Chapter Four
I came home from work one Friday in early November to find the apartment totally upended. The sofa had disappeared, and in its place was a long slim table with attached stools that folded out or tucked in, depending on one’s requirements. Xinwei had read an article that said standing up during meals promoted longevity, while sitting caused cancer, and had adjusted our lives accordingly. When I walked in, she and Raymond were in the middle of dinner, wearing plastic gloves and breaking crab shells with tiny hammers. With one deft foot, Xinwei demonstrated the stool withdrawal mechanism, and explained the article’s findings.
She said I should feel free to use the seats whenever I wanted, though she and Raymond would refrain. Raymond, looking forlorn, gnawed a carpus and shifted his weight from one leg to the other.
The other occupant, the sleepwalker, had absconded to Munich for Oktoberfest, revealing the purpose of his late-night German lessons. But it was now November, and I wondered what our housemate was up to in Bavaria, and how he had secured such a long vacation.
“He moved there,” said Raymond. “He’s got a job at BMW.”
“What? Really? How do you know?”
“LinkedIn.”
“What about his room?”
“We should have made friends with him,” Raymond said slyly. “Free BMW, yeah?”
“Driving is more dangerous than flying,” Xinwei said, spooning roe out of the carapace of the crab. She said this every time Raymond brought up driving, because he loved cars but had an as-yet-incurable fear of planes, meaning he had not once visited her family in China. The farthest they had traveled together outside of the continental United States was England, on the Queen Mary II. It took seven days, and when they arrived they didn’t even go to London because there was a rail strike. They just stayed at the port in Southampton until it was time to return. Xinwei began to rattle off the statistical probabilities of driving deaths versus flying deaths as she stirred the soft orange roe into her rice. Sadly, Xinwei was a rational person, and would never understand that Raymond’s issue had at its base irrationality, and was therefore immune to statistics.
I left them to their crab and retreated to my room, because my father was calling me on the phone. I was apprehensive. My father possessed that trait often ascribed to people my age, the proclivity for texting and the phobia of phone calls, so this was an aberration.
“Guess who’s coming to New York !”
He was shouting over the scherzo of the Third Symphony, and he was close to inaudible. It didn’t help that he spoke to me in an unpredictable jumble of English and Chinese, peppering his Mandarin with English words for various reasons: to signal irony or sophistication, to mock an American pronunciation, to show off a new addition to his vocabulary, or sometimes just because he preferred one word over its translated other, as with the English New York.
“Can you turn that down?”
“Of course I can’t!” he yelled.
“Why? I mean, when? When are you coming?”
“The Whitney Museum wants to do a retrospective of my work. My publicist says I should take it as a compliment, but it sounds like a death knell to me. What do you think? Death knell or compliment?”
“When is it?”
“May. You’re coming back before then for your Christmas break , right?”
“I don’t really have Christmas break anymore, I graduated three years ago.”
“Ah,” he said in his usual tone, inquisitive, almost abashed, but not really apologetic. “You know what?”
“What?”
“I told them I was working on a new piece, a large-scale installation , and I’m letting them premiere it. The second they heard me say ‘ large-scale installation ’ they lost it. They couldn’t say no. So we will bill it as a retrospective with a twist. Doesn’t that sound great? They’re fucking excited.”
