The Foreigner (6 page)

"Lai, lai, lai."

A heavy, uneven tread sounded on the stairs, and Little P reappeared, supporting the weight of a ponderously fat old man in a tracksuit and house slippers.

Slowly they descended, halting, labored, the old man clutching at the banister with a clumsy hand that jerked and felt its way along.

"Emerson, Uncle. Uncle,
jiushi
Emerson."

The man turned his half-lidded eyes to me, thick brows drawn, seeming not to register. One side of his face was slightly paralyzed—body too, which accounted for the shuffling. His little pinkish mouth opened in a yawn, showing darkened gums. He groaned.

"Is he… what’s wrong?" I asked.

"Stroke," said Little P. He settled Uncle on the sofa and pulled a blanket up over his knees. "Treat him like normal. You don’t know him. He was a real hellion before all this happened." He clucked solicitously at Uncle.
"Lai, he cha ba."
He went to the kitchen to make Uncle some tea.

Uncle and I regarded each other silently. He did not look much like my mother, though there was something eerily reminiscent of her in his face—a ghost of her about the mouth. His eyes seemed to brood, hooded and sunken, and his flat hands picked at the coverlet. I hoped my distaste didn’t show. It wasn’t his illness that put me off; it was something else that hung about him.

The bird screamed and spilled its feed again as the door opened and a couple of other men came in. They were in the midst of some kind of argument, one high, complaining voice and a corresponding bass, but they stopped abruptly when they saw me and Uncle sitting together on the plastic sofa. Little P, coming in from the kitchen, nodded in my direction without a word; clearly they had discussed me.

The skinnier of the two pushed forward, wet eyes shining with peculiar intensity. I had an impression of hunger there, some kind of envy or hatred.

"H-hello," I said, forgetting my Chinese in bewilderment.

"Am Poison," he said, a small ratlike man with a deep baritone. "English name. I study two year, two year," with a kind of taunt in his voice. He wore plastic flip-flops and a T-shirt that said
CENTURY 21 DORITOS
, and was chewing a wad of betel nut, which he shifted around rapidly as he spoke. His close-set eyes took me in with sly, darting glances as he gestured toward his soft, fat companion. "My brother, Da Yi. English say Big… One. We are the cousin to you. Son of Uncle."

Big One shook my hand damply, his silk shirt with flamboyant dragons printed down the placket billowing about his thighs.

"Hui jiang guoyu ma?"
he asked. Do you speak Chinese?

I blushed.
"Yi… yi dian-dian."

He grinned unpleasantly, top lip curling away from a row of tiny teeth.
" ’Yi dian-dian,’ "
he repeated.
"Shuo ’yi dian-dian,’ da jia dou tingdechulai ni zhen bushi Zhongguoren."

Poison punched him. Big One looked hurt.

"Do you understan’?" Poison asked curiously.

"Understand what?"

"What he say."

"Something about… Chinese people?"

"Ah." Poison laughed. After a moment, Big One laughed also, and the two of them herded me toward the sideboard of snacks and offered me one of Little P’s beers.

Meanwhile, other people had trickled in, about five or six men. They seemed to know one another already, and fanned out across the sofa and chairs unceremoniously, eating the fruit and jerky and turning up the volume on the TV so that the news blared. They did not speak to or even look at me, and I was aware therefore that they must somehow know who I was. One of them yawned, spreading his bare, ashy knees, and scratched. An air of reluctance seemed to hang over them, like workers at an office party. Maybe Uncle had demanded their attendance.

I studied the old man again from across the room. Little P hovered over him, wiping his mouth as he dribbled tea down his chin. He was not capable of feeding himself, it seemed, let alone ordering a group of men around. Why, then, did I distrust him? My mind circled, closing in on some elusive detail, but Poison kept distracting me with a long, broken story about cars and New York, how he had gone there once and thought it was nothing, a lot of noise and money.

"Chi fan ba."
Little P, having seated Uncle at the long makeshift folding table, began bringing out take-out containers from the kitchen: pig knuckle, tomato scrambled with egg, cabbage and ham, soup boiled with ginger and tiny clams that Little P dipped out of a plastic bag. A huge tureen of rice was handed around, tea was poured, and the men ate, raising their bowls to their mouths and shoveling rice in, still watching the television.

