James and Leo, along with Alf the dog, arrive at the Spiritual House an hour before the luncheon. The sky is heavy with impending snow. Sleet is falling, tiny droplets cling to Alf’s bat-like ears. As they approach the red double doors, the ears twitch. Faint barking echoes from inside. James scoops the dog into his arms. Thirteen inches at the shoulders, Alf has the confidence of a much larger animal. James must keep him from fighting. Also, he must be on Dagou’s side. What will that require?
The moment the door opens, Alf wriggles expertly out of James’s hold and leaps to the floor, collar jingling.
They’re standing in the former gymnasium of an old elementary school. This is the Spiritual House, purchased by Gu Ling Zhu Chi a dozen years ago, when the city shifted its resources to larger educational facilities. Nobody knows how much she paid, or where she found the money; Leo claims the school district was glad to off-load the shabby building at a bargain price. The gym is small, with a stage at one end and doors on either side. Several men from the community and a dozen women, half of them robed in brown, chat in clusters on the wooden basketball court still marked with its colored lines and semicircles. In the center of the court is a table displaying a three-foot porcelain figure of Guan Yin.
While Leo stands grinning, adjusting the strap on his delivery bag, 22James searches for Dagou. The half-dozen temple dogs circle him and Alf in a delirium of barking, clicking paws, and waving tails. They’re mixed breeds, smooth-haired, ears neither floppy nor exactly pointed, and a few with the long legs, fleet feet, of racing hounds. Two are from the Humane Society. Two are rescue dogs from a meat restaurant in South Korea.
“Some spiritual house,” Leo says, offhand. “More like an asylum for women and dogs.”
Alf stands his ground in the middle of the untidy pack, chest ruffled. He lets himself be sniffed. He begins to growl.
“No, Alf—”
But Alf doesn’t go into battle. He shoots back out from the pack of dogs, whining with happiness.
In the same instant, James is swept into a hug from behind. His mother’s new smell, of wool and incense, suffuses his nostrils. Her hug is so firm and loving that he almost panics, struggling to detach himself. Alf yaps frantically. James manages to get free and turns to greet her.
“Hi, Ma—Alf, get down!”
In only a few months, Winnie has transformed. From a plump and pretty woman, she has withered into a puckish novice, her hair shorn to a salt-and-pepper prickle.
“Sister Yun!” Leo exclaims in mock reverence.
“Come here, James,” says Winnie, tugging his sleeve. James can feel her not simply ignoring his father but bracing herself against him. Even the wool of her robe seems to stiffen when he speaks.
But Leo won’t leave her alone. “You remember me?” he croons, leering over James’s shoulder. “You remember me, Sister Yun? From the big, bad world outside the temple?” He slides his gaze from her to James. “So much love,” he says, his voice tinged with irony. Or is it envy?
Alf whines. Leo’s face lights up in a prepossessing smile. He’s suddenly decades younger than his wife, ages younger. He’s the man in the photo taken just after he arrived in the U.S., a cigar clamped between his square teeth. 23
“Horndog,” he scoffs at Alf, who is still trying to leap into Winnie’s arms. “Player. You forget who feeds you now?”
James is still searching for Dagou. He glimpses Ming near the stage, out of place in his navy blazer. Following his mother, with Alf at his heels, James makes his way across the small gym, passing the table with the toddler-sized statue of the bodhisattva, clothed in robes of gold, surrounded by small dishes of food and pots of burning joss sticks. Nearby, there’s a bowl of sesame candy. Winnie picks out a piece and hands it to James, who puts it in his pocket. Then, taking his arm, she leads him past the stage. They leave the gym. They’re standing in a school hallway, near a window.
“Your hair is wet,” she says.
“Only a little.”
“It’s going to be big storm. Gu Ling Zhu Chi said so. Now, let me see you.” Her thumb and forefinger cup his chin. The light, brightened by snow, dazzles his eyes, and he can’t see the other women who speak nearby.
“He looks like you, Winnie,” someone says.
“Nonsense. Look at his nose. He got that nose from the father.”
His mother says, “You’re studying too hard. You need to take deep breaths. Breathe.”
James breathes. The strong smell recalls his mother’s incense table at home. She raised James and his brothers as Christians, and even wore a little gold cross on a fine chain around her throat, but she never gave up Guan Yin. Her Pu Sa stood on a small table in a room upstairs. Before the statuette, she burned incense in a squat holder made of a peanut butter jar covered with tinfoil; next to this, she kept a glass of water in case Guan Yin might suffer from thirst.
She’s the heart of everything, James thinks. She’s the heart of the family, just as Ming is the brains, and Dagou is the lungs, and our father is the spleen. Why has she left home, left us?
“Ma,” he croaks. “I miss you.” Then he blurts, “Are you happy here?”
“I’m fine. Gu Ling Zhu Chi says I only need to work on my tranquility.” 24
Winnie won’t reveal the nature of this threat to her tranquility. James broods over her health. She is ten years younger than his father, but at the thought of her falling ill, he finds himself back in the bowels of Union Station. Fresh sweat springs to his palms. He searches her features for signs, symptoms.
“Don’t worry, James,” she says. “I’m all right.”
They’re joined by three of the Haven community: Mary Wa and her children, Fang and Alice. Mary Wa owns the Oriental Food Mart, where Leo buys supplies. She is Winnie’s best friend; and Fang is James’s. In a girl-heavy peer group, they’re the only boys. Fang is an oddball. He didn’t get along at school and he shows no sign of getting along now. Although Mary still claims that Fang is going to enroll at UW–Madison, he’s not even at the community college. Today she has persuaded him to dress up for the luncheon. His denim sports jacket splits around a wide paisley tie resting on his belly. His face is like a larger version of his mother’s—peach-cheeked, with a mild plump mouth and wire glasses—but whereas Mary’s eyes are serene, his gleam with a fanatic intelligence.
“These people aren’t real Buddhists,” he tells James, pulling him aside as Mary and Alice chat with James’s mother. “They’re just a random group of bodhisattva lovers. This is a woman’s group and a cult of personality, not a temple.”
“How do you know?”
“There are how many Chinese in Haven?” Fang goes on, ignoring him. “Out of forty thousand residents, there are several hundred Chinese, total; maybe six hundred of us including children? There’s not enough money here to support the real thing. It’s a community center. And a humane society. And Gu Ling Zhu Chi isn’t a real teacher of sutras. She just lets them call her that, informally. She knows it,” he adds, glancing at the “head nun” or abbess. “That’s why she calls it the SH, not a temple. She’s not arrogant.”
James thinks of his brother Ming, warning of opportunistic “Buddhist 25types.” “But what is the real thing?” he asks. “Is there a rule book or something?”
“I know what I’m talking about. I’ve been to Chicago. My mother took Alice and me last month, and we went to visit a temple. Alice thinks I’m right,” he says, beckoning to his sister. “Don’t you, Alice?”
James tries not to turn around too quickly. He’s been in love with Alice Wa for years, since the childhood they spent outdoors together while Fang stayed inside, glued to his PlayStation. James must have spent a hundred afternoons with Alice, crouching over anthills, watching the insects burrowing, excavating, dragging corpses of fruit flies and houseflies and even dragonflies into their heaped-up tunnels, glistening wings moving along the sidewalk in an iridescent funeral procession. Although they attended different high schools, they intersected, also, as child laborers, James running errands for the restaurant and Alice at the register of the Oriental Food Mart.
Until they were thirteen, Alice was what you might call a “natural beauty”: smooth-skinned, with light brown eyes behind corrective glasses and a nose so small it could be drawn on paper with two dots. She didn’t go to the gym or play a sport, and since the Was never vacationed, she was in every way untouched by American leisure: the pale princess of her mother’s grocery, thin-wristed, her black hair uncombed around her shoulders. But around fourteen, Alice began to grow, soon surpassing Fang by inches. Her little nose also grew longer, dipping down with the ferocity of the Was’ Manchurian ancestors. James saw her at the store with decreasing frequency. She made no eye contact; her hands shook as she gave out change; her sentences—never complex—trickled away. No one was surprised when, after high school, Alice, too, stayed at home.
Now, standing close to Fang, Alice slides a glance at James, her glasses magnifying her long eyes and soft, caramel-colored irises. If only she would not stoop, but she does. He has a penetrating, hallucinatory double vision of her as some caged, exotic predatory bird. Green-feathered, yellow-eyed, hook-nosed, clawed, and horned. A wing clipped.
Ask her out. It’s Dagou’s voice he imagines. Ask her out, you noodle-dick. 26
“How is college, James?” Alice half whispers, and the sound of her voice—sweet and silvery, with a strange, rich, low undertone her mother instructs her to conceal by raising it to its highest register, like a small girl’s—pierces him. When they were thirteen, she let him look under her shirt. Only once. At the memory, painful feathers sprout up on the flesh of his arms, the back of his neck. Sweat soaks his sleeves. Where are Fang and their mothers?
“Okay,” he says. “Listen, are you at the store later today? I may come by to—”
Alf yips and whines at Alice.
“Stop it, Alf!” More yipping. James tries his father’s command. “Ting! Ting?” Like many dogs, Alf understands two languages, but sometimes listens to neither. He leaps on Alice. She drops her purse.
When James struggles to retrieve it, he and Alice narrowly miss bumping heads, and he catches unexpectedly the smell she’s carried with her since childhood, a combination of cheap shampoo and dried goods—mushrooms, seaweed. There’s also something that affects him so viscerally his hand slips on the purse. He clears his throat.
“Be right back,” he croaks, and hobbles away, Alf at his heels.
In the little men’s bathroom, James bolts the door. He pulls down his pants, sits on the toilet in the left-hand stall, closes his eyes, and takes hold of his penis. Alice, naked, straddles him and pushes his head against the tank. Alice’s vivid caramel eyes lock onto his as she smiles a predatory smile and kisses him, thrusting her tongue deep into his mouth. Her powerful wings flap once, twice as she hovers above him. James ejaculates into a wad of toilet paper. He breathes.
Alf barks.
James opens his eyes. “What the fuck, Alf? Can’t I have some privacy?”
Alf barks again. He stands directly in front of the toilet: bat ears, bright button eyes, heart-shaped nose, and small, slightly quivering jowls.
James stands, flushes the toilet, pulls up his pants. Alf puts his front paws on the toilet, dangles his head inside, and begins to drink. 27
James pushes him aside, closes the toilet lid. Alf whines. James turns on the faucet and hoists Alf to the sink. His pink tongue laps sloppy circles into the stream of water. The dog’s solid weight in his arms, and the clean, harmless water running calm him. He sets Alf back on the floor and turns off the tap.
Someone knocks at the door.
“Just a second.”
Another knock. He opens the door. It’s his father.
“Almost done,” James croaks, gesturing at the sink.
Leo’s face splits into a knowing grin. “Beating off for Buddha? Ha, ha! Sorry to disturb you! It’s time for you to get out of here. Gu Ling Zhu Chi is coming.”
Backstage, Ming and Winnie are already waiting. Up to now, Ming has managed to avoid wasting his morning. He woke early, went for a run, showered, and drove to the Spiritual House. He made some calls for work and skimmed a document. He checked in with his mother. But now the day has come to an inevitable bottleneck. They’re stuck in a group of people, waiting backstage for their audience with Gu Ling Zhu Chi. Dagou still isn’t here.
Gu Ling Zhu Chi’s public appearances are rare and unpredictable. Because Dagou sponsored the community lunch, she’s promised to adjudicate his case. Dagou couldn’t keep his mouth shut, and so there are several other visitors waiting for consultation. They’re mostly women whose American lives have grown too bitter for them to eat more bitterness, or too morally confusing for Confucius. For years, they’ve been coming to Gu Ling Zhu Chi for spiritual guidance.
