A Free Life

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FINALLY Taotao got his passport and visa. For weeks his parents had feared that China, even if not closing the door outright, would restrict the outflow of people. After the Tiananmen massacre on June 4, 1989, all the American airlines except United had canceled their flights to Beijing and Shanghai. At the good news, Pingping burst into tears. She quickly rinsed the colander in which she had drained the shredded turnip for her jellyfish salad, took off her apron, and set out with her husband, Nan Wu, for the town center of Woodland, where the office of Travel International was located.

The plane ticket cost seventy percent more than the regular fare because it had not been purchased three weeks in advance. The Wus didn't hesitate; as long as Taotao could get out of China in time and safely, it was worth any price. They also bought round-trip tickets from Boston to San Francisco for themselves.

Neither Pingping nor Nan could go back to China to fetch Taotao, who had been staying with Pingping's parents for the past three years. And since no one in Pingping's family had a passport-not to mention the difficulty in getting a visa from the U.S. embassy-the boy would have to fly by himself. Pingping's brother, a middle school physics teacher who had just returned to their parents' home for the summer vacation, had agreed to take his nephew from Jinan City to Shanghai. There Taotao would be left in the hands of the American flight attendants. Barely six, he wasn't allowed to change planes unaccompanied, so his parents would have to go and collect him in San Francisco. The travel agent, a bosomy brunette with olive skin and long hair, helped Nan make a reservation for the least expensive room at a hotel near Union Square, where the three of them would stay the first night before flying back to Boston. Altogether the trip would cost them close to $3,000. Never had they spent money so lavishly.

They arrived in San Francisco in the early morning of July 11. They hadn't expected it to be so chilly; nippy gusts were ruffling pedestrians' hair and forcing people to squint. A storm had descended the night before, leaving shop signs tattered and soggy; a few traffic lights were out of order, blinking endlessly. But the ebony facades of some buildings had been washed clean and glossy, and the vigorous wind smelled of the ocean. Pingping, without any warm clothes on, couldn't stop shivering and then began hiccupping violently on their way to the hotel. Nan tried massaging the nape of her neck to relieve her spasms, and once or twice he slapped her back in an attempt to shock her out of them. This trick had worked before, but it didn't help today.

Nan had called United Airlines twice to find out whether Taotao was actually on the plane, but nothing could be confirmed. He was told that the boy's name didn't come up in the computer. Things were still chaotic in China, and many passengers had been switched to this flight from other airlines that had canceled their services, so there wasn't a complete passenger list yet. "Don't worry, Mr. Wu," a pleasant female voice consoled Nan. "Your son should be all right."

"We were told zat he is on zer plane." Nan often mismanaged the interdental sound that the Chinese language doesn't have.

"Then he should be."

"Do you have anozzer way to check zat?"

"I'm afraid I don't, sir. Like I said, he should be okay."

But between "should be" and "is" stretched a gulf of anguish for the boy's parents. If only they knew where their son actually was!

Nan 's brother-in-law had said on the phone that he left Taotao with a group of American air stewardesses, one of whom was an Asian and could speak a little Mandarin. Now the Wus just hoped he was on the plane.

Three hours after they had checked into the hotel, they returned to the airport by a shuttle bus. The plane wasn't supposed to arrive until 12:30. Since it was an international flight, the Wus were not allowed to enter the restricted terminal. All they could do was stand outside customs, staring at the chestnut-colored gate that seemed resolved to remain shut forever. Several times they asked the people at the information desk whether Taotao was on the plane, but nobody could tell them that for certain. A thin, broad-faced woman in a dark blue uniform appeared. She looked Chinese but spoke only English. Hoping there might be another way to find out their son's whereabouts, they asked her to help. Her stubby-chinned face stiffened. She shook her head and said, "If that lady at the desk can't do anything for you, I can't either."

Distraught, Pingping begged her in English, "Please check it for us. He is our only child, just six year old. Three years I didn't see him."

"Like I said, I really can't help you. I have work to do, okay?"

Nan wanted to plead with her too, but the woman looked annoyed, so he refrained. In her eyes, which had more white than black, Nan had caught a flicker of disdain, probably because she knew they were from mainland China and suspected they were still red inside, if not red to the bone.

He wrapped an arm around Pingping, whispering in Chinese, "Let's wait a little longer. I'm sure he'll come out soon. Don't worry in advance." Between themselves they spoke Mandarin.

The way his wife had begged that woman upset him. Pingping, though thirty-three, looked almost ten years younger than her age, with large vivid eyes, a straight nose, a delicate chin, and a lissome figure. Perhaps that woman was jealous of her pretty features and liked seeing her in agony.

At last the gate opened and spat out a string of passengers. Most of them looked exhausted, their eyes dull and inert, and several walked unsteadily, pulling wheeled suitcases or lugging bags. The Wus stepped closer and gazed at the new arrivals. One by one the passengers went by. A tall black man in a baggy blazer cried, "Hey, Toni, so great to see you!" He stretched out his right arm, a dark canvas ukulele case hanging from his left shoulder. Toni, a skinny girl wearing a nose stud and a full head of cornrows, buried her face in his one-armed hug. Except for that cheerful moment, though, most passengers seemed groggy and dejected. Some of the Asians seemed uncertain what to do, and looked around as if wondering who among those standing by were supposed to receive them.

Within five minutes all the new arrivals had cleared customs. Slowly the gate closed. A chill sank into Nan 's heart; Pingping broke into sobs. "They must have lost him! I'm sure they lost him!" she groaned in Chinese, holding her sides with one arm. Tugging Nan 's wrist, she went on, "I told you not to let him take the risk, but you wouldn't listen."

"He'll be all right, believe me." His voice caught, unconvincing even to himself.

The hall was hushed again, almost deserted. Nan didn't know what do. He said to Pingping, "Let's wait a little more, all right?"

"There was only one flight from China today. Don't lie to me! Obviously he was not on it. Oh, if only we had let him wait until somebody could bring him over. We shouldn't have rushed."

"I know."

Then the gate opened again. Two stewardesses walked out, the tall one, a blonde, holding a young boy's hand while the other one, slight and with smiling eyes, was carrying a small red suitcase. "Taotao!" Pingping cried, and rushed over. She swooped him up into her arms and kissed him madly. "How worried we were! Are you all right?" she said.

The boy in a sailor suit smiled, whimpering "Mama, mama" while pressing his face against her chest as if shy of being seen by others. He then turned to Nan, but his face registered no recognition.

" This is your daddy, Taotao," his mother said.

The boy looked at Nan again and gave a hesitant smile, as if his father were a bigger friend being introduced to him. Meanwhile, Pingping went on kissing him and patting his back and stroking his head.

The two stewardesses asked for Nan 's ID, and he produced his driver's license. They compared his name with their paperwork, then congratulated him on the family's reunion.

"He was fine on the plane, very quiet, but a little scared," said the short woman, who looked Malaysian. She handed Nan the suitcase.

He held it with both hands. "Sank you for taking care of him on zer way."

"Our pleasure," said the blonde, who wore mascara and had permed hair, her face crinkling a little as she smiled. "It's wonderful to see a family reunited."

Before Pingping could say anything, the women left as if this were their routine work. "Thank you!" she cried at last. They turned their heads and waved at her, then disappeared past the gate.

₂

NAN had not seen his son for four years. Taotao seemed frailer than in the photos, though he was definitely more handsome, with a thin nose and dark brown eyes, like his mother's. Together the Wus headed for the bus stop, both parents holding the child's hands. Approaching an automatic door, the boy somehow stopped and wouldn't exit the building. He asked his mother, "When are we going back?" His Mandarin had a slight Shandong accent, since he had lived with Pingping's parents.

"What? What are you talking about?" said Pingping.

"Uncle and Aunt are waiting for us in Shanghai."

"Really?"

"Yes, they'll meet us there." "Who said that?"

"They told me to come and take both of you back. Let's go home now."

"Can't we stay just another day?" Nan stepped in, having realized that his in-laws must have tricked Taotao into traveling with the flight attendants.

"No, I want to go home."

Nan forced a smile and choked back a wave of misery. "Don't you want to see dolphins and whales?" he asked. " Real ones?" " Sure. "

" Where are they? Here?"

"No, we're going to make a stop in a city called Boston, where there're lots of whales and dolphins. Don't you want to see them?"

"Yes," Pingping chimed in. "We'll visit a few places before heading for home."

"All right?" Nan added.

The boy looked uncertain. "Then we'd better let Uncle and Aunt know our plan. They're still waiting for us at the Shanghai airport."

"I'll call them. Don't worry," said his father.

So Taotao agreed to return to the hotel with them. Nan was carrying him piggyback on the way to the bus stop while Pingping went on talking with him, asking what food he had eaten on the plane and whether he had been airsick. The din of the traffic muffled the voices of mother and son, and Nan couldn't hear all their conversation. His mind was full, in turmoil; but he was happy. His child had come. He was sure that, eventually, the boy would become an American.

But what about himself? He was uncertain of his future and what to do about his life, not to mention his marriage. The truth was that he just didn't love his wife that much, and she knew it. Pingping knew he was still enamored of his ex-girlfriend, Beina, though that woman was far away in China. It seemed very likely to Nan that Pingping might walk out on him one of these days. Yet now he was all the more convinced that they must live in this country to let their son grow into an American. He must make sure that Taotao would stay out of the cycle of violence that had beset their native land for centuries. The boy must be spared the endless, gratuitous suffering to which the Chinese were as accustomed as if their whole existence depended on it. By any means, the boy must live a life different from his parents' and take this land to be his country! Nan felt sad and glad at the same time, touched by the self-sacrifice he believed he would be making for his child.

On the bus Taotao was sitting on his mother's lap. A moment after they pulled out of the airport, to his parents' astonishment, the boy said, "Mama, there was a big fight in Beijing, do you know? Hundreds of uncles in the People's Liberation Army were killed."

" It was the soldiers who shot a great many civilians," his father corrected him.

"No, I saw on TV bad eggs attacking the army. They burned tanks and overturned trucks. Grandpa said those were thugs and must be suppressed."

"Taotao, Dad is right," his mother broke in. "The People's Army has changed and killed a lot of common people, people like us."

That silenced the boy, who looked cross, biting his lips, which puffed up a little. He stayed quiet the rest of the way.

It was two o'clock. They decided not to return to the hotel directly, and instead went to Chinatown for lunch. At a fruit stand Nan bought a pound of Rainier cherries for Taotao, who had never seen such yellow cherries, each as big as a pigeon's egg. Pingping rinsed a handful of them with the water from the bottle she carried. The boy ate a few and found them delicious; he saved the rest for his younger cousin Binbin, the daughter of Pingping's sister. He didn't want to throw away the stones and instead slotted them into the patch pocket on his jacket so that he could plant them in his grandparents' front yard, where there were already two apricot trees.

They didn't go deep into Chinatown but just entered a Cantonese restaurant close to the ceramic-tiled archway at the intersection of Bush and Grand. A stout middle-aged woman showed them to a table beside a window. As soon as they sat down, she returned with a pot of red tea and three cups and put everything before them. She glanced at them quizzically and seemed to be wondering why they were dining at such a place. She must have known they were FOJs- fresh off the jet-who would scrimp on food to save every penny.

After looking through the menu and consulting Pingping, Nan settled on two dishes and a soup and ordered all in the large size. He avoided the cheaper dishes on purpose, though he had no idea what "Moo Goo Gai Pan" and "Seafood and Tofu Casserole" tasted like. They sounded strange to him. The "Three Delicious Ingredient Soup" didn't make much sense either, but, unable to speak Cantonese and ashamed of asking what was in it, he just ordered it. He disliked these nebulous names. Why not call things what they were? The Chinese here just wanted everything to sound fancy and exotic.

The waitress smirked, collected the menus, and left.

"What's that?" Taotao asked his mother, pointing at half a side of roast pork hanging behind glass above a counter.

" Golden pig," she answered.

"And those?"

"Roast ducks? Want some?"

"Not now."

" It tastes no good, too fatty," Nan said. Then he chuckled as he remembered that when Taotao was a baby, barely able to use a spoon, the boy had liked meat and seafood so much that he'd hog them at a meal and even declare, "I want to eat it all. I don't leave any for others."

Nan looked around and saw a few people eating noodles and won-tons. The Cantonese ate lightly at lunch and wouldn't order so much food as he had. The air was rife with fried scallion and soy sauce. Nan usually liked those smells in a Chinese restaurant, but today the usual aromas somehow irritated his nose. Feeling that his hands were a little sticky, he got up and went to the restroom to wash them.

On his way back to the table, he caught sight of the community newspaper, Asian Voice, stacked on a steel rack near the restaurant's side entrance. He picked up a copy. Sitting down, he opened the paper and saw a full page of photographs of some recent scenes from Beijing. One of them showed a naked soldier hanging, by a piece of iron wire, on the window frame of a burned bus, his feet dangling and still in boots. Beside him stood a rectangle of cardboard bearing two vertical lines of words, which read: "He killed five civilians and was caught when he ran out of bullets. He got his comeuppance!"

The Wus' order came with plain rice. The steaming soup was made with slivers of chicken, shrimp, snow peas, and slices of bamboo shoot. Both dishes tasted good, though Taotao didn't like the squid in the casserole. He wanted more portabella mushroom, and his mother put several pieces on his plate. "Why don't we have big bowls?" he asked.

" Here people use only small bowls for soup in a restaurant," Ping-ping answered.

Gingerly he took a bite of a sliver of chicken as if afraid it was underdone. But soon he became more confident, chewing without hesitation.

Halfway through lunch, Nan said to Taotao, showing him the photos in the newspaper, "Look here, all these are civilians slaughtered by the People's Liberation Army."

"Put that away! He's eating," Pingping protested.

" I just want him to see the truth. Well, Taotao, see how many people they butchered? Here are some bodies and bikes crushed by a tank."

His wife begged, "Please let him finish lunch in peace." "Dad, isn't this an army uncle?" The boy pointed at the hanged soldier.

"Yes. But he killed some civilians and got his punishment. Don't you think he deserved it?"

Taotao was silent for a moment, staring at his plate, then mumbled, "No."

"Why not?" Nan felt frustrated and thought his son was stubborn and hopeless. His bushy mustache bristled.

"Even for that, people shouldn't kill each other," Taotao said in a small voice.

Stupefied, Nan didn't know how to respond for a good while. His wide-spaced eyes gazed at his son as something stirred in his chest, which was so full that he lost his appetite. He managed to finish the food on his plate, then refilled his teacup.

"Don't you want some more?" Pingping asked.

"I've had enough," he sighed. Then his voice turned husky. "This boy is too good-natured and must never go back. He can't survive there. I don't know where I'll end up, but he must become an American. "

"I'm glad you said that," she agreed.

"I don't want to be American, Mama!" Taotao wailed. "I want to go home."

"All right," she said. "Don't talk. Eat. You're a Chinese, of course."

Nan 's eyes glistened with tears, and his cheek twitched. He turned to look out the window. On the narrow street tourists were strolling in twos and threes, and a few Asian men wore cameras around their necks.

The waitress came again and placed in front of Nan a tiny tray that contained three fortune cookies, three toothpicks sheathed in cellophane, and a bill lying facedown. Although the lunch cost only twenty-six dollars, Nan left a five for tip. He meant to show the woman that some FOJs also had a fat wallet. Taotao had never seen a fortune cookie before; he pocketed them all.

In the hotel the TV was showing a Chaplin movie. Taotao was at once captivated by it, laughing so hard that he coughed and gasped continually. He kept brandishing his hands above his head and would jump on the bed whenever a funny scene came on. Pingping was worried and told him to sit down and not to laugh so loudly lest people in the adjacent rooms hear him. Yet when the starved shorty appeared on the screen, wearing a patch of mustache and walking with splayed feet and bowed legs, visualized his fellow worker as a plump chicken and set about chasing him with an ax, Taotao sprang to his feet again, skipping around and shrieking gleefully. Nan was amazed that, all at once, the boy had become so at home here. He couldn't help but grow thoughtful. Indeed, for a child, home is where his parents are and where he feels happy and safe. He doesn't need a country.

Nan was exhausted and soon fell fast asleep in spite of the racket Taotao was kicking up. After the silent film, the TV showed Tom and Jerry. Although Taotao didn't understand it all, the wild cartoon kept him rolling all the same. Pingping was afraid that he might get sick, he was so excited.

₃

HEIDI MASEFIELD'S house sat at the center of two and a half acres of prime land in Woodland, a suburban town twenty miles west of Boston. Near the southern side of this antique colonial stood an immense maple, whose shade fell on several windows in the summertime and kept the rooms cool. From one of its thick boughs hung a swing, two pieces of rope attached to a small legless chair. Except for the terrace at the back of the house and the driveway that led to a country road, the land was covered entirely by the manicured lawn. A line of lilac bushes encircled the property, replaced by low field-stone walls at the front entrance to the yard. During the summer the Masefields were staying on Cape Cod, in a beach bungalow near Fal-mouth, so the Wus could use the Woodland house for themselves. Heidi would be coming back every other week to pick up mail and pay bills. She and her two children wouldn't return until early September, when the elementary school started.