Poison, seated next to me, seized the fabric of my suit between his thumb and forefinger. "This very nice, very nice," he said. "Armani, no? Dolce and Gab’na?" He rubbed my sleeve between his fingers like paper bills. "I know. I have the expensive eye. Very expensive, very nice."

I shrugged away. Actually, it was a Perry Ellis suit my mother had bought me on clearance at Dillard’s, but I could not convince him, for the other men were scruffy in their undershirts and shorts and flip-flops. Under the stark fluorescence, I surveyed the table discreetly, looking longer at my cousins and my brother, my family, a floating panorama of gestures and faces in whom the units of genetic material should have clicked and yearned toward each other, like little magnetic filings, binding us.

The man on my left stood out in a quiet way. Older, more reserved, he sat at the table but seemed somehow disconnected from the others, appearing to listen with great attention to all the muttered conversation without being invited to take part. If he was insulted, he did not show it; he ate neatly and sipped a glass of warmed sake with evident enjoyment, studying his tiny glass from all angles.

"Rrrice." He crooked his finger slightly at the tureen in front of me and said, "Rrrice, please." He smiled at me, conspiratorial, as I passed him the bowl.

"I had lived for twenty years in New York," he explained. "As a professor of engineering. My name is Li An-Qing. Atticus in English."

He removed a piece of bone from his mouth and placed it on the rim of his plate, then wiped the tips of his fingers carefully on a napkin and studied me. "So you are Xiao P’s brother?"

"Yes, older brother."

He sipped his sake, the sharp corner of his tongue darting out to catch a stray drop. "
Intéressant
. Xiao P does not talk about you very much. In fact, yesterday is the first time he has mentioned you in a long time."

I looked over at Little P. He was bent solicitously over Uncle, his head inclined toward the old man in an attitude of deep attention.

"I’m a lot older," I said, though that hardly seemed to explain. "We don’t talk much. We don’t talk at all."

"Oh? Then this must be an occasion. It was very good of you to come so far." He patted my hand. "The reason is unfortunate—your mother—but I am very glad you have come. I have wanted to meet you for many years."

"
Me?
Why?"

He laughed. "It is not so surprising. Xiao P is with us for eight, ten years. You are always curious to know where your compatriots have come from. Tell me." He hesitated. "Do you find much… similarity in your brother?"

"Similarity to me?"

"Similarity to before, I am talking about."

I remembered my encounter in the stairwell yesterday—the hard, narrow face; the slashing knife.

"I don’t know.… I guess not," I said, half-resentful. "Why?"

He looked down the table toward Little P, who caught his eye and held it for a long, veiled moment before returning to an argument with Big One. Atticus stopped chewing. Then resumed, more slowly.

"Rien d’important,"
he said. He finished off his sake abruptly, in a large mouthful. "I only wish to have a better insight." He looked toward Little P again and lowered his voice urgently. "You must know that Xiao P is quite
different
."

My scalp pricked. "You say ’different’ like you mean something else."

Atticus shook his head violently. "No, no, no!
Pas du tout
. I have no wish to slander your brother. You must not tell him I said such a thing. I mean only that he is quite driven."

"In work, you mean."

"Work, life." He was evasive, distracted. "In a way, I admire your brother. He has his own… rectitude."

"Rectitude."

"Principle. Xiao P has his principles. You could say he is the most principled man you will ever meet," he said, and laughed suddenly, surveying the table with dry amusement.

He was even older than Uncle, but despite the peppered hair and shrunken bones, his face was smooth, unlined, he himself timeless in a formal gray mandarin shirt and buttoned vest. Where did he belong among this tattered, disjointed crew? He seemed to know much more about my brother than I did. Did he know about the angry red graffito on his doors? The hair with its clots of blood? The quick, terrible economy with which he handled a blade? Atticus’s fingers fluttered at his throat as he coughed a little, then resumed his eating.

"Are you," I asked carefully, "a friend of Uncle’s?"

He grinned. "
Friend
is a nice word. I work for Zhou Jian-Ping—Uncle, as you call him. I manage the finance for the karaoke and some of his other business. Those two"—he indicated Big One and Poison with a lift of his chin—"probably like to have someone else for the accountant, but the family have obligation to me."