Ming has a grudging admiration for the old abbess. Whatever her Buddhist qualifications, Gu Ling Zhu Chi is the only person in town Leo Chao might listen to. Leo respects her, in his way, because of some 28mysterious backstory Ming doesn’t know. Ming examines his father; Leo waits with uncharacteristic taciturnity, his hands in his pockets and a restaurant delivery bag slung over his shoulder.
Gu Ling Zhu Chi and her handler walk onto the stage.
The old woman is so small her elbow fits right into the fingertips of the handler, an Amazonian nun whose beautifully shaped, silver-blond buzz cut shines like that of a towheaded boy. The Amazon, An, was once Chloe North. Years ago, she appeared early one morning at the front door of the Spiritual House, a high school sophomore, dressed in only a torn Totoro nightgown, clutching a kitchen knife, with bruises on her chest and arms. Next to An’s creamy skin and pale blue gaze, Gu Ling Zhu Chi’s face is brown and shriveled, her pouched eyes calm behind thick-lensed glasses. Even Fang says she’s inscrutable.
The first people to come forward are Mr. and Mrs. Chin, mechanical engineers. Everyone knows the reason for their consultation. Their middle daughter, Lynn Chin, a college sophomore, has changed her major to journalism. She has been seduced by words in a language they don’t like to speak. She’s refusing to take pre-law classes. If not for their resistance, she might be majoring in English.
Lynn herself stands nearby, with Fang and James, and Alf. She is a dusky, bespectacled young woman who’s almost always clutching a book.
“What was your old major again?” Fang mutters to Lynn.
She scowls. “Data science.”
While Mr. Chin, tall and sheepish, shuffles his feet, Lynn’s mother leans toward Gu Ling Zhu Chi. Ming edges offstage. Despite his admiration of Gu Ling Zhu Chi, Ming scoffs at the idea that she can foretell the future. He believes in free will. Moreover, he possesses enough cultural knowledge to see through this fatalistic drivel. He’s had four years of intensive Chinese, and he can read the newspaper in both complex and simple characters. He’s the most literate in Mandarin of his Haven generation. From his college history course with a world-class scholar, he knows that Gu Ling Zhu Chi and her group are small eddies at the edge of the great river of twentieth–century change: they’re cultural leftovers 29from not one but two or even three revolutions ago. Truth be told, he is repulsed by Winnie’s prayers; growing up, he often closed the door in order to avoid the sight of her on her knees, forehead to the floor. Of course, Dagou was never a skeptic; their mother’s prayers filled Dagou with proper guilt and shame. He’s an unreconstructed sinner, stupid with the burden of having grasped neither Eastern nor Western moral teachings.
Still, Ming can’t avoid eavesdropping on Mrs. Chin. In Mrs. Chin’s dream, Lynn is near campus, sitting in a tea shop, drinking matcha bubble tea through a bright pink straw. Mrs. Chin is outside, knocking on the window, but Lynn can’t see or hear her.
“… doesn’t she know that college is more than just four years of bubble tea? That she’s slurping up her higher education—hurtling toward a terrible future?”
Gu Ling Zhu Chi’s eyelids flicker as she speaks. “The dream isn’t about this life, but about the afterlife.” She reaches out to hold Mrs. Chin’s hand. She is praying now, in an inaudible murmur. Ming checks to see how Lynn is taking all of this. She has her nose buried in an Elena Ferrante novel.
Ming has wondered why his mother is just now bringing him and his brothers to Gu Ling Zhu Chi. It occurs to him that he might have it backward. It’s possible that Gu Ling Zhu Chi is the one who asked to see the three of them. Maybe the old abbess wants to speak specifically to him, to Ming. Ming, who has paid his mother’s dowry. Does she want more money? As if he can sense Ming’s apprehension, Alf leans against his leg, comforting and solid. Alf’s bright eyes follow Winnie’s footsteps as she shuffles up to Gu Ling Zhu Chi, who bends toward her slightly, gazing through her thick glasses.
A quarter hour goes by before Winnie comes to fetch him. “We’re going to start without Dagou.”
Ming and his mother walk to the little platform. Everybody else has politely gone backstage, except for James and Fang, that bilingual snoop.
“Sons,” Winnie says. “Greet Gu Ling Zhu Chi.” 30
As he has been taught, Ming ducks his head and mutters, “Gu Ling Zhu Chi.” James copies him.
“James first. Stand here,” Winnie says. “Ming, over there.” She gestures Ming away. Does she not want her sons to hear each other’s fortunes? He steps away, but leans toward them, listening.
“Hold out your hand, James.”
James goes red. Ming grins. His brother must be wondering how much Gu Ling Zhu Chi can see. Can she tell that James wants to make out with Alice Wa? Can she foretell his grade in freshman chemistry? There are other things she might advise him about, Ming considers—such as how to recover from his failure to save the old man at the train station. But James doesn’t have the Mandarin to communicate with her.
Gu Ling Zhu Chi examines James’s palm. She bends his fingers, examining the lines, and murmurs something to his mother, tracing out a shape. She presses his fingertips, squinting through her glasses as the blood flushes back into them over and over. As she does this, she unloads on Winnie a fantasy of James in twenty years: James as a great man. Probably she’s only telling Winnie what she wants to hear. Although, who knows? It might be true. It might be that when they were handing out Leo’s flaws—miserliness, dissipation, lechery—James was passed over.
Winnie nods at Gu Ling Zhu Chi, hopeful, proud. She turns, pats James’s arm. “Okay. She’s done.”
“What’d she say?” James asks.
Winnie shrugs as if it’s not important, but Ming can see that she’s decided not to tell. He can always read her. “Good things,” she says, but he knows something is bothering her. “You’re fine. Now go, James.” She gives him a little push. “Ming, your turn.”
Ming makes his way back and shows Gu Ling Zhu Chi his most deadpan face. She studies him, her pouched eyes magnified by her thick glasses.
As she did with James, Gu Ling Zhu Chi examines his palms and his 31fingertips, pressing the tip of each to examine the flow of his blood. Her own hand is surprisingly warm and supple.
“You’re not well,” she says to Ming.
The expression on his mother’s face ripples like the surface of a pond.
“Interesting,” says Fang’s voice from somewhere behind them. “She says Ming is sick.”
Gu Ling Zhu Chi fixes her eyes on Fang. “Get out of here,” she says.
James and Fang back away.
“You’re about to become very ill,” Gu Ling Zhu Chi says to Ming. “You should seek tranquility immediately.” Her voice is colorless and deep. She continues to discuss his health, his habits, and his diet. Ming knows she’s full of shit. He’s given the Spiritual House a lump of money, and now the old lady is trying to scare him into giving her even more money. Upsetting Winnie is a part of the plan. Winnie is staring at Gu Ling Zhu Chi, stricken. Gu Ling Zhu Chi bends toward her in a concerned, attentive way. Only Alf seems not to notice anything amiss. Instead, he yips with joy and bounds off the stage toward the door.
At last, Dagou has arrived.
From his place on stage, Ming is among the first to see Dagou across the gymnasium. He isn’t happy that his brother has shown up to find him with his hand outstretched, ready to receive his fortune-cookie fortune. But Dagou, wrapped up in his own turbulence, doesn’t pay attention. He strips off his coat, revealing a pink dress shirt, and makes his way toward the stage.
“Hey, everyone,” he says, reaching down absently to tousle Alf between the ears. His voice sounds both higher and deeper, huskier and more sonorous. His gaze settles on Ming; they nod politely.
Ming still hasn’t gotten used to Dagou’s changed physical appearance. Every part of his body has been blown up from the inside into 32a heavier version of itself. His shoulders are twice as thick as the year before, and his feet seem to point out slightly. Flesh hangs even from the lobes of his ears. Only his eyes are familiar, dark and quickly moving. (“Restless,” James once described him. “Horny,” Leo corrected him.)
“Hey, Snaggle.” Dagou walks straight over to James and tousles his hair, too. James stands there with his mouth curled up at the corners like a child. Cuff links flash as Dagou opens his arms to embrace their mother. Then Dagou takes a visible breath, chest swelling, and faces their father. Leo Chao’s face grows both brighter and darker. Younger, with his edges more defined, he seems to recognize another man in Dagou, someone from long ago.
“I’m here,” Dagou announces. “We can start now.”
“Where were you?” Ming can’t help pointing out that after making them all show up, he’s an hour late.
“At the restaurant.”
“It’s Monday. The restaurant’s closed.”
Dagou shrugs. “’Cause JJ’s gone, Ba asked me to go through the supplies with O-Lan.”
“Where is Katherine?” asks Mary Wa.
Dagou hangs his head. “We broke up.”
This is a surprise, and they all stare. Ming drops his gaze. The idea of Dagou dumping Katherine is insufferable.
“What happened?” asks Mary Wa. “I thought you were going to get married.”
Dagou shrugs. “She wouldn’t agree to a prenup.”
Nobody laughs. It’s a good thing most of them don’t know what a prenup is, because Dagou making a marriage joke about Katherine is offensive.
“Well,” says Mary finally, “some girls very shy. You boys want it bad, you need to wait. Sometimes it take one year after marriage, maybe more, for her to get used to the idea.”
“Give up, Ma,” Fang says. 33
“We ended it two weeks ago,” Dagou says, “because I wanted to give her time to make other plans for Christmas.”
There’s a murmur of disappointment. Yet no one but Ming notices Dagou’s lack of consideration. Two weeks to make new Christmas plans? Dagou is an ass.
“Well,” says Mary. “These things run their course.” The course of the relationship was twelve years. “It’s better to break up before having kids. Once you have kids, you can never change your mind.”
“Until they go to college,” puts in Leo Chao, smirking at their mother.
“What if she signs the prenuptial agreement?” someone asks.
“That was a joke.” Dagou looks around hopefully. When no one laughs, he hangs his head. “I just don’t want to marry her,” he blurts. “The more I thought about it, the more I knew I’d be making a terrible mistake.”
“Let’s talk to Gu Ling Zhu Chi,” Winnie says. “Come here.”
Ming is dismissed. At last, Gu Ling Zhu Chi is done decrying his goals, his health, his work habits. Gu Ling Zhu Chi said one thing, in particular, that Ming finds laughable. She said Ming needs to “return” to his family. As if detaching from his family—the most significant accomplishment of his life—is not the primary reason for his survival. This is what Katherine does not know, since Katherine is, maddeningly, drawn to Dagou in part because of his family, because of Winnie. As ever, the thought of Katherine’s attachment to Dagou, to all of them, fills Ming with an unaccountable irritation.
“Gu Ling Zhu Chi, you know William, my oldest.”
Dagou bends humbly toward the old woman in his coral-pink dress shirt, like a jumbo cooked shrimp.
Their father has disappeared. Aside from An and Winnie, most of the nuns have also left the gymnasium, presumably to help with lunch. But everyone else has now edged onto the stage, venturing closer, in order to hear. Winnie and Gu Ling Zhu Chi whisper to each other. Ming peers at his older brother, who is listening intently. With the exception of their 34mother, Ming has never seen Dagou care about what anyone told him to do. Could Brenda Wozicek be the cause of all of this? Then Dagou faces Gu Ling Zhu Chi and begins to mutter in his childish, flat Mandarin.
“Thank you for agreeing to talk to me. It is very, very important.
