“Ma-li, how many Buddhists does it take to screw in the light bulb?”
“Zero! They are the light bulb.”
The machinery behind her seemed to laugh in counterpoint. “Could you…” She coughed and took a breath. She said, “Do you still have that handwritten copy of Chapter 17? It was your father’s copy…”
I should have persisted, I should have asked her what she wanted to tell me, but Ai-ming seemed so fragile. It was as if I had become the older sister, and she the younger. I told her, “Of course, it’s right here on the bookshelf, beside the set we photocopied in San Francisco. Remember? I can see it from where I’m standing…This summer we’ll come to New York, I promise.”
“I miss your voices. Sometimes I’m on the subway for hours each day, I feel like a child in the underworld, and I imagine all kinds of things…The netherworld is a kingdom of its own, with its own prefectures, magistrates and government, it’s supposed to be another city entirely…I am lovesick for some lost paradise / I would rise free and journey far away. Do you know this poem?”
Her words frightened me. “Ai-ming, don’t lose hope now, not when you’ve worked so hard.”
“Oh, Ma-li, it’s not that I’m unhappy. Far from it. I just want to take another step. I want to live.”
—
Before saying goodbye, I had written down her new telephone number on the same page as my solution for the continued fraction of √D. But when Ma tried to reach Ai-ming that night, the line was disconnected. I feared that I had misheard or made an error transcribing it, yet her voice had been so precisely, perfectly clear. When Ma tried to reach Ai-ming’s mother, the line rang, but no one answered.
Two weeks later, a letter arrived. Ai-ming said that her mother’s health had suddenly deteriorated and she was going home. She told us not to worry about her, that very soon she would be able to visit us in Canada. I had wanted to give Ai-ming my e-mail address — marie.jiang1979@pegasusmail.com. We had just set up the internet at home and this was the first address I’d ever had; I knew it meant we would never lose touch, we would be able to communicate almost instantaneously. Each afternoon, when I arrived home from school, I was convinced there would be a letter or a voice mail, but there was only quiet, a qù that became a friction in the air.
When summer came, we flew to New York and took the subway to Ai-ming’s last known address. One of her roommates, Ida, an older woman, said that she had warned Ai-ming not to go. If the INS found out she’d left the country, Ai-ming’s application would be thrown out. Worse, if she was caught re-entering, she’d be barred from the United States for a decade. Ida, herself, had just been granted amnesty under the same program. She gave us directions to the plastic flower factory where Ai-ming had been working, but when we arrived, no one in the office would speak to us. Finally, just as we were leaving, a teenaged girl ran out. She spoke to us in Cantonese. She said that Ai-ming had been expected back weeks ago but had never turned up.
Not knowing what else to do, Ma and I wandered through Chinatown, carrying a photograph of Ai-ming from restaurant to restaurant. One after another, people studied the picture and shook their heads.
Neither of us had ever been to New York before, and I felt like a blade of grass in a world of fish. Every vehicle, it seemed, was in disguise, dressed up as a yellow cab. Ma, dazed, barely seemed to notice the city. As if in a dream, we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, above the rippling water.
That night, Ma used her credit card so that we could attend a concert in Carnegie Hall; in the foyer and the main hall, I studied every face, row after row, up the steep balcony until everything disappeared into shadow. A poem from the Book of Records lodged in my thoughts, Family members wander, scattered on the road, attached to shadows / Longing for home, five landscapes merge into a single city. The music, Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, which my father had performed decades ago with China’s Central Philharmonic, made Ma weep. I sat in the dark, grown up now. I felt too wide, too full of feeling, for the small space I inhabited.
On the plane home, I told Ma it was only a matter of time before Ai-ming contacted us. All we could do was wait.
—
After Ma’s diagnosis in 1998, everything changed. We no longer fit into the hours, days and weeks of the regular world. She began to speak of the future not as an open and undetermined place, but as a fixed measure of time; a year, maybe two, if she was lucky. Her pragmatism hurt me. I was only nineteen years old, and needed to believe she would be the one to defy the numbers. When her chemotherapy began, I had been at university, a mathematics major at last, and I could think of all sorts of statistical reasons why she should not die. I spent many hours brooding over just this problem, as if Ma’s life and death were a simple question of numbers and probabilities. To my surprise, but probably not to Ma’s, all the anger I had stored up since my father’s death returned. When I looked at my university classmates, I heard in their voices and saw in their lives a freedom I felt had been unfairly taken from me. How oblivious they seemed of their good fortune. I compensated by studying harder, by trying to outdo everyone, to defy — what? I didn’t know. It’s no wonder that I became such a solitary young woman. I was irrationally upset with Ma and angry all over again with Ba. I saw that I might lose my mother no matter what the numbers said, no matter how many things she still had left to experience.
As usual, Ma let me think what I wanted.
In the meantime, she altered her diet and dealt with the unending bureaucracy of sick leave, sick pay, health and life insurance, the web of paperwork and medication that quickly encircled her life, so that the measurement of time became divorced from the rising and the falling of the sun, and became instead about the intervals between treatment regimens, hospital stays, meal times, rest and recovery. She made a will and left a sum of money to Ai-ming, which to this day has not been claimed; neither I nor my mother’s lawyer have been able to locate her. That year, I published a paper in a prestigious mathematics journal and I am glad that Ma lived to see this small success, this glimpse of a future stability.
During those long hours at the hospital, I willed myself to understand everything there was to know about algebraic geometry; somehow, the impossibility of my task saved me. I wrote my papers and tried to find my mother’s strength within myself. In the last two years of her life, I changed. Ma’s diagnosis was an end but also a beginning, a period of time intensely lived. We were lucky because, finally, we had time to talk, to go back to subjects we might not have raised in a lifetime of reserve, of quiet. In those two years, I knew only two constants: mathematics and Ma. I learned a great deal about the tenacity of love and also the terrible pain of letting it go. The brevity of my parents’ lives has shaped me.
In 1999, Ma asked me to find Ai-ming. “You’re the only one who knows,” she said.
What did I know, I wondered, what had I truly understood back then? “I’ll try, Ma.”
“I couldn’t find her. I tried so hard but I couldn’t do it. There’s no more time.”
But what if there had been an accident? What if Ai-ming had passed away? I wanted to say these things but could not imagine speaking the words aloud.
The painkillers made her words slow and heavy. “She went back to Beijing. Maybe Shanghai. I’m sure of it.”
“I’ll look, Ma.”
“I wrote a letter to Ai-ming.”
“How?”
“I sent it to her mother in Shanghai. But it was returned, her mother had moved. There was no forwarding address. I called that number so many times.” Ma’s eyes filled with tears. “I promised her mother that I would take care of Ai-ming. I gave her my word. They were family to us.”