It’s a mild winter morning more than six months later. Deep in the Chao house, seated at the old PC in his late father’s cluttered den, James waits for Dagou to appear on-screen for a prescheduled video visit from the prison fifty miles away.
For Christmas he’s sent Dagou a journal, stationery, and the allowed religious necklace: Winnie’s pendant of Guan Yin, seated on a lily pad. He’s already purchased credit—paying a hefty fee—for his brother to buy toiletries and snacks. Thanks to video and in-person visits, small presents, Brenda’s attention, and daily workouts, Dagou is holding on. He must serve his sentence in prison until Jerry, Sara, and Katherine can prepare for the appeal. They’re counting on the likelihood that O-Lan’s flight will discredit her testimony, as she herself predicted.
While he waits for Dagou, James rereads Lynn’s latest post. She’s still blogging, despite the fact that she received a C on the trial assignment, seventy-six out of a hundred points. (Among other factors, she lost credit for each sentence over twenty words and every paragraph over three lines long.) This brought her course grade down to a B for her first journalism elective. Her mother and father are dismayed, but Lynn has decided to keep writing. 279
The big news was announced yesterday: Alf has been found! He’s well and happy, living with the Skaers, of all people. That pack of Skaer cousins, after messing with James’s phone, later found Alf in the snow and saved him. They thought they’d keep him long enough to upset the Chaos, then return him to Leo. But the cousins fell in love with him and didn’t want to let him go. When Leo’s death hit the news, they adopted him.
James studies the accompanying image of Zack Skaer, wearing a Christmas sweater, posing with his arms around a fat, middle-aged French bulldog with a white blaze on his chest. A red bow is stuck between his ears.
James has decided not to confront the Skaers about keeping Alf. What argument can he make, considering that his own family lost the dog, let him run out to founder in the snow? The Skaers saved Alf; they had the right to adopt Alf; they deserve to keep him. James will write to thank them.
“Hey, Snaggle.” Dagou’s image materializes on the monitor.
Dagou looks pretty good. There’s the hint of a glow in his face. It could be his shave, in preparation for the day’s visit. He hasn’t given up.
“I did eighteen sets already,” he tells James. “I do twenty push-ups, jog to the end of my cell and back twenty times, that’s a set. My plan is to get really ripped in the new year. I’ve been reading about it. You can lift using the coffee jugs, you can do chin-ups by wrapping toilet paper around the—” There’s a delay in the transmission. James is reminded briefly of his brother’s broadcasting from FM 88.8.
“You look great,” he says.
“—you can eat peanut butter for protein.” Dagou never liked cheese. “How are you, kid? You look like shit, to be honest.”
James feels his lips twitch. “Thanks.”
“When are you going back to school?”
“I don’t know.” 280
“Come on, kid, you can’t beat me at being the loser of the family. You have to go to school.”
James swallows hard. Every time he talks to Dagou, either in person or on video, he worries it might be the last time he’ll be able to see him, confide in him.
“I shouldn’t take out loans if I don’t have goals.”
“Fuck goals. You should be in college. And fuck loans. Mingo owes you, big-time. He can pay for your school.”
“I always planned to be a doctor,” James says. “Since grade school, I never questioned it.”
“So don’t question it.”
He had thought of it as saving lives and helping others. But his failure in Union Station changed all of that—led, step by step, to the moment when he let O-Lan escape and Dagou go to prison. Of course, he’s confessed to Dagou about letting O-Lan get away; his brother understood, has forgiven him. But Dagou’s forgiveness changed nothing about what he’d done. It’s as if one unthinking day he’d set foot on an island with an active volcano. A fissure opened in the ground. Now he’s standing on one side, watching his life move further and further away.
“A tiny weed widening a crack in a man’s life,” says Dagou. “Those thoughts are dangerous, kid.”
“I can’t help it,” James says. “I just keep thinking.”
“That was my problem. Take my advice: get back to school. School, it could be like my working out. Keeps the energy contained, keeps your brain from developing unhealthy habits. But—” he drops his gaze. “I’m the last person you should come to for advice.”
