Law Abiding

For Spring Festival, China’s biggest holiday, Jin Lei invited me home to visit her family in the city of Kunming, Yunnan Province. We were joined by two friends, Nancy, a sixty-four-year-old retired British nurse, and Robyn, a twenty-two-year-old fundamentalist Christian from Australia who was studying Chinese at Bei Wai. They were both good company as long as we stayed away from the subject of evolution. Nancy and I felt evolution was the most obvious and wonderful process in the world; Robyn believed it was a lie confected to undermine the Bible. Robyn asked me to read a book that discredited the fossil record, a record I cherished as my own family album. I try to be open about ideas contrary to my own, but the first pages proved so ridiculous—“all life on earth was created 6,000 years ago”—that I handed it back to her, imagining Peking Man standing in the very field we passed, laughing his hairy ass off half a million years ago.

“You know there’s actually something called scientific method,” I said. “Laws that govern how we figure stuff out.”

“What about God’s law?”

“Okay, Robyn. I’ll leave your faith alone if you leave mine alone.” She frowned and slipped the book into her bag.

It was late January, and the coal heater in our second-class train car was broken. We bundled up in our seats for the twenty-five hour ride to Kunming. The land south of Beijing was flat with a few bare trees bordering dormant fields, bleak factories, and brick hutongs turning orange in the fading light. We slurped noodles and talked ourselves tired, crawling into the cold bunks above. I listened to the deep, soothing voice of Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder on my cassette Walkman and slept well but woke shivering as flute music piped passengers awake at 6:30 a.m.—a standard practice on Chinese trains. The steward brought hot water for tea, and first light revealed mountains, leafy trees, and the lush groves of our descending latitudes. At a stop somewhere in Henan around noon, I ran out to buy beer, a bag of nuts, and—I couldn’t resist—a grilled fish that I shared with Robyn. We dozed and woke with the breath of cats.

The train crossed the Huanghe, the Yellow River, and I thought of the golden carp, the cradle of Chinese civilization, and Aunt Lil, wondering if this was the Orient of her imagination. Men and women in coolie hats unloaded sagging barges onto donkey carts and blue trucks. Every city seemed to be pouring cement and laying steel. Shining glass office buildings emerged behind bamboo scaffolding. There were sports cars and glamorous women on cell phones. China in transition. Even the Yellow River, with its turbulent history of flooding, had been tamed with dams and high dikes. China’s Sorrow, they called this river, and many people had been washed away over the years. This afternoon things were placid, and a man fished with a long pole on a muddy tributary. I pushed my face against the dirty glass and thought he might be into something very unlike sorrow, but we sped by before I could know.

We were greeted at the train station by Mr. Lu, a handsome man in his late twenties who managed the travel agency employing Jin Lei. He hugged Jin Lei and shook our hands, driving us to a welcome party at a friend’s apartment. There were the usual toasts and platters of marvelous food, people offering me cigarettes, and asking questions in Chinese and English. Robyn’s Chinese was excellent, and she helped interpret for Nancy and me—but I was exhausted and soon dropped into bed.

I woke early before the others, as I usually do, stepped onto the cool concrete floor, and found my way to the concrete shower. After a few seconds of warmth, a column of freezing water shocked my body, sending me into a frantic scrub that lasted less than a minute. Clenching and tensing sharply under the icy downpour, I pulled a muscle in my neck that would plague me for days. My giggling host would later tell me that the bathwater was solar heated and early morning showers were not recommended.

Jin Lei had stayed with her parents, and she returned the next morning with Mr. Lu, both looking happy and bright. We spent the day relaxing along seagull-swept Green Lake and then arrived at the shabby, state-subsidized apartment of Jin Lei’s parents. Chubby, wearing cardigans, and smiling, her kind folks offered tea and spoke to us like family. I asked questions. Mr. Jin, whom I called Jin Laoshi, Professor Jin, was an artist, painter, and set designer for the Kunming stage. He adjusted his heavy square glasses and asked if we were hungry. Ms. Lei, Lei Laoshi, as Chinese women often keep their surnames, was an opera singer who now directed small performances that toured rural areas as part of China’s state culture program. During another program called the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, this creative couple was sent into the countryside to make school chairs and, it turns out, their first daughter, Jin Lei. Although a potential artistic and intellectual threat to the nation, the couple was restored after the death of Chairman Mao in 1976 to the city and the work they loved. They had another daughter, Jin Wei, who aspired to be on television.

Jin Lei’s parents lived a simple life in this concrete flat—the chief luxuries being a television set and a loveseat draped in a dog pelt, where they read, watched their favorite TV shows, or gazed at lacy goldfish in a mossy aquarium. But they had gone to great expense preparing a Spring Festival feast. Hearing I loved seafood and fish, a bundle of crab legs came many miles from the South China Sea to this boiling pot high in Kunming and a scaled and scored carp was ready for the hot oil. They also served Yunnan delicacies of fried goat cheese and thick, peppery bacon. Lei Laoshi bought a bottle of champagne. “They never had it before. Would you open it?” Jin Lei asked me. I proudly took the bottle in my hands and made a big deal over the label while the family, Mr. Lu, Nancy, and Robyn looked at me in anticipation. The wire cage over the cap had a strange twist, and as I tilted the bottle toward me for a better look the cork blasted off and struck my forehead. I staggered a moment and apprehended the amazement of the audience. Someone grabbed the spuming bottle, and I collapsed into my chair, dazed and bleeding. Nancy examined my head and eyes, Lei Laoshi got me a Band-Aid, and Jin Laoshi poured me a glass of his special ginseng baijiu, explaining that it would calm me. “He’s calm,” Nancy said. “He’s very calm.”

