A thread of sky, p.13
A Thread of Sky, page 13
In her two days’ absence, the summer heat had reached full blast, baking the city listless, its native life given way completely to a tourist circus, no mystifying element in the air, only hot dust and faint rot. In a way, it reminded her of the atmosphere in the house after her father’s death.
Mom nudged her and pointed to Tommy bypassing the giant snake of a ticket line—the tapering lifeless tail, the alert body, the vicious fat head attacking the booth. “All-inclusive, see? Can you imagine if we’d come on our own?”
Kay nodded. She was trying to be a good sport.
Mom clamped on a visor. “Did you girls bring hats?”
Nora ignored her. Sophie was fixing her hair in the dark window of a parked cab. Kay shook her head no.
Mom clucked. “Didn’t I warn you about the ozone layer here?” She waved at a vendor wheeling a cart from one tour group to the next. He had no hats, only parasols, flowered and lace-trimmed. Mom asked for three.
Quickly, the vendor sized up her mother, tossed the parasols in a bag, and said, “Very cheap, only one hundred!”
“Mom, don’t,” Kay said.
“I don’t mind the money.”
“I’m not carrying that,” Sophie said.
“Why not?” Mom asked.
“It’s a parasol.”
“No one will laugh at you,” Mom said. “People here take sun protection seriously.”
Kay supposed that was true. Lisa and Summer, the two local women who’d responded to her own ad in that English-language weekly, often expressed dismay over how carelessly she tanned.
Her mother was already digging out a hundred-kuai bill.
“Wait.” At least Kay could bargain the price to something less ridiculous. She gave the vendor her starting price. His glee faded. They careened from warfare to flirtation to comradeship, until they were just a few kuai apart. Tommy had returned with their tickets. Everyone was watching and waiting. The vendor held firm, which meant it was time for the final tactic. Kay started to walk away.
“Oh, let’s just let him have it.” Mom thrust the hundred-kuai bill into the vendor’s hand.
He pocketed it, grinned at Kay, and padded toward the next tour group.
Mom patted her arm. “It’s nothing.”
“He’s not a charity case. There’s a ritual involved. Everyone bargains here.”
Tommy cleared his throat. “Are we ready?” He spoke in accented English, his cloying tone somehow both servile and disdainful.
He gave a commanding wave, and the group started off. Mom tried to pass out the parasols. Nora and Sophie waved her off. Kay took the whole bag and started forward.
“Wait.” Mom brought out her camera.
Her sisters were stone-faced. Kay grinned until her face hurt.
Mom lowered her camera and turned, but not before Kay saw her face sag.
Her sisters walked on either side of Kay, dragging their feet in silence. Kay found herself afraid of conversation. They hadn’t been together since the funeral.
She tried pointing out the ornately painted pagoda eaves, the hundreds of lions carved on the balustrades of the footbridge, but her sisters didn’t bother to feign interest. She tried catching up with the group to hear Tommy’s narration, but he was speaking Cantonese, the dialect her mother and aunt and grandmother were born into, which to Kay, aside from the odd word, was still indecipherable. Soon she was simply pausing where Tommy paused, looking where he pointed.
Lunch was at a “seven-star foreign visitor restaurant” decked out with Christmas lights, pink tablecloths, and bowing waitresses. The food was goopy, deceptively tasty, and quickly gross. Around every table sat other sweaty, duped tour groups.
Next on the itinerary: Tiantan Park. Since that morning with Rick, Kay hadn’t had the chance to revisit it.
This afternoon, the sweltering woods were abandoned. All along Echo Wall, tourists jostled and shrieked. In the courtyard, vendors circled like seagulls, tour groups were being head-counted, and a few elderly locals had been reduced to fanning themselves on benches. The only thing for her group to do was click away with their cameras, which they did, Mom the most relentlessly, and then Tommy led them to buy souvenirs—postcards, stuffed pandas, T-shirts, mugs, all emblazoned as if Tiantan were a brand.