“You’re my oldest brother,” says James. “You’re the only person I come to for advice.”
“We miss Ma,” Dagou says. His chest swells in a deep inhalation, then collapses in a sigh. James thinks of his father, shooting sparks in the dark.
“I loved Ma,” says James. “Only—”
“Only she had no good advice about getting laid.” There’s another 281short delay. Dagou is saying, “… before she died, when I went to her at the hospital. I asked about him. About Ba.”
“What did she say?”
“You know her, she would quote the Sermon on the Mount. ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.’ It was her favorite verse of the Bible. And then, when she could no longer take it, when Christianity became too much for her, she went to the Spiritual House, where it was about cessation from attachment, from desire. She tried to let go of all of it. But she never did, you know. She never ceased attachment. She told me to love. In the hospital. To love him.”
“Maybe she didn’t know what she was saying.”
“She knew.”
For a long moment, neither brother can come up with a response. Then Dagou grins.
“As for getting laid again, you can come to me for advice. I deliver! From behind bars, I can get you laid. I should do a column: ‘Dear Convict.’ ‘Dear Convict,’” he intones, in his best voice from FM 88.8. “‘There’s this hot girl, and she doesn’t know I exist. What do I do? Signed, Horny Bastard.’” Dagou shrugs. “‘Dear HB,’” he says, “‘You need to get convicted—’”
“That’s not funny. And you’re not a convict.” To comfort Dagou, James has said this before.
But today, Dagou says, “That’s not true.”
“Yes, it’s true!”
“It’s true on a technicality. I’m being held unlawfully. I didn’t commit the crime for which I’ve been convicted. But if you look at it another way, I deserve to be here. I did a lot of other shitty things, for which I wasn’t punished.”
James struggles to reply.
“Forget about it. Listen up. I had an idea about another dish for the fantasy party! I know it’s too late now, so how about next year? Ma’s savory zongzi.” 282
In the last two months, Dagou has been making plans for an evermore-elaborate fantasy Christmas party. At night, lying awake, he tries to recall every dish his parents ever discussed and attempted: the triumphant reconstitutions of fish dishes from the other side of the world; the salted greens and crispy skins they teased from childhood memories. He remembers even the failed meals. He directs James and Ming to reconstitute these recipes and to feed their results to Tyrone, Freedy, and the most loyal customers, who critique the dishes. Dagou and James spend most visits discussing these experiments. Are they trying too hard with their cao bing? Is their bing too neurotically or timidly sliced, or too evenly stir-fried? Does it miss the crunchy and uneven bits that had graced their mother’s celebrated version?
Lately, Dagou has been seized by the idea that if only there were no hunger, humankind would be all right. He means more, he says, than hunger of the body. He believes they’re related: Hunger of spirit is hunger of body. The answer lies in the stomach.
“I’ve been writing to Katherine,” he says. “She’s going to visit me today, on her way out to the party. I’m going to grill her about the afternoon, like, five years ago, when Ma taught us to make her savory zongzi.”
Although she’s had two video visits, Katherine hasn’t gone to see Dagou in person since his conviction. James suspects they’ll be discussing more than recipes. “And Brenda?”
“She’s coming tomorrow. Christmas visit.”
Dagou’s features twist. His face is wretched, darkened.
“I can see her mind go back and forth!” he says. “She walks in thinking, I’m going to dump him, gotta dump him now! I can see the other guy. He’s an accountant. White guy, dirty blond hair, six-pack abs, met him at the Festival Foods”—James knows there is no such person—“and he’s coming by to help her with her leaky sink or make himself useful around the house, since there’s no man around. Why stick with me? Why be faithful to me, an imprisoned loser? Every visit, I know she’s going to dump me, then she walks in here and feels sorry for me. I should give her her fucking 283freedom back. If I was a better guy, I would. I will. Fuck if I’m going to keep her tied down.”
“She loves you, Dagou.”
“I’ve been trying to break up with her every time she walks in here.”
“You’re just low because today’s the anniversary … of what happened.”
