“I can’t believe this. There’s no good faith in this world anymore — it’s worse than China.” He grabbed his walking stick and lumbered out of the room.
The three women laughed and told me that the old goat was a first-time visitor and that they felt lucky to have me living on the same floor. We were in the kitchen now, all wide awake. Nana put on a kettle to boil some water for an herbal tea called Sweet Dreams.
I wasn’t pleased by what I had done. “I acted like a pimp, didn’t I?”
“No, you did well,” Huong replied.
“Thank God we have a man among us,” Lili added.
Lili’s words made me uneasy. I’m not one of you, I thought. But afterward, I felt they were more friendly than before, and even Lili started speaking to me more often and with her eyes fully open. They’d ask me what I would like for dinner, and cooked fish three or four times a week because I was fond of seafood. My factory provided steamed rice for its workers at lunch, so I just needed to bring something to go with it. Whenever it was Huong’s turn to cook, she would set aside the leftovers in a plastic container for me to take to work the next day. Nana and Lili often joked that Huong treated me as if I were her boyfriend. At first, I felt embarrassed, but little by little I got used to their teasing.
One morning in late July, I woke up feeling as if my lungs were on fire. I must have caught the flu, but I had to go to the factory, where a stack of cut pieces was waiting to be ironed. Unlike the sewing women, I couldn’t sit down at the ironing table. The shop provided tea in a samovar, which tasted a little fishy, but I drank one mug after another to soothe my throat and keep my eyes open. As a result, I went to the bathroom more frequently. Some of the floorboards were crooked, and I had to be careful when walking around. By midafternoon I was sweating all over and my pulse was racing, so I decided to rest on a long bench by the wall, but I tripped and fell before I could reach it. The moment I picked myself up, my foreman, Jimmy Choi, a broad-shouldered fellow of about forty-five, came over and said, “Are you all right, Wanping?”
“I’m okay,” I mumbled, brushing the dust off my pants.
“You look terrible.”
“I might be running a fever.”
He felt my forehead with his thick, rough hand. “You’d better go home. We’re not busy today, and Danny and Marc can manage without you.”
Jimmy drove me back to Mrs. Chen’s in his pickup and told me not to worry about coming to work the next day if I didn’t feel up to it. I said I would try my best to show up.
I felt too awful to join my housemates at dinner. Instead, I stayed in bed with my eyes closed, forcing myself not to moan. Still, I couldn’t help moaning through my nose occasionally, which made me feel better. Before dark, Huong came in and put a carton of orange juice and a cup on the nightstand, saying I must drink a lot of liquid to excrete the poison from my body. “What would you like for dinner?” she asked.
“I don’t want to eat.”
“Come on, you must eat something to fight the illness.”
“I’ll be all right.”
I knew she would be busy that evening, because it was Friday. After she left, I drank some orange juice and then lay back and tried to fall asleep. My throat felt slightly better, but the fever was still raging. I regretted not having gone to the herb store earlier to get some ready-made boluses. The room was quiet except for the faint drone of a mosquito. The instant it landed on my cheek, I killed it with a slap. I was miserable and couldn’t help but miss home. Such a feeling hadn’t visited me for a long time — I had always managed to suppress my homesickness so that I could make it through my daily routine. A busy man cannot afford to be nostalgic. But that evening the image of my mother kept coming to mind. She knew a lot of folk remedies and could easily have helped me recover in a day or two, but she would have kept me in bed for longer to ensure that I recuperated fully. When I was little, I used to enjoy being sick so she could fuss over me. I hadn’t seen her for two years now. Oh, how I missed her!
As I was dozing off, someone knocked on the door. “Come in,” I said.
Huong came in again, this time holding a steaming bowl. “Sit up and eat some noodles,” she told me.
“You cooked this for me?” I was amazed that it was wheat noodles, made from scratch, not the rice noodles we usually ate. She must have guessed that, as a northerner, I would prefer wheat.
“Yes, for you,” she said. “Eat it while it’s hot. It will make you feel better.”
I sat up and began eating with chopsticks and a spoon. There were slivers of chives and napa cabbage in the soup, along with some dried shrimp and three poached eggs. I was touched and turned my head away so that she wouldn’t see my wet eyes. This was genuine home cooking from my province, and I hadn’t tasted anything like it for two years. I wanted to ask her how she had learned to make noodles like this, but I didn’t say a word; I just kept eating ravenously. Meanwhile, seated on a chair beside my bed, she watched me intently, her eyes shimmering.
“Huong, where are you?” Lili cried from the living room.
“Here, I’m here.” She got up and left, leaving the door ajar.
I strained my ears to listen. Lili said, “A man at the Rainbow Inn wants a girl.”
“Wanping’s ill and can’t drive today,” Huong replied.
“The place is on Thirty-seventh Avenue, just a few steps away. You’ve been there.”
“I don’t want to go tonight.”
“What do you mean, you don’t want to go?”
“I should stay and take care of Wanping. Can’t Nana go?”
“She’s busy with someone.”
“Can you do it for me?”
“Well,” Lili sighed, “okay, only this once.”
“Thank you.”
When Huong came back, I told her, “You shouldn’t spend so much time with me. You have things to do.”
“Don’t be silly. Here is some vitamin C and aspirin. Take two of each after the meal.”
That night she checked on me from time to time to make sure I took the pills and drank enough liquid and was fully covered with a thick comforter of hers, so that I could sweat out my flu. Around midnight, I fell asleep, but I had to keep getting up to pee. Huong had left an aluminum cuspidor in my room and told me to use it instead of going to the bathroom, so that I wouldn’t catch cold again.
The next morning, my fever had subsided, though I still felt weak, not as steady on my feet as before. I called Jimmy and said I would definitely come to work that day, but I didn’t get there until after ten. Even so, some of my fellow workers were amazed that I had reappeared so quickly. They must have thought I had caught something more serious, like pneumonia or a venereal disease, and would remain in bed for a week or so. I was glad there was not a lot of work piled up on my ironing table.
A week later, some sewers left the factory and we all got busier. There were twenty women at the garment shop, and with two or three exceptions, they were all married and had children. Most of them were Chinese, though four were Mexican. They could come and go according to their own schedules. That was a main reason they kept their jobs, which paid by the piece, and not very much. Most of them, working full-time, made about three hundred dollars a week. Like them, I could keep a flexible schedule as long as I didn’t let work accumulate on my ironing table or miss deadlines. I must admit that our boss, Mr. Fuh, was a decent man, proficient in English and knowledgeable about business management; he even provided health-care benefits for us, which was another reason some of the women worked here. Their husbands were menial workers or small-business owners and couldn’t possibly get health insurance for their families. Like the other two young pressers, Marc and Danny, I didn’t bother about insurance. I was strong and healthy, not yet thirty, and wouldn’t spend three hundred a month on that.