Your Face in Mine (2 page)

We cross the parking lot together, Martin, the black man who used to be Martin, ducked slightly behind my right shoulder, flickering in and out of my peripheral vision. Somehow I’m still possessed of enough of my faculties to remember to grab a shopping cart. The sliding door creaks on an unoiled runner, and we breathe in the comforting sting of Asian markets everywhere—dried scallops and mushrooms, wilting
choi sum
, fish guts in a bucket behind the seafood counter. Mr. Lee looks up at me over yesterday’s
Apple Daily
—when did they start getting the Hong Kong papers?—and says, you’re too late, the
cha siu bao
are all sold out.

It’s okay, I say. I need to lose weight anyway.

Yeah, says his daughter, stacking napa cabbages on newspaper in a shopping cart. You’re too fat.

Lee gives her a dour Confucian look. Little number three, he says, that’s enough out of you. And then, turning to me: is the black man with you? He doesn’t speak Chinese, too, does he?

Martin has halted by the soy milk case, reading the labels intently.

Yes, I say. Yes, he’s with me. And no, he doesn’t.

Tell him we don’t have candy bars or potato chips. They always ask.

I give him a noncommittal nod.

My wife was Chinese, I say to Martin, making my way down aisle one, filling the cart with black tree fungus and Sichuan chilies and dried beans and tofu skin. I lived there for three years before I got my Ph.D. She taught me how to cook. My voice sounds bland, conversational, informational: I’ve been stunned, that’s the only way to explain it, stunned back into a certain strained normality. He follows everything I’m saying with lidded eyes and pursed lips, nodding to himself, as if it’s exactly what I
would
have done, in his mind, as if he could have projected it all, with slight variations.

Hold on. Your wife
was
? You’re not together?

No, I say, no, she died. She and my daughter died. In a car accident.

How long?

I look at my watch.

A year, I say, six months, three weeks, and two days.

Mr. Lee, who has never before seen me speaking English, is pretending not to watch us, stealing interested glances over a full-page picture of Maggie Cheung.

I was in Shanghai and Hangzhou once, Martin says. Only briefly, on business. Loved it. Loved the energy. Wish I could have stayed longer.

He reaches up and pulls the hood away from his forehead. His hair, a black man’s hair, of course, razored close to the scalp, with neat lines at the temples and the nape of the neck. The look of a man who’s close friends with his barber. I can’t help thinking of my own scraggling beard, and the last time I tried to crop it into a new shape, how it looked, as Meimei used to put it,
half goat-eaten
. Fullness of time, I can’t help thinking. The phrase just won’t leave my mind.
Fullness of time
.

You know, he says. You’re a brave man, Kelly. I think I’d have run away screaming. His voice is different. It is, thoroughly, unmistakably, a black man’s voice, declarative, deep, warm, with a faint twang in the nasal consonants. It’s just a couple of operations, he says. And some skin
treatments. In the right hands, no big thing at all. That is to say, it
won’t
be. When it becomes more common.

Does it, does it—I’m flailing here—does it have a name? What you’ve done?

If it had a name, he says, what would that change, exactly? Would it be more acceptable to you? Would it be
a thing
people do? Would it have a category unto itself?

He laughs.

I’m just playing with you, he says. You should see the look on your face. Kelly, of course it has a name. What do you think it would be called? Racial reassignment.

We’ve stopped at the end of the dried goods aisle, the aisle of staples, and I’m teetering on the edge of the snacks aisle: lychee gummies, shrimp chips, dried squid, mango slices in foil, and three or four rows of Pocky, that bizarre Japanese name for pretzel sticks dipped in coatings of one or another artificially flavored candy. Pocky comes in cigarette-sized packs with flip-top lids, and there is, in addition to strawberry, raspberry, and vanilla, Men’s Pocky, plain chocolate, in a distinguished pine-green. It’s never been clear to me whether this is an elaborate inside joke on the part of the manufacturer or a sincere message to the consumer. There is Men’s Pocky, but not Women’s Pocky. Am I supposed to be reassured, not having to make a choice?

