As James runs through the fluorescent-lit halls, he considers what Ming has just told him. Weightless, he pumps the length of the building, toward the exit nearest the parking lot. He can’t feel the floor under his feet. He can no longer focus on the significance of Ming’s words, for his heart is in flight from them.
Around him is the hospital. He has the sense of being in the arteries of an endless, brilliant beast, an organism, its windows glittering in the dark like jeweled dragon hide, a lone phlebotomy cart circulating in its corridors, tiny vials of blood moving along its arteries. The basement bowels, the cafeteria, the offices at the top. The little room where Winnie died—grief-stricken, jolted by the news of his father’s death, bound to Leo in love and hate. He had once wished to be a doctor, to know this place. The more he learns about the body, the less he has even the smallest sense of knowledge or control, and the more he understands there is no such thing as knowledge and control.
But he is the youngest brother, and he must follow orders. He recalls Ming’s directions, drives through Letter City into the oldest part of town, the shabbiest part. James reaches the house Ming described to him, “cheap white siding, 1920s style, big but with something meanly scaled in all of the proportions.” Using his phone as a light, James climbs the outside stairs.
A single door at the top. His fist echoes and he knows—believes—he knocks in vain. He puts his hand on the knob. As he turns the knob, he believes—hopes—the room will be empty.
He enters, closing the door behind him.
Someone is sitting in the dark, near the kitchen. James flicks on the ceiling light. O-Lan wears jeans, a T-shirt, and a denim jacket; at her feet is the blue carpetbag.
“Hello,” he says, in English.
She doesn’t answer.
“Ming says you can understand me. I’m here to make sure you stay. You’ve got to stay.”
He waits for several seconds; still she doesn’t answer. The light casts shapes over her face. He can see it now, beneath those marks of pain and age: that unmistakable vitality, the blood of his father. He looks at her left hand. On her third finger is the blunt shape of the ugly, yet priceless, ring.
When she speaks, her voice holds the rich, mocking fortitude of Big Chao. “Do you believe I should stay?”
James struggles against the impulse to recoil from the aggression, and the surprise, of her spoken English. For some reason, he remembers Winnie’s voice, You need to breathe. He breathes. “I don’t know,” he says. His mother stays with him, guiding him. “Do you trust anything?” he asks, as she might have done. “Do you have faith, in God, or in the teachings of Buddhism?”
“I’ve been to see Gu Ling Zhu Chi,” she says, surprising him. “I went straight to her temple when I first arrived in Haven. The nuns took one look at me and let me in. They can always tell when someone is truly meant to see her.”
“What did she say?”
“She asked me for my story. I told her I had come to town to destroy my father. I told her about his great injustices toward my mother and me. She prayed for me. Then she summoned Leo Chao to the Spiritual House, and she reintroduced us.”
So all along, Gu Ling Zhu Chi had held this knowledge over his father. It explained Leo Chao’s respect for the old nun.
“I was hungry, homeless, an illegal. She advised him to give me a job. In this way, she thought, he could begin to make it up to me. I would learn to live in peace. And I would serve as a reminder to him, that we must consider the consequences of what we do. She made him promise to employ me. And she offered me lodging.”
“Why didn’t you take it?”
O-Lan shook her head. “She wanted to keep an eye on me. But she didn’t force me to live with her, it’s not her way. I took a room here instead. I worked for him. Of course, he didn’t improve. He exploited me. Gu Ling Zhu Chi was wrong on both counts. He didn’t change his ways, and nothing weakened my determination.”
“But Gu Ling Zhu Chi is right,” James said. “We must consider the consequences of what we do. You have to stay in Haven now. There’ll be an appeal.”
“I don’t mind if everyone knows what I’ve done,” she says. “Yes, there’ll be an appeal, and my testimony will be discredited. But I won’t be here. Why would I have stayed?”
James has to think back, slowly, in order to remember. “A green card.”
“They assume it’s what everyone wants.”
Of course, the prosecuting attorneys assumed she’d be held in Haven by the promise of citizenship. But Ming was right. Why would she want to be a part of this, or any, country? O-Lan, the Orphan, who had no native language.
“You should all know one more thing,” she says. “One more piece of the story.”
He nods, he is ready.
“Your mother guessed who I was. Not right away. It happened about a year after I arrived. I told her what your father did to my mother and me. It’s why she left the restaurant. Why she left your father and went to the nuns.”
Did she guess that he’s often wondered why Winnie had left them? Is she trying to comfort him? It’s possible. In the set of her lips, and in her neck and shoulders, he reads a stubborn and familiar resistance. There is deep pain in her, as well. He’s seized with the recognition, the understanding, that it is even more terrible to be a daughter of Leo Chao than it is to be his son.
“But you’re our sister,” he says. “We can’t just let you go. Where would you go?”
She smiles. “I’m not going to tell you that.”
“I’ll stop you.” James takes out his phone. “I can call 911,” he says. “There are only three entrances to the freeway. The police will follow you.”
She shrugs. “That’s your decision, little brother. You do what you think is right. I’m leaving now. Goodbye.”
There are so many things he wants to talk to her about. More than the ring, the carpetbag. But he finds he cannot bear to be rebuffed by her.
“Goodbye,” he says. Their eyes meet. She reaches for the bag. He stands in place, in her way, but he doesn’t try to stop her. Quick as a cat, she moves past him, out the door, and down the stairs.
James sits down at the card table, holding his phone. She told him to do what he thinks is right. He brings up the screen to dial and stares at the bright numbers. One call, and he will have done the right thing. She’ll be caught, and she’ll receive the punishment she deserves. But is it right? It is more terrible to be a daughter of Leo Chao—worse to be his Chinese daughter than his American son. What would Dagou want him to do?
James puts his phone back into his pocket. He’ll wait for the authorities to discover the room is empty. By that time, his sister will be far away, many hours out of town, possibly states away from Haven, in any direction. Soon, James will go back down the stairs, to the hospital. But for several minutes he sits at O-Lan’s empty table, steadying his breath.
The Closing Statements