Repeat After Me Read online

  Da Ge knocked, and I opened the door; he was wearing a black jacket and his shiny shoes. He reminded me of my older brother Benj as a teenager, stuffed into dress clothes, buttoned up and miserable at choral cavalcades or bar mitzvahs. The tube in Da Ge’s hands was almost three feet long, extending past his shoulder and down to his knee. His hands looked knotted on the sides of it. He glanced at the helmet and then at me.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “To see you,” he said.

  I contemplated what a professional response would be, and settled on, “Uh, you can see me in class.”

  “That’s not you,” he said.

  This was weird enough to make me a little nervous. He was still standing in the hallway. I didn’t know whether to invite him in. His voice sped up.

  “Anyway, it’s just to bring you this and say sorry for I miss so many class.” He handed me the tube gingerly. I set the helmet down, but he didn’t take it.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s a language. You’re interested in this.”

  “A language?”

  He darkened. “A thing of language. Here,” he said.

  He reached into the hallway and took the tube back. It occurred to me that he would hit me with it, but once he didn’t, I couldn’t believe I’d thought it. Inevitability is like that. Once things happen the way they happen, there’s no chance anymore that they could have happened any other way. And once there’s no chance anymore, there was never any chance. His feet were outside the door. Setting the bottom of the tube on the floor in front of him, he pried the top off and laid the thing down, forcing me to take a step back. Then he crouched down and his shoulder blades spread out over his knees. He slid a scroll out slowly and stood up as he unraveled it. H-e-s i-n l-o-v-e w-i-t-h m-e spelled itself out on my right hand, fitting neatly.

  The scroll was longer than Da Ge was tall; it stretched out past his feet on the floor between us. It was made of rough cream-colored fabric and had a huge Chinese character at its center. Circling that character were dozens of little ones.

  “It’s dragons,” he said. “Ninety-nine of that word and one other.”

  I was quiet.

  “It’s for you,” he said.

  “Um,” I said, “it’s amazing. I mean, thank you. Maybe we should, um—”

  I bent down to lift the bottom half of the scroll from the floor and felt his eyes on my back as I did it. I rose again, and he was holding his two corners and looking at me. When our eyes met, I imagined we were folding sheets together. We would move into the center, fold over each other, pull back out, and fold again. Then one of us would take the remaining square of a sheet and finish the project. I’d probably be the one, I thought. He would watch. We lifted the dragon scroll onto the table, and I spread it like a cloth.

  “It’s okay for you,” he said when I finished, and then he turned to go. “It’s a thing belonged to my mother. That old kind of writing . . .” He shrugged.

  I waited.

  “Well,” he said, noncommittal now, perhaps embarrassed. “It’s old. Then, China have hope.”

  “And now?”

  “Today they take the army out of the city. Now your old president Nixon are there. Used to be he visit happily in the 1970. Maybe because he is there, so there are no more soldier on the corners. Maybe he will talk to the leaders. But Chinese people do not get to talk this story. Only leaders.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” I said.

  “The time of thing getting better, moving up, moving forward—that hope time is over,” he clarified. “For me, New York is the final place. But here I am stranger.”

  He turned to the scroll. “Those characters—it’s different way to write ‘dragon.’”

  “You said there was one other one. What is it?” I hoped for something, but couldn’t have put my finger on what it was.

  “Long life,” he said. His voice didn’t move over the words; they came out flat, painted on. I spelled them out. Lo-n-g l-i-f-e, two extra fingers. N-o l-o-n-g l-i-f-e, I tried. Or “Yes, very,” and it fit, too. Y-e-s, v-e-r-y l-o-n-g l-i-f-e.

  He walked to the door, which I now regretted having left open.

  “Wait, Da Ge?”

  “Yeah?”

  I wanted to know what he meant, for him to come back in and tell me something, to say or do something. I wanted to ask where he’d gotten the scar on his face, why he was in the city with his mother’s dragon scroll in my apartment. I wanted him to stay.

  “Um. Thanks again for the—”

  “It’s nothing,” he said, walking to the elevator.