“I’m a shit.”
To cheer up his brother, James tells the news that Alf has been discovered with the Skaers. He’s even a little fatter than before.
“Ba always said that dog was a whore.” Dagou shakes his head, but James can tell he feels better. They’ve reached the end of the visit. Katherine will be coming to see him at two o’clock. Dagou wishes James a great Christmas party. He also sends a greeting to pass along to Ming, who’s left his job in New York and is now living, with James, in what was once their father’s house.
As the earth’s axis tilted away from the sun, and as the medications took effect, Ming’s inflammatory monologues eased. He’s not drinking coffee, and he’s promised not to spend more than ten minutes a day on the internet. His native arrogance has made it possible for him to gradually and scrupulously wean himself off of the psychotropic drugs, the anti-anxiety drugs, the sleep-inducing drugs, and the antidepressants. He goes to the gym and visits occasionally the talk therapist prescribed for him. But the psychosis has opened a window in his mind, and he now has extra insight that comes from an experience in another world. He’s as fierce and critical as ever, but he struggles with vivid dreams, and he doesn’t tell most of them to anyone, not even his brothers.
Ming and James used most of the bail money, plus some of James’s savings, to buy the house and restaurant back from Gu Ling Zhu Chi. It was right that the property should go back to the Chao family, Gu Ling Zhu Chi said. She’d received a visit from Winnie’s spirit before the 284forty-nine-day ceremony; Winnie was troubled about the will after her death. And of course the old abbess wouldn’t refuse the money to endow the Spiritual House, where their mother and their half sister had sought refuge. After sending the money to the Spiritual House, Ming wasn’t yet at ease. They had more to pay back, for the past and for the future. And so the money left over has been put into an account to pay for health benefits for Brenda, as well as for Tyrone and Freedy, who’re working part-time while they save up to start their own restaurant.
When James comes looking for him, Ming is waiting in their father’s old chair, watching a soap he secretly enjoys, set in Wyoming, about a ranching family that owns a llama, Thelma, with an IQ of 155.
James says hello, sits in Winnie’s old chair. “Did you have anything for lunch?”
This is the anniversary of Ming’s drive through the snow: of the texts from Katherine, of his unshaven muzzle in the window at the service plaza. No, he hasn’t had lunch. He stares at the TV, ignoring James, and glowering at Thelma, who’s playing a trick on her human owner, Macy, involving a mailbox and a locked gate.
But during the commercial break, he mutes the sound. The old house stands around the brothers, hushed, as the winter sun moves up the sky.
For months now, he’s been holding back on James. He’s been taking things one day at a time, biting his tongue. But on this day, the anniversary, he must speak. “I thought you were different,” he says. “I thought you were on higher ground. I told you go search the car. But instead you got distracted and went off like any one of us, off to sniff some tail. While you’re making out with Alice, Dagou cluelessly drives away with the money in the trunk and everything goes to hell.”
He stops and waits for a reply, but James doesn’t try to defend himself. Most likely he knows Ming is right.
Ming goes on. “It’s just a guess, but I’ll bet you a bundle that Dad saw Dagou brought the wrong bag to the hospital. That he knew the money was in Ma’s room, and probably even checked on it, but for some reason he decided to leave it in the room where anyone could have gotten to it. He knew 285about it, so why didn’t he put it somewhere else immediately? Why not put it in the house? Or in the restaurant office? For crying out loud. Fifty thousand dollars. Fifty thousand, and he lets it sit in a hospital closet.”
“Maybe he thought O-Lan would steal it if he left it in the office.”
Ming has already considered this. Leo would have known O-Lan also knew about the bag, he says. She would have learned about it from her bilingual eavesdropping. She’d be expecting it to turn up sooner or later. “So he leaves it where he assumes she won’t think to search. But he never gets a chance to retrieve it. Dies first. Not knowing that O-Lan might actually have some connection with Ma.”
James says, “Maybe he wanted her to have the money.”