Racial reassignment
surgery
.

Yeah, of course, surgery. But it’s more than that. It’s a long process.

Meaning, I have to say—I strain to form the words—meaning you were always black. Like a sex change. Inside you always felt black.

Damn, he says. You get right to the point, don’t you? I don’t remember you being this direct, Kelly.

Martin, I say, without quite being able to look at him—I cast my eyes up to the stained ceiling tile, the fluorescent panel lamps dotted with dead flies—we’re not going to see each other again, are we? Isn’t
that the point? You wanted a new life. I’m certainly not going to intrude.

Anyone can get a new life, he says. It’s easy to fall off the map. I don’t recall you ever trying to track me down. And all of you guys left, anyway. Am I just repeating the obvious here? I never thought I’d see you back in Baltimore. You get hired by Hopkins?

No, I say. I’m not an academic. Not anymore. I work in public radio.

No kidding? You mean, what is it, 91.1? The Hopkins station?

No, the other one. WBCC. 107.3.

Oh, yeah. Right. Way up at the top of the dial. I always wondered why there were two.

Are you a listener?

Heck no, he says. I listen to XM. No offense, I like the news sometimes, but not all that turtleneck-sweater, mandolin, Lake Wobegon stuff. Not my thing.

Yeah. I understand.

You do? You understand?

I read the surveys,
runs through my mind,
that’s my job, I know the demographics. I could break down our audience into the single percentiles.
Look, I say, I mean, it’s not a secret. It’s a
problem
.
We think about it every day. We want to be a station for the whole city, you know,
Baltimore
, and we’re just not. It’s an issue. I’m trying, believe me.

He whistles through his teeth. Maybe you’re the man for me, he says. I need somebody to help me with this project. This idea I have. A
communicator
. He takes a slim billfold from his front pocket—the long, old-fashioned kind, meant to fit in a blazer—and takes out a glossy orange business card.
Martin Wilkinson, Orchid Imports LLC.

You changed your name.

You know many brothers named Martin Lipkin?

It’s just one in a long list of inconceivable things I’ve had to conceive of in the last fifteen minutes, so I nod nonchalantly.

And what, you sell orchids?

No, no. Electronics. My wife came up with the name.

Okay, I say, nodding again, a yes-man.

So you’ll email me? Can I buy you lunch?

Is that really a good idea? I ask him. I mean, I
know
you. Aren’t I kind of a liability? A piece of personal history?

I trust you, he says, staring at me, boxing me in, so that I’m forced to look straight at his coffee-colored pupils—just the same as before, at least as far as I remember. Listen, he says, we can act like this never happened. If that’s what you want. Either way, you’ll respect my privacy. I know that much. So I’m just asking: you want to come with me a little further down this road, Kelly? You curious? You want the whole story?

Keeping my head straight, our eyes level, in this Vulcan-mind-meld game he seems to want to play, I conduct the briefest possible mental inventory of my life: an empty apartment; an enormous, shockingly expensive storage unit out in Towson, filled with boxes I’ll never open; a job, if you can call it a job; a few friends, widely spaced; a 500-page manuscript on two dead poets, gathering dust in its library binding up in Cambridge; a wall of books in five languages I never want to read again.

Yes, I say, yes, I’ll have lunch with you, Martin.

See you then. He pulls his hood back up, hunches his shoulders, and disappears through the door, back into the tepid weather, the diffident sunshine, the blank, anonymous world that seems almost to have created him.