Her grandmother sat by the gift shop entrance, looking profoundly solitary, and profoundly unmoved.
A little timidly, Kay sat beside her. “It must be strange for you, this tour.”
“It’s not bad.”
“But being back in China, after so many years.”
After a moment, her grandmother nodded.
“Do you remember fleeing?”
Grandma nodded again.
“What was that like?”
“It was—” Grandma shrugged. “It was war.”
Kay had waited most of the year to reach that era in her history class, but the unit had focused exclusively on the triumph of Chairman Mao and his loyal masses. When she tried to ask about the other side, she was only told, once again, that they were a corrupt elite who got soundly and justly defeated.
She’d asked her parents about that fateful journey from the mainland, but her father remembered nothing, while her mother seemed to feel affronted by her questions. After meeting her grandfather, Kay had written a letter to her grandmother. Her grandmother’s reply was quick, typed, and devoid of answers.
All the links to her own history seemed to have vanished during that flight, as if they’d dropped into the strait. Kay had studied, in sociology, the difficulty among immigrants of revisiting the past, but she couldn’t resign herself to such loss.
“Grandma, hearing about your revolutionary work really inspired me.”
Her grandmother gave a little start. There was a flicker in her eyes.
Carefully, Kay said, “You were a prominent leader for women’s rights, and against the Japanese occupation.”
Her grandmother nodded.
Kay waited. Her grandmother was silent. Flustered, Kay tried to explain her latest campaign—the personals she’d read, the ad she’d placed herself, her two respondents whom, despite her best efforts, she couldn’t say she’d helped. At last she stammered, “I know this kind of work is always hard, but how do you know when to give up? How do you know when to move on?”
“As long as you can keep fighting, you don’t give up.”
“Well, when you left China, when you gave up your revolutionary work—”
The flicker turned flinty. “I had no choice.”
“Kay, do you like this? Should I buy you one?” It was her mother, waving a silly souvenir.
Now the rest of the group spilled out of the gift shop, and Tommy herded them all toward the bus. By the time Kay turned back, her grandmother’s face was placid again.
Kay supposed she still hadn’t studied enough, hadn’t found the right questions. She feared she never would.
A few months ago, she’d received a Lunar New Year card from her grandfather, containing just twelve words—her name, a well-wishing message, and his name. The characters looked textbook-perfect, until she looked close: each stroke was composed of tiny oscillations. Someday soon, those oscillations would become even shakier, more erratic, and then cease completely. She couldn’t bear for that card to be their last exchange, and yet, though she carried the card in her backpack, she hadn’t managed to reply.
Olympic-size pool, sauna, and gym beneath the lobby, French and fusion restaurants on the roof. A glass elevator trimmed with gold lights glided up and down, reflecting off the glass walls, the glass doors, all the shiny surfaces becoming mirrors against the deepening night.
Brightly, Mom said, “After such a long, hot day, isn’t it nice to be in a fancy hotel?”
“But look around—we could be anywhere.” Kay had exhausted her good sportsmanship.
“Tomorrow we’re going to the Great Wall. So it’ll be pretty obvious where we are.”
“Which section?”
Mom shrugged. “The must-see section.”
“No. It’s a tourist circus.” Everyone looked a little startled at her intensity. “My friend Du Yi told me about a section so unspoiled it doesn’t even have a name. Let me take us there.”
After a pause, Mom said indulgently, “Okay. You be tour guide for the day.”
No one objected. They wanted only to duck into the comfort of their rooms. While they paired up, washed up, and went to bed, Kay walked through the glitzy lobby and outside, wandering away from all the hulking multinational hotels that had devoured the district until she found herself on a familiar-looking street.
An orange-hooded pay phone, a wonton stall, a convenience store. A rickety fruit stand whose proprietor lounged in nothing but pajama pants, with offerings from peaches and bananas to guavas, mangosteens, rambutans, others she could name only in Chinese. An “adult health” shop with contraceptives and sex toys openly displayed. A hair salon where pink neon and bare legs indicated the full range of services.
