Repeat After Me Read online

  Da Ge poured us both more water and chewed quietly. I didn’t know why he had told me that story or what to say. Was he going to burn my house down?

  “China is not like New York,” he said. “Maybe for some people, like Xiao Wang, it’s difficult to live here. In China are many rules for face. There are rules for eating and drinking and talking.”

  “I think that might be true here, too,” I tried. “And Xiao Wang—”

  “Not the same rules.”

  “What do you mean by rules?”

  “It’s hard to say that in English.”

  “So teach me some Chinese.”

  “Ni hao,” he said, “hello.”

  “Knee how,” I repeated.

  “Good,” he said, “your pronunciation is good.”

  “Maybe you can take me to visit China, in that case,” I joked.

  “I can’t go to China now,” he said, not amused.

  “Oh. Because of Tiananmen?”

  “A lot of reason. I come to America right when China need me, so maybe it’s my—how do you say—fate—I stay here. Anyway, maybe you would have to live in China for many years to understand the logistic.” He smiled.

  “The logistic?”

  “That way of thinking. The Chinese thinking. Like the government.”

  “Is there a way of thinking common to all Chinese?”

  “Common?”

  “Chinese thinking? What does that even mean?”

  “Now you know,” he said, “the Chinese government will rather kill its young generation than lose face.”

  “But that’s not a Chinese way of thinking,” I said. “I mean, you don’t think that way, and you’re Chinese. Xiao Wang doesn’t think that way, and she’s Chinese.”

  “I believe in democracy, so I am different to Xiao Wang and that government.”

  I wondered how well he and Xiao Wang knew each other.

  “Used to be I really believe that democracy can come,” he was saying. “Because I am like my mother; we think if you want something so much it’s enough that that thing maybe can happen. But now I know it’s impossible, and this make me more Chinese.”

  “I doubt cynicism is particular to the Chinese way of thinking,” I said. “There’s very little hope for social justice or change in America, either.”

  “Well,” he said, “even though I hate the government, I will rather die than lose face, like that government. So maybe it is Chinese way of thinking.”

  “You would rather die than lose face? Then you can understand what the government did,” I proposed. I took another serving of his chicken, even though I wasn’t hungry. He watched me chew.

  “China just want to be stability, not to boss and control the rest of the world like America. Maybe the government did that because it feel weak. I can understand, but I can’t be that. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Anyway, now I am foreigner. And every country have a kind of box for foreigner. In New York I live like in that dark box.”

  “But isn’t that just because you don’t feel at home here yet?”

  I considered what it might like to live in a dark box in his hometown. Sadly, it sounded good to me. I imagined going to China with Da Ge, tucking myself into a safe, dark box. It would be like making a fort out of blankets in my parents’ living room, hearing them talking in the dining room, knowing night meant a bath, my dad reading Charlotte’s Web to me again and Narnia to Benj, click of the pink lamp going out.

  “You’ll get used to New York,” I told Da Ge, collecting myself. “Maybe I can help—by teaching you some things?” I put a red pepper in my mouth.

  “It’s not just language,” he said. “If your English is okay, okay, so maybe the box have window.” He laughed a short hard laugh. “But even then you are cleaning clothes or deliver food on a bicycle for twenty years, you still cannot belong.”

  “There must be lots of Chinese students and artists and businesspeople here, too. And lawyers and doctors, I mean—”

  “Sometimes I see clearly,” he interrupted, setting his chopsticks down, “about America. Or maybe my life in America. When my life in China, I am part of that place. I cannot see where China stop—” He chopped his hand down on the table and then lifted it and gestured to himself. “Where China stop and I start.”

  I nodded.

  “But in America,” he continued, “I am not part of it. I can see my life, but maybe I also can’t see anything, don’t know who I am. Who I could be here. If I am American. Do you know my meaning?”

  “I think so,” I said. “I think it might be culture shock. Have you heard of—”

  “In Chinese we have this saying—the players of the game of—how do you say, with king and queen or horse?”