  “Wait, Da Ge?”

  He turned again, patient. “Yeah?”

  I felt the blood rushing into my limbs. “I read your assignment.”

  “What?”

  “The essay about your birth.”

  He smiled. “It’s great event for China,” he said.

  “What was Beijing like then? I mean, when it was still hopeful.”

  He moved back toward my doorway for a minute, looking me over as if to determine whether I could be serious. Then he shrugged. The elevator arrived.

  “1966?” he asked.

  “Is that when you were born?”

  “It’s the Cultural Revolution begin,” he said. “People are suffer then.” He thought for a moment, perhaps imagining my perspective, remembering he was talking to an American girl. “Maybe for you China is like photograph with no color. Mao is leader before your McDonalds makes the promise to arrive. When I am born in Beijing, it is totally different place. I think you cannot imagine.” The elevator left.

  “My McDonalds?”

  “This McDonalds of your country. Very tasty.”

  “Is there a McDonald’s in China?”

  “Next year it will arrive like VIP American guest who come to China.”

  “An American VIP guest?”

  “All American who come to China are VIP. Like Nixon. They come like world police and tell China—okay do this, not okay do that.” He moved back toward the elevator, pushed the button again.

  “Does China listen?”

  “Of course China like to pai the ma pi of America, your beautiful country.”

  “Pay the what?”

  “Pat the ass of a horse.”

  “China likes to pat the ass of an American horse?”

  When he laughed, his missing tooth looked like a Halloween costume. I wanted to put my fingers in his mouth. But he left. He was still laughing when he turned back to look at me, then slid into the elevator out of sight. The doors closed, and he was gone, swallowed and digested by my building. I hung the dragons in my hallway. Now, as I write this, they’re in my Beijing bedroom, where Da Ge has never been and will never be. Where I’m more of an American than I ever was in New York, but less of a VIP guest than a Chinese horse-ass patter.

  The day after Da Ge brought me the dragon scroll, Xiao Wang arrived at school early and stood next to my desk.

  “Do you have a question for me?” I asked her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “Do you like to come to my grandmother’s house for dinner with me one night?”

  “I would love that,” I told her, honestly. “When?”

  “Maybe tonight,” she said.

  “Really? Tonight? Of course. Perfect.”

  “We can go together after class.”

  “At three-thirty? Isn’t that early?”

  “Maybe my grandmother like to eat quite early.”

  After class, Xiao Wang took my arm and held it the entire way to her grandmother’s, as if I had never left Embassy alone. Or taken the subway. She hosted me from the moment she invited me until I left her grandmother’s apartment five hours later, in a string of polite gestures I found both bizarre and endearing. On the train that afternoon, Xiao Wang gave me a nervous look.

  “Maybe I should tell you about my grandmother.”

  “I would like that,” I said.

  “My grandmother is very ol
d lady. How do you say, ancient?”

  “You can say ‘ancient,’ but probably not in front of her,” I suggested.

  “She come from China many years ago. She is seventy-eight now, but she still don’t, you know, used to America.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “So sometime she say the rude thing about American. I hope it’s okay for you.”

  “It’s definitely okay for me.”

  “Also, maybe the food she make is too hot.”

  “It should be fine. I’m sure it will be delicious.”

  “Maybe she believe American are rich and lazy. Sometimes fat, too.”

  “She’s not wrong.”

  “Well, you’re not so fat.”

  “Thank you.”

  Chinatown was all Chinese signs, garlic, electronics, suitcases, pajamas, “I Love New York” souvenirs, and people rushing up and down, horizontal on sidewalks, vertical in building elevators and stairwells. Xiao Wang led me through the crowds to her Grandmother’s apartment, a sixth-floor walk-up next to a flophouse called the Eternity Hotel. The building was cramped and dingy; hot noise from the hotel spilled into the windows. Each of the six flights we climbed had twelve stairs. At the top, Xiao Wang unlocked a door marked 6-C. Xiao Wang’s grandmother padded over to greet us. She was wearing a cotton jacket and cloth shoes. Her features were soft with age but suggested a former birdlike clarity. She smiled and said something in Chinese.