“I have been working at my father’s restaurant for six years. It started when my mother got run-down, got pneumonia, and my father asked me to come back to Haven. I didn’t want to leave New York. Ba promised me that after Ma was better, I could have a choice. He would give me a lot of money to help me resettle in New York. Or, if I decided to stay in Haven for good, he would make me a partner.
“Now six years have passed. I want my half of the restaurant. Half ownership, half of the profits. What is your advice?”
The old woman shakes her head and says a few words in Mandarin. Ming makes out “Xiaoxin.”
Winnie raises her hands up to her face.
Dagou fishes a handkerchief from his pocket and offers it to her. “Hey,” he exclaims. “You’re upsetting my mother!”
Gu Ling Zhu Chi fixes a severe stare upon him. “William, you may stay for lunch,” she says, clear and strict as a schoolteacher. “But then you go to your apartment. You stay home until after the Christmas holidays. Be careful. You are getting in ‘hot water,’ as the Americans say. If you are not extremely careful, something very, very bad will happen.”
Dagou meets her gaze with a frown, a severity of his own, that surprises Ming. “I was hoping you would help me,” he says. “I’ll stay for lunch, but then I’m going back to work.”
“Don’t work,” Gu Ling Zhu Chi says. “Stay away from that restaurant. You’re inserting yourself into a story you don’t know. Now go away,” she commands, as if Dagou were a pesky child. “I want to talk to your mother.” She turns abruptly to An. “I’m tired.” An takes hold of her right elbow, and Winnie the left. Ming follows at a discreet distance, listening. The three women make their way out of the room, murmuring about Dagou’s spiritual jeopardy, ignoring James and Fang, who wait at the door.
“Ming, what did she say?” 35
“It’s his soul.” Ming shrugs. “She says his soul is more important than the restaurant.”
At that moment, Leo Chao’s shout breaks brightly through their conversation. “Time for lunch!”
The nuns seat them in a row: Dagou, Ming, and James. The handsome son, the accomplished son, and the good son.
Under the long table, Alf settles at their feet with his bottom wedged against Ming’s new Ferragamos. The temple dogs stay on the far side of the room. Ming suspects they’re tired of vegetables.
He himself feels uneasy around so much food. His face is sticky from the steam rising off the vegetable dumplings arranged in perfect spirals, savory garlic stems bright green beneath their translucent skins. To his left is a platter heaped with pressed tofu skin, sesame lima beans, and black mushrooms. Set evenly along the center of the table are platters of mock meats: a sleek mock fish, its shining surface slashed into tic-tac-toes, and a helmet of golden brown mock pork, patterned like medieval scale mail. Ming puts a few mushrooms on his plate, but doesn’t eat them. He’s sworn off big meals. He’s sworn off carbs. But he especially swore off Chinese food, long ago.
Five minutes into the meal, Dagou nudges his right arm. “Hey, Mingo,” he mutters. “I put a month’s salary into this food. Why aren’t you eating?”
“I don’t eat lunch.”
“But these su cai jiaozi are really good,” James pipes up.
“It’s over-the-top,” Ming mutters. “Think of the woman-hours they put into making this ‘plain food.’”
James gapes at his half-eaten dumpling; it’s clear this hasn’t occurred to him. It hasn’t crossed his mind that somebody—perhaps the two novices seated opposite them—worked for an entire morning in the cafeteria kitchen soaking, cleaning, and slicing the massive quantity of dried mushrooms. 36Someone spent an afternoon combining the xianzi of the mushrooms, garlic sprouts, bean threads, and greens; and someone rolled the dumpling skins by hand. The SH claims its labor is communal, implying an advanced anarcho-communism, but it’s easy for Ming to imagine that Gu Ling Zhu Chi works the nuns as dictatorially as his father works JJ and O-Lan. The place is actually precapitalist: exploiting unskilled labor, redistributing the surplus in the form of vegetarian delicacies designed to please the palate of its ruler.
Dagou goes back to work at his full plate. He’s planned out every detail of the menu, but he doesn’t seem to know that he’s about to be the real meal here: he’s the main course.
Their father, seated near one end of the long table, smiles broadly. “Pass the vinegar, please!” His voice is so deep and loud that everyone turns to watch him. Holding a steaming dumpling in a large porcelain spoon, he drips a bit of sooty vinegar on top, greedy and focused. He picks up a sliver of ginger, using his chopsticks with the precision of a surgeon, and places it over the dumpling’s puckered nipple. He raises the spoon to his mouth and takes a bite.
“Hmm. It’s good,” he announces. “But I like my dumplings made with pork. Hot meat juice gushing into my mouth at the first bite. Hot, greasy, delicious pork juice!”
Dagou’s chest swells. “You know they’re vegetarians here.”
“You prefer plain dumplings?” their father shoots back.
Dagou doesn’t answer. He and their father favor meat in all of their food.
“I have nothing against ‘plain food,’” their father says, addressing the community at large. “Winnie says it’s sinful to eat living creatures, it amounts to killing, it’s an act of violence, especially because the choice is an act of will, because we can decline to eat meat, because it’s okay—and maybe even healthier, Winnie says—to eat only vegetables. She says people who stop eating meat have long life, and people who eat only vegetables have the longest life. Yeah, yeah. But, Your Elderliness”—he nods at Gu Ling Zhu Chi—“I, Leo Chao, would rather be dead than 37stop eating pig. I will be ash and bone chunks in a little urn before I don’t eat juicy pig.”
It’s because of people like their father that communism will never succeed. Because of simple human graspingness. Ming watches Leo beckon with chopsticks. A pimpled novice staggers from the kitchen with an enormous platter of freshly stir-fried young pea leaves. They’ve been painstakingly stripped from the stems, then soaked, washed, air-dried, and cooked quickly in hot oil with salt and garlic shavings until wilted to a steaming mound. If Leo Chao must eat vegetables, he will devour the most delicious, labor-intensive vegetables.
“Why no meat? Why ‘cessation from desire’?” Leo continues, heaping pea greens on his plate. “I love my desires. They belong to me, and so I listen to them, I believe them, and if I were a smart guy, like Fang here”—he shoots a glance at Fang, who blinks behind his glasses—“I would take notes. I want them to flourish and multiply. So, if you think the point of life is ‘cessation from desire,’ then you and I are mortally opposed. Of course, there’s no need to worry about you because you don’t believe in violence. So, you and I might as well be friends as enemies, except”—and here he grins, exposing a green stem stuck in the gap between his front teeth—“I don’t make friends.”
He turns this green grin to Gu Ling Zhu Chi, at the head of the table. If she’s annoyed, she gives no sign of it. She’s regained her tranquility. Maybe her harsh words earlier, to Dagou, were inspired by an empty stomach; then again, Ming thinks, there is no truth like the truth of what is said on an empty stomach. In vacuum veritas.
“I have a bone to pick with you,” his father is telling the abbess. “You seduced away my wife! She talks to you at one party, becomes your friend, and loses interest in meat, in sex. All of a sudden, she gives it all up!—the restaurant, the house, even the dog!—and moves into this temple. Are you too good for me, Your Peacefulness?” He pauses, momentarily distracted. For a moment it seems possible—it’s almost believable—that he’s actually hurt, that he begrudges Gu Ling Zhu Chi for stealing away Winnie. But then his features break open with laughter. “My wife—Winnie, or 38Sister Yun—at one time, you know, she would enjoy a good pork hock. She had juicy hocks herself!”
Ming doesn’t frown or laugh at this; he’s transcended all reactions to their father. But Dagou glowers, outraged on Winnie’s behalf. Although Dagou, too, is a dog. A dog in knight’s armor! Ming has heard him say worse about Katherine. As for Winnie, her suffering is unbearable. Yet Ming has long ago grown out of defending or protecting her. He is as loyal to her as any son, but nobody forced her to stay with their father for thirty-six years. Long ago, Ming vowed he would never marry a woman like his mother. He has never dated an Asian woman.
Now James leans toward Dagou, gazing at him in love and support. James has vowed to defend him. And Dagou nods at James, grateful for this vow. Ming sits back.
Dagou sticks out his chest. “Dad,” he says, “I invited everyone to lunch today for a conversation that will affect the whole community.”
Self-important words, surely. But a hush falls over the table. Ming can tell that everyone is waiting to hear what will happen next. Dagou’s fate doesn’t affect their livelihood or their own families. And yet the fate of these fellow Chinese parents, and these American sons, is everybody’s fate.
“Six years ago,” Dagou says, “when Ma got sick, you asked me to move back to Haven. You said when I finished helping out, you’d pay me fifty thousand bucks to resettle in New York. But if I stayed in Haven for good, you promised to make me a partner in the restaurant.”
The room has grown still. Only a few people continue to lift cautious chopsticksful of pea greens to their mouths. Ming waits for his brother to expose himself. It won’t be long.
“For six years, I’ve worked in the restaurant. I’ve upgraded the menu, fine-tuned every dish. I’ve developed a small but significant clientele who can handle a more authentic cuisine. I’ve invested my life’s passion into this place! And I’ve made a decision,” Dagou announces. “I want to be a partner at the Fine Chao, and settle down here in Haven.”
James says firmly, “That’s a great idea, Dagou.” 39
Their mother is smiling. Her friends regress into a momentary happiness, nodding and patting her sleeves. In the last decade, everyone has given up hope that the community in Haven might continue past their generation. With the exception of misfits like Fang and Alice, the next generation has reasonably left the wretched town to seek their fortunes in more cosmopolitan places. Now here is Dagou vowing to live at home, modeling filial piety to his age group.
“It will be nice to have a young person here in Haven,” says Ken Fan. With his thick, graying hair and gift for genial small talk, Ken is a silverback and the informal community leader. He adds, “Maybe you could get MBA, online degree.”
The whole group turns to Leo Chao, filled with hope that one of their children should be loyal to them—want to stay with them. But Ming knows that nothing between Dagou and their father was ever so simple.
Leo shakes his head. “I let you come home,” he says, “but you’re expensive.”
“Let me come home? Ha. You begged me to come home.”
“That was when Winnie got that bad pneumonia,” Mary Wa stage-whispers to her half of the table.
“I pay your salary,” their father continues. “I let you eat for free and live over the restaurant. But I can’t support a partner.”
“Now, Leo,” says Ken Fan affably. “That can’t be true.”
“I’ll prove it to you. Show you my tax return.”
“Of course your tax return makes you seem broke,” Dagou fumes. “Of course on paper you’re barely breaking even. You never report cash!”
Everyone suspects that Leo siphons off the cash. But everyone also knows it’s stupid of Dagou to bring it out in the open.
“Look at my son,” Leo says. “When he was little, he thought his father could make it rain. Now he thinks I’m a rainmaker. Thinks I’m sitting on a big pile of cash.”
“You promised me!” Dagou yells back.
There’s an almost imperceptible rumble from their father, a flicker in 40his jaw. Ming holds his breath. Beneath the table, Alf sits upright, pushing his butt more securely into Ming’s loafers.
“In fact, you owe me,” their father is saying. He surveys the table. “Yes, he owes me rent for all these years he lived here for free!”
Dagou’s wide neck flames red. “You offered me the apartment! You—”
“I say nothing all these years. But since you bring it up, every year you are a bigger liability. One thousand per month in rent I could be making for a nice two-bedroom apartment over the restaurant. A nice, spacious two-bedroom home—the place where our own family lived until you were eight years old. I could be renting to another family! Making more than seventy thousand dollars! Not counting interest! You’re living there for free! And since you mention, there’s the extra food. You are not a small guy. I give you room and board. Compounded over six years, that comes out to over one hundred thousand dollars.”
