It is now late March. Morning sun slants through the plate-glass windows of Skaer’s Diner, reaching the corner where James Chao sits reading with a half-finished plate of scrambled eggs and toast. He glances out from his hoodie. It’s the same university hoodie he wore at the train station, but he’s no longer a student. He hasn’t been on campus since January, when Winnie suffered her second, fatal stroke. At that point, he applied for a leave of absence and moved his things out of the dormitory, back to Haven. His hair is shaggy and more length has come into his hands, but the most noticeable change is in the way he looks out from the hoodie. It’s not the expression of a college student.
There’s another change. The red-haired server at the diner is watching him. From behind the register, she lets her gaze slide over to his corner of the room. She makes eye contact when she takes his order, and comes back to say they’re out of strawberry jam packets but she found one more in the back. James notices her, too, sees the way the small silver cross rests on her freckled chest and moves as she breathes. He knows what her attention is about. In the last few months, he’s experienced a transfiguration; a current has run through his body, waking him up. Still, he can’t quite understand what she sees in him. In truth, 152he exists in a liminal space bridging his old self to a future self he can’t yet grasp.
He’s rereading a website article, “The Curious Case of ‘The Brothers Karamahjong.’” It’s ostensibly an analysis of the impending trial of William “Dagou” Chao, now known as “Dog Eater,” who has been indicted for committing a “restaurant murder set in an insular midwestern Chinese American community,” an “ethnic enclave” where an “American girl,” a “blond bombshell” (this is Brenda, who changed her hair color senior year of high school) “drove both father and son into a frenzy,” compelling the suspect to work out obsessively, then to embark upon a desperate spending spree, leading to a bacchanalian Christmas bash, culminating in the consumption of the family dog, whose fate has become an anti-immigrant flash point. A party followed by the suspicious death of the father, owner of the restaurant.
“They keep to themselves,” said Jane Yoder, a neighbor James has never met. “They have their restaurant and their own friends.”
A member of Dagou’s high school class is quoted as saying, “He was obsessed with her. She was everything—blue-eyed and sexy, on the homecoming court.”
James takes a few more bites of scrambled eggs, studying the photos. First, Dagou’s mug shot, widely circulated since the story was picked up by the supermarket tabloids: “Suspect: William Dagou ‘Dog Eater’ Chao.” The image is Dagou, and not Dagou: darker than he really is, with fierce, hooded eyes. His gaze challenges James, yet beseeches him, and there’s an almost disturbing air of repose in the curve of his full mouth. The website has gotten hold of more images of Dagou: his high school and college yearbook photos, also printed in a manner that make him seem more dark skinned than he is; and one snapshot from New York City, of anonymous origin, showing the twenty-five-year-old Dagou leaning over his bass, his bow low at the frog, his shoulders bunched under his shirt.
Brenda’s high school yearbook photo could have been dropped in 153directly from a 1950s pinup poster. Her blue eyes gleam at James. A wave of ash-blond hair curves against her cheek. She is so fresh and sultry that there could be no question she “drove the immigrant father and his son into a frenzy.”
In Ming’s photo, he appears more light-skinned than he really is. But the contrast with Dagou is just as obvious in his erect posture, his jacket and tie, his aura of conventionality and exactitude. “The middle brother whose ignorance of the conflict and whose absence from the crime scene clearly exonerates him from the murder, Ming Chao has provided the financial support to release Dagou ‘Dog Eater’ Chao on $1 million bail.”
Under James’s photo, the article has reprinted the one quote James gave to a reporter, before Ming texted him to shut up. “My brother and father had their disagreements, but Dagou would never commit murder. My brother is innocent.” For some reason, Ming and Katherine don’t want James to release any more statements to the press, not even in support of Dagou. They’ve made James promise not to talk, even though Jerry Stern, Dagou’s lawyer, issued no such edict.
In Alf’s close-up, he’s less than a year old, almost unrecognizably puppyish. He gazes directly at James, head slightly cocked, bat ears unfolded in typical, unceasing alertness. His small black nose is shaped like a heart, the fur on his jowls shimmers, and the blaze on his chest is bright white and fluffy. The image is cropped so that his hindquarters are only partially visible, and a woman’s arm (Winnie’s) can just be seen.
His mother and Alf are gone now. James puts down his fork and shields his eyes with his hands. It’s a few minutes before he can refocus on his screen. There are 294 comments. James scrolls down, then clicks.
Sheri
CA 42 m ago
As a dog lover, I cannot forgive William Chao for callously cooking and serving his father’s pet. This is indefensible behavior. I notice the story of Alf’s disappearance and the mysterious meat dish, which was earlier reported, has been 154hushed up. PETA has this under investigation and the truth will out. Animal abuse is criminal and immoral. Justice for Alf!
Jean Hu
Manhattan 38 m ago
The dog dinner is the Juniper-Tree, adult-diaper-revenge-drive detail of this story making it go viral. Without Alf, no one would care. You’d have just another private tragedy of an oppressed immigrant family.
Fang Wa
Haven 36 m ago
As a person who has known the Chao family for many years, I deride the spread of this rumor as false and malicious, not to mention racist, gossip. The entire Chao family was devoted to Alf and was broken-hearted when he disappeared. The dog-meat story began as a joke. This incident has been blown up and circulated by anti-Asian scandal-mongers.
charlotte wisniak
oshkosh 32 m ago
stop the abuse of helpless animals
You Jin
Iowa City 30 m ago
Please see the attached link to a consortium of dog lovers and concerned citizens from many countries who have been able to rescue Asian restaurant dogs and bring them to the US for adoption.
Joe M.
Louisville 8 m ago
I lived in Xi’an for two years. It’s where I met my wife. I was able to taste dog meat several times. It’s good—a lot like mutton, but with a special savory flavor. I happen to know that the Chinese prize black dogs for their flavor, over any other color. 155
Jonathan N.
Lafayette 46 m ago
As a Chinese American, I find this entire case an embarrassment to my community.
Keiko
Milwaukee 43 m ago
Your comment is an example of the self-hatred that has led to stereotypes such as the “model minority.” Why must we Asians be superior to other groups?
GS Meng
Flushing 1 hour ago
This story is blowing up because of the racism of the white American community. Look to your own families, people, and don’t throw stones.
Linda H.
Washington DC 5 m ago
Agreed. In the newspapers, there are articles about a tyrannical world leader driving emigrants away from the borders of a country that was once a haven for refugees; police officers choking our own citizens in cold blood; immoral judges disallowing marriages of life-long lovers; deranged shooters gunning down scores of well-wishers at a rock music benefit; children going hungry in acutely troubled countries whose economies are stumbling from corruption; hurricanes, floods, tsunamis; whales beaching and foundering on the shores; runaway fires streaking down clogged arteries of desperately escaping vehicles. Amidst this turmoil and grief, why Leo Chao? Why did the death of Leo Chao become news? It couldn’t just be the rumor of a dog meat restaurant. Perhaps it debunks the myth of immigrant success, and tells the story of a secret from behind the high walls of family and community: that behind a family business, a successful father and a set of handsome sons, prowls, clawed and fanged, a mythical monstrousness of tyranny, hatred, and murderous intent? Or perhaps it’s all a desperate need for readers to 156displace their hatreds, their traumas, the tyrannies under which they suffer, onto a story of tyranny and revenge refreshing and different enough to allow them to believe it is not theirs.
Sylvia Han
Atlanta 28 m ago
Brenda Wozicek is a trashy gold-digger bent upon corrupting the lives of innocent Chinese men, and she has been a poor influence on the three sons, not to mention the father.
5 REPLIES
Saskya 27 m ago
Dagou, I’ll make you forget all about Brenda!
Jana 26 m ago
Yes! I heart Dagou!!!
Frannie 25 m ago
James is the one for me. What a sweetie <3 <3 <3.
Nunu 23 m ago
Ming Chao is the hotte$t!
Ed Wong 19 m ago
At last, I’ve discovered the secret of how to attract women as an Asian male: get indicted for patricide.
The diner door opens and shuts. James squints through the sunlight at the newcomer, who approaches his corner, wearing a jacket and a Mao cap. Skaer’s Diner is where no reporters, friends, or even family would go to find James. But beneath the red star and khaki brim, familiar curious dark eyes shine through dirty wire-rimmed glasses. It’s Fang.
Fang removes his cap, comes directly to the booth, and stands there, observing him. James shuts his computer. “I thought I might find you here,” Fang says. “You ready to go to the Spiritual House?”
“No.” James smooths his hair with his fingers. Under his hoodie he’s 157wearing a white dress shirt. In an hour the community will gather for a memorial to mark the final day of the seventh week after Winnie’s death.
“Let’s walk there together,” Fang says. “I have something to discuss with you.”
Leaving the restaurant, they turn down the adjacent alley in order to keep their journey private. Since the story in USA Today, they’ve had to make an effort to avoid strangers—“literally yellow journalists,” Fang says—camping out in the Holiday Inn, lurking near the restaurant, or attaching themselves to any Asian passerby to ask if they know the Chao family or anything about them. For a few minutes, they don’t speak. In the freedom of the alley, James relaxes in silent companionship, letting his mind wander. During these last months, with the tumult of shock and change, time has shifted. He half expects to see his father, alive once more, striding toward them in the alley, a little rumpled, squinting in the morning sun.
Fang pulls out his cap and puts it back on. “Why’d you go to that awful diner?”
“Privacy, I guess.”
“I’m surprised you’re not driven out by the bad vibes,” Fang says. “But listen, I need to talk to you.”
They reach an intersection with a medium-sized street and James crosses quickly, head down, ducking back into the alley. Fang trots after him.
“Listen, James. Do you remember what Gu Ling Zhu Chi told your dad?”
“You know I don’t understand anything she says. But Dagou told me. I remember.”
“Gu Ling Zhu Chi told him he was in danger of a bad death. What does that mean? A bad death doesn’t stop with the death. It means something in his death is going to be a part of your life. It’s going to play out and become your story.” 158
Fang’s gaze is dark. Although he and Alice appear hobbled by eccentricity, they’re also emboldened by it. Their mother is an ordinary person, but somewhere within her, or, most likely, within their lost father, there must have been a great capacity for strangeness. Fang doesn’t care what people think. He doesn’t lose track of anything he sees, and he won’t fail to speak up. Ming says Fang is un-American. He has no ability to adapt, forget; and isn’t that what you do in America? Adapt? Forget?
Now Fang says, “Do you remember that racist children’s book, the book about the Chinese brothers?”
The words echo in James’s mind, but only faintly.
“‘Once upon a time,’” Fang intones, singsonging, “‘there were five Chinese brothers and they all looked exactly alike.’”
Now James recalls the image on the cover. Five pigtailed, slit-eyed figures lined up in a row. He’d rather forget it. But he says, “Each of the brothers had a superpower.”
