“Please don’t think like that! You two must join hands and survive this blow.”
“I’ve lost heart after going through so much. This blow finished me off, and I may never recover.”
“Son, please pull yourself together and put up a fight.”
“I’m just too heartsick to give a damn.”
Connie butted in, “Mother, how about this? You go back to China next week and let Tian and me concentrate on the trouble here.”
“So I’m your big distraction, huh?”
“Yes, Mom,” Tian said. “You two fought and fought and fought, and that made my life unbearable. I was completely stupefied and couldn’t perform well at work. That’s why they terminated me.”
“All right, I’ll go next week, leave you two alone, but you must give me some money. I can’t go back empty-handed or our neighbors will laugh at me.” Her lips quivered as she spoke, her mouth as sunken as if she were toothless.
“I’ll give you two thousand dollars,” Connie said. “Once I start working, I’ll send you more. Don’t worry about the gifts for the relatives and your friends. We’ll buy you some small pieces of jewelry and a couple packs of Wisconsin ginseng.”
“How about a pound of vegetable caterpillars? That will help Tian’s father’s bad kidneys.”
“That costs five thousand dollars! You can get them a lot cheaper in China. Tell you what — I can buy you five pounds of dried sea cucumbers, the Japanese type. That will help improve my father-in-law’s health too.”
Meifen agreed, reluctantly — the sea cucumbers were at most four hundred dollars a pound. Yet her son’s situation terrified her. If he declared bankruptcy, she might get nothing from the young couple, so she’d better take the money and leave. Worse, she could see that Tian might lose his mind if Connie left him at this moment. Meifen used to brag about him as a paragon of success to her neighbors and friends. She had never imagined that his life could be so fragile that it would crumble in just one day. No wonder people always talked about stress and insecurity in America.
Connie said pleasantly, “Mother, I won’t be able to take the job until I see you off at the airport. In the meantime, I’ll have to help Tian get back on his feet.”
“I appreciate that,” Meifen said.
That night Connie asked Tian to share the master bedroom with her, but he wouldn’t, saying they mustn’t nettle his mother from now on. He felt sad, afraid that Meifen might change her mind. He remembered that when he was taking the entrance exam fourteen years back, his parents had stood in the rain under a shared umbrella, waiting for him with a lunch tin, sodas, and tangerines wrapped in a handkerchief. They each had half a shoulder soaked through. Oh, never could he forget their anxious faces. A surge of gratitude drove him to the brink of tears. If only he could speak freely to them again.
Shame
SOON AFTER I’D FOUND a summer job in Flushing, I received a phone call one evening. I was thrilled to hear the voice of Professor Meng, who had come to visit some U.S. universities with a delegation of educators. He used to be my teacher, an expert in American studies at my alma mater back in Nanjing. He had translated a book of short stories by Jack London and was known as a literary scholar in China.
“Where are you staying, Mr. Meng?” I asked.
“At the Chinese consulate here.”
“Can I come and see you?”
“Not tonight — I’m leaving for a party. But we’ll be here for a few days. Can we meet tomorrow?”
I agreed to see him the next afternoon. According to him, after New York, his delegation would head for Boston and then for Chicago and Minneapolis. Mr. Meng had taught me in 1985, for only one semester, in a course in American Jewish fiction. He was not a remarkable teacher — his voice was too flat and at times unclear — but he had a phenomenal memory and was able to give a lot of information on authors and books, some of which I suspected he hadn’t read because they were unavailable in China at the time. He was then in his early fifties, but trim and agile — a fine Ping-Pong player. He often chaffed me, saying I looked already fortyish, though I was only twenty-five. I did appear much older than my age in those days, perhaps owing to my melancholy eyes and to the dull headache I used to have in the mornings. I didn’t mind Mr. Meng’s joking, though. In a way I felt that he treated me better than the other teachers did.
It was overcast and muggy the next morning, as if the whole city of New York were inside a bathhouse. As usual, Ah Min and I set out with a van to deliver fabrics. He was behind the wheel while I sat in the navigator’s seat. We first stopped at a sweatshop on Ninth Street in Brooklyn and dropped a few bundles of cloth there. Then we drove to downtown Manhattan and unloaded the rest of the materials at a larger factory on Mott Street. It’s workshop was on the third floor of a building, and it was noisy in there, the purring and humming of sewing machines accented by the thumps of pressing irons. The floor was littered with scraps of cloth, and stacks of fabrics for coats sat against the walls. Some sewers and finishers, all women, were wearing earphones while their hands were busy. Our unloading was easy, but after that, we were to send finished products to clothing stores. We had to handle the suits and dresses carefully to avoid creasing or dirtying any of them. A thin shadow of a fellow with a pallid face helped us. Together we pulled large plastic bags over the finished garments, one for each, and then hung them on racks with wheels. After that, we took the racks down by the elevator to the first floor, which was five feet above the ground. Ah Min backed the van up to the platform of the elevator, and I put two gangplanks in place so we could pull the racks into the vehicle. The process was slow and exacting; every time it took almost two hours. We had to be very careful, because our boss, a middle-aged man from Hong Kong, would reprimand us for any damaged product, though he had never docked our wages.
Before setting out that morning, I’d spoken to our boss, who let me have the afternoon off. Ah Min dropped me at Union Square around two p.m. after we’d delivered the last batch of suits to a haberdasher’s on Fifth Avenue. He was a friendly fellow with a sleepy look in his eyes and often teased me, probably because I was a temp, as yet unable to drive confidently in Manhattan, and would return to school in Wisconsin when the summer ended. Indeed, I had come to New York mainly to make some money and to see the city, which my master’s thesis adviser, Professor Freeman, had said I must visit if I wanted to understand America.
When I got out of the subway, I found it had started drizzling. As I strode along Forty-second Street toward the Hudson, I regretted not having brought an umbrella with me. The neon lights, obscured some by the powdery rain, were glowing like naked limbs. They were more voluptuous than on a fine day, as if beckoning to pedestrians, but I had to hustle to avoid being drenched. Seven or eight minutes later, I got into the Chinese consulate’s entryway, in which about a dozen people were waiting for the drizzle to stop. An old man with a puffy face and small eyes was in the reception office, reading the overseas edition of The People’s Daily. I told him my teacher’s name and the purpose of my visit. He picked up the phone and punched a number.
A few moments later Mr. Meng came down. He looked the same as three years before. We shook hands; then, in spite of my wet polo shirt, we hugged. He was happy to see me, about to take me into the consulate.
“Wait, stop!” the old man cried through the window of the reception office. “You can’t go in.”