Chapter Ten
“Penelope,”
said Dr. Bae, “come in.”
Light was streaming through the tall windows of his office, flecking the floor with gold. I sat across from him with my palms on the wooden desk, letting the rays of sunlight make stripes across the backs of my hands. I had just come upstairs from my basement dwelling, and I was envious.
“I would like to discuss the exhibition,”
he said. “There have been some changes.”
“Is this about the Mao quote?”
I said. In January we’d argued over the inclusion of a Mao Zedong line about foot binding that I’d suggested we display on one of the walls.
“This is not about the Mao quote,”
said Dr. Bae. “I thought we resolved that.”
“Yes. We did. Oh, the foot?”
His frown deepened. “Foot? What foot?”
“The plaster cast of a foot that I brought here to show you? I shouldn’t have taken it out of the storage room. I won’t do it again. And we can drop the idea I had about—”
“Penelope, everyone has been very impressed with the initiative you’ve taken with the Chinese collection.”
“Thank you,”
I said. I turned my hands over on the desk, and the lines of sunlight resettled on my skin, on the life lines, or whatever the psychic had called them, and then used as evidence that I would meet my death in an elevator shaft.
“I want you to know that the new changes have nothing to do with your work,”
he continued. “There are concerns that the proposed exhibition is not sufficiently inclusive.”
“Inclusive of what?”
“We have thousands of other artifacts that, like the shoes, have never been exhibited to the public. Various kimonos, for example . . .”
The museum, Dr.
Bae explained, had decided to hold a broader exhibition featuring objects from the Chinese and Japanese collections.
The theme would still be women, but there would no longer be a focus on Qing women, or on foot binding.
Obviously this meant that I was no longer in charge of anything; I would contribute my small part, and the head curator for the Asian collections—the person who had left the shoes mildewing in the basement for so long—would take over the rest.
Outside, in the courtyard, the ice in the koi pond was melting.
I sat cross-legged at the edge of the water and shrugged off my jacket.
My relations with Dr.
Bae had been frosty for months.
I sensed that he didn’t trust me anymore, and I worried, beyond the exhibition, what it would mean for my future at the museum.
I didn’t know how to mend the relationship without addressing the issues that seemed to have derailed it, but I knew bringing them up would not work, because he would perceive any broaching of the topic as an accusation.
I felt blurry with defeat.
A bird was making noises in a tree somewhere.
I thought of the Taiwanese priest and his contempt for foreign birdsong.
Had the birds gone south for winter? Had they already returned? Were they, like me, tricked by the preternaturally balmy February weather?
Soon the cold returned, and people retreated from the parks, and it became harder to disengage Apple and Xinwei from Mohd and Raymond.
They were both happy to have me as a third wheel, but I didn’t want to be around Mohd in case Hoang came up in conversation, or actually appeared in person, and I didn’t want to spend time with Raymond; something about the way he left had soured him for me, notwithstanding the fact that he had returned.
Plus, I had gotten used to speaking Mandarin at home with Xinwei, so now it felt like an inconvenience to return to our old trilingual communication style, especially since I had a new urge to exclude Raymond from conversations.
Near the end of the month, Xinwei removed all the Chinese New Year decorations from the doors and walls, because the fifteen days were up.
I wanted them to stay, but she was adamant.
Once they were gone the apartment seemed gloomier than before, and I found it hard to believe that the days were lengthening, even though I knew that they were.
I was demoralized at work after my demotion.
When I told my father what had happened he laughed, and said they were doing to me what the Whitney Museum had done to him.
The only part of my life that seemed to have any forward momentum was the volunteer work with the union.
It felt a little weird since I hadn’t seen Hoang or written to him in weeks, but I also didn’t mind, because I realized that it was something I wanted to do regardless of what he thought about it or me.
I wasn’t sure when exactly the switch occurred, but it seemed to have happened the way habits form—as a result of repeated action.
It felt good to be doing something rather than thinking about it, and to feel tethered to strangers by a commitment I had freely made.
Chris started taking me to strategy meetings so I could meet more of the people involved in the campaign and get a better idea of how organizing worked.
