“Hi, Ma—Alf, get down!”
In only a few months, Winnie has transformed. From a plump and pretty woman, she has withered into a puckish novice, her hair shorn to a salt-and-pepper prickle.
“Sister Yun!” Leo exclaims in mock reverence.
“Come here, James,” says Winnie, tugging his sleeve. James can feel her not simply ignoring his father but bracing herself against him. Even the wool of her robe seems to stiffen when he speaks.
But Leo won’t leave her alone. “You remember me?” he croons, leering over James’s shoulder. “You remember me, Sister Yun? From the big, bad world outside the temple?” He slides his gaze from her to James. “So much love,” he says, his voice tinged with irony. Or is it envy?
Alf whines. Leo’s face lights up in a prepossessing smile. He’s suddenly decades younger than his wife, ages younger. He’s the man in the photo taken just after he arrived in the U.S., a cigar clamped between his square teeth.
“Horndog,” he scoffs at Alf, who is still trying to leap into Winnie’s arms. “Player. You forget who feeds you now?”
James is still searching for Dagou. He glimpses Ming near the stage, out of place in his navy blazer. Following his mother, with Alf at his heels, James makes his way across the small gym, passing the table with the toddler-sized statue of the bodhisattva, clothed in robes of gold, surrounded by small dishes of food and pots of burning joss sticks. Nearby, there’s a bowl of sesame candy. Winnie picks out a piece and hands it to James, who puts it in his pocket. Then, taking his arm, she leads him past the stage. They leave the gym. They’re standing in a school hallway, near a window.
“Your hair is wet,” she says.
“Only a little.”
“It’s going to be big storm. Gu Ling Zhu Chi said so. Now, let me see you.” Her thumb and forefinger cup his chin. The light, brightened by snow, dazzles his eyes, and he can’t see the other women who speak nearby.
“He looks like you, Winnie,” someone says.
“Nonsense. Look at his nose. He got that nose from the father.”
His mother says, “You’re studying too hard. You need to take deep breaths. Breathe.”
James breathes. The strong smell recalls his mother’s incense table at home. She raised James and his brothers as Christians, and even wore a little gold cross on a fine chain around her throat, but she never gave up Guan Yin. Her Pu Sa stood on a small table in a room upstairs. Before the statuette, she burned incense in a squat holder made of a peanut butter jar covered with tinfoil; next to this, she kept a glass of water in case Guan Yin might suffer from thirst.
She’s the heart of everything, James thinks. She’s the heart of the family, just as Ming is the brains, and Dagou is the lungs, and our father is the spleen. Why has she left home, left us?
“Ma,” he croaks. “I miss you.” Then he blurts, “Are you happy here?”
“I’m fine. Gu Ling Zhu Chi says I only need to work on my tranquility.”
Winnie won’t reveal the nature of this threat to her tranquility. James broods over her health. She is ten years younger than his father, but at the thought of her falling ill, he finds himself back in the bowels of Union Station. Fresh sweat springs to his palms. He searches her features for signs, symptoms.
“Don’t worry, James,” she says. “I’m all right.”
They’re joined by three of the Haven community: Mary Wa and her children, Fang and Alice. Mary Wa owns the Oriental Food Mart, where Leo buys supplies. She is Winnie’s best friend; and Fang is James’s. In a girl-heavy peer group, they’re the only boys. Fang is an oddball. He didn’t get along at school and he shows no sign of getting along now. Although Mary still claims that Fang is going to enroll at UW–Madison, he’s not even at the community college. Today she has persuaded him to dress up for the luncheon. His denim sports jacket splits around a wide paisley tie resting on his belly. His face is like a larger version of his mother’s—peach-cheeked, with a mild plump mouth and wire glasses—but whereas Mary’s eyes are serene, his gleam with a fanatic intelligence.
“These people aren’t real Buddhists,” he tells James, pulling him aside as Mary and Alice chat with James’s mother. “They’re just a random group of bodhisattva lovers. This is a woman’s group and a cult of personality, not a temple.”
“How do you know?”
“There are how many Chinese in Haven?” Fang goes on, ignoring him. “Out of forty thousand residents, there are several hundred Chinese, total; maybe six hundred of us including children? There’s not enough money here to support the real thing. It’s a community center. And a humane society. And Gu Ling Zhu Chi isn’t a real teacher of sutras. She just lets them call her that, informally. She knows it,” he adds, glancing at the “head nun” or abbess. “That’s why she calls it the SH, not a temple. She’s not arrogant.”
James thinks of his brother Ming, warning of opportunistic “Buddhist types.” “But what is the real thing?” he asks. “Is there a rule book or something?”
“I know what I’m talking about. I’ve been to Chicago. My mother took Alice and me last month, and we went to visit a temple. Alice thinks I’m right,” he says, beckoning to his sister. “Don’t you, Alice?”
James tries not to turn around too quickly. He’s been in love with Alice Wa for years, since the childhood they spent outdoors together while Fang stayed inside, glued to his PlayStation. James must have spent a hundred afternoons with Alice, crouching over anthills, watching the insects burrowing, excavating, dragging corpses of fruit flies and houseflies and even dragonflies into their heaped-up tunnels, glistening wings moving along the sidewalk in an iridescent funeral procession. Although they attended different high schools, they intersected, also, as child laborers, James running errands for the restaurant and Alice at the register of the Oriental Food Mart.