The Fortunes, page 23
He’d gone to Caltech the following fall (Stanford, his first choice, turned him down; he always fretted about checking the Asian American box amid persistent rumors of admissions quotas). There, as a freshman, he’d first heard the derogatory term banana, meaning yellow on the outside, white on the inside, but he’d secretly welcomed its aptness. As far as he was concerned, his skin had always been something to trip on.
But now he was ashamed that these whites, from Boise and Athens, Knoxville and Reno, knew more about Chinese culture than he did. Being in China gave him the same sense of shame as going to a Chinese restaurant with colleagues who wanted him to tell them “what’s good.” He’d actually blushed when people on the trip had deferred to him and he’d had to explain that he didn’t speak Chinese.
“And you’ve never been to China before?” they ask him at least once a day, as if in amazement, as if waiting for him to change his story. (That’s right, slapping his forehead, how could I forget? I’m the Manchurian candidate.)
These decent, kindly people remind him of why he hates American Buddhists, could never become one. He couldn’t stand the thought of having some white person teach it to him. It’s the same reason he’s never learned martial arts. (“Gertie’s going to learn gung fu,” Alice says. “She has to be able to stand up to bullies.” But in John’s memory the bullies were the ones who knew kung fu.) As a child he’d hated losing at Chinese checkers too.
John’s list of things you couldn’t do if you were Asian American: play ping-pong, play piano, wear glasses (he had saved up for Lasik the summer of his junior year), wear a camera round your neck, ride a bike, drive an import, grow a mustache (or, if female, streak your hair), wear a sweatband, drink beer, ace tests, sing karaoke (though deep down he’d always dreamed of singing the old Johnny Rivers number “Secret Agent Man” as “Secret Asian Man,” but then, wasn’t that every Asian American’s dream, to sing karaoke and somehow still look cool?). He’d actually emailed this list to his old friend Ken a few years back, when they’d briefly reconnected after John’s book came out. Ken—now going by Kensuke—was working for an Asian American social media startup out of Palo Alto: Yello! Maybe that’s why he no longer had a sense of humor. “But if you reject every stereotype,” he’d written back, “what do you have in common with other Asians?”
And now John wants to scandalize these well-meaning souls on the tour by telling them how much he loves chop suey, General Tso’s chicken, and all those other fake Chinese dishes. Takeout, after all, was the only Chinese food he’d known growing up (his father had taught his mother simple Western dishes, but she didn’t cook Chinese, her family having always had servants to cook for them). It was his comfort food, and he never failed to miss it when he walked into authentic Chinese restaurants. His favorite meal on the trip had been on a flight, the tinfoil container reminding him of takeout. He even loved fortune cookies, the stupider and more ungrammatical the better. (Recent plants will work out fine; Something long desired is about to happy. “You only like the ones that can’t come true,” Nola scolded him. “But that’s why you add in bed to the end,” he reminded her.) He wants to tell them that when he was a kid Kung Fu was his favorite show, even with white David Carradine in the lead (even after he knew that Bruce Lee had been passed over for the role because of his accent). And why not? he’d once fumed at a dinner with college friends. The character was supposed to be half white, after all. He was on a quest to find his white stepbrother, for crying out loud. But all anyone remembered was the blind monk calling him “Glasshopper.” (Grasshopper, grasshopper, grasshopper, John had muttered under his breath.) Kids had whispered it whenever a teacher called on him in class, cracking up at their desks, and still he loved the show. The character spoke to him, and it infuriated John to have to be ashamed of that, to have his white friends question his authenticity. Whatever I am is authentically me, isn’t it? he wanted to shout. But he wasn’t always sure.
Once when he’d asked Napoleon if they might see Peking Man—that shared ancestor—someone had piped up, “Beijing man.” The site was too far from the city, Napoleon explained apologetically, and besides, the actual bones were missing, lost or stolen during the evacuation before the Japanese invasion. At least, to John’s immoderate satisfaction, according to his guidebook Peking Man and Peking duck still went by their old romanized names.
“They don’t mean anything by it,” Nola had tried to tell him the night before, after yet another group discussion of the importance of Chinese culture.
Jeannine has been taking Chinese cooking classes. I want her to know what it really tastes like, without the MSG. Eric and Scott have already found a Chinese tutor in San Francisco. Alice is applying for a TESL job in Shanghai—she wants to come back and live in China with her daughter. I want it to be real for her. “And we’re all going to keep the babies in traditional split pants rather than diapers, right?” John asks to shut them up. It’s like they’re wrestling over a lazy Susan, everyone else spinning it one way, he the other.
“They make me feel like there’s something wrong with me, with the way I was brought up,” he told Nola.
“There’s something wrong with the way we were all brought up,” she said. “If you believe the parenting books. None of us are going to parent like our parents.”
“Thanks for the sympathy.”
“Come on, John! Maybe you should write about it if you care so much. At least it’d be . . .”
“What?” He glared at her.