“Each of the brothers was a freak. The first could ‘swallow the sea.’ The second one had an iron neck. The third could stretch his legs like rubber bands. The fourth brother could survive fire. And the fifth could hold his breath for an immeasurable amount of time. Not superpowers, exactly, but distortions. A Western catalogue of dehumanizations. The brothers are interchangeable, yet freaks. And do you remember to what end the freakish powers were deployed? Do you remember, James?”
“No.” James wants, needs, to be left alone, but the only way to end a conversation with Fang is to hear him out. “Tell me.”
From under his cap, Fang holds forth. He describes First Brother, who used his freakish sea-sucking ability to find valuable, exotic fish. Every day, he plundered the ocean, bringing in a living for the family. Then one day a child asked to go with him, begged to be allowed to search the waterless seabed. The First Brother agreed to let him come if he made one crucial promise: that he return to the shore when it was time. The child promised.
When they reached the shore, the First Brother deployed his powers: he swallowed the ocean. “He literally drank the sea,” Fang says. “His head grew, and grew, swelling tightly like an enormous balloon on which his 159slanted eyes were distorted to tiny slits. With greed and with delight, the child rushed out to search and play upon the rocky bed. While the child ignored his signals to return, the First Brother stood on the shore, suffering, his face turning red, his cheeks bulging with the world of coursing salt water. His head a thousand times its normal size.
“He was a strong guy,” Fang says, “but even he could not hold out. ‘It is very hard to hold in the sea.’ Eventually, he had to give in. The sea gushed back out of his mouth. And the little boy drowned under the waves. Dead.”
“Can’t we talk about this later, Fang?”
“The rest of the book is about the consequences of this unfortunate death,” Fang persists. “And who tries to do the cover-up? The other brothers. Their gifts, talents, their freakish abilities, have existed throughout time for the sole purpose, in this narrative, of avoiding the consequences of the murder.”
James and Fang face each other.
“I know what you’re thinking!” James’s voice rings through the alleyway. “You think Dagou was holding it in. He’s First Brother, and he couldn’t take it anymore. He let his suffering and anger spew forth, and he killed our father. But I don’t believe it! I think the whole thing was an accident and Dagou’s innocent.”
His shouts startle the pigeons roosting above, who flutter up and vanish from view. Fang doesn’t answer. The pigeons circle back.
“What is it?” James asks, more quietly. “What do you want?”
“I’ve got to ask you this,” Fang says. “I know you testified to the police. I’ve read the newspapers and news sites, I read about what you told them. But I’ve been considering every detail. Considering with, let’s say, a view from outside the family, an objective view. I want to understand what happened, independent of what Officer Bucek says is true. Or what the jury decides is true.”
“Maybe the difference between us is that I believe in the process,” James says, folding his arms. “The police and the jury will figure out what happened.” 160
“My question is this,” Fang says, ignoring him. “When you went downstairs the second time, close to the end of the party, to get more ice. Did you really see the key on the shelf at that time?”
“Yes, I did.”
“You’re going to testify in court.”
“I don’t think I can get out of it.”
“Because,” Fang says, “if you’re wrong—if you remembered wrong, and the key was not on the shelf at the end of the party—then your father could have been killed by anybody, and not just Dagou. By anyone during the party, or even anyone who happened to be inside the restaurant to sneak it off the shelf in the weeks before the party.”
“No,” James says. The pigeons above are no longer circling but clucking, cooing, listening. “Here’s where we disagree: I do remember seeing the key on the shelf. But, even if I remembered it wrong, I believe someone could have stumbled down there and accidentally removed it. It was an accident.”
“James,” Fang says, “you loved your dad. But don’t let your love make you so blind you can’t see you were the only person who did. Everybody hated him.”
“No one hated him enough to kill him.”
“How can you say what depths of hatred people keep to themselves? The Skaers, for example. Do we know what the Skaers feel about your family’s restaurant, what they think your parents’ workaholism has done to drain their family businesses over the years? And there are others.”
James doesn’t answer. He remembers Dagou’s story about Ken Fan, shamed by Leo’s behavior at the post office. My father made them all look bad.
Fang is still talking. “Did your dad’s claim that he was going to sell the restaurant make Dagou angry enough to do it? Is Ming mercenary and bitter enough to do it? Or what if Dagou wasn’t alone in this? How about Brenda? Why’s she involved with your brother? If all she wants is money, she would start sleeping with an older man. Either she’s, one, got yellow fever; or, two, she’s hot for your brother specifically. What if she’s 161unwilling to give up having sex with your brother? What future does he have, except his father’s restaurant?”
“You’ve got sex on the brain.”
“It takes one to know one,” Fang says, raising his brows. “But thanks for giving me credit. Because I can’t attract sexual partners, people think it doesn’t matter to me.” He wards off James’s objection with an upraised hand. “Anyway, I’m not sure what it is, exactly, but something was going on.”
“Well, you’re wrong about Brenda. She’d never get Dagou into so much trouble.”
“Why wouldn’t it be an employee? I know JJ was in California, but what about that woman who chops vegetables?”
“O-Lan? She never goes near the freezer. She couldn’t read the sign, so she didn’t know about the key.”
“Then back to Brenda. How did she get hired? Your father usually hires FOBs.”
“My dad’s hired outside servers before. Brenda’s broke, and so my dad gave her a job. As a favor,” James adds, although he knows Fang won’t believe him.
“You know as well as I do, your father didn’t give favors. It was all a transaction for him. And he never made a simple transaction. He made a deal. Listen, I know! My mother is much tougher than she appears, but even she had to pull some stunts in order to do business with your dad. He would’ve run her out of business if he hadn’t figured out it would be too time consuming and potentially risky to buy his ‘oriental groceries’ on his own. Oh no, he let my mother stay afloat as a calculated cost. He didn’t think about anyone except himself. You know it’s true.”
“It could be true,” James acknowledges.
“An apparent transaction, James. Just admit that he screwed everyone: women for sex, and men for money. Anyone might have had the motive to kill Leo, might have had an itch they needed to satisfy. Might still need.”
They’ve reached the end of the alleyway. They’re walking out onto a sidewalk that runs along a broad avenue. Two blocks away, in an older 162residential neighborhood, is the former school where the Spiritual House is located. James lowers his voice because they’re no longer shielded. “What do you mean, still?”
Fang peers at James from under his cap. “Well, where’s your father’s money? There’s not a peep in the news that anyone has found any of his money.”
Winnie Chao’s three sons know as much about her as most sons know about their mothers. They remember her smell, sound, and touch; and now, after her death, they can recall a hundred ordinary details; but from these facets the larger story of her life can’t be completed. They’re well acquainted with the hack of her ironic laugh, but they’ve never heard the eager giggle of her early youth; they remark upon her appetite for food, but they have no idea that she liked to bite even her husband in the throes of passion. They know only that she hated him and don’t understand she’d loved him. They’re still nursing their own shame, as men.
For seven times seven days, as Winnie’s spirit wandered quietly between the living and the dead, her sons didn’t see her: not in the restaurant kitchen, where Dagou gestured at O-Lan from the stove; nor in the dining room, where James reread a note from Alice while Ming and Katherine bent together over a laptop. Katherine looked up, sensing she was being watched, but after a moment she turned back to the screen. Only some of the nuns knew Winnie was there. One evening at the Spiritual House, with bright snow falling outside the windows, Sister Omi paused while heaping cabbage leaves into a stainless-steel bowl. She felt a restlessness pass through the room, into the cabbage, which seemed to hover in her hands. Nearby, Sister Chung-Hung bent over a bowl of rice and vegetables. A large, pensive woman who frequently had visions during meals, she wasn’t surprised to see a black-haired Winnie, wearing the same wool coat and plaid scarf from the day of her arrival at the Lake Haven Station, in the middle of winter, more than three decades ago. 163
Now, on the forty-ninth day, Dagou, Ming, and James, together with her essential people, gather at the Spiritual House to support Winnie’s spirit as it makes the transition to a rebirth in the Pure Land. Gu Ling Zhu Chi is here again, with An at her elbow. Also, the nuns; also, Winnie’s closest friends among the Chinese families in Haven. Fang and Alice are here, and Brenda. Jerry Stern arrives early, uncharacteristically professional in a suit and tie, and spends some time with Dagou in Gu Ling Zhu Chi’s sitting room, making sober conversation. Katherine can’t take the day off from work. She has sent an arrangement of plum blossoms and a generous donation.
When the prayers are over, the group stands near the entrance, unwilling to depart quite yet, telling stories. How Winnie came to the U.S. as the paper sister of a distant cousin and met Leo Chao in Chicago, standing in line at a convenience store. Leo, who had somehow managed to make it to the U.S. on his own, and who was already managing a restaurant. (He hired her immediately.) Within a year, they had set out for Haven, “like pioneers,” Leo always said, among the first Chinese people ever to live there.
“Do you know, James,” says Ken Fan, “that in those early days your mother was being courted by a man named Pu? In the end, your dad said, he had to step in and marry her, to save her from the fate of being named Winnie Pu.”
James tries to smile, but he’s still thinking about what Fang said as they were walking: everyone hated his father. He imagines Fang now, whispering, Look at all of these people here for your mother. No one gathered for your father.
He wouldn’t want them to, James silently argues back. My father didn’t believe in any of this. No chanting or incense, no assistance to a future rebirth in the Pure Land. No repenting of his sins, any reunion with his loved ones in Heaven. He didn’t believe in anything except the primacy of his own self.
Exactly! Fang would say. Your father was the consummate American id, an insatiable narcissist, a shameless capitalist who wanted to screw everyone.
And what did it mean for the Chao brothers, James now wonders, 164to be the sons of Leo and Winnie Chao? He thinks of Ming, when they talked at the Other Restaurant, and his torment at being a yellow child in the American Midwest. He thinks of Dagou’s radio story of Leo at the post office, mailing gifts to a mysterious recipient, probably a woman. He pictures his mother, wearing herself out working in a restaurant that opened earlier and closed later than any place in town, living ashamed in a community aware of what shamed her; and he, like Ming, is crushed by what this must have been like. How have they been damaged, raised by Leo, who took his sons along the back alleys of Haven on errands of philandering? James considers Dagou, who is sweating, and Ming, standing pale and impatient in his expensive suit. Their father, the immigrant success story. Longtime owner of his own business. What did it mean to all of them, to be raised in this country, promised a life of American achievement, by a man who exploited their labor?
Leo Chao is dead, yet he will always be their father. He has given all three of them an inheritance of himself. And they’ve all accepted a part of this inheritance. Although he has rejected his father’s ambition, Dagou owns Leo’s garrulousness, his sexual palate. Ming has rejected his father’s Asian-ness, but accepted Leo’s ability with math and his goal of a Life Savings. And James?
“No,” James says aloud. “I don’t want it.”
As if she can sense what he’s thinking, Alice looks up.