Two years ago Dr. Masefield, a plastic surgeon, had drowned in a sailing accident, so his wife had needed someone to help her with housework and to care for her son and daughter. Her sister-in-law, Jean, under whose supervision Nan had once worked as a custodian in a medical building, introduced the Wus to her. Heidi was so pleased when she saw the young couple, who looked steady and were so polite and cleanly dressed, that she hired them on the spot. She let the Wus use the two bedrooms in the attic in exchange for work- Pingping was to cook and do laundry while Nan would drive the children to school in the mornings, and, if their mother was too busy to fetch them, he'd pick them up in the afternoons as well. In addition to free lodging, Heidi paid Pingping two hundred dollars a week.

Although she was rich, Heidi was determined not to take her children to restaurants very often, to prevent them from falling into the habit of dining out. So Pingping cooked breakfast and dinner for them on weekdays. The housework wasn't heavy. Two black women, Pat and her daughter, Jessica, would come once a week to vacuum the floors and clean all the bathrooms except the one in the attic apartment-the mother did most of the work while the daughter, almost twenty, sat around reading. There was also Tom, a firefighter who worked the night shift at the Woodland Fire Station. He came regularly to mow the lawn and prune the flowers and bushes. He also plowed snow and sanded the driveway in the wintertime. Working for Heidi gave the Wus another great advantage they hadn't foreseen-their son now could go to the excellent public school here.

Amazingly, Taotao wasn't jet-lagged at all. For a whole day he skipped up or bounced down the stairs, his footsteps echoing in the house. But he didn't dare go out by himself yet. Now and then he looked out the windows of the kitchen and the study. He marveled at the detached garage that had recognized their car from a distance last night and opened automatically, as if welcoming them home. The lawn impressed him so much that he said, "Mama, I'm going to tell Grandpa there's green carpet everywhere outside our house."

"It's just grass." Pingping smiled. "Why don't you go out and see it?"

" Can you come with me?" " Are you still scared?" "Don't know."

Mother and son went out so he could touch the grass with his hands. She wore a lavender wraparound skirt, and Taotao had on white shorts and maroon leather sandals. The boy loved the feel of the grass under his feet and kept running about as if chasing a phantom ball. His legs were sturdy but slightly bandy, like his father's. After he had frolicked for a while, Pingping took him to the woods beyond the northern end of the Masefields' property to see if they could find a few mushrooms. Under her arm was a thick book; she had to depend on the pictures to tell the edible mushrooms from the poisonous ones here. Together mother and son left the yard, where parts of the grass were glimmering softly and the lawn was shaded in places by the long shadows of the house and the trees.

Nan saw his wife and son fade away into the woods. He was glad that for the rest of the summer they could use this house for themselves, but at the same time his mind was restless, teeming with worrisome thoughts. So many things had happened recently that he was still in a daze. Six weeks earlier, when the field armies were poised to attack the demonstrators in Beijing, some Chinese graduate students at Brandeis University, where Nan had been working toward a Ph.D. in political science, had discussed all the possible means of preventing the violence from being unleashed. They talked for hours on end, but were mainly blowing off steam. Then, without thinking twice, Nan tossed out the idea that they might seize some of the top officials' children studying in the Boston area, especially those at MIT, and demand that their fathers revoke martial law and withdraw the troops from the capital. He was prompted by anger, just having seen on TV soldiers beating civilians with belts, clubs, and steel helmets, many faces smashed, bathed in blood and tears. To his surprise, his fellow compatriots took his suggestion so seriously that they began planning a kidnap. But before they could seize any hostages, the massacre broke out in Beijing and it was too late to do anything. Instead they went to Washington to demonstrate in front of the Chinese embassy. Nan joined them and stood shouting slogans before that ugly brick building, in which the officials and staff hid themselves and wouldn't show their faces but would give the demonstrators either the finger or the victory sign through the window curtains.

Back from D.C., he was shocked by another incident. Hansong, a visiting scholar in East Asian Studies at Harvard, whom Nan had known quite well and who had been actively involved in the aborted kidnap plot, had kept a pistol that he was supposed to return to the gun dealer. Rumor had it that his girlfriend had disappeared in Tiananmen Square and that she must have been killed by the army and buried somewhere in a mass grave. Crazed, Hansong ran out one night and had a row with a homeless man in a park in Watertown. He pulled out his revolver and shot the old man in the head. Nan was so shaken by the killing and by his own involvement in the unexecuted kidnapping that he declared to Pingping that he would never participate in any political activities again. He also decided to give up his graduate work in political science, which he had never liked but which he had been assigned to study when he was admitted to college back in China. Later, he hadn't had any choice but to stay within the same field when he went on to earn a master's degree. Now he felt too sick of it to continue studying it.

He had decided to quit graduate school, but he had no idea what he was going to do. It was said that the U.S. government would take measures to protect the Chinese students and scholars who didn't return to their homeland, so he should be able to stay here legally, but what unnerved him was that from now on he couldn't rely on the university for financial aid anymore. Such an independent condition was new to him. Back in China he had always been a member of a work unit that provided a salary, shelter (usually a bed or at most a room), coupons for cloth and grain and cooking oil, medical care, and sometimes even free condoms. As long as he didn't cause trouble for the authorities, his livelihood was secure. Now he would have to earn a living by himself and also support his family. He was free, free to choose his own way and to make something of himself. But what were the choices available for him? Could he survive in this land? The feeling of uncertainty overwhelmed him.

A week ago, Hansong, the deranged man, had been committed to a mental hospital. Nan hadn't gone to see him, but his friend Dan-ning, who had opposed the kidnap idea from the very beginning, had visited Hansong at the asylum and left him with a tin of jasmine tea, which made Nan wonder if an inmate in there could have free access to hot water. Danning had told Nan that Hansong grinned at him without any trace of remorse. "He's a real psychopath now. His loony smile spooked me and made my scalp crawl," Danning said.

How fortunate it was that Hansong's mental state had prevented him from talking; otherwise he might have revealed their plan for the kidnap. Then every one of them would have been dragged to court.

Pingping and Taotao returned with just one fat yellow mushroom, the kind called Slippery Jack. There had been a drought, and most fungi in the woods had vanished. Nan noticed that since they'd flown back from San Francisco, his son hadn't even once mentioned returning to China. Taotao seemed to be adapting quickly. Although unable to read a word of English yet, the boy was fascinated by an old set of Britannica, which his parents had bought at a church bazaar. He looked at the pictures in some volumes and raised all kinds of questions. He was eager to test his father and even asked him which planet was bigger-Mercury or Saturn? Nan couldn't give a definite answer and just guessed, "Mercury."

"Wrong!" the boy announced, beaming. He seized every opportunity to make fun of his dad. One of his favorite tricks was to tie a long chain of rubber bands to Nan 's toe so that the whole thing would hit his sole when released from the other end. Nan was pleased by his son's little pranks, which he felt indicated that the child had accepted him as his dad.

Even though the Wus had the entire house to themselves, they confined themselves to the attic except when they had to use the kitchen downstairs. In their spacious room upstairs stood a large bed, Nan 's desk, a coffee table under the window facing the northern yard. Two of the walls were lined with books, most of which were the Masefields'. Nan had the habit of reading late at night, so he and his wife slept separately most of the time. Since their child shared the bed with Pingping now, Nan was left alone. He used the other room in the attic. It was smaller but fully furnished, with a pair of single beds and a redwood nightstand in between. This room had occasionally served as a guest room for the Masefields.

Before going to sleep, Nan opened a volume of Robert Frost's poems and began to read. He loved Frost, Auden, Whitman, Li Po, and Tu Fu, but sometimes he couldn't fully understand the poetry written in English. Tonight his eyes were heavy, and from time to time the words blurred into a solid block and then faded from the page. Before he could finish the long poem "The Death of the Hired Man," the book slid from his hand and plopped on the carpet. Without noticing it, he fell asleep, snoring lightly while the porcelain lamp still glowed on the nightstand.

The next day the Wus went to the mall in Watertown to buy toys for Taotao. The boy wasn't interested in cars, or guns, or bicycles, or stuffed animals. He wanted a large telescope so that he could watch the stars. His parents bought it for him for $105. The moment they came back, Taotao opened the long carton and began assembling the telescope. He couldn't read the instructions but wouldn't let his father help. Whenever Nan picked up a knob or screw, the boy would yell, "Put that down!" Somehow he managed to join the pieces together without a glitch, as if he had owned such a thing before. He wouldn't go down to eat dinner until he set the tube on the tripod.

Unfortunately it was an overcast night, so his parents wouldn't go out with him to stargaze. This upset him. After dinner, he was told to go upstairs and clear away the paper and the plastic bags, putting them in the trash can in the bathroom, and then come down again to look at a picture book together with his mother. Pingping had checked some childrens' books out of the town library to prepare herself for teaching him how to read English.

As she and Nan were talking about how to register him at the elementary school, suddenly something thudded on the stairs, followed by footsteps and a clack. "Taotao," Pingping called out, "are you all right?"

There was no response. Then, to their amazement, the boy scurried into the kitchen, dragging his red suitcase, which now had a squashed corner. "I'm packing, leaving for home," he announced, his face sullen.

" What did you say?" his mother asked.

"I'm going back to Grandpa and Grandma."

That astounded his parents. After a brief pause, they burst out laughing. "Well, you're welcome to leave," Nan told him with a straight face.

The boy was puzzled. "I'm packing."

"Sure. Do it, quickly," Pingping urged.

Taotao let go of the suitcase, dropped down onto the floor, and broke out crying. "I miss Grandma and Grandpa!"

That frightened his parents, who had thought he was merely bluffing because they wouldn't go out with him to stargaze. His mother picked him up, sat him on her lap, wiped away his tears with her fingers, and rocked him gently. Nan said, "Come on, we'll watch stars when there are no clouds, all right?"

"You're already a big boy," his mother added. "You should know we can't go back anymore. We'll have to live here. China won't let us live in peace if we return. You know, Dad and Mom are going to work very hard so that we can have our own home someday."

The boy blubbered some more, snuffling fitfully. He seemed to understand most of what she was saying, and kept nodding his head.

Somehow, after that, he didn't want to go out to gaze at stars anymore, and the telescope was just propped beside the window at the landing upstairs. Once in a while he'd observe the sky with it, but every time he watched for only a minute or two. Soon he stopped missing his grandparents as well. Whenever he was naughty or disobedient, his parents would say they were going to send him back to China by the express mail, but this threat scared him for only a few months.

₄

THESE DAYS Pingping was so happy that even her limbs felt lighter. An internal glow expanded in her, and a pinkish sheen frequently came over her face. She often hummed Chinese folk songs when she was cooking or sewing. Whenever she went shopping or to the post office, she'd take Taotao along as if the boy might disappear the moment she left him alone. Even when Taotao played within the yard, she'd accompany him. Behind Heidi's house, beyond the blueberry bushes, lay a tennis court, green and springy as if coated with rubber, surrounded by a tall steel fence. But the Wus didn't go there. Instead, they often kicked a volleyball under a basketball hoop in the front yard. Taotao played only soccer.

Pingping understood that the joyful days were temporary, because the summer would end soon-the Masefields would come back and she'd resume doing the housework. Furthermore, Taotao would begin school in early September, which might be hard for him. She had been reading children's books in English together with him for five or six hours a day. Since he watched a lot of TV, he had begun to pick up words, able to say "Uh-oh," "Okey-dokey," and even "Get lost." Having him with her, Pingping felt more certain how she would live. In the past years she had prepared herself mentally for returning to China, because Nan had planned to go back and teach at his alma mater, a small college in Harbin City. Yet whenever she dreamed of home, she'd have nightmares, in which she rushed around looking for a clean toilet but couldn't find one. Nan told her that modern restrooms had been put up in many Chinese cities lately; in fact, there had been a campaign to modernize the public facilities, and to use some of them you'd have to pay, like buying a cup of tea. Nan would joke, "Like no free lunch in America, there'll be no free bathrooms in China anymore. Too many people." Still, Pingping couldn't stop searching for a toilet in her dreams. But since Taotao came, her nightmares had mostly stopped and her head had grown clearer. Even if Nan changed his mind and returned to China someday, she'd live in America raising their child alone. She was sure of that.

Nan had come to the United States alone in the summer of 1985. A year and a half later Pingping had managed to leave China. But the officials wouldn't allow her to bring Taotao along for fear she might not return, so the boy stayed with her parents in Jinan City, a provincial capital more than two hundred miles south of Beijing. Soon after her arrival in Boston, Pingping told Nan that she wanted to save $20,000 before they went back home. That astonished Nan, to whom the figure was unreasonable, though he already had more than $3,600 in the bank. He had never cared about getting rich and would tease her, saying she was a born capitalist. Yet Pingping wanted financial independence, which meant a tidy sum in their bank account so that they wouldn't worry about getting a raise that had to be approved by officials at whose feet many people would grovel. So she resolved to make money and save as much as possible while they lived here. Among his compatriots at Brandeis, Nan was known as a rich man after his first year at the school, mainly because he had worked constantly to earn the money needed for his wife's visa-the U.S. embassy in Beijing required a bank statement that showed at least $3,000. Unlike the graduate students in the science departments, Nan didn't have a stipend and had to take care of his own living expenses. To save time for his study, he'd cook himself huge meals, each of which he'd eat for half a week. Sometimes he slept only three or four hours a day. He lived such an industrious life that he had lost more than twenty pounds by the time Pingping came to join him.

Two and a half years later, after Pingping had worked in a nursing home for a year and then for Heidi for a year and a half, and after Nan had done various odd jobs, the Wus had saved $30,000. Yet this sum didn't give them any sense of security, because now they were planning to live here permanently. If Nan quit his Ph.D. candidacy,

Pingping wasn't sure what he was going to do. Though she knew he didn't love her, she loved him deeply. Before she'd married him, her father had warned her that she might not live a secure life with Nan, who, though a decent young man, was by nature impractical, an incorrigible dreamer. Yet she had never regretted being his wife, though she did feel hurt from time to time and was even tempted to drink (though she disliked American wines and there was no way to find the kind of fragrant Luzhou liquor here, of which she had used to pilfer mouthfuls from her father's bottles when she was a child). She was certain Nan wouldn't just walk out on her. For better or worse, he was trustworthy and dependable. Now that Taotao was here, Nan was all the more willing to be the head of the household. In his own words, "To be the draft horse pulling the cart of this family."

"I'll look for a full-time job soon," he told Pingping one afternoon. Their son was napping in the other room.

"What kind of jobs do you have in mind?"

" Do I have a choice? " Again a caustic edge sharpened his voice.

"Don't be nasty. I always can work too."

That mollified him some. He sighed, "I'll keep my eyes open for jobs."

Pingping remained silent, feeling guilty because Heidi didn't pay her during the summer. They had spent thousands of dollars recently and couldn't afford to stay home eating away their savings. Yet she wanted to teach Taotao some basics before his school started, so it was Nan who needed to look for a job.

It was reported that the U.S. government was going to issue green cards to the Chinese students who did not intend to return to China. Professor Nicholson in Nan's department, a specialist in American domestic policy, had assured him that the United States would definitely keep the Chinese students here. This baggy-eyed scholar said to Nan, "Believe me, any country will be willing to have the cream of China 's young generation." That was probably true. Indeed, both Canada and Australia had just granted permanent residency to all the Chinese students and scholars living there. Pingping and Nan felt relieved to know they wouldn't have to spend thousands of dollars and wait years for green cards like most immigrants. Still, they were unsettled. Mentally they were not prepared for such a new life.

₅

THE FALL SEMESTER would be starting in two weeks, and if he didn't register as a student Nan wouldn't be able to work in the university library anymore. For days he had been looking for a job but couldn't find one. He had liked his job as a custodian in the medical building very much; it was not demanding and gave him some time to read, though he was paid only $4.65 an hour, and though his fellow worker Nick, the maintenance man, often carried a dime bag on him and smoked a joint in their windowless office, mixed with tobacco to hide the scent. For years Nan had adhered to the principle that he would sell his brawn but not his brain. He wanted to save his mind for his study. Now graduate work was no longer his concern, so he wouldn't be too picky about jobs.

He responded to numerous ads, but no one was interested in a man without any employable skill. He went to several Chinese restaurants and they wouldn't use him either, because his accent betrayed that he was from northern China and because he couldn't speak any southern dialect. They didn't explain why, but he guessed the reason. At Nanking Village in Watertown, the owner of the place, an old woman with high cheekbones, told him, "If only you had come last week. I just hired a waitress, that fat girl." Apparently she liked Nan and showed him some respect, as if he were a poor scholar in dire straits but might ascend to a consequential post someday. Nan even wrote to several Chinese-language programs in local colleges, one of which did respond, but in a form letter, saying they couldn't hire him although they might rue that they had let "a pearl" slip through their fingers.

A pearl only your mother can appreciate! Nan sneered to himself.

Without any hope he phoned a factory in Watertown that had advertised for a night watchman. A man named Don told him to come in and fill out a form. Nan was not enthusiastic about the job but went anyway.

Don was a middle-aged supervisor with a bald crown who spoke English with an Italian accent. Seeing that Nan was a foreign student and over thirty, he seemed more interested. They sat in the factory's office, which stank of tobacco and plastic. The room, with its grimy windows facing west, was dim despite several fluorescent tubes shining. "Have you done this kind of work before?" Don asked Nan.