“I don’t know! Real.”
“It’d be real if I wrote about feeling inauthentic?”
“Honest, then.”
He thought about wounding her. And what about you? What are you writing? “Nothing” has been the answer for so long that he’s long stopped asking, but now he suspects she’s started again in secret, since the abortion, and he realizes he’s scared of what she might answer.
John hesitates in the lobby. He’s not set foot outside the hotel alone. He has some premonition, some fear that if he does, he’ll never come back, that he’ll disappear into the crowd. It’s ridiculous, but he remembers a story about some uncle who’d returned to China from Singapore on a visit as a child—it must have been in the thirties—and almost been kidnapped. John can’t recall the details; probably there weren’t any. The uncle would have been a small boy at the time (Of course, no one would kidnap a girl, he’d assured his daughter, John’s cousin); perhaps he just imagined it. And yet there it is, some irrational fear, the same anxiety that has kept John away all these years. It’s probably fueled by his own childhood images of China: crowds in Mao suits waving Little Red Books. Back then the Communist countries—China, the Soviet Union—seemed like prisons for their citizens. He went to a Halloween party once as the Tank Man, the unknown and likely disappeared fellow who’d faced down the tanks in Tiananmen Square. White shirt, black pants, laden with plastic bags in each hand. No one got it. The most iconic Chinese figure of the decade, and no one recognized him. The nearest anyone guessed was “Delivery guy?” Several of his friends seemed puzzled that he’d come as another Chinese, as if it weren’t a costume.
Mostly, though, there’s some essential math at play here. How do you expect to take one of theirs without them taking one of yours? Gotcha! indeed.
He’s relieved when he sees the hotel bar still open, hurries into its hushed, shadowy embrace.
As much as he resents the other adopters, he knows they resent him too.
Bev suggested as much, albeit wistfully, when she confided in him over dinner one night, “Oh, how I envy you, John, and little Mei Mei. You’ll be able to take her out to the park, and parties, the mall, and not have everyone know she’s adopted. Even if you and Nola are together, people will think the little one is your own flesh and blood. That’ll make a difference, I reckon.”
(Bev told him another time that Lily loved helping out around the home. “Her favorite thing when she first came home with us was folding laundry. Imagine! My little Chinese laundry, I call her!” She laughed, and then covered her mouth as if to catch the words.)
John had nodded along with others around the table, and remembering it now, he finally grasps that all their study of things Chinese—all their acquisitions of scrolls and knickknacks (Eric and Scott have arranged for a rosewood dresser to be shipped to them in Seattle for their daughter’s room), which make him think of pet supplies to furnish a habitat—is a compensation for what he has: looking the part. And they know it too, and resent him for how easily it comes. In particular, he’s felt it when people ask how long the process has been for him and Nola.
Nine months, Nola says, proud of the symmetry. But everyone else has been waiting a year, eighteen months, two years in one case. “Serendipity, I guess,” Nola says, and it may be—a fluke of timing—but he knows the others suspect they got special treatment because he’s Chinese.
The only couple less liked on the tour are Norman and Amanda. They’re “preferential adopters,” as they’re quick to point out. “We could have kids of our own,” Amanda begins. “But why bring another life onto this overcrowded planet?” Norman finishes for her. It makes a kind of sense—John doesn’t disagree with them on the issue of overpopulation—and yet Norman’s righteousness grates. Other couples on the trip, after all, have tried very hard, gone to extreme lengths, to bring another life onto the planet. “It’s egotism, plain and simple,” Norman said the first night, “to want to perpetuate our own genes, and suicidal on a planetary, species-wide level.”
“Egotism indeed!” Nola fumed later in their room.
“Ignore him,” John counseled (the man has a receding hairline and a ponytail). But he can’t take his own advice. Norman fascinates him. Their fate, after all, is his choice, his principle.
“You share the Chinese government’s position on population then, the one-child policy?” he asked one morning over breakfast (toast for John, rice porridge for Norman), and Norman nodded sagely. “A regrettable necessity.” But this is a tricky response. They—their group as a whole—are beneficiaries, indirectly, of the policy, even if they mostly deplore it. Chinese families who can have only one child get rid of their girls—sometimes to orphanages, but sometimes by killing them, aborting them, or abandoning them after birth. The policy is in large part why they’re here, these Westerners, yet it’s also a source of heartbreak, broken homes and families. They are already practicing what they will tell the children they haven’t even received yet when they ask about their biological parents. For the sake of the kids, they don’t want to make these shadowy figures into villains (you can’t tell them they didn’t love them or didn’t want them, you have to say that they couldn’t keep them, the adoption books advise). Much easier to make the law the villain, the government. If they’re saving these children from something, it’s from the consequences of this law, and yet here they are, about to gain from it.
It’s a moral knot, but one that in Norman’s big hands seems to unravel, and the rest of them envy him this bluff confidence more than anything.
But John can’t let it lie. For him, the law isn’t the problem per se. The problem is that Chinese families want boys, a cultural phenomenon (albeit one hardly unique to the Chinese).
