Repeat After Me (5 page)

“Thank you,” said Xiao Wang. She translated for her grandmother and then told me, “You can call her Nai Nai, which mean grandmother in Chinese.”

“Great,” I said, “Thank you.”

Then, to my astonishment, Nai Nai sprang up from the rocking chair like an action hero and set about putting nine plastic plates on the round table. Xiao Wang and I stood and tried to help, but she swatted us away. I thought of my mother’s mother, my Grandma Leah, setting her table until she died at eighty-seven, fifteen years after losing my grandfather. Her heavy silver forks curled up at the ends like flowers. She left those and three strands of pearls to me, treasures boxed up in my mother’s apartment.

“We should sit at the table,” Xiao Wang instructed.

I examined the dishes: dumplings, squares of tofu in a reddish-brown sauce, wilted green vegetables, bean sprouts, scrambled eggs and tomatoes, a drizzled stack of chicken strips, spareribs, cellophane noodles tossed with cucumber and carrot, cabbage in hot red oil, fried peanuts, a whole fish, and a bowl of soup with eggs floating in it, so thin they looked like tissue or leaves. Nai Nai handed Xiao Wang and me each a bowl of rice and a set of chopsticks. I imagined stabbing each individual piece of food with my chopsticks, revealing myself as the savage I was. Xiao Wang, always a hawk for social nuance and the smallest hint of anyone else’s discomfort, quietly got me a fork.

“No, no, it’s okay. I’ll use these,” I said. I had used chopsticks many times, of course, but never under what I thought
might be the scrutiny of Chinese chefs. “When in Rome,” I said, stupidly. And then, “We have this saying—When in Rome, do as the Romans do.’”

Xiao Wang broke into a polite smile, pretending she had understood.

“This food looks amazing,” I said. She told her grandmother.

“No, no, it’s nothing,” Nai Nai said, via Xiao Wang’s translation. “Eat more! Eat more!” She went to get tea and then stood over us, refilling our teacups every time we took single sips, and heaping more meat onto our plates. It was only when we had stuffed ourselves to the point of sickness that she took a modest helping of the tofu dish and picked at it delicately.

I’ve noticed that old people in China are more vibrant than in the West. Every street corner in Beijing has a gym for babies and their grandparents, and everywhere you go, old people are hugging trees, stretching their legs, ballroom dancing, and skiing on stationary cross-country machines. Now that I live in Nai Nai’s country, I often wonder what her old age would have looked like here. She would have exercised with friends in the parks and been surrounded by people she knew, who spoke her language, vendors selling the ingredients she wanted to buy. Was she breathless with loneliness in America? My grandma was faint with it after my grandfather died; she stayed above water by coming to my mother’s four nights a week, by continuing to host Passover until it was physically impossible (at which point my mother and her sister did the Seder according to my grandmother’s instructions at my grandmother’s apartment). What would my grandmother have done in China? Or anywhere without us?

Xiao Wang says no matter what Nai Nai felt about her own life in the United States, she would have done anything
to secure citizenship for Xiao Wang’s future children. She believed it was worth it,
it
being the diminished state of immigrants’ lives—in honor of the expanded possibilities their sacrifice created for future generations. It’s everywhere in New York, this sacrifice: in every biologist delivering fast food, teacher giving manicures, artist working as a busboy.

“I miss the river,” was all Nai Nai would allow when I asked that first night if she felt homesick. “We swam in the river, naked to our feet.”

“What river?” I asked Xiao Wang, who was translating.

“The Mekong,” Xiao Wang said. “Maybe she miss the nature life. Maybe for her, New York too commercial. In New York River, no children can swim.” She turned to Nai Nai and repeated this in Chinese. Nai Nai nodded vigorously.

I thought the Mekong must be pure, unlike the Hudson, and didn’t want to tell Xiao Wang and Nai Nai that the Columbia rowing team had recently spotted a floating corpse in the Hudson. I said nothing.

The China they described sounded inviting, perhaps complicated with the problems and secret histories of other people, but free of mine. I wanted to go. I could leave New York forever, I thought, and swim in the Mekong, naked to my feet, whatever that meant. Now of course I realize that there’s nothing pure about the Mekong; kids just swim in the pollution there.

“You are from New York?” Nai Nai asked me, via Xiao Wang. “It’s your home?”

