TONG ACCEPTED A SOCIAL INVITATION for the first time in the thirty years he’d worked as bookkeeper in Willie’s office. We had resigned ourselves to not inviting him, since he never came, but Nico and Lori’s wedding was an important event, even for a man as introverted as he. “Is obligation to go?” he asked. Lori said yes it was, something no one had dared tell him before. He came alone; finally his wife had asked for the divorce, after years and years of sleeping in the same bed without speaking. I thought that in view of the success I’d had with Nico and Lori, I could also look for a girlfriend for Tong, but he informed me that he wanted a Chinese woman, and in that community I was sadly lacking in contacts. In Tong’s favor was the fact that San Francisco’s Chinatown is the most heavily populated and famous Chinese enclave in the Western world, but when I suggested looking there, he explained that he wanted a woman who had not been contaminated by America. He was dreaming of a submissive wife, eyes always cast to the ground, who would cook his favorite dishes, cut his fingernails, give him a son, and in passing serve her mother-in-law like a slave. I don’t know who had put that fantasy in his head, probably his mother, that tiny old lady we all feared. “Do you believe there is such a woman left in this world, Tong?” I asked, perplexed. For an answer, he led me to the computer screen and showed me an unending list of photos and descriptions of girls ready to marry a stranger in order to flee their country or their family. They were classified by race, nationality, and religion, and should the inquirer be more demanding, even the size of their bras. If I had known that this supermarket of female bargains existed, I wouldn’t have agonized so over Nico. Although, thinking it over, it’s better I didn’t. I would never have found Lori on those lists.
The search for Tong’s future bride turned out to be a long and complicated office project. At that time we had divided the old Sausalito whorehouse into Willie’s law office, my office on the first floor, and Lori’s on the second, where she managed the foundation. Lori’s elegant touch had changed that house as well, which now was resplendent with framed posters of my books, Tibetan rugs, blue and white porcelain jardinières filled with plants, and a complete kitchen where there was always everything we needed to serve tea, as if we were at the Savoy. Tong gave himself the task of selecting the candidates, which we then criticized: this one has mean eyes, this one is evangelical, this one paints her face like a whore, and so on. We didn’t allow Tong to be impressed by appearance; photographs do lie, as he knew very well seeing that Lori had computer-enhanced his portrait; she had made him taller, younger, and with whiter skin, which seems to be appreciated in China. Tong’s mother installed herself in the kitchen to compare astral signs, and when finally a young Cantonese nurse emerged who seemed ideal to all of us, she went to consult an astrologer in Chinatown, who gave his approval as well. A round face smiled from the photograph, red cheeks and bright eyes that made you want to kiss her.
After a formal correspondence between Tong and the hypothetical bride, which lasted several months, Willie announced that they would go to China to meet her. I couldn’t go with them, though I was dying of curiosity. I asked Tabra to stay with me because I don’t like to sleep alone. My friend’s business was in the black again. She wasn’t living with us anymore; she had found a house, small, but with a patio that looked out toward golden hills, where she could create the illusion of the isolation that was so important to her. I’m sure that living with our tribe must have been torture for her. She needs solitude but she agreed to stay with me while Willie was gone. For a while she stopped going out on blind dates because she was working day and night to get out of debt, but she never stopped hoping for the return of her Plumed Lizard, who did appear on the horizon from time to time. Suddenly his recorded voice on the answering machine would order, “It’s four thirty in the afternoon; call me before five or you will never see me again.” Tabra would get home at midnight, bone-weary, and find this charming message and be upset for weeks. Fortunately, her work forced her to travel, and she had interludes in Bali, India, and other distant places from which she sent me delicious letters filled with adventures and written with that fluid sarcasm that is her trademark.
“Sit yourself down and write a travel book, Tabra,” I begged her more than once.
“I’m an artist, I’m not an author,” she said defensively. “But if you can make necklaces, I suppose I can write a book.”
Willie took his heavy suitcase of cameras to China and returned with some very good photographs, especially portraits of people, which is what most interests him. As always, the most memorable photo is the one he didn’t get to take. In a remote village in Mongolia, where he had gone by himself because he wanted to give Tong the opportunity to spend a few days with the proposed bride without him as a witness, he saw a hundred-year-old woman with bound feet, feet like girls had once suffered in that part of the world. He went up to her and tried to ask with signs if he could take a photo of her diminutive “golden lilies,” but the centenarian ran away as fast as her tiny deformed feet would take her, screaming. She had never seen anyone with blue eyes and thought that Death had come to carry her away.
The trip was nonetheless a success, according to my husband, because Tong’s future bride was perfect, exactly what his bookkeeper was looking for: timid, docile, and unaware of the rights women enjoy in America. She seemed healthy and strong, and surely she would give him the desired male child. Her name was Lili and she earned her living as a surgical nurse, sixteen hours a day, six days a week, for a salary equivalent to two hundred dollars a month. “No wonder she wants to get out of here,” Willie commented, as if living with Tong and his mother would be any easier.