"Obligation?" Somehow it was hard to imagine my raw-looking cousins feeling obligation to anyone, let alone this slight, courtly old man. "You mean financial obligations?"

He frowned. "How to explain. Uncle and I, we are neighbors in our youth. His father—your grandfather, you probably know—was an interpreter for the Japanese."

"I didn’t know he worked for the Japanese."

"Everyone here worked for the Japanese in the 1930s. You know your history? This is World War Two. Japan is in Manchuria, Taiwan is the Japanese colony. Japan needs translators on the mainland but cannot use a mainland Chinese. Too risky. So they send your grandfather and others instead—loyal subjects of the Emperor," he said, a little derisive.

"I didn’t know," I repeated. The sudden brush of my own blood with the faceless bulk of history sent a tremor through my limbs, like a drumbeat felt from far away.

"The army says one year, two years only. But five years pass, and still your grandfather is not allowed home. Your grandmother was sick then, and cannot manage your mother and Uncle both, so my father took Uncle and raise him along with me and my sister. Only temporary, of course. Your grandfather come back eventually, but very, very late—not until after Hiroshima. Uncle was about twelve, I think. He barely know his father at all. But he was always very grateful to my family. Grateful, and angry."

I glanced down at the end of the table, where Uncle was painfully feeding himself a spoonful of soup.

"I expect he does not remember enough for it to be important now," said Atticus.

After dinner, Poison and the others immediately got down to their intended business, setting up a few tables of mah-jongg, the click of the tiles like glass rolled by the sea, accompanied by a lot of cigarette smoke and cursing. Poison tried to engage me as a fourth at his table, but I didn’t want to play. My flight home was tomorrow, and there was still the business of my mother’s ashes to take care of; the will; the sudden yearning to talk to my brother, the hundreds of things I had to tell him, to ask.

The room seemed suddenly too crowded, and I wanted to get my brother alone for a while, though he himself appeared to have no need of a tête-à-tête. He stood on the other side of the card tables, opposite me, not playing, watching their games as he smoked. I had the idea that he was using the men as a kind of live barrier, a defense against me. I had accustomed myself to his face, with its stitches and bruises, but as I looked at him across the room now, it blinked once more into anonymity.

"Emerson?" Atticus, who had been sitting next to Uncle, got up to leave. "Will you help me?" He pulled a handful of plastic bags out of his raincoat pocket.

I followed him to the entry. He sat down with some difficulty on an overturned crate near the door and tied a bag around his left foot, then one around his right to keep the rain off his shoes.

"I am sorry you are leaving so soon," he said. "But if you come back, I invite you to look me up." He handed me his card. "It was a vigorous conversation."

"Yes, it was." I knotted the bags securely around his ankles and sat back, uncertain.

"What did you mean about Little P, about his having… rectitude?"

Atticus suddenly appeared very interested in his shoes and adjusted the knot around his right ankle.

"I think this will hold." He held out a hand, and I pulled him up. He tied the belt of his raincoat, stamping his feet experimentally a couple of times. He seemed not to have heard my question, offering me his hand instead. "Good-bye, Emerson. I wish you good luck."

But as he opened the door, he cast a furtive glance over my shoulder at Uncle and the others. He paused, then drew me out into the entryway, closing the door behind us.

"
Écoutez-moi
, Xiao Chang," he said quietly. "I asked before if you noticed some change in your brother. Why did you not answer me?"

I bit my lip. "Because I don’t know."

"Wrong," he said. "You are afraid to acknowledge what changes you see. Well, and perhaps you are right," he said, with a small sigh. "Maybe it is right to be afraid."

"Has Little P"—I couldn’t quite form a question to fit my apprehension—"done something?"

He shook his head. "I must go," he said, making a movement toward the elevators.

I caught his arm. "But you said he was principled. The most principled man I would ever meet."

"Yes, of course.
Buguo,
many kinds of people have principle. Mao Zedong, you know, was also a man of great rectitude."

"I don’t understand."

The door opened, and one of the men came out, muttering: he had not won his pot. Before the door closed, I caught a glimpse of Little P and Uncle conferring. Atticus saw them too. He shook out his rain hat with an air of resolution.