  “Chess?”

  “Right. That players cannot see clearly. Only who stand to the side—the pangguanzhe, watcher of the whole game, can see clearly. Understand?”

  “Of course I do. Your English is beautiful.”

  “Thank you,” he said, but he was humoring me, worried I had missed his point. “But beautiful English not enough. That maybe keep me from being totally Chinese anymore, but it does not make me American. I am in the—how do you say—no place.”

  I thought, me too, let’s keep each other company, let’s run away. His way of talking, interrupting, gave me a jolt of being alive. Somewhere in between what he said and what I understood was a place I wished to inhabit. I thought I wanted to understand him. But in fact, what I wanted was to feel whatever it was he felt. Instead of what I felt.

  When he excused himself to go outside and smoke, I worried that he might leave without warning me, as he had arrived. But after a few minutes, he came back in and helped with the dishes in my small kitchen. We didn’t speak; he cleared the table and I washed, both of us working quickly. The sounds reminded me of my parents’ apartment, and I closed my eyes, clink of dishes in the sink, slip of Ivory soap on my fingers.

  Da Ge was standing so close to me that I could hear him breathe. He began humming something softly, a song I had never heard, but liked. I thought we knew each other well, after our dinner together, even that we were alike in some way I couldn’t define. I wanted him to stay, to watch a movie, keep talking, sing whatever song it was out loud, take off our clothes, have sex, make breakfast in the morning. I was hunting for words or a way to be brave when he straightened up and said, “Thank you for dinner.”

  “No,” I said, “thank you. It was really nice to—I was—do you—”

  “I see you soon in class,” he said. “I have some business. I should go.”

  Then he was gone. I stood in the hallway, wondering what “business” he meant, whether he had heard my invitation and turned it down, or whether I hadn’t made it, before turning back to the dragons and longevity on my wall. I touched the soft paper edge of his scroll, felt the two hours we’d just spent underneath me like something to sleep on. My apartment smelled better than it ever had before, alive, beloved, as if a family lived there.

  During my wretched, failed senior year in college, Adam made me see a shrink. I thought I was happy, but Adam suspected otherwise. He was a good reader. And he spent more time with me than anyone else did, so he realized I was in trouble before it became undeniable all around. As much as my particular weirdnesses charmed Adam, he worried, too. He expressed surprise, for example, that I’d never been to a therapist, what with the divorce being my fault and the barely speaking ever again to my dad or the brother I adored.

  My brother, Benj Mitchell, with his long eyelashes and huge capacity for empathy, was away at Berkeley when our father left. Benj was so instantly forgiving that my mother and I had trouble forgiving him, although she would never put it that way. Maybe it was easier for Benj because he didn’t have to live at home when it happened. He would have been reading in People’s Park in sandals, his hair a little bit too long and curling down around his ears while my mom and I were watching movers take half our fam
ily’s books and tools and pottery to a brick box house next to a fake lake in New Jersey. He didn’t see our mom on the blue couch for six months, thinking. He didn’t see her drift around the kitchen like a wisp of dust. He wasn’t up at night with the two of us, each in her own room, each pretending not to know the other was awake. Benj got to pack his sweet mind with useful facts, apply to law school, and get accepted. That’s why he could stand to stay with our father and his new mistress-wife in their Jersey colonial during vacations from Berkeley. That’s why he told me that parents are worth forgiving, no matter what they do, because they’re yours and you must love them anyway. What if they don’t forgive you, I asked Benj. He said they always do.

  I used to stalk my father and his wife drive-by style, watching her tulips and daffodils bloom in spring and wither in the summers when they were away. I didn’t know where they went. The first winter after my dad left us, a snowman appeared on their lawn, and I cried in my car, wondering what kid had built it, whether they would have kids. That snowman demonstrated to me that she had a family, people she loved and who loved her. Children who rolled around her yard, making angels. Sometimes I dragged my friend Julia on those drives, and we’d see my father’s windows lit up, and I would speculate about what he must be reading, sitting in a big soft chair. Hawthorne. Melville. Northrop Frye? Now, thousands of safe miles away, I Google him and his wife occasionally—find conferences they natter at, articles they publish on education. I try not to care anymore.

