The Leavers

“Yeah,” Daniel said.

They careened down a long road, empty except for the occasional passing truck. Daniel spat out gravel and dust and the wind blew a glob of saliva back onto his jeans. He couldn’t let go of the driver’s waist, so the spit sat on his thigh, taunting him, spreading into the fabric. Green fields and hills were punctuated by clusters of buildings. With their knobby trunks and feathery leaves, the trees seemed older, friendlier, than the pines and oaks of upstate New York.

“Where you from?” the driver asked, as the fields gave way to taller buildings.

“America.”

“Ha!”

“New York.”

“Chinese?” the driver asked.

“Yes.”

“Cantonese?”

“Fuzhounese.”

The driver made a sound like pshaw. “No.”

“Yes. My mother is from Minjiang.”

“Hrm.”

The four-lane road was clogged with cars and buses. The driver slowed to a standstill, surrounded by a solid mass of traffic, all of it honking in unison, then lit a cigarette, the smoke drifting directly into Daniel’s face. The light changed to green and the driver threw the cigarette onto the ground and accelerated, Daniel bouncing hard against his back.

He was dropped off on a busy street near a Pizza Hut and a shopping mall.

“You know a hotel around here?”

“Over there,” the driver said, gesturing to the other side of an overpass and a traffic circle. He had a small, pimpled babyface, and Daniel saw that they were around the same age.

“How much for the ride?”

“One hundred fifty yuan.”

Daniel took out two hundred–yuan bills from the money he’d gotten at the airport currency exchange.

“You speak funny.” The driver handed Daniel his change. “You’ve got a Cantonese accent.”

It wasn’t until Daniel was paying for a room at the Min Hotel, a six-story building with wall-to-wall orange carpet, that he realized the driver had given him only ten yuan in change.

His room was on the third floor at the end of a long hallway, a double room with two queen-sized beds, more expensive than the singles. It was the only room they had available, the clerk said, and Daniel had been too tired, too humiliated by his accent, to argue. He crawled into the bed closest to the window, the sheets and pillows smelling like cigarette smoke, though he’d requested a non-smoking room. He would call her when he was more coherent. Maybe then he would sound less Cantonese.

He woke up three hours later, head aching, the room dark. According to the clock it was early evening, and when he opened the curtains, it was still light out. A line of buses idled in traffic below. A crowd of people were standing outside the Pizza Hut. Overwhelmed, he sat down on the bed. He calculated what time it was in New York, how long it had been since he’d eaten. He turned on his phone and dialed his mother’s number, but it wouldn’t go through. He tried again and got the same result. There was no wireless Internet in the hotel, so he couldn’t get online to see if he had to dial a special code. He tried again using the phone by the bed, but it only produced an automated recording that said he was unable to make this phone call. It was Planet Ridgeborough all over again.

“You’ll have to dial this code,” the clerk said, when he went down to the front desk.

“Even for a—nearby call?”

The clerk’s eyebrows resembled subtraction signs. “Your cell won’t work here,” she said. “If you use the phone in your room and punch in this code, you should be able to complete the call. We can charge any phone calls to your account if you give us a credit card.”

Daniel tried to decipher the clerk’s rapid words as he grasped for a response. He took out his credit card. He’d already charged the flight; a couple phone calls wouldn’t make a difference.

He returned to the room and called his mother’s number again, using the phone by the bed. This time, he got her voice mail.

“Mama, it’s Deming. I’m in Fuzhou and I want to see you. I’m staying at the Min Hotel in Wuyi Square, room 323. Please call me.” He left the phone number for his room and went out in search of dinner.

FUZHOU SMELLED LIKE A barbecue in autumn. The buildings had windows that reminded him of eyes, tracking his winding journey. Some buildings were wide and curved with long strips of windows like slices of gray masking tape, others tall and skinny with sharp or circular rooftops. Some buildings looked like an open greeting card, set on a table with arms flung out to embrace him. Others were only partially constructed, their tops a skeletal cage of scaffolding, and from a distance they resembled a band of mismatched toys. There was an architectural incongruence, but it made sense. Daniel preferred disorder to order, liked the trees in the spaces between buildings, leaves touching the low roofs of older homes. The city looked like it was trying to build itself up but would never fully succeed. This was an underdog’s city, ambitious and messily hungry, so haphazard it could collapse one night and be reassembled by the following morning.

The sounds of Fuzhou were deep yellows, blues, and oranges. Fuzhounese and Mandarin banged out around him, the playlist of his unconscious, and even the words and phrases he didn’t recognize were like falling into a warm bath. There was not one scrap of English, not anywhere; not in the street signs and bus stops and billboards, not in the voices he overheard, nor in the music sliding out of taxis. It was trippy, surreal, the swirl of familiar sounds on such unfamiliar streets. He’d never been to Fuzhou before but it was a place he already knew. His brain struggling to stay alert, he repeated to himself in English: I’m in China! I’m in China!

He turned to avoid a moped careening down the sidewalk and a bicyclist nearly swerved into him. When he stopped, the woman behind him yelled, “Move it!” He ducked into the nearest store to get his bearings. After a little effort he recalled the word for map and bought one of the city, but when he unfolded it the street names were in Chinese characters and he couldn’t read a thing.

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