Sorry to bother you again. Do you know what happened to the bag from Ma’s hospital room? I’m about to file a report with the police.
Ming texts back, Someone else must have unloaded it. Check at the SH. He pockets his phone and takes the elevator up to his apartment: clean, neutrally furnished, comfortingly bare. He’s chosen a high-rise in the Thirties from which he can follow the changing traffic lights straight up the avenue to his midtown office. He swaps out his shirts and underwear; presto, the suitcase is ready for his next trip to Wisconsin. He’s experimenting with a direct flight to Chicago. In a week, Katherine will pick him up at O’Hare and drive him to Haven for a meeting to discuss, and hopefully decide for good, whether Dagou is going to testify on his own behalf.
Ming has time for frequent trips to Haven now, because he’s no longer sleeping. Katherine insists it’s mania, but he can’t be so easily pathologized. Someone has to keep an eye on Jerry Stern: someone has to monitor preparations for Dagou’s trial, a month away. With JJ and Lulu gone to California for good, someone has to help James and Dagou and Brenda keep the restaurant open. Maybe now that he’s an orphan, Ming is finally being the son his parents wanted. Returning to Haven every weekend, helping Jerry plan the family defense. Coming up with the money for bail, not to mention the fee for breaking the lease on that ridiculous penthouse. Working shifts at the restaurant, helping out his brothers.
Only Katherine is Ming’s competitor, coming to Haven as frequently as he does. She drives up from Chicago every weekend, staying at a picturesque B&B run by a gay Ukrainian couple who seem to be unaware of who she is (although Ming suspects they know all about the trial and are leaving her in peace out of what he grudgingly calls midwestern decency). She’s obsessed with the legal aspects of Dagou’s case.
Others don’t use the word “obsessed” to describe Katherine’s behavior—instead, they say “dedicated” and “loyal” and “devoted.” No one has the heart to question why she’s still visiting, still wearing Dagou’s ring. Once, Mary Wa slipped up and referred to Katherine as Dagou’s wife. (Ming pointed out this would mean Brenda, his actual partner, was his mistress.) Ming is the only person besides Brenda who sees Katherine for what she is—a vengeful martyr in a Kabuki mask of dedication. Ming is also the only person besides Brenda who knows how infrequently Dagou actually talks to Katherine—knows (because he’s keeping track) that aside from infrequent, strained coffees, Dagou never sees Katherine.
At O’Hare, Katherine executes a perfect pickup on the arrivals curb. But the pleasure of being met at the airport is destroyed by her jabbering about family matters. Ming has to bite his lip to keep from rattling out a stream of critique: She’s as bad as the most racially deprived white person fetishizing Asian culture. Her interest in Dagou, in the Chao family, is entirely due to her sense of deprivation after having been raised as racially Chinese in a well-meaning but white American family. Can’t she get over it? Can’t she even be grateful for the total, blissful wipe-out of the self-abnegation, the anxiety, the shameful graspingness, of immigration? Rather than missing out, Katherine has been fast-forwarded; and yet she chooses, stubbornly and idiotically, to push the rewind button by worshipping their family. She’s unaccountably sorrowful about the deaths of his parents, even his father.
“Are you sad?” she asks Ming tearily.
He glowers at her profile; she’s focused on the road, responsible driver that she is. No one else would have the gall to ask that question of him. Keeping his voice level, he replies that people need to mourn in their own time. He takes out his phone to avoid more talk. But she doesn’t notice. Is he getting enough sleep? Is everything all right with his health?
“I’m fine. I need a cup of coffee.”
“I’m sure you’re fine,” she says, after they pull into a Starbucks, “but you look simply awful.”
“I’ve got to take a call,” he says, hoping to end the conversation.
“Is it Dagou?” She blushes. “I mean, are you going to talk to Dagou?”
“Are you?”
“He’s—busy,” she says. “My therapist says this is a hard time for him.”
In his New York life (his adult life), Ming has the luxury of an even temper, but an hour with Katherine and he can’t control himself.
“Does your therapist try to make you forgive him?” He gulps the coffee, burning his mouth. “Does she say it’s all a process?”
Katherine stops at the car and bends over her sneaker, slender fingers making clean white shoestrings into perfect loops. Ming imagines her as a child, learning to tie her shoes, stubbornly making rabbit ears. The vision fills him with rage. He presses on.
“Why do you idolize him? Why do you idolize us?” he asks, wrenching open the door to the passenger seat. “You’ve got to know by now, Katherine, that just because we’re biologically connected, and although we’re one hundred percent Chinese American, our family is a clusterfuck. We’re lost. My parents’ marriage was indisputably lost, and Dagou’s lost, he’s a disaster, and only a genuine miracle will pull him out of it. Even James, his life is going to be lost the moment he grows up enough to know his ass from his elbow. And I—”
“You are filled with self-hatred. You’re as racist as any extremist bigot!”
She gets into the car, but doesn’t start the engine. Instead, she turns and glares at him. He’s alarmed, not by what she’s just said (she’s probably right), but by the sight of her face. Katherine is pale, her eyes filled with tears, and even though he knows she was raised by a husky Corcoran blonde, her emotional palette is not his mother’s, not a drop of her upbringing bleeds Chinese; despite this knowledge, he is seized with the kind of pain only Winnie made him feel. It’s pain he would give anything—any amount—to escape. Has given.
Katherine starts the car and pulls back onto the highway, avoiding his gaze.
“You idolize him,” he repeats.
“You think I do,” she says, her voice shaking. “You think I worship him, and all of you. You think I humiliate myself clinging to an imagined family I never had.”
“I’ve got to get out of here,” Ming says. “I can’t stand this for one more minute.”
“I have a loving family,” she says.
Ming leaps at this. “Exactly!” he says. “They love you, you all treat each other way better than anyone in my family treats each other!”