“I threw him away, the drunk!”
Foon Wah laughed. They all did.
“Ni to! Ni to!” the daughters cooed, leading Foon Wah to the couch.
The daughters brought the older women four bowls of mushroom chestnut soup. Staring at one another through the steam, incredulous that they were all still alive, and overwhelmed by what time had given and taken from each, the older women sat in a circle.
“But you have been alone all this time? No children?”
“I remarried,” said Mee Lai between slurps. “My second husband died two years ago. We have three kids—they’re in the city.” Grasping Foon Wah’s wrist, she bent forward to explain.
“After the Communists took over, you could get a divorce. The Communists got rid of many of the old practices!” she exclaimed. “The Women’s Federation told me about the new marriage law. They took me to a class so I could teach others. I used to travel around, teaching women about the marriage law. I went to see an eye doctor,and he gave me some glasses. And then I married the eye doctor! Chor Jung—a year younger than me! A very good man. But he had liver problems, died two years ago.”
For almost fifty years, Foon Wah had believed her friend trapped in an unhappy marriage with that fat man in Lew village. She had imagined Mee Lai suffering to remind herself that she was the lucky one. Yet in all that time, Mee Lai had been free.
Foon Wah was glad for this, of course.
“And you!” cried Mee Lai, nudging Foon Wah. “You with that handsome American brother. I still remember his name—Chin Dun Ho!”
Foon Wah nodded, looking down at her feet.
“With a husband so pretty,” Mee Lai laughed, “you wish you are the first to die!”
One thing hadn’t changed: the respect accorded to those who had gone to America. Her cousins’ children followed her around, anticipating her every need. When she slipped them heng bou, they pressed their hands together, bowing and murmuring with gratitude. A ten-dollar bill was worth fifty yuan, and Foon Wah knew they probably imagined she was a wealthy woman. She considered trying to dissuade them of this notion but realized her attempts would be futile. Never in a million years could they dream of buying a travel package to fly across the world. And her body was weak, pampered—she had been sitting on porcelain toilets for so long that she found it near impossible to squat over the trench in the woods.
It moved her to watch the women in the kitchen debone a fish just the way she liked to, to hear them hum their approval the way she did, and to see the old women’s feet, in their open sandals, curling toe over toe, just like hers. Many of the men and children had left for America, Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Sydney, and her cousins complained that hardly anyone lived in Ng village anymore. Only ghosts.
She thought endlessly about her ghosts. Her ghosts in China, her ghosts in Brooklyn. On the third day, she asked a relative to take her on the back of his motorbike to Chin village. When they arrived, theChin villagers poured forward to greet her. She wanted to cry; everyone’s country lilt was so exactly like Koon Lai’s. Those who still remained in Chin village were Koon Lai’s distant kin, second and third cousins, their bloodlines untouched by the blessing and the curse of America. In the house where Richard had been raised, Foon Wah burned incense and bowed at the altar. She then asked to be taken to the area where Koon Lai’s prized new house had stood. But there was nothing there, not even the structure’s remains: the Communists had instructed the villagers to dismantle the ruins and plant a pumpkin patch in its place.
“But the canal,” the cousin added when he perceived her disappointment. “Your father-in-law built the canal. They still use it. You want us to take you to it?”
She smiled, declining with a quick shake of her head.
At the end of her journey, she felt it a great privilege to be old and to have caught a glimpse of how the world continues after one has left it. To realize that life is like the best of Chinese movies: a series of sweet heartbreaks that move in no particular direction.
Still, she began to miss a bowl of cornflakes, and to tire of squatting in trenches. At the end of those four weeks, she was ready to go home.
JASON
When his daughter shut the door of her bedroom and lived for days on LUNA Bars despite the carefully prepared meals he cooked for her, Jason thought of his younger self. How he’d taken off with his typewriter, wanting nothing to do with his parents. It brought him some comfort to think maybe she’d inherited her intensity from him—and one day she’d grow up and, like him, find someone who made her a little less severe.
He returned to this line of thought often, and it was easier than thinking about the other part: that the things she’d said in the kitchen on Halloween had upset him. She thought he didn’t care what had happened to the Livonia Avenue restaurant building and to the people who had lived in it, but that was not the case.
He was deeply disturbed to hear there had been a fire, that people had been hurt. But his father had sold the building and never looked back. What happened after the sale was not his family’s business, Jason felt.
But then, there were people in Brownsville who still remembered his father. Who believed he’d been responsible for this calamity.
Perhaps Sadie was right. He was still running. His father’s past was the last thing he wanted to think about.
All spring and summer, as his daughter dug into the history ofthe Livonia Avenue lot, Jason chewed over how he could help. His own days were slow and solitary. He wrote in the morning, and in the afternoons he worked as an associate editor forVerbena Press.Often, he’d reflect on how lucky he was to do what he loved, to eat well, and to feel safe. In the evenings, he cooked and ate with Rachel, and they read aloud Ibsen or Chekhov, or else they played the game where one of them read a line from a book and the other had to guess the author. He cherished the quiet, for as a child, quiet was all he had ever wanted. To hear Rachel hum along to Billy Joel, or Brian Lehrer ponder the questions of the day, or the chirping of the sparrow out the window—that was enough for him.
In the early ’90s, when they’d moved to Park Slope—Rachel’s parents had bought the brownstone on their behalf—Jason had been a bit anxious about returning to Brooklyn. Then he’d realized that the new Brooklyn wasn’t anything like the old one. Maybe it was Park Slope, or maybe it was the era. He never stopped double-checking the locks on the door, but as Sadie got older, he could be okay if she went to a party and didn’t come back until after midnight.
But it was also true that Brooklyn had lost something. Its people. Neighbors had disappeared from the block, and he didn’t particularly like the entitled ones who’d replaced them. There was a certain Brooklyn stoop culture on the wane. He missed the days when he could just sidle up to Macon’s place, throw a stuffed animal at the window, and that was all it took to get a friend’s attention.
It was thus a big surprise to him when, one weekend in October, Macon George friended him on Facebook. As soon as Jason accepted the friend request, Macon sent him a message.
Oct. 10, 2015, 10:23 p.m.
