Repeat After Me (8 page)

In my kitchen, he chopped chicken and bell peppers into quarter-inch pieces as perfect as jewels, and expressed such shock over my lack of a wok it was as if I had killed a person he loved. I watched his arms move over the food. He saw me looking and pushed the sleeves of his cream sweater up. Then he mixed thick condiments he’d brought and coated the cubes of chicken. He threw roots into a frying pan, put the chicken in, took the chicken out, and braised pepper gems until they turned neon green and red. As a finale, he fried everything together in a splash and sizzle that turned my entire kitchen into a stir-fry. I had never seen a bigger mess.

I was rapt, spelling out I’-m i-n l-o-v-e w-i-t-h h-i-m on my fingers as he presented his glistening chicken exhibition and apologized that it was inauthentic.

“It’s perfect,” I said, “I don’t cook.” I was thinking should I be nervous? That he’s in my house, that I don’t know him, didn’t ask him over? That he’s my student?

But it was cold outside, and I wasn’t nervous. I was happier to have him in my apartment than I can express, even now. He made me feel dangerous and interesting even as I dreamed that I might make him feel safe. Da Ge was like having a working fireplace; every room he entered heated up with him in it, and just out the windows was instant winter wherever he wasn’t.

He was rummaging through my silverware drawer, and I was relieved to have a few pairs of disposable chopsticks left over from takeout. We stood across the table from each other, and I poured water from a Brita into mugs while he spooned rice into my bowl and put chicken and peppers on top.

I sat down. He sat, too, waited for something. I took a bite of chicken, and the sesame oil and ginger and sugar bloomed in my mouth.

“It’s fantastic,” I said. “Thank you for making dinner.”

“It’s nothing,” he said, delighted. “Many Chinese men are excellent cook. Next time I make a fish.” Then he served himself, picked his chopsticks up, and mysteriously rubbed them together before taking a bite. The food seemed to cheer him up. He smiled at me. It was very quiet in my living room.

“So.” I thought I should probably ask what he was doing coming over uninvited to make dinner at my apartment, but couldn’t think of a polite way to frame it. He took another bite, chewed.

“What’s your scar from?” I asked, surprising myself.

He reached up as if remembering it was there, and ran his fingers over the rise of flesh. “It’s from accident. Long time before,” he said in a cold orange voice. Wanting to avoid the trapped glance I had seen at school, I changed the subject fast.

“How’s New York? You adjusting okay?” My inner critic berated me for being tedious, but Da Ge was looking straight at me like a laser. I would have liked to know what he saw.

“In America I think I am good guy. Not like Beijing where I am hooligan.”

I laughed. “
Hooligan?
Did your English teacher in China teach you that word?”

He ignored this. “One time I was smoking with my artist friend Hong Yue, and I put the cigarette down on some paper. Maybe I am drunk, too. It’s accident. But the room, in my father’s house, burn quickly. A kind of surprise this burning. Exciting.”

“You burned your father’s house down?”

“It’s accident. Actually, we think it’s kind of funny, me and Hong Yue. But later my father make me work for many months to pay him the money to repair that room.”

Da Ge poured us both more water and chewed quietly. I didn’t know why he had told me that story or what to say. Was he going to burn my house down?

“China is not like New York,” he said. “Maybe for some people, like Xiao Wang, it’s difficult to live here. In China are many rules for face. There are rules for eating and drinking and talking.”

“I think that might be true here, too,” I tried. “And Xiao Wang—”

“Not the same rules.”

“What do you mean by rules?”

“It’s hard to say that in English.”

“So teach me some Chinese.”

“
Ni hao
,” he said, “hello.”

“Knee how,” I repeated.

“Good,” he said, “your pronunciation is good.”

“Maybe you can take me to visit China, in that case,” I joked.

“I can’t go to China now,” he said, not amused.

“Oh. Because of Tiananmen?”

“A lot of reason. I come to America right when China need me, so maybe it’s my—how do you say—fate—I stay here. Anyway, maybe you would have to live in China for many years to understand the logistic.” He smiled.

“The logistic?”

“That way of thinking. The Chinese thinking. Like the government.”

“Is there a way of thinking common to all Chinese?”

“Common?”

“Chinese thinking? What does that even mean?”

“Now you know,” he said, “the Chinese government will rather kill its young generation than lose face.”

“But that’s not a Chinese way of thinking,” I said. “I mean, you don’t think that way, and you’re Chinese. Xiao Wang doesn’t think that way, and she’s Chinese.”

“I believe in democracy, so I am different to Xiao Wang and that government.”

I wondered how well he and Xiao Wang knew each other.

“Used to be I really believe that democracy can come,” he was saying. “Because I am like my mother; we think if you want something so much it’s enough that that thing maybe can happen. But now I know it’s impossible, and this make me more Chinese.”

“I doubt cynicism is particular to the Chinese way of thinking,” I said. “There’s very little hope for social justice or change in America, either.”

“Well,” he said, “even though I hate the government, I will rather die than lose face, like that government. So maybe it is Chinese way of thinking.”

“You would rather die than lose face? Then you can understand what the government did,” I proposed. I took
another serving of his chicken, even though I wasn’t hungry. He watched me chew.

“China just want to be stability, not to boss and control the rest of the world like America. Maybe the government did that because it feel weak. I can understand, but I can’t be that. Do you know what I mean?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Anyway, now I am foreigner. And every country have a kind of box for foreigner. In New York I live like in that dark box.”

“But isn’t that just because you don’t feel at home here yet?”

I considered what it might like to live in a dark box in his hometown. Sadly, it sounded good to me. I imagined going to China with Da Ge, tucking myself into a safe, dark box. It would be like making a fort out of blankets in my parents’ living room, hearing them talking in the dining room, knowing night meant a bath, my dad reading
Charlotte’s Web
to me again and
Narnia
to Benj, click of the pink lamp going out.

