The Fortunes (30 page)

It's not just the jet lag that has him feeling numbed and out of sync.

Nola tells him it ought to impress him, all this interest in China and the Chinese, and he knows what she means. It's startling to see so many white people paying attention to China. In junior high, he recalls, kids were shocked that he was Chinese but didn't come from China, that there were multiple dialects, that China had fought alongside the United States against the Japanese. This latter had especially surprised people who continuously confused Chinese and Japanese, not to mention Koreans and Vietnamese. “They fought with or against all of us in the past fifty years and they still can't tell us apart. And they wonder why they lost some of those wars,” his friend Ken Takamura used to say. “Shit, they can tell our restaurants apart more easily than us.” When he and Ken had to explain it to other kids at the start of each school year, Ken would roar, “
Orient
-ation, Holmes! I'm sushi, he's chop suey.” But John wasn't so sure; even now when he heard Chairman Mao referred to as “the Great Helmsman” he pictured Mr. Sulu from
Star Trek.
“We're both chopsticks and rice and noodles,” he told Ken. (They were friends, after all—John didn't have that many—he'd rather emphasize what they had in common.) He didn't bother pointing out that chop suey was as Chinese as California roll was Japanese. When Ken lost patience he used to tell the white kids, “You nuked my folks; his are going to nuke you. Figure it out.”

The solution, as it turned out, was for Ken's dad to get a job in Silicon Valley, leaving John as the only Asian in his class. Except back then he was still called “Oriental.”

None of his fellow parents-to-be would make such mistakes now, of course, and he should be happy. It's social progress, right, albeit their group is hardly representative. And yet it grates a little. He gets the underlying logic, to be sure. They're doing it for their future children. They want to be able to bring those kids up with a connection to China, feeling proud of their heritage. The idea is that their biological parents may have given them up, may have been obliged to because of the social policies of their government, but there's still a parent
culture
they can connect to.

I probably just envy them,
John thinks bitterly, but he's also suspicious of the parents. Isn't there some liberal guilt at play here? Some disowning of ownership?
We're going to take you away from your home but also keep you connected to it.
The Chinese government encourages the idea; so do the adoption agencies. That's the purported reason why in-country adoptions are required, why these trips include a sightseeing element. “It's not a vacation, it's a cultural education,” as Nola has explained it. “And let's not forget the foreign exchange,” John replied, but that was going too far. Money—the expenses already incurred, and in particular the bricks of fresh bills in their suitcase (China's being a cash economy, and the Chinese preferring clean bills), which they'll hand over to the orphanage tomorrow—is off-limits or referred to only euphemistically as a donation,
lucky money.

“Well, how do you think they pay for the care of the other orphans?” Nola had snapped at him when he'd tried to articulate his unease. But the “other” orphans are almost as taboo as the question of money. They—all of them—are engaged in a careful calibration of selfishness. It helps that they're “saving” the children from poverty and lovelessness rather than just filling wants in their own lives, but . . . what about all those they can't save?

In the elevator he stares at the panel for a vacant moment, trying to figure out what's wrong. There's no fourth floor, no fourteenth, no thirteenth—the number four,
si,
he recalls, which sounds like the word for “death,” being unlucky in Chinese, the number thirteen omitted for the sake of Western guests. He appreciates the sentiment. And yet as the elevator falls he can't help imagining those unlucky floors—dark, empty, unfinished—beyond the walls of the elevator shaft.

He knows the adoptees are sometimes known in Chinese as the lucky ones, but as most of the parents are honest enough to acknowledge,
they're
the lucky ones.

“Except what if we're just the rich ones?” John has wondered.

“Oh, don't get all postcolonial on me,” Nola told him. “I've actually read Said.” (Once when he applied for a job that required an interest in postcolonial studies, she'd reassured him, “You don't need to have studied it, you are it!” He'd always considered himself more of an expert on
dis
orientalism.)

“
That's
not what's bugging you.”

“No?”

“No.”

