The Natural Laws of Good Luck (12 page)

Then Zhong-hua went missing. We were going into his second winter in America. The leaves had fallen, and the ground had frozen several inches downward. All day the wind blew, and toward dusk frozen bullets of snow pelted the metal roof. A winter storm warning was in effect, and I didn't know where he was. I played Paroda's precocious insight in my head: “Mom, this is just his way.” More than once he had not returned, and it turned out that he really was lost, driving east through the state of Massachusetts, having overshot home by fifty miles, or winding his way north on Vermont
Route 7 thinking he was on New York Route 7. A blizzard gathered force. Paroda was at her girlfriend's house. The thin old window glass shook, and I paced anxiously through the darkening house, finally coming to rest on the big armchair in front of the woodstove, where blue flames quivered over the bed of coals. Ice pinged down the metal chimney pipe. I hugged my knees. What if he hit a telephone pole? What if he slid off the road on the black ice? What if he was lost in Connecticut or New Hampshire or on his way to Canada?

I called Da Jie's husband, Da Ge. He told me to call the police. The police told me that because my husband had been gone only eight hours, he could not be considered a missing person. He must be missing forty-eight hours. That is, unless he was suicidal. Was he suicidal? Could he in any way, shape, or form or by any stretch of the imagination be deemed suicidal? I hesitated, considered how frozen a person might become in forty-eight hours, then answered, “Maybe.” They agreed to look for him. A few more hours went by.

An officer came to the house and asked me more questions. He said he had almost not made it up the mountain to our house, that no sane person would be out in this blizzard by choice. His mustache unthawed and dripped as he took notes. I told him my husband had recently come from China and was having a lot of trouble with English. I said he might be depressed. Actually, anytime I had asked my husband if he felt depressed, he knit his brow and blew air, “Puhhh,” at this ludicrous possibility, then forcefully added, “Not! Never this way.” The officer left out the kitchen door and in four strides vanished into the howling whiteness.

I sat in the dark until the phone rang. “I have your husband here. His car was under a snowdrift at the bottom of the mountain, and he was inside sleeping. He says he wants to come home. If I can get back up the hill, I'll bring him on home.”

Zhong-hua had been at the movie theater. Being money-conscious, he had entered for the four o'clock shows and stayed in the ten-screen theater until closing to get as much value as possible from one ticket. From the final James Bond scene on a tropical
island beach, he emerged to the upstate blizzard. It took him an hour to locate the car in the parking lot, because he exited on the wrong side of the theater. Then he began the long journey homeward.

I stood in the garage staring at him in disbelief that he would stay out in this weather and not let me know where he was. I couldn't even speak, I was so angry. I put up my hands in surrender. “Look, I can't even talk to you. I don't want to hear stupid words. I don't want to see your face.” I turned away and clomped back into the house. He came in and climbed the stairs to bed, looking thoughtful. I slept in the brown chair with my self-righteous rage spilling over the edge with my feet. Resorting to the brown chair turned out to be just the right communicative gesture. The next morning my husband said, “This time I wrong!”

Before the blizzard, I had been working on internally dissolving the distress I experienced when my husband stayed away from home and did not call. Afterward, more anxious than ever and wishing to put myself out of misery, I repeatedly determined to discuss the importance of calling home. At first, my husband's standard answer to such invitations was “I think no need talk” or “Not talk is OK.” Or he looked at me curiously and said, “This for you very important thing? You have free time think about this?” He did not persist with this tactic once he saw that it resulted in my becoming more and more agitated and unhappy and less and less like a good Chinese lady. “Why your eyes jumping out of your head?” he would ask, visibly shaken. He must have thought carefully about a new strategy because, instead of refusing to talk, he began to say, “Yes, yes, go ahead, you talk. I will listen.” He positioned himself dutifully beside me, usually with a pillow, indicating that he was there for the duration. He listened; indeed, he said it was “like music,” even though sometimes I was screaming and crying, but he did not say a word and maintained excellent composure. When I finished, he said that yes, it was best for me to talk, healthy for the body, and then got up and left the room.