“No. No way. He simply overlooked the possibility that O-Lan and Ma might have had their own relationship. That she’d feel gratitude for Ma’s decency when she was starting out. That Ma might guess who she was, but not hold it against her. That she might want to deliver food to Ma when Dagou’s being questioned. So, at some point, when she’s bringing Ma soup, she eyes the bag. Takes it right out of the hospital room and puts it into her trunk. Although of course she doesn’t leave town. Not yet. She’s watching and waiting, waiting to get that ring. She follows Katherine, back and forth. To the restaurant. To our house. She’s spying through a window when Katherine takes off the ring and puts it on the counter.”
“Why didn’t she leave town then? After she got the money and the ring?”
Ming hesitates. “She was waiting to talk to me.”
“You’ve got it all figured out.” James tries to placate him.
But James can’t possibly understand; because of the false language barrier, he never had a conversation with O-Lan. He’s never eaten her food. For a moment Ming can almost taste the red radishes, the thin white lotus like the lace of bones. With an effort, he trains his mind back to the conversation. “Of course,” he says, “that still doesn’t solve the question of where Dad was planning to put the money after retrieving it from the hospital. There’s the biggest mystery: What was his real way of hiding money? He left the money in the hospital and died planning to get it back 286and bring it to his secret hiding place. You know he was sitting on a pile of cash, years and years of cash. His Life Savings.”
“You think he was loaded.”
“I know. Some people, they go through life, and what they have to show for it is money. I know Ba was that way.” He finishes the thought. “It takes one to know one.”
They sit silently in front of the TV. Ming is aware of Christmas Eve oppressing them. James checks his phone. He’s about to leave for the restaurant, to set up for the party. They must both be at the restaurant soon. James puts his phone away, and Ming senses something he’s never felt around his younger brother before—not love, not exactly. Comfort, gratitude, and trust. He knows he must take a risk and bring up the matter he’s been keeping back, something that’s been growing in his mind. He stares at the screen’s bright, meaningless images.
“I suspect you’re another one,” he says. “I think you’ve got a taste for treasure, James.”
There is a tick of quiet between commercials.
“Ming,” says James, glancing over, trying to meet his eye. Ming looks away. “So, it’s about the freezer room. I don’t think Dad’s stash is invested out in the world. I think it’s at the restaurant, in the basement.”
Ming keeps his gaze trained at the television.
“You were going on about a lot of stuff, when you were sick. I had a hunch—so I went and looked it up. Eight hundred thirty-eight thousand dollars, that was the going price of a bar of gold, last winter.”
So the old nun was right, and James is, indeed, cannier and more relentless than they’ve been giving him credit for. “You fucking well know Dad wasn’t talking to me from the spirit world. That was just a crazy fucking hallucination, James.”
“Listen, Ming,” James says, “I went downstairs last week, to check it out. The room seems like it’s falling apart. The south wall, in the back, it’s like part of a brick wall was halfway taken down. There are at least three skinny bricks, recently painted.” 287
“Stop.”
“He told you about it,” James persists. “He must have wanted you to go find it. He must have trusted you not to waste it.”
“No, no, thanks. I don’t need it and I don’t want it.”
They sit together in silence. “We can leave it down there,” James says. “In case one of us needs it in the future. For the restaurant. Or for more legal costs, or—”
“All right.”
When James is gone, Ming heaves himself out of his father’s chair and goes upstairs to get ready for the Christmas party.
What the four of them (Ming, James, Brenda, and Katherine) rarely mention is the fact that they’re keeping the restaurant open for Dagou, who will need the place after the appeal is successful and he’s out of prison. This is the advantage of a family business, Ming thinks, as he gets into the shower: it can employ an ex-convict as a matter of policy.
Anyway, they have time on their hands. Business has become less steady after the verdict. The Haven regulars haven’t abandoned them, but the peripheral customers have stayed away because of the persistent rumor about dog meat. The rediscovery of Alf might help somewhat. But people are cautious: the restaurant is now marked, or marred. It’s no longer an upstart business founded by new arrivals, but a local institution with a history and tragedy of its own.
