A Paper Son (3 page)

Now in my banker's suite I tossed Franklin's flier onto my desk beside my laptop, and prepared a cup of tea. Outside the storm attacked with the frantic energy of a novice fighter in the first round. I felt strangely calm now, and ready for the family at the railing. I had an idea now of why they were there, and what I was going to do with them. The water settled and there they were again, with the twilit city spread out in front of them. The woman's name was Li-Yu, I decided. Her children would be Rose and Henry. Her husband would be called Bing. The city wasn't San Francisco—it was too dark, too far away. I decided on Canton, the origin of uncertain journeys somewhere in my own family's distant past. The year would be 1925. I opened my laptop.
From the deck of the steamer,
I wrote,
they can see what must be nearly all of Canton.

From the deck of the steamer they can see what must be nearly all of Canton. In the day's last light the city's buildings look secretive and dangerous as they crouch inside a smoky haze, their haunches illuminated by diffuse, flame-colored lights from unseen sources. The wharf uncoils and reaches toward the ship like a dirty claw. The air is cold, and smells of fish and garbage. So this is it, Li-Yu thinks. The fabled heart of China.

It has been hours since they steamed past that outer armada of islands, past Hong Kong, and were swallowed by the hills and plains of Guangdong. The Pearl River, Bing said, looking inland, northward, his excitement clear. Li-Yu had spent weeks at sea, and weeks before that, trying to absorb some of this excitement, but none of it had settled in her. Even now, with the end of their journey so close, and the oppression of the ship's steerage compartments nearly behind them, she couldn't shake the feeling that she was offering herself and her children to the throat of a hungry dragon. She watched the hills and rice paddies glide past, wondering what sort of river could so easily consume a ship like this.

She knew well a version of this country, one she had pieced together from thousands of miles away, from her parents' stories and from clues like the smell and feel of the clothes and the few things that had survived their trip across the Pacific, the year before Li-Yu was born. In her mind the countryside was dotted with mist-shrouded mountains and temples with roofs curling like phoenix wings, its halves divided by that stupendous wall. The government consisted of soldiers, their columns bristling with rifles, marching through the grainy landscapes of news clips and magazine photographs, and of the boy Puyi in his embroidered silk robes, with his hat and his haughty stare, an emperor without an empire, and now nothing more than a commoner. Before seeing this view of Canton she felt she might have known something about its cities, having been raised in the Chinatowns of Stockton and Oakland and San Francisco, where her sisters now live, far behind her. She knows the sound of twenty men speaking Cantonese all to each other at once, and she knows the smells of roasted duck and dumplings and the steam of rice. She knows the shops and their wares, and the textures of jade and ivory and bamboo and silk. But there is nothing familiar about this city that now reaches for them with its claw of a wharf and pulls them into its shroud of twilight and smoke. The quays teem with cargo and equipment, and the sounds of hundreds of shouting voices rise up over the growl of the ship's engines. The mouths of streets appear, revealing narrow corridors that twist from the docks into the city's interior.

Li-Yu tightens her grip on Rose and Henry. Bing turns from the railing, where he has been smiling and breathing in great draughts of the smelly air. He squats down next to the children. “This is China, our home,” he says, steadying himself with a loose hug around their legs. “What do you think?” Neither of them speaks. He looks back and forth at their blank faces. “You'll love it,” he says. “Ask your mother.” He looks up at Li-Yu. “Tell them,” he says.

Neither of her children looks to her, and Li-Yu offers nothing. Bing stands and leans toward her ear. “I thought we were supposed to be together,” he says.

“We are,” she says.

“I thought you were going to talk to them,” he says.

“What can I tell them?” she says, looking out across the dark city. “What do I know?”

But Bing has already stopped listening; he's gazing down at the wharf, which is now just beneath them, and crawling with people. The ship docks with a bump and a heightened groan as the engines work to check the rest of its momentum. The deck rings with footfalls as the passengers clamor for the stairs. Li-Yu gives each of her children a small canvas bag to carry, tells them to hang on to the back of her coat, and hoists her bags. Bing takes his own suitcases and plunges into the crowd. Li-Yu chases after him, and though she can feel the tug of both children's hands, she imagines how easy it would be for them to be pulled away into the crowd, like fruit plucked from a tree. They make it onto the dock without getting separated, but Henry is fighting tears, and Rose's jaw is hard and set. The wharf is nothing like Li-Yu imagined. The signs are in Chinese, but the faces are from all over the world. She hears a dozen different languages before they have gone a hundred steps. Bing is jubilant. He is congratulating strangers, laughing, turning and calling things out to Li-Yu and the kids, his words garbled like he's been drinking. At one point she loses sight of him completely. She stops, gathers her children against her sides, and searches the crowd before her. Just when she is about to panic he comes bounding in from the side.

“Over here,” he says, smiling, pulling them toward the edge of the crowd. There is an open-air restaurant, little more than a cart with a few upturned wooden crates around it. Bing gestures at them to squat and after a quick exchange with the cook he returns with bowls of rice porridge, slices of grilled pork, boiled peanuts, a dish of lotus root and tree fungus in a rich brown sauce.

“Eat, eat,” he says, spreading the dishes on the crates, beaming as if he has just cooked them himself. He tousles Henry's hair. “Real food!” he says. “Eat up, we only have half an hour.”

“Until what?” Li-Yu says, picking up her chopsticks.

“Until the boat to Xinhui!” he says. “We'll be there before the sun sets tomorrow!”

Li-Yu shakes her head.

He points somewhere, vaguely inland. “Nearly there now!” he says.

