The Bridegroom (17 page)

“Then why did you come back?”

“I came back to take you with me.” Her apricot eyes winked at him, the long lashes flapping. “Did I go abroad just for myself? Didn’t I say I was leaving to look for a new life for our family four years ago?”

“Yes, you did.”

“You see, now I’m back to fetch you and our child. If we work hard, we’ll get rich there and have a big house and two cars. Don’t you want to drive a brand-new Ford?”

“No, I don’t know how to drive.”

“You can always learn. I can drive, it’s much easier than riding a bicycle.” Her hands gripped an imaginary wheel, turning it left and right, while her head tilted back, her eyes half shut.

He swallowed. “No. Even if you give me a gold mountain, I won’t go.”

“You know, Chigan, we can have more kids there.” She winked again and smiled with a dimple on her chin.

This seemed to sink in, because he always wanted a son but wasn’t allowed to have another child here. Yet after a moment’s silence, he said, “Dandan is enough for me. I don’t want another kid.”

“Come on, will you be happy to remain a mechanic in the boatyard for the rest of your life?”

“Happy is the man who’s content.”

“All right, if you don’t want to leave, let Dandan go with me. She’ll have a good future there. She will go to Harvard.”

“What’s that?”

“The best university in the world.”

“No, it can’t be better than Oxford.”

“Please, let her go with me.” She tried to smile again, but her face twisted.

Of course he wouldn’t trust her with the child. She couldn’t bear his refusal anymore and burst into tears, begging him to let her see Dandan just once. Her crying softened him a little, and he agreed to talk to their daughter and see what the child thought.

The next afternoon he pedaled to his parents’. Onto the carrier of his Flying Pigeon bicycle was tied a long carton containing an electronic keyboard, a gift Jinli had brought back for her daughter.

Chigan’s father scolded him and called him a thickhead, saying that if Jinli saw the child she could easily talk her into leaving with her. “Why can’t you see through such a simple trick?” the old man asked, pointing a half-eaten tomato at his son.

The keyboard was put away; they would give it to Dandan at the right time. The grandparents then asked the child, who was upstairs watching the TV program “Baby Science,” to write to her mother. Chigan returned with the short letter before nightfall. After reading it, Jinli was heartbroken and locked herself in her room, weeping quietly. The letter said: “Go away, bad woman. I don’t want a mother like you!”

That stopped her from attempting to take the family abroad. What was she going to do next? Probably she would return to New York soon. But when asked about that, she said she would stay, since neither her husband nor their child wanted to leave.

To our surprise, a week later Chigan filed for divorce. Who could have imagined this feckless man was capable of taking such a step? It must have been his parents who planned it and used their connections to make the court give priority to the case, for without delay the divorce was granted. Jinli didn’t seem to mind losing her husband, though she did fight in court for custody of her daughter. The judge said she was an irresponsible parent, then announced to her, “Out of our concern for the child’s physical and mental health, this court declines your request.” She was, however, ordered to pay thirty-yuan in child support a month. Strange to say, she insisted on paying a hundred instead. This puzzled us. People began to wonder how much money she actually had. Perhaps she was a lady of wealth.

Then word went about that Jinli had a lot of money. Some people said she was small-minded and stingy. If she was so rich, why not buy her parents-in-law a twenty-seven-inch color TV—either a Sony or a Sanyo? Had she done that, surely they’d have let go of the child. Yet some people didn’t believe she was rich. They proved to be wrong.

On a windy afternoon Jinli arrived at Five Continents Commons to buy a new apartment. Recently our city had put up a few residential buildings on the riverbank to attract foreign customers, mainly overseas Chinese from Southeast Asia and businesspeople form Taiwan. Jinli seemed still set on staying in Muji, or at least spending a few months a year here.

“Your passport, please,” said a slender young man, the manager of the estate.

Having handed him her passport, she felt something was wrong and wiggled slightly in the chair.

The man looked through the maroon-covered passport and said without raising his eyes, “This was issued by the People’s Republic of China. You’re a Chinese citizen?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I can’t help you. These apartments are only for foreign customers. We want hard currencies.”

“I’ll pay you U.S. dollars.” She blushed a little and clasped her hands. Her interlaced fingers made the ring invisible.

A gleam crossed his dark eyes, but he shook his head and said, “No. I’m allowed to do business with foreigners only.”

“What’s the difference if I pay the same money and the same price?”

“I’m sorry, Comrade. This is a rule I have to follow or I’ll lose my job.” He combed back his soft hair with his fingers.