At the first meeting I attended, we sat at an elliptical conference table and ate fried chicken and iceberg lettuce salad off paper plates, and people went around the room sharing progress updates.
The mood was exuberant.
The organizing committee of the Rivebelle had gone public with their desire to form a union, and now committee members were wearing union pins and lanyards at work, getting into gleeful confrontations with their managers.
They needed to convince more coworkers who were on the fence about unionizing, because there would eventually be a vote to decide.
The hotel was trying everything it could to discourage them, giving presentations at mandatory staff meetings about how much better it was to work at a nonunion hotel and referring to the Rivebelle as a “family”
that a union would disrupt.
The managers were on the lookout for the smallest infractions, which they could use as pretext to fire pro-union employees.
One committee member had already been fired for allegedly eating a sandwich outside of his lunch break.
There had been a huge upswing in the number of housekeepers—the largest contingent of workers in the hotel, and thus the most crucial to win over—joining the campaign, after one of them had walked into a vacated guest room to find feces smeared all over the bathroom mirror, bed, chairs, and floor.
It was one of the “sustainable stay”
rooms.
Her manager wouldn’t give her extra time or help to clean the mess, even though it was impossible to do so alone in the time allotted by the elec tronic system, which meant she was penalized when she failed to move on to the next room.
Two more penalties would result in an unpaid suspension.
Gus was at the meeting, and I sat next to him.
Mariama, one of the housekeepers most involved in the union campaign, was saying that housekeepers had the highest injury rates of all hotel workers.
“So many of us have to take pain medication just to get through the workday,”
she said. “But there’s no medication for dealing with this poop nonsense.”
They discussed a coworker who had been fired after a guest complained that some cash was missing from his room, and blamed housekeeping.
When the guest checked out a few days later, he mentioned to the front desk that in fact there had been no theft—he’d found the cash when he was packing—but the housekeeper hadn’t been notified or compensated, and she didn’t get her job back.
I found this appalling.
I remembered the dentist who, the first time I flyered for the union, handed back the leaflet and said to me, “What do you expect me to do about this?,”
and how I’d had the same thought myself. It increasingly seemed that the object of the exercise was to convince such people to instead ask, “What can we do about this?”
When Chris was introducing me, he made a joke about how much he had learned about the Napoleonic wars since we met, and everyone laughed.
But after the meeting, he said the union needed good researchers, and if I could focus on a topic that wasn’t Napoleon or tiny shoes, it was something I should think about.
I asked what such a job entailed.
He said you had to do a lot of research—on companies, on politicians, on federal and state policy—and write strategy reports and help with press releases. “We could use your crazy brain,”
Chris said. It was a lovely compliment. I was touched.
Later, I walked my bike to the SEPTA stop with Gus.
“How’s that rich guy doing? Still a handmaid of evil?”
“He actually really hates his job. He told me he might quit.”
“Tell him his bartender thinks he should too.”
We talked about the meeting and the unionization strategy. I asked Gus if he was still an anarchist, and he explained that he was in fact an anarcho-syndicalist.
“If I’m being honest, the union’s too top-down for me. I’m not trying to split hairs right now. That’s been a big historical mistake. But they’re pretty liberal.”
“By liberal you mean not left-wing enough?”
“Exactly. They’re good people, but it’s very hierarchical, and it’s entrenched in the status quo. But unionizing is a good start.”
“Right,”
I said. “Are you going to the rally?”
“Of course. The energy is great, and it’s important. Good to get everybody together in one place, rehearse for the general strike.”
“What general strike?”
“ The general strike!”
Gus said. I had never seen him so animated. “Oh shit, where to begin? Damn it, the bus is here. I gotta get this or I’ll be late for work. I’ll send you some reading after my shift!”
“Who else is working today?”
I shouted after him.
“He’s in Colorado!”
Gus yelled. I watched the bus lurch away, embarrassed that he had known who I was asking about. Colorado?
I hoped that Gus wouldn’t forget to send me his anarcho-syndicalist reading recommendations.
Now that Inno barely had time to catch up, let alone read for pleasure and talk to me about it, no one was sending me any interesting books or articles to discuss.