When I was growing up, birthdays were low-key and presents very small. Paroda, however, loved celebrations of every kind, expensive presents, and shows of affection. In Zhong-hua's first year, she had been distracted by high school graduation, and both of our May birthdays slid by with a new shirt for Zhong-hua and flowers for me. The second May, she was home from her first year of college and able to focus on instigating: “What are you getting Mom for her birthday?”

Zhong-hua was taken aback and then distressed. “You think I should do what?” he asked her. He hated the idea of buying anything that had no purpose other than sentiment, like flowers. One cannot eat flowers, he pointed out. When my birthday came, I made no mention of it. In China, birthdays are celebrated only for the very young and the very old. Old age is considered an accomplishment, and one is allowed to gather all descendants together and gloat happily. But it was not good luck to celebrate prematurely, unnecessarily calling attention to oneself that could invite jealousy. Middle-aged people should just carry on as usual. I was doing that. It was eleven thirty at night, and I had my pajamas on. He came into the bedroom more animated than I had ever seen him.

“We should need to go dancing! It is your birthday!” I knew very well he didn't think my birthday was an event, and anyway it was Sunday—all the dance clubs were closed.

“Come on! It's your birthday. Let's go to the mountain.” I saw he was determined to honor this birthday idea one way or another, so I put on a coat and boots over my pajamas and off we went. At the top of the pass between New York and Massachusetts, we got out of the car. It was pitch-black, and a stiff May wind blew from the northwest.

“Go on. I think you love the mountain. I'll wait for you.” He got back in the car and smoked cigarettes while I walked around the blustery parking lot in my pajamas. We were not done yet. Next he drove to the lake, which he knew I also loved. We got out and took some tiny blind steps onto the tilted fishing dock. The water lapped
against the shore rocks. Owls called one another. The air smelled of pine needles, Old Gold 100s, and fish. After that we went to the place where the road crosses over the Little Hoosick River. A steep trail leads down the bank to the underpass, where the water runs swift and deep, full of speckled trout. Upstream is a secret waterfall: secret because it is so difficult to get there. One must step in shoe-sucking mud, scramble up slippery rocks while grabbing at branches to keep from falling into the rushing water, jump an abyss between two boulders, and crawl on hands and knees to the base of a falls that crashes through bowels and chest and takes the breath away. Icy spray wet our faces and put out Zhong-hua's cigarette. The water fell to a deafening maw of foam. We crouched on the churning edge, where I felt both a terror of being swallowed whole and the safety of containment in thunderous calm. Zhong-hua lit another cigarette. On the way home, he said with an indignant air that in China dance clubs were always open, especially Sunday.

The next year some friends stopped by to wish me happy birthday, which startled Zhong-hua into action. He had a talent for making visual feasts out of anything we had on hand, however scanty. Our cupboards were bare that day, but on the counter sat a salty growth of fungus that had grown in the rock crevices of Szechuan Province. This gray, amorphous lump had brooded undisturbed for months, looking like a human cerebrum. He sliced this fungus into flowery cross sections and served it embellished with even saltier homemade pickles, made by drying long finger-thin cucumbers in the sun and dropping them into a vat of salt and vinegar, where they sank and reappeared months later, like immortals who could hold their breath for up to two years. Chinese wine was served on the side. My friends' facial expressions ranged from curiosity to puckered concern to outright alarm as the 100-proof flower “wine” scorched their throats. This was the famous mao-tai wine that the medical staff had used to disinfect wounds and sterilize instruments on the Red Army's Long March during the Communist revolution. Our guests made efforts to be polite
and appreciative: “Oh, this is diiifferent!” “Zhong-hua, you're so taaalented,” “Very, very interesting . . . ,” and then, “Oh, dear God, DEAR GOD!”

On Independence Day, Zhong-hua invited our friend Kathy for supper. He filleted shrimp with minced ginger and vinegar; heaped a bean-thread noodle mountain with chopped cucumber and sesame oil; sautéed squid with scallions, garlic, and hot red peppers; and boiled a savory cabbage, pork, and sweet-potato noodle stew. Preparing so much food reminded Zhong-hua that he was a bit fat. “You can cut some of my fat off and cook it while I am sleeping.”

