My mother pursed her lips. “Your brother is concerned about you, Ling Wan-ju. He is interested in your happiness.”
“He just doesn’t want me to embarrass him.”
“Bringing shame to your brother would cause you sorrow, would it not? So in this concern, he is interested in your happiness.”
I could only stare. The woman was a natural wonder.
“Your brother cares for you,” she insisted again. “All your brothers do.”
“I suppose you’re right. Sometimes they have odd ways of showing it, though.” I sighed and finished my tea.
“That is a privilege of family. To express concern and be understood, even if the expression is odd.”
“Yes, Ma.” I got up, kissed her again, and went off to get dressed and face the day.
30
Three nights later, there was another celebration. As Asian Art Week opened with grand fanfare, and Beijing/NYC debuted to critical praise, the East Village communal studio in Flushing threw a party to welcome Mike Liu to New York. The PRC government had already issued a press release to the effect that, for humanitarian reasons involving his health, lawbreaker Liu Mai-ke had been released from his obligation to the Chinese people to serve his sentence and, by the benevolence of the government and the Party, been sent to the West for medical treatment. The press release had been Xeroxed a few hundred times at different sizes and pinned up all over the studio’s corridors, where it had been painted and drawn on by the artists. In some places it was covered with glitter; in others it was folded into origami animals. A giant copy was suspended from the ceiling and hung with bells that tinkled in the breeze whenever the door opened. It kept opening, too, to admit the hippest of the hip; literary and art world stars; Chinese community movers and shakers; and all the downtown glitterati, every one of them dressed in black. The only other color you could see, spotted throughout the crowd, was red, the color of luck and joy.
The party was roaring by the time we arrived, me in black silk pants and sleeveless black blouse, with a chunky red glass necklace; Jack in black suit jacket, black jeans, white shirt and red tie. Bill was a bit out of place, in a charcoal suit with a gray shirt and no tie, but at least he wasn’t wearing Vladimir’s bling.
“I thought about it,” he’d said when he picked me up. “But if Jack won’t wear the fat suit, you’re not getting the bling, either.”
“How is it I’m so lucky?” I’d climbed in the car and we’d fetched Jack and made tracks to Queens.
Unlike our first visit to the studio, entrance tonight was through the loading dock doors. The party and its thumping soundtrack spilled out onto the sidewalk and into the street. “Hey, Jack!” Francie See waved from behind a long outdoor table crowded with wine bottles. “We’re taking turns playing bartender. Hi, Lydia, Bill. What can I get you?”
Jack asked for Cabernet, Bill took a beer, and I got a Pellegrino with lime—I was forced to glare at Jack when he asked if I wouldn’t rather have a cosmo—and we strolled on inside. Almost no one at this shindig understood the part we’d played in freeing Mike Liu, which was how we wanted it. As far as we knew, just he and Anna, Pete Tsang, and Dr. Yang had any idea at all. Of them, Dr. Yang knew the most, but even he was sketchy on the whole Lionel Lau thing. The less anyone knew, we’d decided, the safer everyone would be.
“Is that Mike Liu?” I pointed down the hall to a thin man with glasses. He was animated, laughing, talking. Radiant, you might say, as was Anna, at his side. “Gee, he doesn’t look sick. Let’s go get introduced.” We headed over, but Mike and Anna were swept up by a writer I recognized from a profile in The New Yorker. “Oh,” I said. “I guess we’ll be later.”
“That’s the way it goes when you’re on the B list,” Bill shrugged.
Jack said, “Oh, really? I wouldn’t know.”
“Jack?” Someone had stepped out in front of us, an Asian woman in a red cheongsam. She raised her voice over the music to say, “Hello, Ms. Chin. Hello, Mr. Smith.” It took me a moment, then I realized: Anna’s mother.
“Mrs. Yang!” I said. “You look wonderful.”
Her bearing was still subdued, dignified, but she no longer looked grim, as she had when we’d met her in Anna’s living room. “Thank you. May I speak with you for just a minute?” She included all of us in her gaze, so we followed her through the door of the nearest open studio. It happened to be Francie See’s, where the bowl-and-tap painting we’d seen the birth of was pinned to the wall, joining all the other paintings of water, infinitely yielding and yet, in the end, invincible. Mrs. Yang turned to face us.
“I wanted to thank you. For all you’ve done for Anna, and my family.”
I said, “Dr. Yang told you?”
“Yes, he did. He keeps no secrets from me.”
“Oh. Well, you’re very welcome.” The guys seemed to have elected me spokesperson, or maybe I did that myself; so to be properly Chinese about it, I went on, “We’re honored to have had the opportunity to help. We were lucky to be able to come up with a fitting solution to the problem.”
“Fitting.” Mrs. Yang gave a small smile. “Yes, some solutions are more fitting than others. Anna’s so happy now that Mike is here, it’s hard to remember that my husband and I once opposed this marriage.”
“You wanted to protect her,” Bill said. “I’m sure she understood that, even if she didn’t like the way you tried to do it.”
“Of course she did,” I said. To my surprise I found myself channeling my mother. “That’s a privilege of family. To express concern and be understood, even if the expression’s odd.”
The look Mrs. Yang gave me was definitely odd. So was what she said: “And beyond family? Can one be understood, do you think, and maybe even forgiven, for expressions of concern that are … odd?”
I didn’t know what to say because I didn’t know what we were talking about. Bill just drank his beer, so I guessed he didn’t either. Jack, though, leaned down, kissed Mrs. Yang’s cheek, and said, “Forgiveness is always possible, even without understanding. When there’s understanding, it’s inevitable. Go back to your son-in-law’s party, Yang Yu-feng.”
After a moment she smiled; then she bowed. Jack bowed back, and she left the room.
I said, “Um?”
Jack smiled as he watched Mrs. Yang make her way down the hall. “She’s the one who shot at me.”
“What?”
“That’s what she wants to be forgiven for. She said he has no secrets from her. But she kept a few from him. She knew Anna had made the paintings, and what Anna and Pete were planning to use them for. That’s why the target was me, not Dr. Yang. For one thing, I’m not sure she could bring herself to shoot at him, even if no one was supposed to get hurt. For another, it didn’t matter that there are other people who do what I do. By the time Dr. Yang found and hired one of them the Free Mike Liu rally would’ve happened and the paintings would’ve been shown. She just wanted to buy time for Anna by scaring me off.”
“No, seriously? Where would Mrs. Yang even get a gun?”
“Oh, I don’t think she personally did it. She hired it.”
“Okay, then where would she get a person with a gun?”
“A gun, and a high slime factor. Right here, in the studio next to Anna’s.”
“Jon-Jon Jie?”
Jack nodded. “I’m sure Mrs. Yang paid him well. And he probably thought that this would, long-term, give him something to hold over Dr. Yang. For when he wants a show reviewed or something.”
“Gunshots in the middle of the day on Madison Avenue? He’d take that kind of risk?”
“Come on, he’s a Texas cowboy.”
Bill said, “What are you going to do?”