I texted Inno, telling him about my conversation with Gus, and asked if he had quit his job yet.
He replied with a long voice message explaining that he needed to wait for a while, otherwise he would have to forfeit his signing bonus, which would not be cost-efficient, but that he did plan to quit, and then beg the Potato Park for forgiveness and a second chance.
“Please give me good warning if you turn into some kind of anarchist, and I will try to look past your refusal to countenance the much more rational philosophy of effective altruism,”
Inno said in the message.
“I must go, but I would like you to know that I am sitting by the pool with my laptop and a perfectly chilled glass of Chablis, carrying out my menial labor, and I miss you very much.
Come visit.”
That evening, my father WeChatted me my mother’s home address, which I had asked him for.
Then he announced that he would be off the grid for the next week to take LSD in the Gobi Desert.
He said he had hit a wall artistically and needed to rejuvenate his consciousness.
In the last voice message he sent before he left, he told me not to tell my mother that he said hello, as in, he wanted me to tell her that he had declined to pass on a greeting.
I tried to talk to him on the phone, so that I could accuse him of timing his trip to be out of touch when I went to see her, but he said he had to leave for an appointment with his acupuncturist, and we could talk when he came back.
I read Sentimental Education on the train to Maplewood.
In the morning I had been too nervous to eat, but now I had spent two hours on the bus to Manhattan and then forty minutes on the train into New Jersey, and I realized as I stepped onto the platform that I was starving.
I worried that there wouldn’t be anything within walking distance, because it was the suburbs, but there was a pizzeria close by, in a pretty brick building on a corner lot, between a juice bar and a bank.
It was a quarter to twelve and there was no one in the restaurant besides the waiter, a man in his fifties wearing a white shirt with a starched collar and, on the breast pocket, a small pin of an Italian flag.
I ordered a dish of spicy rigatoni and thought of my friends as I shook parmesan cheese over the pasta.
Recently I had come across a news article about the unseemly things that McKinsey was doing in China and Saudi Arabia and other places.
How could it be morally impermissible to eat certain foods, but, as Inno argued, a moral imperative to take a job with such a company in order to donate some of your earnings to charity? Was I na?ve for being made uneasy by utilitarian rationale? Was it better to do something sort of shady that you enjoyed and make a lot of money and keep it, like Apple, or do something even shadier that you hated and make more money and give a lot of it away, like Inno? Or was it better to do something neutral but impactless, and make not that much money, and keep it, like me? Was Apple right that I had moral luck? Was it better to say you believed in something and then let yourself and others down, or say nothing, do nothing, believe in nothing? What was it, really, that Inno believed in? Perhaps I should have challenged him more.
The waiter came by to check if everything was alright, and I asked him if he knew a woman named Rose Lin, a resident of Maplewood.
He said he didn’t.
“Rose Williams?” I tried.
“I know a Rose Zhang. She made that.”
He pointed at the small white bowl that held the grated cheese.
When he left, I picked it up and studied it.
The bowl had fine ridges all around its lower half, and the rest was smooth, tapering into a dainty lip.
I checked the underside: r.z.
in childish blue letters, a loose oval around the initials.
The oval was imperfect.
I could see where she had tried to join the end of one line to the other to complete the shape, and missed.
It was this detail I found most upsetting of all.
As with some of the embroidery on the shoes I cataloged at work, it was the imperfection that made you realize there was a person behind the artifact.
I put the bowl down.
Why was she using my father’s name? Her legal surname, until she changed it in her twenties, was Williams, the name of her adoptive parents; she had not taken my father’s name when they married, believing it antiquated and unfeminist to do so.
Rose Lin was how she made sure to introduce herself to the parents of my school friends.
That way people knew she had given me her own name, saw in it a matrilineal revolt.
Now she had left me with it. What was “Rose Zhang”? Witness protection? Performance art? An elaborate joke? An admission of defeat?
After the pasta, I ordered a panna cotta, and then an espresso.
When, on my second coffee, I realized I was procrastinating, I disciplined myself and paid the bill.
The house was only a few minutes away from the restaurant.
Now and then a minivan slid by, silent on the freshly laid asphalt, but apart from that the streets were empty.