When I lived there, in the waning gray years of Deng Xiaoping’s senility, Weiming College was a cluster of dark square buildings with tile roofs, in a kind of sinicized Art Nouveau style, built on a bluff over the Yellow River. The architect, a German named Manfred Schepler, had built the college for Seventh-day Adventist missionaries in the 1920s but, dissatisfied with the design, committed suicide by hurling himself off the roof of the chapel into the river. That was the local legend, at any rate. My apartment, a cavernous space intended to house six foreign teachers, looked out over the river, almost invariably shrouded in mist. Swallows nested on a ledge above my windows, and all day long the shadows of their diving flickered across the walls. I mentioned to Wendy that it gave me an odd feeling, being continually reminded of Schepler’s suicide, and she pursed her lips and shook her head and said, no, that’s not a memory we like to revisit.

Revisit
was exactly the kind of word she used all the time when we first met. She added English words to her vocabulary through careful and unselfconscious practice, without the slightest indication of an eagerness, an anxiousness, to learn. In this way, she stood apart from every other Chinese person I knew in Wudeng. There were many, thank God, who were completely indifferent to English, but those who did
want to learn looked at me as a kind of mobile language-instruction machine that had to be pumped from time to time with offers of homemade local food and foreign exchange certificates. I barricaded myself in my apartment to get away from them, the first two months I lived there, subsisting on a dwindling supply of macaroni and cheese I’d brought with me by the case from the Park n’ Shop in Hong Kong, and watching the VHS movies the previous teacher had abandoned before leaving for a hard-seat trek to Kashgar.

And then she appeared, with her back to me, having a conversation with one of the secretaries in the Foreign Languages office when I was using the ancient mimeograph machine between classes. She saw me in the reflection of a piece of framed calligraphy, she always claims, and turned to me and said, you are the new English teacher. I hope your tenure here is satisfying.

The sensation of standing on ball bearings:
tenure
, in the particular place and moment. Where did this woman come from, I was thinking, whose English was better than any of the teaching faculty’s, but who seemed by all accounts to be a student, in gray slacks, too long, with a short-sleeved blue button-down shirt that barely contained her small but noticeable breasts, and a pair of gray steel glasses forked over her long, aquiline nose, that reminded me of an interviewer on a BBC talk show?

Qing Dewen was her name.
Wendy,
she said. My name is Wendy. I never called her anything else.

—

We were married nine months later, in a small ceremony in my parents’ backyard in New Paltz, and then afterward, the following September, in a riotous celebration at the only restaurant to speak of in Wudeng. By then I had become fluent enough in Guizhou dialect to understand the jokes men made behind my back about the red hair that sprouts from the tips of white men’s penises. We were a star couple, Wendy used to say; everyone in town knew us, and out-of-towners stopped us on the
street for pictures. By then we had moved off campus and into an apartment upstairs from her parents. Her father, Qing Xiyun, had been a well-known poet before the Cultural Revolution; he’d gone to college in Shanghai and lived there for some years, working for the Cultural Bureau. When the Cultural Bureau was disbanded, he was sent to work in a tractor factory near Xian; that was where Wendy was born. After 1977 he was allowed to leave, but without a residency permit for Shanghai, he could only return to Wudeng. Now retired, officially, he worked as a night guard at the college. Wendy’s mother, too, was retired, but she worked even harder, making hand-pulled noodles at home with two assistants.

That year was the happiest I have ever had. Wudeng then was still a small town, and we woke up with the roosters, the shouts of fruit sellers and dumpling vendors on their early rounds, and gusts of cold air through the windows that smelled like the river. We had a tiny table I’d nailed together out of two packing crates, and every morning we brewed a pot of Nescafé and sat together, reading, grading papers, listening to Bach or Brahms on my CD player from home. In the afternoons, after my classes, I sat with Xiyun on the front stoop, drinking tea out of glass jars, watching the children running home from school. He could quote long passages from Du Fu, Li Bai, Su Shi, and Li Qingzhao, but his favorite was Tao Qian, the first and greatest recluse of Chinese poetry:

From the eastern hedge, I pluck chrysanthemum flowers,

And idly look toward the southern hills.

The mountain air is beautiful day and night,

The birds fly back to roost with one another.

I know that this must have some deeper meaning,

I try to explain, but cannot find the words.

