The Foreigner (2 page)

"And what do you do, Mei Hua?" It came out rather strangled. Mei Hua blinked at me.

"I am the accountant." Blink, blink. Her English was not quite native in its propriety; she spoke as if reading from a primer. "And yourself?"

"Myself?"

Again, she blinked worriedly. "What is your professional job?"

"Oh…" Looking down, I licked my finger and rubbed at a dash of rollerball ink on my cuff. "I work in finance. Corporate finance." The ink smudged, making blots. "It’s not very interesting."

"He is only modest," my mother said lightly, suddenly reaching over and dabbing at the ink with her wetted napkin. "He is the fi
nan
cial
an
alyst."

The title, or perhaps just the hushed way my mother said it, must have rung a bell, for Mei Hua lit up like a signboard and regarded me with more confidence. This was irritating.

"You can call it whatever you want." I tugged my sleeve away. "It’s still a boring job. A job for peons and drones."

"Modesty," my mother affirmed, giving Mei Hua a knowing glance.

"And a little immoral."

"Emerson!"

"I think it must be very interesting," said Mei Hua.

"Sure. I look for ways to cut costs at mismanaged companies." I popped a shrimp chip in my mouth. "Basically a nice way of saying that I cut jobs, and put honest people out of work so the board members can have their multimillion-dollar condos in Vail and spend their Christmas holiday dogsledding in the Arctic. Nothing more interesting than that!"

"But you are compensated, of course?" asked Mei Hua.

"Of course, of course. Well compensated. I mean, what’s a few thousand jobs here or there as long as I get some good scratch out of it? Dental and one annual eye exam too."

"You see?" said my mother, apologetic, as if I were not there. The food was arriving, and she began plying both Mei Hua and me with generous servings of rice and braised tendon and pea greens, almost purring in the warmth of her own benevolence. "His heart is so tender, always caring about the others! Even strangers! And even though his work gives him the moral pain, he sacrifices his principle to support me, to support his family. A good man. A good head of household."

"I can see," said Mei Hua, blinking her gigantic eyes.

"He has always been the good boy."

"Oh, pshaw." I made a self-deprecating moue, but she took me at face value.

"The modesty again." An exchange of looks.

"Listen to her." I chuckled, feeling a little crazed. "Someone once said, ’Mothers are the best lovers.’ I guess that’s true, if by ’best’ they meant ’blind.’ Who else would refer to me as a ’boy’? It’s my fortieth birthday. Obviously."

"Means nothing," my mother snapped. Then, regaining herself, she smoothed her hair and poured Mei Hua some more tea. "A son is always the little boy to the mother," she explained, filling her own teacup. She filled mine last. "Especially when the little boy is still not married."

"I am sure he will find the right woman
soon,
" said Mei Hua. She had a very flat voice; it sounded like a threat. My mother clutched Mei Hua’s arm as if she were drowning.

"You say so, but how?" she said fervently. "He has no interest in seeing the girls! Every day he just work, work, work, and then on Friday, all he want is to have dinner with Mother."

"What?"
The tea burned my lip. "Hang on, this is for
your
benefit too, you know."

"So it is
my
fault you do not have a wife, is what you are saying." My mother’s lip quivered.

"Oh, Mother, please."

"No!" she cried. "Let us be honest with each other! Just say it, say it straight out! You think I am the bad mother."

"I didn’t
say
that."

"It is not the words but what they
mean
." She pressed her napkin to her lips. "And it is true! I am the failure. I have failed." Tears rolled down her cheeks like rainwater, a sudden midsummer squall. Crocodile tears, I knew, for she never cried except to extract promises or confessions; when she was truly upset, she was dry as a bone, and dangerously still. Of course Mei Hua didn’t know that. She put an awkward arm around my mother’s shoulders.

I sighed. "Mother…"

"To have failed after all my effort," she went on, lamenting. "Everything I have done, all my life, has been for him. His father and I, we come to this country, we have nothing! We know nothing. But we come here for him to have the better life. I work the business. I buy the clothes. I buy the car. I send him to college. And for what?" Her lips narrowed. "Forty years old today, and no wife. No family. What will he do when I am gone, I ask you?" A fresh burst of tears.