Gazing at Alice, James knows he’s also accepted his father’s inheritance. That surety of desire, making his hands twitch now as he imagines reaching under her skirt. Over the last few months, he has become attuned to her body in a way he hadn’t known was possible. And it’s as if this new power—the uncanny ability to detect in others the feelings he and Alice have awakened in each other—has grown into something he can’t suppress or ignore. He is changing. For example, he knows from simply standing near them that the stale old sexual feelings between Mr. and Mrs. Fan are enclosed within a kind of talcum-powdered envelope of cordial respect. On the other end of the spectrum, he’s strongly aware that Sister Omi and another novice are awash in a passionate magnetism 165of very recent sexual feelings. Where will his inheritance take him? Gu Ling Zhu Chi said he would have adventures, live in many places. She said love would matter to him, more than anything else. He wonders, not for the first time since leaving college, what she meant by this.
“James?”
Brenda pulls James aside, into the room where the offering table is. She’s wearing a simple black dress and has twisted her hair into a dark bun, revealing only a glow of blue at the ends. James can sense she’s been affected by the ceremonies marking his mother’s death. Yet she’s no longer thinking about the prayers. She frowns at him, her lashes thickening.
“You seem a little angry, James. Are you okay?”
“No. I mean, sure, I’m functional, if that’s what you mean.” James fixes his gaze over her shoulder, at the black-and-white portrait of his mother hanging above the offering table.
Brenda bites her lip. Her teeth are perfectly white and even; her mouth is full and red even though she’s wearing no lipstick. James is more aware than ever of his sexual attraction to her, but he understands that whatever flirtatiousness she might have felt toward him is gone. It’s been replaced, not by indifference, but by a kind of mutual concern. Family love. He knows she does truly love Dagou.
“James,” she says, “you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. But I’ve been thinking this over a lot. About that night—Christmas Eve.”
“What about it?”
“Are you sure about when Katherine left the restaurant?”
James doesn’t answer. Brenda’s question has brought him up short. “Well, no,” he says after a moment. “I didn’t actually watch her leave. But Dagou and I both know, we’re both pretty sure she was gone. Why?” He’s still looking at Winnie’s portrait. Winnie gazes soberly back at him. For a moment he almost believes she’s trying to tell him something. It would be about tranquility, about how to find tranquility.
“Well, this is just stuff I think about when I can’t sleep,” Brenda says slowly. “But sometimes I get a hunch; I can sense he’s bluffing. He knows she was doing something that night, something she maybe shouldn’t have 166been doing, and all of this bluster about what he was doing—his whole story about going downstairs, standing at the door, about changing his mind—it’s just some way of protecting her.”
Forgetting his mother, James turns his gaze to Brenda. She is frightened. “Of course he’s protecting her,” he says, determined both to comfort her and to reassure himself. “He protects her all the time, because he feels guilty about being in love with you.”
“She’s been holding something back for months. She’s fighting to control herself, I don’t know why.”
“She still loves him, but he really loves you. That’s all it is.”
“I hope you’re right.”
They rejoin the dwindling group; Brenda takes Dagou’s hand. Several of Winnie’s friends have departed. Jerry Stern is gone. Three nuns stand near Dagou, listening to him patiently, James can see, out of respect for their mother.
“Ma was a singular Chinese mom,” Dagou is saying. “She raised us to believe in the value of a spiritual life. She was a devout Christian and a devout Buddhist. Some people have double happiness, but Ma had double spirituality. And she had faith in us, in her kids.”
“You were a good son to her,” says one of the nuns.
James nods. Even in those terrible days when he was being held and questioned constantly by the police, Dagou sent O-Lan to deliver delicacies to Winnie in the hospital. Now he holds Brenda’s hand tightly and uses his other hand to blot his perspiring face with a wad of Kleenex. “She never gave up on me,” he says. “She told me to believe in myself, she told me to believe in love. She was a really singular….” His voice trickles off.
Fang steps away to the bathroom, the same bathroom where Alf once put his pink tongue into the toilet.
“So, you chose to have a speedy trial?” Ken Fan rescues Dagou.
Here Dagou glances furtively over at Ming, who refuses to look back. Ming, who’s come up with bail. Ming and Katherine, along with Jerry, are in favor of pulling out the legal stops to delay the trial for as long as possible, for at least a year. 167
“I just couldn’t wait anymore,” Dagou says to Ken Fan. “I want everything to be over with. So yeah, I opted for a relatively speedy trial.”
Ken says, “It will all work out. Whatever happens, it will all work out for the best.”
How can he utter that platitude? James wonders. He can’t mean that Dagou ending up in prison could be for the best. Dagou doesn’t notice. He thanks Ken profusely, perspiring. The day before, he and James went to Target to buy something to wear to Winnie’s event, because his shirt and slacks from the winter no longer fit him. He eats continually when he’s not in public.
“Listen,” Fang says, pulling James aside. He’s wearing the keen look James recognizes from the alley. Detective Fang. “There’s a stranger in the bathroom. Someone in dirty sneakers.”
“Is it a guest?”
“No, that’s what I’m saying.” Fang hesitates. “It was a stranger, in the other stall. I left the bathroom and waited in the hallway for a while, but they didn’t come out. Come look.”
They head to the bathroom. James checks inside, but whoever had been in the stall has vanished.
When they rejoin the group, Mary Wa asks James if he’ll be going back to school in the fall. James shrugs, and she reaches out to pat his arm. Winnie’s death has aged Mary. Her permanent wave is silver-tipped and her irises are faded. Still, she is solicitous to others. She asks Ming if he’s been sleeping.
“I’m still catching up,” Ming says.
Katherine also worries about Ming. The previous weekend, she pulled James aside to discuss what she called his “manic symptoms,” asking James to keep an eye on his brother when she’s in Chicago. “He’s fragile,” she said. “He’s much more distressed than he lets on. He should stop drinking coffee. He should stop looking at the internet.”
Ming needs to take a few days off, Mary Wa is saying now. This has been a terrible time for him, it is all an awful shock. Stay here with friends, at the Spiritual House, for a few more minutes. Even as she’s saying 168this, Ming slides toward the door. One of Ming’s tricks of being an escape artist, James surmises, is that no one expects him to stick around, even for his own good.
James walks Ming to his car.
“Fang says there was a stranger here, in the bathroom,” James says. “Someone with really dirty sneakers.”
“Yeah, well,” says Ming. “It’s the paparazzi. We’re all famous now.” He reaches the door of his car. “Villagers,” he mutters. He leans against the shiny black surface, closing his eyes and letting the fresh air stream over his face. “They’re coming for me, too, did you know that?” James remembers what Gu Ling Zhu Chi said: Ming is ill.
“Are you okay?” James asks. “You’re … changing, somehow.”
“What do you mean?” Ming barks, opening his eyes to glare at James.
“Nothing—well, you look like you might be coming down with something.”
Ming shakes his head, shakes off the thought.
“You need rest. Have you even gotten a full night’s sleep since you did all of that driving, Christmas Eve?”
“Listen, I’ve got to go. I’ve got a flight to catch.”
James listens. Ming is holding his breath. Then he says, “I don’t need sleep.”
“It’s the trial,” James says automatically. “It’s putting us all on edge.”
“It’s not the trial,” Ming says. “The trial is a procedure, and when it’s over, we’ll know where we stand. In case of the worst outcome, we’ll have the option to appeal.” Ming shakes his head again, very slightly. “It’s something else,” he mutters, not to James. He opens the passenger door of his rental car, puts his computer on the front seat, then circles to the driver’s door, still muttering. He doesn’t know James is listening, with his special new ability to hear.
“The villagers are out,” Ming is muttering. “Following the trail in the snow….”
Ming’s door slams shut. James watches the car disappear, turns, and goes back inside. 169
In the entryway of the Spiritual House, Dagou is kissing Brenda. He gives her one last, tender kiss, and leaves for the restaurant. James knows after arriving at work, Dagou will boil noodles and make an enormous batch of pork with scallion strips, chopped garlic, and jiu cai. He’ll dish out a large bowl for himself, scoop hot pepper sludge over it, and sit in the corner of the empty dining room, shoveling in the savory, spicy pork noodles. Eating, and being with Brenda, are his best means of steadying his emotions these days.
Most of the nuns return to their rooms or to the kitchen. Mary, Fang, and Alice say goodbye. Soon only James is left to do Gu Ling Zhu Chi’s bidding: he’s to carry his mother’s personal effects to his car and take them home.
As he follows Sister Omi into a storage room to retrieve Winnie’s possessions, the irony of what James is doing doesn’t escape him. For some time, his mother wanted to leave the house where she lived with his father. She planned and schemed to leave; then, in her final months, she achieved her desire to live in tranquility with the nuns. Now she’s dead, and James is transporting her personal effects back to the house she was so desperate to get away from. Still, it makes no sense to take her things anywhere else.
Maybe it doesn’t matter, because Winnie had so little, only one box and one bag, the carpetbag Dagou packed with clothes for the hospital. Someone must have brought it back to the Spiritual House after she died.
James goes through the box. Although his mother was able to scale down her belongings in Buddhist fashion, some of her old habits did survive her transition to a life of tranquility. There are very few personal possessions, but there are multiples of each. James counts two small statuettes of the Guan Yin—one gold, one robed in white—and two small incense pots. There are seven strands of prayer beads. Three of these James keeps for himself and his brothers, and the rest he gives to Omi. There are a couple of beautiful old shoehorns. Half-used toiletries, which 170he throws out, with doubles, which he gives away. Only items of the old country, irreplaceable, are singular. A pendant of Guan Yin seated on a lily pad. An ivory comb missing two teeth. A jade button.
Why had his mother lit incense, all those years? Because of her quarrels with his father? Because of Dagou? Because of the hatred and anger in her house?
When he’s repacked the remaining items into the box, Omi picks it up, somewhat unnecessarily, and follows him to the car.
James puts down the bag of clothes and takes out his keys. Omi sets down the box, seizes his hand, and looks up at him, her eyes filled with tears. He’s suddenly panicked by the grip of her bony fingers. He remembers hearing someone say that people who become Buddhists begin with too many feelings.
“Winnie was my friend,” Omi says.
James understands that the passion he glimpsed between Omi and the other novice is fueled by grief. He’s filled with pity and the desire to be alone. “Thank you, Omi.”
James opens the trunk, hoists Winnie’s things inside. Stooping under the lid of the trunk, he finds himself staring at Winnie’s carpetbag.
The bag is burgundy in color. But how is this possible, when he knows, remembers with the vividness of small details in devastating moments, that the bag in her closet at the hospital was blue? He can still visualize the blue carpetbag, which no one ever opened because Winnie, after checking in, never left the unit. She had done everything she could to detach herself from him, but the news of Leo’s death was an unendurable blow to her. She never again wore anything except for skimpy, freezing, cotton hospital gowns. Blanket after blanket they spread over her, tucking them around her shoulders, while the bag sat in the closet. Not long afterward, she suffered her second, devastating stroke. James envisions his mother, unresponsive, in the hospital bed. He feels again the recognition that she’s let him go. But he has no recollection of what happened to the blue bag. 171
James unzips the burgundy bag. It’s half-filled with clothes packed for the hospital, folded neatly, smelling of incense.
