The Natural Laws of Good Luck (9 page)

The driver's license opened up a new activity called “goin' 'round.” The business suit was kept handy for visits to the Department of Motor Vehicles, the INS, and traffic court, but usually Zhong-hua dressed more comfortably in loose-cut Tai Chi pants, a T-shirt, a light jacket. The gold Cupid pin now went everywhere. I was still not accustomed to my husband's abrupt unannounced arrivals and departures. Working alone in my basement studio on a clay mold for a mask or a batch of new teapots, I often lost track of time. Unaware that Zhong-hua had gone anywhere, I called out but got no answer. I looked in the garage and saw that he had taken the car, perhaps just to the gas station or to the hardware store. But he sometimes did not return until long after dark. By then I was feeling ignored and disrespected. He was supposed to tell me when he left, where he was going, and when he would be back. I soon learned how alarming and peculiar these expectations were to him.

“Where were you?” I said.

“Not where,” he said.

“Oh. Really? Not where?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

I was trying to be respectful of what was normal to him, but this new standard of not communicating unsettled me.

“Zhong-hua, can you tell me when you're going out somewhere? I like to know.”

“OK, you're welcome. So long. Thank you very much.”

Whenever my husband thought something was ridiculous, he would respond with what was, to him, a nonsensical sequence of words.

“And could you call me if you're not coming home before dark? I don't know if you are lost or had an accident or what happened to you.”

“Why talk about terrible things? Nothing happen. Just go 'round. Need something, I will call. You think OK, not OK?” Despite my efforts to teach him English sentence structure, my
husband translated many phrases literally from Chinese. It was hardwired in his brain. Thus, “OK, not OK?” was a translation of the common Chinese phrase
“Hao, bu hao?”
Literally, this is “Good, not good?”

“OK. It really is OK. But could you call?” I hated that this small request was making him look like a trapped animal and making me feel like a nag and a beggar. Frustrated, my husband became very still. His face hardened, and his lips closed tightly. Frozen in position, he spoke with measured force: “I think no need. In China, no need call. If I want see my friend, I just go. If I need doctor, just go. Never call. No need call. I don't understand why Americans always need call so many times. Why not talk again in the home? Good, not?”

“I like to get a call.”

“Do you have another thing?”

“No.”

“Uh.”

I felt so disregarded that I complained to Da Jie. I didn't know this would cause him to lose face with his relatives and also serve to lower their opinion of me, a wife who could not keep her woes contained. If while goin' 'round he stopped at Da Jie's house and lingered past midnight, she would prompt him, “Must call Ellen. Should be.” He did.

“Hello?”

“I am Lu. I tonight late come home. Do you have another thing?”

“No other thing.”

“Uh.”

He hung up after an
oh
or
uh
. The unceremonious ending at first struck me as an affront, until I heard him end all phone calls to other members of the family in a similar way. I liked the phone calls even though I knew he would not remember if Da Jie did not insist. Paroda said, “Mom, why do you get upset when it's the same thing every time? That's his way.” She pointed out that her grandfather, my father, demonstrated similar telephone behavior, unilaterally terminating
the conversation while the other person was in midsentence by saying “We'll see ya” or “Good luck with that” and hanging up. I had learned to accept this with no judgment and only slightly hurt feelings—but it had taken forty years. I tried another tactic with my husband next time he called. After he came to the part where he said, “Do you have another thing?” I said tersely, “No other thing,” and quickly hung up before he could. This did not perturb him at all and gave me the pleasurable feeling of neatly snipping off the conversation.

All summer my husband soothed his displaced spirit with more focused goin' 'round, such as watching the framing of new houses. Goin' 'round was by definition unplanned, so I was sometimes in the car when an outing suddenly took a detour. Frame construction fascinated him and seemed “very easy” compared to the mud brick or lath and plaster methods used in China. He drove up close to the construction site as if he were a member of the crew and sat himself on a cement block with a cigarette, rising from time to time to stroll from room to room. My husband moved through the world with no furtiveness, always coolly trespassing. More often than not, he was provided coffee and a bun or a centralized chair from which to watch all day. Not sure how to categorize him, people treated him like a long-lost cousin or projected onto him wisdom and mystery, launching into wistful monologues: “You see, I'm not just a carpenter—I'm an artist. I like to hug trees and shit like that. I'm real spiritual, you know what I mean?”

