I could see his thick hair, his tricky eyebrows, his smooth, lying face, his clever mouth. I had not seen him for over forty years. And now, just to hear Helen mention his name, I could feel his breath on my neck, remember him laughing and telling me he had finally found me and would drag me back, no choice.
“Don’t be scared. It’s true, he’s gone,” said Helen. “Read it yourself.”
I took the letter from her hands. I read it. I found out: Forty years later and Wen Fu was still laughing in my face. Because the letter did not say he died twenty, thirty, forty years ago. He died last month, on Christmas Day.
I slapped the letter. “Can you imagine?” I said to Helen. “Even to the end, he found a way to make me miserable forever! Died on Christmas!”
“What does it matter when he died?” said Helen. She was poking her mouth with a toothpick, raising one comer of her mouth so she looked as if she were smiling. “He’s dead, can’t come get you anymore, that’s what matters.”
“Already got me!” I cried. “Already in my mind! Now I will always be thinking of him on Christmas. How can I sing ‘Silent Night,’ ‘Joy to the World,’ when I want to shout and say, So glad he is dead! Wrong thought, wrong day.”
“Then you should sweep your floors, sweep him out of your mind,” she said, throwing her hand out—as if it were so easy!
And I knew she was talking about the Chinese new year coming up soon, about that old saying: Sweep away last year’s dust and all bad feelings.
What does Helen know about sweeping? If you looked at her kitchen floor, you would see—dust balls as big as mice, black smudges polished smooth in every corner, twenty years’ worth, all the disappointments she thinks I can’t see.
“That’s what I was thinking,” said Helen. “We should sweep all the lies out of our life. Tell everyone our true situation, how we met.”
“What are you saying?”
“Why should I go to my grave with all those lies? That I am your sister-in-law, married to your half brother, a man I never met. And my birthdate is wrong. You made me one year younger. Now when I die, my long life is cut short one year early.”
“What kind of nonsense are you saying?”
“I am saying now that Wen Fu is dead, I want to correct everything before it’s too late. No more secrets, no more lying.”
A bad feeling was moving in my stomach. Why was she talking this way? She wanted to expose everything!—my past, my marriage to Wen Fu, everything I had worked so hard to forget.
“How can you do that?” I scolded her. “You want to tell my secrets, just like that? We made a promise—never to tell.”
“That was a long time ago,” argued Helen. “Of course, we couldn’t say anything then. You were afraid. You thought Wen Fu would still chase you. And we both needed a way to get into this country. So it made sense back then. But now—”
“This is a secret.”
“What does it matter now? Wen Fu is dead,” said Helen. “He can’t come get you. We can’t be deported. It matters more to tell the truth, not to go to the next world with so many lies. How can I face my first husband in heaven, when all these years I have been saying I was married to your brother? How can I have a tombstone that says I was born in 1919? Everyone will laugh at me behind my dead back, saying I was so old I could not even remember how old I really was.”
“Then you tell everyone your things, just don’t tell them about mine,” I said.
Helen frowned. “How can I do that? Then I have to make up more lies, how we met, why I know you. You are asking me to talk to the devil. If you don’t tell, I must—before the new year.”
“You are asking me to bring disaster into my life. If you tell your children, then my children will know too.”
“Then you should tell them yourself,” said Helen. “They are grownups now, not children anymore. They’ll understand. Maybe they’ll be happy to know something about their mother’s background. Hard life in China, that’s very popular now, nothing shameful in that.”
“You don’t know what shameful is!” I said.
We argued like that, back and forth, back and forth. But after a while, I knew it was useless. It was like her pom-pom fish and her long-distance money. Helen thinks she’s always right. How could I argue with someone who makes no sense? I was shaking mad.
When she went to put more water on for tea, I told her it was already too late. I picked up the groceries I had bought at Happy Super that afternoon, then put on my coat.
“Wait a little,” Helen said. “Henry can drive you. Safer that way.”