Dagou squirms. Ming’s lips twitch. Here is the irregularity in Dagou’s model of filial piety: if Dagou is truly a filial son, an obedient, selfless son, as he so clearly thinks he is, then he shouldn’t assume anything more in return for his labor.
“And now the dog wants a bigger house!” Leo continues. Ming wonders what his father is talking about. “You finally want to settle in Haven like your father! You were too good for it before. Now that you’re a failure—”
“That’s not true! He’s not a failure!” James pipes up, challenging Leo.
Genially, Leo waves him off. It was stupid for Dagou to think their brother’s help would make a difference. With his skinny face and his college hoodie, not to mention his God-knows-why affection for every one of them, James is not a serious adversary.
“You think I’m a loser!” Dagou yells. “Am I a loser for keeping us alive when all the decent places are moving to the strip? I keep your business going. You pay me almost nothing. My salary is a joke. I want an equal share of the profits.”
“Big man,” sneers Leo.
Ming knows Dagou will turn to Winnie a second before he does it. He always runs to their mother. 41
“He grown up now,” Winnie says. “Let him have his share.”
“You stay out of this! You gave up the business when you left it for this menstruation hut!”
The table erupts. “Lay off it.” “Don’t talk to her like that!” “This is a Spiritual House.”
Leo pushes back his chair.
Standing, he has the look of a beast on its hind legs: hairy, primitive, his long arms hanging almost to his knees. It isn’t just the dark, unshaven hair sprouting in patches on his cheeks. There is something hungry yet remote in his close-set eyes. Everyone can see it. Some of them shrink back and turn away. Ming knows this eerie quality well. It has been there in his father for as long as he can remember. Long ago, he learned to escape its worst, to allow other members of the family to confront it. Now he climbs up into a place of refuge in his mind. A kind of hunting blind, where he can watch and wait.
From above, Ming watches his brother. Dagou has the blank expression of someone who is only just becoming aware of what he’s done.
“‘Don’t talk to her like that,’” their father jeers. “Mama’s boy! And you …”
He grins wickedly at Winnie. Despite her vow of tranquility, she appears ready to bolt from her chair. The nuns seated on either side hold on to her arms.
“You think he’s still your diaper-filling lamb. You have no idea what a dog he is. Ask him why he needs money now. Ask him. Ask him.”
Dagou looks around the table. “It’s true, I’ve fallen in love,” he announces. “My whole life is changing.” He pauses importantly. People stare at their plates.
“Christ,” says their father. “All this fuss over a decent fuck.”
The nuns gasp. Now Dagou’s chair creaks, and he also rises to his feet. He is enormous and he swells with rage. His shoulders tense. He points at his father and his finger is shaking. It could be that he has decided, once and for all, to take down Big Chao. As the Sons of Liberty rose against King George. As the sons turned on Chronos, as he himself turned upon Uranus. So it will be in the family Chao. 42
Dagou opens his mouth to speak. Closes it. Opens it again. No sound comes out of him. His cheeks are trembling. He stands at the long table, opening and shutting his mouth.
James turns imploringly to Ming.
From his position above the fray, Ming shrugs.
After half a minute, Dagou produces a noise: a kind of squeal, the yelp of a dog that has been struck.
“What are you saying?” teases their father. “Speak up, I can’t hear you!”
Dagou inhales one more time, but what comes out of his mouth is just above a whisper. “Don’t you talk about her like that,” he manages to squeak out, and then, more deliberately, “you asshole!”
Their father laughs. It’s a big sound of pleasure, amused and sensual, a man’s laugh, a timbre of laugh that has possibly never been heard in the Spiritual House. The two novices across the table stiffen as the laugh releases itself, ringing out, then settling down gradually, followed by a long intake of breath.
“Apologize!”
“Never!” Dagou screams back in a voice that cracks as shrill and high as a small boy’s.
“Apologize before the Christmas party, or else you’re fired!”
Dagou balls his hands into fists. Lines of fury are drawn across his face. His jaw works, his chest heaves. Spittle flies from his mouth. For a moment, even from his safe distance, Ming is afraid.
“William.”
Gu Ling Zhu Chi is struggling to stand. An grabs the old woman’s elbow, helping her raise herself, gradually, over her end of the table. When she speaks again, her dry voice holds absolute authority.
“William. I told you. Go back to your apartment.”
A silence follows. Everyone waits.
Dagou pivots almost frantically from their mother to the old nun and back to their mother again. But Winnie will be no help. Ming knows this about their mother. Her inability to stand up to their father has always shamed him. 43
Winnie, her face so enragingly heartsick that Ming can hardly watch, gestures toward the door.
Dagou pushes back his chair and picks up his coat.
James is staring miserably at his plate. Clearly, James feels he has failed to be a good brother. Ming himself has no such regret. It is many years since he has tried to help Dagou, longer yet since he has admired him. It’s hard to remember a time when he ever looked up to him.
Still, when Dagou nods at him in farewell, Ming nods back.
Passing James’s seat, Dagou bends down to him, puts a hand upon his shoulder. “Snaggle,” he mutters. Ming leans in close to hear. “Come by later? My place around three o’clock?”
James nods.
The room is silent except for Dagou’s disappearing footsteps. The front door closes almost timidly.
Gu Ling Zhu Chi is still standing, with her steely, blue-eyed handler at her side.
“Leo Chao,” she says. “Big Chao. You are the boss. But it would be to your own advantage to watch behind you. You know what I am talking about. You’re in danger of a bad death.”
Her dry voice, crackling with certitude, is followed by expectant quiet.
Leo only shrugs and picks up his delivery bag. The novices across the table sigh. They think it’s over. But Winnie is still alert and watchful in her chair. Ming doesn’t leave his hunter’s blind. He’s waiting for a parting attack: Leo Chao seldom fails to get in the final word. Now he makes his way across the gymnasium, not seeming to care. He’s almost reached the doors when he stops, opens his bag, and takes out a bulky package wrapped in white paper.
“You can’t say I don’t come ready to give,” he calls out. “I brought special treats!”
He throws the package in the direction of the big gray mutt nearest him.
Ming feels Alf, below the table, raise his head.
The other dogs jump at once to their feet. It’s as if Leo’s thrown a 44magnet into a box of filings. Ears perk, nostrils twitch, and a high, starved howl breaks into the air. The room explodes with desperate barking. Alf charges out from under the table.
The dogs fight over the bloody package. Their snarling snouts seek out the paper, their teeth snap on air. Their tails whip and brush and dance. Those who can’t get close stand back and whine. From the table, the nuns cry out in protest; the dogs ignore them.
Someone is rushing toward the fray. It’s Winnie, all tranquility forgotten, frantic yet determined to rescue her beloved Alf. Brown robes flying, she plunges into the melee. She seizes Alf by the collar, but Alf wriggles free, and Winnie is left holding the leather band. As Leo Chao opens the doors to step outside, a German shepherd mix seizes the meat and dashes into the swirling snow. Alf rushes after him.
“Alf!” Winnie cries out.
But Leo stands by. “Let him have his fun!” He grins and leaves the building, slamming the doors behind him.
James remembers it this way: The winter after Ming went east, to college, their mother, now working too hard, came down with a bad cold that turned into pneumonia and sent her to the hospital. Dagou left New York, where he’d been living on kitchen jobs and gigs as a bass player, returned to Haven, and moved into the old family apartment over the restaurant. James’s big brother was in town again, charismatically uncombed and unshaven, loquacious and needy, pressing James into assistance as he cast extraordinary spells of pungent, savory magic in the restaurant kitchen. Reminiscing about New York, dispensing guidance about the world at large. The two of them spent hours and hours watching football and playing video games in the apartment. It was Dagou who took to calling James “Snaggle” (a joke on James’s crooked front tooth and a play on the transliteration “Sangou”) and Dagou who nicknamed their puppy “Alf” (a joke on “Arf”; his given name was Bruce Lee 45Chao). Dagou took up enough space for two brothers. Although there remained, whenever James thought of Ming, a wordless space, a question mark, a pause.
In midafternoon, as James climbs up the snowy steps to Dagou’s bachelor apartment, he remembers it as a place of refuge. He opens the door with anticipation and nostalgia.
“Snaggle,” his brother’s deep, husky voice emerges from the other room. “Check this out.”
Leaving his wet shoes in the kitchen, James passes the old family bedroom now redone with a luxurious king-sized bed draped with a faux-fur blanket. He enters the old living room, now a darkly glowing, carpeted space, a cave, with walls warmly painted brown, and dimmed wall sconces. From one side hangs a stuffed boar’s head; and on the other side is mounted a screen, slowly humping through a spiral of rich colors. Dagou’s tall bass looms magisterially in a corner. The rest of the room is dominated by an overstuffed leather couch and a glass coffee table with legs of burnished metal. On the table are piles of cookbooks in two languages, and a fortress of electronic equipment, including a mysterious black box.
Dagou, a barefooted bear in a cave, hunches at his laptop, its glow lighting up the high, ruddy contours of his face. James is reminded vividly of their father, sitting with his glass of baijiu in the dark. But Dagou is typing away at the laptop with an air of furious industry.
“Hey, Dagou.”
“Hey, Snaggle!” Dagou moves a pile of red stationery from the couch. James lowers himself into the empty space, and the smell of leather suffuses him; it’s like sitting in an enormous baseball glove. A glass is put into his hand. James sniffs a strong odor of alcohol. Beneath the leather and the alcohol, he can sense the comforting interest his brother has always taken in him, the generous interest of a larger, stronger animal nudging a youngling.
“Come on, try it. Tell me what you think,” says Dagou, pointing at the glass. “I’m bringing out the best stuff for you.” 46
James takes a sip. “It’s—strong,” he says, his throat burning. It’s not as strong as his father’s baijiu, but he doesn’t say so. He picks up a sheet of red paper.
You are invited to the
Annual Christmas Party!
Delectable dishes!
and special libations by Dagou Chao!
Fine Chao Restaurant
December 24, 6 p.m.
Dagou sticks out his chest. “This year, Ma asked me to take over the food for the Christmas party. Well, I’m planning the best fucking party ever. Ba doesn’t want me as a partner? I’ll show him!”
James remembers the old woman’s warning to Dagou: Stay away from that restaurant. You’re inserting yourself into a story you don’t know. “Who did you invite?”
“I sent these paper invites to Ma’s friends. But now I’m thinking I’ll invite everyone!” Dagou waves his arm in the direction of the equipment on the table.
James peers at the tangle of wires; his brother calls himself an “audio-gook.” “What’s this box?”
Dagou grins. “This is an illegal transmitter. I bought it for a few hundred bucks off of a guy who convinced someone to drag it here from China in his suitcase. I wait until it’s dark and put it in the attic.” He nods at his laptop. “I’m making notes for tonight. Tune in to 88.8 between one and two a.m. tonight for pirate radio! FM 88.8, a lucky number! I’ve been broadcasting for weeks. I don’t know if anyone listens, but I don’t care. I’m going to invite the whole world to my party!”
“I’ll tune in,” James promises, making a mental note. “It’s great to see you,” he says. “I came to the restaurant last night. Where were you?”
Dagou closes his laptop. He gestures for the tumbler and James hands it to him. “It’s a long story.” He takes a gulp. “I’m in a kind of jam.” 47
“Are you going to talk to Ba?”
“Never.” Dagou takes another gulp. “I would tell you all about it, James, but it’s too depressing.”
“But you’re picking fights with Ba. You’re drinking in the afternoon. What’s going on?”
Dagou sets down the tumbler. “You’re full of questions, aren’t you, Snaggle? Well, you know my old dreams of living in the city? Of living as a small fish in a big pond until I make it as a musician? Well, I’m done with that. I’ve given up, I’m ready to settle down for good in Haven, to be a big fish in a small pond. But the problem is—I’m not big enough to do it!” He buries his face in his hands.