"Yes. I worked for one and a half years at zer Waltham Medical Center, as a cahstodian. Here's recommendation by my former bawss."

Don looked through the letter, which Heidi's sister-in-law Jean had written for Nan when she got fired and had to let her staff of three go. Don tilted his beetle eyebrows and asked, "Tell me, why did you leave that place?"

"My bawss was sacked, so we got laid all together."

"You got what?" Don asked with a start. A young secretary at another desk tittered and turned her pallid face toward the two men.

Realizing he'd left out the adverb "off," Nan amended, "Sorry, sorry, they used anozzer company, so we all got laid off."

"I see." Don smiled. "We need you to take a physical before we can hire you."

"What's zat? Body examination?"

"Correct. Here's the clinic you should go to." Don penciled the address at the top of a form and pushed it to Nan. "After the doc fills this out, you bring it back to me."

"Okay. Do you awffer medical care?"

"You mean health insurance?"

"Yes."

"We do provide benefits." "Cahver a whole family?" "Yes, if you choose to buy it."

Nan was pleased to hear that. Having left school, he was no longer qualified for the student health insurance and would have to find a new one for his family. But the idea of taking a physical bothered him. He was healthy and sturdy, and the job paid only $4.50 an hour; there should be no need for them to be so meticulous. On second thought, he realized that the factory, which manufactured plastic products, would be liable to lawsuits filed by its employees.

Nan went to the clinic on Prospect Street in Waltham. It was a small office that had opened recently and had only one physician; there wasn't even a secretary around, probably because it was lunch hour. Nan handed the form to the bulky doctor, who showed him into a room that wasn't fully furnished yet. The dark leather couch was brand-new; so were the floor lamps. In spite of his pale face and brown stubble, the doctor reminded Nan of a Japanese chef he had once seen at a restaurant in Cambridge. The man had a pair of glasses hanging around his neck and against his chest. As he was checking Nan's hearing, Nan wondered whether the doctor was far-sighted or nearsighted.

After listening to his breathing, tapping his chest, and palpating his stomach, the doctor said, "All right, open your pants."

Nan started. "You need to check everysing?"

"Yep." The man grinned, putting on a pair of latex gloves.

Nan unfastened his belt and moved down his pants and briefs. On the right side of his belly stretched a scar like a short engorged leech. The doctor pressed it with his index and middle fingers, saying, "How did you get this?"

"Appendix."

"Appendicitis?"

"Yes."

"That shouldn't have left such a big scar. Does it still hurt?" He pressed harder.

"No."

"Fascinating. It's healed okay, I guess." He spoke as if to himself. Next, to Nan 's astonishment, the doctor grabbed his testicles, rubbed them in his palm for three or four seconds, then squeezed them hard and yanked them twice. A numbing pain radiated through Nan 's abdomen and made him almost cry out.

"Any prawblem?" he managed to ask, and noticed the man observing his member intently.

"No. Genitalia are normal," the doctor grunted, scribbling on the form without raising his puffy eyes.

Nan was too shocked to say another word. Having buckled up his pants, he was led into the outer room. Rapidly the doctor filled out the form and shoved it back to him. "You're all set," he said with a smirk.

Stepping out of the clinic, Nan wondered if the doctor was allowed to touch his genitals. He felt insulted but didn't know what to do. Should he go back and ask him to explain what the physical was supposed to include? That wouldn't do. "Never argue with a doctor"-that was a dictum followed by people back home. Even now, Nan couldn't understand some of the terms on the form. If only he had brought along his pocket dictionary. Perhaps the doctor had just meant to find out whether he had a normal penis. Still, the man shouldn't have pulled his testicles that hard. The more Nan thought about this, the more outraged he was. Yet he forced himself to let it go. What was important was the job. He'd better not make a fuss.

A boy on a skateboard rushed by on the sidewalk and almost ran into Nan. "Watch out, dork!" shouted the teenager with an orange mohawk. That stopped Nan from brooding, and he hurried to his car, parked behind the clinic.

₆

NAN liked the job at the factory. He worked at night and on weekends when all the machines stopped and the workshops were closed. There was another watchman, Larry, a spindly student majoring in thanatology at Mount Ida College. He and Nan rotated. On Nan 's first day Larry told him, "I can't hack it anymore, have to quit one of these days." Indeed the fellow looked sickly and shaggy, his face always covered in sweat, but he never missed his shift.

Once an hour, the watchman had to walk through the three workshops and the warehouse to make sure everything was all right. There were sixteen keys affixed to the walls and the wooden pillars inside the factory, and he had to carry a clock to those spots, insert the keys into it, and turn them, so that the next morning Don could read the record. As long as the clock showed enough of the hourly marks, Don would be satisfied.

Usually a round took Nan about fifteen minutes; after that he could stay in the lab upstairs, doing whatever he liked. A black-and-white TV sat on a long worktable strewn with pinking shears, large scissors, rulers, red and blue markers, and bolts of waterproof cloth of various colors. If he got tired of reading, he'd watch television. On weekends he could go up to the rooftop and stay in the open air. Behind the factory, close to the base of the two-story building, flowed a branch of the Charles. The green water looked stagnant; it was quite narrow, no more than a hundred feet wide, but it was deep. Sometimes one or two anglers would come fishing on the bank, and Nan, not allowed to leave the building, would sit on the rooftop and watch them. Most of the time they caught bass, bluegill, perch, pumpkinseed, and smelts, but the water was so polluted that they always threw their catches back, even a thirty-pound carp Nan once saw a man drag ashore, its rotund body motionless while its slimy tail kept slapping the grass.

Between his rounds, Nan read a good deal, mainly poetry and novels, and if he didn't read or watch TV, he let his thoughts roam. Recently many Chinese students in the humanities and social sciences, having realized they might have to live in the United States for good, had changed their fields in order to make themselves more marketable. Nan knew that some people who had been writing dissertations on Shakespeare or Dewey or Tocqueville had decided to go to business or law school. More amazing, in some cases their advisors encouraged them to switch fields and even wrote recommendations for them. Nan's professor, Mr. Peterson, was different and said it was unfortunate that Nan would be leaving the Ph.D. program, because he believed Nan could have become an excellent political scientist if he had studied the subject devotedly. Professor Peterson even tried to dissuade him, but Nan wouldn't change his mind.

Nan was determined to quit political science, but deep down he was disappointed about leaving academia. He had written to Professor Clifford Stevens at the University of Chicago to inquire about the possibility of doing graduate work in Chinese poetry or comparative poetics under his guidance, but he never heard a word from that distinguished scholar. Nowadays most American graduate schools were inundated with applications from China. Worse yet, after the Tiananmen massacre, the student enrollments in the Chinese language and studies had dropped so drastically that many American colleges had begun to scale down their Chinese programs. So, for the time being, there was no way Nan could study Chinese poetry.

Four years ago, a former professor of his in China had visited the United States as part of a Chinese delegation of American Studies, as an expert in U.S. political history because he had translated some essays by Thomas Jefferson. When his former teacher came to visit Harvard, Nan went to the Holiday Inn in Somerville to see him. The old man, beardless and browless like an albino, told Nan about his meeting with Professor Carolyn Barrow at Harvard. He said, "The old lady was very nice and gave me six of her books. Do you know her writings?"

"I read some of her papers. She's well revered for her work in political theories."

"I guessed that," the teacher went on. "I gave her a stack of plates."

"What do you mean?"

"I brought with me some fine porcelain, and I gave her eight pieces." He smiled, his lips puckered.

That account had scandalized Nan. His old teacher hadn't shown any trace of discomfort, as if the fact that his porcelain and Professor Barrow's books were at least equal in monetary value had canceled all the difference in the nature of the two sets of presents. Nan was sure that some other Chinese scholars had done similar things. Without telling anybody, he had made up his mind that he'd write many books after he finished his Ph.D. and returned to his homeland to teach. Someday when he came to revisit the United States, he'd bring only his own works as gifts for American scholars. Yes, he'd write a whole shelf of books and would never subject himself to his teacher's kind of disgrace.

Now that ambition, inflated with a sense of national pride, was gone. He might never go back to his native land, and it would be unimaginable for him to write scholarly books in English if he was no longer in academia. Worse, he had little passion left for any field of study except for poetry. But that was impossible for now.

₇

AT WORK the night watchmen were not supposed to leave the factory. Nan noticed, however, that Larry often went out to buy things. Larry said that as long as you made your hourly rounds on the dot, Don wouldn't care. Sometimes Nan didn't bring food with him and would steal out to get a hamburger or fried rice.

One night, the moment he finished the ten o'clock round, he drove to Riche Brothers, a nearby supermarket open around the clock. He picked up a can of luncheon meat, a jar of gherkins, and a French bread. Hurriedly he checked out of the express lane and then headed for the front entrance. As he was striding out the automatic door, he almost bumped into a couple, both thirtyish, who had just come out of the adjacent liquor store. The man, his chestnut mane reaching his shoulders, was tall, with an athletic build, and carried three video tapes in one hand, while the woman, wearing a baseball cap, had a bony face and a slim body and held a half-filled paper bag in her arms. They were both in black leather jackets and jeans with frayed cuffs, but she wore blue high-tops whereas he had on heavy-duty boots. Nan stepped aside as she did the same to avoid a collision. "Sorry," he said with a smile. She rolled her large watery eyes, then peered at him.

Nan walked away toward his car. Strangely enough, the couple turned back and came toward him. The woman whispered to the man, who was nodding. When they caught up with Nan, the man said in a raspy voice, "Hey, buddy, wanna come with us?"

"For what?" Nan was startled. A gust of wind swept up a few scraps of paper tumbling past a corral holding two rows of shopping carts.

"For fun." The man blinked his eyes, the left of which was black as if bruised, and he opened his mouth to laugh, but only a dry cough came out. There was enough alcohol on his breath to cover a few yards around him.

The woman smiled suggestively, showing the gaps between her teeth. Nan shook his head and said, "I have work to do."

"Wanna have a drink?" the man asked.

The woman took out a can of Coors, snapped it open, and took a swig. "Mmm… it's nice and cold. Have this." She handed the beer to Nan.

"No, sanks. I reelly cannot."

"C'mon, don't you want some fun?" The man grinned, the corners of his mouth going up.

"What fun?"

"With purty girls."

Nan was too shocked to answer, while the woman crooked her forefinger, wiggling it at him. He hated that gesture, which to him suggested he was an obedient dog.

She coaxed, "Please come with us. We've never had an Oriental man there."

"No, I mahst go!"

"Whoa!" the man shouted after him. "Don't run, you gook. Don't you want some young pussies?"

They both laughed. Nan started his car and pulled out of the parking lot. To his horror, the couple hopped into their pickup, backed it out, and followed him. Nan 's heart was throbbing, but he drove unhurriedly as if he hadn't noticed them. "Calm down, calm down," he repeated to himself while observing them in the rearview mirror. Their truck didn't accelerate and just followed behind at a distance of about two hundred feet. A white moth was trapped in Nan 's car, fluttering at the windshield. He brushed it away with one swipe.

After four turns Nan swerved into the factory's front yard. He sprang out of his car while the pickup was rolling into the parking lot too. He dashed away to the side entrance of the building. His flashlight fell on the ground with a clash, but he didn't stop to retrieve it and kept running. He thrust the key into the lock and opened the door. Rushing in, he snagged his windbreaker's pocket on the handle with a rasp. Without looking at the rip, he locked the door, switched off the lights, and turned left into the dark storage room with windows facing the yard. He saw the couple out there. They seemed puzzled. Their truck was idling, but its front lights were off. They each carried a baseball bat under an arm and eyed the side entrance as if on the defensive. They whispered to each other for a while; then the man crushed his beer can on the side window of Nan 's car. He picked up Nan 's long flashlight and waved it at the building.

The woman cupped her mouth with both hands and shouted at the entrance, "Come out, you dumb prick!"

"We're gonna come in and bust ya!" the man cried, and he kicked the side door of Nan 's car. He spat and blew his nose on the windshield.

Blood thudded in Nan 's ears as he kept his eyes glued to the couple. He withdrew his face from the dusty windowpanes so that they couldn't see him. His mind was in a tumult of anger and fear, which made him queasy and out of breath. Stop kicking my car, you idiot! he shouted mentally. Heavens, what do they want of me? I'm not a sex maniac like they think. Go away! Go fuck yourselves!

But they wouldn't leave. They whispered to each other again and were evidently planning their next move. What should he do if they broke into the building? He wouldn't let them. He'd do anything to stop them. He'd hide in the darkness and knock them down with a steel bar. Yes, he'd lick them if they came in. Go, go, go! But they wouldn't move. Why were they so determined to hurt him? Just because they could? Just because his face was yellow, not as white as theirs? How come they thought he'd like to take part in their monkey business? Crazy! Stupid! They were barking up the wrong tree. Even if they paid him a thousand dollars, he wouldn't join them. Neither would he let them set foot in here. They'd better not mess with him.

They looked quite patient over there, waiting and gazing at the factory. How could he get rid of them? Were they planning to break in?

Finally, Nan pushed open the one-paned transom and cried, "Eef you don't leave, I shall call zer police."

"Oh yeah?" the man barked. "Bring all the cops over and line them up to suck my cock." They both guffawed.

Nan shouted again, "I have a gahn here. I'm shooting if you don't leave right away." With a steel bar he knocked a metal bench, which sent out a dull clang.

That transfixed the couple for a few seconds. Then they scrambled back into the pickup and thunked the doors shut. The front lights came on; the man revved the engine, and after a long honk, the truck swerved onto the road and sped away. Its broad wheels squealed and crushed through dark puddles of rainwater.

Nan heaved a sigh of relief, wondering if they were high on drugs besides alcohol. How frightened he was! Had they grabbed hold of him, they might have dragged him to a secret place and hurt him. He suspected they must have intended to take him either to an orgy or a studio to make a pornographic film. He regretted having gone out at night and having smiled at that crazy woman.

The watchman's clock was still in his car, but for a long while he dared not go fetch it. Not until almost eleven p.m. did he retrieve it. Luckily, the side door of his car wasn't damaged much-just a few dings-but his flashlight was gone.

His fellow worker, Larry, had a pistol like a toy derringer, and now Nan couldn't help wondering if he should get a handgun or a knife. But he remembered his vow to Pingping that, besides shunning politics, he'd never resort to any kind of violence in his life, so he decided not to carry any weapon.

When he told his wife about the incident the next day, she was terrified, though she tried to loosen him up a little, teasing him, "It serves you right. Don't ever eye up a woman again."

"I didn't flirt with her, I just smiled. They must have been stoned."

"They must have smelled something on you."

"What?"

"You're a born lech." "That's not true."

"Of course you are." She giggled and went on sewing up the tear in his windbreaker.

From that day on Nan wouldn't go out on the night shift anymore. He'd bring along an electric pot so that he could cook instant noodles or soup in the lab, but most times Pingping prepared food for him. She'd pack a banana or apple or orange. She made him promise he'd never sneak out of the factory again.

₈

THE MASEFIELDS had been back from Cape Cod for three weeks. Heidi's children, Nathan and Livia, ages eleven and eight, had been pleased to see Taotao, especially Livia, who adopted a protective attitude toward the younger boy. The girl, who had a wide forehead and large deep-set eyes, was short and scrawny for her age. She had many friends in the neighborhood and often invited them over, but Taotao wouldn't join them. Neither would he play with Nathan. Most of the time he stayed upstairs in the attic. Whenever Livia found him in the kitchen with his mother, she'd teach him a few English words. "Say 'Thank you, please' when you want something," she told him; or "Say 'Can I have this, please?' " And Taotao would repeat after her. Sometimes she'd hold out her hands with the short fingers raised and ask him, "How many is this?" The boy always answered correctly in English. In every way she treated him like a friend. She seemed eager to please Taotao, who was still timid and quiet. She often said to Pingping and Heidi, "He's really smart. Why's he so shy?"

The Wus ate their own meals separately. They'd enter the large kitchen only after the Masefields were finished with dinner. This meant Pingping had to cook two meals in the afternoons. Unlike his parents, Taotao was fond of American food, which made his mother's cooking easier. Following him, his parents had begun to eat what they wouldn't touch before-pizza, cheese, spaghetti, macaroni, hot dogs. Cheese tasted like soap to Nan at first, but now he chewed it with relish and could tell if the flavor was sharp. Still, he found that milk would upset his stomach, so his wife gave him ice cream instead.

In the evenings Pingping spent most of the time reading aloud to

Taotao. She also taught him arithmetic, which was easier for him since she explained everything in Chinese. She had been a math teacher at a vocational school back in China, but she had hated teaching, a profession assigned to her by the state. Now she was happy to teach her son with the thick textbooks Nan had bought at a secondhand bookstore in Sudbury, a nearby town. She found that American math books were much better written than the Chinese textbooks, more detailed, more comprehensive, and more suitable for students to teach themselves math. Each book was chock-full of information, at least ten times more than a Chinese schoolbook contained.