Zhong-hua smiled and nodded, “Yes, yes.”

“I dig Chinese people. Yeah, I do. Listen, man, can I give you a hug?”

“Oh, thank you very much, sir.”

At used-car lots, construction sites, convenience stores, and garage sales, my husband demonstrated Tai Chi and taught simple Qigong exercises. He made lists of people interested in Tai Chi lessons on the inside of matchbooks and the back of gas receipts.

Da Jie also liked driving around, especially if the promise of monetary reward was attached to the effort. Da Jie was a Wushu master,
trained in traditional Shaolin martial arts from the age of twelve. She was built the same as Zhong-hua—short, thick, and powerful. At home, Da Jie took orders from her husband, but when Da Jie was with her younger brother, she was most definitely in charge.

She told us about a national Kung Fu competition in Cleveland, where vendors could rent a table. Da Jie said that she and my husband should drive to Cleveland and sell the martial arts pants and silk tunics their sister in China had made. Cleveland was very nice, she'd heard. Da Jie said it was a straight line on New York 90 West from Albany to Cleveland, and the tournament was being held right there at the exit. So convenient! I doubted that, but she seemed confident. The straight-line part of the journey went very well, except it took ten hours. They arrived in Cleveland by 11:00 PM and drove around for two hours looking for a cheap hotel. After checking in, they decided to go out for some Chinese food. They became lost on the way back to the hotel and did not find it again until 4:00 AM. Neither of them could decipher the street signs. The tournament registration was at 7:30 AM. They sold one pair of Tai Chi shoes, two T-shirts, and a hot pink silk uniform. It all came to $90. After they paid the hotel bill for two nights, gas, and food on credit, the profit was negative $340.

They were almost home Sunday night, with Da Jie at the wheel and my husband sleeping in the backseat. Da Jie detoured to a casino. Over the next four hours, Zhong-hua snored on, and dollar by dollar, the $90 disappeared into the slot machines. Da Jie was too guilt-ridden to face her husband, Da Ge, so she slept in our big brown chair in front of the cold woodstove with her feet up on the kindling box. The long straight line and disappointing jackpot of the Cleveland trip depressed my husband's driving zeal for several weeks.

In early June, my husband had sown a large bag of lettuce seed from China. The result was enough lettuce to feed the city of Troy. Every seedling that appeared was carefully transplanted and faithfully watered until the garden looked like a dewy green cloud.
Zhong-hua made “lettuce soup” three times a day, which consisted of a few chicken legs plus several armloads of lettuce that wilted down when stir-fried with garlic and scallions. Paroda and I loved the lettuce soup, but we could not eat enough to make a dent in the bushy beds.

One summer evening, my husband suggested we take some lettuce to our neighbor three miles away. We got in the car at dusk with a pile of lettuce. After delivering this offering, we started home down the winding dirt road, our wheels popping gravel into the evening song of birds, crickets, and tree frogs. The road took a bend, but Zhong-hua did not. In slow motion we simply rolled off the side of the road, bumped across a ditch, and jolted into a tree stump. My husband broke out in jolly laughter while I just stared at him in horror. He didn't realize what I already knew—the car was destroyed. I got out and began a grim, brisk climb up the hill to our friend's house for help. Zhong-hua hurried along beside me, his powerful hand pressed into the small of my back, his face stricken.

Our friend towed the car home. We had no collision insurance. Back home, Zhong-hua descended to the dank cellar and ensconced himself in the moldy swivel chair. I knew he was there because the orange moon of his cigarette floated in the darkness, tracking a slow arc at intervals. He didn't speak or move, but apparently the fingers that held the cigarette still worked and his lungs still worked to take a puff.