Are the Chaos immigrants anymore? Ming wonders, as he searches for his reflection in the steam-covered mirror. Are they still an immigrant family, now that their mother and father are gone, and after all the passion they’ve spent, the transgressions they’ve committed in Haven? He remembers the luncheon at the Spiritual House: Leo shouting, Alf pressing his butt against his shoes, he himself retreating safely into his hunting blind. He can’t pretend he’s innocent, can’t protect himself anymore. If the past year has been about anything, it has been about their recognition—his, Dagou’s, and James’s—that they are Americans now. This country is the place where they have made their ghosts. It’s home. 288
The midday sun, unseasonably warm, shines through the last oak leaves that drop into James’s path, as he rides his bicycle, without haste, down Cosgrove Avenue, toward the restaurant. At a long traffic light, he digs his hand into his pocket and discovers the piece of sesame candy given to him a year ago by his mother, at the Spiritual House. He unwraps the sticky candy and eats it slowly, enjoying the sweetness, popping the seeds between his teeth.
Arriving at the restaurant, James skids to a stop to avoid the small figure of Mary Wa, emerging from the station wagon in which she sometimes makes deliveries. She’s insisted on delivering the supplies for the party.
“Let me help,” says James, leaning his bicycle against the restaurant. In the front seat of the car, Alice is sitting with her sketchbook. James’s heart pummels his chest. He hasn’t seen Alice in almost four months.
“Where’s Fang?”
Mary opens the back of the station wagon. “Fang is still asleep,” she says. “And what are you doing, awake?”
James shrugs, smiling slightly.
“You never used to be this way, James Chao. Keeping my son up until three o’clock in the morning, drinking and talking about who knows what. Fang says you and Lynn make him apply to Madison. But what about you, James? You’re not going back to school? You don’t want to be doctor anymore?”
“I don’t know, Mrs. Wa. I’m taking a break.”
“Just because your brother is not allowed to live his life, it doesn’t mean you don’t live yours,” she says, with an uncharacteristically sage expression. “You get on with your own life.” She puts a hand on his shoulder. “You’re getting strong,” she says. “Well, you need some time. Time to get over everything, and time to get used to the fact that Winnie is no longer on this earth.”
James says nothing, but it is comforting to have a motherly hand on his shoulder. After a while, he moves away, toward the entrance. 289
“You’re not locking up that bike?”
“No one’s going to steal my bike.”
“We need something to eat,” Mary says unexpectedly. “Come on, Alice.”
Alice gets out of the car. Together, they walk through the red double doors, under the banner that has been up for three months and is beginning to fly a bit loose on windy days, grand re-opening.
The sun streams into the dining room, lighting up the same old booths upholstered with red vinyl. Yet there are notable changes. The lampshades are new. The place looks cleaner than before, and the air is less sticky, as if someone has personally wiped the decades-thick film of cooking oil from every square inch of every table and booth. Someone has. The walls have been repainted smoothly in “Himalayan Paw,” a matte golden color chosen by Katherine. An enormous lucky bamboo, which Katherine purchased for an unreasonable sum, stands near the door. There’s a flock of framed black-and-white photographs on the walls, snapshots of the Chao family members over the last dozen years: James and Dagou, when James was in middle school; Dagou posed with his instrument; all three brothers; the brothers with their parents. Near the register, there’s a photograph of Alf and Winnie, taken sometime in the year before James left for college. Winnie kneels with her arms around Alf, who’s beaming at the person behind the camera. Someone has gone to the trouble of removing the glow of the flashbulb from his eyes.
“There’s no need to hide anything,” Katherine said, on the day when she brought over the stack of framed photographs wrapped in brown paper.
In the kitchen, the old counter has been replaced. The office has been cleaned out. The bathroom has been remodeled, and, downstairs, the refrigeration in the freezer room has been disconnected.
Mary Wa asks to be seated. “Alice needs something to eat. All she would have this morning was orange juice. Dumping cold acid into her stomach, first thing.”
Nervously, James gestures to a table. 290
“I’m okay, Ma,” says Alice. She sits down in a resigned way and looks at the menu.