“I am from here, yes.” My mother lived in a penthouse apartment on 93rd and Riverside, a place my grandparents had bought her and my father in 1966. She had jade plants on the roof deck and a blue velvet couch in the living room, where I used to sit reading for so many hours straight they’d come to check if I was breathing. I remembered the energy
of the house before my father left. How it went from chaos to silence. My mom, brittle on the blue couch.

“Nai Nai want to know do you live—how do you say—with your family at home?” Xiao Wang asked. I wondered if I emitted a kind of unhappiness siren.

“I have my own apartment now,” I said, “but I go to my mom’s a lot.”

“Isn’t that lonely? Don’t you wish you live at home with your mother?” Nai Nai asked. Xiao Wang translated and then waited for my response.

“It’s not so much wanting to go home,” I said, “but wanting to go back in time.” Then, embarrassed at having said so much and concerned that they hadn’t understood, I chattered on, “Back in time, you know, back to an earlier time, backwards.”

Xiao Wang nodded. “Your family is okay?” she asked.

I told her no, not really, and when she waited, I said my father had left my mother. She stopped translating, and Nai Nai watched us, rocking slower and slower. I couldn’t tell if she was increasingly attentive or drowsy.

“When?”

“When I was seventeen,” I said.

“Oh! It’s quite recent.”

“Well, five years ago.”

“What is problem?” Xiao Wang asked.

I shrugged and blushed. Xiao Wang turned to Nai Nai to fill her in.

“Nai Nai say maybe Americans feel—how do you say—casual—about end of the marriage,” Xiao Wang said.

“Divorce,” I said. “But I’m not sure about that. I think maybe one of them was having an affair.”

I stopped short of the truth, which is that my father fell in love with a colleague when I was sixteen. I actually saw them together on 111th and Amsterdam, as if in a tacky
movie. I was on my way to meet Julia at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. When I had walked half a block past 110th, I spotted my father across the street in front of the cathedral where three peacocks live. My hand moved to wave, but I stopped it and my voice. My father? He had his hands on the hips of a woman in a straight skirt and brown leather boots. I stared, thought those high boots do not belong to my mother, moved my eyes to the woman’s neck and face, which was turned up laughing toward my dad. And I ran. It took me a year to get the words out of my throat to tell my mother. And as soon as I did, my dad left us and married the laughing woman instead.

“What means
affair
?” Xiao Wang asked. She was translating for Nai Nai, who I feared would be horrified by the tale of my father’s infidelity. But when I looked over again, she was asleep. Apparently for a seventy-eight-year-old woman, there was nothing new about this story. Who could blame her for sleeping through it? Xiao Wang stopped translating and covered Nai Nai with a blanket.

“You know,” I said, “having an affair—being unfaithful, having another lover—someone other than your wife or husband.”

Xiao Wang nodded, as if she knew a lot about such matters. “I’m married,” she said, perhaps sensing my doubt that she could understand.

I looked around the room, and she laughed.

“My husband is in China. He start a tourism business in Jinhong. Now he is travel often in Beijing. Anyway, maybe we do not consider marriage how you do in America.”

“How do you consider it in China?”

“It’s not simple like here,” she said, marking the beginning of more than a decade of responding to every question I ever asked with some variation on “It’s not simple like you think.”

“Maybe we have to get married for various reasons of the family or the society,” she said. “But those are also involving love, I think. Not the television love of America, but a kind of marriage love.”

“People in the West get married for all sorts of complicated reasons, too,” I suggested. “Not just TV love.” I smiled, thinking of the kind of love Xiao Wang might mean.
Roseanne
was America’s most popular TV show, along with
The Cosby Show
and
Cheers
. I can see why, if Xiao Wang got her information from American TV (which even now she admits she did), she would find our ideas of romance simple. Of course, as I often tell Xiao Wang, if I defined Chinese love by Chinese television, it would be a drab, state-run affair.

“And maybe it is,” she says, laughing.

Back then, I just said that people left each other for complicated reasons, that nothing like that was ever simple.

She said, “Why do your father leave?”

I told her the story. It was the first time I had ever told anyone other than Julia. I didn’t know why I felt safe with Xiao Wang. Maybe it was Nai Nai’s soft snoring in the corner. Or the comfortable, if incorrect, notion that someone who didn’t speak fluent English wasn’t a real listener in the same way as someone who did. Or wasn’t a critic, anyway.