“Not tonight,” she says. “The children need to rest. I need to rest. Even you need to rest.”

“We'll rest! What could be more relaxing than a quiet boat ride? We'll look at the stars, and the river will rock the children to sleep.”

“I've been on a quiet boat ride for weeks,” she says. “We're staying here.”

He jabs at the crowd streaming past them with his chopsticks, sauce dribbling from the corner of his mouth. “This is rest?” he says. “Nobody sleeps here. You'll see.”

“Henry is nearly asleep in his
jook
,” she says. “We stay.”

Bing curses through a mouthful of mushrooms, drops his chopsticks on the crate, and storms away. One of the chopsticks clatters to the ground. Henry picks it up, places it neatly alongside its mate, and attempts a smile at her.

“Where is Dad going?” he says.

“He'll be back,” she says.

He returns minutes later and points up one of the narrow serpentine roads that fan out from the wharf. “Let's go,” he says.

Once in their bed the children fall asleep instantly. Bing seems to forget about the delay. He holds Li-Yu and talks on and on about all the things she and the children will love in Xinhui. His voice grows quiet, his words soft and far apart as he tires and fades. Li-Yu stays awake until very late, listening to the breathing of her children and her husband, and to the sounds of voices outside, and wooden wheels rolling on stone.

***

While I'd been writing, the storm had continued its siege on the city. A wind had risen and now my windows hummed and rattled. My teacup sat where I'd left it, untouched, its heat gone and its mysteries inert. My computer's desktop was littered with a dozen open browser windows: maps and images of China, articles on its history and geography, articles on steamships and Pacific crossings. I closed them all and centered my document on the screen again. I checked the clock. I knew I was supposed to be hungry by now, but when I thought about looking in the refrigerator or in the cupboard all I could see was Li-Yu, lying awake in that room, listening.

***

The next morning Bing awakens them early. After a breakfast of steamed pork buns from a street vendor they return to the waterfront, where they wait in a thick dark fog for the water taxi. By the time it is fully light they are underway. The city seems as though it will never end but finally it shrinks and clears, and soon the little boat is plying up a wide avenue of water that runs through an endless patchwork of fallow rice paddies, which are empty but for puddles of rainwater and small piles of rotting stalks left from the fall harvest.

Rose and Henry say almost nothing, except when they lean in to whisper to Li-Yu that they have to use the bathroom. The other children on board stare at the scenery for a time, but then they scatter to find other diversions. Hills emerge from the fog, ghostlike, and then disappear back into it. The air grows colder. A breeze pushes against them. Li-Yu gathers her children and squeezes them against her sides.

“We're almost there,” Bing says, smiling broadly. “Just one more night.” He drops to a knee in front of his children and points to the empty rice paddies all around them. “You wouldn't know it this time of year, but the fields of Guangdong are where the best rice in China grows. And since the best rice in the world grows in China, what do you think we'll find growing here next summer?”

The children nod but do not answer. Li-Yu looks upriver, peering through the fog for the land Bing has described, for the memories of her parents. She sees nothing but endless paddies, and looks to Bing for an explanation. This doesn't look like the place you described, she wants to say. Where are the valleys, the mountains, the blossoms? There is only this river, the endless mud of these rice fields, and the occasional village. But Bing is staring off into the distance, perhaps seeing things in the mists that she cannot. In the months leading up to the move he had been expansive, holding on to her at night and telling her over and over again how things were going to be. He'd indulged all the kids' wishes—all they'd had to say was that they were going to miss something: cinnamon buns, ginger ale, chewing gum—and he'd be on his way to the grocery store. But then they departed and San Francisco diminished behind them. At sea he had spent more and more time, it seemed, lost in thoughts of something else. She had to ask him questions two and three times before she knew he'd heard her.

The boat drifts past a little riverside village. There are women washing clothes along the riverbanks, but they do not look up or wave. Li-Yu wonders again how she let Bing talk her into this. Her parents had been stunned when she'd first told them she was considering it. She had been in their living room. They had stared at her in silence for what seemed like several minutes. Finally her mother turned slightly, almost imperceptibly, toward her father.

“Do you know how hard it was for us to get here?” her father said, quietly. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, as if this foolhardy daughter before him could be cleared away like a trick of light.

“Yes,” she said.

He put his glasses back on and folded his arms across his chest. “Our grandchildren were born in America,” he said.

Li-Yu shrugged.

Her mom said, “Here are a few things you wouldn't have in China: those shoes you're wearing, and those clothes. That purse, or that chair you're sitting in.”

“I'm sure they have chairs in China,” Li-Yu said. “They even have thrones.”

“Used to.”

“Don't you think it would be good for me and for the kids to see China?”

“No,” her dad said.

“This room and pretty much everything in it,” her mom said, looking around, “except the dirt.”

“They have never met their other grandparents,” Li-Yu said.

“Bing chose to come here,” her father said.

“Let's go look in the kitchen,” her mom said.

“I don't want to go look in the kitchen,” Li-Yu said. “Bing says it's a nice big house, the largest in the village.”

Her parents exchanged looks. “It's a terrible plan,” her father said, “and that's that.”

“If Bing wants to take you and the children to China,” her mother began to say, but her father cut the sentence off with a stamp of his foot.

“Resist,” he said.

The stamp echoed through the house. Her parents stared at her, their unblinking eyes steely.

“We didn't raise you to be a Chinese wife,” her mother said.

“It's not like it is here,” her father said.

“I'm Chinese, and I'm a wife,” Li-Yu said. “Not much is going to change those things.”