Without warning, he remembers the train station. The old man’s melting features. He remembers the concrete and steel, shadows, night falling, cold, the taste of cranberries.
Back in January, while Winnie was still alive, the police questioned him and his brothers about a bag belonging to Zhang Fujian of Suzhou, China. They all denied knowing the location of the bag. Ming had never seen it. Dagou had never heard of it. James described how he’d put it into the cavernous trunk of his father’s Ford Taurus. But he couldn’t remember taking it out. The police searched the Ford, the house, the restaurant. They never found it.
At the time, James and Fang wondered what connection the police could have discovered between Leo’s death and the bag carried by the man in the train station. Were the two cases intersecting? Why did the officers question James so thoroughly, so pointlessly, about a bag of money that, as far as they could see, had nothing to do with Dagou, their father, or the restaurant?
Now James hears an echo of Fang’s voice in the alley: Where’s the money? It doesn’t matter whether the two cases intersect. It’s his responsibility to report his new discovery to the police.
He thinks back, once more, to December, to his arrival with Ming, in Haven. At the restaurant, he’d transferred Zhang Fujian’s bag into his father’s Ford. Say he had later that night removed the bag, along with his own luggage, and brought it into the house. There, somebody—most likely his father—could have discovered it. But it was also possible he, James, had abandoned the bag inside his father’s trunk, bringing only his own luggage into the house. It was possible Zhang Fujian’s bag had been left inside the Ford and Dagou had unloaded it, instead of this burgundy bag, for Winnie, at the hospital. In a haze of anger at his father and in panic over Winnie’s sudden illness, Dagou could’ve removed Zhang Fujian’s blue bag from the Ford, confusing it with Winnie’s, and taken it to 172her hospital room. It could have rested in her little closet, in the hospital, while detectives impounded and searched the Ford to recover the bag for Cecilia Chang, the bag that was somehow connected to the investigation. Then, after Winnie died, someone—one of his brothers, or even one of his parents’ friends—would’ve carried the blue bag out of the hospital and loaded it into a car. And then what?
Dagou might remember. Or he might, at least, remember bringing this other bag of Winnie’s clothes back to the Spiritual House. But Dagou has enough to worry about now, and, sunk as he would be in a medicating haze of pork noodles and jiu cai, cannot be expected to keep things straight.
Ming isn’t much better. Although he’s now frequently in Haven, staying at the family house, in his old room, he’s in a deep distraction. He’s usually bent over his laptop, arguing with Katherine or Jerry over plans for the trial; or else he’s sunk into their father’s old chair, his face lit by his phone, buried in his Phoenix deal.
James pulls over and texts Ming. Where is the bag of clothes from Ma’s room at the hospital?
He speeds the remaining half mile and runs into the house, taking the stairs down to the basement two at a time.
Ming doesn’t text back. For an hour, James works downstairs, methodically moving every box and suitcase, every duffel. Layer by layer, what he unearths is not a few months old, but years, decades old, from the time when his mother and father were hopeful new Americans, jaunty and light-stepping, filled with qi. Had his father ever worn a fedora? Had his mother ever been slender enough to fit into the qipaos from the red suitcase? James finds three cigar boxes emblazoned with the words It’s a boy! and pastel blue cutouts of gingerbread children. He raises one of the boxes to his face, sniffs the faded, sweet tobacco smell. He searches every corner of the basement. After an hour, he climbs, more slowly, back upstairs. There’s one other place to look. As he approaches the room that was once his parents’, his footsteps slow.
The familiarity and strangeness of the room assault him. The wide 173dresser top his mother once tidied, frantically putting things away, is now piled with clothing and the Chinese newspapers that block the walls, the window, pressing from all sides. The musty air is thick with Leo’s stale sweat. His animal substance fills the room. Yet James smells, also—he’s sure of it—loneliness, and fear. He turns on the light. First the closet, piled with shoes: he goes through it pair by pair, box by box, to the back of Winnie’s corner. Tears smart his eyes. He closes them briefly, then continues to look through the items in the bureaus, under the bed. Finally, conceding failure, James leaves the room, shutting the door behind him.
James texts Ming a second time, but gets no response. Then he showers and waits for Alice. Sitting at the unlit kitchen table, he watches for her shadow at the back door. In an effort to stay unseen, surrounded by windows, he doesn’t even risk a lit phone to check his email. The lengthening days push back the dusk, requiring the two of them to meet later and later. In her bedroom, in the gathering dark, Alice is shedding her worn nightgown for a black T-shirt and jeans. She’s perching on her bedroom windowsill, climbing onto the porch roof, and shimmying down a post, stealing along the ten alley blocks to the house. He’s protested her route, worrying she’ll be unsafe, but no one frequents the back alleys except for other lovers hurrying to their assignations. She’s watched over by Haven’s secret-keepers, and by the ghost of Leo Chao. Even during this time in the glare of trial publicity, it’s possible, they’ve learned, to keep an open secret from the eyes of reporters, friends, and all family but Dagou. Everyone smiles over the public knowledge that he and Alice are sweet on one another. But apart from Dagou, no one would approve of what they do together on the nights when Ming is at the restaurant.
James designs his daily plans and conversations to protect their meetings. He’s aware now of a depth and cunning he never knew he had. With each successful machination, he stretches the reach of his inheritance: Chao wiliness, Chao secrecy, Chao cunning. Still, he’s surprised when 174things work out. He feels a jolt each time he sees her shadow at the kitchen door. Feels astonishment, in the bedroom, each time he’s able to bring her to pleasure. Chao appetite, Chao desire. Alice is less bewildered than he. Somehow, she always knew, in her sketchbook: her elaborate visual imaginings of the underground were early explorations of what lay beneath the visible world. For James, each spark of power and pleasure is a discovery. Their nights together are changing him, changing his life, maybe even more than they’re changing Alice. James knows he’s in love. He knows he’s experiencing a sexual awakening: dimly he understands he won’t always feel every moment as intensely as he does now. Dagou has told him. Long ago, Dagou warned him. But he doesn’t think about it. This denial is also an inheritance of the Chaos.
Tonight it’s warm, and in the creases of her skin James can sniff the sharp and intimate smell of fresh sweat. Their bodies slap together wetly. Afterward, they lie in bed and watch the watery moonlight shining through the window, moving up the wall, glinting against his little group of childhood trophies. Alice reaches over him for her glasses and puts them on. Not for the first time, he’s seized with the knowledge, the fear, that she’s about to change everything. But when she speaks, her tone is light.
“A funny thing happened,” she says. “On the way here. I was in the alley that crosses Kelly Street, and I heard barking from somewhere that sounded just like Alf. Exactly. But when I looked around, the only dog I could see turned out to be a sort of poodle with its nose sticking out of a car window.”
“Are you sure?”
Alice nods. “What I really knew, in that moment, was—I was sure of it—that Alf is alive, and someone’s taking care of him.”
“I don’t think so.”
After three months, James hasn’t received a response to his signs, ads, and repeated check-ins with the Humane Society and other local shelters. More than the other confirmed, known losses, the question of Alf keeps him awake at night. Ming is no help. Dagou and Brenda are consumed with worry over other problems; James doesn’t want to bother 175them about it. He has told only Alice; they’ve spent hours repeating the same conversation.
“Of course, Alf can’t have just disappeared,” she says now.
James replies with a point he’s made a dozen times. “If he was brought to the police department, or the Humane Society, we would know. We had a chip embedded between his shoulder blades. Dagou had it registered. They would call us.”
Alice touches the spot between James’s shoulder blades. She knows James has called the police department that morning, calls them every morning, so they don’t forget to keep an eye out for Alf’s body.
“I wish we’d gotten him a GPS collar,” James says for the tenth time. “But Ba didn’t want to pay for it.”
“He wasn’t wearing his collar,” she reminds him, as she does every time the idea of a GPS occurs to him.
“I think he’s dead.”
“Well, I think it’s possible he isn’t dead, or at the police department, or the Humane Society. Someone’s taking care of him. Someone who’s too busy or upset to bother looking at the news. Or maybe …” James senses she’s about to say something she’s never mentioned in all their conversations. “Maybe they know who he is, know who he belongs to, but they’ve fallen in love with him and they don’t want to give him up.”
Alf’s secret life. James remembers his father’s words, when Dagou proposed buying the GPS collar. “Leave the dog alone,” Leo said. “Let him have his secret life!” Leo would know more than anyone. James remembers Alf’s familiarity with the route to Letter City. Brenda thought he had a girlfriend there. Alf, keeper of secrets.
Alice says, “Mr. Strycker called the store today.”
Simeon Strycker is the prosecuting attorney.
“He wants you to testify for the prosecution?”
“Yes.”
James shakes his head. He imagines Dagou talking into the reeds about killing Leo. He sees Ming, his jaw clenched, driving through the snow. And he knows that he, James Chao, Alice’s secret lover, is also 176capable of doing something wild, entirely irrational. It might be an act of heroism or an act of self-destruction. At the moment, he would do anything to protect Alice.
“What does he want you to say?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says. “I just want you to know. Just you and Lynn and Fang.”
“Okay,” he says. He curls away from her, on his side. Alice curls behind him and slides her arm around him. But her words ring between them. Why won’t she tell him? He tells her everything.
Alice believes in Alf’s private life, because she, Alice, has a private life. James knows Alice, has known her since he can remember. Yet she is unknowable.
Where is the bag of clothes from Ma’s room at the hospital?
On the shuttle at O’Hare Airport, Ming frowns over James’s text.
He’s en route to the East Coast, more than ready to leave—frantic with the desperation that torments him whenever he’s been in Haven longer than a day or two, even and especially now that his parents are dead. Time has shifted for Ming as well as for James: as he reads the text, his mind circles, once again, back to December. There was the phone call to the restaurant, about the missing carpetbag. The quarrel with Katherine. The argument with O-Lan.
Why is he preoccupied by his disagreement with O-Lan, a person who, truth be told, repulses him? O-Lan smells strongly of hand lotion but underlying this is an odor lotion can’t disguise. There’s a term for this in Mandarin, “fox smell.” He has found her B.O. repugnant since their first encounter years ago, when he conversed with her in defiance of Leo’s callous disregard of this new help, ignorant, clearly without papers (which was one of the ways his father saved money). Even now, out of resistance, Ming continues to talk to her; and, as if she senses his insincerity, she makes their conversations as challenging for him as possible. 177
That afternoon, December 23, with James trying to eavesdrop in the dining room, she asked him whether he was still planning to fly east. She’d overheard his father telling a customer, one of the Chinese community, that he was leaving town.