She’s dressed characteristically out of season, wearing an arsenic-green cotton print that emphasizes her long, thin arms. The dress is the kind another girl might have bought at a vintage store, but James guesses it came from an old suitcase in the basement. He remembers the smell of her skin. He wants to run his hands up and down her arms, to make her shiver.
Alice asks for tofu and mushrooms; she must have decided to continue with her plan to stop eating meat. Is she getting enough protein? James adds extra tofu and a beaten egg into her soup. From the kitchen, he watches her profile as she eats. He wants to take a photograph but he’s sure she would be disturbed by that, and it does seem voyeuristic. Still, how else to imprint in his memory the exact slope of her forehead, the long curve of her nose against the gold wall of the restaurant, glowing in the winter light? As he stands there watching her eat, each moment stretches into a translucent pool of time—endless, and yet over in an instant.
He has to leave her alone. Still, he interrupts her as she makes her way to the bathroom. “When are you going to New York?”
“I told them I would start on January fifteenth.” She’s taking a job in Brooklyn as a babysitter for one of Ming’s old coworkers, sharing a studio apartment with one of Lynn’s classmate’s sisters.
“So, really soon,” he says.
He’s afraid he’s guilt-tripped her, but she studies him somewhat gently and asks, “How are you?”
James shakes his head. “I miss you,” he says quietly, but her mother is hovering. “I’ll see you tonight, at the party.”
Alice nods. James stares at his sneakers. After the verdict, Alice said it made sense for them not to be alone together for a while. Of course, they’ll always be friends, but why bring back old feelings? James wonders now. Have the feelings Alice once felt for him vanished in the same way so much of Dagou’s anger and hatred for Leo Chao have gone? 291After emotions are felt, expressed, where do they go? Is there a place where spent passion collects? Surely it can’t simply vaporize, disappear like smoke. There must be a secret hiding place. For every old love affair, a locked room.
Now Alice is leaving with her mother. He waves from the door as they get back into their car. It’s hard to be the one left behind.
He’s staring at Mary Wa’s vanishing station wagon when he senses the opening of a portal. Hears Dagou’s deep, husky voice. I forget you have such bad Chinese. You’ll live a big, important life, you’ll grow up into a powerful man. You’re going to have adventures—expansive, challenging adventures; you’re going to live in many places. Maybe, when the appeal is successful, he’ll say goodbye to Dagou, and to the restaurant. Maybe he’ll go out into the world. He could have other lovers, perhaps many more. And he’ll be all right financially, he’ll find a job. Didn’t Ming say he, James, had a nose for money like their father and like Ming himself? Didn’t Gu Ling Zhu Chi say he would remember everyone he ever knew? It’s possible that, somewhere out in the world, he’ll meet up with Alice, and they’ll be together again.
By five o’clock the restaurant tables are rearranged in preparation for another, much smaller Christmas party. Instead of long rows, the tables are set up in a square, with chairs along the outside. There are red tablecloths and napkins, and in the center there is another table with a very tall vase that Katherine has filled with red roses, holly, and fancy white mums. For Christmas the brothers have planned a menu of sea bass and vegetables—nothing grandiose this year—although, to honor their parents, they’ve also stewed a large kettle of pork hocks.
Around four o’clock, Jerry Stern enters the restaurant and sits down in his usual booth. James, wearing an apron, waits on him.
“Talked to Dagou yesterday, about the appeal,” Jerry says genially. “How about a beer?”
While James gets the beer, Jerry picks up one of the restaurant menus 292and flips through it. The plastic cover and the laminated pages are smooth and glossy. James wiped each of the menus with Windex one night when he found it impossible to sleep. The menu is also fat with new inserts reflecting ideas Dagou dreams up and persuades them to try.
“How did Dagou feel about the appeal?” James asks, returning with the beer.
“Of course, discussing it made him a bit anxious, but—” Jerry frowned at the “Chef-at-Large Menu,” an orange sheet of paper. “Bird’s nest soup? Think the chef-at-large might be getting you in over your head?”
“You tell him.”
