Gingko Season

Chapter One

That September I was spending more time than usual on the fire escape, climbing through the window of my bedroom when the weather was fine or just after it had rained.

The fire escape overlooked an empty lot, and on clear nights the amalgamation of light from the streetlamps, the LEDs and the neon signs, the apartment windows, the lines of ceiling-strip fluorescence in empty office buildings, the cars and buses and trucks, and, farther afield, the detrital glow of Delawarean and New Jerseyan industry and manufacturing failed to entirely obscure the stars.

On those evenings I leaned against the brick wall that separated my bedroom from the outside world and wondered if they were going to build something in that empty lot, and how it would affect my prospect of survival in the event of a conflagration.

There was a Buddhist monastery below the apartment, and because I was afraid of startling or upsetting the monks if I appeared suddenly at their window, I had never descended the emergency stairs.

During the day, if I stayed home, I could hear the monks chanting sutras, their voices coming up through the floorboards to me as I lay in bed.

When I went out to work in the mornings the smell of incense suffused the common hallway between the two sets of double-latched doors, where the mailboxes were located, and I would stop in the anteroom, pretending to check for letters and bills if someone else was passing through, turning the small key in the lock without opening the door.

If I was alone in the vestibule I didn’t need to perform the mail-checking pantomime and was able instead to stand in the quiet, inexplicably carpeted room, breathing in the scent of frankincense and cloves.

Across the street was a kung-fu academy led by an imperious man with a walrus mustache, and every day after school, children in tracksuits would file up the stairs and reappear an hour or two later, chattering and pummeling each other, their cheeks flushed, sweat plastering locks of damp hair to their small foreheads.

I shared the apartment with a couple in their late thirties and a rotating selection of youngish men starting out jobs in management consulting or finance, many of whom were the first in their families to attend college and were renting the room next to mine while they waited for a few weeks of paychecks to accumulate, after which they possessed enough cash and the requisite proof of employment to move out of Chinatown and rent a studio in a building with a doorman off Rittenhouse Square, or perhaps in one of the newer developments with large windows that faced the Schuylkill River.

Although the young men replaced one another like seasons, the couple, whose names were Xinwei and Raymond, had already been living in the apartment before I arrived and, I assumed, would indefinitely remain one of its fixtures.

They were not the landlords nor did they seem to have any special relationship with the landlord; they did not work in particularly low-paying fields; they were easy to live with, and they appeared sociable, friendly, and well adjusted.

It seemed rude to ask why they had chosen to live for so long with an ever-changing cast of younger strangers in a cramped flat in Chinatown, and so their presence became, for me, mystifying but inoffensive.

Xinwei was from Guangdong, and I spoke with her in Mandarin; Raymond was from Philly, half-Vietnamese and half-Chinese, and I spoke with him in English; to one another they spoke in Cantonese.

If we were all present at the same time and equal participants in the conversation we resorted to English, so that no one person would be excluded, but this was still not ideal, because Xinwei, though she understood everything, held herself to exacting standards and in English struggled to articulate her thoughts with a level of precision that satisfied her, so it almost always ended up that Raymond and I spoke in English and she responded to us in both Mandarin and Cantonese, translating herself twice for our benefit.

If Raymond or I tried to address her in the language we spoke with her when the other was not around, she would switch to English, a tacit signal of her displeasure, and, suitably chagrined, we would revert, and she would do the same.

Often Raymond had his relatives over.

Other times he and Xinwei invited friends to play cards or dice, which I joined if I had nothing else to do, because it was more fun than staying in my room and listening to them laugh and yell into the early hours.

The living room of the apartment was too small to fit much furniture.

For the days they hosted family dinners, they had purchased three collapsible camping tables, which they arranged in a row in front of the sofa.

To get to the bathroom or the kitchen or the front door I had to bypass this makeshift banquet, sidling past curious aunts and uncles, wary children, and blinking grand-relations, and, so as not to risk toppling the densely packed and precariously perched dishes of white rice, pork ribs, steamed fish, or water spinach—I had always thought it a shame that its Chinese name, “empty heart,”

had not migrated into the English translation—I was obliged to press myself against the wall and shuffle sideways, shouting greetings as I passed.

The occupant of the third room, six foot five with lugubrious basset-hound eyes and an oppressive hunched posture, had the habit of ordering McDonald’s, and the strong smell of the fast food—either nauseating or tantalizing, depending on my own level of hunger—seeped through the thin wall separating his room from mine, raising in me a fury so potent I found it impossible to concentrate on anything else, and I had to climb out and sit for a while on the fire escape until the rage subsided or the scent disappeared.

Apart from the McDonald’s, his intrusive behaviors included talking in his sleep so loudly that it woke me up in the middle of the night, and practicing German on an app that had him repeat the robotic sentences in his low and dour tone.

