North of Beautiful (32 page)

“But they didn’t,” she said finally, her lips pursing. This was not a topic she wished to revisit.

So I continued our tour, kept to the script, pointing out the Hall of Preserving Harmony and the palace’s most precious stone carving, an enormous ramp of two hundred tons of marble, etched with dragons. Even if Mom didn’t want to discuss it, I couldn’t help but think about that pivotal moment in China’s history. Instead of exploring and sending out more intrepid adventurers like Zheng He, China had turned inward. This great civilization wheeled backward the way Europe had in its Dark Ages. Advancements made over a thousand years before the western world — like its invention of the movable type printing press, compass, paper — all that great technological lead had disappeared. Other countries rose in power and knowledge, and China went to sleep.

The dragon was waking now.

Mom was making motions like she was ready to move on to the next building, shifting her weight from foot to foot. Still, I stared at those dragons, their sinuous snakelike bodies, their claws. I’m sure they were protecting the emperor — everything in this city was designed to protect the emperor — but to me, the dragons looked like they were circling each other, preparing to battle for supremacy.

The one person I could remember standing up for Mom when Dad berated her was Aunt Susannah. The last time Susannah came to visit had been five years ago, two years before her untimely death. That, as far as I knew, was the last time Mom saw her — any of us saw her.

On that last visit, Dad began his incessant nitpicking at Mom’s cooking — the eggshell she purportedly had left in his brownie.

“It’s an eggshell, no big deal,” Susannah had said softly, but I could feel the tension in her toned body as she rested her hip against the kitchen island, ready to pounce and gouge and protect her little sister if necessary.

Dad smirked in response. From where I stood at the sink, washing the dinner dishes, I hoped that, for once, he would let this questioning of his authority pass. It was a sister’s prerogative to stick up for her sibling, especially her little sister. And Aunt Susannah was a guest.

But, no, Dad had to correct her in that calm patronizing voice of his: “It’s a big deal to me.”

Instead of being cowed, Susannah pulled herself to her full five feet. I knew that because I had just turned eleven and Susannah herself had made a point of measuring us against each other, back to back. We shared the same height, the same shoe size, but not much else. She had courage to spare; I had barely enough.

“Then let me make this perfectly clear,” she said, every bit as calm as Dad. “Don’t disrespect my sister.”

Mom fluttered around like a helpless bird caught away from her nest.

“Or what?” Dad asked, resting his newspaper on the table.

Susannah merely stared at him. “Lois, pack your things. You’re coming with me.”

“Lois.” That’s all Dad had to say, her name, and Mom stopped moving. She would have stopped breathing if she could. I did, even as my hands continued to wash and dry, wash and dry.

“You deserve better than this,” Susannah continued relentlessly, not shifting her eyes off Dad as though he were a rabid dog, unpredictable and out of his mind.

Five years ago, Merc was long out of the house, finishing up law school at Yale.

Five years ago, Claudius was out with his friends, getting high again. He wasn’t there to get into an accident to distract Dad.

But I was.

I remember staring at the reflection of my face in the window above the kitchen sink, hating my face. Hating that underneath the port-wine stain, I could see Dad and his blue-green eyes and his aristocratic nose. I remember taking the stain remover from under the kitchen sink, rubbing the cleanser on my face as if it were one of the fancy toners Mom bought to beautify my skin, not abrade it. The reaction was instantaneous. My skin bubbled, hiding the purple stain and my father within my face.

It worked. Mom gasped, “Terra!”

She stayed, Susannah left, and Dad fumed impotently. Another crisis diverted.

But how many more times would we hurt ourselves to diffuse Dad?

The miracle was, Dad wasn’t here. He wasn’t anywhere close to here. China was the last place he would go, this country of his shame. No wonder Merc had moved to this very country. Here, he was safe.

Here, Mom and I were both safe.

For all that I’d studied about China, reading at least eight different guidebooks, poring over expat discussion boards about Beijing and Shanghai, borrowing Mandarin tapes from the library. As much as I read Wild Swans and Amy Tan and Lisa See, reread Da Chen and The Red Scarf Girl, nothing prepared me when I turned around to face the Hall of Supreme Harmony — that iconic building in the Outer Court. Nothing prepared me for the sad opulence, this tragic grandeur that once had been the bastion of both royalty and their eunuchs and concubines — all battling for survival.