With his mother's help at home, Taotao did decently at school, though he was still in the lowest reading group. Nan had gone to see his son at school a few times and noticed that a freckle-faced girl named Loreen often read to Taotao. He was moved by the sight in which the girl put her finger on a drawing, saying, "This is a jumbo jet heading for Miami," while his son listened attentively. Nan knew that the girl's father played basketball for the Celtics, and he had once seen him with Loreen sitting on his knee at a PTA meeting. The man was a giant, but somehow his daughter was weedy and frail. Taotao told his parents that Loreen was good to him and even gave him her milk at lunch. Yet not all the students were kind to him, and a few called him Conehead.

One afternoon in mid-October, Nan and Pingping went to have a conference with Mrs. Gardener, Taotao's homeroom teacher. The classroom was already empty of students, and the little chairs had all been pushed under the child-size tables. "Take a seat," the teacher said in a tired voice to Nan and Pingping, smiling kindly. She was in her early forties and had round eyes and a pudgy face.

They sat down in front of Mrs. Gardener, who began talking about Taotao's progress. Meanwhile, the boy was sitting on his heels in the corridor, waiting for his parents.

"I have just put him into another reading group, one level up," the teacher said about Taotao.

"Sank you for promoting him." Nan 's eyes brightened.

"We are very happy about that," Pingping added.

"Mrs. Wu, does Taotao have a bladder problem?"

"Not really. He pee in bed a few times when he's baby, but that's okay."

"In class he goes to the bathroom every ten minutes. The other students are amused. He must feel embarrassed, I gather. I'm worried about that."

"He may be nervous," Nan put in.

"He could be. I've noticed that in the math class he doesn't go to the bathroom as often."

"I work hard with his reading at home," Pingping said.

"I can tell. He has made a lot of progress. Still, it's not easy for him to keep up with the rest of the class. That's why I want to ask you this-would you like to have him placed in a bilingual class? The school is going to start one soon."

"No!" Nan objected. "We don't want him to be in a class jahst for foreigners."

"Yes, he doesn't need that," Pingping chimed in. Mrs. Gardener looked perplexed. "Why? That'll make him more comfortable."

"He comes here to stahdy, not to be comfortable," replied Nan.

"I don't understand, Mr. Wu, although I appreciate your taking his education so seriously."

"He can catch up wiz zer class, believe me. Please give him a chance," Nan said.

"Please don't get rid of him!" Pingping begged. "Taotao said a lotta good thing about you, Mrs. Gardener. He's unhappy if you take him out."

The teacher looked at her in astonishment, then was all smiles. "I don't mean to send him away. Don't get me wrong. If you insist, we won't put him in the bilingual class."

After that meeting, Pingping worked harder to help Taotao with his reading. Every week she borrowed a dozen or so children's books from the town library and read them together with him. Even when the boy was too tired to continue, she'd go on reading aloud so he could listen while working a jigsaw puzzle or playing with Legos or the toy robots Nathan had lent him. She didn't always understand what she read. Once, as mother and son were reading a story about

King William and his knights who conquered a fortress, the boy asked, "Mama, what does 'laid waste' mean?"

"Poop and pee everywhere." She then continued loudly, "The king was pleased with the raid and awarded his men…"

Another time they were reading an abridged biography of Queen Elizabeth. When they came to a scene in which Her Majesty was so furious with a courtier that she laid her hands on him, Taotao asked his mother, "What is 'boxed his ears'?"

"To cover up his earholes so he couldn't hear anything."

"It doesn't sound like that."

"All right, let's mark this and ask Daddy when he's back."

Among the titles Pingping had checked out of the library, she liked the simplified Black Beauty best. She'd sigh, saying, "I'm like that horse, always moving from place to place and serving others. As long as the harness is on me, I can't take a run for joy or lie down for weariness. I have to work, work, work, until I die." Her eyes would fill.

Taotao didn't fully understand what she meant, but her words upset Nan when he overheard her. He knew her life had been misspent. When Pingping was a child, her mother had prophesied her hard future, saying she had a princess's body but a maid's fate. Pingping resented that but never dared to talk back. She always dreamed of becoming a doctor like her parents and often went to her father's clinic to do voluntary work, giving injections, decocting medicinal herbs, performing acupuncture and cupping, boiling syringes and needles. Everybody praised her, many patients wanted her to treat them, and people believed she had life-nurturing hands and would make an excellent doctor someday. But when she had grown up, she couldn't even attend nursing school and was assigned to study applied mathematics in a technical school. How she envied those youths in her neighborhood who had gone to college or the army through their parents' clout. In her mind she had blamed her father for not pulling strings for her, even though she knew that the old man, born into a rich peasant's family and classified as a reactionary element, dared not, and could not, assert himself. Now she made Taotao study hard, hoping he could go to medical school someday. If that happened, she would spend her last penny helping him.

₉

IN EARLY NOVEMBER, the Masefields left for Italy to visit Heidi's sister, Rosalind, who lived in Rome most of the time. Seizing the opportunity, Nan invited Danning and three other friends over for dinner. But except for Danning they all declined, saying they were too busy. True enough, two of them had to work the graveyard shift at the Chinese Information Center in Newton that had been established recently by a group of dissidents to help the underground democracy movement in China. But it was also true that since Nan had quit graduate school, most of his friends had distanced themselves from him. They probably viewed him as a loser. Pingping urged him to break with them completely. "They're just a bunch of fair-weather snobs, not your friends," she told Nan. "Who needs them?"

Danning, however, was always eager to visit the Wus. He was almost thirty-five and had a seven-year-old daughter back in China. His wife had joined him in the United States two years before but had left him last winter. They had often quarreled, and she'd yell at him, calling him names and saying that one of these days she would quit being his "pretty slave." She liked bragging about her looks, which were by no means extraordinary; she merely sported a pair of sparkling eyes shaded by long lashes. Her nose was flat, her mouth wide, and one side of her face larger than the other. She told people that she had grown up always with a nanny for herself and had never cooked a single meal back home when she lived with her parents, but now she did all kinds of housework that made her feel humiliated. One night as she and Danning fought again, she grabbed a kitchen knife and swiped at him. "Ow!" he cried, feeling the pain in his back. At the sight of blood she dropped the knife and ran away. Their roommate, who shared the three-bedroom apartment with them, drove him to the hospital, where Danning received twelve stitches. His wife didn't come back after a few days, so he reported it to the police-not his wound, but her disappearance. She was nowhere to be found, though some people said they had seen her shopping at Ming's Supermarket in Chinatown. It was whispered that she was living with a wealthy businessman from Canton now. Although Pingping didn't like Danning's wife that much, she never blamed her. She'd say to Nan, "Why couldn't Danning see that Anni meant to leave him? He always bragged about this and that but never saw the fire in his backyard."

"Come on, have some sympathy," Nan would object. "He's a smart man. How can we tell he wasn't aware of his marital trouble?"

"I hope he can find her."

The truth was that Danning still didn't know her whereabouts. She hadn't written him a word and had never called. Oddly enough, he seemed to enjoy living as a bachelor, in no hurry to look for her. Their daughter was cared for by his parents back in Beijing.

Before dinner, Nan gave his guest a tour of the Masefields' place. He took Danning to the tennis court, its green surface studded with yellow balls; the frayed net was slack, betraying that nobody had played here recently. Next they went to the swimming pool beyond the tennis fence, the water wrinkling in the breeze and a pair of white plastic geese bobbing in a corner, their necks tethered to a steel pipe by ropes. Then Nan and Danning entered the workshop next to the garage, in which Heidi made pottery. The room had in it a hardwood floor, a ceiling fan, a tall electric heater, and a long workbench on which were stacked some terra-cotta pots. Near the window stood a potter's wheel and a side chair. A column of sunlight slanted in, specks of dust billowing in it. Danning was so impressed that he said, "This makes me sad, very sad."

"Why?" Nan was surprised.

" We all work so hard, but how could we ever get as rich as this family?"

"Heidi owns half a bank and an insurance company. Old New England money. We shouldn't measure ourselves against her."

Danning sighed. "We'll never live like this. What's the good of working myself to a skeleton here?"

"It took several generations for her family to build the wealth. She also inherited lots of money from her husband."

"I should give up. The American dream is not for me." Danning's nostrils flared as his face scrunched.

"I thought I was the only pessimist." Nan chuckled. He realized that for a long time he hadn't been interested in making money, perhaps because he had seen so much wealth at this place that he had gradually lost heart, no longer possessed by the hunger that drives new immigrants to wrestle with fortune.

Dinner was simple: eggplant stuffed with minced pork, a salad of assorted vegetables, preserved eggs, braised shrimp, and dumplings filled with beef and napa cabbage. Danning wanted beer despite Nan's warning that he'd have a long drive back to Belmont. Nan took a six-pack of Budweiser out of the refrigerator and opened a bottle for his friend. They were seated at the dining table in the kitchen, which had a bay window that looked onto the front yard. In the flower bed the yellow mums and marigolds had all withered, and some tattered blossoms drooped, touching the ground. The trees dropped leaves now and again, white pine seeds helicoptering listlessly and husks of oak leaves zigzagging down, sinking through the opalescent light. A couple of tufted titmice were busy pecking at the sunflower seeds contained in a glass feeder hanging from a bough of the bulky linden at the center of the yard. Danning ate with a good appetite and kept saying to Nan that it was great to have one's family together. He seemed to respect Pingping a lot and frequently patted Taotao on the head. He spooned some mashed garlic onto his plate and asked Nan, "Have you decided what to do yet?"

"No, but I've been thinking of doing something that moneyed people can't do. You see how rich the Masefields are. It doesn't make sense for me to dream of getting rich." Nan turned to Pingping, who looked alarmed, a shadow dimming her face.

"What do you plan to do?" Danning put half a dumpling into his mouth, chewing with his lips closed.

"Probably I'll write. I want to be a writer."

"Writing articles for newspapers?"

"No, poetry."

"Wow, you're such an idealist, a dreamer! I take off my cap." "Don't be sarcastic. I'm just saying I might try to write some poems. "

" Still, I admire you for that, for being faithful to your own heart and following your own passion. To be honest, I don't like physics, but I have to finish the dissertation to get the damn degree."

"What would you do if you were free to choose?"

" Well, I would write novels, one after another. I know I could be a prolific writer, telling stories about our experiences in America."

" You would publish them in China?"

" Of course, where else can you have your readers if you write in Chinese?"

"I can't think about writing novels. I don't have that kind of long wind."

"What will you do for money? Poetry won't fetch a salary." " I always can work. "

Nan was reluctant to talk more about his plan since he hadn't made up his mind yet. His wife put in about him, "He's always rich in the heart."

"That makes him remarkable, doesn't it?" said Danning.

"I hope we just live a life similar to others' here, making some money and having our own home, so that every day will be the same as the previous one," she replied thoughtfully.

"Come now," Nan said to her. "I'll work hard to bring in money, you know that."

That quieted her. She got up to take a bowl of fruit out of the refrigerator. As they started to eat the dessert, Danning said, " Nan, have you heard anything from the Chinese consulate yet?"

" No, about what?"

"They've been investigating your involvement in the planned kidnap."

"Really? How do you know?" Pingping broke in.

"Vice Consul Hu asked me last week about Nan 's role in the case. I said I had no idea. It seemed they knew Nan had brought up the suggestion of seizing hostages, and he must be a target of their investigation."

Nan was so flabbergasted that he couldn't respond for a moment. Then he asked, "What are they going to do to me, do you know?"

"Don't be scared. They can't do anything to you here. But once you're back in China, that'll be different. So don't fall into their hands."

"How did they come to know about the plan?" "I don't have the foggiest idea. Somebody must have given you away."

"Yuming Wang or Manyou Zhou?"

"It can be any one of those involved, but there's no way to identify the informer. Anybody could turn you in to save his own ass." "You mean I've been singled out as a scapegoat?" "Right."

Nan turned to Pingping, who looked panic-stricken, her eyes flickering. She placed her hand on Taotao's head, stroking his hair unconsciously.

" What should I do?" Nan asked his friend.

"Relax. Don't say anything against the government in front of others, not even in your letters or on the phone when you call home. If those top leaders' children confront you, just say you made a rash remark and never thought others would take it seriously. It won't hurt if you apologize to them."

" No, never. "

"I know you won't."

When Danning was about to leave, Pingping thanked him for letting them know of the official investigation. Danning said, "I planned to call and tell you about it even if I couldn't come today." He grinned, his face a little lopsided. He had drunk three bottles of beer but wouldn't stay longer to let the alcohol dissolve some. He told Pingping he hadn't had a homemade dinner for two months. He was sorry about the troublesome information, but they shouldn't be scared. Nan should just be careful and avoid getting hotheaded again. Danning stepped into his rusty hatchback and drove away.

That night Pingping didn't go to bed until eleven-thirty, when Nan had to set off for the factory. They talked about their situation. Now it looked like Nan definitely couldn't return to China, and even in this country he'd have to keep a low profile. They'd be lucky if both of their families, especially their siblings, didn't suffer on Nan 's account.

Recently Nan had mailed his passport to the Chinese consulate in New York for renewal, so he was now afraid that the officials might create difficulties for him and put his papers on hold. He felt powerless whenever dealing with them. It was as if invisible hands still manipulated his life even though he lived far away from China.

At work that night, Nan wrote to his parents, telling them to take good care and that everything was fine with his family here. He mentioned: "I have enclosed a hair of mine. If you don't find it in the envelope, that means someone has tampered with the letter. Let me know if you see it." He wanted to ascertain whether his mail was monitored. If it was, there'd be no doubt that he'd been blacklisted. How he regretted having blurted out the crazy kidnap idea in the presence of more than a dozen people. Now it had boomeranged on him. The more he thought about his situation, the more convinced he was that any one of those who had heard him could have informed against him. No wonder so many of his friends and acquaintances had grown estranged from him lately. They were probably all desperate to clear themselves.

₁₀

"WELL, I'm sorry to tell you we're moving," Don said to Nan. They were in his tiny office in the middle of the main workshop, with a glass wall on every side. A few workers had just punched in, drinking coffee and making noises with tools, but all the machines were still quiet.

"Zer whole factory?" Nan asked Don. "Yep."

"Where are you going?"

"We bought a place outside Fitchburg. If you want, you can come work for us there."

"Zat is hard. My son goes to school here." Nan turned silent and recalled Fitchburg, a town he had been to once. A year earlier he and Danning had gone to Keene, New Hampshire, to pick up two cheap computers assembled by a four-man company housed in a barn. On their way back they had stopped for lunch at Fitchburg, which had some lovely Victorian and colonial houses surrounded by woods. It was a long drive from Woodland, at least an hour.

"Anyway, think about it. We'll close this place by mid-January." Don screwed up his yellow eye.

"I will."

"Don't forget your bird."

"Sure, I won't." Nan had just finished his shift. Having hung the clock behind the door of the office for Don to check, he went over to a giant refrigerator, on the side of which was taped a large poster of a black sprinter drifting along with a star-spangled banner above her head. She looked as if she had just won a dash, her expression euphoric and beaming. But below her glistening legs stretched a line of words scribbled in blue ink by one of the workers: "If you can catch me, you can fuck me!" Nan opened the door of the fridge and picked out a turkey, a gift the factory offered to every employee.

It was snowing a little, the low clouds tumbling in the wind. Snowflakes swirled down and melted the moment they hit the blacktop, which curved away toward the blurred townscape of Waltham in the west. Nan drove numbly ahead, still rattled by the news that the factory was moving.

Twenty minutes later he reached the Masefields'. He handed the package with the turkey to Pingping, who was making pancakes in the kitchen. Then he went upstairs to sleep without having had any breakfast.

At the sight of the large turkey, everybody got excited. Taotao, who had been chatting with Livia about a limping doe that had wandered into the front yard that morning, turned to ask his mother how to cook this huge bird. He had eaten deli turkey in school but wanted to know if this real turkey tasted the same. By now he had risen to the middle reading group in his class and could speak quite a bit of English, though he used only short sentences. Even when he talked with his parents, he'd mix English into Chinese.

Pingping drove all three children to school after they'd had breakfast. Before she set out with them, she had suggested to Heidi that they share the turkey for dinner that evening, though Thanksgiving was still two days away. "It's too big for us," she said. Indeed, it weighed more than twenty pounds. Heidi agreed happily. She'd be taking her children to her in-laws' for Thanksgiving dinner and wouldn't be buying a turkey this year.

For Nathan and Livia, it was extraordinary that Nan had brought back a turkey for free. They thought he was a security guard at the factory, somewhat like a policeman. "Wow, amazing!" Nathan said in the van, licking his chafed lips. He was a husky boy with russet hair and silken skin, but he wasn't bright. He had never once gotten an A for his homework and always remained below the average in his class. Good-humored and handsome, he'd flash a broad smile whenever Pingping said he looked like the young Ronald Reagan when the president had been an actor in Hollywood.

Back from the school, Pingping cleaned the turkey, sprinkled salt and pepper on it, and put it into the refrigerator. She then went upstairs to prepare some arithmetic problems for Taotao. Nan was snoring loudly in the other room. He must have been utterly exhausted. Pingping wouldn't even use the bathroom upstairs for fear of disturbing him. Toward midmorning she went to Star Market and bought yams, potatoes, green beans, a pumpkin pie, and some vegetables. As soon as she came back, she began roasting the turkey, which she had never done before. Heidi helped, showing her how to baste the bird. This was easy for Pingping, who was so good at cooking that she dared to cook anything after she'd tasted it. She also mixed some flour with butter and raisins to make biscuits.

