hundred and twenty. He closed his eyes and held his breath, expecting the car to swerve at any moment into the guardrail, to be flung into the back of the seat before him. He imagined the tearing of metal and glass, the crunch and shatter of bone, the spray of blood like in the horror movies he wasn’t allowed to watch. Nothing happened. Then he looked up to see the flash of his father’s face in the rearview mirror, grainy but no different than it always was. Something about that steadfastness of his father’s expression, its immovability, reassured him. Michael swallowed the sweet, sticky film in his mouth. Of course the car wouldn’t crash; his father wouldn’t let it.

  It was, Michael remembers, as the sweet aftertaste lingers on his tongue, maybe one of the last times he had such conviction in his father’s ability to keep him safe, to make everything right.

  When he exits the Muslim market and turns onto a quieter side street, Michael feels strangely depleted. He’s finished his snack and the blood sugar it provided. It’s late afternoon now, and he considers taking one of the cream-colored, red-trimmed buses back to the hotel. But he doesn’t know how much a ticket costs, and it appears to be rush hour, with crowds of people pushing and shoving at each stop. So instead he decides to fortify himself for the walk back with a soda. He pays the vendor and has just started to unscrew the cap when he feels a hand quickly dart in the pocket into which he has placed his wallet. He turns around to see a figure darting down the street ahead of him. Without thinking, Michael sprints after him. With an extra burst of speed, he reaches out and grabs the back of the thief’s shirt and spins him around.

  It is a teenage boy, red-cheeked and panting. Michael is both taller and stronger than him. He grasps the boy by his collar and shakes him, hard.

  “Give me my wallet, you fucker!”

  A confused look crosses the boy’s face. Michael shakes him again, shouts more obscenities. The fact that the boy doesn’t understand what he is saying makes him even angrier. Spit flies into the boy’s eye, and he blinks it away. Now he is limp in Michael’s grip, his shoulders sagging, his head lowered.

  A crowd from a nearby bus stop has started to gather around them, including an older man who the boy looks toward. The man nods once, and the boy sheepishly hands the wallet back to Michael. Then the bus ar
rives, dispelling everyone’s curiosity, and the two disappear into the throng of people that board it.

  Still breathing hard, Michael checks his wallet with trembling fingers. A hundred kuai bill is missing. Somehow, between the time Michael caught him and got back his wallet, the boy managed to steal the note, which is worth fewer than twenty dollars. Everything else, though, is intact. Also, amazingly enough, Michael is still holding the soda, which is now warm. He throws it away.

  Slowly, he starts on the endless walk back to the hotel. His nerves are still jangling with uncertainty and fear—fear over the theft, but also at the way he had acted. It was clear the pickpocket was young and much weaker than him. But Michael could have punched him, he had been that angry. He thinks about the man who the boy looked at for direction afterward. Were they some kind of father-and-son pickpocketing team? What kind of father would let his child steal? Someone who has no choice.

  For the first time he feels the alienness of the city around him, the possible danger. The street kid yesterday who grabbed his ice cream momentarily rattled him, but now he’s shaken. Suddenly, everyone looks untrustworthy. He wonders how many times he’s been swindled since he’s arrived, whether the student who offered to pass on his message to Liao Weishu the day before really will do so. She could just be another in a long line of locals out to make a fool of the American who looks like them, but otherwise could have come from a different planet. The afternoon has left a bad taste in his mouth, and he doesn’t know how much longer he wants to stay in this city.

  Furthermore, even if Liao gets in touch with him, how naïve is Michael to think that he has anything meaningful to say about his friendship with Michael’s father? Michael is expecting Liao to shed some light on his father’s life, to provide an explanation for what his father said to him one night when he was a teenager, which has forever divided the way Michael felt about him into a Before and an After. But Michael is beginning to think that everything he’s done since he opened Liao’s letter—buying a plane ticket on credit he can’t repay, running off to a country whose language he doesn’t speak, and walking around with his wallet practically in plain sight—has been a big mistake.