“What?” I thought I had not heard correctly.

“You can cut some of my fat and cook it when I am in sleeping time.”

I had no answer. What was the answer?

“You can make a delicious meal from my side.”

Still I was speechless. Was this supposed to be funny?

“Long-ago times, there was a wife and husband, and they had little to eat. The wife very loved meat. While her husband slept, she cut off some of his shoulder and some of his thigh and cooked it. When he woke up, he walked a crooked way. He said, ‘What have you done, wife?' She told him what she had done. ‘Oh, well, wife, next time you must cut meat from both of my sides so I can walk straight and do not fall to one side, OK?' From that day on, the two never saw the full moon again, only the sliced moon, and that is why every month the woman feels the man's pain, where she sliced his flesh.”

Until he was nineteen years old, my husband never had enough to eat. People stripped trees of their leaves to stay alive. The boiled leaves had some nutritional value but caused the children's legs to break out in blisters. After supper, they would run outside to pop the blisters. Zhong-hua laughed as he told this story. This was “just so” laughter, not joyful mirth. My husband was born in 1958, the first year of Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward. At the core of Mao's plan was the forced communal agriculture implemented
on thousands of state collective farms resembling feudal manors. The villagers were encouraged to smelt their own steel to further industrialization. The homemade steel furnaces produced brittle, unusable steel and took manpower away from food production.

The Chinese government wanted citizens to believe that the new commune system would bring China out of poverty. Officials grossly exaggerated harvest statistics while continuing to collect the grain falsely reported as excess from the starving peasants—grain that was then exported, most of it sent to Russia to repay China's debt. An estimated 30 million people died between 1958 and 1962, in the largest famine in human history. My husband's insatiable appetite and inability to drive past a Price Chopper without veering into the parking lot undoubtedly comes from his having barely survived this terrible tragedy, the magnitude of which the rest of the world did not discover until decades later.

Even years later, when he was a sixteen-year-old sent by Mao to work in a village as a farmhand and schoolteacher, food was scarce. Mao's revolutionary scientists had developed hybrid field corn that produced ears twenty inches long. It was so dry and tasteless that even the chickens refused to peck it. Zhong-hua ate nothing but this corn for two of the three years he lived in the village, three meals a day of pounded kernels shaped into flat cakes and heated on sheet metal without oil. The hybrid corn caused constipation, and the people squatted moaning over the latrines using small pointed sticks to dig their own feces out. I cringed when someone mentioned corn in any context, since it always prompted Zhong-hua to retell this story.

With more stories, Zhong-hua let me know that forbearance, otherwise known as long-suffering, was the cultural norm in the face of marriage difficulties. He told the story of Zhou Enlai, whose devoted wife, Deng Yingchao, was a buck-toothed and homely woman who had not given him a son. When Zhou became premier of the People's Republic, she entreated him to find a prettier wife who would be an asset to his new global image. He flatly refused
and kept her by his side until his death. Zhong-hua also told me a story of one of his colleagues at the factory. This forty-five-year-old man had never married. Finally, he had married a very friendly thirty-five-year-old woman. After the wedding, his friends took him out drinking. He seemed morose and declined the toasts. He didn't eat the steamed fish, the garlic with oysters, or the spicy cabbage. My husband took him aside and coaxed it out of him:

“I'm not happy,” he admitted.

“You just got married! What do you mean you are not happy? Is your wife not good?”

“Good.”

“What, then?”

“She has everything.”

“That's great! What woman has everything? You are very fortunate!”

“No, I mean she has everything—she has balls, a penis like a pencil, and a small hole.”

“You cannot have sex together?”

“Can, but the hole is small, and my wife has pain. I am depressed, very, very depressed.”

I asked Zhong-hua if the man would divorce this wife who had everything. He said no, because the woman was a good woman whom everyone liked. She had done nothing wrong. Marriage calls for acceptance. Marriage is sacred.