FOUR #2
When long tentacles of afternoon shadow stretched across the park, my father glanced at his watch and said we should make our way to the neighborhood where Dr. and Mrs. Giles lived.
We didn’t want to be late for dinner. We walked out of the park and paused on the flagstones.
My mother suggested stopping for a nice bottle of wine to bring as a gift, and a kind elderly lady out walking the smallest dog I had ever seen pointed us in the direction of a wine store.
After purchasing a bottle of red wine, we hopped into another cab. My father quickly murmured directions to the driver, and he took off. I was proud that my father knew his way around the city and didn’t need a map. I was still young enough to believe that my parents knew everything.
We shot up Madison Avenue, turned left onto a block of tall, stately buildings, then took a left again down another wide avenue, where we stopped at a red light.
Across the street to my right, the sidewalk had opened onto a large flat plaza, with fountains and benches.
“Look.” My mother pointed out the window.
I peered up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the impossibly grand reach of it, the endless tiers of neat white steps, its thick round columns flanking two gigantic, colorful banners.
THE OLMEC ART OF ANCIENT MEXICO, I read.
REALISM REVISITED: THE AMERICAN MASTERWORKS.
“Can we go in?” I asked.
My father shook his head. “Not today, Ingrid. We don’t want to keep Dr. Giles and his wife waiting.” He saw the crestfallen look on my face and added, “Next time, okay? New York will always be here. I promise.”
The cab stopped in front of an enormous white building with a polished gold plaque at its entrance. My father looked up at the numbers on the green and white awning and said, “This is the one. Right here’s fine, thanks.”
We pushed through the revolving doors and walked into a gleaming marble lobby with a separate area off to the right that actually looked like someone’s living room.
Someone rich. I remember thinking suddenly that my mother’s shoes made a lot of noise.
For the first time that day, I wondered whether we were properly dressed.
My mother had wanted to bring a fresh change of clothes for dinner after tromping around the city all day, but Dr. Giles had said to just come as we were, we weren’t going anywhere fancy.
A rotund, rosy-cheeked man in a forest green uniform with gold piping at the cuffs and hem stood behind a tall wooden desk a few yards from us. He was busy signing a clipboard held by a skinny man in a brown uniform, who was balancing a large parcel against his hip.
“Forgot the wine!” my father exclaimed under his breath, and dashed back out through the glass doors toward our cab, which was just pulling away from the curb. He took off after it.
My mother approached the doorman and said politely, “We’re the Yungs. We’re here to see Dr. and Mrs. Giles?”
He looked my mother and me up and down. “How do you spell that?”
“Y-U-N-G,” she said, enunciating each letter clearly.
“One moment.” He picked up a green phone and dialed a number he seemed to know by heart.
He announced us, listened for a moment, then hung up and said, “Yes, they’re expecting you.
The elevators are around the corner, down the hall, and to your right.
Twenty-E.” Then he turned back to the newspaper half-hidden in front of him.
“Let’s wait over here for your dad,” my mother said in Mandarin, herding me away from the doorman. A moment later, my father burst through the doors and came puffing up, holding the black plastic bag that contained the bottle of wine.
The doorman glanced up, jerked his head to the left, and said, “Delivery entrance is around the corner.”
My father paused a second, then started past the doorman. “No, I’m here to—”
The doorman stepped out from behind his desk and planted himself in front of my father, blocking his path. “I said, deliveries are around the corner. Can’t you understand English?”
My mother made a small noise I hadn’t heard her make before, a kind of startled choke.
My father didn’t speak for a moment. Then he said evenly, “We are here to have dinner with Dr. Roger Giles. You can tell him it’s Dr. Le-Wen Yung and his family.”
The doorman looked over at my mother and me now, more carefully this time.
My mother raised her chin a little as she returned his stare.
I thought for a moment that he might apologize—he had to, didn’t he?
But he just stepped back behind his desk and picked up his paper again. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “Twenty-E.”
My father had turned a dark shade of red. He and my mother were both silent as the three of us made our way down a long carpeted hall to the elevators. I knew from the set of their faces not to say a word.
I remember wanting to cry, but not a sad kind of crying. An angry kind. I was angry at the man in the dark green uniform, and angry at myself, for feeling embarrassed for my father.
Finally we reached a dark-wood-paneled elevator with a shiny brass handrail. I was surprised to see that another man in green sat inside. He smiled at us and asked, “Which floor?” My parents looked startled by the appearance of another uniformed man, but I piped up, “Twenty, please.”
“Right away, young lady.”
The doors closed and whisked us the twenty floors up. The elevator traveled so fast that my ears popped, and I thought what a strange and wonderful thing that must be—to live so high above the ground that your ears popped every time you got home!
I snuck a glance at my father. He still had a dark look on his face and stared resolutely at the lit numbers as they counted up to twenty.
My mother straightened her skirt and inspected her reflection in a compact from her purse.
She reached over and smoothed down my hair, and I squirmed away from her, embarrassed and annoyed, before the elevator stopped at the twentieth floor.
After we sat stiffly through a delicious dinner of roast beef and whipped potatoes, during which neither my mother nor my father had said much, for which I’d compensated by keeping up a constant chatter with the Gileses about what I was learning in the third grade, Dr. Giles suggested retiring to the living room for something he called a cordial.
It had been light out when we sat down to dinner, so when we stepped back into the living room, with its wide picture window open to the city, I was not prepared for the view that greeted us.
My mother, father, and I stood together in front of that picture window, gazing out over the dark tops of the trees in Central Park and the majestic spires and towers of Manhattan, glinting silver and pink in the deepening dusk. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
“It’s quite something, isn’t it?” Dr. Giles remarked cheerfully, as he poured four drinks into ornate crystal glasses. “That view’s what finally sold Nancy and me on this place.”
I could not stop looking and looking out that window, at the deep violet hue spreading across the sky.
It felt as if the day’s humiliations were draining from my body, and I was waking up fresh.
I had never wanted to belong to anything more than to that shimmering landscape of office towers lit up against the dark New York sky.
Each individual glittering box of light—like gems strung along a necklace—seemed to me to be a tiny oblong window onto success, acceptance, respect, that is to say, a place in the world.
Everything that must be good and great and worth striving for.
I thought about how each glimmering box of light came with a telephone, a computer, a keyboard, a desk, diplomas on a wall, shelves full of books.
I thought to myself that these must be the kinds of things anyone would want.
I resolved at that moment to come back here and look at this city skyline someday after I was grown, and know that one of those millions of tiny, far-off, glittering boxes of light in the sky was mine.
I wasn’t big. I wasn’t strong. I wasn’t tall.
I wasn’t even a boy. But people said I was smart.
So I simply willed myself to succeed—over and over and over again—because I had to.
It was the only way I could think of to protect my parents and myself.
It was how I would justify what my family was doing here. I didn’t see any other way.