“You’re flying out today?” she asked. He leaned forward to decipher her Mandarin. “You know you won’t be able to come back.”
She spoke too quickly for him. He was forced to ask, “What are you talking about?”
She stared, not at him, but at the artwork on the wall. Regarded the cheap Song landscape reproduction with an expression of contempt.
“There’s going to be a storm,” she said. “The storm, our storm, is moving east. And it will join with another storm, coming up the coast.”
“I’ll just have to try to go,” he said. He wasn’t sure of the Mandarin expression for “take off.”
She went back to her work on the counter. The kitchen was quiet in the midafternoon, with only a large cauldron of broth simmering on the stove.
“Hey,” he said, more harshly than he had intended.
Slowly she turned, in mocking obedience to his command.
“You told me that after I reach New York, I won’t be able to come back. What made you think I would want to come right back?”
In her impenetrable expression, he could make out the shape her face would have when she was an old woman. “I’m just saying, young boss, that if you decide to leave this afternoon, you won’t be able to come back. You’ll be gone for days.”
She was forcing him to ask. “What difference does that make?”
“If you were to be needed at home.”
“I have a lot of work to do. My mother is out of danger. Why would I come back?”
“You would be the one to know that. He’s your brother, young boss.”
This remark for some reason lit Ming up with rage, but he only answered, sardonically, in English, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
Because she couldn’t understand, he had the last word. She turned 178back to chopping cabbage in a manner both servile and dismissive. Ming escaped to the dining room, only to bump into Katherine looking for Dagou and to begin that infuriating conversation. Then the phone call about the carpetbag. The meeting with James at the Other Restaurant, and then straight to the airport. Like a well-trained athlete, speeding through security and boarding, buckling his seat belt. The flight attendant closing the door.
The moment his plane left the ground, Ming knew he’d made the wrong decision. The certainty gripped him like a sudden claustrophobia. He took out his phone but couldn’t focus on the screen.
There was nothing to do. He’d have to wait it out. He adjusted his seat, closed his eyes.
But his mind wandered to the restaurant again, the conversation with O-Lan. “There’s going to be a storm.” He hated her. Her fox smell, her shovel jaw, the inexplicably familiar smirk. The minutes hobbled by. After some time mulling over this half dream, he became aware of a change in the plane’s flight pattern: it was no longer descending, but banking. The plane had slipped into a holding pattern and was making long, sweeping circles around Newark Airport. Pushing up the window shade, he could see the distant flashing lights of two other planes looping below them, waiting. The pilot’s voice crackled over the audio system: bad weather, no one allowed to land. Air traffic control was diverting all planes inland to Bradley Airport near Hartford, Connecticut.
An hour later he was staring at the lit grid of the runways, their edges sparkling with light snow. It was now early in the morning, and his eyes hurt. Why, after all, had he thought he could beat this storm? It was the same winter storm that had buried Haven, the snow into which Alf had vanished. And now, on the East Coast, the storm was being whipped up by a nor’easter’s howling wind.
He turned on his phone and found a text from Katherine: Big family fight at hospital.
He sat in the dark plane for perhaps five minutes with the snow-sparkled 179runway lights woven around him. He’d said, “I’m not my brother’s keeper!” He texted back. Thank you for letting me know.
She instantly replied, Dagou is very upset.
After a moment, he typed back, He gets that way.
He threatened your father. People heard.
As the other passengers deplaned, Ming sat belted into his seat, almost afraid that any movement would reveal something to the sender of this text. He imagined Katherine waiting, also in the dark, her black eyes fixed on her phone, her precise, smooth features reflecting its glow, a thousand miles away now. Could she look through the screen and see his agitation? He must be calm, very calm.
After a long moment, a reply came like a gift into his mind. He typed, Maybe you should talk to him. He erased it.
I’m surprised you managed to leave, she continued out of turn.
I was diverted to Hartford. He sat still for a second, then typed, I’m deplaning now.
Ming, he needs to talk to someone.
Ming could think of no way to answer her unspoken question, nothing she would accept. Finally, he wrote, You.
Wasn’t this the permission she wanted? Wanted, for whatever reason, permission to be the strong one, when his brother was weak? For a dozen years now, more mismatched every year, unwilling to let his brother go and take a chance on showing her flaws to someone who was not inferior to her? Ming scowled. And who was he, Ming, to mock her for this? Wasn’t he, Ming, also relying on her superiority and competence, leaning on her unnatural interest in his family, and on the unswerving, inexplicable bedrock of her loyalty to them all? Relying upon Katherine to get him out of a situation he couldn’t bear. The difference was that he, Ming, knew he was being a coward, while his brother was a coward without a kernel of self-awareness.
Katherine didn’t text back.
On the tarmac at Bradley Airport, hunched into the collar of his over-coat, 180Ming took out his phone and began to look up flights back to the Midwest. All flights were canceled for the next two days. Air travel in the entire Northeast was at a standstill.
He would rent a car and drive to New York City. Wait out the storm there for a couple of days, dealing with an electronic blizzard of its own kind, with Phoenix. Ming chose a sport utility vehicle with four-wheel drive, a white BMW. He would blend into the snow. He felt an urgency to hide himself, to reveal his location to no one. Someone could be coming after him. This is irrational, he thought. You should go to a hotel and rest. But he was being perfectly rational: white was neutral, white was invisible, white was innocent.
He’d opted out of all of this. Chosen to live his life away from his family. The stupidity of Dagou, the naïveté of James. The cruelty of his father. He’d done everything he could for them. Had paid dowry to the SH, given his mother what she wanted. Had tried to talk to James, to tell him to get away. There was no way to help Dagou. But he’d warned Katherine, repeatedly. Hadn’t he told her to give up? What else could he possibly have done? But he’d left Katherine in Haven while Winnie was sick. (His mother would be all right, she would forgive him. She knew he needed to get away as badly as she did.) Was it possible, had Katherine been trying to tell him, that his brothers weren’t as strong as he, that his mother’s illness would be especially hard on them? Hard on Dagou? (He’d sent Katherine in his place. He’d left town. Katherine knew he had done this.)
He drove over the metal teeth at the rental exit, steering the BMW through a flurry of snow toward Interstate 91. He would turn south, toward the city.
But when he reached the highway his hand shot out and flicked the signal to the left, toward the north. He stared at the blinking arrow and thought of O-Lan’s little triangular teeth, like a cat’s teeth. He must follow it, the blinker heading not south, toward New York City, but north, 181into Massachusetts, where he would reach Interstate 90, which would lead him back to Haven.
The roads around the airport had been plowed. Not until he turned onto the highway did he realize there were at least four inches of churned-up snow on its surface. It took an hour to drive the twenty-five miles north to Springfield, Massachusetts. There he left 91 and slowly followed the white exit ramp onto Interstate 90, a broad, churned snow trail west, into the Berkshires.
As he drove into the mountains, the storm grew worse. Snow fell through the headlight beams in silvery gusts, pouring down on the narrow tire tracks before him, as if someone above had opened up an enormous box of glitter and dumped it over Western Massachusetts. The lone car in front of him crawled along at twenty miles per hour.
Ming pulled in at a rest stop to buy coffee. The parking lot was crowded with shaggy white cars. Making his way between their shapes, Ming slipped. He was obliged to right himself by plunging his arm into the layer of white covering another car. The shock of cold up his sleeve enraged him. His phone fell into the snow. He crouched in the snow, pawing through it until his ice-block fingers bumped against something solid.
In the food court, travelers had hung their damp coats on the backs of their chairs. They sipped coffee and played cards. He checked his phone, then the clock on the wall. His phone said one a.m. but the clock said three a.m. What time zone was he in? Leaving the bathroom, Ming felt a buzz in his pocket. He turned off the phone.
A few of the travelers glanced up. He sensed, with the instincts of someone who had grown up as an outsider, that their eyes rested upon him for a moment longer than they normally would. They were thinking what was he doing here. Quickly, he checked his reflection in the window. Of the three brothers, only Ming, the smallest, favored running and biking. Like all of the brothers, he had their father’s high cheekbones, and eyes with strong epicanthal folds and not a hint of a double eyelid. All of the brothers were good-looking, but only Ming had Winnie’s pale skin. 182
When he went back outside, he couldn’t find his car. The parking lot was freshly covered, unfamiliar. Back and forth he walked between the rows of vehicles, scraping windows, license plates. Snowflakes sifted down his collar. Finally, he decided on a methodical approach; he clicked his key fob at the beginning, middle, and end of every row. This proved successful. He turned on the engine and heater, used his arms to swipe at the windows. There were no other cars at the pumps. Cowards.
He waited at the entrance ramp and got behind a pickup draped in white. He followed, creeping along, sipping from his coffee. Heavy snow churned under his wheels. Then the pickup turned off the highway. Ming drove on. Here and there were swipe marks where a car had slid off the road; cars lay overturned like dead roaches, and on one of the long inclines near Lenox, several trucks lay on their sides. Police cars twirled their lights. After Lenox, he was able to drive behind a snowplow for dozens of miles, but the plow turned off near the state border and he was alone, the lone car traveling west, an invisible white car in the white storm, traveling secretly past Albany.
There had been a maddening superiority about the corners of O-Lan’s mouth. But despite her warning to him that he wouldn’t be able to return, he was coming. As for Katherine, who’d called him up for the sole purpose of chastising him for leaving Haven, leaving his brother: he would show Katherine; he would arrive after traveling heroically through the night, and she would be astonished, humbled.
Gradually the snow grew pale; the sun had risen. He hadn’t yet reached Rochester. It was the morning of Christmas Eve; Dagou would be preparing for the party.
All day, Ming drove on, stopping for coffee and catnaps in the passenger seat. As he had guessed, the snow gave out near Erie, Pennsylvania; the highways in Ohio were well plowed. At three a.m. on Christmas Day, the sky was clear. He went into a service plaza to stretch his legs. Holding a fresh black coffee, he walked past a man and a boy wearing puffy down jackets. The boy was sleepy but the man and Ming locked eyes for a moment. The man’s eyes popped open. Startled, Ming checked his 183reflection in the window. An alien and yet familiar creature stared back at him from the semidarkness. Its face was that of a stranger: sallow, greenish yellow skin, slits for eyes. The creature was unshaven, his dark mug protruding. Ming raised his arm; the creature raised its arm. He hurled his coffee and a blotch covered the window. The smell of coffee hit the air. Hot dark drops splattered on his shirt.
“Hey!” somebody yelled.
He bolted through the doors and out into the snow, ran to his car, and pulled back onto the highway.
It was afternoon on Christmas Day before he turned on his phone and found several voice messages from Katherine, Please call. It was from Katherine that Ming learned his father had died in the cold.
Sorry to bother you again. Do you know what happened to the bag from Ma’s hospital room? I’m about to file a report with the police.