“That’s good,” I said. I was thinking about the sofa, trying to assess the implications of its departure. I didn’t often sit on it, but I didn’t like the idea of living in a house with no sofa, or, more specifically, in a house where the sofa could be there one day and be whisked away the next. Xinwei, of course, had made the deci sion unilaterally. Still, I couldn’t lead myself to the conclusion that Xinwei might be lacking in certain interpersonal qualities, or that this behavior was something I should communicate with her about. I decided I didn’t mind living without a sofa. Apple, I knew, would call me a pushover and send me a link to Joan Didion’s essay about self-respect, even though I had repeatedly told Apple that according to the metrics laid out in the essay, I did have self-respect. Didion seemed to suggest that feeling like a doormat was a much greater indicator of being a doormat than appearing, on the outside, to be one. But Apple had a hard time grasping my perspective. She assessed other people’s behavior through the prism of her own: she distrusted Hoang, for example, for what she saw as his affectation of “quirk” when he did things like not having a phone, freeing the lab mice, and getting fired for not lying about freeing the lab mice. She viewed these behaviors as “fake,” as pretensions, because she could not imagine herself doing them, and therefore could not imagine that someone who did them was not being “fake.” For the same reason, if I told her, as I surely would, what had happened to the sofa in my apartment, she would think I was being stubborn and only pretending—if not to Xinwei, then to her, or, most intractably, to myself—not to mind, because if Apple’s roommate disposed of a large piece of common furniture one day and she shrugged it off, she would only be pretending not to mind.
“This Xinwei sounds like Napoleon,” my father said, after I told him about the new table. He always found a way to mention Napoleon when the Third Symphony was playing, ever since I told him that Beethoven originally dedicated the piece to him, but ripped up the manuscript in a fury when Napoleon crowned himself emperor and betrayed the republican ideals that Beethoven so admired. I fought dual impulses to defend either Xinwei or Napoleon against the unfair comparison. My father returned to the subject of the retrospective, and mused about the weather in Manhattan, and after a few minutes I realized that he thought I lived in New York. By now it was too late to issue a correction—he might think I had deliberately misled him and become upset—so I said nothing. After a while, he said that Fei, his personal assistant slash girlfriend, was summoning him to breakfast, and ended the call.
I left my room and ate some crab with Xinwei and Raymond, who were somehow still discussing air travel. As I cracked open a pincer with the ridged inner thighs of Xinwei’s steel crab tong, I realized I should have taken the rare opportunity of getting my father, for one, on the phone, and two, paying relative attention, to tell him that earlier in the week Dr. Bae, the head of new programming for the museum, had called me in to tell me that he wanted me to take the lead in curating a small exhibition on women and domestic life in the Qing Dynasty, which would of course feature the institution’s heretofore undisplayed collection of shoes for bound feet. I sent my father a brief voice message on WeChat, summarizing the news, and a while later he sent back a picture of his own painting, a blue-toned, shadowy portrait of his mother from two decades earlier. He had depicted her as a girl, just before she ran off to join the Party, scaling a mountain rock with her flat and useful feet. The painting was titled 大脚儿 / unbound , and it had been a huge hit, one of my father’s first breakthrough works, putting him on the map in the Western art world. A message popped up after the picture:
remember this? only sold for a million.
The next day I set out for the library, where I planned to spend the morning before meeting Apple and Gus at some kind of protest to which the latter was bringing the former, and to which she in turn was bringing me. After that, I had a meeting at the museum with Dr. Bae, who apparently worked on Saturdays. The air outside had a bone-dampening chill, and the sky was a sooty sheet. Leaves crunched under my shoes, and the weight of my steps transformed those freshly fallen, their edges curling up in the air as if still stretching toward the sunlight, into powdered debris, frosting the gum-spotted pavement with their copper hue.
I had always disliked November, which I regarded as a fallow month, full of shrinking days—the beginning of the smallening of the world that was winter, which did not let up until the first day of spring, whenever that happened to be. My distaste for November had eased when I moved to America, thanks to the warm balm of Thanksgiving, which I had spent in Apple’s home many times, and also thanks to the Black Friday sales. This year I hoped to get my hands on an Instant Pot. But those events were at the end of the month, and long bleak weeks separated me from them.
The library was a nice place to spend a cold weekend morning reading about Napoleon. Of course I could read whatever I wanted at home, online, but the simple rituals of library-going—securing my favorite seat, consulting the stacks—made it an enjoyable outing. Because of my work at the museum, I now regarded the study of nineteenth-century Chinese history as my day job, which made the study of nineteenth-century European history feel like a fun hobby, and for me it was. Napoleonic history had been a pet subject of mine for years, and my conversation with my father had refreshed my interest.