Soon the house was filled with a meaty aroma. Heidi was so happy that she walked around with a glass of Chablis, her hazel eyes shining and her cheeks pink as if rouged. Usually she uncorked a bottle of wine a day, though she never got drunk. In the cellar of her house there were hundreds of bottles of wine in crates or on racks, some of them more than twenty years old. The Wus didn't drink, so Heidi had never locked the cellar.

In the afternoon Nan told Pingping about the factory's move. Small wonder Don had hired him on the spot three months before. If Nan had been an American, Don would have been obligated to let him know the temporary nature of the job when he applied. Now what should Nan do? He wouldn't mind working as a night watchman for some years, but he'd need a more reliable car than his old Ford if he had to commute to Fitchburg every day. Without much consideration, Pingping and Nan agreed that he shouldn't go with them, because Taotao could have better schooling here. What's more, Nan 's job paid less than two hundred dollars a week, and after taxes and gas there wouldn't be much left. For the time being they had best stay with the Masefields. In this way they could save at least what Pingping made.

Heidi had cleared the mail and bills from the table in the dining room, which was seldom used and where the wide floorboards creaked a little when stepped on. On the southern wall, between the windows, hung an oval mirror, below which was a pier table. In one corner was a mahogany shelf displaying antique English porcelain. Near the door stood a bronze elephant, two feet tall, brought back from India by the late Dr. Masefield and now serving as a doorstop. From the very beginning, this low-ceilinged dining room had reminded Nan of the one in Nathaniel Hawthorne's house in Salem, which he had once visited with a friend.

Pingping spread a salmon-colored cloth on the table, then began placing the food on it. Dinner started at half past four, earlier than usual. The two families sat down, Heidi at the head of the table, her half-filled glass standing beside the hand-painted plate she had made herself. The others all drank milk or orange juice. Nathan and Livia enjoyed the turkey, the biscuits, and the baked yams as if the meal were better than the food offered by any of the restaurants their mother had taken them to on weekends. Taotao liked the gravy and wanted more of it on his meat and mashed potatoes. Pingping helped him. The boy wouldn't touch the stewed eggplant, which was Heidi's favorite. Heidi had on her plate the first cut of turkey breast with the crispy skin, which she loved.

The three children soon finished dinner and left. Livia and Taotao went into the living room, where they drew pictures with crayons, their laughter ringing from there continually. That put Pingping at ease; that morning she had come across a tattered copy of Playboy in Nathan's bedroom, and she didn't want Taotao to join the older boy upstairs. She and Nan often wondered why Heidi hadn't dumped all the back issues of Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, and other pornographic magazines left by her husband. Wouldn't they warp Nathan's mind, making him think of nothing but naked women and girls? How could he concentrate on his schoolwork if he filled his brain with smut every day? Pingping couldn't figure out why Heidi was so careless. Nan guessed that maybe Heidi wanted her son to know more about women. His wife disagreed. What sort of sex education was this? More like a perversion.

As the adults conversed at the dining table, Heidi asked Pingping, "What's the biggest difference between life in China and life here?"

Nan and Pingping exchanged smiles. He knew that despite her desperate search for a clean toilet in her dreams, she missed many things back home, especially the mountain outside the small town where she had grown up.

"Come, tell me what's so funny?" Heidi persisted, rolling her eyes. Two dimples deepened on her cheeks, and the skin above her cleavage had turned reddish. With her fork she lifted a length of sauteed broccoli onto her plate.

"You can take shower here every day, real convenience," Pingping said.

"How did you do that in China?"

"We go to public bathhouse. I carry Taotao on my back and a big basin in fronta me, got on bus to downtown. After we wash, I carry him and everything back. He's so tired he slept all way, but I almost can't stand on my leg anymore. The bus too crowded and I can't find seat."

"How often did you go to the bathhouse?" "Usually once a week. There's too many people everywhere." "Where did you live-I mean, in what kind of housing?" "We have one room."

"Like a studio with a kitchenette and a bathroom in it?" "No, just one room."

"Really? Do most Chinese live like that?" "Some people."

"My goodness, I guess my house can accommodate a hundred Chinese." Heidi tittered, a hacking noise in her throat.

"Not true," Pingping said, coloring. " Nan 's parents live in four-bedrooms apartment, and my younger brother have three huge rooms for his family."

"I was just kidding." Heidi smiled, rather embarrassed. She sloshed the wine around in her glass and took a mouthful.

Nan was amazed that Pingping, despite her preference for American life, would be so sensitive about Heidi's casual remark. She and he often complained about China in harsh language between themselves, but to Pingping, others mustn't say anything unjustifiably negative about their native land without giving offense. If only he and his wife could break off with China altogether and squeeze every bit of it out of themselves!

Heidi turned to Nan. "What's the major difference to you?" She narrowed her eyes as if sleepy.

"In China every day I wanted to jump up and fight wiz someone. On buses, in restaurants, and in movie theaters, anywhere I went, I wanted to fight. Zere you have to fight to survive, but here I don't want to fight wiz anyone, as eef I lost my spirit."

"It's true," Pingping put in. "He's real fighter in China."

"I don't understand." Heidi shook her fluffy, slightly grizzled head. "You mean you're more peaceful or more oppressed here?"

"I can't tell for sure," he said. "Back in China I knew how to deal wiz bad guys, so I eizer confront them or avoided zem, but here I can't fight anyone. I'm not sure how far I can go, where to stop."

"That's strange."

Pingping added, "What big temper he used to have. He's more like gentleman now. Some Chinese men are mean, think themselves superior than women. They treat their wife like house servant."

"A lot of American men abuse women too," Heidi said.

Nan didn't comment, lost in thought. What good would fighting and yelling do here? Who cares what noise I make? The louder I shout, the bigger a fool I'll make of myself. I feel like a crippled man here.

Pingping kept on, "I glad Nan stopped mix with his Chinese friends. When they're together, they talk nothing, only politics. How to save the country, how to run government, how to take Taiwan back, how to beat Japan, and how to deal with USA. Everybody like prime minister or something."

Heidi tittered while Nan grimaced, knowing his wife wasn't totally wrong. Heidi had by now emptied the whole bottle of wine. Before dinner she had heard from Pingping about the factory's imminent move, so she asked Nan, "Are you going to look for another job?"

"Of coss."

"You have a master's, don't you?" "Yes, just got it."

"Do you want me to talk to the principal of West Oxford? I've known him for a number of years. They might need someone to teach Chinese."

Nan hesitated, unsure if he should express his interest. He didn't have a degree in Chinese, and that preparatory school might not consider him at all. He had looked for a teaching position in the language before and had been turned down again and again on the grounds that his specialty was political science. Pingping said, "Thank you, Heidi. I don't think Nan should teach little kids. He has best mind in our generation, a published poet in China. People know him like scholar."

Nan remained silent, moved but also abashed. He thought about his wife's words. She talked as if they were still in China. They were in America now and had to compromise.

He looked at Pingping and then at Heidi. His wife kept a straight face, blushing up to the ears, while Heidi, tipsy, simpered vaguely.

₁₁

A LETTER from Nan 's parents arrived two weeks after Thanksgiving. His father wrote that Nan shouldn't be too paranoid and that they had indeed found in the envelope a thick hair, which they could tell belonged to nobody but their oldest son. This verification enraged Nan, because in fact he had not enclosed a hair in his letter at all. The mail examiner must have put in a substitute. Now, Nan was convinced that he was blacklisted. Unsettled, he tried to recall his conversation with Danning from a few weeks earlier so as to grasp the implications he might have missed. He was afraid that his trouble with the authorities might affect the careers of his siblings back home, one of whom, his younger brother, was a reporter at an official newspaper.

In the postscript his father wrote:

My son, I hate to reiterate this, but I ought to say it again. At home you could depend on your parents, but in America you are on your own and should make as many friends as you can. Remember, one more friend is one more way of survival. Don't put on airs and insulate yourself. Try to befriend as many people as possible. You don't know who may hold out a helpful hand in your hour of need.

The old bugger is full of crap! Nan said to himself. Here we're alone and can't possibly depend on friends for our survival. Besides, all the Chinese here have changed and become self-centered and won't share time and resources with others. Everyone is struggling to keep himself from sinking. It's not like in China, where you can attach yourself to a high-ranking official and live in a network of friends snugly as long as you make no waves and don't get ahead of others.

Nan had never been close to his father, who had looked down on him because as a college instructor, Nan couldn't get decent housing for his own family and had to live in a room borrowed from his father's beverage research institute. The old man often said to Ping-ping that Nan at most had a second-rate mind, but Pingping would counter, "He's better than you. He'll be a professor someday." Her father-in-law would hoot, far from offended, though he still called Nan "a born loser." On his fifty-sixth birthday five years before, the old man had excluded Nan from the dinner party because he had invited some important guests and was afraid that Nan, gauche and absentminded, might make a gaffe. Nan 's younger brother Ning, smooth-tongued and more outgoing, kept their father's friends company at the party. That hurt Nan. He didn't respect the old man, who lived in a network of officials and was nothing but an empleomaniac, foolishly perusing the histories of various dynasties, particularly the Ming and the Ching, to learn statecraft (or political trickery); this despite the fact that the old man was in charge of a department of only ninety people and was already close to retirement age. In private Nan called his father "a lifetime lackey."

The letter from home disturbed Pingping as well. She advised Nan to forgive his father and not to be annoyed. She even ventured, "He might have a point. You shouldn't continue to live like this."

"What can I do, eh?" asked Nan.

"Maybe go to school again?"

"To study what? Law or business or computer science?"

"I didn't say any of those. Why can't you specialize in something you like? You write in English better than most people. Why not put that to good use?"

"I need money for tuition. Nowadays there're so many Chinese students in America that schools don't give as many scholarships as before. After the Tiananmen massacre, who still wants to admit students from that ruthless country?"

"But it won't hurt to try."

They did have some savings, which both of them had agreed not to touch-they must keep some cash on hand in case of emergency, now that their child was with them. "I want to be a writer, to write many books," Nan muttered.

"In Chinese?"

"Of course."

"You'll have no chance if you do that." "Why do you say that?"

"Where can you have your writings published? Besides, you can't get along with those Chinese writers living in this area. Some of them are plain scoundrels. You're a different type and can never find acceptance among them."

"You worry too much. I don't need to befriend anyone to be a writer. If my work is good, of course someone will publish it. My problem is that I have to make a living as well, have to secure a regular income. That I don't know how to do." He grasped the chest of his olive green turtleneck and shook it. "Never have I felt so useless. I don't know how to sell myself here, I don't know how to sell anything, I can never be a salesman! Oh well, as I'm already worthless, I'd better not dream of making a salary."

Pingping fell silent. Nan 's state of mind troubled her. How could they live decently if he indulged in writing poetry? She wasn't even sure whether he had talent for that, though he had published about a dozen short poems back in China, all in small magazines. She knew that if he studied any subject in the humanities or social sciences, he might become a scholar eventually. But somehow he had just lost interest in academia, though he was still a dreamer and read a lot every day. True, he had always worked since coming to America, but he seemed to be getting nowhere and had never held a real job. Among some of his compatriots at Brandeis, Nan had a nickname, Mr. Wagon Man, because he had once quoted Emerson at a party- "Hitch your wagon to a star"-in an attempt to dissuade a linguist from switching to the field of economics. A historian, an arch-browed man from Henan Province, admonished Nan not to "parrot that so-called New England sage" who was a racist and always despised the Chinese.

Nan let out a sigh and told Pingping, "Don't worry. I'll figure out a way. I'll make certain Taotao will live a life better than ours."

"Sure, that's why we are here."

She said no more, not wanting to pressure him. In a way, she was pleased to know he still wanted to write, which indicated that he hadn't lost his spirit, though at the same time she feared he might blunder into a blind alley. She had no idea what she could do here. Compared with her, Nan was far more capable and should be able to lead a full life if he found his way. In any case, he mustn't remain wobbly too long; this family depended on him.

12

"I'M YOUR FRIEND. You can trust me," Nan said to Pingping two days later.

They were sitting on the sky blue carpet in Nan 's bedroom while their son watched television in the other room, letting out peals of laughter from time to time. Pingping understood what Nan implied- no matter how he tried, he couldn't love her wholeheartedly. Accustomed to his confessions of this kind, she murmured while looking away and choking back her tears, "Still, I love you."

He sighed. "If only I could go somewhere nobody can find me. I'm so tired."

"You always want to walk out on us!" "No, I've never thought of doing anything like that." "Fine. I want a divorce so you'll have to support both Taotao and me."

"You know I'll never have enough money for the alimony. Divorce will make matters worse, unless you marry a rich man." He forced a smile.

"I hate you! You've turned me into your servant, your slave!"

That silenced him. He dared not continue-more exchange on this subject would make her more distraught. She might even go to the lawyer's office next to the bank at the town center and file for divorce. He regretted having brought it up again.

It was true that he didn't love her, but it was also true that he had always cherished her as his wife, determined to be a decent husband and father. He felt for her, knowing she loved him devotedly. Many times she had said that death would be a great relief for her, and that only because Taotao was still so young did she have to live, to raise him. She'd accuse Nan of having a heart of stone-however hard she tried to please and comfort him, he'd be as impassive as before.

The truth was that, exhausted emotionally, he was incapable of loving any woman. Ever since his first love, Beina, had abandoned him eight years before, his heart had remained numb. Soon after that ill-fated relationship he had met Pingping, who had also been crossed in love, jilted by a naval officer. Nan married her soon afterward because they enjoyed spending time together and both were tired of dating, and because he assumed that the marriage would help him heal quickly, at least forcing him to forget the heartless Beina. He knew he didn't love Pingping passionately, but now that he was too tired to look for another woman, why not marry her to help her out? Also, love could always be developed and nurtured after they married. Afraid of hurting her feelings, he had told her he loved her and wanted to live with her for the rest of his life. She adored him, saying he was the most honest and intelligent man she had ever met, although he appeared a little absentminded and was so kind-hearted that some people would take advantage of him.

If only he could pluck Beina out of his heart! Now and then this scene would rise behind his eyes: He was standing in a cold drizzle and drenched through, in his arm a bouquet of carnations that had turned fresher and crisper in the rain. In the distance, horses' hooves were clattering on an asphalt road, the sound mixed with a muffled jingle of harness bells; a horn boomed from a ferryboat in the north as if to announce a solemn ceremony. He had been waiting more than three hours, but that wild-eyed woman never showed up. He guessed she must have gone to a beach resort to celebrate her twenty-sixth birthday with another man. How Nan was crushed! Why? Why? Why? His heart writhed with endless questions. He felt maimed, as though all of a sudden drained of lifeblood. When he met her two days later, she said with that impenetrable smile on her plump lips, "I just didn't feel like coming out on that wet day. Didn't I tell you it was over between us?"

"Then why did you hint you were expecting a birthday present?"

"That's not what I meant." She laughed that ringing laugh and swung her waist-length hair. "I just said, A real man should be fierce like an eagle and gentle like a dove. Give me a man like that. That would be a real gift.' I didn't mean I wanted something from you." She kept her eyes up to the starlit sky as if speaking to someone up there.

Too sick to listen to her anymore, Nan strode away and left her alone waiting for the bus to go home. For a long time afterward he lived in a daze, his heart often gripped by paroxysms of pain. Later he learned that Beina's new lover, a translator of Japanese who worked in the same information office as she, often went to Japan on behalf of their sewing machine factory and brought back fancy merchandise. The man had presented her with a red Yamaha scooter, which she rode to work, catching envious eyes on the streets. By contrast, Nan couldn't even buy her a new bicycle. Never had he thought she could be bought that way. He felt as if she had stolen his heart, crushed it, and dumped it somewhere he couldn't find it. If only he could shut her out of his mind. If only he could get her out of his system!

Two years later, after his son was born, Nan ran into a former classmate who talked at length about the wild Beina, who had recently gone to Beijing to take a test for an English interpreter position at the UN but hadn't even made the first cut. Nonetheless, that impressed Nan, and coming home, he couldn't help but confess to his wife that he still missed his ex-girlfriend terribly. Pressed by Pingping, he admitted he had married her not out of love but out of convenience and compassion. "No," he confessed, "I have no strong feelings for any woman except for Beina. If only I had never met her."

Wordlessly Pingping turned her face away. Tears, as if forced up from her constricted chest, rolled down her cheeks. His confession upset her so much that her breasts, swollen with milk, went dry the next day.

After coming to America, Nan lived alone during the first one and a half years. He assumed that the distance of an ocean and a continent might help develop his affection for his wife into love, since sometimes he did miss her, but the numbness in his heart never went away. He also thought he'd forget Beina; yet she wrote to ask him to help her pay application fees at some American universities. He did that, but afterward he never heard a word from her. Obviously no graduate school admitted her. Somehow even her failure gave him more pain.

Every once in a while he felt attracted to women, especially if they had red hair, but he knew he couldn't love anyone ardently. He had desire, yet little passion. So he didn't try to know any woman. As a matter of fact, as far as desire was concerned, he was normal and strong. Pingping often said he was good in bed, yet he knew that wasn't the reason she had stayed with him: it was because of their child. And he was grateful for that, since he too wanted an intact family for Taotao. In this place neither he nor she had another person to turn to. They were stuck together and had to depend on each other to survive.

