The Chinese Groove, page 25
“Ted!” Aviva called. “Upstairs. Bring it upstairs! Put it all in the kitchen.”
Ted squeezed his way through the crowd of their friends, toting laden trays that Aviva had over-ordered. I set out the food, poured the drinks, cleared the plates, and unstuck the bathroom door for kid after jiggling kid. The house was full of the multi culti come to celebrate the naming. They greeted me with kisses and hugs, the whole mixed-up crew thumping me on the back, congratulations, because there was a baby in the house. Yu had chosen the name Ruth after Aviva’s departed mother. She’d had the idea and then asked Ted, and they’d kept it a secret from Aviva until the day before the ceremony when the rabbi called them on the speakerphone to settle the final arrangements for the simchat bat. “Her name is Ruth,” Yu said. Aviva held on to Ted and cried.
I made space on the counter for more food their friends brought. “It doesn’t matter to the rabbi that Yu isn’t Jewish?” I was still attempting to nail down the rules, perplexing though they were.
Aviva paused and looked toward Yu and Baby. “Close enough. We do the best we can. . .”
“. . . with who we are,” Ted said.
We crowded into the living room with half the guests spilling into the hallway. The rabbi, a tall, ample, gray-haired woman whose give-no-quarter rectitude reminded me of Miss Chips, stood at the center of the circle. She wore a stitched cap and layer upon layer of colorful garb that looked more like tablecloths than clothing. Ted, Aviva, and Yu with Baby waited just outside the room. I stood in the doorway looking at the collection of faces, each unique, no multiples among them, and thinking of the missing. Aviva met my gaze and smiled wistfully, her brief, sad expression speaking to me of her son, Eli, and of Leo, growing up and apart in the shelter of the Children’s House, and his parents, Kate and Orit, who had found a new family to join.
“Brucha haba’ah,” the rabbi said, blessed is she who comes, and Yu handed Aviva the baby, who was wrapped in a shawl that Aviva told me had been used at her parents’ wedding. Then the three of them with Baby proceeded into the room to where the rabbi stood. She pointed to a chair, “Elijah’s chair,” she called it, and Aviva placed Baby momentarily on the chair, then picked her up again, smoothed the shawl, and handed her back to Yu.
“Wait,” Ted said.
The rabbi stopped.
“Wait, please. I’ll be just a minute.” Ted worked his way through the crowded room, down the stairs, and out the front door. Guests peered through the windows to watch his progress. I didn’t have to; I guessed where he was going. Baby fussed, Yu cooed, Aviva stayed quiet. She looked different than I had ever seen her. Not victorious, but calm.
Ted returned with Henry. I’d been so preoccupied that I hadn’t attended him well that morning. He was unshaven, his shirt was wrongly buttoned, and his belt was cinched too tightly, which made his pant legs flare. But he was there on two firm feet, his eyes as bright as Leo’s when a story was being told. People stretched out their hands to Henry, saying hello. He looked with care at every person, and I could see that he was hoping that one of them would be Kate.
“Okay?” the rabbi asked.
Ted and Aviva nodded. Yu placed Baby into Ted’s arms and he lifted her to the circle.
I LEFT BEFORE THE party ended and walked toward the park. The uniform avenues that had looked so bleak to me upon my arrival now seemed like village streets. There was the telephone pole that Leo and I raced to; there was Crouder’s favorite hydrant. Here was the crack in the sidewalk that made Leo shout with joy when we flew over it on the bike, Leo riding bareback and wearing no shoes or helmet. On either side of the street were all the homes whose occupants had annoyed Henry in one way or another, a sure sign that they were neighbors.
Low clouds covered the sun, and the park was damp and muted, its tall trees somber in the late-November light. I thought of the sparkling waters of Gejiu’s Golden Lake and the deep red color of the pomegranates in the fall and the bright pink flowers of the Yunnan crab apple trees. They would be a happy sight after my months of living in the fog, and the smells and sounds of the noodle shops and night markets and tin factories and teahouses would welcome a countryman home.