  Back then Adam nagged me enough that I agreed to call a doctor he knew, a guy named Mark Holderstein. Dr. Holderstein was a bit like a fastidious lit critic, in his sweater vest and argyle socks that showed some spindly leg when he crossed his ankle over his knee. He was a carrion man, circling for specifics in whatever he read, the type to descend upon a person and devour dead flesh. After diagnosing it, of course.

  “Do you read books?” I asked.

  “Yes. Why?”

  I didn’t answer. “When you read them,” I said, “do you have lots of preconceived notions before you start about what you’ll find and analyze in them?”

  He smiled. “Is this a metaphor?”

  I tried another line of questioning, equally immature and unproductive. “Before I delve into the deep recesses of my mind, I’m curious how you feel about your patients.”

  “Well,” he said, “my patients are regular people with individual needs and issues. I have specific relationships with each of them.”

  “Do you think they’re stupid and pathetic and weak?”

  He was nonplussed by this. “No.”

  “Do you ever fall in love with your patients?”

  “No,” he said. “But therapy is, in large part, about the relationship between the therapist and the client, so sometimes I spend time with patients discussing the ways they feel about me or our sessions.” He paused. “Why are you here?” he asked gently.

  I looked around the office, noticing it for the first time. A photograph hid the spines of five books, probably self-help, on the shelf. In the picture, his wife had a sporty body and sailboating ponytail. Her smile was sly and squinty in the sun; tan kids grinned from under her rippling arms. I imagined objects not pictured: play equipment in the backyard, the plaid or paisley beds they maybe slept in, shafts of light on plush rugs, lotion, likely Clinique, on her bathroom counter. Somewhere a yacht bobbed, waiting for weekends when he, finally away from the despair of others, was allowed to be happy with his family. I felt a jolt of resentment, as if injected into my arm.

  “My bossy boyfriend thought I needed therapy,” I said.

  Dr. Holderstein nodded. “Did you think so, too?”

  “I don’t know. Relative to what?”

  “Why did you agree to come and see me?”

  “Mainly to get Adam off my back, but I also thought it might be interesting.”

  “I hope it will be. Do you want to tell me about what’s going on in your life?”

  Pouring out your dark secrets to a professional has some of the same allure as having an emotional or online affair. The space between you and the doctor fills with information, and in the flash of your first confession (if it’s true), you’re cheating on the people you’re talking about, back -spacing your lovers into ghosts as soon as your bond with the shrink exceeds your intimacy with them. The doctor becomes your confidant and boyfriend, the new one with whom you analyze and thus disparage the old.

  Maybe that’s why I was so worried about what Dr. Holderstein thought of me. I was consumed by the possibility that he would find me pathetic. Or insane. Anxious to demonstrate a normalcy I couldn’t even have identified, let alone embodied, I talked about Columbia, my classes, Adam. I thought Dr. Holderstein would be dazzled by how normal and together and smart these anecdotes made me. But I chose the wrong details: the pigeon nesting behind the chalkboard instead of my coursework, the blinding white of certain Mondays, Adam’s candle-scented way of speaking. Dr. Holderstein told me he hoped I’d come weekly.

  And I did, for the first semester of my senior year. I enjoyed the habit of our meetings, even when I despised their content. I told him about my Eliot, Joyce, and Pound seminar, about the course called “Riot and Rebellion.” I described counting my letters, which Dr. Holderstein called obsessive-compulsive behavior, a term I liked. He said if it wasn’t getting in the way of my living a productive life, it wasn’t a problem.

  “It makes me feel happy,” I said. Even as I said it, I added “really,” so it would fit: i-t m-a-k-e-s m-e r-e-a-l-l-y h-a-p-p-y. Somewhere deep, a small alarm sounded, suggesting this was not true, even if it fit on twenty fingers.