So she gave up the idea of buying an ultramodern apartment, which would cost twenty thousand dollars—about a quarter-million yuan according to the exchange rate on the black market at the time. None of us would dare dream of having so much money! Not even a medium-sized factory here would have that amount of cash. Finally we realized we might have a millionairess among us. Some people began to suck up to Jinli, saying they would help her find a job or a place to stay. But she didn’t seem interested anymore. Whenever people condemned Chigan and his parents in front of her, she would say drily, “When I left I thought I could always come back.” And she began to avoid others.

Nobody knows when she disappeared from Muji City. It’s said that she left for Shenzhen or Hong Kong. Professor Fan, however, claims Jinli returned to New York to rejoin the old man and has changed her name. Chigan refuses to comment; maybe he doesn’t know her whereabouts either.

A month after the divorce, he got married again. The bride, who was a young widow with a four-year-old boy, works in the same institute with him. She’s a decent woman, loves her new husband, and takes good care of him and their home. We often see the newlyweds walking hand in hand in the evening. Never has Chigan looked so happy and healthy. His stomach has begun growing into a potbelly like a general’s.

More amazing is that Dandan adores her stepbrother. She tells others she always wanted a younger brother and now she finally has one. The boy is attached to her, too; together they read picture-storybooks and recite nursery rhymes every day after school. Asked whether her stepmother is kind to her, Dandan will say, “My dad found me a good mommy.” Sometimes she plays hopscotch with other children in front of the apartment building. A pair of huge butterflies, made of yellow ribbons, dangles at the ends of her braids as she capers around. Smiles widen her gazelle eyes.

After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town

“I want my money back!” the customer said, dropped his plate on the counter, and handed me his receipt. He was a fiftyish man, of stout girth. A large crumb hung on the corner of his oily mouth. He had bought four pieces of chicken just now, but only a drumstick and a wing were left on the plate.

“Where are the breast and the thigh?” I asked.

“You can’t take people in like this.” The man’s bulbous eyes flashed with rage. This time I recognized him; he was a worker in the nearby motor factory.

“How did we take you in?” the tall Baisha asked sharply, brandishing a pair of long tongs. She glared at the man, whose crown barely reached the level of her nose.

He said, “This Cowboy Chicken only sounds good and looks tasty. In fact it’s just a name—it’s more batter than meat. After two pieces I still don’t feel a thing in here.” He slapped his flabby side. “I don’t want to eat this fluffy stuff anymore. Give me my money back.”

“No way,” Baisha said and swung her permed hair, which looked like a magpies’ nest. “If you hadn’t touched the chicken, we’d refund you the money. But—”

“Excuse me,” Peter Jiao said, coming out of the kitchen together with Mr. Shapiro.

We explained to him the customer’s demand, which Peter translated for our American boss. Then we all remained silent to see how Peter, our manager, would handle this.

After a brief exchange with Mr. Shapiro in English, Peter said in Chinese to the man, “You’ve eaten two pieces already, so we can only refund half your money. But don’t take this as a precedent. Once you’ve touched the food, it’s yours.”

The man looked unhappy but accepted the offer. Still he muttered, “American dogs.” He was referring to us, the Chinese employed by Cowboy Chicken.

That angered us. We began arguing with Peter and Mr. Shapiro that we shouldn’t have let him take advantage of us this way. Otherwise all kinds of people would come in to sample our food for free. We didn’t need a cheap customer like this one and should throw him out. Mr. Shapiro said we ought to follow the American way of doing business—you must try to satisfy your customers. “The customer is always right,” he had instructed us when we were hired. But he had no idea who he was dealing with. You let a devil into your house, he’ll get into your bed. If Mr. Shapiro continued to play the merciful Buddha, this place would be a mess soon. We had already heard a lot of complaints about our restaurant. People in town would say, “Cowboy Chicken is just for spendthrifts.” True, our product was more expensive and far greasier than the local braised chicken, which was cooked so well that you could eat even the bones.

Sponge in hand, I went over to clean the table littered by that man. The scarlet Formica tabletop smelled like castor oil when greased with chicken bones. The odor always nauseated me. As I was about to move to another table, I saw a hole on the seat the size of a soybean burned by a cigarette. It must have been the work of that son of a dog; instead of refunding his money, we should’ve detained him until he paid for the damage.

