Walking in Fuzhou: bicyclists, mopeds, trash bags, busted furniture, city people, migrants, all fighting for not enough sidewalk space. I walked to lose track of the life that had solidified around me when I hadn’t been paying attention. I liked how close the past felt, how possible it might be to make up a new history. All the different routes I might have taken, all the seemingly insignificant turns that could change your entire existence. I could’ve become anyone, living anywhere. But let’s be real, I was forty years old and most of my choices had already been made. Made for me. Not so easy to veer off course now.
Yong didn’t see the need to walk when he had a perfectly good car, had no curiosity for exploring the city he’d lived in all his life. If he wanted an adventure, he said, he wouldn’t walk around a couple of office buildings; he’d take a trip to Hong Kong or Bangkok or Shanghai, though he never did those things either.
Lately, Boss Cheng had been assigning my co-worker Boqing to do market research on expanding World Top to other cities, and I’d experienced envy so sharp I could smell it. Last week that chump Boqing had gone to Taizhou, and next week, he was off to Zhangzhou. I wanted to travel. But Boss Cheng hadn’t asked me because traveling like that was supposed to be an inconvenience, a responsibility given to a more junior employee. Yong hated traveling for work but I would’ve jumped at the chance to even take the three-hour bullet train to Xiamen. I could sit by the window and watch the cranes and backhoe diggers, cement spreading like a cracked egg across Fujian Province. Fields flattening into housing foundations, villages shaped into towns, all of it whizzing by at two-hundred-fifty kilometers an hour.
There was a thick crowd outside Pizza Hut, waiting to get in. Yong and I had our first dinner there, seven years ago. We went after the last English for Executives class—he’d been one of my worst students—and he told me his wife had died young, of leukemia, and they hadn’t had children, which was okay by him. He said he’d bought his apartment new, paid in full, in cash. “I’m a self-made businessman,” he said, trying to play it cool. But I knew he wouldn’t have been able to get the permits and licenses to start a business without urban hukou. It reminded me of those rich young people Didi and I used to see in New York, with their beat-up jeans and uncombed hair. I told Yong I had lived in America and he said, “You must have studied English in university.” I didn’t correct him; I neither confirmed nor denied.
He called me brilliant, hardworking, and kind, and we both fell in love with this version of Polly. My office job and my English, that one suit I’d saved up for months to buy, that was enough for this city man to believe in my authenticity. So I wasn’t about to let him down. And here we were, seven years later, the illusion and the reality one and the same. Polly: the woman who lived near West Lake and who had gone to university, decided to not have children. Yet it always felt temporary, like one day I’d be exposed, plucked out of the twelfth-floor apartment and deposited right back into Ardsleyville.
We got married six months after that first dinner. The marriage, the sex — they weren’t as boring as I had feared. I got on the pill and figured I’d tell Yong about you eventually, say you were staying with relatives in America, but the months passed and then it seemed too late and too significant to reveal. A person could turn angry at any time. Telling him now? It would be worse than not telling him at all.
I WAS TEN MINUTES late. When I walked into the banquet room, Yong said to the table, “My wife was working.”
“Walking, not working,” I said.
Fu, a balding man Yong introduced to me as the Walmart buyer, sat between him and Zhao, Yong’s partner at the textile factory. I took the empty seat next to Zhao’s wife, Lujin.
Yong was wearing the silver cufflinks I bought him for our sixth wedding anniversary. Crevices bookended his eyes and mouth. He was handsome in a semi-ruined way; his beauty was that his beauty was behind him, his appeal reflecting what he had already survived, though he’d laugh at this because he was not into nostalgia. “I can barely remember anything before the age of thirty,” he liked to say. Maybe he was lying. To his colleagues, he played like his success had been effortless, though before each big meeting he practiced what he was going to say in front of a mirror, wrote his lines down and memorized them. I helped.
The food came fast. A plate piled with prawns, another with scallops and vegetables. Jellyfish, conch, abalone. Lujin poured tea. “How’s business?” A smear of lipstick desecrated one of her front teeth. I didn’t bring this to her attention.
“Our enrollment is at a record high.” I speared a prawn and tore off its head, laying it to rest on my plate. An eye looked up at me. “Everyone wants to learn English.”
“I don’t need English.” Lujin chomped on a large scallop. “We’re doing business in Shanghai.” Lujin was a northerner who’d never forgiven her husband for returning to his home province to run a factory, and Zhao liked to brag about her fluent Mandarin and Shanghainese, those pristine, elegant tones. Dinner parties at Zhao and Lujin’s house in Jiangbin involved Lujin cooking complicated, flavorless meals as Zhao drank beer after beer and his belly got so bloated he’d have to loosen his belt one notch, then another. At these parties the men would complain about the Sichuanese who used to work for nearly nothing but were no longer migrating to Fuzhou in such large amounts, working instead at new factories in Shenzhen. Yong was the kind of boss who loved to complain about being a boss. His complaints were not actual complaints but well-crafted brags; Yongtex was doing well enough that he had things to worry about.
At these parties, the women’s conversations were worse, because I was expected to participate. Ha! Which private schools were the best? Which housecleaners were cheap but honest? There’d be the circulation of a home renovation catalog, pictures of one disembodied kitchen cabinet after another, laid out and shot in flattering poses like swimsuit models. Pictures of empty pots on sparkling stoves and smiling mothers, fathers, and children, all of them black-haired and dark-eyed with improbably pale skin and long legs (where could such specimens be found in Fuzhou?). I’d flip through the pages and remember the plasticky couch in our Bronx apartment, those nights when hotdogs and instant noodles for dinner were more than enough. Or other nights, having left everything I’d known for a new city, thrilled and frightened at what I had done.
Yong was on his second beer, Zhao and Fu on their third. “We have six million dollars in exports per fiscal year,” Zhao said. “We delivered our Christmas orders early last year. The production cost for Walmart was one-fourth the retail price.”
Yong turned to me. “My wife worked in New York City for a long time. She’s an English teacher now, does international translation for Yongtex.”
Fu looked over. I channeled my teacher voice. “I’ve seen the factories in America and they can’t compete with Yongtex.”
“What are the buildings like in New York?” Fu asked.
“Tall. Beautiful. Majestic.”
Lujin looked down at her plate and scratched her thigh.
“And the weather?”
“Hot and sunny in the summertime, and snow in the winter.”