They passed a wet market with plastic buckets of crabs. Two ducks hung in a window, roasted brown and sticky with sauce. Peter took his camera out and fumbled with the settings. He aimed his lens, then frowned at the screen.
“Hey, how about a family shot?” Jim said, taking the camera from Peter. Angel ran in front of the window, hip stuck out into a pose.
“Work it, Angel, work it!” Elaine said. “Come on, Wilkinsons!”
They assembled on the sidewalk beneath the roast ducks and sweaty window, a man in a white apron hacking meat inside as Elaine wrapped her arms around Angel, Peter and Kay’s arms around Deming.
“How do you use this thing?” Jim shouted, and Peter broke away to assist. They passed the camera back and forth. “Okay. Smile, everyone. One, two, three . . . ”
Deming stood against Peter. People were staring. Jim pressed another button. “One more. Daniel, smile in this one. Come on, you’re on vacation. Vacation is supposed to be fun.”
“Smi-ile,” Elaine said.
Deming forced a smile.
“Cheese!” sang Angel.
Kay pulled him closer. “It’s okay,” she whispered, “you don’t have to smile.” But he did, glad that she was on his side.
AT A RESTAURANT ON Mott Street, the waiter gave them English menus, looking at Deming and Angel. He started to dole out chopsticks, then paused and pulled out silverware instead. On the table in front of Deming he placed a glinting metal fork with a water stain on the handle.
“Chopsticks for me, please,” Elaine said.
“Me, too,” said Kay.
“Chopsticks for all,” Jim said.
The waiter put down chopsticks and took their orders, and as he walked away Deming heard him talking to another waiter in Fuzhounese about moving tables together for a larger group of customers. The words elicited zaps in a dormant corner of his brain. Soon, he would be speaking Fuzhounese all the time.
The dishes came out fast and were limp, reheated. Turnip cake, broccoli, shrimp dumplings. Angel stabbed holes into the side of a dumpling, and even the solitary curl of steam was lackluster.
“Delicious,” Kay murmured, scooping up food for Deming’s plate. The meat tasted old. His mother would have never eaten food this bad.
“This is one of those off-the-beaten-path places,” Elaine said. “We’ve been coming here for years.”
Jim turned to Deming. “You must miss this, Daniel, having authentic Chinese food.”
“We went to Great Wall that one time,” Peter said.
Deming recalled the tempura and pad thai he’d picked at during a visit to the buffet table at the strip mall restaurant. The owners hadn’t even looked Chinese.
“Come on, Great Wall doesn’t count,” Kay said. “Daniel knows that.”
“Okay, okay, Ridgeborough isn’t exactly Manhattan when it comes to ethnic food,” Peter said. “It’s more like a cultural desert.”
“You have to reframe it,” Elaine said. “Think of it as a cultural retreat.”
“A cultural siesta,” Jim said.
“But we’ve had terrific Chinese food traveling in Vancouver and London,” Kay said. “Spoiled us for life.”
Peter nibbled a turnip cake. “This is what we come to New York for.”
“And to see us!” Angel said.
“I was about to say that. That’s the most important thing of all. Almost more important than dumplings.”
“Almost?” Angel said.
Elaine waved her hands. “Guys, should we get dessert? Bean soup?”
The waiter stopped at their table. “What would you like?” he asked in English.
Before Elaine could respond, Deming spoke in a rush of Fuzhounese. “She says she wants to order the red bean dessert, you got that?” He’d forgotten the pleasures of flinging vowels, the exhilarant expulsions. He knew his tones were pure 3 Alley.
“Yeah, yeah, of course,” the waiter said.
“Great, bring it on. These American cows want a couple of bowls.”
“You got it.”
Elaine put down her chopsticks. “He’s fluent in Mandarin!”
Deming hated Jim and Elaine’s outsized smiles and exaggerated speech, how they spoke to him and Angel like they were little kids, how Peter and Kay didn’t seem to notice. He had the sensation that he was being mocked, that they all saw him and Angel as objects of amusement.
“It’s not Mandarin,” he said. “It’s Fuzhounese.”
“You know, the local slang,” Peter said.
“Daniel,” said Kay. “Don’t talk like that to Mrs. Hennings.”
“But she’s wrong,” Deming said. “She’s stupid.”
“Daniel!” Peter said.
“But it’s not local slang. It’s a language called Fuzhounese.”
Jim laughed. “It’s all Chinese to us dumb-dumbs.”
“You don’t know,” Deming said. “You don’t even care!”
“I’m so sorry, Daniel,” Elaine said. “It’s my fault for getting it mixed up. I mistook it for Mandarin because I studied it in college.”
“Daniel, say sorry to Mrs. Hennings,” Kay said.
“Sorry.”
“He can be so sensitive,” Kay said to Elaine.
“It’s okay. Obviously, that was in prehistoric times, when I was young and in college,” Elaine said. “But I was an East Asian Studies major, so I should know better.”
“Oh,” Kay said, “remind me, I need to ask you to help me with my terrible Mandarin. Daniel laughs and laughs when I talk to him with my Chinese.”
“I do not!”
“Of course.” Elaine smiled at Kay. “We’ll talk later.”
“I studied international finance in college,” Jim said. “We’ve both always had such a strong fascination with Asia. So it made sense that we decided to get our little girl from there.”
“We didn’t get her,” Elaine said. “We were already bound by red thread.” She over enunciated the words. “You must know the story of the red thread, Daniel. It’s an ancient Asian story.”
“Never heard it.”
“The red thread story! It says that the people who are destined to be with one another are bound with invisible red thread. And that’s how Angel and Jim and I were all connected with red thread, and how we found each other in our forever family.”
“You don’t know the story?” Angel said.
“I said I’ve never heard it.” He couldn’t believe Peter and Kay were nodding along with Elaine and Jim. “Can I be excused for a minute?”
In the bathroom, he washed his hands with a grimy soap bar and looked in the cloudy mirror. He saw skin like Angel’s, eyes and nose like Angel’s, hair like Angel’s.
He could sneak out now. There was a subway station not too far away they had passed on the walk over, and in his pocket was a five-dollar bill, more than enough for train fare. He could sprint from Fordham and University, sneak into the lobby and rush upstairs, knock like crazy until the door opened. Whoever was there would screech when they saw him, they would all scream and scream. Vivian and Michael could still be there. Leon and his mother could have come home.
He slipped in with a family making its way to the exit, three generations of parents and children and a Yi Gong, matching their pace out the door and onto the sidewalk.