She’d launched her second campaign as humbly as possible, placing a simple ad in the English-language weekly under “Cultural Exchange”: “Seeking Chinese women seeking Western men. I’m an ABC who’d like to hear your story.”
Lisa, her first respondent, was tall, porcelain-skinned, and pretty. She’d hoped Kay was a Chinese American man who might be her savior. Sweetly, she said, “For my story, you can pay me. If you can spend your days like this, you can afford it.” She settled for meeting at Häagen-Dazs, ordering sundaes that cost Kay a week’s worth of her own dinners. Lisa’s current boyfriend, a sixty-something Brit, was stingy, she said, and between his monthly visits, she barely scraped by. Besides, she’d caught him advertising in the same weekly for threesomes under the heading, “You, me . . . and you.”
The only daughter of small landlords who’d been “sent down” to toil in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, Lisa had studied English in college and still did intermittent secretarial work, which she loathed. Her freshman year, a Taiwanese businessman had taken her as his mistress and paid her tuition; her parents asked no questions. He was her first, and her first love, but senior year, he dumped her for a f reshman. Thinking laowai would be more romantic, “more Hollywood,” she started accepting dates from Western men she met at bars, at Starbucks, at McDonald’s. Again and again, she got “swindled” by lowly salesmen, students, and drifters claiming to be successful entrepreneurs, professors, and journalists, while the few men with real money broke her heart—but at least, Lisa said, she’d always extracted fancy vacations and gifts, even from “the losers.”
Kay asked how that differed from cash transactions, and Lisa threw down her spoon so angrily Kay thought she might slap her. Kay hastened to apologize, blaming her poor Chinese, until Lisa glanced at her melting sundae. She tossed her hair and picked up her spoon. Kay let her eat in silence until she seemed mollified.
At their next meeting, Kay tried to explain exoticization and fetishization, asking Lisa what she thought lurked behind the Western fascination with Asian women. Lisa said, “Obviously, we have nicer skin and figures. We know how to manage our men. And we age better.” Anyway, she reminded Kay, she’d already decided to set her sights on a Chinese American. When Kay tried to explain her concerns further, Lisa said, “If I wait longer to have a baby, my figure will never recover. Do you have a brother?” When Kay found herself speechless, Lisa offered to introduce her to friends who’d known truly evil “white devils”—for, she said, a modest commission.
Summer, Kay’s second and last respondent, had sleek hair down to her hips and very large, low-hanging breasts. She declared, “We Sichuan women are spicy like our food.” Dryly, Kay said, “And hot like summer?” Of course, the pun didn’t translate. The elder of two daughters of pig farmers (who, as members of an ethnic minority, were exempted from the one-child policy), Summer had left home at sixteen and worked in a doll factory, a hot pot restaurant, and now a shoe store, where she slept at night on a display table, in order to save for her sister’s tuition. Why did she date laowai? “To fuck! Bigger penises. Isn’t it true?” She pressed until Kay admitted a lack of expertise, which Summer found hilarious.
Summer cursed her exes with gusto—“That fat turtle, fuck him, fuck his mother”—while insisting she had great fun. Without prompting, she said she’d only charged once. The guy was American and ugly, made fun of her underwear, and wanted to shave her pubic hair. She let him screw her, then demanded money, and when he refused, she smashed a picture of his girlfriend holding a cake and threatened to call a gangster cousin. Later, she admitted she’d begun charging when a laowai was particularly unattractive or unpleasant, or when marriage seemed absolutely unattainable.
Summer hoped Kay would write a racy exposé about modern Chinese urbanites in which she’d figure as the sexpot star. “Just get it banned, and it’ll be an international bestseller, and we’ll both be famous.” When Kay explained her motivations, Summer listened intently, then asked, “Why don’t you marry a rich laowai? You’re so lucky, you grew up with them. Marry one and you can follow your dreams.” Her own dream was to design shoes. She showed Kay a pair with hand-painted musical notes and lightning bolts.
