IN CLASS THE NEXT morning, I wished I’d followed my own advice to take a deep breath before speaking when I stopped in the middle of a sentence and couldn’t remember what I wanted to say next. My students stared as I glanced at the screen behind me. The word toward glowed in English. My mind churned; the word meant nothing to me.
On my way to work, I had noticed boys your age, young men scurrying with briefcases to office buildings, or dressed in jeans, balanced on construction scaffolding. You could be one of my students. Instead, you had been raised by strangers. You called an American woman Mom, someone who had never had any indecision about motherhood, who wanted it so badly she had taken another woman’s son as her own. When I thought about this I wanted to scream; I wanted to kill someone. I was afraid that if I let myself cry, I would never stop.
A student in the front row raised her hand. “Teacher, you were talking about prepositions.”
“Toward is a preposition,” I said, in hope that it would spark the next sentence. “Can anyone tell me what a preposition is?”
The same student raised her hand. “Prepositions work in phrases to give additional information.” She flipped through her notes. “Common English prepositions include under and after and to.”
“Thank you, Mindy.” I pressed a button on the projector and advanced to the next slide. “Let’s review more vocabulary words.”
According to the clock on the wall, it was ten thirty in the morning. In New York, it was nine thirty the night before. New York, and all of America, was taking place in the past.
As the vocabulary words flashed on the screen, I took my phone out and scrolled down to the number I had saved in my contacts list, under your name: DEMING. Your Chinese name, your real name, not this Daniel Wilkinson. The name I gave you. My chest squeezed. I stepped into the hallway, called you, and left a message.
That evening, I bought a pack of cigarettes for the first time in years and chain-smoked on a bench in the park until I was dizzy. I thought of your new voice, your new name, and wanted to talk to you more. A lump remained in my chest, a raw, welling feeling that I needed to kill. I smoked more; then hurried home to shower, brush my teeth, and wash the smell of cigarettes out of my hair before Yong got there.
Later that week we arranged a time to talk, an early evening when I was home alone, and I took the phone out to the balcony to wait for your call. When I had first moved in, Yong and I would sit here on humid nights and make up nicknames for the towers busting up across the city. Silvertop. Boxyred. Uglygray. Week after week, these buildings grew upwards until their construction scaffolding was removed like post-surgery bandages, followed by a buffing and a filing and a final layer of paint. These days, I could no longer recognize Silvertop and Uglygray from the balcony, as they’d long been absorbed into a mass of other buildings, the skyline so cluttered I couldn’t tell which buildings were new and which were less new. But it was comforting to know that nothing stayed the same for too long, that each day was a new opportunity for reinvention. A person could be transformed by a fresh wardrobe or a different nickname, like the ones I gave my Speed English Now students—Kang, a sour-faced boy with orange-streaked hair, became Ken; Mei, the girl with glitter eyeliner, was Mindy.
I waited. At 6:35, the phone rang, and I answered before the first ring was finished.
“I called a little late,” you said.
“I’m always a little late, too.”
“Is this a good time?”
I looked through the sliding glass door, into the apartment. Yong wouldn’t be home for another hour, but I’d have to dress quickly for the awards banquet.
“Yes, my husband is out. I’m on our balcony right now.”
It wasn’t hard, talking to you. I told you how I had come to New York. You told me about Ridgeborough, the town where you had gone after the Bronx, and your American parents, whom you called Peter and Kay. I didn’t want to know their names. It should have been me who had gone to your high school graduation, who called you on your birthday, whose house you returned to at Christmas. I should have been the one to take credit for raising you. But all you could remember was me leaving and not finding you again.
You were angry. I couldn’t blame you. I was angry, too. I wanted to find a way to fix it, but didn’t know how, not without telling you about Ardsleyville. I didn’t want to think about Ardsleyville. Instead, I said all the wrong things.
Leon was the only person I had ever told, and though enough time had passed that it probably didn’t matter—no one would fine me now or give me prison time for how I left America—it wasn’t information I wanted to share. Telling Yong would ruin everything. There were still nights I would wake up thinking of the concrete floor, the Styrofoam bowls of lukewarm oatmeal—I couldn’t look at oatmeal now; I’d never eat it again—and the din of hundreds of women talking in different languages. I hated that Leon knew this, how fully I’d exposed myself to him. Because if he knew, then it had been real, not a nightmare I could just write off as my imagination. Like how talking to you reminded me of the nightmare of losing you.
Leon was the one who had left on purpose, not me. I didn’t leave on purpose. I loved you more than anyone. You could call another lady “Mama,” but I was your mama, not her. I knew I had forfeited the right to say that, but it was never going to change.
There was a knock on the window, and I jumped in my chair, saw Yong pointing at his watch. I told you I had to go.
THE FUZHOU BUSINESS LEADERS Forum awards dinner was in a conference hall with small windows near the ceiling. It was May, warm outside, but inside I was shivering as Yong fidgeted next to me. Onstage, a real estate tycoon was rambling about his childhood in a village north of Fuzhou, running ten minutes past the five-minute time limit. “I learned the lessons of hunger as a child during the famine years,” the tycoon said in an oddly cheerful lilt, “when my mother would feed us a thin paste of rice and water. Our stomachs growled, but we never complained.”