For I’d decided, you see, to go back. My adventure had come to a close. I knew that Father wouldn’t leave if I wasn’t going with him because there was a groove between us, father to son to father, and it was telling me to go home. Not just for Father’s sake but for mine. Whatever happened next, I wanted to share it with Father and to see the flame in him leap back to life. Flame-lit Father might still have chapters ahead, a turn I wanted to witness. As for me, who could know when and where my next escapade would begin? What tasks would be required of me and what strangers in the woods would stop and help me along the way? Peach Blossom Land wasn’t anything like I had expected. Given my substantial, protuberant, talented Zheng nose for adventure, the same was probably true of whatever home awaited me, the one I would make for myself.
The sky changed, the mist thickened, then drops began to fall, the first of the season. I walked to the bison pasture and stood a long time outside the fence, watching them run in the rain.
HENRY PROTESTED—what about my studies? What about the house? There was still work to be done. But he knew that I was leaving even before I told him, having lately humbled himself, father to son to father.
“Promise me you’ll keep going with your studies,” Henry said.
I shook my head. Promises were a tricky business—Father’s to Mother, mine with Lisbet, the ones I’d made to Father that I’d never intended to keep. Any pledge I might make would be only to myself.
“But I’m grateful for everything you did for me,” I said. “Will you please come to lunch with Father and me so Father can thank you properly?”
“For what?” Henry said. “He owes me nothing.”
“For being my ye ye,” I said.
I drove Henry to Taraval Street, where Father was waiting. He’d made arrangements with our waiter friend, and the table was set with special red napkins and a vase of carnations from Father. We introduced Henry to our waiter friend, who declared that he’d instantly seen that Henry had the face of a Yunnanese. He brought us three steaming bowls of Crossing the Bridge Noodles.
“This is good!” Henry said. “Our cook used to make this dish. My father could eat three helpings.”
“Like Xue Li,” Father said. “Growing up, he had a bottomless stomach.”
“Still true,” Henry said.
“Like a bull,” Father said.
“A very big bull with four stomachs,” Henry said, and the two enjoyed the joke while I called for a second helping.
For the rest of the hour, Father and Henry spoke of the local foods and strong tobacco and rugged beauty of Yunnan. Henry described places he remembered from his youth, like the karst formations of Shilin outside of Kunming, where he was born. He asked about Dianchi Lake, where he used to row as a boy. It was still very beautiful, Father told him. Despite all the changes, Kunming was still the City of Eternal Spring.
Henry called for the check, but our waiter friend, beaming, told him that it had already been paid. At Henry’s mock outrage, Father shyly smiled. He wasn’t accustomed to being host, and his cheeks were pink with pleasure.
“Thank you,” Henry said. “And thank you for our talk today. You’re the only family member I’ll have the chance now to meet. I’m too old to make the journey home even if I wanted.”
FATHER SLEPT DOWNSTAIRS THAT night while Henry and I sat talking. “You’re not the only one leaving,” Henry said. “I’ve decided to return to Beit Hayeladim. I like it there. I’m signing up for good.”
“Because I won’t be here?” I said, dismayed. I had planned to ask Eddie’s mother to help find a Chinatown lady who could take care of Henry.
“No. I spoke with the folks there before I came. I’m joining the collective.”
“What about the house?” I said.
“I’ll keep it for a while longer,” Henry said. “Then I’m going to sell it. I’ll need the money to pay my way at Beit Hayeladim.”
“Have you told Aviva and Ted?”
“I told them yesterday. Ted was surprised but not Aviva. She knew I was ready for a change.”
“You’ll be with Kate. And Leo.”
“That’s right,” Henry said. “In fact, Kate’s coming to get me. She’s driving up tomorrow. There are a few things I’d like to have with me. The hallway chest. Some pictures of Diana.”
I went to the kitchen and poured us the last of the bourbon, thinking of the day I first met Henry and proposed that I move in. “I think it’s brilliant,” I said, bringing him his drink. “A brilliant solution.” Same as Aviva had said to me all those months ago. Old as he was, Henry had learned to bounce.
TED AND KATE PACKED her car with the last of Henry’s things. Aviva and I waited on the sidewalk. Henry was inside unplugging the toaster and lamps, so he didn’t have to pay for a kilowatt hour more than required.
