Leon raised his eyebrows. The guard lit another cigarette. Daniel needed a drink of water, but they had run out, their bottles empty. He didn’t know what he was going to say to his mother’s husband.
Five minutes later, the front door of the building opened and a man emerged, dressed like a gangster, black suit jacket over black button-down shirt, dark sunglasses. As he came closer, Daniel noticed his silver cufflinks and jade ring.
The man nodded at Leon and Daniel. “I’m Yong.” His voice was gravelly yet soft, his hair a shade of jet black that only occurred out of a dye bottle. The wrinkles on his face put his age a little north of Leon’s. “Can I help you?”
“My name is Deming. I know your wife—from New York. This is Leon.” He was unsure of what to say next. Yong wasn’t big, but looked like he could be a scary guy, if you insulted him or said the wrong thing. If Mama had never told her husband about him, he might be putting her in danger, putting himself in danger, by revealing who he was.
Yong took off his sunglasses and studied Daniel’s face. “What did you say your name was again?” Two of his teeth had gold caps.
“Deming . . . Guo.”
“Oh, you’re her son! You look so much like her. I can see it, the nose, the mouth, the jawline! How incredible. She mentioned she spoke to you recently and you lived in New York?”
Daniel caught Leon’s eyes and laughed. “Yes, I’m here visiting.”
“She’s going to be so upset when she finds out she missed you.”
“Where is she?”
“Beijing. The school she works for is looking to expand their branches, so she’s traveling to research the markets. There’s a conference there this week on education, so she’s there for that, as well.”
“I’ve been trying to call her for days. I’ve left her so many messages.”
“Her cell phone was stolen on the train. She called me from the hotel yesterday.”
“When is she coming back to Fuzhou?”
“This weekend.” Yong passed his cell phone to Daniel. “This is the name, the Conference for English Educators. At the Park Hotel.”
Daniel gave the phone to Leon to translate. “I can’t read Chinese,” he said.
THE NOODLES AND LAMB were as delicious as Leon promised, especially washed down with cold beers. When they returned to the apartment, Yimei and three other kids were riding their bikes around the parking lot. Shuang and another woman sat in lawn chairs, drinking cans of iced tea.
“Guess who’s going to Beijing tomorrow?” Leon said.
Daniel listened as Leon described their day. As the conversation shifted into talk about a family who’d recently moved out of the building, he excused himself and walked around the lot. There was a slight breeze, and the sweat on his arms and scalp was drying. The sky was a light purple, and the garbagy smell had faded with the day’s heat. The other children abandoned their bicycles to toss a ball, and he heard Yimei say to her friends, “That’s my cousin from America.”
He waved in her direction. “Deming!” Yimei said. “Catch.”
He saw the ball bound across the air, a swift yellow blur, and lifted his arms, letting it nestle against him. “Heads up, Yimei,” he shouted, and threw the ball back.
Sixteen
Beijing was a city of circles. Six ring roads, each one larger then the next, a series of concentric donuts. The train station was in the third ring. The high-speed train out of Fuzhou took twelve hours, and Daniel had only managed to sleep in spurts, his legs sore from sitting. He ignored the throng of motorcyclists outside the station and instead hailed a cab to the Park Hotel, and the closer he got to the inner rings, the more intricate the architecture, whether it was neon high-rises or older buildings with scalloped rooftops. Thick smog hid the upper stories of the tallest buildings, and some people on the sidewalks wore masks or scarves wrapped around their mouths. Frantic techno music leaked out of the radio, spasming reds. “Turn it up,” Daniel asked the driver. The cab filled with overproduced vocals, a guy rapping in Mandarin. “Louder, please.” The driver complied, the colors deepened. “Louder.”
The Conference for English Educators was taking place on the ground floor of the Park Hotel. Daniel paid the driver and said thank you in Mandarin, got out on the corner carrying his backpack. The street was full of shops selling fake jade jewelry and Buddha figurines to tourists, and he heard one man say in English, “Goddamn I need a nap,” the long vowels funny and exaggerated, almost painful to hear.
He walked through the revolving doors of the hotel, through the lobby, past the front desk, and around a corner, where two women with white nametags sat at a table with books and magazines. A conference schedule, in both Chinese and English, was displayed on a metal stand, and he saw his mother’s name, Polly Lin, listed as one of the speakers on a panel called Teaching Young Adult Learners, from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. He looked at his phone. It was 11:05.
A man in a blue suit, whose nametag announced him as Wei from an English school in Suzhou, intercepted him. “Do you have your nametag?”
“I’m sorry, I must have left it in my room. Should I go and get it?”
Wei turned to check with the two women at the table. As the three of them conferred, Daniel slipped into the auditorium and into the first empty seat he saw, two rows from the back, his view partially blocked by a pillar. Two women and a man were sitting on stage, and one of the women was his mother. A third woman, the moderator, was in a separate chair. His mother had the mic. “That’s what I mean,” she said, her words clear and forceful. She was making emphatic gestures with her right hand as she held the microphone with her left, and Daniel was glad to see she still spoke with her hands. “You cannot apply the same methods to younger learners that you do with older ones. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.” Several people in the audience clapped, and Daniel joined in, making his claps extra loud and resonant.
The moderator asked the man a question about creating an English-language curriculum with Chinese references. His mother passed the microphone. She wore glasses with small gold frames, a snug brown blazer, a cream-colored blouse with an energetic ruffle, and a silk paisley scarf. Her hair was short, puffed, and wavy. She didn’t look ten years older, he couldn’t see any wrinkles or gray hairs, at least from afar, but she looked neater, polished. Not like the professors at Carlough with their former hippie stylings, not like Peter and Kay in their L.L.Bean, but like a real estate broker or a bank teller. She was wearing a skirt. She looked like someone else’s mom.