I soon recovered, though I long contemplated the ironic possibility of surviving so many dangerous drinking exploits only to be killed by a cork. Robyn said grace, and the dinner danced along on ample glasses of beer and baijiu, toasts, and lively conversation in English and Chinese. Lei Laoshi sung an aria, Jin Lei recited a poem, Jin Laoshi showed us his new paintings, and Mr. Lu told a joke that everyone got but me. After dinner, the men shared a smoke from a long bamboo pipe, sort of a cross between a bong and a hookah. Mr. Lu passed it to me with a wink, and I found the cool, native grown tobacco smooth and stimulating.

“Yu,” fish, Jin Laoshi said to me, pulling out a tea-stained book of seventeenth-century paintings by Bada Shanren. “Yu,” I replied with attention. He pushed back his thick glasses and opened to plates featuring ink brush paintings of tear-shaped fish with deeply expressive upturned eyes. Without looking silly or overly cartoonish, Bada Shanren’s fish seem to express the anxiety of disruption and danger—as if the river were dropping and heating up or a great flock of cormorants had just alighted. A young scion of the established Ming dynasty, Bada Shanren’s world was turned upside down with the Manchu conquest and takeover of the Ming in the mid-seventeenth century. How would it feel to have your traditions, values, and laws suddenly challenged by “barbarian” outsiders? I studied the compelling images while goldfish lazily mouthed algae off the aquarium glass. Jin Lei and her mother washed dishes. Mr. Lu picked his teeth, and Jin Laoshi sunk into the dog fur and nodded off.

We spent several days touring Kunming, including Lake Dian, more than two hundred miles of rippling water hung with fishing nets pulled by thin men on wooden junks reefing bamboo-battened sails. We walked through colorful markets, ate spicy noodles, and sipped tea. Jin Lei bought mentholated plasters for my stiff neck, and I purchased a couple dried lizards designed for baijiu infusions. “Good for man strength,” the apothecary said and grinned, while a tomcat on the shelf behind him licked its furry balls. It was cool and sunny in Kunming, and we lingered around monuments, smelled flowers and fresh fruit, and chatted with a family whose tin and plastic shack abutted a twelve-hundred-year-old pagoda. The grandfather had driven a few spikes into the Tang dynasty stone to string wire from the pagoda to his pantry for hanging and curing bacon—the dusty, sacred past tied to the profane and delicious present.

I watched Mr. Lu and Jin Lei talk together—sometimes in laughter and smiles, other times in obvious tension. I could catch words and phrases but could not understand what they were discussing. I asked Robyn, and her face squinched. “You should talk to Jin Lei. She’s going through a rough time.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“You’re both my friends. I don’t want to be a spy.”

“You can help me a little, can’t you?”

“Well, Jin Lei’s courses are over next term. Lu wants her to come back to the travel agency. She doesn’t want to.”

“Okay. I figured that.”

“Lu’s in the Party. And I guess the travel agency is run by the State. I’m not sure. There’s something about Jin Lei getting money to study, and now she must go back to work. I guess it’s the law. Then there’s family stuff. You better talk to her.”

One night Jin Lei and her girlfriends wanted to go dancing. With the right amount of alcohol, I loved club dancing, and we had a couple hours of fun at a hotel disco. Just as things were winding down, Mr. Lu showed up in a polyester suit. I could see Jin Lei’s smile change. I wanted Jin Lei to come home with me. We’d hadn’t been alone together since the trip began.

“I can’t,” she said.

“Why not?” I asked. We had agreed to keep our relationship discreet in Yunnan, but I was feeling strange about her connection to Lu.

I went outside, where one of Jin Lei’s friends was smoking, and asked her for a cigarette. She spoke a little English, and with my limited Chinese we could talk.

“Mr. Lu is a strange boss,” I said.

“He is a good man,” she said. “Very confused.”

“About what?”

“He is Jin Lei’s husband, but maybe changing,” she said. A sickening wave washed through my chest, and I started walking, though I wasn’t sure where. I heard Jin Lei’s voice calling my name. She ran to catch me. I stopped.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Forget it. I’m going home.” I rubbed my sore neck, turned, and walked on.

“No. Henry. Listen.”

I turned again to face Jin Lei. “So, Lu is your husband?”

“Yes, but not like you think. For apartment. It’s hard for young peoples to get place to live. You sometimes must do this. We grew up together. He is like brother. He took care of me. You don’t know.”

“I know you’re married.”

“I don’t love him the way I love you. I want to be with you at Bei Wai, and read books, and study English.”

It took a couple days for me to understand and accept what was going on. But the sting of betrayal faded, and I believed Jin Lei when she said she wanted a new life with me.

As planned, Nancy, Robyn, and I flew back to Beijing. Jin Lei would return later by train. After we got in the air, Nancy dozed off, and Robyn and I sipped beer, talked about Yunnan, and played a game of gin, the creationist and the evolutionist leaving victory to chance and attention. Robyn never had more than one beer; I drained three and took a sip of baijiu from a bottle in my carry-on. White clouds reflected sun through the little curved window, and Robyn began to win in proportion to my rising elevation. When turbulence suddenly shook the plane, I touched her arm and assured her, “It’s okay.” Then I won a hand with a run of hearts.

“You devil,” she said.

“Robyn, maybe God and the Devil, like you and me, have coevolved to get along.”

She smiled and shook her head. “God likes you, Henry. You should figure out why.”

Nancy woke, and we all talked about the journey, sharing some of our photos. I studied a picture of Lake Dian. “You know, I didn’t do any fishing on this trip,” I said with regret.

Nancy looked over her glasses and smiled. “Oh, I think you did plenty, sir. I hope you can handle what you’ve caught. Don’t you dare mislead that girl. Her world’s been turned upside down.”

“I know,” I said. “I’ll help her.”