After a few of these sessions, Kay found herself completely muddled. Lisa and Summer weren’t hapless victims. In fact, she wasn’t sure who was prey. Maybe Du Yi was more right than not. Maybe the transactions were, however warped, equal.
And would Lisa be better off as a full-time secretary, Summer as a factory worker or a pig farmer? Weren’t they simply pursuing their best economic opportunities in this new China? And wouldn’t marriage to a Westerner—any Westerner, even a “loser”—set them and their families for life?
In America, Kay and her sisters and every other Asian woman—and every person of color, maybe every woman—were forced to be representative. Why should Chinese women in China be burdened in that way?
Perhaps she should have focused instead on the plight of those twisted cripples, or the pickpocket boys, or the Great Wall apple farmer. Her heart ached for almost everyone in this country, even as she knew that was wrong, too.
She’d refrained from setting up more sessions, but then Lisa and Summer insisted. They wanted to keep talking. They wanted to know what the other looked like and whom she liked better. Lisa brought her wild vegetables and peanut brittle from her hometown. Summer offered to paint her sneakers. They asked concerned, detailed questions about her diarrhea, and independently fingered the same culprit: the bottled water she bought from migrant peasants on the street. They couldn’t believe her stupidity. Those peasants, they said, salvaged bottles from the garbage, filled them with tap water, and resealed the caps. Their suspicions were validated. Once Kay stopped buying those bottles, she hadn’t had a flare-up.
So Lisa and Summer had helped her in one small but definite way. It was time to stop deluding herself that she could do that much for them.
Every day, Du Yi asked if she was staying. Mr. Wan had promised to find her lucrative stints tutoring other local businessmen in English. Rick had offers to work as a business consultant, a bar manager, an editor at that English-language weekly. He said he’d stay if she would, as if it were a dare. In her last days before this tour, all she’d really managed to do was cram for her finals and convince Rick to join her in sampling dog meat. Their relationship, in particular, was getting more fraught the more she professed nonchalance that it was ending, even as she refrained from saying good-bye, from confirming that she was really leaving.
She’d told herself that when the time came to leave, she’d be ready. Now her scholarship was over. She had a certificate to show for all her studying. She had two days to vacate her dorm, and the thought of moving back into her old room, of living in that house alone with Mom, made her shudder.
If she left, how would she ever come back? Rationally, she knew it was simply a long flight—the same flight her family had just hopped. But she couldn’t shake the fear that, at any time, an absence could become permanent.
She bought fruit and water for tomorrow’s excursion, then went to the pay phone and dialed Du Yi for directions.
“Wait,” he said, as she was about to hang up. “Let me accompany you.”
“No, thank you.”
“When will I meet your family? When will I see you again?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will you stay?”
She’d been drawn to his earnestness, but now he just seemed lacking in dignity.
“I don’t know.” She hung up.
Immediately, she felt a little remorse. She thought of calling Rick or Mr. Wan, but they felt so far away. Even this ordinary street where she now stood felt like a replica, as if she’d already left the real city and would never find her way back.
In the morning, Kay paced the stretch of corridor her family occupied, trying to tamp down her anxiety. “Let’s go! Sneakers, please. And parasols—just kidding!” She decided she’d better wait downstairs.
In the hotel lobby, a man with sinewy shoulders and high cheekbones sat smoking on a loveseat. He turned: Byron. The corners of his eyes were a vulnerable pink against the copper of him.
“Jet lag?” He exhaled smoke.
“Just heading to the Great Wall.”
“Aren’t we all?” He shook out another cigarette and lit it with the one still burning between his lips.
“We’re going to a section only locals know.”
“Then how do you know it?”
“I’ve learned my way around here.” She sounded defensive.
He looked amused. “So you’re leading the female bonding today?”