“You’ll get used to New York,” I told Da Ge, collecting myself. “Maybe I can help—by teaching you some things?” I put a red pepper in my mouth.

“It’s not just language,” he said. “If your English is okay, okay, so maybe the box have window.” He laughed a short hard laugh. “But even then you are cleaning clothes or deliver food on a bicycle for twenty years, you still cannot belong.”

“There must be lots of Chinese students and artists and businesspeople here, too. And lawyers and doctors, I mean—”

“Sometimes I see clearly,” he interrupted, setting his chopsticks down, “about America. Or maybe my life in America. When my life in China, I am part of that place. I cannot see where China stop—” He chopped his hand down
on the table and then lifted it and gestured to himself. “Where China stop and I start.”

I nodded.

“But in America,” he continued, “I am not part of it. I can see my life, but maybe I also can’t see anything, don’t know who I am. Who I could be here. If I am American. Do you know my meaning?”

“I think so,” I said. “I think it might be culture shock. Have you heard of—”

“In Chinese we have this saying—the players of the game of—how do you say, with king and queen or horse?”

“Chess?”

“Right. That players cannot see clearly. Only who stand to the side—the
pangguanzhe
, watcher of the whole game, can see clearly. Understand?”

“Of course I do. Your English is beautiful.”

“Thank you,” he said, but he was humoring me, worried I had missed his point. “But beautiful English not enough. That maybe keep me from being totally Chinese anymore, but it does not make me American. I am in the—how do you say—no place.”

I thought,
me too
, let’s keep each other company, let’s run away. His way of talking, interrupting, gave me a jolt of being alive. Somewhere in between what he said and what I understood was a place I wished to inhabit. I thought I wanted to understand him. But in fact, what I wanted was to feel whatever it was he felt. Instead of what I felt.

When he excused himself to go outside and smoke, I worried that he might leave without warning me, as he had arrived. But after a few minutes, he came back in and helped with the dishes in my small kitchen. We didn’t speak; he cleared the table and I washed, both of us working quickly. The sounds reminded me of my parents’ apartment, and I closed my eyes, clink of dishes in the sink, slip of Ivory soap on my fingers.

Da Ge was standing so close to me that I could hear him breathe. He began humming something softly, a song I had never heard, but liked. I thought we knew each other well, after our dinner together, even that we were alike in some way I couldn’t define. I wanted him to stay, to watch a movie, keep talking, sing whatever song it was out loud, take off our clothes, have sex, make breakfast in the morning. I was hunting for words or a way to be brave when he straightened up and said, “Thank you for dinner.”

“No,” I said, “thank you. It was really nice to—I was—do you—”

“I see you soon in class,” he said. “I have some business. I should go.”

Then he was gone. I stood in the hallway, wondering what “business” he meant, whether he had heard my invitation and turned it down, or whether I hadn’t made it, before turning back to the dragons and longevity on my wall. I touched the soft paper edge of his scroll, felt the two hours we’d just spent underneath me like something to sleep on. My apartment smelled better than it ever had before, alive, beloved, as if a family lived there.

During my wretched, failed senior year in college, Adam made me see a shrink. I thought I was happy, but Adam suspected otherwise. He was a good reader. And he spent more time with me than anyone else did, so he realized I was in trouble before it became undeniable all around. As much as my particular weirdnesses charmed Adam, he worried, too. He expressed surprise, for example, that I’d never been to a therapist, what with the divorce being my fault and the barely speaking ever again to my dad or the brother I adored.

My brother, Benj Mitchell, with his long eyelashes and huge capacity for empathy, was away at Berkeley when our
father left. Benj was so instantly forgiving that my mother and I had trouble forgiving him, although she would never put it that way. Maybe it was easier for Benj because he didn’t have to live at home when it happened. He would have been reading in People’s Park in sandals, his hair a little bit too long and curling down around his ears while my mom and I were watching movers take half our family’s books and tools and pottery to a brick box house next to a fake lake in New Jersey. He didn’t see our mom on the blue couch for six months, thinking. He didn’t see her drift around the kitchen like a wisp of dust. He wasn’t up at night with the two of us, each in her own room, each pretending not to know the other was awake. Benj got to pack his sweet mind with useful facts, apply to law school, and get accepted. That’s why he could stand to stay with our father and his new mistress-wife in their Jersey colonial during vacations from Berkeley. That’s why he told me that parents are worth forgiving, no matter what they do, because they’re yours and you must love them anyway. What if they don’t forgive you, I asked Benj. He said they always do.

I used to stalk my father and his wife drive-by style, watching her tulips and daffodils bloom in spring and wither in the summers when they were away. I didn’t know where they went. The first winter after my dad left us, a snowman appeared on their lawn, and I cried in my car, wondering what kid had built it, whether they would have kids. That snowman demonstrated to me that she had a family, people she loved and who loved her. Children who rolled around her yard, making angels. Sometimes I dragged my friend Julia on those drives, and we’d see my father’s windows lit up, and I would speculate about what he must be reading, sitting in a big soft chair. Hawthorne. Melville. Northrop Frye? Now, thousands of safe miles away, I Google him and his wife occasionally—find
conferences they natter at, articles they publish on education. I try not to care anymore.

Back then Adam nagged me enough that I agreed to call a doctor he knew, a guy named Mark Holderstein. Dr. Holderstein was a bit like a fastidious lit critic, in his sweater vest and argyle socks that showed some spindly leg when he crossed his ankle over his knee. He was a carrion man, circling for specifics in whatever he read, the type to descend upon a person and devour dead flesh. After diagnosing it, of course.