“Well, you remember it’s easy for you to go home and forget all this. But this is her home, and she needs her friends and family. I’m sure they’re questioning her right now.”

Robyn gave me a sympathetic look and set down her cards.

“I know,” I nodded respectfully. Older, wiser, and genuinely concerned, Nancy could speak to me like this. She was right. I now had a great responsibility to Jin Lei.

Beijing was cold. Ice thawed off the lakes and canals, but the water was still too chilly to angle. I taught my classes and thought about Jin Lei. I wrote long letters to Eugene and tried to work out my feelings. Did I love Jin Lei? Yes. Did I want to be married to her? To anyone? I wasn’t sure.

I didn’t trust the institution of marriage. Like the sanctioning of churches and state, the marriage bond itself seemed to entail as much unnatural dogma and expectation and bring as much suffocation and misery as it ensured trust and the promise of lifelong joy. I saw few benefits and many risks. I knew tortured couples and happy couples and every sort in between. But my contract in China ended in July. What then? Jin Lei’s dreams were limited by Mr. Lu, the travel agency, Chinese law, and the Party. Would she get a divorce and free herself of those restraints? Then what? She might end up persona non grata in Kunming. Maybe like the heron in the fish compound we could fly over the wall. In the States, I thought, she could start fresh and pursue a new life. We could go back to school together, develop careers. But we’d need to get married. It would be an act of friendship, I finally reasoned.

“That’s a green-card marriage,” old Art told me as we sipped beers in the faculty dining room. “I think it’s fine,” he said. “But it’s against the law. If they find it’s a sham, you could go to jail.”

“It’s no sham, Art. I’m not getting paid. I love Jin Lei and feel she has a right to this chance. Governments be damned.”

“Okay. Go for it,” he looked away, wary of my cause.

After a few humiliating state counseling sessions, Jin Lei got a divorce. She returned to Beijing, and we completed interviews, medical examinations, and extensive paperwork toward a Chinese marriage license, which we received from the Ministry of Civil Affairs in a plush red case bearing the golden phoenix and dragon. The next step required me to interview with an official at the American Embassy. The embassy was located in a posh neighborhood along with other diplomatic missions and foreign-owned mansions shadowed behind high iron gates among armed guards and flagpoles. One wonders what peasants pedaling by with rice and bloody pig snouts thought about the world outside. After checking my papers and passport, the Marine on duty smiled and said, “Hey. We’re having a party here on Friday. You should come.”

“Sounds great,” I said.

“You’re at the university, right? Bring some chicks.”

“Okay,” I answered and laughed.

“But no Chinese.”

“Really?”

“Chinese nationals can’t come in. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to fuck a couple, but it’s a security risk.”

“Right,” I said.

My name was called. I nodded to the Marine, crossed the lobby, and entered the emigration office. The American official looked over my papers, asked basic questions about how long Jin Lei and I had been together, if we had any children, and the nature of our plans. “To study together in the States,” I said.

“So she’ll be applying for a visa and green card?”

“Yes,” I said.

There was a pause. Then he asked, “She has mole on her face. Where?”

“Uhh.” It took me a second to register the question, and I had to visualize Jin Lei’s face. I pointed to a spot on my own chin, but the mirroring transfer put me on the wrong side. “Oh,” I corrected myself and moved my hand to the right. “On the right side of her mouth. It’s very cute,” I smiled. The man squinted and studied me. I smiled some more. A few tense seconds ticked away, then he stamped and signed the form.

I left China in July of 1996, arriving home to find my father watching the Mets and my brother, David, oiling a pair of Penn reels over newspapers on the kitchen table. I had been living in Asia for five years, had $375 in my bank account, no job, no car, two suitcases, and some worn-out fishing gear. “Well,” my father said and smiled. “Start splitting wood and cutting the grass, and we might feed you.” My brother hugged me with his greasy hands.

David had struggled through his freshmen year of college in Massachusetts after Aunt Lil died, but he transferred to Long Island’s Dowling College, lived at home with our father, and had a decent sophomore year. “I’m starting to like school,” he said. “Especially the history classes.” Dowling also led David to the nearby Connetquot River State Park, sheltering a beautiful six-mile spring-fed trout run flowing into the Great South Bay. David described the park’s history as the South Side Sportsmen’s Club, founded in the 1860s, with members including Teddy Roosevelt, J. P. Morgan, and the Vanderbilts. In addition to native brook trout, the club introduced rainbows and browns and constructed a fish hatchery. David took me to the Connetquot, and at first I was put off by the sign-in and payment process, the strict rules and restrictions: fly fishing only, barbless hooks, no alcohol, stay on your beat.

“You’re at number fifteen. Stay on your beat,” the man in the booth repeated.

“What if there’s no one at the next beat?” I asked.

“You can’t leave your beat. Those are the rules.” He handed me a receipt and yelled, “Next.”

Fishing should free us, but I understand that in heavily populated areas like Long Island somebody had to manage rivers, or they’d soon be trampled and empty. This model has worked well in Great Britain, and I imagined myself walking to a famous beat on the River Test, though at an affordable stateside rate of only fifteen dollars. We fish-walked a half mile down the wooded road, saw deer and wild turkeys, heard a rattling kingfisher and the music of moving water, and I felt even better. I told David about China’s bleaker waters—the fishing parks and dirty canals—and it helped us both appreciate this clean refuge in suburban New York.

The river ran clear under bushes and through swaying mats of starwort. I could see trout nosing the current. A couple mayflies dipped and danced, and I tied on a small Ephemera pattern that I smeared with floatant squeezed from a small vial. I made an easy cast up and across the river and watched the fly drift down. A trout rocketed up and struck. It was a feisty ten-inch brook trout, and I marveled over its bright red spots haloed in pale blue. I caught a few more, let them go, and wandered off my beat to check on David.