Ming texts back, Someone else must have unloaded it. Check at the SH. He pockets his phone and takes the elevator up to his apartment: clean, neutrally furnished, comfortingly bare. He’s chosen a high-rise in the Thirties from which he can follow the changing traffic lights straight up the avenue to his midtown office. He swaps out his shirts and underwear; presto, the suitcase is ready for his next trip to Wisconsin. He’s experimenting with a direct flight to Chicago. In a week, Katherine will pick him up at O’Hare and drive him to Haven for a meeting to discuss, and hopefully decide for good, whether Dagou is going to testify on his own behalf.
Ming has time for frequent trips to Haven now, because he’s no longer sleeping. Katherine insists it’s mania, but he can’t be so easily pathologized. Someone has to keep an eye on Jerry Stern: someone has to monitor preparations for Dagou’s trial, a month away. With JJ and Lulu gone to California for good, someone has to help James and Dagou and Brenda keep the restaurant open. Maybe now that he’s an orphan, Ming is 184finally being the son his parents wanted. Returning to Haven every weekend, helping Jerry plan the family defense. Coming up with the money for bail, not to mention the fee for breaking the lease on that ridiculous penthouse. Working shifts at the restaurant, helping out his brothers.
Only Katherine is Ming’s competitor, coming to Haven as frequently as he does. She drives up from Chicago every weekend, staying at a picturesque B&B run by a gay Ukrainian couple who seem to be unaware of who she is (although Ming suspects they know all about the trial and are leaving her in peace out of what he grudgingly calls midwestern decency). She’s obsessed with the legal aspects of Dagou’s case.
Others don’t use the word “obsessed” to describe Katherine’s behavior—instead, they say “dedicated” and “loyal” and “devoted.” No one has the heart to question why she’s still visiting, still wearing Dagou’s ring. Once, Mary Wa slipped up and referred to Katherine as Dagou’s wife. (Ming pointed out this would mean Brenda, his actual partner, was his mistress.) Ming is the only person besides Brenda who sees Katherine for what she is—a vengeful martyr in a Kabuki mask of dedication. Ming is also the only person besides Brenda who knows how infrequently Dagou actually talks to Katherine—knows (because he’s keeping track) that aside from infrequent, strained coffees, Dagou never sees Katherine.
At O’Hare, Katherine executes a perfect pickup on the arrivals curb. But the pleasure of being met at the airport is destroyed by her jabbering about family matters. Ming has to bite his lip to keep from rattling out a stream of critique: She’s as bad as the most racially deprived white person fetishizing Asian culture. Her interest in Dagou, in the Chao family, is entirely due to her sense of deprivation after having been raised as racially Chinese in a well-meaning but white American family. Can’t she get over it? Can’t she even be grateful for the total, blissful wipe-out of the self-abnegation, the anxiety, the shameful graspingness, of immigration? Rather than missing out, Katherine has been fast-forwarded; and yet she chooses, stubbornly and idiotically, to push the rewind button by worshipping their family. She’s unaccountably sorrowful about the deaths of his parents, even his father. 185
“Are you sad?” she asks Ming tearily.
He glowers at her profile; she’s focused on the road, responsible driver that she is. No one else would have the gall to ask that question of him. Keeping his voice level, he replies that people need to mourn in their own time. He takes out his phone to avoid more talk. But she doesn’t notice. Is he getting enough sleep? Is everything all right with his health?
“I’m fine. I need a cup of coffee.”
“I’m sure you’re fine,” she says, after they pull into a Starbucks, “but you look simply awful.”
“I’ve got to take a call,” he says, hoping to end the conversation.
“Is it Dagou?” She blushes. “I mean, are you going to talk to Dagou?”
“Are you?”
“He’s—busy,” she says. “My therapist says this is a hard time for him.”
In his New York life (his adult life), Ming has the luxury of an even temper, but an hour with Katherine and he can’t control himself.
“Does your therapist try to make you forgive him?” He gulps the coffee, burning his mouth. “Does she say it’s all a process?”
Katherine stops at the car and bends over her sneaker, slender fingers making clean white shoestrings into perfect loops. Ming imagines her as a child, learning to tie her shoes, stubbornly making rabbit ears. The vision fills him with rage. He presses on.
“Why do you idolize him? Why do you idolize us?” he asks, wrenching open the door to the passenger seat. “You’ve got to know by now, Katherine, that just because we’re biologically connected, and although we’re one hundred percent Chinese American, our family is a clusterfuck. We’re lost. My parents’ marriage was indisputably lost, and Dagou’s lost, he’s a disaster, and only a genuine miracle will pull him out of it. Even James, his life is going to be lost the moment he grows up enough to know his ass from his elbow. And I—”
“You are filled with self-hatred. You’re as racist as any extremist bigot!”
She gets into the car, but doesn’t start the engine. Instead, she turns and glares at him. He’s alarmed, not by what she’s just said (she’s probably right), but by the sight of her face. Katherine is pale, her eyes filled 186with tears, and even though he knows she was raised by a husky Corcoran blonde, her emotional palette is not his mother’s, not a drop of her upbringing bleeds Chinese; despite this knowledge, he is seized with the kind of pain only Winnie made him feel. It’s pain he would give anything—any amount—to escape. Has given.
Katherine starts the car and pulls back onto the highway, avoiding his gaze.
“You idolize him,” he repeats.
“You think I do,” she says, her voice shaking. “You think I worship him, and all of you. You think I humiliate myself clinging to an imagined family I never had.”
“I’ve got to get out of here,” Ming says. “I can’t stand this for one more minute.”
“I have a loving family,” she says.
Ming leaps at this. “Exactly!” he says. “They love you, you all treat each other way better than anyone in my family treats each other!”
“And they support my relationship with Dagou, they want me to be connected to my Chinese identity—”
“What Chinese identity?” Ming shouts. To his horror, she looks, again, like a little girl. He sees her at six years old, standing on the playground, watching the sun shine on the blond hair of her classmates. He can’t stand it. Even though he’s been there, is familiar with the origins of self-hatred, knows he can’t bear it because it reminds him of himself, he can’t speak to her any more. He puts his headphones on and turns up the sound.
They meet at Katherine’s B&B to discuss the question of whether Dagou should be a witness for the defense. Dagou wants to tell his story. “I just have to explain what happened,” he’s told each of them. Brenda says he should do what he thinks is best. Katherine, on the other hand, says what happened isn’t believable; it’s best for Dagou to remain silent. Katherine has called this meeting in an effort to take charge, but she’s too bossy and 187the pitch of her anxiety is too high. Without meaning to be, they’re all against her. Ming takes notes on his phone.
Katherine: “We’ve got to persuade Dagou that not to testify is in his own best interest!”
Brenda: “Won’t the jury be expecting him to defend himself?”
Katherine: “He’s not required to testify!”
Brenda: “Jerry, is that true?”
Jerry: “It’s true.”
Katherine: “We need to lay low, be very careful! We have no idea what questions Simeon Strycker would prepare to trip him up, to twist his words, in a cross examination.”
Ming (in Charlie Chan accent): “Be vely careful, vely ancient Chinese seclet.”
Katherine: “That’s not funny.”
Brenda (to Katherine): “Simeon Strycker can’t twist the truth. I think you’re watching too much Court TV.”
Katherine: “Strycker’s got something up his sleeve. I wasn’t going to mention this. But sometimes, when I’m in Haven, I’m pretty sure he’s hired someone to follow me—someone must be following us around.”
Silence. Ming assumes Brenda has taken Katherine’s point, but it turns out she’s only pausing for dramatic effect. She lowers her voice. “You don’t believe he’s innocent,” she says. “That’s why you think he shouldn’t speak on his own behalf.”
For a moment, Katherine looks startled. She reddens, as if caught. She recovers herself. “This is about how to win. This isn’t about who can stand by her man.”
“Won’t it backfire?” Ming asks, finally coming in on Katherine’s side. He launches into his argument: That Dagou has zero impulse control, he could say anything. Isn’t this already clear, Ming points out, from all the crazy things Dagou has said to the police, when he had the right to remain silent? Isn’t it obvious he’ll do the same thing in court? But Ming is too late. Katherine pushes back her chair and runs out of the room. They 188hear the door slam, her footsteps on the pavement, then the revving of her engine. An empty gesture, driving away in a huff, since the B&B is her lodging, after all. They shrug, and everyone packs up, goes home, to spare themselves and Katherine the embarrassment of their being there when she returns.
Later he feels obliged to pick up her call. Her voice, high and tight, crackles into his ear. “This is insane! Dagou needs a different defense attorney than Jerry Stern! Anne Sloane is the hottest young defense attorney in Milwaukee and she’s dying to take the case. You need to help me, Ming! Talk to Dagou.”
She’s right: Dagou needs a better lawyer. But Ming has spoken to Dagou half a dozen times, and Dagou has refused to work with anyone except Jerry Stern.
“He trusts Jerry,” Ming says.
“Then he’s an idiot.” Katherine begins to sob.
“Come over to our house,” Ming says finally. “I’ll make dinner.”
Ming searches through the family kitchen for supplies. Winnie left them overstocked with canned and dried goods, but the Chao men don’t buy groceries. The fridge is stuffed with take-out containers. While Katherine pretends to catch up on emails from work, Ming digs out from the piled-up counter a sprouting yellow onion and some aged potatoes. He dices the onion, and, after digging the eyes out of the potatoes, he cubes them. He watches Katherine’s reflection in the picture window. She studies his wiry hands moving with confidence from knife to bowl to pan handle. (At home, he won’t use the wok.) He cracks some eggs, deftly, showing off his dexterousness perhaps, and makes a savory Spanish omelet. Dagou isn’t the only talented cook among the Chao brothers. The aging cabbage and the carrots from the fridge become, with a few flicks of magic, a salad, dressed with sesame oil and sweetened rice vinegar, sprinkled with sesame seeds. Ming and Katherine sit down at the cluttered kitchen table and eat together, not talking. Although doubtless 189Katherine would’ve preferred something “more authentic”—fried rice with eggs, green onions instead of yellow, and stir-fried cabbage instead of salad—the dinner leaves her curiously softened. Waving Ming aside, she takes off Dagou’s jade ring and puts it gently on the counter, then does the dishes.
They retire to the living room and continue to fight over the case. Ming thinks Katherine is overmanaging Jerry Stern. Jerry is disorganized, but it’s the disorganization of someone who knows what’s in each pile of papers. (Katherine, Ming notices, is mentally re-sorting Jerry’s piles, which would only leave Jerry in a state of confusion.) Ming argues Katherine should trust Jerry’s instincts. Jerry will be the defense lawyer, whereas Katherine will be a bystander, save for the period when she will be a witness.