I crossed to the other side of the road so that I wouldn’t end up directly opposite the house and would be able to sidle up to it at an angle.
I already knew from online that it was big and butter yellow, fringed with white.
In the version I had seen, there was a yard sign saying refugees welcome .
I wasn’t sure if that was my mother or the previous tenants.
The house was still yellow, but the sign was gone, and ceramic flowerpots, reminiscent of the cheese bowl at the restaurant, lined the stairs to the porch.
Some were filled with soil and some were not, but nothing grew inside.
I sprinted back to the restaurant, feeling absurd. The waiter was clearing the table. He asked if I’d forgotten my umbrella.
“You know Rose,”
I said. I was out of breath.
He said that he did.
“What does she . . . what does she get?”
“I’m sorry?”
“What does she order? When she comes here?”
He eyed me. “Are you a friend? A relative?”
I nodded, unwilling to answer that question in words.
“She likes our pizzas. Sometimes she’ll get the rigatoni that you had.”
“She comes a lot?”
“Yes, I’d say so. She very kindly made us our parmesan pots, and for free, too.”
“Kids?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Does she have any kids?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
He picked up the tray on which he had placed my coffee cup and saucer, my glass of water, and the sugar packet I had torn open but not used.
I followed him to the kitchen doors.
He told me I couldn’t come in any farther, so I waited for him in the dining room.
“Husband? Boyfriend? Girlfriend?”
I said when he returned.
“May I ask why you’re asking?”
“I’m her—”
I stopped. Why was it so hard to say daughter? “She’s my mother.”
He studied me. “Rose is your mother?”
“Yes.”
“She’s never mentioned a daughter.”
“Yes, I know, you said.”
“And you’re here to visit her?”
I nodded. The waiter took off his glasses, wiped the lenses on his apron, and put them back on. It made me think of Hoang. What was he doing in Colorado?
“But you know that she’s not here,” he said.
“She’s not?”
“She’s in California, I think for an arts festival.”
“I didn’t know that,”
I said eventually. How did he know so much? Was this a particularly friendly town, or was my mother a particularly friendly person? Had she, like Paul, become a better version of herself after leaving me?
“The truth is, I was adopted,”
I said. “She’s my, my biological mother. I was coming here to surprise her. That’s why I don’t know anything about where she is.”
It was a lie, but it felt metaphysically true. My mother was adopted, and she abandoned me. All the constituent parts were there. All I had done was jumble them around.
“Oh,”
said the waiter. “Oh, I see. I’m so sorry. What a shame.”
He asked me if I wanted to leave a phone number or an email address, and I told him it was fine. He looked like he was about to insist, but he stopped himself. He asked if he should tell her I had come. To say no would be to deny myself something I wanted very badly, but to say yes risked knowing, if I did not hear from her, that she did not care about me. I told him I would leave it to him to decide.
I thought I would head back to the train station but found myself walking again in the direction of the yellow house.
When I came within sight of it, it had all the dimensions and aura of a normal house, indistinguishable from its gray and white neighbors.
Now that I knew it was empty, it had lost the creepy magnetism it had earlier possessed.
I walked up the porch steps and stood on the bristly welcome mat, and then I pressed the electric doorbell.
“Für Elise”
pealed through the house.
The first-floor curtains were drawn, but gauzy, and through their film I could make out living room furniture in neutral colors.
On the coffee table was a copy of the New York Times , open to the crossword page, a white bowl filled with coins, and a bamboo hairbrush.
The very last time I saw my mother, she was standing in the bathroom of our apartment in Beijing, shaving her head with my father’s electric razor.
This was right before the release of the paparazzi photos of Britney Spears shaving her own head, and when that happened everyone at school was laughing about it, and no one could understand why I became so upset whenever the subject came up.
That day, I got home from school and found her in the bathroom, naked, her long hair dripping wet. She sometimes listened to xiangsheng to practice her comprehension of Chinese, and it was blaring so loudly that I heard it in the hallway before opening the front door. She was aping everything the comedians were saying, high pitched for one man and low for the other, but shouting, like she was trying to drown them out, and speaking directly into the mirror. She saw me in the reflection and asked me to fetch some scissors. When I didn’t move right away, she banged her hands on the sink and said, “Now! We can’t waste any time! They’ll come for you, too!”