Mei Hua murmured something comforting in Chinese. Both of them looked at me, distant and hostile—me, callous, thick-skinned, the author of their misery.

What kept me from storming out of the restaurant at that moment, though, was the old, undeniable truth that trumped any complaints about injustice: she had sacrificed everything for me, and I had never repaid her. She had given up her relatives, her home, the direct line to her memories; a whole history had been lost, a huge rift in time had been made. How could I ever make that up to her? The question was always there. It had no answer.

Guilt turned quickly to resentment. I was tired of being the torchbearer of the Changs, tired of the low-hanging ghost that never lifted. I watched Mei Hua pour my mother more tea, my mother absorbed in this silly girl the way you pretend interest in your shoe when you are trying to avoid a confrontation.

"What about Little P?" I said.

Instantly, my mother’s tears dried up. "What about him?" She swallowed visibly.

"I suppose you think
he’s
done his duty by you. Why don’t you set up girls for
him
? Why don’t you needle him about marrying a Chinese girl, or carrying on the family blood? Maybe because he hasn’t been home in almost a decade? Maybe because he never calls or writes? If you think I’m the ingrate…"

But then I caught sight of her expression and trailed off. The shock on her face was painful to me, for it seemed to indicate how deeply she still missed him—even after his abandonment, even after all these years. Little P is my mother’s favorite. He came into her life so late that she considered him a gift, and I have never had the heart to dispute that claim. Even now I felt a sharp regret for having dredged up his name and wished I’d kept quiet.

Her mouth wobbled without sound as she fumbled with her chopsticks. In her confusion, she looked suddenly very old, and her arm shook a little, setting her rice bowl chittering against the edge of her plate. Mei Hua drew back, alarmed. Blindly, my mother reached out for her teacup. The hand was brown and disfigured by the heat and pain of arthritis. I put the cup in her hand for her and watched her lift it jerkily, slopping tea in her bowl.

"I’m sorry, Mother." I touched her elbow.

She shrugged me off. I said nothing.

She turned to Mei Hua. "How many years do you have?"

Mei Hua frowned. "I am thirty-one."

"Thirty-one." She sniffed. "At your age, I have one son already. A husband. A
family
. Tell me, what do you have?"

"I?" Mei Hua looked stunned.

"You young people," she went on harshly. "You think my life is a joke. You look down on me, you pity me. You think the tradition, the marriage is a burden only. You are the little American child all your life, the little Peter Pan, never to grow up. No obligation. No loyalty. No sense of the future."

Mei Hua blinked. "I—"

"I am not feeling well," my mother interrupted. She put a hand to her bony chest abruptly. "I want to go home."

"Mother—"

But there was no stopping her. Holding her purse under one arm, she walked unevenly toward the door, trailing pride and hurt behind her like a veil. After a few paces, she turned.

"I have never like this place," she said with passion.

"Mother." I tried not to shout. "We’ve been eating here for years. Come back and sit down."

She shook her head violently, wiping her nose with a tissue. "Too dark in here. Too salty. A disappointment," she said, voice breaking. "Every single time."

She left.

The check arrived at this juncture, on a scratched plastic tray. Mei Hua went to the ladies’ room while I paid the bill. The restaurant was nearly empty. All the other patrons had gone home, and the waitstaff had slipped into the insular, chatty world of stagehands, joking, shouting, confessing to one another as they swept the floor and stacked the chairs upside down on the tables. All of them were recent immigrants, and as I sat and waited for my receipt, I had a brief spasm of envy. They weren’t rich, but they knew where their pleasures and loyalties lay. They had memories of a damp summer in Guangdong, repeated over many years; the smell of a Chinese street; the look of a Chinese sun descending over a Chinese shop. All of these things, taken together, defined something true, something uncompromised about them.

My mother hadn’t waited for her fortune cookie. With a dull, familiar feeling of anomie, I cracked both cookies open and pulled out the little slips. The first one said:
LOVE IS LIKE THE SPRING RAIN, TO AWAKEN ON THE UNPRODUCTIVE GROUND
. The other said:
YOU ARE THE GREATEST PERSON IN THE WORLD
.