James feels a surge of love for his brother; Dagou never hides what he’s going through. “Is this why you broke up with Katherine?”
Dagou sighs. “Are you disappointed in me for breaking up with her?”
James shakes his head.
“Then you really are on my side. Because, of course, everyone else loves Katherine more than they love me!
“There’s a kind of woman, Snaggle, who is above all a good woman, such a relentlessly good, upstanding person that it’s impossible to be in love with her. That’s Katherine! She even looks like a pillar—such smooth skin, so straight and pure with that long neck—and understanding and forgiving! and solvent!—all of it!—and yet why is it such a struggle to love, to feel an essential tenderness toward her?”
“Didn’t you love her?”
Dagou considers. “I think I admired her, Snaggle.”
James’s thoughts, questions, crowd each other, but he can think of no reply.
“Are you wondering, how is it possible to have sex with someone out of admiration? Well, the answer is, it’s not hard at all.”
“She’s pretty,” James says, now red in the face.
“She’s exceptionally good-looking. And good. She’s way too good for me, that’s the problem. It turns out, I want a woman who is equally as bad as myself.” 48
Dagou straightens up and frowns at his toes again, wiggling them thoughtfully.
“The question is not why I slept with her, or even why we went out for so many years, but, why did I get engaged to her? How did that happen? How did we go from perfectly cordial dating, which had been going on since God knows when, best friends, every day as pleasant and uneventful as the one before, to pledging to spend our lives together?
“She is my best friend. Since she took that job in Chicago and followed me back to the Midwest, our romantic life has slowly evaporated. But it didn’t really matter until the last year or so.”
“Dagou, what’s going on?”
Dagou reaches down, digs his right finger between his smallest toes and twists it around. He brings it out, examines it, and sniffs it.
“So maybe we were engaged for so long it became more and more obvious that we were never going to be married. But words were spoken. Promises made. When we were barely out of college, I gave Katherine Ma’s old ring. It was from Ba’s side of the family, I guess, and when I started bringing Katherine home, Ma gave it to me. You’ve seen it, do you remember it?” James tries to recall. A green stone, the color and clarity of lake water, shimmers from somewhere in his memory. “A big chunk of super-rare jade with a complex gold setting, some Asiatic panther with spots of diamonds wound around the jade—it’s the only thing Ba brought from China, it was the one thing he ever gave to Ma. I honestly don’t think he inherited it; I figure he won it somehow, gambling, during those years he spent in Macau. Ma told me there were still a lot of old things tumbling around Macau, left over from the gold and jewelry people brought out of the country and saved and gambled and lost.
“Anyway, I gave her the ring. We were serious at the time. Words were spoken, promises made, unborn children were imagined and named! We were twenty-two years old. We get engaged, everything is fine, and then—well, a decade goes by. I don’t even know if it’s just one day or gradually, 49but it’s not fine. I realize I don’t want to be married to Katherine. I ignore this. Because I’m a shit. I don’t want to be the bad guy. I want her to break up with me, throw me aside, so I can come across all clean here in Haven to Ma, Ken Fan, Mary Wa—why do I give a flying fuck about what they think? Anyway, this goes on for years, me torturing myself, back and forth, and Katherine—well, I think she knew. I believe she knew I was waiting for her to break up with me and so she just … didn’t.
“Then it happens. One day, someone walks into the restaurant, and my life is changed. And it’s imperative, crucial, that I break up with Katherine and get the ring back.”
“Who is it?”
“Hold on. So, I try. I have no dignity, I beg her to break up with me and give me the ring.” Dagou twists the tumbler in his palm. “She won’t do either thing, of course. You may think breaking up is unilateral. It doesn’t take two people to break up. But you’re not dealing with Katherine. First of all, she knows everyone we know; they call her whenever they need to find me, she talks to Ma every week on the phone. It’s like she’s their daughter, and I’m the shitty son-in-law! I can’t even forget her birthday, they’re all reminding me. They want to know the present.” He imitates Mary Wa’s quack: “‘What did you buy for Katherine?’ And this is because they know the truth: She has no reason to stay with me! She could find someone else in a snap.” He tries to snap his fingers. “So why doesn’t she?” he moans. “Why doesn’t she just fucking find someone else?”
He breaks off and stares at James imploringly.
“I don’t know,” James says.
“Because for Katherine, a promise is a promise. Words are not only words, they are as real as real. Those imaginary Han children, they are real children.
“So what do I do? I sleep with someone else. I fall in love! But secretly. Because I can’t bear to have everyone think I’m a cheating scum. Now I really need the ring. So what do I do but go back and say the most humiliating thing possible.”
In the long silence that follows, James wonders how Dagou thinks he’s 50keeping his relationship with Brenda Wozicek a secret, when everyone seems to know about it.
“I’m telling myself, I’m not a creep because I’m not just going to take the ring from her. And so I offer her ten thousand dollars.”
After a startled moment, James clears his throat. “Wouldn’t that make her feel, well, undignified, Dagou? Wouldn’t she believe that you assumed she could be bought?”
“No shit. Of course. Of course it’s ridiculous, and humiliating, and rude, and awful. I don’t know why I did it. I was desperate, I was a crazy man! Here I am, entirely without dignity, begging her to let me give her ten thousand dollars so she’ll understand we’re broken up and give me back the family ring.”
He stops for a moment, lost in thought. “And of course she won’t take it. She doesn’t need the money. She’s gotten through that fancy law school, and she’s working at this evil accounting firm in Chicago. Katherine is rich.”
This is undoubtedly true. Yet there remains one central question about Katherine, separate from the ring and even from the money. “Why won’t she let you go?”
“Because she says I’ll change my mind. She says she knows I’ll change my mind, that I really love her, and anyone else I ever want is just a fling I need to get out of my system, because we got together so young. She’ll wait, and I’ll come back to her.”
“Um, do you think it might be true?”
“No. There’s someone else. I’m not even sure Katherine thinks it’s true. It’s more like an oath, it’s what she tells herself because she’s decided it’s true. I don’t think she loves me anymore. She smiles at me and I’m afraid she’s going to slap me, but she still smiles, she smiles.”
Surely it can’t be that bad. “Of course she doesn’t want to slap you.”
“Wait a minute, Snaggle. It gets worse.”
He stops, gathering his strength to speak. James waits with a sinking heart.
“Do you think I went to Katherine with a bag of cash and tried to buy 51the ‘family ring’ outright? That would be bad enough, right? Well, what I did was worse, Snaggle. I didn’t have ten thousand dollars, I didn’t have two thousand dollars. I went to her empty-handed and told her, I need the ring right now. I told her, I’d buy it back but—I’d have to owe her.”
James flinches. “Don’t tell me any more.”
“I have to tell somebody! And who else will listen, who else could love me after I finish this story except you, Snaggle? So, now she knows, Snaggle—she knows.”
“What do you mean?”
“She knows I don’t have any money.” Dagou’s face is wrung up in misery. “I’ve been keeping up an elegant lie, telling her Dad pays me well, driving down to visit her in Chicago, blowing my salary on dinner. She thought she was engaged to a bustling restaurateur. But she figured out I don’t have the ten thousand dollars, and she’s not a fool, she knows if I don’t have ten thousand dollars, I don’t have a cent to my name. So then, to make it even worse, she …”
A half minute of silence passes. What did she do? James waits, determined to hear his brother out, but Dagou won’t finish his sentence.
James prompts him. “Why do you need the ring so much?”
Another silence, even more prolonged and obdurate, this time for longer than James can bear. He blurts, “You’re in love with Brenda Wozicek.”
An intense flame of yearning opens up Dagou’s heavyset features. Then, almost as quickly, a scowl battens them down. “It’s not what you think! I don’t want to give the ring to Ren. Ren doesn’t even care about the ring. She wouldn’t want it.”
“Why do you want it back? For the family? For Ma?”
Dagou hunches his big shoulders. “I want to sell the ring, to these obsessive Qing antique collectors from Taiwan. Because Ren wants to live rich. Money is more important to her than anyone in the world.” He lowers his voice. “I haven’t told anyone—I signed a lease on this swanky eighth-floor penthouse across town, over in Lakeside. Starting January first. I’m going to surprise Brenda with the penthouse, ask her to live with me—” 52
James recalls his father’s words: And now the dog wants a bigger house! “Did you tell Ba about the lease?”
“I had to! I can’t afford the rent. I asked Ba for more money. He said to break the lease, but I can’t—it would hurt my credit. Ba just laughed. He says, You tried to bite off more than you could chew! So I set up the luncheon, to ask him for the partnership.”
“Do you have to live in Haven? Does Brenda want to stay here?”
“Probably.” Dagou shakes his head. “I’m tired of focusing on geography. It’s a family obsession. There is no perfect place. It’s just that, for people like us—”
“What do you mean, ‘like us’?”
“We Chaos, who are full of passion and inner chaos! None of us can bear to be in our present lives. We’re charged up with unrelenting ambition for the future; it’s why Ma and Ba came to the States. Or we’re sad about what might have been. Ba says he wishes he hadn’t left China. Ma’s trying to get back to a time without Ba. I’m thirty-three and I want to be nineteen again. We want to travel back in time, but we can’t, and so we want to go to a new place instead. Place is what we have instead of time. No. Not true. Money is what we have now, instead of place or time.” He exhales. “Time is money. Place is money. Love, love is money. And power is money. You’ll see.”
“I don’t want to be like that,” says James.
“Ah,” says Dagou. “But you are. You heard what Gu Ling Zhu Chi said to you.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I forget you have such bad Chinese. Well, Ma told me all about it. Gu Ling Zhu Chi read your I Ching and your palm. Then she stood there and told you your fortune. Do you want to know what it is?”
James is certain he doesn’t want to know. But more urgent than this certainty is the desire to know. “If you and Ma know what it is,” he says, “then so should I.”
“Okay. Well, she said you’re going to come into a lot of money, Snaggle. You’re going to find and lose more money than some men make in a lifetime. 53You’ll live a big, important life, you’ll grow up into a powerful man. You’re going to have adventures—expansive, challenging adventures; you’re going to live in many places. You’ll remember everyone you ever knew, and you’ll take on their burdens for them. Love is going to matter to you, more than anything else, and the love of your life is going to be unrequited.”
“What do you mean.”
“Unrequited. That means, ‘not returned.’” Dagou lifts the tumbler and drains it. “All I know is, kid, when you get your big, important life, when you’re making your deals, don’t forget about your old brother here.”
“Dagou,” James says, “it’s Alice. I want to sleep with her.”
“Give ’em up,” says Dagou miserably. “Women are crazy, Snaggle.”
“But—” James tries again. “Does ‘unrequited’ mean … that I’m not going to have sex with her, Dagou?”
“No, Snaggle.” His brother’s voice is sad. “It doesn’t have to, Snaggle.”
“Dagou. What Gu Ling Zhu Chi warned you about.”
“To stay away from the restaurant.”
“Is she right about that? Is it true?”
“Yeah, Snaggle. It’s true.”
“What can I do to help with the party?” James asks, putting on his jacket.
Dagou fishes under the pile of invitations and pulls out a spiral notebook. James is skeptical; his brother almost never plans anything. He reads in Dagou’s big, jagged handwriting: As far as parties are concerned, there are many kinds of greatness. There is greatness of tone, of style; greatness of setting, of occasion, and of the guests. Most important, however, is the food. Dagou flips the page. James reads: A perfect, simple winter meal in honor of our closest friends.
