“Zhang!” he snaps.
“Foreman Qian,” I say, trotting over, dutiful dog.
“You think Friday already you finish?”
I drop into Chinese. “If the weather is good, yes. If the weather is bad, or we have problems, no.”
Foreman Qian nods. Sips his morning tea.
“Engineer Zhang,” he says, “Have you talked to my daughter?”
“Lately?” I ask. “Not since Thursday.”
He looks unhappy and tired. “She gives you a call, you call me, okay?”
“Something is wrong?” I ask.
“A misunderstanding,” he says. “She is staying with one of her friends.”
I nod, we stand looking at the crew for a moment in apparent camaraderie. Then I trot back and Foreman Qian goes into the trailer. I don’t like being in the middle of this, tonight I’ll tell her to call him. That will take care of my problems.
In the afternoon we have a box playing—we always have a box playing, sounds of Brooklyn—and I catch a weather report. Rain tomorrow. The crew watches me, obviously they already know. I rest a polisher on the edge of the granite planter I am working on.
“Okay,” I say, “I hear it. Work starts at noon tomorrow. Tell your mothers to put your dinners on the counter, we’ll be working under the lights.”
“Shit,” someone says. But I turn the polisher back on and go back to work. I pretend not to notice them bitching. They knew what I was going to say, but hell, bitching is one of the few satisfactions they have.
It is seven-thirty when I leave work. I get my dinner on the way home, stopping for a hamburger on the way to the subway. The subway isn’t crowded. Above me a paper sign says
“Una luz brillara en tu camina/Ven a la iglesia. Descubre lo que has perdido.
” I think whatever I have lost was gone before I was born. I fall asleep on the subway and nearly miss my stop.
The apartment is dark, for a moment I think she has left, but then the lights come up and I see her bag sitting by the door. I check through the whole apartment. No sign, no note.
Perhaps she, like me, is working late? Maybe she went to dinner with someone from work?
So I sit in my chair and go to sleep with the vid on.
The door wakes me and I sit up. The system has shut the vid off, which means I’ve been asleep for more than twenty minutes, I am confused and feel as if it is later than that.
“San-xiang?” I say.
“Hello,” she sings out, “I thought you’d be asleep.”
I was. “I was watching the vid. Did you work late?”
“Tonight is my political study meeting.”
Oh yes, the optimum size of a community. Now what? Tell her she has to go. “Your father is very worried about you,” I say.
“Did you talk to him today? What did he say?”
“He asked me to call him if I saw you. I think you should talk to him. And I think you should decide what you are going to do.” Well put, I think to myself.
She sits down on the couch. “If I call him, he’ll make me come home.”
“But he threw you out,” I say.
She makes a gesture with her hand, waving that away. “He didn’t really mean it.”
“What are you going to do?” I ask.
“I don’t know.” She looks down at her feet, “Call him, I guess. Do you mean tonight?”
Shit. Grow up. All right, if you want me to be the parent. “Yeah, tonight.”
She sits there for a moment, then gets up and goes into the kitchen. There is a long silence, longer than it takes to jack in and connect. Finally I hear her say,
“Baba? Shi wo.
” Papa, it’s me.
A pause.
“Zai Zhang gongchengshide jiali.”
At Engineer Zhang’s place.
A long pause.
Dui,
she breathes.
“Wo dengideng.
” I’ll wait.
I hear the snap when she takes off the contact. “He’s coming to get me,” she says. She is about to cry and escapes into the bathroom. I think about getting a beer but decide I am too tired. At least I can sleep late tomorrow and there won’t be anyone here.
I try not to listen to San-xiang crying in the bathroom.
She comes back out and sits down on the couch. It is not my fault she is ugly, I have no reason to feel guilty. I have always had tremendous trouble defining the limits of responsibility.
“My father is very upset,” she says, and has to regain her self-control.
I nod.
“I am in big trouble,” she says.
“You’re an adult,” I point out.
“Sometimes my father makes that hard to remember. He is pretty good at making people do what he wants.”
“You can just tell him ‘no’.”
“Like you did when he told you to take me out?” she asks.
“That’s different,” I say, “taking you out is enjoyable.”
She nods and looks at the vid. She is crying again, without allowing any sound to escape. I feel trapped. A few minutes and her father will be here. She takes a shuddery breath. “It’s okay,” she says, “you don’t have to ask me out anymore. I mean, you’re very nice but I know you really don’t want to.”
“That’s not true,” I lie. “I enjoy our evenings together.” It’s not altogether a lie.
She shrugs.
“I consider you a friend, San-xiang,” I say as gently as I can.
“Well maybe I’m not looking for friendship,” she snaps and then covers her face with her hands.
I don’t know how to respond but she doesn’t say anything else. After a moment she goes back into the bathroom. I hear water running. My water bill is going to be terrible this month, last month it was pretty good, but this month will be bad. If I took public housing I wouldn’t have to pay anything for the first 800 liters of water I used.
She comes out with her make-up repaired and her eyes red and we watch the vid until my system tells me that her father is outside. I check, and sure enough, there he is in his coveralls. I let him in, and while I am at it I take San-xiang out of the system so she can’t get in unless I let her.
I open the door and say, unnecessarily I’m sure, “Your father is here.”
I hear the lift open and then Foreman Qian walking down the hallway. I open the door, and he glances at me once and brushes past me. “San-xiang,” he says.
