It was only five days, a fever dream, and by the end we were exhausted but still coming together, like two tired magnets that gravitated toward one another out of habit, or lack of choice. As long as we stayed in this room, time wouldn’t go on. We could pretend that two years hadn’t passed since we’d last seen each other, that we weren’t avoiding questions. That you weren’t missing.
You being gone like that, given over to another family like a stray dog, was too much to comprehend, and it hovered, like the rest of the world, just out of reach. I’d heard of a rural couple who had tried to get their daughter back from a family who had adopted her, but had gotten thrown in jail. I thought of taking all the pills at once, took them out of the bottle and counted them (there were thirty-five), and put them back inside. Maybe you could still find me.
As long as we stayed inside, your adoption would not be real. But Leon’s friend was coming home the next day and we would have to leave the apartment.
“I could come with you,” Leon said. We were eating breakfast in a bakery, had gone out to wash the sheets and towels. “We could be together again.” He held his arms across the table, his fingers wrapping around mine.
An ambulance drove past, and I jumped at the sound of the sirens. The past five days had been a delusion. He was asking me to stay with him because he thought it was what I wanted to hear, but he already had a family. I could see the relief in his face when I told him no.
Because being with Leon made your loss real. “Go home to your wife,” I told him. The first day we had been together I thought I could make him choose, but by the fifth day, I no longer wanted to. “Go home to your baby girl.”
You slid down the wall until you were buried under the hotel sheets.
“And that was it?” you said. “You forgot me?”
“I didn’t forget. I just survived.”
I TOOK A CLASS in business Mandarin so I could bury my village accent and get a better job. When the teacher heard I had lived in America, he said he was also opening up an English school. I told him I’d studied in New York and gone to America on a student visa. Even if my English wasn’t good, it was better than some of the other teachers’.
“Working for World Top can’t get you an urban hukou right now,” Boss Cheng said, after I moved into the teacher dormitory, “but we’ll see about the future.” I decided I would work this job, make a lot of money, and figure out a way to go back to New York so I could find you.
I’d been teaching at World Top for almost a year, working and saving as much as I could, when Yong appeared in my class. He didn’t manage to learn much from me, but on the night of his last class, he said in English, “I’d like to see you sometime.”
He started to take me out to dinner twice a week, a few hours during which my grief would retreat, a momentary break. I liked his steadiness, his ambition and kindness; I’d forgotten what it was like to have someone pay attention to me, to have someone to talk to. Here was someone who could be a partner. And this was my chance to marry into an urban hukou, to get a permanent city residency permit. Without one, I’d always be a migrant. The city could kick me out any time. Those five days with Leon, the feeling of the floor dropping out from beneath me? That could never happen again.
After two months, I kissed Yong. Six months later, we had our wedding at a hotel in Wuyi Square. Twelve courses were served, eight of them seafood.
THERE WASN’T ANYTHING I could do,” I said. “I couldn’t go back to America after being deported. I couldn’t go anywhere. If I thought about you too much I wouldn’t be able to live.”
I knew how it must sound to you: I hadn’t tried hard enough, I didn’t love you enough. But I could have kept looking forever. I needed you to understand.
“You forgot me,” you said.
“No. Never.”
“You didn’t even tell your husband about me.”
“I did tell him. You met him. You know.”
“You didn’t tell him until I called you.”
My head sagged. You were right.
“I thought he’d be angry, and then he would leave me.” But that, too, was a lie. I’d only told myself that. I had never believed it.
“I thought you went away because I did something wrong. I was a kid!” You pounded the mattress with your fists. You must have wanted to punch me, too.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “When I returned to China and learned Leon had paid off the rest of my debt, I knew you were okay. Even if I hated the idea of you calling a white lady ‘Mama’ or ‘Mom’.”
You snorted. “Leon didn’t pay off the loan shark. Vivian did.”
Now I felt like I had really been punched. “But you were safe, weren’t you? With your adoptive parents?” I could hear the pleading desperation in my own questions, how badly I wanted to believe you’d been fine, that I had done all I could.
There was a long silence. Finally you said, “I never call my adoptive mother ‘Mama’ or ‘Mom’.”
You shut off the light. For a moment we lay together, on our separate beds, as your words pulled a warm blanket over us and made us less alone.
Nineteen
He hadn’t expected to like teaching so much. Today he split his students out into groups of three for role-playing: ordering at a restaurant, asking for directions in English. The other instructors, even his mother, laughed at him for making work harder for himself and not teaching the workbook. But his students were awake, engaged, and he was willing to be held up for their amusement and curiosity. When he said they could ask him anything they wanted, as long as they asked in English, they shouted out questions. What kind of clothes did people wear in New York? What did they eat? Did he have a girlfriend? Boss Cheng had reprimanded him, said his class was too noisy, but when Daniel’s students told their friends about him and these new students enrolled and requested to be in his class, Boss Cheng stopped bugging him. “Boss Cheng doesn’t know his head from his ass,” his mother said, cackling her old laugh. He leaned toward her compliments, always craving more. “You’re the best teacher at that school. You should be director.” That was her new plan for him. He’d stay in Fuzhou, follow her footsteps. It made him feel proud, yet also unsure. He didn’t know if he wanted to be the director of World Top English. But then she would look at him and smile and he would smile back, thinking, Yes, this is where I belong.
He had been living in China for three months, hadn’t spoken to Peter and Kay since leaving Ridgeborough in August. People no longer laughed at his accent; his Mandarin and Fuzhounese had slipped back into native-speaker levels, and the gaps between translating and speaking had grown smaller and smaller until they were nearly imperceptible, his brain automatically shifting into Chinese.