Jerry says, “I’ve suggested to your brother that he find someone else. There’s an attorney from Milwaukee Katherine wanted to bring in—”
“She was just anxious, Jerry. You know Dagou would never agree to be represented by anyone else.”
“Katherine is a big help to me and Sara,” Jerry says. “For an attorney at an accounting firm, she’s showing a real gift for litigation.”
“She told me she’s thinking of quitting her job and becoming a public defender.”
“Talk her out of it.” Jerry squints at the menu again.
The door bangs open, and they hear a throaty shout, “Haven’t I been patient enough?”
Brenda stalks into the restaurant in a fiery tantrum. She strides past the tables and chairs, flinging her jacket and purse across the seat in her booth.
“She needs to get the hell out of Haven!” Brenda shouts. “She needs to detach! This isn’t hers anymore, she needs to get over this and go on with her life!”
Along with her purse, Brenda carries a laptop computer. She has begun to take accounting classes at the community college. She’s wearing blue-rimmed glasses that emphasize the color of her eyes. She looks prettier than ever to James, especially now as she stands with feet planted, knees slightly bent as if ready to attack from the haunches.
“What happened?” James asks, although he knows very well what happened. 293
“She’s been to visit him!” Brenda’s eyes glitter with outrage and resentment.
“He needs visitors,” James says. Since Katherine revealed her muddled loyalties and stood up for Ming in court, she has truly become family—and he can’t tolerate another loss of family. “He’s an extrovert. He needs distraction, cheering up.”
“Why does she need to see him?” Brenda rages. “They’re broken up. They’ve been broken up for a year. And how could he let her visit? Doesn’t he remember she betrayed him? She doesn’t believe in him. She stabbed him in the back!”
“They were best friends for a long time, Brenda.”
“He says she apologized and begged his forgiveness! Why should he even talk to her? Why should he even give her the time of day? But he did. He did. She was there a full hour!”
“Did he tell you all of this?”
“I made the guard tell me some of it.”
“You did?” James can’t help asking. To cover, and to feign innocence, he adds, “Did he forgive her?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. So I know he did!”
It’s so typical of Dagou to succumb to Katherine’s apology and then to be unable to hide this fact from Brenda.
James suspects the scene was stormy and they forgave each other in mutual prostrations and exclamations of love. He suspects Katherine got on her knees and Dagou burst into tears; and although they didn’t go back to their college days, there was undoubtedly a kind of passion, far more than Brenda would have considered necessary or appropriate. But this makes perfect sense, is somehow comforting to James.
“Why doesn’t she move on?”
James smiles. “Why don’t any of us move on?”
His words shake Brenda out of an internal labyrinth. She fixes her gaze on James with maternal concern. “Are you thinking of leaving town, James? You have your whole life ahead of you—you’re not going to spend another year here in Haven, are you?” 294
James doesn’t answer.
More times than he cares to admit, he’s rewatched the station video online, lying in bed with his screen flickering. The black-and-white train station, the strangers in their winter coats, the old man clutching his carpetbag, shuffling across the screen. James has seen the video so many times he knows each dip and sway of the bag. Too soon, the man who was briefly his grandfather disappears.
I’ll memorialize him, James thinks. I’ll talk about him tonight at the party. I’ll ask everyone to raise a glass to Zhang Fujian.
He thinks, I am James Chao, son of the late Leo and Winnie Chao, brother of Dagou and of Ming, once lover of Alice….
“Sometimes I think she’s not interested anymore,” Brenda is saying. “Maybe she’s just waiting for Ming to come around. They’re made for each other. They’ll end up together; it’s just a matter of time.”
It will only happen after they have all survived the present moment. For now, the world is holding still. Appeals can take years to prepare. And yet, for Ming, something has shifted: he is no longer opposed to dating Asian women. This he ponders in the kitchen, chopping ginger to make their mother’s favorite sea bass. He’s soaking two giant tubs of pea greens according to the nun Omi’s instructions. As a penance to his brother, he is slowly mastering recipes from the Spiritual House, as well as trying out the dishes Dagou dreams up in prison and wants so badly to be making himself.