I
DROVE MEI HUA HOME AND WALKED
her to her door, where she grabbed me by the shoulders and tongued me with some savageness.

"For your birthday," she said, her breath ragged as she pulled back.

"Oh," I said, dabbing the corner of my mouth discreetly with a thumb. "Thank you. Sorry about all that. You know, at dinner. With my mother."

"But she is
right,
" said Mei Hua. "We are so selfish, the young people. We are wanting the dedication to everlasting family. We must start
now
." She hauled me in for another long kiss.

"Yes,"
I gasped, breaking away. "Certainly very selfish. No dedication. Good-bye."

"Will call you!" Her voice echoed down the little alley of condos as I hurried to the car.

I debated driving back to the city, but the force of habit was too strong, and instead I went to the Remada for my usual overnight in my old room. When I reached the lot, the lights in the motel office were still on. I knew I should find my mother, should apologize, but I was too tired just then to summon up energy for the wheedling, the coaxing, the thousand little tricks that reconciliation would require.

I dragged my carryall up to balcony level, let myself in, poured a nip of Jack Daniel’s. Nothing dispelled the day’s melancholy, not the blue light from the TV nor the glow of the bedside sconces. Mei Hua’s strong, bitter licorice taste lingered in my mouth; even the whiskey didn’t chase it. She was annoying, and rapacious, and I felt nothing like love for her. But my body claimed otherwise, and continued to claim otherwise as I unwrapped my Hershey’s bar and sat down on the bed.

My mother pervaded the room. She was in the stiff curtains and dark ruched bedspread, the caustic smell of ammonia; you breathed her in wherever you went. I could have been married years ago, if my mother hadn’t interfered. J, the love of my life, twenty years older, sex and mystery embodied in her languorous, full form. That
American
girl, my mother called her.

I took another sip of whiskey. In time, I might have made J love me—though my mother would never believe it. The old argument between us had never been laid to rest; it ran like groundwater under every word and gesture. You can have American friends, my mother would say, and American neighbors, and American boss, but when it counts, for the family, you marry a Chinese. What does the foreigner know about love? she would ask. What means love to them? What means marriage? No amount of reason would shake her faith in the unbridgeable distance between the ways of loving. If I argued that, at least, the Americans were happy, her response was always one of great scorn:
"Happiness! If all you want is happiness! If you want to settle for happiness!"

But what else was there? I fumbled for the whiskey, knocking over my glass.

The answer came tiredly, inevitably, from the history of our long dispute:
an idea,
she would say—just
an idea,
and nothing more, as if this should explain everything, should counter all loneliness and longing.

"Bullshit," I muttered. "I can’t live on an idea." I got down on my hands and knees and found the highball under the bed. "What do you
want
from me? I gave up my life to be with you. Friday night dinner. Half your health care premium."

I remembered J in the dim parking lot, the luminous white curve of her shoulder showing in the dark, the feel of her fingers brushing up against mine in secret. I had worshiped her, my first—my only—love.

Still, given time, I might have gotten over her, if not for the other treachery. My mother. I took another swig of whiskey. It had been years before my mother had confessed to me what she had done with the letters J sent me after I left: how she had secretly removed them from the mail and sent them back, marked
PERSON UNKNOWN
. By the time I discovered this, J had moved, seemingly disappeared, and I couldn’t find her. Too late to ask now what she’d wanted to say to me. The possibilities sometimes tormented me at night: she loved me; she was lonely; she thought of me constantly. Or maybe it had been bad news: she was in love with someone else; she was getting married—some other man, more worldly, less timid, less weak.

But it didn’t matter anymore. The chance was gone, and that uncertainty, that idea of an alternate life, would always be with me. I’d never said a word to my mother about her betrayal. Useless to be angry, I had thought, when all that was so long ago—but somehow I couldn’t let it go, not quite. I hated, suddenly, my old bedroom, its hybrid look of anonymity and home: the individually wrapped cups by the sink, the water-stained carpet, the old crack running down the wall. The crack used to resemble a map, the shape of Brazil, or Africa, or some far-flung river. Now it was just a crack in the plaster, in the room I had never left.