My brother, an intractable lure and bait angler, tied on the meatiest imposter in his foam-filled box, a black spider. The spider threw a frightening shadow over the brown stones, but the fish loved it. I watched a big rainbow open his pink mouth and gulp the spongy spider. David played the fish with a smile and brought it to the net, its speckled olive back and silvery sides burning magenta. The park allowed anglers to retain two fish. “Keep that one,” I said.

“Dad’s gonna love this,” David said, beaming.

I explored upriver past the hatchery, found an unattended beat, and made a cast beside a promising patch of wild celery. A small rainbow took the fly, and I slowly brought it in, admiring its silver flashes. David walked up behind me and shouted, “Holy shit.” I turned to look at him and then felt a tremendous pull on my line. A monster brown trout swallowed my struggling little rainbow and powered downstream. What a run! The rod bowed and the reel pawl buzzed as I palmed the handle and reel’s rim. David ran down the bank, whooping and pointing as the huge trout turned, flashing a golden, dark spotted flank that thrilled my heart.

“Hey, what’s your beat number?” I heard a man’s voice behind me, looked over, and saw the khaki-shirted official from the check-in both.

“Down there,” I said. “But this brown ran me outta town.”

My brother laughed. “Check out this fish.”

“You’re back at fifteen,” he said. “Break it off.”

“No way,” I cried.

“You can talk to the ranger then.”

“What? Give us a fucking break,” my brother looked at him in shock. “The ranger? You gotta be kidding me. We’re just fishing!”

The official walked off, yelling back over his shoulder, “Well, you won’t be fishing here ever again.”

“Some fucking place,” I shook my head.

“Sorry,” David said. I knew he wanted this to be a great day for us. Then the great brown trout made a great run and broke my tippet. “Great,” I dropped my head. Perhaps in the stress of the moment I squeezed my reel too tightly, or maybe the brown—which wasn’t really hooked at all—sawed the fragile line with his teeth. In any case, it was free. And I was free to turn the hassle and loss into a tale of suburban adventure. I slapped my brother on the back. “Oh man, wait’ta we tell Dad.” We told the story many times over the years, animating the feisty dialogue and perhaps adding a couple pounds to the cannibal brown. My brother, Eugene, and I warily returned to Connetquot River State Park the following summer. A young woman was working the booth, and when I gave her my name, she smiled. “There’s a note here about you,” she said. But she let us in, and we angled as law abiding gentlemen with the exception of a nip of bourbon and puff of chowder.

I worked as a substitute teacher at my old high school and taught freshmen writing and literature classes at Dowling College and Hofstra University. I liked the university work. At Hofstra I became friends with Professors Dana Brand and John Bryant. “You should think about getting your Ph.D.,” Brand told me after observing my class. He was a huge Mets fan, and I brought him a couple old Daily News “Go Mets” buttons my father had kept from the 1969 World Series. John Bryant and I had long talks about early American mariners, such as Amasa Delano, who went to China at the turn of the nineteenth century, and writers including Richard Henry Dana and the great Herman Melville. “You’ve got something in common with these guys,” Bryant smiled. “I’ll write you a recommendation.” I brought him fluke fillets and a couple dozen oysters packed in ice. “Good guanxi,” Jin Lei assured me when we talked over the crackly phone line. She liked the idea of going back to school while I worked on a doctorate. I contacted former teachers at Purdue, and they encouraged me to return.

It took nearly a year before Jin Lei’s passport and visa were approved and she could immigrate to the States. This gave me time to think. I loved Jin Lei, but over time that love felt more brotherly and less romantic. It no longer felt erotic. Sometimes there are no obvious reasons for a change of feelings between two people. Jin Lei was wonderful. Nonetheless, something in the chemistry between us had dimmed my sexual passion. I was disappointed, even disgusted with myself for feeling this way—but it’s how I felt. When she arrived in July of 1997, a month after my thirty-second birthday, I was happy to see her but anxious about our relationship. We embraced a bit clumsily, and I loaded her duct-taped luggage into my father’s new pickup and drove her to our house in Port Jefferson. My father and brother hugged Jin Lei, Twain the cat jumped on her lap, and we sat and talked for hours. In bed at midnight, I kissed her cheek and said, “You must be tired.”

“Not too tired,” she whispered.

I kissed her forehead and rolled over on my back. “Goodnight, Jin Lei.”

That Friday we threw a big welcome party. My brother and I picked a bushel of oysters, and my father splurged on two dozen lobsters. We took Jin Lei fishing for porgies—which were making a great comeback in Long Island Sound—and she loved it, reeling in fish after fish as the sun poured down on the calm water. I showed Jin Lei how to carefully handle the spiky porgy, holding it up to admire its pearly luster. She traced a finger over the scaled crosshatching. “Like a church window,” she said. “Wow, yes,” I smiled, seeing for the first time the porgy’s skin and scales as stained glass. Later she helped me clean, butter, salt, and foil-wrap the fish for the grill. Jin Lei planned grand noodle dishes and several vegetable delights using local zucchini, tomato, and eggplant ignited with pickled peppers smuggled in from Yunnan. Eugene and his wife, Susan, delivered striped bass fillets from their trip off the Jersey coast. The kitchen filled with sizzling sounds, garlic aromas, and smoke from a Long Island duck we forgot in the oven.

As the band—three guys from down the street—warmed up with the Grateful Dead’s “Brown Eyed Women,” my brother wheeled in a keg of Coors and neighbors presented bottles of wine. With more and more guests gathered on the back patio, I unveiled a two-gallon jar of baijiu infused with the dried lizard I purchased in Kunming. The spotted creature had steeped for six months, turning the clear liquor a fossilly amber. I ladled up the first draft.