The only people I ever saw in the library were the elderly, the odd, the homeless, and the student poor—not college students, whose campuses were amply furnished, but high school and middle school students whose schools might have had places designated as libraries, but were so in name only, lacking computers and most books.
I took my favorite seat and spent some time going over what I planned to say to Dr. Bae in our meeting later that afternoon. In my notebook, I doodled bicornes and tricolor cockades with my six-in-one multi pen. The detail that endeared me most to Napoleon when I first started reading about him was that he never lost his Corsican accent, and French people made fun of him for it his entire life, from his schoolmates in dreary Aube to the aristocrats who surrounded him when he was emperor. From time to time I glanced up to see what the people at the computers were doing with their screens: playing solitaire, writing an essay about the cotton gin, scrolling down the WHYY homepage on a font setting so large I could make out the subheadings of the articles. Although I loved the library, I could never quite get used to the whiff of the carceral, especially the entry and exit point, with its metal detector and turnstile and its security guard who sat behind bulletproof glass plating and never spoke, only glumly motioned for you to open your bag as you left so she could see if you had stolen any books. According to the kids who sometimes chatted with me across the shared tables, their schools had a similar setup.
I found Apple and Gus in a coffee shop, nestled in a corner table, their heads close together. I was still adjusting to their acquaintance. As I moved closer, I could hear Gus talking about the housekeepers. One of them, a woman named Mariama, was friendly with one of the line cooks in the hotel restaurant, Dorothea, because they lived in the same neighborhood, and they sometimes commuted together when their shifts coincided. Mariama had lately learned from Dorothea, Gus said, waving to me when I pulled up a chair but not pausing his narration, that a couple of the kitchen employees, frustrated about various issues, including that their wages had not gone up by more than a dollar and a few cents in a decade of work, not even after the hotel renovation, had been in contact with representatives of a nationwide hospitality workers’ union, just to get a sense of what their deal was, to hear what they had to say.
“Now a bunch of us are getting into the idea, most of the kitchen folks, a couple in housekeeping, and a lot of the bar staff. Hoang too,” Gus added, nodding, I feared, specifically to me, before turning back to Apple.
“You’re forming a union?” I said.
“We’re forming a committee.”
“You’re forming a committee to form a union?”
“Exactly. But we haven’t gone public. We’re exploring our options.”
“How easy would that be to do?”
“Unionize? Hard,” Gus said. He made brief mention of the National Labor Relations Board and the Trump administration’s anti-worker policies. But, he added, there was no point worrying about that now; it was early days, and they were focused on talking to everyone who worked at the hotel, trying to see how open they were to the idea of some kind of collective action, to which many people, for various reasons, some practical, some ideological, some arbitrary, were averse. Gus began talking about the difficulties of getting his coworkers alone to talk, and how some of them didn’t even want to be seen with the employees who supported unionization, because they worried their bosses might see and think they supported it too, which could jeopardize their jobs. To avoid this, the committee was making house calls, but most people slammed the doors in their faces. The more Gus talked, the more I realized I didn’t really know what “unionizing” entailed. I knew about Reagan and the air traffic control lers, and Thatcher and the coal miners, but those episodes had involved preexisting unions, things fully formed. I had no idea what was involved in trying to make one from scratch. Apple and Gus finished their coffees and we started walking.
“Is anyone else coming?” I asked Gus.
“Yeah, a few people. It’ll be good.”
“Anyone we’d know?” Apple said, trying to catch my eye.
“Don’t think so.”