“But if you make Chinese culture the bad guy,” Nola observed back in their room—Norman having gone off exploring with Amanda—“you run the risk of alienating the girls from their heritage and potentially damaging their self-image.”
“But why,” John wanted to know, “should they have to maintain any connection with a culture that devalues them and has cast them out? Because they look Chinese is why,” he answered his own question. “Because we know they will look different and be treated as if they’re different in our society. We’re giving them something to fall back on when they’re discriminated against.”
“Oh, come on,” Nola hissed. “It’s not that bad.” (Nola, who had felt the need to warn her mother before she met John that he was half Chinese.)
“Really? You think if we were all in Romania now we’d be talking about keeping our kids connected to Romanian culture?” (Are you sure he isn’t black? her mother replied.)
They’d fought in fierce whispers, not wanting anyone to hear them through the walls, the way they’d have sex if they ever had sex.
The whole “culture” thing, for John, is a defense against racism, an anticipation of it, but also perhaps in some obscure way a perpetuation of it. “If even their parents see them as other, what hope do these babies have of assimilating?”
“If you believe that,” Nola wailed, “why are we even here? If you had such a shitty childhood, why are we doing this?”
John wonders himself. Norman, he knows, would call this kind of thinking very Western. “The Chinese,” he has pointed out, “are matter-of-fact about adoption. They see it as practical . . . on the parents’ part. We need children to look after us in our old age.” He and Amanda laughed as if they couldn’t imagine ever growing old.
“What do you think about all this?” John asked Napoleon over lunch one day. They’d just watched the noodles they were eating being made—oohing and aahing at the show as if at a magic act, the noodles appearing from the twisted, stretched dough as if by sleight of hand—but now they paused in their slurping. Napoleon grinned at them. “Is good! Good for babies, good for mommies and daddies. Also more Chinese girls in America now, for Chinese American boys for marry.”
Such guileless, sunny chauvinism! It made John laugh, but only him.
“No offense, Miss Nola,” Napoleon said, small head bobbing birdlike on her slender neck. “You so ho leng, beautiful. Skin like white jade.”
Nola gave her bright, tight smile. “I don’t think John ever even dated a Chinese.”
“What? Really!” they asked. “Never?” And now, John thought, they were calling him racist, offended on behalf of their not-yet, not-quite daughters. “They were always going with white boys,” he said with a sour smile. “Aren’t all our desires racist in one way or another?”
They paused to watch the cook demonstrating how to make shaved noodles, slicing them off a long loaf of dough and flipping them acrobatically into the boiling water.
“Besides,” Norman said, changing the subject magisterially, “all this thinking is very twentieth-century. The pendulum is swinging back. Already boys outnumber girls in Chinese schools. Within a couple of decades the gender imbalance could be as much as twenty percent. What will all those boys do when it comes time to marry?” Eric and Scott exchanged a glance. “Maybe the girls will finally be valued for their scarcity.”
The little boys they’ve seen on the streets, in parks and pavilions, are often only children and plump (or just bundled up), and Jeannine has remarked that the little fatties, round as the blown-sugar animals they clutch, will be lucky to find wives. But John is an only child and was husky as a kid, and he finds himself feeling oddly sympathetic to the piggy-eyed, pink-cheeked brats.
“Do you know what you’re going to have?” Norman asked Napoleon. Just like that, John marveled.
She shook her head.
“What are you and your husband hoping for?” Norman pressed, and she blushed.
“Give her a break, Norm,” John said, which was enough to stop the questioning. Norman doesn’t like being called Norm. Norm is the name of a fat man in a bar. Norman is whippet-thin, tall, a cyclist. John pictures him all in Lycra, skinny and tubular as his bike frame. Behind his back the others call him “Normal.” When it thundered one evening they called it a “dark and normy night.” John is responsible for most, if not all, of these lines.
One consequence of the gender imbalance looming in China, John recalls in the bar, is the likelihood of increased prostitution. It’s already happening, if the hotel is anything to go by. After dinner, the long rosewood bar was lined with young women. In Beijing they snaked through the lobby in a loose line, as if on the catwalk at a fashion show—“knockouts in knockoffs,” as Norman put it—heels clicking on the marble floors like beads on an abacus. Now, even though the bar is almost empty, the girls at work somewhere in the hotel, their absence seems to fill it. He watches one of the stragglers close her phone with a snap, sashay toward the elevators in her mini-cheongsam, her stilettos lean as chopsticks. There’s a single girl with a glossy bob left at the end of the bar. He watches her dial, hang up, dial again. He wonders if she was the one who called him. He wonders if he was her first call of the night.
She has set her phone down to take a drink, exchange a few words with the bow-tied bartender. John’s curious if she’ll approach him, feels obscurely rejected that she’s barely cast a glance in his direction. He’s used to a kind of sexual invisibility in the U.S., but here he’s affronted.