Every time I come to her house she says that. Every time she says that I know what she really means. Thirty years ago, Jimmy and I moved out of Chinatown and bought our house on Eighth Avenue between Geary and Anza. And for two years Helen said to me, “That part of town, not too safe. That part of town—oh!—we could not move there.” Then after Jimmy died—guess what?—she and Henry bought a bigger house one block from my place, on Ninth, a higher-number street. “Now we can take care of you,” she said. “Safer that way.” But I knew she was just using me as her excuse.
Last night I said the same thing I always say. “Don’t bother, I can walk by myself. Good exercise.”
“Too dangerous,” she insisted. But I knew she already didn’t mean it. She was whispering, so she would not wake up her husband. “You should be more careful,” she said.
“Wah, you think someone wants to rob me for my tangerines, for one can of bamboo shoots?”
She grabbed the plastic bag from my hand. “Then I will help you carry this,” she said. “Too heavy for you.”
I grabbed back my bag. “Don’t do polite words with me.”
“You are too old to carry it by yourself,” she said, reaching again for my bag.
“You forget. You are too old, too. One year older already.”
And finally she let me and my bag go.
All night long I cleaned my house to forget. I shook my curtains, beat my sofa, dusted my tables and the rail going up my stairs. I wiped down the TV set, wiped the picture frame on top, the glass, looked at the picture underneath: Jimmy, always so young.
I went into my bedroom, changed the sheets on my bed, the same bed I shared with Jimmy, the curve of his body still sunken in.
I went into Samuel’s room. I dusted the plastic airplanes he made, Japanese and American bombers, the little soldiers running away on his desk. I opened a dresser and saw a Playboy magazine. Ai! It was like an old slap to my face. I once told Samuel to throw that magazine away: 1964, it said, the same year Jimmy died, when everyone stopped listening to me.
I went into Pearl’s room. So many hurts and fights in this room. The Barbie doll I let her have, but no Ken. The perfume I wouldn’t let her wear because it made her smell like cheap stuff. The curved dressing table with the round mirror and silver handles, the one I loved so much, but gave to my daughter instead. And when she saw it, she said she hated it! “You picked this one out just to torture me,” she shouted.
I was remembering this, dusting her table. That’s when I saw tiny words carved into the top of the dressing table: “I love RD.”
Who is RD? Who does my daughter love enough to ruin this furniture she hates so much? Is he American or Chinese? And then I became angry: Look what she did to my good furniture!
Of course, after I calmed down, I realized Pearl didn’t do this recently. That was maybe twenty-five years ago. Because now Pearl is over forty years old. And she is no longer in love with RD. She is married to Phil Brandt, not Chinese, but still a nice man, a doctor, although not the best kind.
When Pearl first introduced him to me, I tried to be nice. I said, “Oh, a doctor. I’ll send all my friends to be your patients.” And then he told me what kind of doctor he was. A pathologist!— someone who looks at people only when it’s too late, after they’ve died. How could I send my friends to that kind of doctor?
But Pearl has a good job, a speech therapist for retarded child
ren, although she told me never to say that. A few years ago, she said, “We don’t call them retarded or handicapped children anymore. We say ‘children with disabilities.’ We put the children first, the disabilities second. And I don’t do just speech therapy. I’m really what’s called a speech and language clinician. And I work only with children who have moderate to severe communicative disorders. You should never call them retarded.”
I asked her to tell me what she did again and she wrote it down: “A speech and language clinician for children with moderate to severe communicative disorders.” I practiced saying this many, many times. I still have those words in my purse. I still can’t say them. So now maybe Pearl thinks I’m retarded, too.
Of course, Pearl’s two daughters have no problems speaking English. When the older one was only two years old, she ran up to me at the door, shouting, “Ha-bu! Ha-bu! Ha-bu is here!” How clever, I was thinking. She knows how to call her Grandmother in Shanghainese. And then my granddaughter said in English: “What presents did you bring me? What kind? How many? Where are they?”