It’s not clear whether Katherine herself should testify. He can’t explain why he has this apprehension. She is, in essence, the perfect witness: well groomed, conservatively dressed, reasonable, relentlessly honest, utterly credible. Despite all this, for some reason he has a sense the trial won’t go well for her. On this night, fortified perhaps by the omelet, he ventures to tell her.
All of her befuddled pleasure from the little dinner is instantly forgotten.
“How do you know anything?” she says. “Who knows Dagou better than I do? Who talked to him every day, while you were off making your fortune in Manhattan?”
Ming, pushed into a corner, comes out fighting.
“That’s why you should back off,” he says, reaching for his superpower of expressionlessness. “This is an emotional trial for you. You could crack under the pressure.”
Katherine grows scarlet. Her lower lip swells, and Ming is reminded of Dagou and their father at the Spiritual House. With a screek, Katherine pushes back her chair. She grabs her purse and stalks stiff-legged into the kitchen. He hears the jingle of her keys.
This is followed by a long silence. There’s no movement toward the door; she’s absolutely motionless. 190
Purse in hand, Katherine stands in the kitchen, rigid fury abruptly slack, struggling to comprehend what has happened.
It is a Chao family foible: misplacing things. You could call it losing things, though they never do call it this. They’ve lost too much: their family ship balancing bravely on a crest, a wave of losses. Lost money, lost home, lost country, lost languages, lost years, lost ancestors, lost stories, lost memories, lost hopes, lost lives; and there is more, it’s clear from their veiled faces, their foreboded happiness, their infrequent, wild laughter. Their extravagance. To balance the losses, poor Winnie stockpiled more sons, more dishes, more emergency supplies. Months after her departure, the kitchen cabinets are still three-deep in canisters of tea, white wood ears, brown wood ears, bottles of fermented rice, bags of dried shrimp.
Is it because of Winnie’s crowded counter space that in this moment Katherine can’t recall, can’t quite even imagine, where she put the ring? (Or is part of it, she can’t help thinking, that she’s rattled by the little dinner Ming made? The way he cooked, with more reticence and more precision than Dagou, but, unexpectedly, with that same attention?) She wants to leave him in a fury, but she literally cannot leave empty-handed. She breathes for several minutes, in and out, moving her gaze slowly, methodically around a package of dried mushrooms. The space on the counter is empty.
She looks at her naked finger. Then at her other hand, down at the floor, back at the counter. Then into the sink. She doesn’t lose things. She keeps them safe. Someone moved it; it was moved. Not by her. Did Ming get up, when they were arguing—did he leave the room?
Footsteps behind her. “What’s the matter? What’re you looking for?”
She turns, flinches at how young and tired he seems. “It’s—the ring. I can’t find it.”
He scowls at her finger, and then, without a word, they begin to search. Systematically, removing every plastic pouch, every canister, tin, container, piling them on the table. Wiping down the counter. Squinting under the counter.
“Are you sure you put it there?” 191
“I’m sure.” Her voice is shaking.
They move everything back to the counter and go over the table. Then the sink again, the floor, the windowsills, the cabinets. They look through Katherine’s purse, although she’s certain she didn’t put it in there. Then the other room. Two hours pass. They’re exhausted. She can tell he wants her to leave: if only she would leave!
“Maybe I’m remembering wrong,” she says. “Maybe I knocked it into the sink. Maybe we should take the drain apart.” She stares, hard, at the empty sink strainer. “No,” she says, “I’m sure I put it on the counter.”
But there’s no other possibility. Unless—would he, would Ming have done it?
“What is it?”
“Nothing.”
Could it be? Is it possible that, despite his claims, he’s jealous of Dagou because he’s the oldest? Does Ming secretly want all of the things Dagou has never questioned being entitled to? Could it actually be—her breathing sharpens—
“What is it?”
She snaps. “Did you take it?”
She expects him to explode. But he only shakes his head. “Why would I do that?”
“Because you’re so competitive!” No, she is the exploding one. There’s so much she’s been holding back: what everybody thinks she feels; what she truly feels; what she alone knows, or suspects, and cannot even allow herself to think, about Dagou. She must hold back. She regains her self-control. “You might want the one valuable thing he has that you can’t buy. You might want to be the one—the one to give the ring to the mother of the future family heirs. You might, somewhere, deep down, be as old-school patriarchal, as dynastic-thinking, as your brother, as your father!”
Her words are followed by a resounding stillness. Then Ming says, as quietly as James, “That I might want what he has.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I might. But I would never take it from you.” 192
She thinks: Because it means so much to me, and not to him after all. But there is something else in his tone, an uncharacteristic, almost unendurable gentleness.
They stand and stare at one another. Her eyes burn with tears. She sees, making its way through months of weariness, grief, confusion, and pain, a spark—definitely, there is a moment when a flicker of Chao desire, which she knows so well, flares into Ming’s black eyes. He will—unquestionably—take her into his arms. What does she want? But then Ming remembers who she is. He gathers himself, and says, “You should go home.”
He doesn’t get involved with Asian women. Though Katherine is only genetically Asian. She’s been raised by a white family, and her emotions, Ming reminds himself, are white emotions! Still, because of certain childhood scars fused into his psyche, the sight of her discouragement (really, any flicker of upset or disappointment) stirs up in him useless feelings, Asian feelings, that have been pushed away long ago.
Ming can’t tell if she still wants to be with Dagou. It could be pride alone that keeps her working on Dagou’s behalf. But were Ming to be honest with himself, he believes it’s less than fifty percent pride; it’s more a profound loyalty and, yes, love. What kind of love is this? he wonders. What is its source? How and why did she attach herself to his buffoon of a brother in such a way that love was woven in so deep?
Ming remembers Katherine on the first Christmas Dagou brought her home. They were in their senior year of college, and Ming was a high school junior, old enough to recognize another socially disciplined introvert. She was pretty—beautiful, really, right from the beginning—but shy. Most likely it was Dagou’s casual manners and his natural warmth that first drew her out. (Dagou’s beer-faced grin, beaming through the crowd at a college party.) He remembers her meeting Winnie. She wasn’t 193faking the part of the diffident, sycophantic future daughter-in-law; she was truly moved and honored.
If he (not Dagou) had been dating her, he would have recognized in that moment, with Katherine looking down at Winnie as if at a long-lost mother, and Winnie beaming back up at Katherine as if at a long-lost daughter, that he’d made a terrible mistake to bring her home. That he, the son and the lover, was now responsible. He would’ve taken better care of her. Katherine and his heedless, harebrained brother. It’s more preposterous every day. How can her love be keeping her bound to him? From what depth of love could come this fathomless loyalty? And how can Dagou fail to see it—fail to see what a priceless, peerless gift he dangled, and now squanders?
Weeks pass. It’s two days before the trial. Ming is working on a large eggplant with garlic sauce, the final order of the night, when his phone buzzes at his hip. He sets down the spatula, turning from the sizzling wok to check the screen. It’s a text from Rydson, telling him to fly to Phoenix in two days for a series of meetings. “Affirmative,” Ming dictates, pocketing his phone, turning back to the stove.
So, he’ll miss the first few days of the trial. Fine—he won’t be in trouble; he’s still basking in the halo effect from ponying up the bail.
Savagely, Ming scrapes singed eggplant and garlic from the bottom of the wok. He flinches as hot oil spits in his face, glaring at O-Lan, who stands at the counter slicing scallions into tiny o’s. Ming wonders if she was more communicative when Dagou was working. Since the forty-nine-day ceremony, Brenda and Dagou have spent every possible hour together at her house. Tonight, Freedy is serving; Ming is covering the kitchen while James is off with Alice on a supposedly secret date that has been meticulously arranged in person or by note. Alice has no mobile and it’s hard to reach her away from the Oriental Food Mart. Ming has 194gone to see her there, with Mary Wa in the back room spying hopefully, maybe hoping he might save her daughter from being so eccentric and reclusive. In fact, the opposite is true. Privately, perhaps unknown even to James, Ming is supplying Alice with names and email addresses of potential employers in New York, information with which she may create a faraway, impoverished artistic life, a life even more powerfully private, sealed off from Mary.
Ming’s sinuses fill with a pungent, burning odor. The eggplant has shriveled into a scorching mess. Ming wrenches the wok off the flame. He’s ruined the order and must start over. Yet while he does this (dips oil into the second wok, throws in the garlic to begin again) there comes a nudge, a recognition working its way up from the deep subconscious. It’s several minutes before he understands what caught his attention.
O-Lan’s sneakers.
They’re ancient Converse boy’s sneakers that were once black, with white rubber toe tops, stars, and soles; but the toe tops and the stars are gray-brown with an accumulation of restaurant grease, and the black fabric has faded to a dull gray-brown as well, until black and white are almost the same color.
After closing, Ming waits for O-Lan to remove her apron, wash her hands, and step out of the kitchen, past the office. He waits for her car to leave the lot. He locks the restaurant door, and, keeping a distance of about two blocks, follows as she drives through the tangle of back alleyways.
Past old sleeping porches, garages, and back gardens; through unmarked intersections, close to lighted windows, Ming trails the distant taillights of O-Lan’s car. It’s an eighteen-year-old Dodge, entirely anonymous, probably unregistered. (After all, how could she register the car? She’s not legally in this country. Her car can’t be legal, either. Or is that true? He remembers Jerry saying one needs proof of residency to register a car, but that may not be the same as proof of citizenship.) Ming frowns into the dark. Years of driving as carefully as possible so as never to be 195stopped by the police; years of fixing every headlight and taillight. It’s a wonder she drives at all. But they’ve all taken her and her car for granted. Sending her to the Oriental Food Mart. Roping her into bringing food to Winnie at the hospital.
Now she’s bypassing Letter City, driving uphill, past the maze of houses to the neighborhood’s inglorious back end, near a shabby warehouse for baked goods.
Ming pulls over a block away, switching off his lights. O-Lan parks behind an old house, emerges from the car carrying a bag over her shoulder, and circles up a fire escape whose black-painted metal threads gleam faintly. Ming waits until a light turns on in the attic. Then he gets back into his own car. He circles the block and finds a parking space, locking the door as he gets out. Xiaoxin. He places his feet on the metal steps that lead behind the shabby old house. Climbing, circling silently up and up. The door at the top of the stairs is small. The knob turns easily in his hand; he breathes.
Inside, O-Lan stands two yards away, looking coolly at his face.
“Hi,” he says, startled to see she’s waiting for him.
“Hi,” she echoes the English word, her mouth opening blankly, like a goldfish. There’s something unfamiliar yet recognizable in the way she says the word. He’ll think about it later.
The room, the narrow footprint of the house, is bare and neat, but not fastidiously clean. The ceiling slants toward the eaves, where the low wall is dominated by a window.
“You’re ill,” she says, in her odd dialect.
“You were at my mother’s memorial service,” he says, struggling for his Mandarin vocabulary.
