The Natural Laws of Good Luck (2 page)

That spring the peepers were so loud outside the window that my teenage daughter Paroda, the only one still at home, couldn't fall asleep. She lay there thinking of ways we could improve our
standard of living, and in her mind, this should be accomplished by acquiring more things. The want ads resurrected, we found a television, a sewing machine, and a free trampoline that was two hours away. The black rubber top draped over the roof of the car, concealing the upper half of all the windows. As we crept home with pipes looming up between the passenger's seat and the driver's seat and out the back windows, the muffler scraped swollen bumps of asphalt, and by the time we drove up our own road, the tailpipe was dragging in the dirt.

Bouncing up into blue sky and flapping our arms was ecstatic fun at first. The dogs sat below, spotting us with the rising and falling of their noses. It hadn't occurred to Paroda or to me that it was too late for the trampoline or that the empty sky could not fulfill our longings. We tried alternate jumping, my weight propelling her upward and vice versa, but she said I had no rhythm, and each impact caused me to pee my pants on ascension. At fifteen, she was more interested in boys than backward flips and decided to use the trampoline to lie on her back in a two-piece bathing suit.

In redoubled efforts to make my own sovereign sense of life, I employed my hands more than my head, because knowing how to do things seemed vitally important to a feeling of belonging to the world. I started with the old doorknobs, which were forever coming off in our hands. It had taken some years of tightening and retightening the screws to no avail before I realized that the threads were stripped. Even that simple thing had presented a mystery. I pulled porcupine quills out of my dog's gums with pliers and cleaned his fight wounds with Betadine. I sliced the throats of my chickens, tied their legs, and hung them upside down, their little assholes curiously identical to my own.

Every time I stepped out the back door, several toads blinked their gold-rimmed eyes in the porch light. I felt this amphibious wealth as an omen; I could smell a fragrant storm on the horizon. Outside my house was a small pond, surrounded by cattails and birch trees and rapidly filling in with mud and islands of grass. The
nostrils of box turtles, bullfrogs, and blacksnakes appeared and disappeared at the amber surface. The great blue heron reigned supreme. Never caught arriving, he was just suddenly and completely there, as if the sky had opened and closed behind him. Leaving, he would step once and rise into air thickened by his own wings. If there were someone somewhere in the world available to share all this with me, then I guessed that person would have to appear like the heron, out of a tear in the sky.

From the dew of toad-attended nights came an unexpected spring. My friend invited herself over for “talking together.” I had known her for nine years, since the day after she arrived from China—about three years after her husband, Zhang Bei-hu, my Tai Chi teacher. Before my teacher brought her to class, he described his wife as not pretty, only “so-so” by Chinese standards. He repeated this three times so slowly and pointedly that it seemed an incantation to repel potential admirers. I thought she was the most beautiful person I had ever seen, especially her curly lips with their never-ending vocabulary of pouts, presses, hesitant poses, and different-shaped portals for her high-pitched, musical laughter. She had a full, round face with dimples and a smooth, honey-colored expanse of forehead. I felt her bewilderment with her husband's new American personality and his impatience with her need for him to slow down to help her adjust. I identified with her saddened but hopeful spirit, fighting off bitterness while holding out for a taste of sweetness.

Now, years later, my friend still found the English language an excruciatingly clumsy vehicle of expression, so her announcing that she wanted to have a talk with me aroused suspicion. Usually we just ate lunch, laughing when food fell from my chopsticks or her napkin disappeared under the table. She winced when I tried to pronounce her name, Yiliang, while she did quite well enunciating mine: “Eh-lin-ah.” She imparted sisterly wisdom to me, such as, “Before twenty year old, daughter no good, don't listen mother. After twenty, daughter not too bad. I think all daughter same way. You don't worry.” On husbands she said, “Men all same way too.
Doesn't matter Chinese, not Chinese. Men not understand what the lady need. This traditional Chinese saying.” She dubbed any aphorism she deemed worthy a “traditional Chinese saying.”