If only he were able to love her passionately! If only he weren't so sick at heart! He was tired, and this emotional fatigue had been sinking deeper and deeper into his being. Yet strangely enough, these days the desire for writing often stirred him and demanded an instant release. At work in the factory he wrote several poems, none of which turned out promising, so he put them aside and spent his time poring over Frost's Selected Poems.

₁₃

EVER SINCE Don had told him about the factory's move, Nan had been looking for a job. He had also been reading books on poetry writing. Sometimes at night he tried to write poems, but the words he put on paper ended up seeming flat and incoherent. Usually the beginning would be strong, but then the lines would sag as the poem proceeded, as if there were a leak that sank the speaking voice. Nan was afraid he no longer had the youthful energy for making poetry. A decade ago, when he had just fallen in love with Beina, he had written more than a hundred poems, all of which came with ease. At times he had poured out two or three pieces a day; every part of her became his subject-her lamplike eyes, her peachy face, her pearly teeth, her dainty hands, her swift mind, her quivering hips, above all her fearless spirit. But after she had jilted him, he burned the notebook containing all his love poems. If only he could be possessed by that kind of head-over-heels feelings again. In contrast, though the desire to write frequently spurred him on, every line now was a big struggle, marred by diffidence and sluggishness.

He wished he could hold on to his current job. Just a few years more would give him a period of apprenticeship, during which he could read many books and learn more about literature besides the craft of poetry writing. But that was just a fantasy. He had to find another job soon. He went to a steakhouse in Watertown and told the manager that he had waited tables at a Chinese restaurant. The balding man looked askance at him, twisting his swallow of a mustache with his long fingers. Apparently Nan couldn't lie without blushing. He was relieved two days later when the man told him they couldn't hire him. He had been daunted by their menu, which contained many Italian words. Just a glance at it gave him a headache, let alone the long wine list on which almost all the names were unfamiliar to him. Nan turned up at a drugstore near Harvard Square in Cambridge; its owner, a portly gentleman, was interested in hiring him as an evening-shift supervisor, but first the applicant would have to show him his green card. Nan produced his work permit, but the man wouldn't accept it, saying he'd be fined thousands of dollars if the INS caught him. He'd take nothing except a green card, which Nan had applied for but couldn't get until the next year. Then Nan entered a used bookstore with a HELP WANTED sign leaning against a stack of moldy, leather-bound tomes in the window. A fortyish woman wearing pince-nez said they needed someone to work at most twelve hours a week, not a full-timer.

At last, a week before Christmas, a security guard's position opened up at Hampden Park, a condominium complex in Newton, just off Route 9. Sandy, the manager, told Nan to come in and fill out some forms. He went there the next morning. The place consisted of three connected buildings, behind which were a swimming pool and a parking lot shaded by two long sheds. There were altogether about 120 condominiums, all sharing the same front entrance, and most of the residents were retirees.

Sandy was a stocky man of around forty, with salt-and-pepper hair, a squarish face, pale skin, and narrow eyes. Nan sat in the manager's office in the basement, a metal desk between him and Sandy. After describing the job and asking Nan a few questions, Sandy said, "You'll make good money here."

Nan grinned incredulously.

"You have a cynical smile, young man. You don't believe me?" asked the manager.

"Honestly, no. How can I make good mahney eef you pay me jahst five dollars an hour?"

"Well, I can't do better than that."

"I know I cannot make a lot of mahney here, but I need zer jawb and medical insurance."

"Believe me, for this kind of a job you won't get any benefits elsewhere."

"Zat's true."

"I like your honesty, though."

"The troos is that no matter how hard I work, I can never be more zan a Social Security nahmber." Nan blurted out the sentence that had echoed in his mind for days.

Sandy stared at him in amazement, then his face relaxed. He said, "I can't either. You're a smart guy and I know what you mean. Here's a uniform. Always put it on when you come to work."

Usually there were two security guards working on the same shift at Hampden Park. One serving as a concierge stayed in the office at the front entrance, which was so tiny that it could contain only one chair, while the other patrolled the parking lot behind the buildings. Nan was pleased to take charge of the backyard, because the guard at the front office had to pay attention to the people passing by, since every visitor must be announced. The guard in the parking lot was less busy. Nan could walk around, but was not permitted to sit down. If it snowed or rained, he could remain under either of the two long, wall-less sheds that covered the entire parking lot. But he couldn't read while standing below so many windows-the residents would have reported him to Sandy if they saw him do that. So he carried a pocket English-Chinese dictionary with him. Now and then he'd take it out and go over a few word entries he had marked in pencil.

The guard in the parking lot was also supposed to help the residents load and unload their cars. If they returned from shopping, he was supposed to give them a hand, carrying the grocery bags to their apartments. This was no problem for Nan; besides, most times people would tip him a dollar or two. If it was a good shift, he could make an extra ten dollars. Some middle-aged people avoided using him, reluctant to waste money on tips, especially those who drove cheap cars. A Hispanic woman named Maria, around thirty, always asked him to carry stuff for her. She was very close to Ivan, another guard who usually worked the night shift, and she tried to be friendly with Nan too, calling him "a great guy." But she'd never tip him. At most she'd offer him a drink, which he always declined. She had thick auburn hair and a fine figure, and would wave at Nan whenever she came to the parking lot.

Besides the day shift, Nan occasionally worked at the front office at night. He hated to be seen by everyone at the entrance and dared not look at his pocket dictionary before ten p.m. There were four other guards, but he was scheduled to work mainly with Ivan and Tim. Tim was a spare black man from Canada, around sixty, and wore a gray mustache and a lumpy ring though he was single, divorced long ago. He often talked to Nan about his retirement plan. He was working another job too, driving a shuttle bus between Logan Airport and downtown Boston. With a mysterious look and some pride he told Nan that he had to hold two jobs to make enough money for a mansion he had been building in a suburb of Toronto. That was his dream home, which he'd retire to and which would cost him more than half a million dollars.

"When are you going back to Canada to live in your big house?" Nan asked Tim one afternoon, standing at the glass door of the tiny office.

"As soon as I'm through with this job, in a year or two. I don't like it here."

"You mean Hampden Park or Boston?" "I mean the United States." "But zere's a lawt of snow in Canada, right?" "I don't mind."

"Don't you have better jawbs here?"

"Give me a break!" Tim cackled. Then he rolled up the sleeve of his pale blue shirt. "Look here." He pointed at his forearm.

"What? You mean you have hair on your skin?" Actually, Nan found Tim's arm as smooth as his own.

"No. Pigmentation."

"Oh, you are cahlored," said Nan.

In fact Tim wasn't very dark, his skin at most mocha. "That's right. Blacks are treated like trash in this country."

"But you make more mahney here."

"Yes, plus I'm busting my ass."

"How much more do you make here zan in Canada?"

"It's not the number but the purchasing power of the U.S. dollars that counts. For example, for a pack of toilet paper you pay three bucks here, but you have to pay four in Canada."

"Is Canada a better place for blacks to live?"

"Yes, that's why I'm a Canadian citizen and proud of it."

"So minorities are tritted equally there?"

"No, of course not. Still, Canadians are more open-minded than Americans."

"How do they trit Chinese?" "Similar to blacks, I would say."

Nan remembered something. "I have a question for you, Tim."

"What?"

"Is a Chinese also cahlored?" Nan had seen some job ads that encouraged "people of color" to apply, but he wasn't sure if he was considered colored. How odd that term was. Wasn't white also a color? Why were whites viewed as colorless? Logically speaking, everybody should be "colored."

"I'm not positive about that here," said Tim. "In Canada people don't call me 'colored' to my face."

"Come on, you have dark skin."

"Why should I lie to you? I'm black, but not colored. 'Colored' is a bad word in Canada."

"I wish I were cahlored, zough." "Why's that?"

"If you are cahlored here, you can have better employment."

"That's baloney, Nan! Blacks only have the shitty jobs nobody wants." Tim's bleary eyes stared at him, their corners wrinkled in rays.

Nan didn't respond, wondering if that was true. Ads for government jobs and teaching positions almost always urged "people of color" to apply, and he wondered if he should try for one. He'd be happy if he could work as a fireman or postman. Any stable job would be great. It wasn't just for the pay, but for the benefits and the sense of security-some peace of mind. On the other hand, Tim might be right-Nan had never seen a black postman or fireman in Woodland.

Later Nan pondered his conversation with Tim. Although he admired the old man's hardiness, it made him uneasy. Despite his age, Tim held two full-time jobs, running like a machine without respite. People here worked too hard, obsessed with the illusion of getting rich. Americans often disparaged workaholism in Japan, but most of them worked as hard as the Japanese, if not harder. In this place if you didn't make money, you were a loser, a nobody. Your worth was measured by the property you owned and by the amount you had in the bank. On the radio, the host of Money Matters would ask callers blatantly, "What's your worth?" You couldn't answer "I hold two master's degrees" or "I'm a model worker" or "I'm an honest guy." You had to come up with a specific figure. On TV, jolly old men would declare, "I feel like a million bucks!" Nan once saw in a lonely hearts section of the Boston Herald that a man seeking women described his profession as "millionaire." Money, money, money-money was God in this place.

₁₄

THE OTHER GUARD often paired with him was Ivan, a man in his mid-thirties, a recent immigrant from Russia. Ivan was a squat fellow, broad in the shoulders and thick in the stomach, and often wore a knowing grin on his face, whose rugged features showed a good deal of strength and cunning. He drove a white pickup that had a short body but four seats in the cab. Every night he brought along a laptop and typed away on it. Nan hadn't seen such a small computer before and was impressed by Ivan's dexterity in using the machine, for which Ivan said he had paid more than $4,000. One night when most of the residents had turned in, the two guards talked. Ivan claimed he was already wealthy, though he'd come to America only six years before.

"What are you doing wiz your computer here?" Nan asked him. "Business."

"What kind?"

"Transport oil."

"To anozzer country?"

"To Europe."

"Have you been in zis trade for long?" "Yes, very many years." "So you're a rich man?"

"Yes, I am." Ivan smiled, and his fleshy cheeks broadened, reminding Nan of a giant owl.

"Zen why are you working at Hampden Park?"

"Look, I'm making money just sitting here while I can work with Russian companies for big deals. This way is better to use my time. Time's money."

"Zat's true." Nan remembered that back in China, where you had nothing but time, no one was paid by the hour but all by the month. But here you made money by selling your hours. He asked Ivan again, "You don't work during zer day?"

"Of course I do. I visit people for business. That's why I work here at night most the days."

"Do you already own a house here?"

"No. My wife and I lease an apartment in Dorchester."

"Why didn't you buy your own house?"

"What's a house? It's just shelter. Like a car, it's just a vehicle. There's no need for fancy products. Why should I let a house waste my capital? Tell you what, we own a very expensive apartment in Switzerland."

"Reelly?"

"On Lake Geneva, beautiful place. Did you ever visit Europe?" "No. How mahch does it cawst? I mean zee apartment." "That's classified information. We bought it to invest. Real 'state was skyrocking over there, you know."

"How come you got rich so quickly here?"

"I followed my ways."

"You don't share your expertise?"

"All right, let me offer you one advice, Nan," Ivan harrumphed, his large eyes gleaming in the dimly lighted room. "In America there're only two ways to acquire riches. First, use others' money; second, use others' labor. I'm doing both." He hee-hawed.

Although Nan knew what Ivan said was true, he felt discomfited. He had once spent a year and a half poring over Marx's Das Capital, and he understood how capitalists accumulated their wealth. In theory, all profits resulted from surplus labor, the blood and sweat of workers. Evidently Ivan had intuitively grasped the essence of capitalism. But how could he- Nan -act like a capitalist? Besides having no capital to invest, he simply couldn't imagine himself using others' money or labor. That would amount to exploitation, wouldn't it? Yet to succeed in this place, shouldn't he do something like what Ivan had been doing? Maybe he had to, but how?

In a way the situation at Hampden Park was quite unusual. If what Ivan said was true, then the boss, Sandy Tripp, was poorer than some of the guards he supervised. Sandy must have known that. That might be why he was polite to Tim and Ivan. He didn't interfere with Ivan's working on the computer at night even though some residents had complained about it. Nan liked his boss better than his fellow workers. Sandy wasn't strict with his staff and was often absent from the premises, leaving the place entirely to the care of the guards.

₁₅

IN LATE FEBRUARY, a letter came from the Chinese consulate in New York, informing Nan that they couldn't renew his passport because he hadn't attached the approval from his former work unit, Harbin Teachers College. The official letter told Nan to write to the school's personnel office and obtain their permission to let him continue studying in America. Only then could the consulate renew his passport. Nan was outraged. None of his former leaders, all jealous of his being in America, would ever grant him such an approval. Worse, he had quit graduate school here, and if they knew his current non-student status, they'd demand he return with dispatch. Nan wasn't sure whether there was official contact between Harbin Teachers College and the Chinese consulate, which seemed determined to make things difficult for him. Probably so-officials were always in cahoots to bully and torment people. He called Danning, who had heard that recently several people couldn't get their passports renewed on account of their involvement with the student movement the summer before.

What should Nan do? He couldn't write to the head of the personnel office at his former college. That devious man had once asked Nan to buy him a refrigerator, but Nan, disgusted, hadn't answered his letter. Perhaps he should appeal for help from the chairwoman of his former department, pretending he was still registered at Bran-deis. That could be a long shot, though, for he had never been close to her and hadn't written her a word since he was here. He wasn't even sure if she'd bother to respond. How miserable he felt as he walked around in the back lot of Hampden Park, brooding about his predicament. Why should he trouble so much about his passport if he'd get his green card soon? Why let himself remain in the clutches of those invisible hands? Why shouldn't he break loose and set out on his own? What a misfortune it was to be born Chinese, for whom a trifle like a passport renewal would be tantamount to an insuperable obstacle! If you were Chinese, any petty official could torment you and make your life unbearable. And wherever you went, the powers-that-be would demand your obedience. If only he were an American.

With those thoughts on his mind, Nan returned from work in the evening. He was hungry, but couldn't go into the kitchen to eat until the Masefields finished dinner.

Pingping cleared the table and took out of the oven the meal she had cooked for her family-a whole chicken, Tater Tots, and rice porridge. To this she added a salad of cucumber and lettuce. Taotao didn't like the roast chicken and wouldn't eat the drumstick his mother had cut off for him. He complained about the porridge too and left half a bowl unfinished.

Nan always hated to see food wasted, never having forgotten the hunger pangs he'd had during the three famine years in the early 1960s. "We should send you back to China! Totally spoiled," he said to his son.

"Bullshit!" the boy grunted in English.

"What did you say?" Nan sprang up and grabbed at him.

"Please don't!" Pingping wedged herself between them. "We're not in our own home, please!"

Nan sat down, glowering at Taotao. He demanded, "Where did you learn that word?"

The boy, stunned, looked tearful. Pingping ordered, "Apologize to Daddy."

But Taotao wouldn't say anything. This incensed Nan more. He blasted, "Such a heartless brat! I've lived in this country slaving away just for your sake. Instead of being grateful, you hold me in contempt and insult me at every turn. Let me tell you, if not for you, I'd go back to China tomorrow."

"That's not true," Pingping said. "We can't go back because of our own doings. You shouldn't have mixed our decision with his fault."

"Of course it's true. I can always go back, but I want to waste my life here, for him!" He pointed at their son.

"Then why wouldn't the consulate renew your passport? Stop blaming others. We decided to live here, and we must cope with all the difficulties. Come, Taotao, apologize to Daddy."

The boy muttered, "I'm sorry."

" Sorry is not enough, too late," said Nan.

Pingping got up and held the boy's arm. "Let's go. Leave him alone." She took him away.

"If you use foul language again, I'll send you back to China by the express mail," Nan shouted after Taotao.

Without another word, mother and son went out of the kitchen, climbing the stairs to their quarters.

Nan resumed eating. He didn't feel hungry anymore, but was so angry that his appetite knew no bounds. He didn't care what he put into his mouth and just ate and ate and ate, chewing the food ferociously while not tasting it.

To his astonishment, he finished the whole chicken and most of the Tater Tots without noticing how much he had eaten. Strange to say, he didn't feel stuffed. He was sick at heart and regretted his eruption and began blaming himself. Taotao is right. You're full of it. You use self-sacrifice as a pretext for your own failure and useless-ness, and you want others to pity you and share your bitterness. You're silly and pathetic!

In fact, his daily grouchiness was mostly due to his loathing for his job, which he kept mainly for its substandard health insurance. At work he had to walk around in the parking lot constantly, and at the close of the day his legs were heavy and stiff. He often returned home loaded with gas. His family kept out of his way most of the time and avoided eating with him. This aggravated him more. As a result, he ate without restraint and often finished whatever Pingping put on the table. His wife joked once that she was afraid he might eat the plates and bowls as well. Despite the voracious eating, he didn't gain weight and even looked more haggard than before.

₁₆

THOUGH he didn't see his dad very often, Taotao would play pranks on him whenever he could. The boy loved his father and by now knew his parents couldn't possibly mail him back to his grandparents. On the last Saturday morning of March, Nan came back from a graveyard shift with a stiff neck and shoulders. The moment he pulled into the yard, Taotao ran to the front entrance of the house and locked the screen door from inside. His father saw him, but exhausted and moody, Nan shambled over without looking at his son and yanked the door open. The latch snapped. The boy stood stock-still as his father checked the broken catch.