“Are you sure this is okay?” Ted asked Kate.
“Of course it is,” Kate said. “It’s a pleasure for us, not a burden. There are lots of people to help.”
“You have to promise to call me whenever you need a break,” Aviva said. “I’ll come spell you. I want to check the place out—maybe I’ll retire there.”
“But you’re sure?” Ted asked again.
“Please, Ted,” Aviva said. “Listen to Kate. Take them at their word. Come inside for a minute, Kate. I’ve got some things for Leo.”
The women went into Ted and Aviva’s house and I went to fetch Henry. He walked down his front steps without once glancing back.
“I left my rod and reel,” he told Ted.
“There’s room for it,” Ted said.
“Try that lighter-weight line,” Henry said. “You’ll get the hang of it.”
Ted smiled briefly. “All right, I will.”
Kate came outside and settled Henry into the car and checked his seat belt and made sure the sun wasn’t shining in his eyes. Seeing her tender care for his father, Ted finally relaxed.
“He’ll be happy there,” he said to Aviva as Kate and Henry drove away.
“I’ve been trying to tell you,” Aviva said, linking her arm in his.
After that, Ted and I went out for a last patty melt and a beer. I thanked him for all he had done for me, and he thanked me in return. “Before you came, we never spoke of Eli. Now we talk about him freely.” He slipped me an envelope, no cash in it. He’d written me a poem:
I rose early this morning
To walk in the Honghe River valley.
I had only the birds for company
And the smell of woodsmoke.
History calls me home
And I turn and approach it.
It was Henry who paid the way home for Father and me. Bonus wages, he gruffly said, for labors above and beyond.
31.
The Old Family Home
I GUESS YOU KNOW THE PUBLIC PART OF THE STORY. My app became a grand success, making millions for Eddie, Paloma, and Deng. But even they couldn’t have predicted the effect of TinRoad on the worldwide matchmaking business. It happened purely by accident; it wasn’t part of the plan. People all over the world began finding their mates when a traveler delivered a package to their door, which made the business grow even faster. According to data analytics, my app is the number one driver of mixed marriages worldwide, pairing people across borders, continents, nations, and tribes. Across class, race, ethnicity, religion, and foot-paring, tale-spinning, food-scrounging expertise. All those happy endings make perfect sense to me. Why wouldn’t one open the door with hope in one’s heart to a package sent with love?
Ted and Aviva helped Yu go to college. They decided they wanted to travel more and study a foreign language, so they took night classes at City College to try to learn Mandarin. Aviva gave up but Ted stuck with it, though his accent is really bad. They’ve been to every country in Western Europe plus Israel, Peru, and Japan. Every few years, Ted and I reunite in Kunming and I take him to the lake where his father rowed as a boy.
Henry settled at Beit Hayeladim, where he still lives. He needs extra help these days and hired one Chinese lady caregiver after another until, finally, a relative of Yu’s from a village west of here signed up for the job. She’s working on Henry to bring her whole family over. She’d better hurry up; he’s almost a hundred.
Henry held on to the house for several years. He couldn’t bring himself to sell it to a stranger, so he rented it out instead. A few years after the app started making a profit, Eddie and Paloma insisted over Deng’s objection that I be paid a starter’s fee. With the money I received, I helped Ted and Aviva buy the saltbox from Henry, and so I became, like countless of my countrymen, a holder of real estate too expensive for most Americans to own. Yu and her daughter, Ruth, live in the house at present. They have a dog, a little black-and-white mutt with a mark on his right ear who showed up one day on their doorstep. I like to think he’s Crouder’s bastard sponging at the old family home.
My wife, Sarafina, and I live in Mengzi, and we have a beautiful six-year-old daughter. Sarafina is teaching her to speak Swahili, and I’m teaching her English. We’re both on the faculty at Honghe University, where I went to college. My subject is history—the Boxer Rebellion to the present, with a unit in Miss Chips’s honor on western interventions, good and bad. My country’s past and present also has its good and bad, for better and for worse, which is a barter made by everyone who calls a country “home.”