“Let’s see,” Dagou says, poring over a list. “I’ve got it planned out. An awesome meal for Ma’s friends. I can get most of this myself tomorrow. But why don’t you take this list”—he rips out a sheet of paper—“to the Oriental Food Mart. Tell Alice to put these items aside, I’ll come pick 54them up tomorrow. Get me eight bunches of hollow-hearted greens, I need to snag them early. Charge them to the account. Oh, and one more thing,” he says, as James turns to leave.
“What?”
“One of the nuns called me. Ma is really upset. She went straight to her room after the luncheon, with a pounding headache.”
“Should I talk to her?”
“She needs her rest. But I got a text from Brenda.” He gestures at his phone on the coffee table. “Somehow, Alf ended up at her house in Letter City. Can you go pick him up? I’ll text you the address. It would make Ma feel better. She loves that dog.”
“Got it.”
“And when you’re at the store, talk to Alice. Ask her out!” Dagou says, as James heads to the door. “Don’t wimp out on me. It’s time you got laid.”
The afternoon is raw. The clouds lower, pale and unrelenting, sealing everything under a colorless vault of winter. Mary Wa’s store, a quarter mile south, lies on a slight incline. At the bottom of the rise, James begins to jog. At first he watches carefully, trying to avoid the puddles and slick, marbled ice, but when freezing slush floods his sneakers, he stops making an effort and simply gazes at the shabby homes and businesses. He passes an insurance agency, a spiraling barber pole, and the tropical fish store, half-hidden behind steamy plate glass.
He watches Alice through the window of the Oriental Food Mart. She’s on a stool behind the counter, hunched over her sketchbook, knees drawn up under her shapeless gray sweater. She focuses as if she isn’t in the store. When the door bangs, she darts a glance at James and folds the book against her chest.
“Hi, Alice.”
“Hi.”
With a rush of gratitude, James reaches for his brother’s script. 55“Would you please put these things aside for the party?” he asks, handing her the folded page from Dagou’s notebook. “Dagou says he’ll pick them up and pay tomorrow. And I need eight bunches of hollow-hearted greens. He said to put it on his credit.”
Alice reddens. “I’m not supposed to give Dagou any more credit.”
James stands rooted to the floor, feeling the blood recede from his own face and neck.
“I’m sorry,” Alice says.
“No, it’s okay. I’ve got cash.” James reaches for his wallet, trying to think of something else to say. “You have to help me find them, though,” he adds, inspired. “I get them confused with pea greens.”
Alice slides her sketchbook under the counter. She leads him over to the cold room. James follows a pace behind her. He’s close enough to watch the tendons flicker as she flips the ponytail back over her shoulder. He sniffs cautiously at her cheap shampoo and then, unexpectedly, his dick stiffens. The sap of aggression, Big Chao’s blood. He wants to grab her from behind. Alice, somehow unable to hear the pounding of his heart, examines one bunch of greens, then another.
“Here,” she says. “This batch came in from Chicago two days ago. They should be all right.” She counts out eight bunches and leads him out of the cold room, shutting the door carefully.
“Alice,” James says, “when did Dagou start running up so much credit?”
Alice tries the door again. “Sometimes the latch gets stuck open or closed.”
James repeats his question. “I won’t tell anyone,” he says, although he doesn’t know if this is true. He must find out, must persuade her to tell him everything, even though this isn’t the way he would have chosen to prolong their conversation.
She shakes her head. He’s known Alice long enough to recognize when it’s impossible to talk her into doing anything against her mother’s instructions. But he can never predict when she’ll take it upon herself to disobey. There was that Sunday afternoon, when they were thirteen, 56when she raised the corner of her shirt and let him see a budding breast. He still often trips over this stuck moment in his memory. The line of her narrow torso and then the aureole, the pinkish quirk of flesh, the delicate nub of her nipple. “I want to see it again,” he said breathlessly, the following Sunday. She never showed him again.
They’re already at the cash register. “What’re you drawing? Can I see?”
He expects her to say no. But now she’s holding out the open sketchbook for him to examine.
He’s expecting nothing special, perhaps wispy penciled images of their surroundings: low metal shelves holding neat, meager rows of canned goods, small piles of Asian pears. He’s prepared for something tentative, or perhaps even skilled, but incomplete, a beginning—something to encourage.
Instead, the page is dark with ink. James sees an elaborate drawing, covering the entire sheet except for one corner. He makes out a series of chambers, long rounded rooms. Inside them, a community exists—one room has rows and rows of tiny beds, another laundry lines with identical dresses, tiny hats, clipped onto clotheslines. The chambers are populated with figures, not human shapes, but animals. Rabbits, badgers, rats, weasels. There are adults and children. Playing, conversing. There’s a playroom filled with little swings, slides, dragon-shaped riders on coils. There’s a coatroom. And here—James is sure of it—is the Fine Chao: dining tables outfitted with tiny lamps; a kitchen with hanging pots and pans. There is a pantry in which James can make out roots, leaves, and sprouts. And a room for cold storage, filled with shelves of what seem to be enormous seeds, kernels, or grains, organized by type, still encased in their protective hulls, and shelves of various-shaped but similar objects that prick upon his memory: insect wings. Glittering wings of all shapes and sizes, drawn in detail, so thinly inked they appear transparent. Toward the top of the page there is a horizontal line, and above the line, a mound.
“Wow,” says James. “This is—” He stops. He can’t share the peculiar 57sensations that have welled into him. He’s been given a glimpse into a world belonging to Alice, utterly private, but designed and arranged according to a pattern curiously personal to himself.
“I was going to include a library,” Alice says, “over here.” She points to the blank corner.
“It’s so strange,” he says, without meaning to say she is strange. Maybe she doesn’t care. “I love it,” he says in a firm voice.
“Sixteen dollars,” Alice says, now red-faced, pushing some buttons.
James shuffles through his wallet again and finds a ten and two fives. He gives them over and watches her count out the change. Her hands move with practiced confidence at the cash drawer. But when she gives him the money, her fingers shake.
“Alice,” James says, “would you go on a date with me? Hypothetically, I mean—”
“I don’t know.”
“So you won’t go?”
“My mother would probably want me to.”
“Don’t tell your mother.”
She looks up. Her light brown eyes are unreadable, but he knows he’s said something to interest her.
“I’ll text you,” he says, holding her gaze for a moment before it slides away. But of course she doesn’t have a phone. He struggles for a plan. “Let’s just plan to meet tomorrow, later in the afternoon. Five o’clock. I’ll come here.”
“No,” she says. “My mother will be here.”
“Then meet me at the restaurant. No, wait, not the restaurant.”
There’s nowhere in Haven they’re guaranteed to be alone. Work and home, both Leo’s. But there’s a heady likelihood his father will be at work. “My house,” he says with some pride.
Leaving the store, he peers back through the window. She’s seated on the stool again, opening her sketchbook. He stands on the sidewalk, watching as she bends over the pages. 58
Walking down the avenue, James remembers long-ago scenes private to him and Alice. It’s winter, their mittens are cold and stiff from making a snow fort, and they’re picking their way through slushy ruts in the back alleys of childhood. It’s a summer afternoon, they’re scrambling up to the train tracks, Alice giving James a penny to place on the track and James scurrying away, pulling her with him as huge, dirty freight cars thunder by. These memories transfix his mind; he can’t visit them with anyone else. Now he imagines the two of them on a date: standing in line together at a movie theater, Alice wearing a short skirt and a turtleneck sweater, dark wool tights. Does she own these clothes, would she even like going with him to the movies?
He’s left behind the hollow-hearted greens. Does he have time to retrieve them? He checks his phone for Dagou’s text, studying Brenda’s address.
A snowball slams into the back of his head. Icy water trickles down his neck. His phone slips from his hands and skitters into a puddle.
“Ching, chong, fuk choyyyyyyyy!”
Scrambling for his phone, he twists to catch a glimpse of his assailants. Two middle school boys, small but fierce. Their skinny faces, bright with trouble and accusation, are familiar. He knows them by their brilliant, slanted light gray eyes and Scandinavian cheekbones. It’s Zack and Cody Skaer. The Skaer cousins have been bullying the Chao brothers since James can remember. Trey, the worst of them and Ming’s middle school nemesis, has inherited the family diner; he claims the Chaos compete with them for customers. Zack is his nephew.
“It’s okay,” says Zack. His pale eyes glitter at James like shattered glass; his freckles stand out even in the dead of winter. “You can fix it. You know how to fix a wet phone? Put it into a bag of rice! Ching, chong!”
“Listen—” James begins.
“C’mon, let’s get out of here,” says Cody.
Voices, friends and other cousins, are calling. Zack and Cody run off. 59
James turns off his phone, takes out the SIM card, and puts the pieces into his pocket. Then he straightens to watch them all run down the avenue, little Zack trailing the fleeter, taller boys.
In ninth grade, James and Don Skaer came to a truce. James let Don copy his homework, and Don offered James his cigarettes, plus once an actual blunt, which James tried to smoke, because he enjoyed standing with someone behind the school on a November day. The difference between himself and Ming, he thinks, is that Ming was once enraged by the fake kung fu sounds and he himself was not. Maybe James wasn’t angry because he couldn’t understand Chinese any better than these boys; it was all Greek to him, as Ming said. It was Ming, fluent in Mandarin, who was infuriated, ashamed, and, therefore, a true target.
James plods through the snow, searching for Brenda’s house. Letter City was once inhabited by the working Czech community of Haven. Now it’s the kind of neighborhood where some residents stay put forever while some move in and out so frequently that you can’t keep track of who lives where. There are narrow backyards abutting narrower alleyways. The houses are quite small, but each has its own porch and small front yard, close to the sidewalk. Now and then James passes a bungalow lavishly festooned with Christmas lights, but most are dark. The unplowed streets are almost impassable. He turns into a windless back lane, unnamed and rarely used. The snow is shallower here but there are no paw prints. Why did Dagou send him on this errand? His thoughts are interrupted by clear chimes, the bells of the nearby church, St. Ludmila.
James remembers he’s been here before.
He must have been eight or nine years old. He came this way with Leo on Mondays off. He recalls his father beckoning him with a jerk of his chin and the two of them heading out, hand in hand down the alley. James closes his eyes. There’s the sound of church bells, the odor of melting earth, old dog shit, and rotting chestnuts. He and Leo standing at a back gate. His father’s hand twitching around his, his breath whistling 60through the warm spring air with taut anticipation. They had come to visit his friend Sharon, a woman with curly yellow hair and ringing laughter. James understands, just now, that the woman, Sharon, was one of his father’s lovers. It was the dog in him. He wonders how much his mother knew about Leo’s wanderings. She must have known. James makes his way through the snow, down one block, then the next. It’s barely possible to recognize the back side of some houses by their size and color, glowing faintly in the snow: peeled white, slate-gray, dull brown, blue siding. The colors are the same in back as in the front, but the back sides reveal bulky additions, sheds, cellar doors, air-conditioning units, satellites, and laundry lines; they are the secret sides of the houses.
He turns left into a parking area held in common by two somewhat shabby gray bungalows. He checks the address, steps onto the porch, and knocks on the door.
Footsteps, quick and firm. The door opens and fills his eyes with soft gold light. A dog darts from this radiance. James bends toward him and with a yip, Alf leaps onto his snowy knees.
Alf, warm and starry-eyed, wriggles up to lick him. James leans over with relief to grab the wagging dog. The door opens wider. A rush of warmth, the scent of spiced candles. A musical voice cries, “James!”
James is face-to-face with Brenda Wozicek.
