Weeks pass. It’s two days before the trial. Ming is working on a large eggplant with garlic sauce, the final order of the night, when his phone buzzes at his hip. He sets down the spatula, turning from the sizzling wok to check the screen. It’s a text from Rydson, telling him to fly to Phoenix in two days for a series of meetings. “Affirmative,” Ming dictates, pocketing his phone, turning back to the stove.
So, he’ll miss the first few days of the trial. Fine—he won’t be in trouble; he’s still basking in the halo effect from ponying up the bail.
Savagely, Ming scrapes singed eggplant and garlic from the bottom of the wok. He flinches as hot oil spits in his face, glaring at O-Lan, who stands at the counter slicing scallions into tiny o’s. Ming wonders if she was more communicative when Dagou was working. Since the forty-nine-day ceremony, Brenda and Dagou have spent every possible hour together at her house. Tonight, Freedy is serving; Ming is covering the kitchen while James is off with Alice on a supposedly secret date that has been meticulously arranged in person or by note. Alice has no mobile and it’s hard to reach her away from the Oriental Food Mart. Ming has gone to see her there, with Mary Wa in the back room spying hopefully, maybe hoping he might save her daughter from being so eccentric and reclusive. In fact, the opposite is true. Privately, perhaps unknown even to James, Ming is supplying Alice with names and email addresses of potential employers in New York, information with which she may create a faraway, impoverished artistic life, a life even more powerfully private, sealed off from Mary.
Ming’s sinuses fill with a pungent, burning odor. The eggplant has shriveled into a scorching mess. Ming wrenches the wok off the flame. He’s ruined the order and must start over. Yet while he does this (dips oil into the second wok, throws in the garlic to begin again) there comes a nudge, a recognition working its way up from the deep subconscious. It’s several minutes before he understands what caught his attention.
O-Lan’s sneakers.
They’re ancient Converse boy’s sneakers that were once black, with white rubber toe tops, stars, and soles; but the toe tops and the stars are gray-brown with an accumulation of restaurant grease, and the black fabric has faded to a dull gray-brown as well, until black and white are almost the same color.
After closing, Ming waits for O-Lan to remove her apron, wash her hands, and step out of the kitchen, past the office. He waits for her car to leave the lot. He locks the restaurant door, and, keeping a distance of about two blocks, follows as she drives through the tangle of back alleyways.
Past old sleeping porches, garages, and back gardens; through unmarked intersections, close to lighted windows, Ming trails the distant taillights of O-Lan’s car. It’s an eighteen-year-old Dodge, entirely anonymous, probably unregistered. (After all, how could she register the car? She’s not legally in this country. Her car can’t be legal, either. Or is that true? He remembers Jerry saying one needs proof of residency to register a car, but that may not be the same as proof of citizenship.) Ming frowns into the dark. Years of driving as carefully as possible so as never to be stopped by the police; years of fixing every headlight and taillight. It’s a wonder she drives at all. But they’ve all taken her and her car for granted. Sending her to the Oriental Food Mart. Roping her into bringing food to Winnie at the hospital.
Now she’s bypassing Letter City, driving uphill, past the maze of houses to the neighborhood’s inglorious back end, near a shabby warehouse for baked goods.
Ming pulls over a block away, switching off his lights. O-Lan parks behind an old house, emerges from the car carrying a bag over her shoulder, and circles up a fire escape whose black-painted metal threads gleam faintly. Ming waits until a light turns on in the attic. Then he gets back into his own car. He circles the block and finds a parking space, locking the door as he gets out. Xiaoxin. He places his feet on the metal steps that lead behind the shabby old house. Climbing, circling silently up and up. The door at the top of the stairs is small. The knob turns easily in his hand; he breathes.
Inside, O-Lan stands two yards away, looking coolly at his face.
“Hi,” he says, startled to see she’s waiting for him.
“Hi,” she echoes the English word, her mouth opening blankly, like a goldfish. There’s something unfamiliar yet recognizable in the way she says the word. He’ll think about it later.
The room, the narrow footprint of the house, is bare and neat, but not fastidiously clean. The ceiling slants toward the eaves, where the low wall is dominated by a window.
“You’re ill,” she says, in her odd dialect.
“You were at my mother’s memorial service,” he says, struggling for his Mandarin vocabulary.
She doesn’t answer. Ming walks over to the window and peers down the hill on the collection of chimneys and receding rooftops at the edge of town: dark and shabby, with one steep tin roof. The empty warehouse parking lot spreading like a lake beyond. “It’s like a painting,” he says. “In the winter, it would be almost like that painting by Bruegel the Elder, with the hunters in the snow.”
“Your mind is wandering,” she says. “You have been getting worse and worse for months. You should go back to New York and stop flying every week. Your younger brother is here. He can look after your older brother.”
“You didn’t answer me,” he says. “I’ve never seen you at the Spiritual House before. You’re not a Buddhist. Why did you come?”
“I can’t pay my respects to the dead?”
“Do you respect the dead?”
“I do.”
“You weren’t invited,” he continues after a moment.
“You weren’t invited here.”
“Why’ve you stayed in Haven for such a long time?”
“To you, how long is long?”
Now he’s sure she’s mocking him. He’s flustered, hampered by his language skills, which are barely proficient. “This isn’t about me. Long for you is more than two years. None of the other helpers stayed past a year. You have nothing tying you to this place. No real job, no family—”
He stops, inexplicably confused. “Did you have some kind of special arrangement with my father?”
“Yes,” she says. “But not in the way you think.”
He doesn’t answer, worn out by the effort to converse in Mandarin.
“What do you think?” she asks.
Below, a man holding a plastic sack half-filled with aluminum cans searches the dumpster. He moves with measured concentration, stacking bags and pizza boxes to one side.
“It’s very inappropriate that you have come here to my room,” she says. “You’re stranger than I would have thought.”
Ming watches the man below. What she says is probably true.
“You’re so proud of being able to speak Chinese. Yet you’re also proud you’re not Chinese.”
Was that scorn in her voice? “But I am,” he protests, surprising himself. “I am Chinese.”
“You are a tourist. None of you brothers is Chinese, you least of all.”
Ming clears his throat.
“I assumed you understood all this: that you, your brothers, all three of you are lost.”