“Who wants to try? It’s good for man power, if you know what I mean.” People laughed, stared, and considered. But even among this group of intrepid drinkers, there were no volunteers. My father finally stepped forward. “At my age, I need some man power.” He quaffed a jigger, tightened his mouth, and pronounced, “Not bad. A little brackish. But not bad.” The lizard baijiu did, indeed, taste of the sea, perhaps redolent of our primal origins and storied past splashing around with dragons and leviathans. Jin Lei later explained that I should have rinsed the lizard of its preserving salts before bathing it in spirits. But by the end of the night half the jar was gone, the sea monster transubstantiated into early hour antics of howling, lewd dancing, and a tree climbing contest that ended with my brother falling into a mucky mulch pile of lobster shells and fish bones. He slept on a lawn chair, awakened by the highly aroused pawing and licking of a couple neighborhood cats.

The next morning my father went out to his flagpole, as he does every morning, but that day under the stars and stripes he raised the banner of the People’s Republic of China, its red field flashing gold stars against the blue Atlantic sky. His old buddy from the Korean War, Tony, came by and turned furious—“That’s the damn Red Chinese, Charley. What the hell you doing?” My father waved him away. “We’re not at war with China. What’s the matter with you?” They didn’t talk much after that. “To hell with Tony,” my father said. “I love Jin Lei.”

Folks loved Jin Lei. She was outgoing, warm, bright, and funny, though some people disapproved of our arrangement. “Are they married or what?” a neighbor woman interrogated my father. “We got enough Orientals in this country,” she hissed, and dad accidently backed over her petunias. And one of my brother’s mentors, a retired teacher who owned a stamp shop in Stony Brook, went on about my deceiving the US government and disgracing the institution of marriage. My brother stood by me and told the man that this country could use a few more people like Jin Lei.

Jin Lei and I talked about being friends rather than lovers, and she thought we might just need more time to get to know each other again. “Maybe you are so afraid,” she said to me. I just looked at her. She gently asked if I was afraid of losing the women in my life. She spoke of my mother’s death when I was thirteen and the recent loss of Aunt Lil. “Maybe,” I said.

We drove around Long Island, and Jin Lei asked about the fish glued to the backs of cars. “Jesus fish,” I said and explained the revived symbol once used by early Christians to identify each other.

“Christians really like fish,” she nodded.

I went on to talk about Jesus and the net-casting disciples, and the Greek word ICHTHYS, fish, that served as an acronym signifying “Jesus Christ, God’s Son. Savior.” Jin Lei listened then asked, “Do people think you strange to love fish and not God?”

“I love God, just not in the way most Christians do,” I said. “God is fish. Fish is God.”

Jin Lei shook her head in confusion. “I need some money for school. In China, we pray for money. Can you pray to your fish god for some money?”

I laughed and said we might have better luck harvesting some shellfish. So we picked and sold oysters to earn some extra cash, and Jin Lei quickly developed a knack for haggling with restaurant owners over the price. “Now I’m a real capitalist,” she joked. It was wonderful watching her in America. Alone one afternoon when door-to-door missionaries showed up, Jin Lei accepted their free Bible, invited them into our living room for tea, and started telling them about Laozi, even offering to send them copies of the Dao De Jing.

“It’s gonna take more than a prayer,” my father said to us as he listened to the low compression cylinders of the ’85 Buick Regal my uncle gave me. “Eight hundred miles to Indiana? I wouldn’t risk it.” But he had a friend with a low mileage 1986 Olds engine that would work in my Regal. We bought the Olds engine for two bushels of oysters. My father parked the tired Buick under the oak tree in the backyard, swung block and tackle over a thick limb, pulled out the clunker, and dropped in a smooth-running transplant that carried me for years.

In August of 1997, Jin Lei and I loaded the repowered car with boxes, suitcases, and some fishing gear, said goodbye, and drove west listening to Jin Lei’s CD of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. She kept replaying “Fishing in the Dark,” saying it was our song.

In West Lafayette, Indiana, we rented a second floor apartment at Williamsburg on the Wabash, a faux colonial complex beside the Wabash River and just a couple hundred feet from two flood ponds where had I fished many times as a master’s student. It had been six years, and I’d seen a lot of strange and wonderful water around the world, but the Wabash basin held a special place in my muddy heart. Before we even unpacked, I pulled out a rod, walked through the sycamores and maples down the steep bank, and made a cast. After ten minutes a solid fish took my jig. Jin Lei stood behind me, “Hen hao,” she cheered. “We have dinner.”

“Well,” I said, trying to ease her hopes. “There’s a lot of pollution in this water.”

“Worse than China?”

“Maybe not. No. But let’s throw this one back.” When I saw that the silvery gray fish was a drum, I howled, “Gaspergoooo,” old times and old waters rising. I held up the fish for Jin Lei.

“I love this place,” she said.

After long, hot days preparing for school, we’d have a light dinner of rice and vegetables and then cool off down by the river-linked ponds. Bordered by high banks and trees, the South Williamsburg Pond offered a wonderfully wild sanctuary for beavers, birds, turtles, and fish. There were constant splashes and rise forms. Longnose gar hovered a few inches below the surface, and the dark shadows of larger fish—bowfin, catfish, sturgeon, paddlefish—passed by as we cast or just watched. Jin Lei and I had been translating some Chinese fishing poems, and she recited the simple ninth-century verses of Bai Juyi, “Walking around the pond, I watch intently the fish as they swim.” Jin Lei and I walked or sat together; sometimes I scribbled in a small notebook or wandered off, casting into the wooded cover or across the deep drop, just needing some time alone. One night I snagged, landed, and released a large paddlefish that reminded me of the one Ben Whitehorse caught from the Missouri almost twenty years before. Using three-inch floating Rapalas, I also hooked a few big gar, but their hard, toothy jaws always shed the lure or cut the line. A Mexican man in a cowboy hat told me to use yarn wrapped around the lure, claiming it would get stuck in the gar’s teeth. “We do it down in Tamaulipas,” he said. It was good advice, and one warm afternoon I landed a yard-long gar using, you might say, the fish’s own teeth as hooks. I talked to the man from Tamaulipas now and then, and he once told me about catching fish from the backseat of a car.

