You could work there, you know, he said as he had before. Doctors here demand some of the highest hourly rates in the state, thus the country. Great work-life balance.
I nodded. But the squat brick building eerily aglow on my left had always seemed too pristine to be a hospital. There was no sense of danger or chaos. No contradictory signs like this way to emergency, but this way to ambulatory care. Left for billing, right for accounts payable. Down for lower floors, up for basement.
As Fang drove up their driveway and pulled into their garage, he asked if I was in some kind of trouble.
No trouble, I said.
From the garage we started walking along a scenic, pebbled footpath toward the main house, which had been extensively decorated for the new year with long, embroidered banners, flanking a newly painted red door, and groups of colorful lanterns evenly spaced around the porch. The footpath veered past the main house and into the back lawn, where the guesthouse stood, decorated more modestly with one lantern. I’d been telling Fang about my work situation, that I’d accumulated so many vacation days it was encouraged I take them all at once, which was very nice of the hospital wasn’t it, very thoughtful and kind. Fang listened but I couldn’t get a read on him. I couldn’t tell if he suspected that I’d been fired and had nowhere else to go. I did have nowhere else to go, but theoretically, I still had a job.
On the guesthouse porch, Fang said that I could stay here for now and we would figure the rest out tomorrow. It’s after ten, he said. Best not to wake up everyone else.
Been a while, hasn’t it? I said fakely. How was the trip and beautiful Mountain Time Colorado?
Fang handed me a set of keys, along with a tote bag of Tami’s clothes. His face had pinched, and under the small porch light, I could only see lines and shadows. He told me to cut the act. He knew that I’d been coming to see our mother in secret while they weren’t home.
She told you, didn’t she?
Course not. But it wasn’t terribly hard to figure out or anyway that unpredictable. Ma can keep a secret, but you’ve never been a good liar.
I opened my mouth to say something but closed it again when I realized that it was a lost cause.
Everyone processes grief differently, and what Ma says, different people need different kinds of support.
But Fang could draw a direct line from my having spent only two days in China not grieving to my situation now. I was alone, thus lonely. I had no partner or children to help me get through. Yet the thought of family scared me, which was why I avoided it. I had to check those feelings from now on, he said, and get over them. A family is safe harbor, so it was crucial to establish yourself within this harbor, and to establish that harbor within a place.
Did we wish to be seen as immigrants forever, he asked, or did we want to become settlers of a place? Settlers created settlements and the ten-mile-radius target in Greenwich was meant to be that.
My turn to say that it was late and to unlock the guesthouse door and go inside.
You’ve always been like this, he said, everything on your own terms, no regard for the big picture.
* * *
—
I HAD TROUBLE SLEEPING that night. Outside was too quiet, the guesthouse even more so, and Tami’s nightgown was too long for me at the bottom, in the sleeves, was too perfumed around the neck.
Sleep, I said, and my brain said no.
A direct line? I could draw one from Fang having felt denied everything to denying himself nothing. From him having been left behind by our parents to his belief system now. Control, being close enough to control, following a plan.
His big-picture plan, long established, was that progress came in three waves. The first wave was our parents, who took any job available and occupied the lowest social rung. In their discontent, they invested in their children, us, and we would go on to rebuild the wealth that had been lost. The third wave, my brother’s children, would be the first to benefit from a safety net created by wave two. Finally, they could take risks, pursue passions, and, as my brother believed, make us culturally ascendant. It was then three waves until fiscal and social success, and my big-picture job was to provide a third, which is the part that I had trouble with. If I never married or had children, it was heavily implied that all this planning was for naught.
Was it harder to be a woman? Or an immigrant? Or a Chinese person outside of China? And why did being a good any of the above require you to edit yourself down so you could become someone else?
As my brother liked to point out, the cycle was vicious and unending. The Mayflower carried the first Americans, but newcomers seen as too foreign are so often labeled “fresh off the boat.” Immigrants become settlers who go on to call out the new immigrants. The Mayflower was centuries ago, I’d said, making excuses, I suppose, for the Mayflower. What about the railroads? he replied. The gold rush wasn’t so long ago. Fang cared about U.S. history way more than I did and had sat me down before for lessons.
Following the gold rush, after the completion of the railroads, the Chinese accounted for 0.002 percent of the U.S. population but were blamed for stealing American jobs. Entire communities were massacred, entire groups of Chinese men, women, kids. To solve the problem of job theft and thus the massacres, exclusion laws were enacted for the next sixty-some years. The women were banned first, as few were believed to have come to America for honorable work. Whores. Concubines. Hard not to wonder if the ban’s more insidious motive was breeding—remove the women first, tarnished already, and you stem an unwanted population. After the men were banned, no Chinese were allowed into the country or allowed to return if they’d left. Chinatowns, Chinese food, the red gates of equality that sometimes led to dingy streets where the aliens, or so the leftover Chinese were known, could retreat. The first immigrants were barred from citizenship, owning property, and marrying outside of their race. A woman took the citizenship of her husband then, so equally unfortunate for the Chinaman who could not gain citizenship was the woman who, if born here, would lose hers for marrying him. And who would’ve married the long-suffering Chinaman then, except for the longer-suffering Chinawoman? By no coincidence, the year the ban was lifted was at the end of the Second World War, when China was our ally against Japan and a third of the Japanese population in America, mostly citizens, had already been interned. As a token of thanks, the Chinese were granted paths to citizenship, and for the next twenty years, the annual immigration quota for the Chinese was raised to a generous 105, a number that still worried some Americans who believed if you give those greedy aliens an inch, they will take a mile.
U.S. history was appalling, but I also didn’t know what my brother expected me to do about it. These events predated us and our parents. We weren’t descendants of railroad workers or the first Chinatown restaurateurs.
Nothing to do with us? he’d say. How many ethnic groups has this country ever banned? History repeats itself. Asians are often pitted against other Asians, and even citizenship can’t always save you.
If history did repeat itself, then I needed only to wait for the next round to experience the trauma firsthand. Though maybe the next round was now in my exile from the hospital, the city, apartment 9A, and a virus problem on the other side of the world.
A daughter of immigrants is the daughter of guests, is a part-time guest herself, and the best kind of guest goes with the flow. She stays in a guesthouse.