“Baba,
” she says poised on the couch, holding her back very straight but keeping her eyes down. Perfect posture for a Chinese girl.
In Chinese he demands, “How do you explain this?”
“I am not explaining,” she says.
“This is terrible, what you have done to your mother! You could have at least called and told us where you were. Where have you been!”
“Here,” she says so softly I can barely understand.
“Here? With Zhang Zhong Shan?”
“Here.”
He looks at me, his face very red. “You told me you hadn’t seen her!”
“She asked me to.”
He looks back at her. “You stayed here alone?” He is trembling
with fury, I have never seen him like this. His face is so red I am afraid he will make himself ill.
“Foreman Qian,” I say, “perhaps you would sit down. I have tea, beer.”
“What have you been doing for two days! What is your mother going to do when she hears about this! And you,” he turns to me, “how could you do this! I have had you to my home and now you are taking advantage of my daughter!”
“Foreman Qian,” I say, the words sounding as ludicrous in Chinese as they do in English, “I have not taken advantage of your daughter, I did not even ask her to come here.”
“I cannot believe this!” he says to her, ignoring me. “You want us to treat you as if you are an adult, but you do this?” I am embarrassed. Foreman Qian sounds like the cliché of the Chinese father, protecting his daughter from bad influence. Like a vid. People do not act like this in real life. But then, people don’t try to marry their daughters to bent foremen they barely know, either. “What if they found out at your job! Do you think you would ever be transferred to China if they thought you were an immoral girl?”
“The Great Cleansing Winds campaign is over,” San-xiang says, “No one talks that way anymore.”
“Well why don’t you just tell them at work that you are staying with an Engineering Technician without citizenship and see how they talk.”
San-xiang flushes.
Foreman Qian rounds on me, “I would have been happy to treat you like a son, I had no idea you were so stupid.”
“I have been entirely respectful with your daughter,” I say.
“She called me Tuesday and asked if she could come here, she told me she had an argument with you and her mother.”
“A man alone with a girl, you expect me to believe this?”
“It’s true,” San-xiang says coldly, “Engineer Zhang is not interested in me,
baba,
I am too ugly for a man.”
He takes that like a body blow. For the first time I see his position, a father with an ugly daughter, trying to make up to her for spending her face money. But he rolls right on, not even acknowledging her comment. “I don’t believe this foolishness. You have been here two nights. The neighbors know you are here.”
If this were a Chinese building, the auntie watching the hall would report what we are doing to the building committee, but this is not a Chinese building, I’m the only ABC living here and there are no Chinese. “Here,” I say, “no one cares.”
“I can believe that,” he says, looking at my apartment. “What about your mother?” he says to San-xiang.
“I will tell her I’m sorry,” San-xiang says.
“Do you think that will erase what you’ve done?”
“What do you want me to do?” she cries.
“Do you expect to continue on after this?” Foreman Qian asks.
“No,” she says, “we have already decided to stop.”
I expect that to mollify him but instead he turns back to me. “So! You have had her here! Now you are finished with her? Is that it! She is trash and you discard her?”
“No—” I say, astonished and angry.
“You are a stupid bit of dogshit!” he says.
“Enough!” I shout back, this is a real Chinese argument now, conducted like any good Chinese argument, at full volume. “I didn’t ask your daughter to come here! I treated her well! I told her to call you and now all you do is shout at me! Don’t shout at me because you can’t control your daughter!”
“What do you expect me to believe! I find my daughter in this dirty little apartment where there is barely room to turn around and you tell me you have been living like sisters? And then you say you do not want to see my daughter again? How can you tell me you are not interested in a Chinese girl! In citizenship! Maybe this was just to get my daughter in trouble so she would have to marry you!”
“You wanted your daughter to marry me!” I say. “You tried to bribe me with your talk of Guangzhou University!” My face is flushed, I feel it. “Well Foreman Qian, something you did not know, my mother is not Chinese. I am not really Chinese. My mother’s name is Teresa Luis and she is Hispanic!”
Wode mama jiao
Teresa Luis
ye ta shi Hai-si-ba-na!
Foreman Qian is shocked into silence. The Spanish name stands out from the Chinese.
After a moment Foreman Qian stutters, “Your mother; her surname is Li. I read your records.”
“Li is her party name. Only my father is Chinese. Now, please leave,” I say, “I have to work tomorrow.”
I see a different anger building in his face, a colder anger. Finally Foreman Qian says, “Ah, now you remember that you work for me.”
“I have told the crew to be on the site at noon, hopefully the rain will be over,” I say. His face frightens me, the red is gone and now the anger is white.
“We will talk,” Foreman Qian says and it is clearly a threat. “San-xiang, let’s go.”
She collects her bag silently. “I’m sorry,” she says in English.
“San-xiang!” her father snaps.
And I close the door behind them. I stand there for a minute, and then I go to the kitchen and get a beer. There are only five beers, I suspect that isn’t enough.
Before I go to the site the next day I go to the employment office and check the jobs on the board. I cannot look for a job until I no longer have one, so I don’t stay long for fear someone will ask to look at my work card. I do not see any jobs.
I do not know what I will do when I am unemployed. I may have to give up my flat if I am unemployed for very long and accept approved housing. Living in Virginia or northern Pennsylvania
and taking the train to the city. I will be able to take the train but only during non-peak hours. Maybe I can live with Peter for awhile.