“You were sitting in the backseat with your rod?” I asked, confused.

“No, no,” he shook his head. “The car’s in water. The fish like to hide there.”

He pointed downriver to some sloughs and explained in vividly gestured English that he dropped his bait through the back window of a partially submerged car and caught some sunfish and a catfish “right off the backseat.” In Mexico, he said, they always fished in and around sunken cars.

I retranslated this story to Jin Lei, who latched onto the automobile aspect, floating on the pond in an inner tube, kick-trolling a Ford Fender and a Dardevle spoon she dug out of my tackle box, miraculously picking up a three-pound channel catfish that she was determined to cook and eat. I called a biologist friend who explained the advisory.

“One or two meals a month of smaller catfish from the Wabash would be okay. Don’t eat fish over ten pounds, and definitely fillet everything.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’d give it a full oil change if I could.”

Jin Lei and I did our best to carefully fillet the catfish, frying the pink blushed slabs of pale meat in virgin olive oil and freshly chopped garlic. “Haochi,” Jin Lei said. “Delicious.”

After a few days back in Indiana, I went to see my old friend, Sean McNerney. We had exchanged letters while I was in Asia, and I called him from New York. Sean had abandoned his degree program, but he worked his way up to head chef at C-Rays, a well-regarded restaurant in town. I stepped into the kitchen one night after closing, and Sean was sitting at the end of a steel counter, joking in Spanish with a couple Latino men in grimy aprons. He saw me and stood, heavier, wearier, his face shiny and red from the heat and labor of a hundred dinners. “Salveo piscator,” hail angler, he greeted me in Latin and asked if I had seen the new translation of the Odyssey, lamenting that they still hadn’t gotten the fishing scenes right.

Our friendship instantly renewed, we returned to our old angling spots below the Oakdale Dam on the Tippecanoe River, stopping at the bait shop to see bourbon-nosed Smitty and his cats, and caught our limit of silver bass and several large carp and suckers. I told Sean how in China we used anise to mask human odors, but these American carp seemed less discriminating. Asia had given me a new attitude about carp, and we kept a couple that Jin Lei prepared for a group of new friends, including two Chinese professors. “Hao chi!” the praise went up around the table as we plucked out cloves of pale, succulent flesh with our chopsticks. Everyone was asking how and where we caught the fish. There was a good Asian market in West Lafayette, but customers complained that their fish tasted muddy. “From fish farms, yes?” Professor Wang asked me, pushing back her long black hair.

“Probably,” I said, explaining that the carp we were eating came from the clear, cool waters of the Tippecanoe River. The fish moved upstream to the dam, where there was an abundance of small shad and other forage. “And I clean the fish right away and pack them in ice. They’re very fresh,” I said.

“Yesterday?” Wang asked.

“Yes,” I said, filling her glass with a little more white wine.

“So to get a fish like this you must catch it,” she seemed to study my face.

“Yes,” I said. “Or know a fisherman.”

Jin Lei read the situation perfectly. The following week she collected orders and then sent Sean and me fishing. “We need six carp about this big,” Jin Lei opened her hands to the length of her keyboard. “Or a little longer.”

“Come with us, Jin Lei,” Sean urged.

“I must study,” she said without remorse.

Jin Lei liked to fish and play, but she loved to read and study. She took to the wide waters of an American university like a fish. She made friends, connected with the Chinese community on campus, had her transcripts translated, and was enrolled in undergraduate classes that would qualify her for a master’s program in comparative literature.

“What do you want to be?” I asked her one day.

“A professor like you,” she said.

I smiled and nodded but knew her skills in English were a long way from a master’s thesis or a doctoral dissertation. Just a few months ago, I spied her reading children’s books pulled from the shelves of my father’s house. She was sounding out difficult words, looking up vocabulary, and making notes. Now she stared at an online gloss of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, despairing over Jim’s diction. “I’ll help you when we get back,” I said, kissing her cheek.

Sean and I scrubbed out his dirty cooler and filled it with ice from a local motel’s ice machine. “Don’t worry,” Sean said. “Conchita—the housekeeper here—she’s the sister of my line cook.”

“Good guanxi,” I commended Sean, explaining the term.

At the Oakdale Dam we set up our gear, and Sean pulled out bottle of ouzo.

“What the hell are you doing with that?” I asked.

“Anise, man. Let’s rub some on our hands. Maybe we’ll catch even more.”

I laughed out loud and told him it was probably a waste of good booze. So we shifted East to West, and like old Greek fishermen, we took long pulls of ouzo, rolled up our sleeves, and got our lines in the water.

I started throwing a chrome Castmaster, thinking I’d pick up a silver bass, but I hooked a twenty-inch carp, took him down through the rock race and beached him on the gravel. I cut the gills, bled and gutted the fish, and tossed the entrails into the river. Then Sean hooked one. “I can’t believe they’re taking lures,” he beamed. I helped him land the fish, and when I pulled out my knife an old bearded man approached me with a bucket. “Gimme the guts, will ya?” he asked.

“Guts? Sure,” I said. “For what?”