Sarafina teaches mechanical engineering. We met when she hand-delivered a package to me that Lisbet sent from Nairobi, a guitar she bought as a present for me at the Maasai Market. So I guess you could say that Lisbet found me love.
The aunties disapprove of us. The feeling is mutual.
My wife and daughter like to visit by laptop with Aviva, Yu, and Ruth. They chat about school and work and the films they’ve seen, and how Henry is doing. Aviva has decided that when the time comes, Sarafina and I must send our daughter to the U.S. for college. “We have a whole house waiting for her,” Aviva says. “There’s room for her parents too.”
And what, you ask, of Father? Did he have chapters left in him yet? He went home and found a job and a new café where he likes to sit and visit with friends, and though I see him take delight in watching the scene around him and hear him frequently remark on a grandmother hurrying with a child on her back, or a lad proudly walking on legs too short to strut, or a bus driver’s colorful cursing, he’s never put those notes together to tell a whole story again. Eventually, he took an interest in various neighborhood ladies. He lives with one now, a loud-mouthed woman, nothing like Mother was, but Father is happy enough.
Sometimes, when he’s alone, I visit him in Gejiu, and he sits on the bed, eyes closed, his back to the wall, and asks me to tell him a story. I do this for him as Mother once did for me. I’ve learned a lot of the old folktales from books I found in the library. He likes to cheer for improbable heroes and laugh at high officials outwitted by clever old men. But when he’s in a melancholy mood, he asks for the story of the fisherman in the Peach Blossom Forest.
“Not that one,” I say. “It has a sad ending. The fisherman never finds his way back to the forest.”
“Your mother liked the ending,” Father tells me, “because the fisherman went home.”
And I go home after that and see my daughter into bed, and after she’s arranged her pillows and had her drink of water, I stretch out on the floor to tell her a story about a girl on an adventure, an adventure always changing, in a land across the sea. It’s not easy to please her, and that pleases me, for she never wants the same story twice.
Zheng Xue Li
Mengzi, Yunnan Province
With translation (“The Story of the Peach Blossom Forest”) by
Leo Choy Hazan
Los Angeles, California
Acknowledgments
THANK YOU TO MY dear brothers, Philip Y. Ma and the late Christopher Y. Ma, who reached out across years of silence to seek the family lost to us. You brought our father comfort.
Thank you to Sanford, Eliza, Hannah, Emily, and Zachary, who sustained me throughout. Wei Wei time is the best time.
I’m deeply grateful to my agent, Stacy Testa, for the utmost care and commitment. Thanks and best wishes to Geri Thoma and the Writers House team.
I bounced high with happiness on the day this book found a home at Counterpoint Press, whose contributions to literature I’ve long admired. I’ve stayed aloft ever since, thanks to the expert guidance of Dan Smetanka and Dan López; the work of Laura Berry, Barrett Briske, Nicole Caputo, Wah-Ming Chang, Rachel Fershleiser, Megan Fishmann, and colleagues; and the wonderful cover art by Na Kim.
Thanks also to:
Bora Lee Reed, Peter Fish, Natalie Baszile, and Allison Hoover Bartlett for your generosity and friendship.
Margaret Carter, Diane Cash, Elisa Clowes, John Gutierrez, Tony Stayner, Kyra Subbotin, and Misha Weidman for books, love, and more books.
Liz Nichols, storyteller.
Robert Eu, Mrs. Norma Halteh, Catherine Hartman of City College of San Francisco, Karen Levi, Teresa Pantaleo, Mark Subbotin, Chanan Tigay, and David Yang for supplying facts. The quote from Assemblyman Hector De La Torre was reported in the Los Angeles Times, July 27, 2008.
The fabulous Lynn Freed.
The Chinese Historical Society of America and their helpful exhibit “Chinese in the Sunset.”
Andria Lo and Valerie Luu for “Chinatown Pretty.”
Bill Rauch, Stan Lai, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for introducing me to the legend of the Peach Blossom Forest. When I asked my mother if she ever heard of it, my ignorance amused her. We had great fun finding different retellings of the tale.
The Corporation of Yaddo.
The City of San Francisco, my ever-changing home.