He had dared her to say it . . . and she'd shrugged. They had to raise a child together, after all. But he knew what she meant.

Once, years earlier, in high school, he'd experimented with being more Chinese. He'd hosted a Chinese New Year's party. What seventeen-year-old doesn't want an excuse for a party? Suddenly his Chineseness seemed advantageous. It helped that Chinese New Year that year fell the week of spring break. His father had been on duty, and his mother had helped him prepare and then gone out to celebrate with friends. He made his guests “steamboat,” a hotpot made from a soup base warmed in a rice cooker into which diners added shrimp and meat, dumplings, fish balls, noodles, and vegetables. The noodles were for long life, he explained. He was wearing a musty Mao jacket of his father's, left over from the Beatles era, which stank more and more of mothballs as the night went on. What about the tofu? a blonde called Helen asked, and he said, “Luck, I think,” not wanting to disappoint her. “What about the shrimp?” she asked. Fertility, he thought, but he wasn't sure he could tell her that (not when the curled pink shrimp were making him think of a penis), so he offered, “Money, fortune, prosperity.” “Isn't fortune the same as luck?” someone else asked. They were looking at him a little skeptically now, so when his friend Evan asked with a smirk, “And how about fish balls? They don't seem so lucky, for the fish at least!” John snapped, “They mean,
Fuck you, white boy.
” The table had laughed, but the party hadn't gone so well—at least, he'd failed to hook up with Helen. Later in school he heard someone call him “Fish Balls” behind his back.

He'd gone to Caltech the following fall (Stanford, his first choice, turned him down; he always fretted about checking the Asian American box amid persistent rumors of admissions quotas). There, as a freshman, he'd first heard the derogatory term
banana,
meaning yellow on the outside, white on the inside, but he'd secretly welcomed its aptness. As far as he was concerned, his skin had always been something to trip on.

But now he was ashamed that these whites, from Boise and Athens, Knoxville and Reno, knew more about Chinese culture than he did. Being in China gave him the same sense of shame as going to a Chinese restaurant with colleagues who wanted him to tell them “what's good.” He'd actually blushed when people on the trip had deferred to him and he'd had to explain that he didn't speak Chinese.

“And you've never been to China before?” they ask him at least once a day, as if in amazement, as if waiting for him to change his story. (
That's right,
slapping his forehead,
how could I forget?
I'm
the Manchurian candidate.
)

These decent, kindly people remind him of why he hates American Buddhists, could never become one. He couldn't stand the thought of having some white person teach it to him. It's the same reason he's never learned martial arts. (“Gertie's going to learn gung fu,” Alice says. “She has to be able to stand up to bullies.” But in John's memory the bullies were the ones who knew kung fu.) As a child he'd hated losing at Chinese checkers too.

John's list of things you couldn't do if you were Asian American: play ping-pong, play piano, wear glasses (he had saved up for Lasik the summer of his junior year), wear a camera round your neck, ride a bike, drive an import, grow a mustache (or, if female, streak your hair), wear a sweatband, drink beer, ace tests, sing karaoke (though deep down he'd always dreamed of singing the old Johnny Rivers number “Secret Agent Man” as “Secret
Asian
Man,” but then, wasn't that every Asian American's dream, to sing karaoke and somehow still look cool?). He'd actually emailed this list to his old friend Ken a few years back, when they'd briefly reconnected after John's book came out. Ken—now going by Kensuke—was working for an Asian American social media startup out of Palo Alto:
Yello!
Maybe that's why he no longer had a sense of humor. “But if you reject every stereotype,” he'd written back, “what do you have in common with other Asians?”