I hated Mr. Shapiro’s hypocrisy. He always appeared good-hearted and considerate to customers, but was cruel to us, his employees. The previous month he had deducted forty yuan from my pay. It hurt like having a rib taken out of my chest. What had happened was that I had given eight chicken breasts to a girl from my brother’s electricity station. She came in to buy some chicken. By the company’s regulations I was supposed to give her two drumsticks, two thighs, two wings, and two breasts. She said to me, “Be a good man, Hongwen. Give me more meat.” Somehow I couldn’t resist her charming smile, so I yielded to her request. My boss caught me stuffing the paper box with the meatiest pieces, but he remained silent until the girl was out of earshot. Then he dumped on me all his piss and crap. “If you do that again,” he said, “I’ll fire you.” I was so frightened! Later, he fined me, as an example to the seven other Chinese employees.

Mr. Shapiro was an old fox, good at sweet-talking. When we asked him why he had chosen to do business in our Muji City, he said he wanted to help the Chinese people, because in the late thirties his parents had fled Red Russia and lived here for three years before moving on to Australia; they had been treated decently, though they were Jews. With an earnest look on his round, whiskery face, Mr. Shapiro explained, “The Jews and the Chinese had a similar fate, so I feel close to you. We all have dark hair.” He chuckled as if he had said something funny. In fact that was capitalist baloney. We don’t need to eat Cowboy Chicken here, or appreciate his stout red nose and his balding crown, or wince at the thick black hair on his arms. His company exploited not just us but also thousands of country people. A few villages in Hebei Province grew potatoes for Cowboy Chicken, because the soil and climate there produced potatoes similar to Idaho’s. In addition, the company had set up a few chicken farms in Anhui Province to provide meat for its chain in China. It used Chinese produce and labor and made money out of Chinese customers, then shipped its profits back to the U.S. How could Mr. Shapiro have the barefaced gall to claim he had come to help us? We have no need for a savior like him. As for his parents’ stay in our city half a century ago, it’s true that the citizens here had treated Jews without discrimination. That was because to us a Jew was just another foreigner, no different from any other white devil. We still cannot tell the difference.

We nicknamed Mr. Shapiro “Party Secretary,” because just like a Party boss anywhere he did little work. The only difference was that he didn’t organize political studies or demand we report to him our inner thoughts. Peter Jiao, his manager, ran the business for him. I had known Peter since middle school, when his name was Peihai—an anemic, studious boy with few friends to play with. Boys often made fun of him because he had four tourbillions on his head. His father had served as a platoon commander in the Korean War and had been captured by the American army. Unlike some of the POWs, who chose to go to Canada or Taiwan after the war, Peihai’s father, out of his love for our motherland, decided to come back. But when he returned, he was discharged from the army and sent down to a farm in a northern suburb of our city. In reality, all those captives who had come back were classified as suspected traitors. A lot of them were jailed again. Peihai’s father worked under surveillance on the farm, but people rarely maltreated him, and he had his own home in a nearby village. He was quiet most of the time; so was his wife, a woman who never knew her dad’s name because she had been fathered by some Japanese officer. Their only son, Peihai, had to walk three miles to town for school every weekday. That was why we called him Country Boy.

Unlike us, he always got good grades. In 1977, when colleges reopened, he passed the entrance exams and enrolled at Tianjin Foreign Language Institute to study English. We had all sat for the exams, but only two out of the three hundred seniors from our high school had passed the admission standard. After college, Peihai went to America, studying history at the University of Iowa. Later he changed his field and earned a degree in business from that school. Then he came back, a completely different man, robust and wealthy, with curly hair and a new name. He looked energetic, cheerful, and younger than his age. At work he was always dressed formally, in a Western suit and a bright-colored necktie. He once joked with us, saying he had over fifty pounds of American flesh. To tell the truth, I liked Peter better than Peihai. I often wondered what in America had made him change so much—in just six years from an awkward boy to a capable, confident man. Was it American water? American milk and beef? The American climate? The American way of life? I don’t know for sure. More impressive, Peter spoke English beautifully, much better than those professors and lecturers in the City College who had never gone abroad and had learned their English mainly from textbooks written by the Russians. He had hired me probably because I had never bugged him in our school days and because I had a slightly lame foot. Out of gratitude I never spoke about his past to my fellow workers.

On the day Cowboy Chicken opened, about forty officials from the City Hall came to celebrate. At the opening ceremony, a vice mayor cut the red silk ribbon with a pair of scissors two feet long. He then presented Mr. Shapiro with a brass key the size of a small poker. What’s that for? we wondered. Our city didn’t have a gate with a colossal lock for it to open. The attendees at the ceremony sampled our chicken, fries, coleslaw, salad, biscuits. Coca-Cola, ginger ale, and orange soda were poured free like water. People touched the vinyl seats, the Formica tables, the dishwasher, the microwave, the cash register, the linoleum tile on the kitchen floor, and poked their heads into the freezer and the brand-new rest rooms. They were impressed by the whole package, shipped directly from the U.S. A white-bearded official said, “We must learn from the Americans. See how they have managed to meet every need of their customers, taking care of not only what goes in but also what comes out. Everything was thought out beforehand.” Some of them watched us frying chicken in the stainless-steel troughs, which were safe and clean, nothing like a soot-bottomed cauldron or a noisy, unsteady wok. The vice mayor shook hands with every employee and told us to work hard and cooperatively with our American boss. The next day the city’s newspaper, the
Muji Herald,
published a lengthy article about Cowboy Chicken, describing its appearance here as a significant breakthrough in the city’s campaign to attract foreign investors.