Ich komme aus Amerika.

Mein Hemd ist blau.

Wo ist der Bahnhof? One of the only times we spoke, we exchanged basic biographical details and friendly smiles, and I began to feel guilty for having silently seethed.

I made a lighthearted reference to his somnolent chatter, and, familiar now, he told me that he also sleepwalked, and that earlier in the week he’d woken up in the morning to find that every single one of his socks had been removed from their drawer and stuffed under his mattress in an orderly row.

After that I always locked the door before I went to bed.

When she was able to leave the office at a reasonable hour, my friend Apple would join me on the fire escape to drink and chat, I against the brick wall and she facing me, resting her elbows on the railing, her back to the empty lot, a position I could never manage because it induced in me a terrible sensation of vertigo, similar to the feeling I got when I traveled up very long escalators.

On this particular evening, arranged just so, we were discussing her day at work.

She had recently started a job at a large law firm, and had been assigned to a new team that was overseeing the takeover of a small electronic cigarette startup by a large tobacco company.

“Pee,”

she was saying—her affectionate rendering of my name, Penelope, an abbreviation that I hated but she loved—“it’s all true. Lawyers are evil. Like, cartoon villain shit. I’m kind of into it.”

“You’re into it?”

“I feel like it’s not immoral, because I myself vape,”

Apple said. “And I’m learning a lot about M corporate law would be Apple’s. She had readied herself for it since high school with the grim diligence of a public executioner. Now, after years of mock trials, she was at the guillotine for the first time, watching tumbrels of American teenagers roll toward her.

“I don’t think I know the difference between immoral and amoral,”

I admitted.

“I always thought of it as, people are immoral and non-people are amoral. Like markets, rocks, ants. Anything that doesn’t possess a moral code.”

“They always call psychopaths amoral in TV shows.”

“They call a lot of people a lot of things in TV shows.”

“What about scruples?”

“What about them?”

“I don’t know,”

I said. “Can you make rings?”

She sucked at her pen and then made a funnel shape with her mouth and huffed little puffs of milky smoke, the circles growing wider and wider as they drifted into the night.

“How was your day?”

she said, after she was done.

I told her that it had been good. After some hesitation I added, “I think I’m in love.”

That morning, I had taken advantage of the bright and temperate early autumn weather and biked to work.

After hauling my bicycle, a scuffed red-and-black hybrid with a top tube, which apparently classified it as a men’s bike, but which I rode and loved anyway, down the stairs of the building, pausing as I usually did in the vestibule to bask in the Buddhist aromas, I walked through Chinatown, where the trucks carrying fresh choy sum, freeze-dried mushrooms, and other special foodstuffs were delivering their wares to the wet market.

I passed the tattered Obamacare sign and my favorite douhua stall, and then underneath the arch, which proudly declared 埠華城費 —“Philadelphia Chinatown.”

I mounted my bicycle and set off down Tenth Street and up Spruce and watched as the buildings became gradually more ornate and less run-down, the trees more manicured, the shopfront windows larger and more imposing until they began to fall away around Twenty-First Street, where the lanes narrowed and the cars thinned out and the rowhouses blinked with alternating colors: brick, cream, cerulean, pink.

Acceleration and a gear change for the ramp up the South Street Bridge, past the AT suits of medieval armor in dusty vitrines; writhing Medusas on circular shields, leaning against the walls like cheap film props; many, many paintings (“Bronzino!”

my father whispered at one); objects which, had I seen them outside, would have meant nothing to me, but because of the exclusive manner in which I was experiencing them, became founts of delight, meaning, and awe.

At the end of the corridor the Wenzhounese-Tuscan unlocked another door and motioned for us to pass through it.

“Arrivederci,”

she said, “zaijian, baibai,”

and slipped back into the secret passageway like it was nothing.

That was the kind of impression I hoped I made on the Pennsylvanian sixth-graders when I passed them on my way into work.

That day it was Annalisa at the front desk, and I nodded gingerly at her.

Unlike the other three front desk attendants, who commuted from Mount Airy or Kensington, and for some of whom the job was one of two or even three that they juggled, Annalisa was an undergraduate in art history who took shifts at the museum as part of an internship.

She wore a gold septum piercing and black mock turtlenecks with no bra and smiled, but never laughed.

None of us had seen her teeth, which was why the others referred to her as “Mona Lisa”

when she was not around.

Everyone had nicknames but she was the only one whose nickname was not spoken in front of her, signaling her separation.

Darren was Dasher, because he walked with a limp due to an adolescent motorbike injury; Sharif was the Sheriff, for obvious homophonic reasons;

Carol was the Water Goddess, which she resented because it spoke to her resemblance to a fertility statue in the Central American collection that she did not find attractive; and I was Antelope, not because my coworkers had identified in me any particular grace or agility, but because one of them, upon receiving the staff-wide email welcoming me to the museum, had read “Penelope”

and thought the pronunciation rhymed with that of the ruminant.