The afternoon she came over, she summoned all her powers to make the few words she knew convey a startlingly clear message. We sat facing each other, she on my grandmother's rocker and I at her feet on a low footstool. She said that she had noticed I was lonely—no good. Loneliness was a demon that could detach you from the world. Having two old people together is better than one old person all alone. These two can take care of each other and try to understand each other. Understanding required many years; therefore, the two must help each other live a long, long life. Her brother in China was lonely too. Maybe we would like each other. She would send me to China to find out.

That was her speech, and she had exhausted her vocabulary. She grasped the arms of the chair and stood up. I, too, stood up. She drew a huge breath and said, “OK, all done.” She had caught me off guard with this strange idea, unnerved the atmosphere and lowered the barometric pressure in the low-ceilinged room. We walked arm in arm toward the door, and I said I wasn't so sure. “You think about,” she said.

Thinking back a few months, I realized that Yiliang had been cooking this idea of hers ever since February. I had been sitting next to her in the high school auditorium in the midst of the four-hour-long Chinese New Year's talent show. Besides the natural songbirds and weapon-flashing acrobats, there were nose singers, forgetful dancers, and bad joke tellers, but all held their heads high, supported by the precept that anything worth doing is worth doing badly. I agreed with this, for almost two hours.

A young man in a suit and tie wielded a yo-yo with solemn finesse, but Yiliang wasn't watching. She was pressing her nose with her forefinger, squishing it down to meet her curly upper lip. “Maybe,” she murmured, tapping the finger, then turning to address my lap, “maybe could work.”

I didn't ask her what could work. Answering questions only stranded her in the mire of the English language. Instead, I shared with her that I had gotten a speeding ticket on the way over, on a dark, doglegged back road, for going forty-two in a thirty-five-mile-an-hour zone. “Police catch you now is good thing,” she said. No stranger to upside-down logic, I accepted her statement. On the way home, even though I took a different route, I was pulled over again.

Later, anticipating my blind date in China, I looked up the Chinese zodiac, which is based on the twelve-year orbit of Jupiter, the planet of luck. Each year has its own animal whose traits are reflected in the people born under that sign. I found that her brother was a dog person, and I was a snake. The astrologer's commentary, informed by centuries of folk wisdom, was simply “This could work.”

When Yiliang first proposed that I meet her brother, it seemed an odd and disturbing idea, since I knew nothing about him and had never considered going to China. Still, I thought that not choosing for myself might possibly work better for me. Allowing my own attractions to steer my life had only battered my heart.

Yiliang's husband, Zhang, was leading a small tour group to China, and I could come along. I asked Yiliang, “What's your brother like?”

“He is very kind, very weak.”

“He's very weak? Oh dear.”

“Oh dear? I think you don't need ‘oh dear.' What does
weak
mean in English?”

“Weak
means ‘not very strong.'”

“No, no. He is not this word, because he is very strong. I cannot translate. He is not exactly weak, maybe just some way weak, sometime weak, but not exactly weak. You know, my brother doesn't like fighting, arguing something. My brother is very peaceful, quiet, very nice. He very love painting something, but he painting all no good.
Weak
is wrong word, but my English no good. So sorry, cannot find right word for brother.”

Yiliang's husband's sister, having met the man in question at family gatherings back in China, volunteered that he had a face that was
bu cuo
. The literal translation of
bu cuo
is “not bad,” but the actual meaning is “really cute.” She elaborated that he looked better than his sister because his upper lip did not pout over his lower lip—not pretty, by her standards. No one on her side of the family had the undesirable lip configuration.

“My side all not too ugly—don't you agree?”

I nodded awkwardly, still unaware at that point in time that “not too ugly” meant “pretty cute.”

With only one wrong word and several bland words, including the two blandest of all—
nice
and
cute
—I discarded them all and asked no more questions. My mind remained empty of ideas, except one: her brother's name was Zhong-hua. I learned that
zhong
means “middle” and
hua
“flower,” “bloom,” or “flowering.” Therefore,
Zhong-hua
translates as “Middle-Flowering,” referring to Middle Kingdom, the ancient name for China. Other than flowers, maybe fields of poppies, no images enticed.