“Isn’t it amazing?” Pearl said. “She already speaks in complete sentences. Most kids her age use only two-word phrases. She’s really smart.”
And I said, “What good is it to have her be this kind of smart? You should teach her manners, not to ask too much, same way I taught you.”
My daughter gave me a smiling-frowning look. She said, “Oh, Ma.” That’s all she said. “Oh, Ma.” No more argument.
I was thinking about this, while cleaning her room. That is how she is. That is how I am. Always careful to be polite, always trying not to bump into each other, just like strangers.
And then my hand knocked into something underneath her bed. Those granddaughters—so messy when they play. I pulled it out. In my hands I held a pink plastic box. It was locked, no way to open it without a key. “My Secret Treasures,” it said on top.
Oh, I remembered. I gave Pearl that box when she was ten, for her birthday. Back then she had opened the box, looked inside.
“It’s empty,” she said. She looked up at me, as if I should change this.
“Of course. Now it is empty. Later you can put things inside,” I told her. Maybe she thought the box was too old-fashioned, just like the dresser. But to me it was modern, something I thought she would like very much.
“What kind of things?” she asked.
“Secrets, privacy, American junk.”
She said nothing, only stared at the lid. It showed a girl with a yellow ponytail, lying in bed, her feet on the wall, talking on the phone. We had lots of fights about that too, talking too much on the phone.
But now I could see: Where the ponytail had once been yellow, now it was black. And the box, once empty and holding only her disappointment, now was so heavy, lots of things inside.
Oh, I was excited! To open the treasures of my young daughter’s heart, all those things kept hidden from me for so many years.
I looked in other drawers, searching for the key to the lock. No key. I looked underneath her bed. I found an old pair of Chinese slippers with a hole at each big toe.
I decided to go downstairs, get a knife and cut the latch open. But before I could take even one step forward, my mind walked ahead of me. What was inside? What hurts and disappointments? And if I opened the box and saw a stranger, what then? What if this daughter inside the box was nothing like the one I had imagined I had raised?
I was trying to decide what to do. Cut the lock or not? Put the box back or open it later? And as I asked myself these questions, I smoothed my hair. My hand brushed against a bobby pin, and it was like an instant answer. I took that bobby pin and put it in the lock.
Inside the box I found two tiny lipsticks, one pink, one white. I saw some jewelry, a silver necklace with a cross, a ring with a fake ruby on one side and bubble gum on the other. Underneath that, more junk, even terrible things—tampons, which I warned her not to use, blue eye makeup, which I also warned her not to use. And underneath that were silly things, an announcement for something called “Sadie Hawkins Day Dance,” and letters from her friend Jeanette. I remember that girl, the one whose mother always let her go boy-crazy.
Pearl fought me. “Why can’t I ask a boy to Sadie Hawkins? Jeanette’s going. Jeanette’s mother is letting her go.”
“You want to follow a girl who has no sense? You want to listen to her mother? That mother doesn’t even have concern for her own daughter!”
I was seeing all this again in front of me. I opened one of Jeanette’s letters. What was this? “Hey, ding-dong. He’s bonkers for you. Fake him out. Make out.”
I was right! That girl made no sense.
And then I saw something else. My breathing stopped. It was a small card with a picture of Jesus on one side. On the other side, it said: “In loving memory, James Y. Louie.” More words, the date he was born, April 14, 1914. But then look: The date he died. It was covered with black marks, so many angry marks.
I was happy and sad all at once, the way you feel when you listen to old songs you had almost forgotten. And you can only weep that each note is already gone the moment you hear it, before you can say, “How true! How true this was!”
Because right then I realized I was wrong. Right away I wanted to call Pearl and tell her, “Now I know. You were sad. You were crying, if not outside, then inside. You loved your daddy.”