Heidi had seen everything. She said to Nan, "Why did you bust the latch on purpose?"

"I'm sorry. It was already loose," he mumbled, though that was true.

"But didn't Taotao lock the screen door when he saw you coming in?"

"He did."

"Well, you should have it fixed." "All right, I will do zat."

"I have Bob's phone number. You can call him." "Sure, I will eef I need him."

Bob was the carpenter who had put the latch in the previous spring, and Heidi assumed Nan was going to call him in to install a new one. But after breakfast, Nan unscrewed the catch. Then he and Taotao set out for the hardware store at the town center, carrying the broken part in a brown paper bag. Nan wasn't sure if they could find a match. All the way he blamed his son for being so careless. This time the boy remained quiet.

Without difficulty the salesman at Motts Hardware, who eyed Nan enviously for his fatherhood, found the same kind of latch, which cost less than seven dollars. Although Nan needed only the catch, he had to buy the whole set. On his way back, his mood lifted and he began talking with his son casually. Taotao told him that he had several friends now, Mark, Ralph, Billy, and others. He had risen to the reading group of the second level and was doing superbly in the arithmetic tests.

"How about Loreen?" Nan asked in English, remembering the frail, freckled girl who had often read to his son. "Her family moved." "Where did zey go?"

"Her dad retired from the Celtics and they went back to Indiana." "Do you miss her?" "Not really."

"Wasn't she your friend?" "She was okay."

"She helped you a lawt, didn't she? You shouldn't forget her."

The boy fell silent. Nan was amazed how easy it was for him to speak English with Taotao. Perhaps from now on he should talk with him more often to improve his own English.

Together father and son installed the catch. The whole job took just a few minutes. Heidi was impressed, saying, "Bob charged me eighty dollars for it last time. I didn't know it was so easy."

That was a major problem in this household, Pingping and Nan had noticed long before. People sometimes overcharged Heidi when they worked for her. Very often a mechanic or plumber or carpenter didn't finish a job and would soon have to come back again. Heidi didn't have the vaguest idea how much the cost should be. Over the winter a mechanic who spoke only Portuguese had come three times to fix the cooking range, just to make two burners work again, but he had billed Heidi more than $150 for each visit, plus the parts. Once a huckster had stopped by with a powerful vacuum cleaner that could pick up an iron ball four inches in diameter; Heidi was so taken with his demonstration that she paid $1,000 for the machine.

Heidi was impressed by Nan 's ability to fix small things. He had always changed the oil in his car and replaced the battery by himself, and once even repaired the rear brake of Nathan's bicycle. The previous winter he had replaced the toilet flapper to stop a leak in the bathroom next to the kitchen. Pingping was pleased by his handy-manship and praised him. Back in China he had been a clumsy man and couldn't even patch a flat bicycle tire, which most men could do. In their neighborhood he was known for being lazy. He wouldn't do any housework and instead raised four doves, which were snow-white and lovely, each wearing a brass whistle on its wing, so they'd emit a fluty sound when flying. Several times the wives in the neighborhood complained to Pingping that their husbands had begun to emulate Nan and had stopped doing household chores. They urged her at least to let him wash dishes and his underwear. She promised to make him work, but he seldom lifted a finger to help her. Even Nan 's mother said that if a bottle of cooking oil fell over and spilled, he wouldn't bother to pick it up.

American life had changed him. Now he loved hand tools-oh, the infinite varieties of American tools, each designed for one purpose, just like the vast English vocabulary, each word denoting precisely one thing or one idea. What's more, Nan was always ready to run an errand for his wife, though he still grumbled on occasion. This was mainly due to the job he hated intensely but had to keep. Even he could feel the change in himself. He wasn't a feeble bookworm anymore; he was no longer ashamed of working hard to make a dollar.

₁₇

NAN and Pingping sometimes quarreled when their son wasn't around. But they had agreed to stay together until Taotao grew up. Nan once asked Pingping, "What will you do after that?"

"Either go to a nunnery or kill myself," she said. Ever since girlhood she had been infatuated with the image of a nun: the long gown, the flying headpiece, the white gloves, the glossy rosary.

"I'll be a monk, then," said Nan.

"Let's go to a temple together so we can often meet. Promise, you'll spend some time with me every week."

Nan always liked her peculiar kind of innocence, and replied, "You're talking as if all the monks will leave you alone."

She punched his arm. "I'm serious."

Nan said no more. How he wished he could work up more emotion to reciprocate her love. If only he weren't so exhausted and so sick at heart. If only he hadn't been wounded so deeply by that fox Beina.

Sometimes when Pingping couldn't stand his impassivity anymore, she'd pick up the phone and call someone. Nan would do the same when he was unhappy. He'd talk with Danning, and most times they'd chat for a long while. His friend would urge him to be more considerate to Pingping. For better or worse, she was willing to sacrifice everything for their family and was absolutely loyal to him. What else could he want from her? Where could he find a better woman? He ought to feel fortunate and grateful.

Unlike Nan, Pingping didn't have a friend of her own. Then who did she call when she was upset or angry? Nan often wondered and got unsettled. Sometimes the instant the line went through, she'd hang up. Once he asked who she was phoning. "None of your business," she said. "I can call anyone I want to."

One evening in mid-April they quarreled again. She dropped his tea mug on the floor. About that he said nothing and just wiped the wet spot on the carpet with a rag. He was afraid she might go so far as to tear one of his books, which she'd done before. Yet today his silence incensed her more. She rushed out of the room, picked up the phone from the top of a wooden chest and began dialing. He followed her out and pressed down the plunger of the phone. She glared at him, her eyes flashing madly.

"Who do you want to speak to?" he asked.

"Leave me alone!"

" No. You must let me know. "

"You never care anyway."

"Please! If you have someone you'd like to meet, I won't hold you back, I promise. Just let me know." He reached for the handset but couldn't wrench it off her hand.

"Let go of me!"

"Not until you tell me who you're calling." "I dialed nobody but 911, all right?" "What?" he gasped. "You're insane!"

The gravity of his voice stopped her. She released the phone, staring at him.

"They may come here with an ambulance," he told her, still in disbelief.

"No, I've never said a word to them. How could they get here?"

"Their machine must show the caller's number, so they can trace you to this place."

That stunned her and she started sobbing. Nan replaced the phone, enfolded her with one arm, and said, "Come, stop crying. Nothing like that has happened yet."

"I really didn't know they could find out I called. I just meant to make you jealous."

Her last sentence surprised him, but also somewhat pleased him. He smiled and told her, "You acted like a small child. All right, no more crying. Don't dial 911 again."

She nodded yes and muttered, "I hate you as much as I love you. If only I could leave and never see you again."

"Just give me some time, okay? I'll find a decent job and then my temper will improve. I'll be a better man."

" You really need to do something to save yourself and our family. We can't continue to live like this."

"I know we can't stay under Heidi's roof forever. I'll figure out a way. "

"You're always a good talker."

"Only in Chinese." He grimaced.

"Remember what you said to me when we first met?"

"What did I say?"

"You said, 'Life is a tragedy, but its meaning lies in how we face the tragedy.'"

" That was just juvenile rubbish I had picked up from reading Hemingway. "

"But I fell in love with you for that. You were a full man then, the first man who ever said something meaningful to me. I had always been angry whenever I was with another man. You were so different from others, but now you've been losing your spirit. You must brace up and save yourself."

"I know I'm just drifting along."

"We must find our way."

Nan nodded without another word. His heart was filled with pain and gratitude. If his wife had been of two hearts with him, this family would have fallen apart long ago. He must find a way to make a decent living and mustn't despair of himself.

₁₈

PINGPING was mending Heidi's bathrobe in the kitchen while talking with Heidi. On the table were three stacks of laundered clothes she had just folded. Outside, the clouds had broken, electric wires and leafy branches still glistening with rainwater. The lilacs and young dogwood trees had lowered their white and pinkish blossoms in the glowing afternoon sun. Beyond the shrubs two rabbits scampered about, now nibbling grass and now chasing each other. Ping-ping and Nan were both allergic to pollen. Nan was extremely sensitive to oak and dogwood, whereas Pingping didn't know what she was allergic to. She was most miserable in late April, when her nose would dribble and swell and she'd keep a wad of tissue in her pocket all the time. Nan would repeat in English "April is the cru-elest month," though his wife had no idea it was a line of poetry. The previous spring when pollen had set in, they had thought they were suffering from the flu and had taken Tylenol, Bayer, and other cold pills available over the counter, but none of the medicines helped much. Not until mid-May had Nan figured out what it was, but by then the miserable season was almost over for them.

Pingping was glad that a morning shower had washed away a lot of pollen so the air would be somewhat clean for a day or two. She and Heidi had been talking about yesterday evening's quarrel. Heidi told her that Eric, her late husband's younger brother, was a ladies' man, so she wondered if Nan was the same.

" Nan doesn't like woman," Pingping said.

Heidi looked surprised. "What did you say? You mean, he's more fond of men?"

"No, he's not gay."

"Then what's his problem? Most men like women." "His mind."

"I don't get it." Heidi shook her newly permed hair, which made her head appear larger than usual, her cheeks shiny and pinkish, and her face three or four years younger than the past week.

"How can I say this?" Pingping said. "Back in China he like pretty womans-women, but now he always say he's tired." She was too ashamed to reveal he didn't love her.

"I know some men are like that, especially after they've had too many women."

" Nan doesn't have affair."

"How can you be so sure?"

"I just know. When he come to USA, I told him he can have another woman if he want, but just don't forget me and Taotao, and don't get disease."

"Wow, you said that?"

"Yes."

"What did he do then?"

"Nothing. He said he has no time to chase women, he's too tired. He want to study hard and then come back home."

"Something could be wrong with his mind. You know what? He should see a shrink."

"What is shrink?"

"A psychiatrist. Nathan has seen Dr. Blumenthal in Wellesley every Tuesday afternoon since his dad died." "That help him?"

"Of course, a lot. He's steadier now. He used to be very moody." "Maybe Nan should meet that shrink too. How much it cost?" "It depends. I guess around seventy an hour." "I see."

Heidi put on her reading glasses and began leafing through a mailorder catalog while Pingping spread the bathrobe on the table to see whether there was another spot that needed patching. She was impressed that Heidi wouldn't throw away the tattered robe. Both of them turned silent for the time being.

Later that afternoon Pingping asked Nathan what Dr. Blumenthal had done to him on Tuesday. The boy blinked his whitish eyes and said, "Nothing. He just listened to me talk."

"Really? He make money just by listen to you?"

"Sure. He also asked questions."

"What kind?"

"Like 'How do you feel today?' and 'Did Scott bug you again last week?' "

"I can do that." She was amazed.

That evening she told Nan about her conversation with Heidi and suggested he consider seeing a psychiatrist. He had just received his diploma for his M.A., which had come in a large envelope braced with a rectangle of cardboard, so he was in a pleasant frame of mind and was about to play checkers with Taotao. He said in response to Pingping's suggestion, "I don't believe in psychiatry. Why should we throw away money like that?"

"Nathan said it made him feel much better."

"But it doesn't really calm him down. Don't you see he still has an outburst every now and then?"

"I'm afraid you might lose your mind."

"I've already lost most of it. I can't get worse." He gave a short laugh. "Don't worry. I can talk to you. We can be each other's psychiatrists."

"At least you should give it a try."

"Even if it helps, I won't do that. You know how hard it is for us to make a dollar. We have to save as much as we can. In this country, without money you can't do anything. We should move out of this house soon and have to have more cash in hand."

In reality, Nan didn't often speak to Pingping about his feelings, which were disordered and unclear to himself. If he couldn't help it anymore, he just poured his misery out on her, and once in a while she did the same to him. In appearance he was peaceful and gentle, but at heart he felt as if he were running a temperature, about to collapse. But somehow he always managed to pull himself together and go through his daily drudgery without a hitch. He didn't have time to read books now, though at work he tried to dip into his dictionary whenever it was possible. How he missed his former job at the factory, where he had been able even to catnap if he was tired of reading. Nowadays, besides the dictionary, he also carried with him a small notebook in which he had copied out some poems, both English and Chinese. He wanted to memorize the lines he loved.

₁₉

NEVER having contacted Harbin Teachers College, Nan couldn't send its approval letter to the Chinese consulate to have his passport renewed, but it was said that lately the policy for such a renewal had changed and that no permission from one's former work unit was required anymore. So when Nan received a letter from the Chinese consulate one day in mid-May, he was pleased, fingering the booklet enclosed in a manila envelope with the thought that it must contain his passport. It did indeed. But when he opened the gilt-worded cover, he was stunned by a scarlet seal that declared cANCELED.

Both he and Pingping were devastated, knowing this was the official revenge for his involvement in the plan for the kidnap. Though Nan, shocked and outraged, couldn't think coherently for hours, the significance of the cancellation gradually sank in. Now the door back to China was shut and he had become a countryless man. What was to be done? The more he thought, the more angry he felt. Why had he been so passive, letting the Chinese consulate deliver blows on him at will? Why should he remain an obedient subject of that ruthless country? Shouldn't people be entitled to abandon their country if all the authorities did was make them sacrifice and suffer? He'd get naturalized here as soon as possible. By any means, he'd better discard the baggage of China so as to travel light. He must become an independent man.

With a feeling of forced pride and a mind in turmoil, Nan went to Hampden Park in the afternoon. He didn't patrol the parking lot but instead leaned against a resident's SUV with two bullet holes in its door. He wasn't supposed to rest like this, but today he didn't care. As he was still musing about his revoked passport, Maria, the thirtyish Latina living on the third floor of the north building, appeared and beckoned him over. Reluctantly Nan went up to her. "You need help?" he asked.

She beamed, batting her dark eyelashes. "One of my lightbulbs is dead-can you replace it for me?" "Sure, my pleasure."

It was a warm day, and she wore jeans and a pink wrap-over top that revealed her belly button, under which bulged a small fold of flab. Nan had never seen such a navel, an innie almost two inches across. He followed her upstairs. Her wide behind swung provocatively as she was going up, and he observed her shapely waist, partly naked and well tanned. Her hip-hugging pants were held only by a button on the front. At the gooseneck of the handrail she told him, "My mother's coming to visit, so I need to tidy my place up a bit."

"Where's she coming from?"

" New Mexico."

The defective light was in the kitchen, where the north-facing window let in a flood of sunlight. The ceiling was so high that Nan had to place a stool on a tall chair, then climbed onto them.

"Be careful, dear. Don't fall," she crooned.

"I won't." Though he said that, his right leg was shaking a little.

The lightbulb was covered by a scalloped fixture, and he unscrewed the nut and handed the glass shade to Maria. The incandescent bulb was half black, burned out. "Can you turn zer switch off?" he asked.

She flicked it off and came over to hand him a new bulb. "Let me hold you, dear, so you won't fall," she said, smiling and showing her even teeth. She hugged his calves from behind and pressed her nose between them. "Hmm, you smell good. You have strong legs."

"And also strong arms." He was screwing on the shade. "Can you open zer light?" He caught himself using the wrong verb.

"What?" she asked.

"Turn on zer switch."

"Sure."

The light came on. Before she could sidle back to him, he jumped down with his right hand holding the top corner of the refrigerator.

As he landed on the ceramic tile, his dictionary fell out of his pocket and spread facedown at Maria's feet. She picked it up and flipped through some pages. "My goodness, you've marked the entire book!"

"Almost. I have to stahdy English whenever I can." His face was reddening.

She handed it back to him. "I used to read books, but I don't have the time anymore."

Without another word he put the stool and the chair back to their original places. She asked, "Can I give you a glass of wine?" She looked him in the face, her eyes intense and unblinking.

"No, sanks."

"Why are you always so polite, Nan?" "I'm supposed to be."

"C'mon, just have some wine and loosen up a bit. It's not busy out there." She poured half a glass of zinfandel and handed it to him.

"No, sanks. It will make my face red and Sandy can see it."

"You're such a serious guy. I'm sure you don't talk to your girlfriend like this. Are you afraid of me or something?"

He smiled, rather embarrassed. "I'm not afraid of anyone."

"Not even a woman?"

"I have a wife and a son. When I don't work, of coss I can relax at home."

"So you're trying to be professional here." She tittered, then kept on, "I don't mind if you have a family. Can't we be friends, just friends?" She sipped her glass of wine, probably to cover her edgi-ness, while her eyes held him as if pulling him toward her.

"Sure, but I must leave." He turned to the door. "Sorry, Tim needs me in zee office." In his confusion he forgot that Tim had just quit as a result of a lung problem, which Tim told others was pulmonary emphysema but Sandy suspected was cancer. Without enough hands, Sandy had to work in the front office these days.

"Thank you for the help, Nan," Maria said damply. "You're a sweet guy."

"It's my pleasure."

Though he didn't feel attracted to Maria, his heart was racing a little. But in her eagerness and affected manner he had seen a lonesome, flighty woman. She wasn't a bad person, but he wouldn't get entangled with her.

After that day, she continued to ask him to carry grocery bags for her and still wouldn't tip him. He was always polite, however cold she was to him.