I had learned not to show sympathy or nurturing affection, such as brushing his hair off his forehead. He did not like that. He told me that a fellow factory worker whose wife was always patting his head and stroking his hair got a lot of trouble because of it. Everyone knows this brings misfortune to a man, but she wouldn't stop. One day at work, his shirt caught in the cogs and he was pulled into the machinery. His internal organs were mangled, and he was in the hospital for three months. When he finally went home, the doctor said to remember one important thing: don't have sex, because it could be fatal. Unfortunately, the wife loved sex very much, and the very
first night she seduced him. His penis started shrinking and then developed a permanent crook. A few months showed no improvement, and the wife abandoned him for a virile replacement. This sad story cured me from touching my man's hair.

I left him to his vigil. He spent four nights in the moldy chair, wrapped in a blanket, smoking. During the days, he walked around expressionless or sat on a milk crate by the pond. Eula came home and told him it could happen to anybody, that it was just a car, that at least we were not hurt. She told him that she'd totaled her father's car just two weeks after she got her license, and that was after flunking the driving test four times. He didn't want comfort; he wanted to be left alone. On the fifth day, Zhong-hua took a shower, cooked two pounds of Chinese dumplings with pork and leeks, and ate them noisily. He announced we would fix this car. He estimated it would take three months. We chained the front of the car to a tree. Zhong-hua applied muscle to the come-along until the steel body groaned into alignment. We stayed up late every night pounding the hood flat with sledgehammers. Finally, he bought used parts from the scrap yard and rewired the headlights himself.

Living in the hinterlands as we did, we could not be carless and earn a living. A local low-end used-car dealer had a great little truck on the lot for seven hundred dollars. We had only five hundred dollars. He agreed, a bit too eagerly, and within an hour delivered it himself with two mechanic companions, one of them blind and accompanied by his Seeing Eye dog. One by one, they all jumped out of the tiny cab. The skeletal body sported an intact roof, a truck bed, and a gas tank anchored in air with wire. Jagged, rusty remnants barely hung together around gaping holes, but I was satisfied when it started right up every time and barreled down the highway like a fancy go-cart.

Making the truck “pretty” was imperative to Zhong-hua. He bought a rivet gun and some sheets of aluminum from the heating duct store. He measured, cut, and bent the metal to replace the ravaged body around this brave engine. Every section was an
exact replica of the decayed or missing body part. We bought a quart of silver paint and made the whole thing dazzle. When the muffler fell off a few days later, we both descended to a realm of rust and decay, lay on our backs with ants crawling over our faces, and attempted to force into place a muffler made for a different car Zhong-hua had found by the road. Zhong-hua wore the tuxedo pants he had purchased for one dollar at a garage sale. The silk-ribboned cuffs stuck out from under the car above his tattered sneakers. Paroda stood on the grass with her arms folded over her chest, watching in her bemused nonjudgmental way. “Hey, Zhong-hua,” she said, “nice pants.”

The engine never failed, but everything else did. That year, between the three of us, we used every one of our sixteen Triple-A road service calls and met a lot of other good-hearted people not employed by Triple-A who stopped to help. Zhong-hua quickly advanced from repairing truck parts with a hot glue gun and pouring transmission fluid into the oil tank because he could not read the bottle to being able to properly install alternators, timing belts, fan belts, front and rear brakes, all electrical components, and automatic transmissions. He also fixed electric appliances, vacuums, and cameras and watches. His method required an average of two days sitting in front of the problem, thinking and smoking Old Golds, before he touched anything.

My husband's road troubles continued for a while. He couldn't remember the rule about not turning left from the right-hand lane. He turned in front of a Lincoln Continental. Brakes screamed, and Zhong-hua was looking right into the quivering jowls of the red-faced driver, who jabbed at him with a meaty forefinger. I noticed Zhong-hua noticing the three gold rings and long, curly arm hair. The man stuck his whole face out the window and sputtered, “You almost killed us!”

“Yes.”

“I said, you almost killed us, buddy. Do you hear?”

“Yes, yes.”

“What do you have to say when I say you almost killed us?”

“Thank you very much!”

“I'm yelling at you. Why do you say thank you?”

“I don't know. I just think, thank you.”