  I told Dr. Holderstein that Mondays were white, Tuesdays were blue, Wednesdays were yellow, Thursdays brown, and Fridays red. He said people with colors for days have “synesthesia,” and I was less surprised to know he had a word for everything than I was to learn that not everyone had colors for the days. I could not imagine there were those who did have colors, but that theirs differed from mine. I longed to set the record straight.

  In fact, the life in my mind was itself increasingly colorful, cluttered, difficult. When I admitted that I had stopped sleeping, Dr. Holderstein was concerned. I said I didn’t need sleep, and for the first time, he objected forcefully. He threw the word “mania,” onto the desk between us, where it writhed and struggled for air. I said nothing, watched the blue, slippery word, hoped it would suffocate. He said there was the possibility, in someone who was “racing” the way I was, of an “episode.” I was unhappy when he suggested I take some lithium.

  “Why?” I asked. It was, I thought, confirmation that he was judging me after all.

  “It will even you out a bit; you seem hypomanic.”

  “Hippo what?”

  He smiled. “Hypomania is mania without psychosis, but it can sometimes turn into more serious mania, and I just want to make sure you don’t spiral.”

  “You do know that my father cheated on my mother and I saw him and told her about it, and then he never spoke to me again, right?”

  “I know only what you’ve told me.”

  “My brother Benj forgave him. They’re still in touch.”

  “But you and he are not?”

  “You have very good grammar,” I said.

  Dr. Holderstein smiled kindly. “Have you tried to contact him?”

  I nodded.

  “And how has he responded?”

  “He hasn’t.” Every year after my father left, I wrote him a letter. He never wrote back, even though he and my mother continued to speak sometimes about Benj and maybe me and certainly other administrative matters. When I was finishing high school, stunned under the cloud of my parents’ breakup, I predictably considered the whole thing to be my fault. Of course my father didn’t want to have anything to do with me ever again—I had ratted him out, after all. But maybe he just wasn’t an adult, still isn’t. Maybe my mere presence was such a breathtaking reminder of what a villain he’d been that he couldn’t e
ndure it. So he chose ways to blame me, shedding his guilty skin and suffocating me under it. I stopped writing the letters when I moved to China.

  Dr. Holderstein, to his credit, cut right to the question at the center of things: “Do you and your mom ever talk about what happened with your father?”

  “Not really.”

  “Why not?”

  I considered this. “That’s a good question.”

  The minute my father left us, my mother and I became colleagues in the office of our house. We protected each other by not talking about him, and as a result, she stopped being my parent and started being a person, a disturbing development. I shrugged.

  “I don’t want to hurt my mother’s feelings. And anyway, now it’s been years. Bringing it up would be weird. I turned out fine. She did a good job—it’s not like she was insufficient after he left.”

  Even as I said this, I knew what an overcompensation it was.

  “Isn’t any single parent insufficient in some ways?” Dr. Holderstein asked.

  I didn’t respond at all to this, although now that I’ve been a single parent for a decade, I have a few thousand answers. I know what he meant, anyway. Maybe Dr. Holder -stein was just eerily prescient, since his question turned out to be the primary focus of my adult life.

  I told Dr. Holderstein what I knew then and could bear to hear myself say: I wanted to escape. If I’d had one wish, I said, it would be to go somewhere safe, where nothing excruciating had ever happened to my family. Where no one knew who I was.

  He thought I meant denial, but it turns out I meant China. I got my wish, even if Dr. Holderstein never got his, which was to help me avoid a manic episode. He tried valiantly. Before we were out of time, he gave me a detailed rundown of the potential side effects of lithium and said repeatedly that while he wasn’t a big prescriber of either antidepressants or mood stabilizers, he thought this might prevent worse medications for me down the line. And maybe it would have, but I threw the prescription out on my way to the subway and never went to another appointment.