“Even emperors toppled,” I whispered. Empires are overthrown. Emperors lose power, die. The last emperor of China had been forced to serve as a farmer for seven ignoble years.

No power was total, no power permanent, no power absolute.

Not even Dad’s.

There is a time to study a map passionately, obsessively. To see where you’ve gone, where others have gone before you. To commit to memory every obstacle, every danger. Shakespeare had a term for this obsession: mappery. But there is a time, too, when you say, come dragons. I challenge you to find me.

I shivered, thinking about how life would have been so different had Mom kept on her path instead of stepping onto Dad’s. Had she enrolled in college, gotten her degree, could she have been like Norah, mistress of coffee beans, ruler of profit-and-loss statements? Could she have been fearless like her own sister and ventured to countries whose names I couldn’t pronounce, much less place on a map?

What would life have been like for me without my port-wine stain?

I opened my lips, then closed them. “Mom,” I said. Again, my lips parted and then pursed. I lifted my finger to them, not shushing my questions, not locking them in, just indecisive.

“What, honey?”

Oh, nothing. These words poised for their normal swan’s dive, that headlong plummet that would end any intimate sharing. I cleared my throat.

“Would you look at that,” said Mom, laughing in wonderment. “A Starbucks right here in the Forbidden City.”

“What?”

I looked where Mom was pointing. There was no telltale sign, no emblematic mermaid to lure the thirsty and caffeine-deprived inside. That is, there was no sign of the Starbucks until a man stumbled out the nondescript door, clutching his coffee in one hand, a wad of napkins in the other. If ever I needed a nudge telling me I was on the right path, there it was.

“Mom,” I began afresh, “what should I do about Erik?”

“You mean, what should you do about Jacob? Or why you’re still together with Erik?” she asked, surprising me. She was striding fast now, faster than I had ever seen her walk in the last few years. I don’t think she saw any of the buildings we were passing, not the Hall of Supreme Harmony or the Hongyi Pavilion. Finally, she slowed, panting a bit, sweating a lot. “Why are you?”

“Because . . .”

“Because you slept with him?”

“Mom!” And then grimacing, I looked away, mumbled, “How did you know?”

“I just did.” She waved impatiently. “And I don’t agree with what you did. But that’s not a good enough reason to stay together with a boy.”

I’m not sure what I expected Mom to say, but her commentary on my sex life wasn’t it. After all, she had always warned me that relationships were hard work. That divorce wasn’t an option. I had so needed to know that I had someone, it didn’t matter that that someone wasn’t right for me.

She chewed on her lip, wanting to say something more.

“What?” I asked. Jump the moat, Mom.

“You didn’t get pregnant the way I did. You don’t have to be stuck.”

I swallowed. “You don’t have to stay stuck, Mom.”

She just shook her head as if it was too late for her. “Be careful with Jacob. That boy has been through enough.”

“I know,” I said sharply. And then softened my voice. “I know that. I should have broken up with Erik before coming. I just wasn’t sure of Jacob.”

“Are you now?” she asked quietly, but her eyes never left mine.

With no hesitation, I nodded. Jacob was the kind of guy who never said anything unless he meant it. He was the kind of guy who would break up with a girl if his heart wasn’t into the relationship. He was also the kind of guy who would never date someone who already had a boyfriend.

“I’ll break up with Erik as soon as we’re back home,” I said out loud, more for myself than for Mom.

Mom nodded. “That sounds like a good idea.”

Without needing a map, I knew what lay before us: the Meridian Gate, the central entrance to the Forbidden City that was once the exclusive domain of the emperor. He alone strode through this entrance. Directly outside lay Tiananman Square, the site of protests and repression. But even quashed rebellions leave us different. Because freedom may be a forbidden fruit in tyrannies, but once tasted, it is unforgettable. No matter how desperately Dad tried to contain us, we were all spinning out of his control. My brothers had orbited away from home. I took my untreatable face to the dermatologist against his wishes. The one person he had corralled with any effectiveness was Mom — and here she was, thousands of miles away from him. We had all mounted our own private rebellions successfully.