What I loved the most were the times when an old woman from the neighborhood would stop with a load of vegetables on one shoulder and
complain loudly about her arthritis, or pass on a shred of gossip, without giving me a second glance, as if my presence was no more remarkable than anyone else’s. I felt almost as if I had grown a second skin, or passed into some ghostly state, a hologram. Of course, that was a fantasy. Everyone knew we would leave, eventually, that Wendy had married me to leave. It was almost a point of pride. But in that process, somehow, I had become part of the story.

Would I have wanted it any other way? Would I have wanted to stay for good? It’s pointless to dwell on hypotheticals. Modern Chinese law does technically permit foreigners to become naturalized, but the spirit of the law is
jus sanguinis
. The law of blood. Foreign-born children of Chinese parents can give up their citizenship and return, with difficulty, but no Westerner has ever
actually
become a Chinese citizen. There are permanent residency cards for a tiny privileged few—millionaire investors, tenured professors—but for anyone else, for me, to stay in China, even if I could keep a job, would have meant a yearly trip to Seoul to renew my visa. A permanent temporary worker. Wendy and I could have had ten children and it would be the same. Beyond all that, I wouldn’t have been able to stand it, as the only one, the Wudeng
laowai
, the Pearl S. Buck of the village—a freak of nature, like an albino, or a six-fingered man. I loved it, but only in the most impossible way; and then I took Wendy away with me. Though she knew it was a terrible cliché, and it was hideously embarrassing, especially in front of my friends, she never tired of saying
America is my dream come true.
We lived in the States for eight years, and never went back to China, even after she got her green card. I don’t need to, she said, when I questioned her. I’ve had enough China for one lifetime.

—

The great miracle of our relationship was that we rarely needed to discuss anything, our lives so perfectly intertwined. At least that was how it seemed to me. When we moved to Cambridge, on one student
stipend and a loan from my parents, she walked into the Yenching Library and was hired as a cataloging clerk on the spot, complete with an approved work visa. Three years later, after I finished my general exams, in the fall of 2000, she said,
I want to go off the pill
;
we conceived Meimei just after Christmas.

It’s true that she was extremely quiet, eerily so, by American standards, and I had to press her to tell me what she was thinking. At times I grew exhausted and snapped at her, sure she was silently judging me, playing the passive-aggressive. But for the most part she was just watching. The world was new to her. I’ve never met anyone less inclined to make up her mind about abstractions. In day-to-day life she simply never needed to deliberate.

There’s something about you, she said to me, once, after we’d been in Cambridge six months. You’re not like other Americans. It’s a surprise to me. You’re—what is it? Quiet? Cool? Calm?

You tell me.

Bland, she said. Is that right? Not as an insult. As a compliment.

Are you saying I’m more Chinese?

Don’t be ridiculous. What does that mean,
more Chinese
?

More like a typical Chinese person.

I don’t know any typical Chinese person. But I think I understand you. You’re like a character from an old story. Like a monk. A Taoist monk.
Passive.

That’s
not a compliment. To an American, anyway.

Careful. Can I say that? Careful?

I am careful. That much is true. I hold back. I reserve judgment. I take more time than I should to consider the consequences, you could say. I was that way in college, before we met, all through our relationship, in the aftermath, and now. My entire adult life.

There’s a reason for that, I should have told her. Though I never did. And I can’t tell you, either, quite yet.

—

My apartment—the upstairs floor of a town house on Palmer Street, in Charles Village—is really still just our old house, re-created in miniature. She bought the furniture, re-sanded and re-stained it; she chose the gauzy curtains, the kilim in the living room, the calligraphy scrolls, the old Shanghai movie posters framed above the dining table, souvenirs Xiyun picked up in the Fifties. In the kitchen I’ve framed three of Meimei’s paintings, from what we called her green phase: pictures of horses, elephants, mice, cars, all made of neat green balloons and labeled, helpfully, in her three-year-old scrawl.