The lamplight glows on her pale skin and the soft red yarn of her sweater. She has light eyes fringed with thick lashes, and a full red mouth. Her dark hair has a wide, vivid streak of a deep turquoise.
Alf squirms in James’s arms. His collar is, of course, missing, and with it his tag, shaped like a bone, with the Chaos’ home phone number. Now he jumps to the floor and cavorts around Brenda. He lets her scratch his ears; he pants, grinning, tongue rolling, frantic tail whipping his buttocks vigorously back and forth. James, still dazed, hears an echo of his father’s voice: “The tail is wagging the dog!”
Brenda stops scratching; Alf’s tail droops. Brenda hoists him up, and he lolls happily in her arms. “James, you’re soaked. Come in and dry off.”
James is arrested by the beauty of her heart-shaped face. Ming might 61call her small-town, might talk ironically about her dye and tattoos, but she is undeniably sexy.
“Take off your coat,” she says, nodding to the coatrack. “You’re shivering. You need to dry off. Put your wet shoes here.”
Now he’s stuck, shoeless, in her house. Struggling to breathe normally, conscious of his sodden jeans, and—could it be?—the tears in his eyes.
“Sweetie,” she says, “you’ve gotten so big.” James feels the blood rush into his cold cheeks. “Did you come looking for me?” Brenda speaks softly, with surprise, as if it would please her more than anything if that were true. For a moment he wants to say he did.
“Um, no,” he says. “Actually, I came looking for Alf. Dagou said he was here.” Alf and Brenda regard him quizzically. “Do you—I’m just wondering, does Alf come here a lot? You two seem super attached.”
“No, I just really love dogs.”
“How did he get here?”
“Maybe he’s got a girlfriend somewhere in the neighborhood.”
Like man, like dog. Embarrassed, James changes the subject. “This is a nice place. I like the way you’ve fixed it up.”
“Thanks!” She shrugs, pouting. “It’s put a dent in my credit cards.” James steals another look around him, half expecting the room to waver and dissolve in arrears, but the lamplight is as warm as ever.
Alf jumps down, trots purposefully into the other room, as if someone else is there. Brenda glances behind her. James watches the soft line of her throat. She tucks a curl behind her ear in a furtive, restless way that confuses and excites him. Her small ear glows against her dark hair. Her movements are graceful and deliberate, but there’s something unpredictable about her—not quite impatient, not rebellious, but wakeful and resistant.
“Dagou sent you here?”
“Um, yeah.” She’s frowning. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Brenda says. “But I texted him to come and get Alf himself.”
At this moment, he’s startled to hear a light footstep from somewhere 62farther inside the house. Self-consciously, he pulls his gaze away from Brenda.
Katherine Corcoran is standing in the doorway, Alf at her side.
“Katherine.” James swallows hard, wishing for Dagou. “Why’re you here?”
Katherine smiles. “I could just as well ask you that.”
“Looking for Alf. Dagou said—” He stops, struck by the recognition that Brenda texted Dagou to come over right when Katherine was visiting. Had Brenda planned an accidental meet-up of herself, Katherine, and Dagou? Whatever her intentions, Dagou has, by sending James, made a narrow escape.
There it is, the elaborate setting, the luminous bright green jade on Katherine’s finger.
“How are you?” he stammers. “I didn’t know you would be in town. I thought—”
“I’ll be in Sioux City at my parents’ on the twenty-fifth, but of course I still came to visit. I’ve been coming to Haven during Christmastime for so many years.”
She knows he knows this; she stayed at their house, cooked in their kitchen. Katherine in an apron, learning from his mother how to wash the rice, how to let the oil get to just the right heat before throwing in the vegetables. She’s like an older sister to him. She even looks like his sister, with her dark hair and Asian features. She was adopted from a rural orphanage in Sichuan.
“Everyone here is family,” she says. “It’s so good to see you, James! How long has it been—since your high school graduation?”
Remembering Dagou’s fear of her smile, James has a sudden desire to run from the room.
Katherine gestures to Brenda, who nods graciously. “And Mary Wa has told me all about Brenda. It turns out we have so many things in common. We’ve been having a good talk—we’ve been planning the decorations for this year’s Christmas party!”
Brenda says, “James, what’s wrong with your hand?” 63
“That? Oh—it’s fine,” he says, trying to recall the origin of the scrape. It must have happened when he dropped his phone. He remembers the dismantled phone in his pocket and is anxious to go home. “Do you have a ziplock baggie and dry rice?”
“No. When I want rice, I get takeout from the restaurant.”
“I should go.”
“Hold on.”
Brenda leaves the room, Alf trotting behind her. She brings back ointment and a bandage. As she dabs on the ointment and applies the bandage, James can feel some tension or pain ease under her fingers. He sniffs her perfume—something woodsy, faintly sweet—and the combination of her touch, her nearness, and her scent is disorienting. Whereas Katherine is perfect, like an etching, Brenda’s beauty is multidimensional. Just being near her is making him uncomfortable. He can’t stare at her for one more minute, but he can’t stop staring.
“Come into the living room,” she says. James is led to the soft red sofa and lets himself sink into it.
Katherine leans toward him from a wing chair.
“James, help us with the party,” she says. “Your mom wants us to keep up the family traditions. She wants continuity. She told me all about the first party, the year the restaurant opened, before Dagou was born. All they could afford was noodles. They made eight different noodle dishes!”
Hers eyes are very dark, shining into his. He turns away, ashamed.
“I was thinking, this year, something special, in honor of your mother? We could decorate the restaurant with wreaths and fir branches? And red napkins and tablecloths, of course: everything red for good luck and longevity. A real Christmas tree? We can retire the fake one. We could make it all vegetarian, in her honor. Even though she won’t be there.”
“Vegetarian Christmas lamb,” says Brenda sweetly. “What do you think, James?”
“Yes, James,” echoes Katherine. “What would your mother like?”
James turns from Katherine to Brenda, then back to Katherine. Both women are watching him. “Um,” he says, stalling, “Ma is definitely a vegetarian 64now. But the Christmas party was always, well, kind of a meat free-for-all. So, I don’t know.”
The parties all began with readings from the gospel, but they devolved to food, drink, loud talk, and laughter, children running, shrieking, breaking things, chaos, more chaos, his father getting drunk with Lynn’s father, engaging in a round of camaraderie and insults, and his mother darting in and out of the kitchen—“like a chicken with her head cut off!” Leo Chao said—until everyone had eaten themselves into a state of food-drunkenness, and drunk themselves to the brink of palpitations, and staggered off into the night.
Alf is snoozing with his head propped up on Brenda’s lap. Brenda is eyeing James as if they share a secret.
Katherine is saying, “… tea candles, mistletoe, really good party crackers with—”
“What about Dagou?” James interrupts. His mother was always indifferent to candles, wreaths, miniature lit villages, and fresh-cut spruce trees. He recalls Dagou’s notebook. “I think Dagou’s been making plans. He wants a simple meal—”
“In honor of your mother’s friends,” Brenda finishes.
In the silence that follows, James hears the clear and mystical sound of a single chime. Brenda slips a phone out of her pocket, checks it. She leaves the room. Traitorously, Alf follows again.
James and Katherine sit listening to Brenda’s half-audible murmur from the kitchen. Katherine twists the jade ring on her finger. She meets his eye and smiles. James feels an answering smile fade from his face. He does not possess emotional self-control anywhere near as strong as hers. And yet, as she becomes engrossed in her own phone, he sees something desolate in the privacy of her bent neck. They can still hear Brenda’s voice. It’s like listening to an unknown woman talking and laughing through a bedroom wall.
Katherine puts her phone into her purse. “Dagou has been honest with me,” she says. “He’s caught up in the idea of pursuing a friendship with Brenda. Mary Wa thinks Brenda is trying to steal him away from 65me. But, of course, that can’t be possible. She’s not a femme fatale. We’ve been making friends. She turns out to be a lot like me; she’s an ambitious woman who grew up in the middle of nowhere. The minute she leaves Haven, she’ll see the opportunities available to her. She’ll forget about the restaurant and the things she’s doing now. She’ll be caught up in the professional opportunities of a city.”
Over Katherine’s shoulder, James sees Alf enter the room ahead of Brenda, whose pace is dreamy. He gestures to Katherine, but she continues, determined. “And Brenda has so many ambitions that have nothing to do with Haven. She wants to move to Los Angeles!”
Brenda takes her seat, patting the cushion next to her. Alf jumps up. “Actually,” she says, “that idea is something you kind of made up as you were talking before. I don’t want to move to Los Angeles.”
“You did theater in high school,” Katherine points out. “You said you’d like to pursue your interests.”
“I’m a small-town actor.” Brenda shrugs. “My plans aren’t professional. I’m not hung up on the superiority of a professional life, or living in a big city. I don’t need to go anywhere.”
Katherine nods and smiles, but James can tell that Brenda’s lack of ambition has caught her off balance. She’s tried to empower Brenda, to elevate her future in a way that Brenda couldn’t care less about. Brenda has slipped out of this plan, shrugged out of it.
“What are your interests?”
“I’ll remodel my home. I’ll go to the gym. That’s the kind of woman I want to be.”
James’s laughter catches in his throat.
“It’s true, James. I don’t want to work,” Brenda says. Her confidence is superb. James believes her. It’s as if he’s never seen her fill a pitcher of water or burn her hand on a hot dish. “My long-range goal,” she says, “is to marry into wealth. And for that, there are opportunities right here in Haven.”
Katherine’s tone hardens almost imperceptibly. “If that’s what you want, why don’t you go after Ming?” 66
“If you don’t know why,” Brenda says with a chilly smile, “then you’re dumber than you look, Katherine.”
James changes the subject. “Dagou’s not wealthy,” he points out.
“Not now,” Brenda says. Again, in the smug curve of her red lips, James glimpses a surety that would be absurd if it were not for the beauty of her mouth.
“And he’s not going to stay in Haven,” Katherine says. Although he’s always believed Dagou would leave, James has now heard the truth from Dagou himself. Katherine’s certainty of the opposite—self-deception?—makes him uncomfortable. He grew up in a shouting house. He doesn’t know what to do about manipulative empowerment or chilly smiles.
“He came here to help out his mother,” Katherine continues, “but he doesn’t belong here. Isn’t that right, James?”
“I’ve been working at the lab this fall,” James says. “I’ve been really busy and haven’t had a chance to check in with him.” He feels pressured to keep talking. “Today at the Spiritual House—” He knows he’s said the wrong thing. “What I mean is—”
“Mary Wa told me what Dagou said. It’s true: we’re taking a break,” Katherine says, to reassure him he need not feel awkward.
“Okay,” James mumbles.
“But we’re not broken up—we’re on hiatus.” Katherine nods at her left hand.
“You’re still wearing the ring,” Brenda says. Next to her, Alf snorts in his sleep.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Katherine holds up her hand. The panther setting looks crude on her slender finger. But the jade glows with an almost unnatural green, and James understands it must, indeed, be very valuable.
“It’s a priceless ring,” Katherine murmurs, gazing at it. “A family ring. A symbol of the old country.”
“Dagou wants to sell it,” says Brenda conversationally.
Katherine flinches. “That’s not true. He once told me the ring isn’t about money. It’s about the value of family, the value of history. It’s to be given only, not sold, and given out of affection.” She turns to Brenda 67and a sudden rush of emotion comes into her voice. “I’d give the ring away, if someone really wanted it, but I would never sell it to anyone, not even—”
“That’s very generous of you,” says Brenda. “I’d assumed it was a symbol of your relationship with Dagou. An engagement ring.”