Unexpectedly, Mom asked, “Honey, did you know that the empress was allowed to go through this gate only one day in her life?”

“Yeah, her wedding day. How did you know?”

“Norah told me.”

Probably during one of their talks about marriages . . . and her ex-husband’s remarriage. I looked at Mom, knowing the same idea was already forming in her head from the way she narrowed her eyes at that gate, daring it in a game of chicken. And I said, “Well, it’s time to change history, don’t you think?”

I took her hand in mine, not the way I used to hold hers as a child, but with our fingers woven together. And we strode through the archway of emperors and into the open — hand in hand, my mother and I.

Chapter twenty-seven

New World

THE NEXT MORNING, AFTER AN early start, Mom and I sat aboard a cable car, sailing us up the lush green mountainside to the highest point on the Great Wall in Mutianyu, a remote section of the Wall off the beaten tourist track.

“You might not want to look down,” I advised Mom. While I wasn’t scared of heights, I did wonder about the safety of the cable car, swaying as it was on the thin overhead cord of wavering steel.

Even though her face was white and her hands gripped the edge of her seat, Mom kept her eyes open, fixed ahead. When we disembarked and started past a group practicing tai chi on the Wall, Mom actually dared to peek over the ledge. While she gasped — it was a long way to the ground — she didn’t back away. Instead, she motioned me to her side, and both of us studied the expansive vista of hunchbacked mountains and the Great Wall itself undulating in front of us, the spine of the dragon, some call it. I could see why. It was as if the mountains themselves had been peeled back, laying open the skeletal wall. Mom squeezed my arm. “It’s beautiful, absolutely beautiful.”

What was beautiful, I wanted to tell Mom, was both of us on this wall, designed to keep invaders out, but failed. The nomads still sacked China. When it came down to it, there was no way every section of this 3,000-kilometer wall could be kept intact and protected, not when someone was determined to break in. Like us.

I approached a man, asked him to take a picture of us by way of lifting up my camera, pointing at Mom and me, and then smiling. Jacob was right; smiles were disarming.

Later, Mom and I began to walk the length of the Wall, which had so many more stairs than I thought it would. For some reason, I had pictured the Wall as one continuous flat; it was more like a gentle roller-coaster with hills and valleys.

“Oh, I think this might be as far as I go,” Mom said, gazing uneasily at the fifth steep flight of uneven stone steps rising before us.

“Here, Mom.” I held her arm to help her up. “Just a little ways more.” And then to distract her: “Can you believe we’re here? On the Great Wall?”

“No.” She was breathing hard, her face flushed from exertion. I started to worry that I was pushing her too much. She might have a heart attack; she hadn’t exercised like this in years.

“Have a seat, Mom.” I wiped off a block of rock for her and crouched next to her. “So was this worth it?”

She threw her head back and laughed openmouthed in a way I had never seen her at home, a deep-throated chortle that started from the very depths of her soul. “I had a moment when we were touring the . . . what was it called?”

“The Forbidden City?”

“No, that old neighborhood.”

“Hutong.”

“Right.” She clapped her hands. “The hutong. And my rickshaw almost crashed into another. Then I wasn’t so sure.”

“I didn’t see that.”

“No?” Mom smiled secretly, proud of her own adventure. “I had no idea. . . .”

“No idea what?”

“That there was so much to see in the world.”

We both looked over the Wall to the west, where I could imagine the thundering of horses’ hooves as nomadic warriors approached the Wall, intent on breaching it. To the west, the rest of the Silk Road lay with its promise of sand dunes and camels and caravans. And beyond that Europe.

“There is so much to see,” I repeated. And then, “It’s too bad Merc didn’t come with us. You know, he hasn’t seen anything in China.” He hasn’t seen anything of us. Of me.

Mom looked thoughtful, brushing grit that I had missed off her seat of stone. Then she said, “It’s his loss. All we can do is tell him what he missed, and hope that next time, he’ll make a better choice.”

I snorted. As if telling him that would convince him to put down his BlackBerry.

“You know, honey” — Mom wound a loose thread from the bottom of her sweatshirt around her finger, pulled, and tore it off — “one day he’ll realize what he’s sacrificed.”