“Crayfish bait. You gonna have more? Heads, too. I’ll leave the pail here.” He put a rag over the pail and screwed it down into the gravel. The next carp Sean hooked was snagged in the back. Then I caught one in the mouth and then snagged a sucker. “Bite or get out of the way,” we joked. There must have been a dense concentration of carp and suckers below the dam. In two hours we caught twenty fish; killed eight carp, four suckers, and three silvers; filled the old man’s gut bucket; and packed our ice chest with one last fish.

“What the hell you doing with all them carp?” the old man asked.

“We gotta bunch of Chinese friends who really love them.”

“Shit, them niggers and chinks can have ’em.”

“What did you say?” Sean leaned into the man, but I put my hand on my friend’s shoulder and addressed the crayfisherman.

“You don’t know what you’re missing, old-timer.”

“Shit,” he grumbled.

“Bug eater,” Sean jabbed as we walked away.

Back at Williamsburg, Jin Lei gave us addresses of where we were to drop off the fish.

“So, am I collecting money for these?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Say they are gift.”

“Okay,” I shrugged.

We delivered the first brace of fish to Professor Wang. She thanked us warmly and handed me a couple books. “These are for Jin Lei. And tell her to come see me on Monday. I have an idea for her.”

At another Chinese professor’s house we got more books for Jin Lei, and the professor asked if Sean could do an East-West luncheon at C-Rays for an upcoming conference. “Sure,” Sean said, and they talked menu and cost. At the barracks-like married student housing complex we called on Zou Zhen, a Chinese graduate student doing a doctorate in American literature. Zou Zhen and I had spoken about my idea for a dissertation on early American narratives about China, and when I gave him a fish, he handed me a bibliography of books by missionaries that were new to me. “This is gold,” I said, thanking him over and over. This kind attention continued with a couple more fish lovers, and it soon became obvious that Jin Lei had tied into some serious guanxi.

The following week, Sean and I continued our carp fishing operations, landed twenty fish, delivered a dozen, and were left with a heavy surplus. “You wanna try the Asian market?” I suggested. West Lafayette and Lafayette both had Asian food stores. I knew the Taiwanese family that ran the West Lafayette market, and we told them about our haul of fresh fish. “Let me see,” the man said. We stepped out to my car and opened the trunk and our ice packed cooler. He pulled a fish out, smelled it, and asked, “You have license?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Okay. How much?”

Sean and I looked at each other. “Well,” I said, “How about some trade?”

“Trade?” the man tilted his head.

“I’m looking for some ma la spice,” Sean queried.

“Rice noodles, tofu, dried seaweed?” I added.

“Okay, okay,” the proprietor said. And thus began our fish and grocery barter. We iced up at the hotel, Conchita adding little soaps and coffee packets to our pickups in exchange for a few fresh fish. Sean even considered a carp special for C-Ray’s—“We’ll call it Cyprina, after the Latin name.” I applauded the idea, but the owner, Ray, scorned it away, “We’re not gonna serve trash fish.” Ray continued to offer farm-raised salmon and muddy tilapia when there was an abundant supply of fine carp swimming through the state.

One morning Sean collected me in his little Nissan pickup. I was terribly hungover, up half the night drinking with my major professor, Dick Thompson. Studies were going well, but it was hard to keep up with Thompson, a good scholar and teacher who, at twice my age, could put away a barrel of bourbon and never fumble a word. Thompson and I took a taxi home, and I was trying to remember where I left my car when Sean started reciting a litany of hangover cures, including two raw owl eggs prescribed by the Roman natural philosopher Pliny the Elder in the first century.

“Pull the fuck over, and I’ll raid an owl’s nest,” I growled.

“I don’t think it’s the breeding season,” Sean tightened his lips and clenched the wheel.

I was always happy to go fishing, but after a month of snagging carp and suckers out of the river and delivering them to friends and markets, I began to feel a little less like an angler. The hangover further soured my attitude. We caught several fish at the dam, walked up to the parking lot, and saw the old crayfisherman step out of his truck, toss an empty can into the bushes, and go into the Oakdale Inn. His Ford was plastered with rebel flags and bumper stickers like Kick Their Ass, Take Their Gas. I opened the cooler, pulled out a small carp, and shoved it up his tailpipe.

“What the hell’s gotten into you?” Sean looked into my bloodshot eyes.

I took another fish from the ice and pointed it at Sean. “Look at this fish, Sean. Do we even know this fish?”

“I think you need some sleep, Henry.”

“Listen to me. We used to love and remember every fish. Right? Every fish. Now we’re hustlers.”

“We’re having fun. And people are eating our fish.”

“I don’t know, Sean.” I shoved the stiff fish back onto the ice. Herbert Hoover, in a speech years after his presidency, praised fishing as a “mockery of profits and egos” and a “quieting of hate.” I went over, pulled the carp out of the old guy’s tailpipe, and threw it to a nest of cats gathered around the kitchen door of the inn.

Sean drove us home, and I leaned back in the seat, slipping into a foamy dream, tumbling through white water, feeling like I would sink and drown, but my body was held up by thousands of fish—carp, bass, catfish—their shiny bodies squirming beneath me. I was crowd surfing over a stadium of admiring fish. Then they vanished and I sunk, drowning in the darkening water. I woke gasping. “Take it easy, buddy,” Sean said. When we got to the Asian market in West Lafayette the owner looked worried. “State man in here,” he said. “Ask about carp. Come from where?”

“The Tippecanoe. You know that,” I said.

“Need your license number to sell.”

“I don’t have any license to sell,” I said.

“You tell me you have license.”

“A fishing license, sure.” I pulled out my wallet.

“No, no,” he shook his head. “Stay away now. Maybe come back at Spring Festival,” he looked around nervously, hustling us out with a case of expired bamboo shoots.