We never spoke on the phone or exchanged letters because neither of us knew enough of the other's words. He would have been capable of saying an economical “I am Lu Zhong-hua,” and I just
“Ni shenti hao bu hao”
(How's your physical health?). We both knew our limitations and chose the silent way. I tried to imagine all the water, stars, sand dunes, storms, and trembling leaves between this man and me.

I am an anxious person and not eager to trust. How can I explain that when I thought of this man I had agreed to meet, I felt immense calm? I had never felt calm before and wondered if
calm
and
weak
meant the same thing in Chinese. In the months before I traveled to China, we had a fervid courtship, impossible as it may seem. I felt as if he were speaking right into my soul: “Don't worry. You can relax.”

People reacted differently to my decision to go to China to meet a man. Paroda, a great romantic, was excited and pleased. My older
three children reserved both judgment and enthusiasm and said later that, having but one mother, they had no alternate standard for what a mother should be or do. Two wise old friends said, “Yes, of course, this is your destiny.” The common wisdom is that people, by seeking love, risk losing themselves. I did not fear this loss. The very essence of me was in that unfinished part ever tipping toward the unknown or somersaulting, completely without grace, except in its willingness to be changed.

I got off the plane in Beijing to a surge of Chinese people politely pushing, shuffling, and nudging past one another. This was not the politeness of words but the politeness of no words and no eye contact. Jowl to jowl and hip to hip, they managed not to invade one another's capsules. Everywhere I turned, there were people pressed so closely that any one of them could stand on one leg and lean without falling down. They averted their eyes and baby-stepped purposefully, all without offending other people by noticing them. In China's public places, you can still feel a private space despite being hotly pressed from all sides. This was unlike the experience of American crowds, where you end up feeling harried, invaded, and even accosted. Rocked in the personal houseboat of my own body, I sailed comfortably, for the first time in my life, into a sea of introverts.

A voice said, “There he is—that one, you see, with the flowers.” I saw one solid figure standing absolutely still. A multitude swayed around him. I had never seen a photograph of him, yet recognized this density, this shape—its decisive statement, “I am here.” Condensed and contained, he appeared at the same time to have been waiting there for a thousand years and to have just parachuted down through a hole in the world above this one. He was rooted like a tree to the center of the earth, and he had roses. Other people pushed and bumped him as if he were invisible to them. His eyes remained fixed on nothing.

The temperature was ninety-nine degrees Fahrenheit. Beads of moisture clung to his firmly closed jaw and to the unfurled petals.
He had a strong-boned face, ruddy skin, and an ultra-flat-topped crew cut. Large wire-rimmed glasses seemed about to slide off the low bridge of his nose. A green plaid short-sleeved shirt and loose-fitting pants, belted high, clothed a short, stout, no-frills package.

His eyes met mine, and with a quick bow of the head, he looked down, smiling inwardly. I smiled this way, too. It was the most no-nonsense, needing-no-further-elaboration, sincerely silent communication I would ever receive from another human being. I should have remembered its completeness in times to come better than I did.

The Middle Flowering

T
HE ROSES HAD BEEN HIS SISTER
'
S IDEA
. “American women like,” she had instructed. Zhong-hua would never again resort to this kind of romantic gesture. With him I was to learn a strange and separate language of love.

Our first meal together was shared with a group at a large, round table. The entrées were placed on a revolving Chinese-style lazy Susan, a tiny plate and teacup placed before each guest. I reached for a dish in the center, but before my hand closed around a serving spoon, someone had spun the circle and the desired food revolved to the other side of the world. Whisking food away from other people by spinning the lazy Susan was evidently not considered rude, but other things were. Zhong-hua never took the last few morsels of a savory dish, for example, and he carefully picked from the sides of a shared dish with his chopsticks rather than mining the center.