On certain days, Ming feels certain he and Katherine loathe each other, and that this hatred is so specific and well founded, so based on things each has said or done, that there is no way they could ever transcend it. They’re two highly compatible people fated to speak only about one subject, and, if Dagou were to be released from prison and Katherine to abandon Haven for good (with less guilt, and diminished attachment to this momentous, and hopefully successful, appeal), they might talk less and less, until they’re just friends on social media (perhaps, for this purpose, Ming might rejoin social media). Katherine will meet a more deserving man—maybe a fellow lawyer. She’ll give up her daydream of 295becoming a public defender. Ming will return to New York, throw himself into his work, and finish making his fifty million.
At other times, Ming can just as clearly envision the two of them clutching hands before a justice of the peace. He can see their enormous airy old apartment in an august building along the lakefront in Chicago. Together, more than they would alone, they’ll be able to move forward from the present. They’ll cycle through Bavaria and eat their way through France. They’ll bicker constantly. They might even make a pilgrimage to China: to Katherine’s orphanage and Leo and Winnie’s ancestral villages. And eventually they might have the Han children Katherine once wanted; they’ll raise a new dynasty of Chaos to conquer the restless, shimmering vision of the world Leo Chao dreamed about, the vision that led him to this unlikely place.
They have one snapshot from Katherine’s phone. In the image, Dagou fills the kitchen doorway in his smudged white apron, grinning carelessly at the photographer. O-Lan stands behind him, working at the counter, slightly out of focus. Whenever a Chinese newcomer visits the restaurant, Ming shows them the photo and asks if they’ve seen anyone resembling her. No one has. Of all their contacts, only Gu Ling Zhu Chi might have an inkling of where she is. Ming and James have tried several times to reach the old abbess. They know they must speak with her soon because her time is coming to an end. But on their most recent visit to the Spiritual House, they were stopped at the door by An, who examined them with her blue gaze; and they were told that, in her dotage, Gu Ling Zhu Chi was dozing through the afternoons. No one must disturb her rest.
Far away, the sun is setting over the desert. The sky behind it deepens to royal blue. Under this there lies an infamous and extraordinary city, and near the city’s edge stands the New World Hotel, a glowing palace of debt and fancy.
When it’s well past dark, a Chinese woman leaves the hotel through 296the side door of the lobby, skirting the cars lining up for valet parking. She’s a plain woman, with canniness and discernment in her gaze; she could be anywhere between thirty-five and fifty. She strolls down the strip, past a kaleidoscope of lights. She passes sparkling trees, reindeer, sleighs laden with gifts, life-sized, psychedelic gingerbread houses. There are also palaces, monuments to what she knows are lesser desires: fake country villages, fake European landmarks, false worlds. But the art inside the New World Hotel is real. There is a Constable, a Shishkin, and, she’s almost sure of it, a Brueghel the Younger.
She walks to the hotel almost every day. It’s possible to go inside and view real paintings. To win a little money, stroll the sculpture garden, then slip out and make her way down to the anonymous room where she is living. This city, more than anywhere she’s been, is a mix of exaggeration and routine. Every day, the same and new. In the mornings, sunrise. There is a world here, and there’s the underbelly of the world. There is the desert, where it’s possible to bury the past in shifting sands. Her father would have loved this.
She glances down at her finger, at the green jade glowing faintly in the dusk. Seen through the window, abandoned on the counter. In the end, the ring was easy to reclaim. She’d simply slipped through the back door, into the kitchen with the stealth of a cat. She has the ring now, and she has her birthright. She has her real name: Chao Ru.
She came to America resolved to make herself an orphan. In doing so, in carrying out her plan, she found a family. Deep in the interior, toiling at that shabby restaurant with its neon sign: there, she found three brothers. She has no desire to call or write to them. But it’s something to know they exist, living their own flawed, desirous lives. That her blood is shared. The blood of the thief, the pioneer and the marauder, the yearner and the usurper.
She looks out at the desert and its dream of tranquility. 297