Interstitial
Courtesy of the author
钟德睿
Known facts, contours of a life. Shipped off at fourteen to relatives he’d never met, to a country he’d never set foot in, for no other reason than a dream.
Dreams had currency then. Dynasties fell, empires rose, great powers went to war, and the maps of the world were redrawn in an instant.
In the early twentieth century, the grand narrative was about civilizational evolution.
Darwin and Spencer made their way to China, and China’s intellectuals concluded: Adapt, or go extinct.
Modernity was coming to the East; the Yellow Race was catching up.
This nation is diseased, wrote Liang Qichao; ignorant, feeble, backward; we need a new people, we must become strong.
At school, reading Rousseau and de Tocqueville, the boy too was compelled by this collective daydream, the constitutional foundations of a new China.
The Qing dynasty was overthrown, the National Assembly declared a republic, and democracy was on the horizon.
Then came the war, and the civil war after that.
He went into the army, where he developed habits he kept for the rest of his life: obsessive hand-washing, for that warded off dysentery; ramrod-straight posture; pants ironed to creases so sharp you could trace a pencil down his leg.
The Cold War: promises of utopia ending at the strait, but on either side, families were torn apart, newspapers shut down, protestors disappeared.
He did not leave for Taiwan, and he did not dare entertain regrets about whether he should have.
Everyone was starving. They were starving even in Cambodia, where the land was so fertile it was said you could shit in the dirt and seeds would sprout.
Yet somehow there was a famine, and whispers of worse, but so little news made it past the borders.
The silence was agony. Finally a letter arrived from a refugee camp in Thailand.
From his sister: Our parents are gone. My husband is gone.
My sons are gone. We are the only ones left.
He never asked for more details than that.
He wasn’t there; he didn’t have the right.
His sister had been an English teacher before the war.
She had provided translation services at the camp, and for that, the Americans told her they’d send her wherever she wanted to go.
California, or the mainland? She asked her brother for advice—how are things over there? Don’t come, he begged her. Go on.
The world swung to the right. The Communist dictators stepped down or were deposed; their agrarian utopias would never come to pass.
China opened its markets and invited the world in.
All his neighbors were starting businesses: electronics shops, sneaker stores.
Pig farmers became millionaires. Those were the golden years.
Dreams had currency again. When the borders relaxed, he felt like he’d won.
He had been right after all, to hold on to his hand, to insist on riding it out.
The madness could not last forever. Things had to revert to the mean.
All three of his daughters went off to college, and then all three found good jobs, and husbands with even better jobs.
They purchased homes. They showed him the running water, electricity, the porcelain toilet seats—bidets, imported from Japan, so much more hygienic, just press this button to make it stop.
Still vivid the memory of the famine years, and now they didn’t blink at banquet dinners at Sky No.
1—a restaurant where you could reserve a private room in a skyscraper high over a developing Guangzhou.
The waiters brought tender chicken over mushrooms, honey-glazed short ribs, steamed shrimp upon beds of vermicelli.
His stomach hurt. He said he wanted yams, and twenty minutes later the chef sent up a plate of intricately carved taro, cassava, and Japanese sweet potato; half were steamed, the other half sautéed with crystallized brown sugar.
Old people prefer the simple food, joked the waitress.
She took a photo for them, showed him the phone, and he was stunned by this vision: the patriarch, the matriarch, surrounded by plump, well-fed daughters.
Are we royalty? he asked, and they laughed; Ba, everyone eats like this now.
His youngest daughter off to Los Angeles, and then off to UC Irvine, where she married the first engineering student from China she met.
They followed his work to Massachusetts, and they bought a house with multiple bedrooms and a front yard where he could plant apple trees and trust they’d stay long enough to see the harvest. Space was different here in the suburbs.
There was no bus, there was no sidewalk, you had to drive just to get some fruit for the mornings, but he had never learned how.
It was so quiet. No neighbors peeping out their windows; no washing lines strung up between buildings.
This was the land of individual freedoms. Every man on his island, and if someone stood on your sidewalk, said his daughter, you were allowed to shoot them.
They expected him to stay. Everyone wanted to go to America, set down anchors for the chain; everyone got a green card, became naturalized, got a job and a retirement account, and then brought their parents over as well.
But he didn’t like relying on others. He liked knowing every face on the block, and he liked being able to walk out his own front door and know exactly where he would end up, and when his son-in-law asked him quietly if they might talk, it was a relief.
See you soon. Not that soon. They were too busy to visit, the flight too long.
When the girls did come, they asked constantly how many days were left before they could go.
They were impatient with this land of squatting toilets, uncertain Wi-Fi, the lack of air-conditioning.
They wanted the Nintendo, they were upset about missing a birthday party, they didn’t like the food their popo cooked at home: the way she tossed everything into the steamer for breakfast, eggs and pork buns and slices of bread alike.
Too soggy, they complained. Who puts sandwich bread in a steamer?
Let’s have a proper dinner, said his daughter, and off they went, again to Sky No.
1. The girls did not care for the view. Too much smog, they said; you can’t see anything.
They whined that the orange juice tasted funny and shuddered at the pickled chicken’s feet and cold sliced tripe, and did not know to pour tea for their elders, and did not take seconds when urged.
He looked at them and tried to feel proud.
Chatty, chubby foreigners. They were happy, but they were not his.
He rode in the car with them to Baiyun International Airport and waited with them in line to check their bags. When do we take off? the girls kept asking. How long is the flight?
It’s always good to see you, he told his daughter. Come home soon. She met his eyes, weary. Yes, soon—but it was not a promise so much as a deferral.
She didn’t like China. She found it more foreign every time.
Her Cantonese faltered; she never had occasion to use it anymore.
She hated the smog, the taxis. She thought the food was dirty; she didn’t let her daughters purchase sweet potatoes from street hawkers.
The crowds made her nervous. Too many people in this country, and she didn’t like how they looked at her on the street—this woman with three children, at a time when most were given permission to have only one.
Who had she bribed? Once, visibly pregnant with the youngest, walking with the other two hand in hand, she’d been stopped at a crosswalk by a police officer, and she’d had to fish her American passport out of her purse before he let her go.
Twelve hours later she texted: landed safely, we’re home.
Impossible now to find a time when the whole family could make the trip.
Work was unsteady for his son-in-law; he lived in terror of being let go, and he couldn’t take the time off.
All three girls were in school, so nine months of the year were out, and when they were on break, the girls had summer camps, or sleepovers.
It’s not fair, they protested. They couldn’t agree on anything else, but on this alone they put up a united front: Why do we have to spend all our breaks in China?
Maybe next summer, said his daughter; and then the summer after that, and then it was a meaningless refrain.
Nobody’s fault. The separation had been a long time coming.
He knew he’d lost her. He had lost her the day he decided to give her away, as if children were interchangeable, as if one could make up for two, and it made no difference that it had been her lifelong dream to leave.