I had always admired the sleight of hand on the part of whoever had first mispronounced my name.

Their deflection had been so quick, so skillful, that not only did no one remember whose mistake it had been, but, apart from me, no one could recall with certainty the origin of the nickname, and a few had begun to think that it was some characteristic of myself that had inspired it, and see in me traits that did not exist: that I had long legs and ran fast, when in fact my limbs were an average length and my gait unremarkable; or that I had the aura of a potential victim, of prey.

Nevertheless, I had gotten off lightly compared to Darren or Sharif, who hated his nickname because he hated the police.

Sometimes I felt bad for mirthless Annalisa, since she was the odd one out, and if not for her it would probably have been me.

After passing through the main hall I entered the Americas, dim hallways of spotlit displays: beaded gourd with horsehair, hickory wood lacrosse stick, buckskin bag, and a life-sized diorama that I always mistook for real people roasting brown objects over a false fire.

In the next room, there was a small Aztec man made of volcanic rock, and a woman made of stone, and many clay cups.

I took an emergency stairwell shortcut into the lower level of the museum, fluorescent-lit and security-padded, underground.

On the days I worked in the office, at the computer, I could do whatever I wanted, relatively speaking, but on days like that one, when I needed to spend time in the collections room, I followed strict procedure.

If I had a cup of takeaway coffee from the museum café, I would have to finish it before I entered, because food and drink were banned, to protect the objects.

Pens were not allowed, because of the ink; if you needed to write something you used a pencil.

Water bottles were permitted, but only those with sports caps and nozzles.

They were very specific that it had to be nozzles, not the foldable straws or the fun spouts.

The bottles made of aluminum or insulated steel, with screw-top lids and bright matte coats, which were very trendy (Mona Lisa carried one, in austere black), had been explicitly banned.

The water bottle rule did not concern me, because I preferred to quench my thirst at the cooler, with a paper cup, a system that also provided me with luxurious and illicit mini-breaks throughout the day.

My hair was already tied back, so I swallowed the dregs of my coffee and entered the clean white room.

For several months I had been in charge of organizing a large number of items in the museum’s archives: shoes for women with bound feet.

The museum had, over the decades, amassed hundreds of slippers, boots, socks, and other paraphernalia, such as wood or plaster composite models of the small pointed foot with etchings to show the painfully crimped toes, crafted by “natural feet societies”

to be flourished at rallies calling for the abolition of foot binding.

Prior to my arrival these hundreds of items had languished in storage, untagged and uncataloged, piled on top of one another in cabinet drawers in the basement of the museum, collecting dust.

Then the museum had appointed a Korean American anthropologist named Dr.

Bartholomew Bae to “spearhead new programming.” Dr.

Bae’s stated priority upon joining was a vigorous revamp of “underserved”

(a word I never read without mistakenly seeing “undeserved”) areas of the museum—in practice, everything aside from the Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Americas exhibits, i.e., Asia and Africa—and more programming for these places.

I had been hired to work on the Chinese section, rescued from the pleasant tedium of data analytics by a former professor who remembered my interest in the lives of women in the Qing Dynasty and my success in wheedling money from the department to attend a summer archaeology course at Peking University.

My time at work was split between the white basement room where I dealt with the objects and the quiet beige office, one floor above, where I helped with administrative tasks involving membership records, accounting files, or events, depending on who needed a little extra help.

That September day, during whose evening I would have my fire escape conversation with Apple about her new job, I spent the morning in the white room, matching tiny eggshell-colored socks with their partners, introducing them to the small plastic cases that would become their permanent home, pressing sticker labels with brief penciled descriptions of the items onto the boxes, and taking pictures on my phone so I could enter the particulars into the database when I left.

Sometimes the socks came with little tags, attached by an unknown museum employee years earlier, offering hand-scrawled clues to their histories:

1974 donation, Ms. Fang, says great-aunt’s wedding shoes

1999 donation, Mr. Wong, claims late Ming (unlikely but verify)

came with one red slipper (pair lost)

Other times a sturdier shoe might have on its sole a faded stamp with a number and a few words in a European language, indicating that after leaving its original owners in China, it had lived a second life as a curio of Parisian or Berliner trade houses before embarking on its third life decomposing in an American museum basement:

2272 chaussures brodées chinoises pour pieds bandés

8963 Baumwollene Frauerschuhe für Faschfüsse aus Newchwang

But most of them were unadorned with information.

One of my tasks was to note details like the style, material, and condition of the sock or shoe and make an educated guess of the item’s provenance, age, geographical region, social class of origin, and anything else I might be able to surmise.

Late that morning I spent nearly ten minutes studying a pair of longish white socks, relatively thick, probably meant for indoor winter wear.