And then I thought about Helen, what she said last night, how she would tell Pearl all my secrets, my lies. And after that, why should my daughter believe me anymore?
I took out my vacuum cleaner to catch all the dust I had thrown into the air by bringing out this worry. I went into my hallway and vacuumed the top of my carpet, the plastic runner, the sides where the carpet showed. I lifted the runner to clean the carpet underneath. I saw how the carpet was still bright underneath, like gold-colored brocade. But on the sides, where the carpet showed, it was worn and dirty-looking. And no matter how much I cleaned, it didn’t matter. It would always look this way. Just like this stain from my life. I could never get it out.
I went downstairs and sat on my sofa. And when morning came, I was still sitting, still awake, holding that letter from Beautiful Betty. I was thinking about all those times Wen Fu could have died, should have died: During the war, when so many pilots died all at once. When he crashed that jeep and killed someone else. When the Communists took over and killed the Kuomintang. During the Cultural Revolution. All those other times when so many other people died, when he should have died but did not die.
And now this letter from Beautiful Betty, telling Helen how he had died in bed, his whole family watching: his other wife and his children by that other wife, his brother and his brother’s wife, his old pilot friends.
In my mind, I could see them all: dropping tears on Wen Fu’s face, smoothing his hair, wrapping warm bricks to put at his feet, calming him, soothing him, calling to him, “Don’t go! Don’t go!”
He died peacefully, the letter had said, died of a bad heart at age seventy-eight.
I slapped that letter in two. It was his bad heart that kept him alive! And now I was the one left with a bad heart. I sat on my sofa, crying and shouting, wishing I had been at his deathbed, wishing he were still alive. Because if he were, I would lean over his bed and call his name. I would pry open his eyes and tell him, Wen Fu, now I have come back. And when he saw my heart through my eyes, I would round my lips and spit hard in his face.
Look what he started by dying! Dead and he still comes back. And all the time, Helen is saying, “What does it matter?” What would she tell her children? How much would she tell them?
Sure, I could tell my children first: I had another marriage, to someone else. It was a very bad marriage. I made a mistake. But now that man is dead.
I could tell them: I had other children from that first marriage, but I lost them, so sad, but that was wartime, long time ago.
I could tell them: I pretended I was already married to your fath
er so I could come to this country. I had to, the Communists were taking over. And Helen lied for me, so later I had to lie for her too.
And then I would see Pearl’s face, always suspicious. No, no, I would say, it is not as bad as you think. I really did marry your father, right after I arrived. And then I had both of you, you first in 1950, Samuel second in 1952. And we really would have lived happily ever after, just like in those stories, if only your father had not died.
But even if I told it to them that way, Pearl would know. That’s not all that happened. She would see it in my dark eyes, my still hands, my shaky voice. She would not say anything, but she would know everything, not the lies, but the truth.
And then Pearl would know the worst truth of all—what Helen does not know, what Jimmy didn’t know, what I have tried to forget for forty years. Wen Fu, that bad man, he was Pearl’s father.
I have tried to think how I would tell my daughter. But every time I begin, I can hear her voice, so much hurt, “I knew it. You always loved Samuel more.” So she would never believe me.
But maybe if I told her, This is not true. I loved you the most, more than Samuel, more than all the children I had before you. I would tell her, I loved you in ways you never saw. And maybe you do not believe this. But I know this is true, feel my heart. Because you broke my heart the hardest, and maybe I broke yours the same way.
I will call her, long, long distance. Cost doesn’t matter, I will say. I have to tell you something, can’t wait any longer. And then I will start to tell her, not what happened, but why it happened, how it could not be any other way.
5
TEN THOUSAND THINGS
First I told my daughter I no longer had a pain in my heart, the reason why I said she had to come right away.
She still had a big worried look on her face. “Maybe we should take you to the doctor anyway. Just to make sure.”
“I am already sure,” I said. “Now I feel better. Now I don’t have to pay a big doctor bill. Take your coat off.”