Maria's calling him "a sweet guy" reminded Nan of his experience with another woman, Heather Burt, who had been a girlfriend of Maurice Fome, Nan 's fellow graduate student at Brandeis. Maurice, a slim black man often wearing a broad smile, was from Sudan and had attended the Sorbonne before coming to the United States. He was fluent in both French and English in addition to several African languages, and would call a car "means of conveyance" and water "dihydromonoxide." He had many girlfriends, both white and black, some of whom had come from England and France to visit him. Usually they stayed just a few days, then left and never came again. Heather Burt differed from the other women and would come to see him every other month, driving her old sky blue sedan all the way from Youngstown, Ohio. Since Nan and Maurice lived in the same building and had the same professor as their advisor, Nan got to know Heather quite well. She was in her late twenties, with fair skin and facial hair like peach down, and she had a sonorous voice almost like a man's, though she was delicate and short, just five foot one.

She came to see Maurice again in late July 1986, intending to stay two weeks and get engaged to him. But when she stepped into his apartment, Maurice was in a trance, sitting in a beanbag chair with foam at his mouth, murmuring something nobody could understand. He wouldn't talk to Heather or anyone and didn't even recognize her. His eyes were milky, the pupils almost invisible.

That evening, having nowhere to go, Heather stayed at Nan 's apartment, her eyes red and her face crumpled. Sitting at the table in the living room, she told Nan that Maurice's father, a tribal shaman, was calling to him from a mountain in Sudan. "He's not himself anymore and didn't understand what I said," she sighed, dragging at a cigarette.

"You mean he can communicate wiz his father in Africa?" For all his fondness for Maurice, Nan suspected he was shamming. "Yes, he can," she replied in earnest. "Do you believe zat?"

"I do."

She took a swallow of the green tea Nan had poured for her, then told him that her father, an auto mechanic, after opposing the idea of her being engaged to a black man, had finally given her his approval and blessing. But some of her friends still disliked the idea. "They asked me," she said, " ' You really don't mind having a black guy in your bed?' I told them, 'It makes no difference. He's good.' See now, I'm in the doghouse." Two whitish tears fell out of her eyes, and she blew her nose into a paper towel, then raised her hand to tuck a strip of ginger hair behind her ear.

"You mean you're cornered?" Nan had never heard that idiom.

"I mean I'm in serious trouble."

Several days in a row Maurice didn't recognize Heather, who continued to stay at Nan 's apartment, in his roommate Gary's room. Gary had gone back to Israel for the summer. During the day Nan went to work in the library and in the evenings cooked dinner for both himself and Heather. Sometimes they'd converse for hours after dinner, sharing tea and ice cream. She seemed to have calmed down some.

One night, the moment he turned in, Heather knocked on his door, which he hadn't locked. "Come in," he said.

She stepped in and, with a misshapen face, asked him, "Can I spend the night with you?"

"You-you don't know me zat well."

"Please!"

In spite of the surprise, Nan did feel a stirring rush and waved her to come over. For a whole year he hadn't touched a woman, and sometimes he was afraid he might have lost his potency, so he was eager to have her. She dropped her nightgown and got into his bed.

After caressing him for a while, she asked, "Do you have a rubber?" Her silk panties fell on the floor.

"You mean candy?" he guessed, thinking of chewing gum. His fingers kept fondling her breast.

She laughed. "I love your sense of humor." She wrapped her arm around his neck and kissed his mouth hard as if to suck the breath out of him.

So they made love and even tried soixante-neuf in the way shown in Gary 's copy of Penthouse. Nan didn't like it, though he made her come, crying ecstatically as if in pain. He was glad he still could have sex with a woman like a normal man. How relieved he was after he came. Soon he fell into postcoital slumber.

The next morning he went to work without disturbing her, and left her breakfast in the kitchen-a blueberry bagel and two fried eggs, sunny side up on a white plate. When he came back in the evening, she was gone without leaving a word, though she had finished the breakfast and washed the dish. For days he was worried, fearing she might have gotten pregnant since they hadn't used a condom. On the other hand, he felt she might have been on the pill. She would have herself ready for Maurice before coming to see him, wouldn't she?

Then the thought began to disturb him that he could have caught some venereal disease. A few years earlier he had read in a Chinese newspaper that more than a third of Americans and Canadians had gonorrhea, herpes, syphilis. The previous winter his mother had written to warn him not to have sexual contact with foreign women, saying that if he got syphilis, his nose would rot, he'd go bald and blind, and he would pass the virus on to his wife and children and grandchildren. She had told him that in the old China, every day people had to boil chopsticks and bowls used by syphilitics so that their families wouldn't be infected. The more Nan thought about the one-night stand, the more he regretted it. If only he had observed Heather's body carefully before having sex with her. She couldn't have fled without a reason, could she? When he ran into Maurice, Nan couldn't help but observe the whiteheads on his thin neck, wondering if they were herpes blisters.

For three weeks he felt agitated and miserable, and even thought of going to the infirmary for a checkup, but he decided not to. Then right before school started, a letter from Heather arrived. She wrote in a scraggy hand that leaned slightly to one side:

August 26, 1986

Dear Nan,

I hope this will reach you and find you well. I don't have your address, so I'm sending this letter to your department. Thank you so much for accommodating me when I was in Boston. Without your help, I couldn't have survived the crisis. I'm sorry to have dragged you into my personal trouble when I was there. You are a sweet man. That night you made me feel great, as if I became a woman again. But to tell the truth, afterward I felt guilty, so I left in the morning without saying good-bye.

Don't be angry with me, Nan. We both sinned, though I am the one who made you commit fornication. Last weekend I confessed everything at the church, and it lightened my mind considerably. God is large-hearted and has forgiven me. Perhaps you need to go to confession too. Try it. It really helps.

Please don't think ill of me. I know you're a kind, generous man. I will remember you fondly.

Yours,

Heather

Her letter bewildered him. Nobody had ever called him "a sweet man." Neither did he know what "a sweet man" was like. Weren't men supposed to be strong and fierce, full of spunk? How could he be sweet? He was baffled.

He had never considered that, similar to himself, eager to prove the adequacy of his manhood with the one-night stand, Heather had been desperate to restore her womanhood. How could a woman have the kind of crippled feeling like a man's fear of having lost his potency? Perhaps for Heather this was more psychological than physical, since she didn't have to depend on an erection to perform in bed. She must have wanted to convince herself of being desired by a man or of her ability to make love to a man.

Rather than feeling guilty, Nan was fearful and somewhat upset.

He had promised his wife that he wouldn't have another woman in America. But Heather was a different case. He wasn't really fond of her. The yearlong celibacy had tormented him and made him feel he might not be adequate between the sheets anymore. The idea of sin hadn't entered his mind until he read Heather's letter. He couldn't imagine kneeling in a box and exposing himself to a priest, though he had gone to a church in Waltham on two Sundays. He consulted his Webster's Collegiate Dictionary to see the difference between "fornication" and "copulation." Being a one-night fornicator didn't bother him that much. What worried him most was whether Heather had carried any disease. Her letter sounded calm, with no trace of anxiety. Did this mean she was a clean and healthy woman?

For the whole fall he was troubled by that question. He examined his genitals carefully whenever he took a shower, but noticed nothing abnormal. His body was still fine and vigorous; his vision and hearing were as clear as before. Everything was normal. Not until it snowed did he manage to put the worry out of his mind.

₂₀

AT HAMPDEN PARK, Ivan often talked to Nan about women, complaining that it was too expensive to have a date here. In Russia, he said, women would take care of the expenses when they went out with him. Nan doubted whether that was true. Ivan claimed that he had been a junior officer in the Red Army in the late 1970s and that Russian women were always enamored of uniforms and epaulets. Nan wondered why the cost of dating a woman would nettle Ivan so much if he was a successful businessman. Didn't he own real estate on Lake Geneva? He must already be a millionaire. One night, when Ivan talked about American women again, Nan asked him, "Are you not afraid of catching AIDS?"

Ivan let out a bray of laughter. "I've known lots of girls and can take care of diseases."

"So you like American women?"

"Not particularly. I need female company sometimes."

"How about your wife?"

"She lives in Paris. I don't need to pay attention to her." "You mean you two are separated?"

"No. She's bossing a business there. She's Frenchwoman by birth, you know."

"So she let you have anozzer woman when she is away?"

Ivan smiled without answering. The expression on his face seemed to indicate that he was good at handling women. It reminded Nan of the saying "A brazen face is a man's great leverage with ladies." He then noticed that Ivan's laptop wasn't there. "Where's your computer?" he asked.

"Its hard disk busted dead. I left it home."

"You do oil exports still?" "Well, I changed my profession." "Doing what now?"

"That's top secret." Ivan laughed again. "By the way, don't you like Maria? She talked very much about you."

"Maria is all right, but I'm too tired to sink about women."

"You're smart. Maria goes nutty sometimes. What an appetite she possesses. She ate two rib-eye steaks when we dined together last time."

"And she drinks a lawt too." "Like a cow whale." "So you're dating her?"

"Not really. We visited a restaurant last weekend. God, I won't do that again. It's just too much."

By now Nan saw that Ivan wasn't very different from himself, a mere nighttime drudge, though this man from Vladivostok appeared to be confident and thriving here. Unlike him, Ivan must still believe in the dream of becoming a man of means.

A few days later Sandy called Nan into his office and told him not to carry his dictionary to work again. He insisted that personally he wouldn't have minded as long as Nan did his job well. But someone at the recent residents' meeting voiced the complaint in front of others, so he had no choice but to stop Nan from reading anything at work. "No hard feelings, Nan," said Sandy. "As the manager here, I have to let you know."

"I understand." Nan promised he wouldn't bring any book with him again. He knew it must be Maria who had bitched about him. But why? Only because he wouldn't flirt with her, or take her out, or bed her? Or simply because she could hurt him? He felt outraged and disgusted. From now on, he'd turn his back on that woman whenever she came to the parking lot.

₂₁

THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY of the Tiananmen massacre was approaching, and the Yenching Institute at Harvard University was holding a memorial meeting in its auditorium. Several Chinese dignitaries, ranging from celebrated historians to the student movement leaders who had recently fled China, were to speak at the conference, so on Saturday morning Nan and Danning went there to hear those famous people talk. Among them, Nan was particularly interested in a poet, Yong Chu, who had lived in the United States for more than two decades, teaching at a private college in Rhode Island. What was amazing about this man was that he had made his name in Taiwan, in mainland China, and in the Chinese diaspora as well, although he had lived in North America. Nan remembered being very touched by some of his poems, which were written in a slightly archaic style that reflected the influence of the lyrics of the Song dynasty. The poet was especially known for the famous lines: "The jenny donkey under me is unaware / She's trotting into a mistaken serenade."

The conference wasn't as interesting as Nan had expected. Two student leaders talked about their experiences in fleeing China through an underground channel. Because some of the audience couldn't understand Chinese, a young woman, a graduate student, sat on the stage interpreting. Her voice, however, was too soft, aggravated by her shyness, which kept her eyes downcast when she spoke. After the student leaders' speeches, a Yale professor, an expert in Chinese intellectual thought, began expounding on the necessity of the Confucian values for contemporary China, a country that, chaotic and ruined, was on the brink of a moral meltdown because there was no religion to guide its populace. Nan was bored and said to Danning, "I shouldn't be here. What a drag!" He definitely would skip the panel discussion in the afternoon.

After the professor's speech, a noted dissident named Manping Liu went up and began to speak. This man in his mid-fifties had once headed China 's Central Institute of Social Reforms, but owing to his involvement with the student movement the previous spring, he had fled the country and was now living in New York City. He had a strong but lean face, and his voice sounded metallic and resonant. He talked about the necessity of developing democracy within the Communist Party, because there wasn't yet another political force in China that could rival the ruling party, and because the country couldn't afford to have a hiatus in governing power if the Communist rule was abolished. His argument and analyses were cogent and at moments subtle, able to hold the audience. He emphasized that China 's hope lay in reforming the Communist Party. Nan had read some of Mr. Liu's articles and was familiar with his thoughts, but today he felt there was something unsavory in his speech that Nan couldn't put his finger on, though he hadn't lost his reverence for the scholar's sincerity. Everyone could tell that Mr. Liu was speaking from his heart. Somehow Nan kept observing the old man's hand, which was small and delicate like a young woman's and which was gesturing as he spoke. That hand, a true scholar's, was born to wield a pen.

Then Yong Chu, the poet, took the microphone. He had served as an aircraft pilot in the Chinese Nationalist Army for five years, dog-fighting the Communists' MiGs over Taiwan Strait. Though getting on toward sixty, he was the picture of health, with a dark, strong face like a peasant's. It was said that he could drink a whole bottle of vodka at one sitting without getting drunk. His poetry often showed a kind of masculinity that was rarely found in the works of contemporary Chinese poets. Mr. Chu announced in a booming voice:

"The Tiananmen Democracy Movement is the greatest event of mankind. It demonstrates the Chinese people's bravery and resolve. Weilin Wang, the young man who single-handedly stopped a column of tanks, is a national hero whose image has lodged in the minds of the whole world and whose name will be recorded in history forever.

In one fearless stroke he removed all the shame from my face. He showed the world that there are still courageous Chinese willing to lay down their lives for an ideal. He's our pride and China 's pride, and so are all the heroes in Tiananmen Square who sacrificed themselves for democracy. Their immortal deeds have made our personal achievements look so trivial that I feel I have shrunk to nothing. Here I declare that the whole body of my poetry isn't even worth one drop of the blood shed by the martyrs in Tiananmen Square…"

The speech annoyed Nan, whose illusion of this master poet quickly vanished. He wondered why Mr. Chu had let national pride supersede the value of his poetry, as though patriotism and literary arts should be judged by the same criteria. As an accomplished poet, he should see that the function of his poetry was to transcend history and to outlast politics and that a poet should be responsible mainly for the language he used. Instead, he was haranguing like an official in charge of propaganda.

Before the meeting was over, Nan left the auditorium with Dan-ning, who invited him to go to his place for dinner. Danning now had a girlfriend named Sirong, a visiting scholar from Beijing. But Nan would have to get home and have some sleep before going to work that evening, so instead they went to the Harvard Science Center for coffee.

In the cafeteria Nan took a decaf and Danning a mocha to a table. "I'm going back to China next month," Danning told him the moment they sat down.

"Really? Are you going to teach somewhere?"

"At the People's University."

" Does it have a physics department?"

"They have a computer science program where I'll teach, but I'm not that interested in teaching. I've been writing fiction. Actually, I had a novella just accepted by Spring Breeze. It will come out in the fall."

"Congratulations!" Nan was amazed despite knowing the bimonthly was a provincial literary magazine.

" Thanks. I plan to devote myself to writing novels," said Danning. "Then what will you do with your Ph.D. in physics?" "I'll use it to earn a salary."

"That's a good arrangement. I'm impressed, also jealous. You're on your way."

"No matter where I go, I feel I'm a Chinese to the marrow. I'm terribly homesick recently, perhaps because I'm getting old and softheaded."

"You're only thirty-five."

"But I feel I'm aging rapidly in this country."

"To be honest, I don't worry about my nationality anymore. I wear my nationality like a coat." There was so much bitterness in Nan 's voice that his friend was startled.

"That can't be true. That's just your fantasy, Nan. For example, you speak Chinese like a news anchorman, but your English will never be as good."

"Language and nationality are different issues. I just want to be a decent human being."

"Can you be that without loving your country, your homeland?"

" China isn't my country anymore. I spit at China, because it treats its citizens like gullible children and always prevents them from growing up into real individuals. It demands nothing but obedience. To me, loyalty is a two-way street. China has betrayed me, so I refuse to remain its subject anymore."

"Come now, you're not an American citizen yet."

"I've wrenched China out of my heart." Nan grimaced, his eyes brimming with tears.

"You're just angry. You know you can never do that, no matter how hard you try. I can see that China hurt you deeply. Your anger just shows you're still emotionally bound to our motherland and you cannot remain detached."

"I wish I had more anger so that I could write genuine poetry. I feel crippled inside, numb here." Nan placed his hand on his chest.

"That's because you've tried to cut yourself off from your roots."

"Enough of that patriotic nonsense. Patriotism is the last stick in the authorities' hand. With it they strike whomever they don't like."

"All right, I won't argue with you about that, Nan. We're going our separate ways from now on. But we'll remain friends, won't we?"

"Yes, forever buddies. I wish you all good luck and a great success."

"I wish you a happy family. You have a lovely wife and a fine son. I envy you. You ought to cherish what you have." "I have trouble with Pingping."

"I sensed that, but that will pass. If you live in this land, a stable family means everything. It's like a sturdy boat in a rough sea, and you have to stay within the boat to cross the ocean."

"I'llremember that."

"Also, don't ever talk to any Chinese like you did just now. You'll get into more trouble. You don't know who will turn you in."

"I'll be more careful in front of others, of course."

On their way out, Nan said he was sick of his current job, which had turned him into a semi-coolie. Danning told him that a Chinese-language poetry magazine in New York City was looking for a managing editor, but he knew nothing about the pay and the workload. Nan was interested and got the phone number of the editor in chief from Danning. The two friends hugged and parted ways, walking in opposite directions along Massachusetts Avenue.