The police had blocked off the section of Market Street that ran past Independence Hall, and forty or fifty cops were standing in a line in front of the crowd among which we numbered. The gathering, Gus explained, was a semi-spontaneous counterprotest of a preapproved rally organized by a far-right group not local to the city. The right-wing group said they were gathering in support of the president, ahead of the midterm election on Tuesday; Gus said they were white nationalists. They had bused in members and supporters, some from several states away, and a few people had even flown in from the other side of the country for the occasion, according to the group’s Twitter announcements, which Gus and his friends were monitoring. Apparently a lot more members had planned to come but were scared off when they heard how many people were showing up to oppose them. The police had propped their bikes up tire-to-tire to make a barrier separating the counterprotesters from the sanctioned rally. The officers faced us with folded arms. They wore conical silver bicycle helmets, and some of them had bottles of blue Gatorade tucked into their big black belts.
On the grass, behind the cops, the men milled about. Most of them wore sunglasses and baseball caps, and many held up American flags larger than their own bodies. One man had a Gadsden flag, a bright yellow pop in a sea of red and blue. The flags billowed hugely in the wind and made a pleasing visual symmetry with the even larger American flag above Independence Hall that wafted above them, big as a car. The men were outnumbered by the counterprotesters, who were a funny mix of old people in tie-dye, young people with cardboard signs that said Sharpied things like no safe space for hate , and a loose gaggle of figures garbed head to toe in black, bandannas obscuring their faces, lingering at the edges of the crowd. Gus said hi to a few of them. Apple had briefed me beforehand: they were anarchists, like Gus.
I looked at the flag-bearing men again, the men whose right to assembly the cops were making sure was respected. A couple of them were setting up an amplifier and microphone, which brought to my mind the squads of women in Beijing with blue-rinse perms and tattooed eyebrows who square-danced in the public parks at night. The rest of the men watched as their companions fussed with the electronic equipment. I was too far away to make out the expressions on their faces, but it didn’t look like they were talking, and I wondered how many of them knew each other, if they were mostly strangers or friends.
We stood around for a while, observing the people on either side of the police line shift around and sometimes shout insults across the cordon of cops. Gus occasionally threw one out, or else turned to Apple and me and made mysterious references to “comrades.” I thought maybe he was in normal clothes, rather than masked and wearing black, in order to chaperone and reassure us, which, if true, was very nice of him. He suggested we walk around to the far side of the park to get a different view.
“So are you still avoiding him?” Apple said to me. Gus was a few paces ahead, but she said it in Chinese, which she rarely ever used with me, claiming that I would mock her Taiwanese accent and childish syntax. She made exceptions when she wanted to gossip.
“Who?”
“You know who.”
“I’m not avoiding anyone. What do you think of all this?”
“This? Gus says it’s more important than—how do you say voting in Chinese?”
“Is it?”
“More important? Of course it isn’t,” Apple said. She switched to English and added, “But I’m investigating the claim.”
The grassy slope was cut up by metal barricades between which we zigzagged to reach a second line of bicycles higher up on the field. We were farther away now, and we could see everything spread out below like Napoleonic army formations before a battle. I still couldn’t make out anybody’s expressions. A reporter from a local newspaper hovered a few feet away, wearing one of the biggest backpacks I’d ever seen, tagged with the word press . He extracted a camera from the bag and began to fiddle with it.
A woman and a toddler walked by on the grass, and the woman hoisted the child onto her shoulders. “See the big group on the other side of the street? Those are the good people.”
A group of Cub Scouts walked past, right as the counterprotesters chanted in unison, “NAZI SCUM OFF OUR STREETS!”
“Those are the people that disagree with the president, right?” one of the boys asked the adult that was leading them.
“Those are the people that disagree, period,” the man replied.
Gus perked up when he heard this, and as the Cub Scouts trailed off, he shouted, “That’s a facile reduction!” A few of the boys turned their heads, but the man leading them did not.
“Were you talking to the guy or the kid?” I said. I was jesting but I was also unsure.
Gus paused. “Both,” he said.
There was a shuffling behind us, and we turned to see six blinkered police horses trotting over the grass. They passed us and moved nearer to the road, and their riders arranged them in a neat brown row. A Buick trundled by, windows down, and the driver slowed the car and leaned out. “Thank you!” he shouted to the horses.
Gus shook his head. “This country is full of bootlickers.”