“Dagou and I have history,” Katherine says, and James can hear again, in her voice, what could be love, or pride, or hope. “We practically grew up together. We don’t—I don’t—need a piece of jewelry to represent our bond.”
“If you don’t need it, then will you give it to me?” Brenda asks. Stretching out a hand, opening a soft, pink palm.
Alf looks up.
“I’ll give it back to Dagou. I know Dagou wants it back,” Brenda says, continuing to hold out her open hand. “He wants to sell it for a down payment on a place here in Haven.”
The weather in the room has shifted. Alf jumps off the couch and comes over to James. He reaches down to pet the dog, but cannot take his eyes off of Katherine. She looks very young, fingering the ring.
James believes Katherine might give the ring to Brenda. It might matter more to Katherine to be able to give the ring away than to possess the ring itself. But she’s visibly incapable of making up her mind. The ideal thing to do in this moment would be to laugh Brenda’s question away. But Katherine continues to finger the ring, to bite her lip. Even James can see that Katherine wants the ring in a way so visceral and so personal she can’t bear to give it up. The struggle goes on and on. James can sense in the air, as vital as oxygen, Brenda’s restless cruelty. She is making Katherine reveal something about herself that she would not, in a million years, have wanted to reveal: that she wants nothing in the world as much as this ring.
Brenda is smiling.
“I would never take the ring if it means so much to you, Katherine,” she says softly, and James hears beneath this softness another kind of cruelty that makes his blood tingle. He can bear it no longer. He stands up. 68
“I don’t think either one of you loves Dagou!” he shouts. “This isn’t even about Dagou, for either of you.”
He hurries through the kitchen toward the back door, desperate to leave. He shoves his feet into his wet shoes.
“Come on, Alf.” He pushes the door open, and the cold air swirls inside.
For a minute, Alf stays at Brenda’s feet. He doesn’t want to come. Then, all at once, he wriggles away and shoots past James.
“Alf!” James stumbles onto the porch.
Brenda says, “Come back, James.”
“I’ve got to go after him!”
“You need your coat,” she says. “Don’t worry. Seeing you reminded him to go home. I bet he’s halfway there by now.”
She’s holding out his coat. He spares a crucial moment to grab it. Then he turns and rushes down the snowy steps.
“Alf!” The narrow street is an unrecognizable landscape of shapes and shadows. There is no sign or sound of the dog. In the light from Brenda’s porch, he makes out a set of paw prints, which he traces past a neighbor’s house and into the back alleyway. James follows the paw prints east, toward home. Snow is drifting up against the back porches and garages, making the alleyway a tunnel of white. The prints are filling with snow. He hears the church bell again, but faintly. His lashes, frozen stiff, press together as he squints into the swirling white. Alf’s trail is gone.
An hour later, inside his father’s house, behind the closed door of his room, James seals his phone into a plastic baggie of dry rice. He props his wet sneakers against the heating vent. He tunes the radio to FM 88.8. Outside, snow swirls thickly against his bedroom window. Leo, downstairs in his chair, grunts something at the television set. The house is emptier, lonely, without his mother. And Alf—after a long and unsuccessful 69search, James did not find him safe at home. Where could he be? Perhaps, returned to Brenda’s. At this very moment he might be curled on her soft red couch. Brenda might have texted James; it’s possible this reassuring text is simply locked in his nonfunctioning phone.
James opens his laptop, checks his email. A thousand miles away, a deep freezer has malfunctioned in the laboratory where he worked during the semester. Several years’ research is in jeopardy and his supervisor wants to know when he can return to campus. An undergraduate ski club is being organized for January. His suite mate wants to know if anyone is still in the dormitory; he’s left a charger in his room. At the thought of his suite mate, an Oregonian with a surfer haircut and a beard, James feels a part of his mind rekindle almost physically; he’s almost forgotten the dorm, the laboratory. Going to college has split him cleanly in two. There’s no overlap between his college self and his identity as Snaggle, the third Chao brother. Is it possible for either of these two parts to fade away, disappear? Is it necessary to choose between them?
He puts his laptop away, turns out the light, and buries his head in his familiar, musty pillow.
He’s woken by the sound of static. Cacophonous, otherworldly, tooth-jarring static. James dives for the volume knob on the radio and, before he can master it, Dagou’s deep baritone fills the room.
“This is FM 88.8, the Doghouse.” There’s stock audio of a dog barking. “Music, news, bad metaphors, and original broadcasting.”
It’s like seeing Dagou from outside his window, glimpsing him alone at night in a lighted room.
“And now a word from our sponsor. Are you bored? Tired of boiled string beans? Tired of turkey? Searching for strange flavors, ethnic exoticism, a little family hostility, immigrant anxiety, served up with a heady dash of self-hatred? Then come to the Fine Chao Restaurant! I’ll be your waiter and chef, and I’m happy to provide you with all of that. That’s D-A-G-O-U, Big Dog in Mandarin, for those of you who know me and were always wondering. 70
“And now back to our regular evening show: A Dog’s Life.
“Let me begin with a story—let’s say it’s one of my fondest childhood memories.”
In his hotel room, halfway across town, Ming is tuning the clock radio, setting the station to rouse himself for an early morning conference call. He has trouble sleeping in Haven, and trouble getting up. He doesn’t trust the hotel’s wake-up system, and his phone alarm is too quiet. He’s searching for a station with especially irritating music, slipping from a sermon to pop, when a familiar baritone speaks into his inner ear.
“It’s about twenty-five years ago …”
Ming stops his fingertips against the dial.
“… and I’m about six years old.
“I’m standing in the Haven Post Office with my father. You might remember me from those days: I’m the stout boy at the restaurant, black hair sticking out like a puffball, nose in the kitchen. In case you were wondering how my hair got like that, my mother buzzed it on setting three and it grew out in all directions. I never had a professional haircut as a kid.”
For about a minute, Ming doesn’t move. Dagou’s radio project, a complete surprise, is also inevitable. It’s like a blog, except that a blog is recorded online, forever; whereas this pirate radio project is unrecorded, spooling fugitive words into the dark, impermanent and fleeting, words that might as well have never been, unless they’re overheard. The project is so Dagou, talking into the reeds: indiscreet, self-absorbed, self-destructive, and a waste of personal resources. Not to mention under the table; Ming is sure the equipment is contraband. He lets go of the clock radio and sits back in the bed, letting his brother’s story fill his ears.
“There’s something you need to know: As a kid, I really do believe my father knows how to make it rain. I believe he’s the biggest, the strongest, the most magnificent man in the world. The only man in the world. 71
“So I’m five years old, and I’m with my father. Ba has to mail a package. I have no idea what’s in the package or who it’s going to, but I can sense it’s important. He announces to the clerk, ‘This is going to China.’
“She’s a tight-mouthed, prissy type, and I can tell right away she doesn’t like my father one bit. Most people don’t. For one thing, he’s bigger than the average Asian guy, and also he’s dark. I’m like him, too, big and dark; it’s Ming with the alabaster complexion; and my youngest brother, Snaggle, is ‘just right.’ But for another thing, Ba is crude. He’s checking out the clerk in a way I don’t understand because I’m six years old, but I now get that he’s undressing her. Considering her possibilities. She’s not young and she’s not pretty. But he’s an equal opportunity barbarian.
“She says, ‘Excuse me, but this package smells. Is this perishable?’ and I know—because I watched him sealing the box—that instead of using packing peanuts, he’s filled the empty spaces with dried mushrooms.
“Even at the time I wondered what else was in the box. Was it a gift? To whom? What did my mother think? Did she even know about this package?
“There’s a pause. She leans toward him just a little, in part, I suspect, because of his undeniable Oriental magnetism, and in part because she thinks he doesn’t know much English. And as she’s leaning forward, my father opens his mouth and says, in a carrying voice, right into her face, ‘None of your business.’
“She straightens up and says, ‘Excuse me, mister. Answer my question.’
“He says, ‘I told you, none of your business.’
“She says, ‘I’m getting the manager.’ Suddenly there’s this fat-faced guy staring over the counter. My father stares back. The crackle of hostility is hair-raising. I try not to listen. But even though I put my fingers in my ears and la-la-la, I can hear their angry exchange. At some point, my father begins to punctuate all of his sentences with ‘you,’ like, ‘Back off, you!’ I know I should stand by him, but I have started backpedaling, I edge away from the counter. I’m not the only person doing this. There’s another Chinese guy in line, Ken Fan—he’s turned away, staring out the window as if he’s memorizing the license plates of every car in the parking 72lot. Then Ken Fan sneaks out of the post office. Why? Because he’s embarrassed to witness this behavior from someone who looks like him.
“The manager yells, ‘I’m calling the police. Susan, call the police.’ And she picks up the phone.
“My dad takes his package off the counter. ‘William,’ he says—that’s me—‘we’re leaving.’
“That’s when I hesitate. I don’t want to follow him out. I want to pretend he’s not my father. He gets to the door and he can sense my pause, because he barks, in this deep-throated Mandarin, my name: ‘Dagou.’ You should know that all of us have dog nicknames, given by our parents: Big Dog, Second Dog, Third Dog. They must have wanted another kid, maybe a girl, who would have been ‘Little Dog.’” Dagou plays the same audio cue of a dog barking. “Humble nicknames mean we’re precious; our parents are protecting us from hubris, from malevolence. But like all nicknames, they also mean: You’re mine.
“I follow him trying to act like I’m not with him. He grabs my arm with the vise grip of someone who’s at the wok all day. On the sidewalk, he’s yelling, ‘You sniveling, disloyal coward! You should be ashamed of yourself! You’re my son and you stand by me!’
“I walk along, filled with shame.
“He yells, ‘If you hate me, then you hate yourself!’
“He yells, ‘Apologize to me! Coward, you owe me an apology!’
“I say nothing. I can’t speak.
“And right then, while I’m standing at the passenger side, he gets into the car and, quick as anything, locks my door! Then he starts the engine. Pulls away!
“And what do I do? I’m six years old. I don’t even know how to get home. In two seconds, I’m running through the parking lot, chasing the car. I catch up at the red light. I’m banging on the door, bawling and groveling and yelling, I apologize, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Ming hears the unmistakable sound of Dagou taking a gulp of something. “And in today’s news … despite my six years of great work in the kitchen, six years of cooking the freshest, most subtle versions of sad-sack 73menu items—six years of bringing an authenticity to the food that he can appreciate!—my dad just gave me an ultimatum: ‘Apologize before the Christmas Party, or you’re fired.’
“He thinks I’m still a child, and he’s not wrong. I won’t be an adult, I won’t be able to live my life, until after he is dead.
Dagou lowers his voice. “Yeah, sometimes I lie awake thinking of the different ways that he could go. He could slip on the greasy kitchen floor and crack his head open. He could fall down the stairs. Or the best way, the easier way, would be for him to get locked into the freezer room. That room is older than he is, and totally not up to code. There’s no way to get out except with the key we keep on the inside wall. Say the key is missing. He’ll be locked inside, gone for good. Wouldn’t it be amazing? To wake up every day and know my life is my own.”
Ming snaps off the radio. He can no longer bear to listen. Does he hate the self-absorption, the woeful self-aggrandizement of Dagou’s performance? Has Dagou relayed a story that reminds Ming of his own humiliation by Leo? No, it’s something else. Ming is a child, standing by Winnie’s side, listening to the conversation of the community women. He’s watching his mother’s face. It’s not the only time he’s registered this particular distress. The pain of it, searing, infinitely private. He knows Winnie’s pain as he knows a first memory. To what other woman had his father planned to send the package? Sitting in his hotel room, years later—decades later—Ming clenches his hands.