I said my father’s name, John Mitchell, disliking the taste of it in my mouth. Then I said he had grown up on a farm in Iowa, the fourth son in a family of Roberts, Jameses, Williams, and Johns, that two of his brothers had died in a car accident as teenagers, and the other took over the farm. My father, in a surprise move unlike any other the family had ever imagined, broke away to go to college and then graduate school, where he wrote a dissertation on Gatsby that was apparently shimmering with brilliance and promise. So he and one of his best chapters got to fly
to a conference in New York, where he yapped away without irony or experience about Daisy and the predicament of the modern American marriage. And met my mother, Naomi Silvermintz. It was his first trip to the East Coast, and she was in a dance recital some professor took my father to see. I imagine my mother was all of New York to him, sharp-tongued and mysteriously sleek. Even her name sounded like jewelry: shining and minty music to a farm boy. My father, to hear the pre-divorce version, loved my mother the instant he saw her barefoot in that black leotard. “It wasn’t ballet bullshit where the women are weightless and floating,” he used to tell my older brother Benj and me before he abandoned my mother and me. “It was the stomping, barefoot, modern dance that suited your mother.” He relished this story, loved casting himself as the lover of a strong girl more than he actually loved her, I think.

Xiao Wang said, “He must love her sometime though.”

“Of course,” I said. “I think he even loved her later, after—I mean, I don’t think it was so much about her. He was just disappointed in his life.”

“Why? It must be he has an okay life, right?”

I had a hard time explaining without making him sound luxuriously self-indulgent. I mean, all that happened was that his stardom never materialized. The Gatsby dissertation was published as a book six years after he finished it, but he never wrote anything else. He married my mother, and they had Benj and me, and she danced and taught dance while he cobbled together a collage of adjunct positions until he eventually got a job teaching history at a private high school. If my mother found this as disappointing or unsexy as he did, she hid it. She came from enough money to be unconcerned with whether he made any, and found my dad unorthodox and bohemian hot. So she
watched for years as he threw himself into projects and hobbies, to the compulsive exclusion of sleeping or eating. He made shelves, beds, paintings, pottery, business plans. She complimented his intensity, loved whatever he built, tried, dreamt up. She said he was unusual, a genius, and at their dinner parties, she helped him hide or glorify his Iowa farm past, depending on his mood.

Then the laughing woman became his new project. And my mother had nothing to say about his genius anymore. The woman was of course like my mother, just significantly younger, less wealthy, and more freshly impressed. I felt awkward telling Xiao Wang this, as if the cliché were my fault. But I held on to the naïve hope that she wouldn’t recognize the hackneyed trope of it all.

That didn’t pan out.

“It’s so common story,” she said when I’d finished. I couldn’t help laughing.

“It feels personal nonetheless,” I joked.

“Of course it’s difficult. I didn’t mean it’s not difficult!” She apologized. “Why you don’t have family name?” I was surprised she had noticed this.

“I changed my name when I turned eighteen,” I said. “I wanted my mom’s.”

“Maybe your parents’ bad decision will make you good to choose more true thing for yourself,” she said. “They don’t keep in unhappy love. It can make you—liberation.”

“Free,” I said. I looked over at her sleeping Nai Nai.

“My grandfather die many years ago,” Xiao Wang said. “She come to America many years after he do, when he is sick, to help him. Then I come to help her because maybe now she will be too old.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s nothing for sorry. He was more than eighty.”

“Still,” I said.

“I’m sorry about your bad family story,” she said.

“Thank you.”

Then Xiao Wang walked me all to the subway, and right before I descended into the tunnel, I hugged her impulsively, and she leapt backwards like I had pulled a knife.

“I’m sorry!” I said, horrified.

“No, no, of course,” she said. “It’s fine, this embrace. Maybe I am not so casual to embrace, but no problem. It’s the American habit. I will, how do you say—used to this.”

She patted me on the arm.

I love studying Chinese. There’s something satisfying for an obsessive-compulsive in the compressed logic of it, the ability of each sound to have dozens of meanings, often including conflicting ones. There are the stroke marks coming together to form characters that look like the nouns they describe. Da Ge was proud that Chinese was both more sensible than English and more expressive. I like a language somewhere in between, a Chinglish hybrid that allows for importing the most expressive components of each language into the other.