And now John wants to scandalize these well-meaning souls on the tour by telling them how much he loves chop suey, General Tso's chicken, and all those other fake Chinese dishes. Takeout, after all, was the only Chinese food he'd known growing up (his father had taught his mother simple Western dishes, but she didn't cook Chinese, her family having always had servants to cook for them). It was his comfort food, and he never failed to miss it when he walked into authentic Chinese restaurants. His favorite meal on the trip had been on a flight, the tinfoil container reminding him of takeout. He even loved fortune cookies, the stupider and more ungrammatical the better. (
Recent plants will work out fine;
Something long desired is about to happy.
“You only like the ones that
can't
come true,” Nola scolded him. “But that's why you add
in bed
to the end,” he reminded her.) He wants to tell them that when he was a kid
Kung Fu
was his favorite show, even with white David Carradine in the lead (even after he knew that Bruce Lee had been passed over for the role because of his accent). And why not? he'd once fumed at a dinner with college friends. The character was supposed to be half white, after all. He was on a quest to find his white stepbrother, for crying out loud. But all anyone remembered was the blind monk calling him “Glasshopper.” (
Grass
hopper,
grass
hopper,
grass
hopper, John had muttered under his breath.) Kids had whispered it whenever a teacher called on him in class, cracking up at their desks, and still he loved the show. The character spoke to him, and it infuriated John to have to be ashamed of that, to have his white friends question his authenticity.
Whatever I am is authentically me, isn't it?
he wanted to shout. But he wasn't always sure.

Once when he'd asked Napoleon if they might see Peking Man—that shared ancestor—someone had piped up, “
Beijing
man.” The site was too far from the city, Napoleon explained apologetically, and besides, the actual bones were missing, lost or stolen during the evacuation before the Japanese invasion. At least, to John's immoderate satisfaction, according to his guidebook Peking Man and Peking duck still went by their old romanized names.

“They don't mean anything by it,” Nola had tried to tell him the night before, after yet another group discussion of the importance of Chinese culture.

Jeannine has been taking Chinese cooking classes.
I want her to know what it really tastes like, without the MSG.
Eric and Scott have already found a Chinese tutor in San Francisco. Alice is applying for a TESL job in Shanghai—she wants to come back and live in China with her daughter.
I want it to be real for her.
“And we're all going to keep the babies in traditional split pants rather than diapers, right?” John asks to shut them up. It's like they're wrestling over a lazy Susan, everyone else spinning it one way, he the other.

“They make me feel like there's something wrong with me, with the way I was brought up,” he told Nola.

“There's something wrong with the way we were
all
brought up,” she said. “If you believe the parenting books. None of us are going to parent like our parents.”

“Thanks for the sympathy.”

“Come on, John! Maybe you should write about it if you care so much. At least it'd be . . .”

“What?” He glared at her.

“I don't know! Real.”

“It'd be real if I wrote about feeling inauthentic?”

“Honest, then.”

He thought about wounding her.
And what about you? What are you writing?
“Nothing” has been the answer for so long that he's long stopped asking, but now he suspects she's started again in secret, since the abortion, and he realizes he's scared of what she might answer.

John hesitates in the lobby. He's not set foot outside the hotel alone. He has some premonition, some fear that if he does, he'll never come back, that he'll disappear into the crowd. It's ridiculous, but he remembers a story about some uncle who'd returned to China from Singapore on a visit as a child—it must have been in the thirties—and almost been kidnapped. John can't recall the details; probably there weren't any. The uncle would have been a small boy at the time (
Of course, no one would kidnap a girl,
he'd assured his daughter, John's cousin); perhaps he just imagined it. And yet there it is, some irrational fear, the same anxiety that has kept John away all these years. It's probably fueled by his own childhood images of China: crowds in Mao suits waving Little Red Books. Back then the Communist countries—China, the Soviet Union—seemed like prisons for their citizens. He went to a Halloween party once as the Tank Man, the unknown and likely disappeared fellow who'd faced down the tanks in Tiananmen Square. White shirt, black pants, laden with plastic bags in each hand. No one got it. The most iconic Chinese figure of the decade, and no one recognized him. The nearest anyone guessed was “Delivery guy?” Several of his friends seemed puzzled that he'd come as another Chinese, as if it weren't a costume.