•   •   •

T
he circumstances of the accident were never fully explained, at least in a way I could understand, but the bare outline is this: Wendy and Meimei were driving east on Storrow Drive, on a wet November day, in a car she’d borrowed from a friend, an old Audi station wagon. The brakes failed, or the car hydroplaned, or probably, most likely, both: it crashed through a guardrail, rolled over a narrow strip of grass, and went into the Charles, and they drowned. There’s no way to avoid saying it. Wendy managed to get out of her seat belt and into the back, and their bodies were intertwined, of course; she was trying to unbuckle Meimei’s restraining harness.

For a month I hardly left the house. My bosses at WBUR—I’d gone to work there two years before, while still working on my dissertation, and had put off looking for an academic job until I realized I no longer wanted one—had given me six weeks’ paid leave, and I spent most of it in my attic study, or on the living room couch, compulsively reading. I read
War and Peace
,
The Man Without Qualities
,
The Tale of Genji
,
the complete
Journey to the West
,
The Dream of the Red Chamber
.
At night, to
relax, I watched two or three movies in a row. One night I watched Claude Lanzmann’s
Shoah
, all nine hours, and woke up on the couch at noon the next day, freezing, the blanket fallen off, hardly able to move. A friend of mine from graduate school, now a professor at the University of Hawaii, sent me a care package of his own hand-grown hydroponic indica packed in Kona coffee cans; I smoked it twice a day, at eleven and six, to give myself an appetite, and then went out and ate unbearably spicy meals. Shrimp vindaloo, extra-hot. Jerk chicken with pickled Scotch bonnet peppers on the side. Guizhou-style lamb hot pot. Otherwise I couldn’t taste anything at all.

I walled in my life with stimuli, or tried to, anyway; if I had been a different person, or in a different frame of mind, I would have spent all the life insurance money in one go, on a Fiji vacation or a Lamborghini. Grief permanently alters the mind, my therapist said. Don’t underestimate its power. He asked me to do a simple exercise. When you wake up in the morning, immediately ask yourself,
what kind of person am I today?
Make a commitment:
I am sad but getting better. I am focused. I return phone calls.
It worked for a while, but I realized, months later, that it made the underlying problem worse. I took small steps; that created the illusion I was getting better.

Grief makes you temporarily invisible: a fugitive in your own place, in your own time. That’s not news. What frightened me, when I gained just enough traction to begin to think about it, was that I didn’t mind so much. In fact, it seemed like a confirmation of who I already was. Snuggled inside my nearly middle-aged soul, wombed inside my happy fatherhood, was a creature who would use the excuse of mourning just to buy time, until no one expected me to
heal
or
move on
. I thought, for a while, that I would make an excellent crank: bushy-bearded, in a torn T-shirt, getting by on disability or food stamps, walled into my apartment with books and manuscripts. I could teach myself Sanskrit and Tibetan and ancient Greek. I could rot on a bench in Harvard Square, part of a venerable tradition, mumbling fragments of Aristophanes.

Finally, obviously, I realized I had to leave. Cambridge was unbearable; my house was unbearable; and my job, which I had loved, the office of program development and planning, had turned into a pale tunnel of drawn faces and outreaching hands. I had become a kind of obelisk of grief, a freak of disaster, and for young women, especially—women I cared about, and mean no disrespect toward—there was something almost pornographic about the way they looked at me, something almost exuberant about all that horror and pity.

The recruiter—no more than a voice to me, Lois, a woman speaking from Boulder, who did this for a living, matching NPR and PRI stations and staff—said to me, this is a bit of an unusual one. It’s a fixer-upper. In fact, it’s in real trouble. WBCC, in Baltimore, have you heard of it? Probably not. It’s second-tier, community radio, independent license, free-form music during the day—kind of a turkey, if you ask me. They’ve got big money problems. But look, they need a PM
now
,
and they’ll take you for sure, experience or no. Have you been? Baltimore’s a nice town. Super-cheap. Lots of character. Forty-five minutes from D.C.—