During the first few weeks we had a lot of customers, especially young people, who, eager to taste something American, came in droves. We got so much business that the cooked-meat stands on the streets had to move farther and farther away from our restaurant. Sometimes when we passed those stands, their owners would spit on the ground and curse without looking at us, “Foreign lackeys!”

We’d cry back, “I eat Cowboy Chicken every day and gained lots of weight.”

At first Mr. Shapiro worked hard, often staying around until we closed at ten-thirty. But as the business was flourishing, he hung back more and stayed in his office for hours on end, reading newspapers and sometimes chewing a skinny sausage wrapped in cellophane. He rested so well in the daytime and had so much energy to spare that he began to date the girls working for him. There were four of them, two full-timers and two part-timers, all around twenty, healthy and lively, though not dazzlingly pretty. Imagine, once a week, on Thursday night, a man of over fifty went out with a young girl who was happy to go anywhere he took her. This made us, the three men hired by him, feel useless, like a bunch of eunuchs, particularly myself because I’d never had a girlfriend, though I was almost thirty. Most girls were nice to me, but for them I was merely a good fellow, deserving more pity than affection, as if my crippled foot made me less than a man. For me, Mr. Shapiro was just a dirty old man, but the girls here were no better, always ready to sell something—a smile, a few sweet words, and perhaps their flesh.

The day after Mr. Shapiro had taken Baisha out, I asked her about the date, curious to see what else besides money made this paunchy man so attractive to girls. What’s more, I was eager to find out whether he had bedded them in his apartment after dinner. That was illegal. If he had done it, we’d have something on him and could turn him in when it was necessary. I asked Baisha casually, “How many rooms does he have?” My hands were busy pulling plates out of the dishwasher and piling them up on a table.

“How should I know?” she said and gave me a suspicious stare. I must admit, she was smart and had a mind quick like a lizard.

“Didn’t you spend some time with him yesterday evening?”

“Yes, we had dinner. That was all.”

“Was it good?” I had heard he had taken the girls to Lucky House, a third-rate restaurant near the marketplace.

“So-so.”

“What did you eat?”

“Fried noodles and sautéed beef tripe.”

“Well, I wish somebody would give me a treat like that.”

“What made you think it was his treat?”

“It wasn’t?” I put the last plate on the pile.

“I paid for what I ate. I won’t go out with him again. He’s such a cheapskate.”

“If he didn’t plan to spend money, why did he invite you out?”

“He said this was the American way. He gave the waitress a big tip, though, a ten, but the girl wouldn’t take it.”

“So afterwards you just went home?”

“Yes. I thought he’d take me to the movies or a karaoke bar. He just picked up his big butt and said he had a good time. Before we parted on the street, he yawned and said he missed his wife and kids.”

“That was strange.”

Manyou, Jinglin, and I—the three male employees—talked among ourselves about Mr. Shapiro’s way of taking the girls out. We couldn’t see what he was up to. How could he have a good time just eating a meal with a girl? This puzzled us. We asked Peter whether all American men were so stingy, but he said that like us they would generally pay the bill in such a case. He explained, “Probably Mr. Shapiro wants to make it clear to the girls that this isn’t a date, but a working dinner.”

Who would buy that? Why didn’t he have a working dinner with one of us, the male employees? We guessed he might have used the girls, because if he had gone to a fancy place like Four Seas Garden or the North Star Palace, which had special menus for foreigners, he’d have had to pay at least five times more than a Chinese customer. We checked with the girls, and they admitted that Mr. Shapiro had asked them to order everything. So he had indeed paid the Chinese prices. No wonder he had a good time. What an old fox. Still, why wouldn’t he take the girls to his apartment? Though none of them was a beauty, just the smell of the youthful flesh should have turned his old head, shouldn’t it? Especially the two part-timers, the college students, who had fine figures and educated voices; they worked only twenty hours a week and wouldn’t condescend to talk with us very often. Probably Mr. Shapiro was no good in bed, a true eunuch.