Although we still gave fish to people and made an occasional trade at the Asian markets, our fishing business folded. Like fishing guides and pin hookers who love their work, I never fished purely for profit, but our carp trade did get out of hand. Turning once again to fishing literature, I was refreshed by the fifteenth-century advice of Dame Juliana Berners that you must not use the art of angling for “increasing and sparing of your money only, but principally for your solace, and to cause the health of your body, and especially of your soul.”

“We had to bribe the guards with a carton of cigarettes, but yeah, we got in and caught some carp on flies,” I told this incredulous hawk of a man who had flown down the hallway, questioning the veracity of one of my China stories. And when he saw me cast a nymph below the Oakdale Dam one morning, he smiled: “You caught fish in China with that cast? Must’ve been a mix up in the language.” Willard Greenwood, a fellow graduate student in the English department, was a Maine-raised fly fisherman with family roots back to seventeenth-century colonial New England. “Imagine all the brook trout, all the Atlantic salmon,” he mused on ancestral anglings. Willard urged me to read Thomas McGuane, Nick Lyons, Margot Page, and Ted Leeson, and he showed me how to tie flies and prepare leaders. We sat at our desks in Heavilon Hall, pushed the ungraded freshmen compositions aside, and wrapped soft Woolly Buggers and spiky Muddler Minnows, trying to think like fish. Willard was a good teacher, and he read aloud passages from McGuane, “I try to tie flies that will make me fish better, to fish more often, to dream of fish when I can’t fish …” Willard glanced at the clock, wondering if there was still time to get on the river after office hours. Then he continued, “… and to take further steps toward actually becoming a fish myself.” Just as that bug in the vise was looking pretty yummy—like tempura between my chopsticks—a girl came in to talk about her paper. She saw the scalps of fur and hair, put a hand to her Greek-lettered chest, and cried, “Oh my God, did you eat those?”

I led Willard to the south fork of Wildcat Creek near Monitor, where I had caught many smallmouth bass on jigs and live minnows. He parked his dented Mazda in the public access lot, and we suited up, entered the water under the State Road 26 Bridge, and waded downstream. “Nice place,” he praised. At first I just watched Willard work his magic. The Woolly Bugger can be a clunky fly to cast, but he sent out graceful rolls of line that dropped the heavy black charm into moving pockets between roots and rock. Fishing without an indicator, he mended and felt for tension through the line and soon hooked a foot-long smallmouth that skied like a copper rocket. Backed up against the bushes, Willard executed smart roll casts, showing me how to pinch line and power the rod with my thumb.

We spread over the river. I plucked some plastic trash from the willows, shoved it down my waders, and then just took my time casting, mending, feeling, and eventually catching a ten-inch smallmouth with fiery red eyes. The pressures of school seemed far away, and I thought again of McGuane, “Angling is where the child, if not the infant, gets to go on living.” I listened to the water and birds, played at casting, caught another small fish, and enjoyed the flowing world.

We worked our way downstream through the holes, took a break together, and ate some cookies while I told him about my old Indiana girlfriend, Caitlin, and how we tumbled out of the canoe and made love against a mossy trunk. Willard smiled and told me that despite all the proverbial warnings, he and his girlfriend had sex in a canoe—in Maine—“And that water is cold, man. So we took it real easy, and it lasted forever.”

“Sounds like good tantric training,” I said.

“Every teenager should do a little canoe screwing,” he professed.

Willard and I walked back to the bridge and started upstream to what I remembered as the best water on the Wildcat. A sign planted in the middle of a gravel bar read No Trespassing. I was puzzled. Could it refer to the houses high above the bank? We were wading in the middle of the river. How could we trespass? I told Willard that I had fished this stretch many times and guided him to a deep, long, bassy cut. Willard started casting, and I saw a man walk across his shaggy lawn. “Didn’t you see the sign?” he yelled. “This is private property.”

“Good morning, sir. We’re just passing through. Sorry.” I signaled Willard to reel up. “We’ll walk on by. Sorry.”

“Hey, you’re on my property. Go back the way you came.”

I looked back at him and waved. “Sorry,” I said again. Courtesy and a willingness to move on usually worked in these situations.

“I’m calling the sheriff,” he yelled.

I finally turned to him and raised both hands in exasperation. “I’ve fished here many times. I don’t understand. We’re in the middle of the river.”

“You’d understand if you picked up all the trash. This is private property. Those aren’t your fish to catch. We’ll get the sheriff down here if that’s want you want.”

I felt anger rise inside me. “Go ahead, call the sheriff.” I turned to Willard, “Come on.” Willard looked unsure, but we walked the edge of the sandbar against the shallow riffles and the man’s wishes. “Hey,” I heard him yell one more time, but we pushed through the water until we were out of sight. This stretch of the Wildcat held a lot of memories that suddenly felt brittle and stained like photos in a neglected album. How could a man own a wild river or its wild fish? It was a members-only law against the higher laws of nature of which we were all members.

We continued fishing, but the mood was tense. My fly kept snagging in the bushes, and Willard was worried about his car. I knew a way up through the pasture back to the road, and we returned to the access lot with no signs of the sheriff. “Let’s get out of here,” Willard said and pulled out his keys. “Hold on.” I set my rod against the side mirror, bent down to reel up the slack, caught of glimpse of myself, and knew what I had to do. I heard a mower over at the property owner’s house and walked toward it. He was on a green rider, and when he saw me coming, he looked alarmed. He turned off the engine and dismounted. I took off my hat, bowed a little, and said, “I just wanted to say sorry. I fished that river so many times. I just couldn’t believe it was closed.” He was silent for a moment before repeating his complaint about the trash. “I’m the last person who would drop trash. In fact, I picked some up,” I said. The man stared, “Well I don’t know you.” I thought of introducing myself but just said, “It won’t happen again.” I put my hat on and walked away.