I stood in the kitchen for a long time, unsure of what to do. I opened a drawer and stared at forks, spoons, and chopsticks. My father had removed the knives months earlier. I opened another drawer and found the blunt kitchen scissors, wrapped in a dishcloth, perhaps as a disguise. Eventually she came in, after she had called my name and gotten no response. She said, “Why are you crying?”
I shrugged. She told me to stop crying. She said, “Great things are coming, but not if you act the way you always act.”
She spotted the scissors, which I was holding to my chest. She said, “Oh, good, you found them.”
She took them from me and walked back to the bathroom.
I followed her.
Again I looked at her looking at herself, and marveled at how alien she seemed, how easy it was for someone you loved to shut themselves off from you, as easy as closing a door.
I could tell she wanted me to say something in protest, like she was daring me, and if I spoke it would render her triumphant somehow.
She crackled with a malicious, frightening energy.
She seized her wet hair in one fist and moved it into the mouth of the scissors.
She paused for a moment, measuring the violence, and then lopped it off.
When she was done, she turned and offered the scissors to me, blade first.
“Will you help me even out the back?” I shook my head, and she said, “I told you not to act the way you always act.
But I knew you would.” That was when she spotted the electric razor and decided to forgo the bob.
If not for the bamboo hairbrush on her coffee table, a banal object in an assortment of banality, I would not have wondered, standing on the porch of her empty home, what her hair looked like now.
I thought of my conversation with the waiter. I’m her daughter. A sentence I hadn’t been able to say, because I did not feel like I was hers.
The liquefied natural gas plant bloomed into view.
After we passed it, the Meadowlands: tiny lakes moated by reeds and brush, and the Hackensack River, a thick gray ribbon.
From the upper level of the bus, at a certain angle, the road became invisible, and it looked like we were coasting on the water.
Suddenly I felt warmth, and I could hear murmurs from the other passengers over the voice of the narrator of my Napoleon podcast.
On the opposite lane of the highway, now only a few feet ahead, a large truck was stationary in the middle of the road, and it was on fire.
We zipped past, and my face burned.
The flames were a virile orange, wet and opaque, and the air around them was glassy with heat.
We left the burning truck behind.
The drivers of the cars closest to it were filming on their phones.
Behind them, more vehicles slowed and stopped, joining the jam.
In Sentimental Education , Arnoux, short on cash, opened a pottery factory, but he couldn’t replicate “the copper-red of the Chinese”—the color vanished from the surface of his pots when they went into the kiln.
The bus sped on.
I wondered if my mother and Paul were in cahoots, except I could not guess their collective aim, besides making pottery an unbearable sub ject.
When I thought about them together like this, as an abstract collective, it all made very little sense to me—why were there people I loved so much, whose approximate locations I knew, but who were not in my life? Sunlight flicked through the bare trees.
If, the next day, I bought a plane ticket to Beijing, sat for thirteen hours, disembarked, pressed my thumbs into the scanner, queued at immigration with all the foreigners and my American passport, hailed a taxi, and gave my father’s address, I would see an identical scene from the window of the cab—the skeletal husks of the poplars in winter and the weak sunlight whisking between them, racing like a horse alongside the cars, slowing as we slowed.
Outside the air would smell wonderfully of coal and inside the taxi it would smell of cigarettes and sweat.
The trees made me think of Hoang, of his misleading tattoo.
I tore a blank page from the end of the book.
Gus had clarified, in between reminders to read the links he sent to Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, and Bakunin, that Hoang had taken some time off work and not, as I feared, moved to Colorado.
I traced the “H” of his name over and over with my pen as I thought about what to write.
I wanted to apologize again.
I dreaded that he was vacationing with the girl from his living room and struggled not to imagine them on a romantic road trip together, camping under the stars, observing beautiful sunsets, touching each other, and so on.
I was failing in my struggle not to imagine it.
In the end, I made no reference to our last meeting.