  “Welcome you warmly to our house,” said Xiao Wang.

  “Thank you.” I looked around. Pipes hung low across the ceiling, which had intricate maps of water damage and looked like it might sag and fall through its own cracks. There was a gray-and-blue-flecked fold-out couch, a wicker rocking chair, a twelve-inch television, and several folding chairs around a plastic table. To the right was a kitchen that couldn’t have held more than one person at a time. A metal hood fanned out over the stove. To the left was a bedroom with a dresser and double bed visible through the open door. The bed appeared to have been made to military standards. I imagined bouncing coins on its quilt.

  Xiao Wang’s grandmother gestured toward the couch and said something else. I nodded as she spoke, unsure of whether to look at her or Xiao Wang, when Xiao Wang began translating.

  “Please sit,” Xiao Wang said, so I perched myself awkwardly on a folding chair. “My Nai Nai say we are grateful for the teaching English. She say I often talk about the class and that I like it. She do not say that when I come home, I often give her the lesson of that day, so she can feel like to be a part of this class I take.”

  “I’m so glad,” I said. I wondered if I should offer to come by and tutor the old woman, and I thought that I would like to. But maybe she and Xiao Wang cherished the recycled lessons. “I would be happy to help in any way I can.”

  “Thank you,” said Xiao Wang. She translated for her grandmother and then told me, “You can call her Nai Nai, which mean grandmother in Chinese.”

  “Great,” I said, “Thank you.”

  Then, to my astonishment, Nai Nai sprang up from the rocking chair like an action hero and set about putting nine plastic plates on the round table. Xiao Wang and I stood and tried to help, but she swatted us away. I thought of my mother’s mother, my Grandma Leah, setting her table until she died at eighty-seven, fifteen years after losing my grandfather. Her heavy silver forks curled up at the ends like flowers. She left those and three strands of pearls to me, treasures boxed up in my mother’s apartment.

  “We should sit at the table,” Xiao Wang instructed.

  I examined the dishes: dumplings, squares of tofu in a reddish-brown sauce, wilted green vegetables, bean sprouts, scrambled eggs and tomatoes, a drizzled stack of chicken strips, spareribs, cellophane noodles tossed with cucumber and carrot, cabbage in hot red oil, fried peanuts, a whole fish, and a bowl of soup with eggs floating in it, so thin they looked like tissue or leaves. Nai Nai handed Xiao Wang and me each a bowl of rice and a set of chopsticks. I imagined stabbing each individual piece of food with my chopsticks, revealing myself as the savage I was. Xiao Wang, always a hawk for social nuance and the smallest hint of anyone else’s discomfort, quietly got me a fork.

  “No, no, it’s okay. I’ll use these,” I said. I had used chopsticks many times, of course, but never under what I thought might be the scrutiny of Chinese chefs. “When in Rome,” I said, stupidly. And then, “We have this saying—When in Rome, do as the Romans do.’”

  Xiao Wang broke into a polite smile, pretending she had understood.

  “This food looks amazing,” I said. She told her grandmother.

  “No, no, it’s nothing,” Nai Nai said, via Xiao Wang’s translation. “Eat more! Eat more!” She went to get tea and then stood over us, refilling our teacups every time we took single sips, and heaping more meat onto our plates. It was only when we had stuffed ourselves to the point of sickness that she took a modest helping of the tofu dish and picked at it delicately.

  I’ve noticed that old people in China are more vibrant than in the West. Every street corner in Beijing has a gym for babies and their grandparents, and everywhere you go, old people are hugging trees, stretching their legs, ballroom dancing, and skiing on stationary cross-country machines. Now that I live in Nai Nai’s country, I often wonder what her old age would have looked like here. She would have exercised with friends in the parks and been surrounded by people she knew, who spoke her language, vendors selling the ingredients she wanted to buy. Was she breathless with loneliness in America? My grandma was faint with it after my grandfather died; she stayed above water by coming to my mother’s four nights a week, by continuing to host Passover until it was physically impossible (at which point my mother and her sister did the Seder according to my grandmother’s instructions at my grandmother’s apartment). What would my grandmother have done in China? Or anywhere without us?