She doesn’t answer. Ming walks over to the window and peers down the hill on the collection of chimneys and receding rooftops at the edge of town: dark and shabby, with one steep tin roof. The empty warehouse parking lot spreading like a lake beyond. “It’s like a painting,” he says. “In the winter, it would be almost like that painting by Bruegel the Elder, with the hunters in the snow.” 196
“Your mind is wandering,” she says. “You have been getting worse and worse for months. You should go back to New York and stop flying every week. Your younger brother is here. He can look after your older brother.”
“You didn’t answer me,” he says. “I’ve never seen you at the Spiritual House before. You’re not a Buddhist. Why did you come?”
“I can’t pay my respects to the dead?”
“Do you respect the dead?”
“I do.”
“You weren’t invited,” he continues after a moment.
“You weren’t invited here.”
“Why’ve you stayed in Haven for such a long time?”
“To you, how long is long?”
Now he’s sure she’s mocking him. He’s flustered, hampered by his language skills, which are barely proficient. “This isn’t about me. Long for you is more than two years. None of the other helpers stayed past a year. You have nothing tying you to this place. No real job, no family—”
He stops, inexplicably confused. “Did you have some kind of special arrangement with my father?”
“Yes,” she says. “But not in the way you think.”
He doesn’t answer, worn out by the effort to converse in Mandarin.
“What do you think?” she asks.
Below, a man holding a plastic sack half-filled with aluminum cans searches the dumpster. He moves with measured concentration, stacking bags and pizza boxes to one side.
“It’s very inappropriate that you have come here to my room,” she says. “You’re stranger than I would have thought.”
Ming watches the man below. What she says is probably true.
“You’re so proud of being able to speak Chinese. Yet you’re also proud you’re not Chinese.”
Was that scorn in her voice? “But I am,” he protests, surprising himself. “I am Chinese.”
“You are a tourist. None of you brothers is Chinese, you least of all.” 197
Ming clears his throat.
“I assumed you understood all this: that you, your brothers, all three of you are lost.”
The yellow light fills his eyes as he turns to look at her. Strands of white in her hair, ashy skin still shiny with oil, bags under the eyes. Some fundamental answer encased in her bones. Why did he come? Yes, he wants, needs, to talk to this woman, but why?
She goes on. “And here I thought you understood, understood all along, and acted accordingly. Surely you left town knowing it was going to happen.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I thought you knew. The storm. The storm coming to the East Coast. I still believe you knew. You don’t want to take responsibility for what you knew was happening. You, and only you, possessed the knowledge and foresight to prevent it from happening. And yet you didn’t.”
“No,” Ming says. “I didn’t.”
“You knew what you were doing.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“No, I think it’s clear you’re the one who is losing your mind.”
A wingbeat of acknowledgment flicks between them.
“What do you mean, I knew what I was doing?”
“You’re too intelligent to not see this. You knew about the freezer. You knew it was possible for someone to be trapped inside the freezer.”
“Why would I have thought it would happen? Just because something is possible doesn’t mean it will happen.”
“But your older brother told you it would happen. He told the entire community, he broadcast it on the radio, that he wanted to close the door.”
There’s a radio on the kitchen counter. “He was angry, he was raving—”
“You knew how miserable William was, how much he hated your father,” she says. He’s struck by her certainty, her confidence. Is it because she’s speaking the truth? “And you, too, hated him. You hated his embarrassing reputation for being boorish, a womanizer, a lout. But you hated 198him the most because he was an immigrant, a father who couldn’t help you accomplish what you wanted, who could give you nothing to bring you closer to what you wanted to be. He was not only of no use to you, he was less than no use. He was a humiliating, shameful person with no control over his crude passions. He was an embarrassment, it would have been better if he were dead, then you wouldn’t have to make excuses for him, hide him, disguise him, disguise yourself. Like your brother, you wished him gone. You know that by leaving town you were approving his murder. You wanted him to die! And so, when we were discussing the storm, we were discussing his murder. Americans love to talk about the weather—it can stand for so many things.”
Ming waits: she has more to say.
“You, of all of us,” she went on, “are the person who is least certain Dagou is innocent.”
His mind moves back to O-Lan’s first months at the restaurant. He was home for only a week that summer, her first. Didn’t he try to speak to her, near the dishwasher? Wasn’t he the least distant of the family?
“You hate me,” he says. “But I’ve done nothing against you.”
She does not reply, doesn’t need to.
“You hate all of us. You think we’re fat, stupid Americans. We’re spoiled. But you think there’s something real about us.” She gives him a startled glance, and he knows he has correctly guessed her thoughts. “So you’ve stayed with us. Even my father couldn’t figure out how to get rid of you.” He remembers something. “He cut your salary once. I remember it, I saw the books. He cut your salary and you kept showing up.” Confusion tumbles his consciousness. “Why did you keep showing up? And why didn’t—why—”
“Why didn’t he fire me?”
She smiles slyly, a wide smile that turns up at the corners like the Cheshire Cat’s. He has never seen her full smile, and it repulses him.
Stumbling over his own feet, he hurries out, shutting the door with force, as if he can make her disappear. 199
It’s the night before the trial. Ming lies fully dressed on his old bed, listening to the neighborhood dogs barking to one another, yard to yard. His turn now. His eyes are dry and he rarely blinks. He keeps rubbing his left ear and feeling his forehead with his palm and the back of his hand. No fever, but his mind moves from image to image with an uncommon speed, touching lightly and refusing to stop, to focus. He sees his brother Dagou in his pink shirt. “You asshole!” Shutting his eyes, Ming can still see vividly his old posters (Albert Einstein, John Lennon), his debate trophies and math team trophies, his stack of Werewolf comic books, his old bathrobe hanging off the back of the door. His analog clock radio. Scruffy and generic objects, evidence of a past that shouldn’t matter. But, of course, this was the room where it began: where he first read a copy of the Financial Times that had been left in the restaurant and understood if he could only become educated in the right way, he could grow rich enough to leave this place behind. Not only this house, but this community, this town, this state; and he would never return, never again be near his father. Has leaving Haven been enough? Is it possible to get even farther from them, from all of this? That is what the fifty million is about.
Ming rubs his ears. He leans over and fiddles with the volume knob on his old clock radio. He’s set the radio alarm in case he sleeps, to wake him up in time to catch his flight to Phoenix. But he can’t sleep. Some time earlier, James checked in, colorless and anxious, and left the house. Now, at closing time, James must be putting up a sign that says the restaurant will be shut down for the duration of the trial. James and O-Lan are removing their aprons and washing their hands.
How old is O-Lan? She has seemed beyond fertility. Slightly hollow around the eyes, with a few white hairs at her temples, dull ocher of her cheeks, soft flesh under her arms. But is it possible she’s only in her forties, less than ten years older than Dagou?
Ming props himself up on his elbow, ears pricked. He checks the 200radio volume knob again. He gets out of bed, still wearing his shoes, and leaves, locking the door carefully behind him. He drives slowly, pausing occasionally to review his thoughts, until he reaches the house. Soon O-Lan will be returning from the restaurant. He parks two blocks away, waiting, until he sees her old Hyundai emerge from one alley, slowly cross the street, and enter the next alley. He waits until the attic light turns on before opening his car door. At the top of the stairs, he tries the knob. Once more, it turns easily in his hand.
This time she’s sitting at the table, calmly eating an orange. He hesitates, then plants himself a few feet away.
She chews slowly, watching him with no expression.
“You’re related to him,” he bursts out. “To us. You are his daughter.”
O-Lan smiles again. He can see it now—the family resemblance, in the very spade-shaped jaw he hates. Why hasn’t he seen it before?
“Since when do you care about flesh and blood?”
“You’re our half sister.” It’s obvious now. She’s not a small woman; there’s breadth to her shoulders, and there’s something in the way she cants her hips at the counter. Her feline smile, the shape of her cheeks, can only be Big Chao’s. He backs away, his body repulsed even as it knows. She’s right: he’s never acknowledged his own blood, has never wanted to belong to these people, to his family.
“You don’t look well,” she says. “The customers are right. You’re going off the rails.”
“Off the rails?” he scoffs. “I’m the only rational person at the restaurant.”
“You were rational. I used to think you the most reasonable of the brothers. You were rational until you had a glimpse of the truth—very simple, but distorting your assumptions, blowing them up from the inside.”
“Get out of here—get out!” Ming yells.
“This is my flat.”
He turns to leave. He feels, from behind, such a force of coldness that he stumbles again. A miasma of confusion and hatred and misery 201rises over him like a wave. He’ll be drowned. Surely all of this hatred isn’t about him. It transcends him in time and space, it’s something from the past.
He turns again to face her.
“You must hate him! You, too, hate him!”
“I thought we had also talked about this,” she says. “We agreed on this: You are the one who truly hates him. Because you hate yourself.”
“Did he know you?”
“He knew. He denied it, in the beginning, but he knew.”
“Tell me the story.”
“You’re such a strange person,” she says. “You want to get away, and yet you keep coming back. You want to forget, and yet you want to know what happened.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s not much, to you. My mother, who was cast aside, and robbed, for the sake of an exit to this country, lived in bitterness and died years later, a ruined woman. It’s dangerous to cast people aside. You forget them, unaware they’ve not forgotten you, unaware of the tremendous spite and hatred somewhere in the world. My mother died without money or valuables, without opportunities, without happiness. She never had a life of her own, she had only me.”
“Cast aside—for the sake of a way into this country?”
“You wouldn’t know. There was a possibility, with a payment, to enter the United States. But only enough money for one person. A thief.” She meets his eye. “And he called himself a pioneer.”
He looks away.
Now she’s telling him about the shame she and her mother lived in. Poverty and hunger. “One year it got so bad my mother searched him down, tracked him down. She never told me this—she kept almost everything about him a secret from me—but I knew, I guessed, I got the truth out of her. She wrote asking for money, for food. Not for the ring, which he stole from her. But for food. And she never heard back.” 202
He’s thinking about Dagou’s radio story. Six-year-old Dagou with the puffball haircut. The unsent package, packed with dried mushrooms, addressed to somewhere in China.
“To think I’ve always held you in respect,” she’s saying. “You got the farthest away. You were able to leave him. You’re safe in your office, high up in your skyscraper, totaling up your annual bonuses.” How does she know about the hunting blind? Ming waves his hand in a spasmodic gesture. He wants her to stop talking now. “But you’re the one he most wanted to be. You’re the pillager, the plunderer,” she continues. “The most American. Of all his sons, you’re most like him.”
She lowers the half-eaten orange into her lap.
“So many things … now I’m a woman without a country, without a mother, a woman whose father is not my father. Who is most at fault? My mother, who died a bitter, ruined, very ill woman, abandoned by my father? She never had a life of her own, she had only her one desire: to ruin my father, to make sure he would not live, to still that endlessly healthy red blood.”
Ming turns again, panicked. He leaves the room and stumbles down the stairs.