  Xiao Wang says no matter what Nai Nai felt about her own life in the United States, she would have done anything to secure citizenship for Xiao Wang’s future children. She believed it was worth it, it being the diminished state of immigrants’ lives—in honor of the expanded possibilities their sacrifice created for future generations. It’s everywhere in New York, this sacrifice: in every biologist delivering fast food, teacher giving manicures, artist working as a busboy.

  “I miss the river,” was all Nai Nai would allow when I asked that first night if she felt homesick. “We swam in the river, naked to our feet.”

  “What river?” I asked Xiao Wang, who was translating.

  “The Mekong,” Xiao Wang said. “Maybe she miss the nature life. Maybe for her, New York too commercial. In New York River, no children can swim.” She turned to Nai Nai and repeated this in Chinese. Nai Nai nodded vigorously.

  I thought the Mekong must be pure, unlike the Hudson, and didn’t want to tell Xiao Wang and Nai Nai that the Columbia rowing team had recently spotted a floating corpse in the Hudson. I said nothing.

  The China they described sounded inviting, perhaps complicated with the problems and secret histories of other people, but free of mine. I wanted to go. I could leave New York forever, I thought, and swim in the Mekong, naked to my feet, whatever that meant. Now of course I realize that there’s nothing pure about the Mekong; kids just swim in the pollution there.

  “You are from New York?” Nai Nai asked me, via Xiao Wang. “It’s your home?”

  “I am from here, yes.” My mother lived in a penthouse apartment on 93rd and Riverside, a place my grandparents had bought her and my father in 1966. She had jade plants on the roof deck and a blue velvet couch in the living room, where I used to sit reading for so many hours straight they’d come to check if I was breathing. I remembered the energy of the house before my father left. How it went from chaos to silence. My mom, brittle on the blue couch.

  “Nai Nai want to know do you live—how do you say—with your family at home?” Xiao Wang asked. I wondered if I emitted a kind of unhappiness siren.

  “I h
ave my own apartment now,” I said, “but I go to my mom’s a lot.”

  “Isn’t that lonely? Don’t you wish you live at home with your mother?” Nai Nai asked. Xiao Wang translated and then waited for my response.

  “It’s not so much wanting to go home,” I said, “but wanting to go back in time.” Then, embarrassed at having said so much and concerned that they hadn’t understood, I chattered on, “Back in time, you know, back to an earlier time, backwards.”

  Xiao Wang nodded. “Your family is okay?” she asked.

  I told her no, not really, and when she waited, I said my father had left my mother. She stopped translating, and Nai Nai watched us, rocking slower and slower. I couldn’t tell if she was increasingly attentive or drowsy.

  “When?”

  “When I was seventeen,” I said.

  “Oh! It’s quite recent.”

  “Well, five years ago.”

  “What is problem?” Xiao Wang asked.

  I shrugged and blushed. Xiao Wang turned to Nai Nai to fill her in.

  “Nai Nai say maybe Americans feel—how do you say—casual—about end of the marriage,” Xiao Wang said.

  “Divorce,” I said. “But I’m not sure about that. I think maybe one of them was having an affair.”

  I stopped short of the truth, which is that my father fell in love with a colleague when I was sixteen. I actually saw them together on 111th and Amsterdam, as if in a tacky movie. I was on my way to meet Julia at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. When I had walked half a block past 110th, I spotted my father across the street in front of the cathedral where three peacocks live. My hand moved to wave, but I stopped it and my voice. My father? He had his hands on the hips of a woman in a straight skirt and brown leather boots. I stared, thought those high boots do not belong to my mother, moved my eyes to the woman’s neck and face, which was turned up laughing toward my dad. And I ran. It took me a year to get the words out of my throat to tell my mother. And as soon as I did, my dad left us and married the laughing woman instead.