Throwing himself on his mattress, Richard grinned. “You sending me to China to pick out a Chinese woman?”
“I’m sending you to see your mother,” Koon Lai shot back, and Richard, suddenly quiet, rolled onto his elbow.
In the dozen years since he’d left, he had thought of his mother often, though only for a few seconds at a time, always quick to close the lid on that can. But now he had the ticket in his shirt; he could not pass up an opportunity to see her.
He flew to San Francisco, then boarded the ship to Canton. To his relief, it was not like the one on which he’d come to America. Hisfather had paid for a bed in a better tier, and he dined in a hall with both bak gui and Chinese.
When he went to eat supper on the first night, he hesitated for a moment in front of the self-segregating groups of Chinese people and white Americans.
“We’ve got room for you,” an American voice called to him, but when he turned around, it was a young Chinese man who beamed. The soldier was surrounded by five other Chinese men, each wearing an American air force uniform.
He’d never seen so many like himself, smiling not in the timorous way the Chinese smile, but with the beaming confidence of American men.
“Being here, you forget the way we lived,” one of them was saying. “You know what I mean? No heat, no running water, no toilet. When I was in Beijing, I met these kids—poor as hell. Never seen a watch. They kept grabbing my wrist, tapping the glass, saying something in Mandarin. Honestly, I didn’t have a clue what they were saying.”
“Chinese women don’t ask for much,” said another. “Buy her a box of chocolates and she’ll eat one piece a year, for ten years.”
Richard’s new Californian companions had been back to China already, fighting on the Pacific front, and now they were returning for wives. The American government had passed a law, Richard learned from them, allowing Chinese American veterans to bring a bride from China over to the States: a reward for their service. And so, these men were hitching to China to claim their prize. They wanted an America full of strawberry-nosed, fat-cheeked children. By the time they’d docked, and before Koon Lai’s plan had begun to unfold, Richard thought he might desire the same.
When he arrived in Hong Kong, a delegation of Chins had been organized to greet him. They held a banner:WELCOM HOME DUN HO RICHARD SOLDER. He leapt toward it, and then he saw his mother.
It was as if someone had taken a soup spoon and carved the fat out of her cheeks.
“Dun Ho, aiya, you are so tall, so strong!” his mother cried, though her eyes remained dry of tears. “You’re home! Are you hungry? You must be hungry!”
It was true that he was strong and that he was hungry, and he nodded and grinned, though his heart was suddenly heavy as a ship anchor.
But he had come home, which is what she’d always wanted. And she was his mother: What more could she want but to feed him?
In the smothering heat of Canton’s most popular banquet house, he wined and dined with the relatives, piling his plate high with sea bass and tripe until he had to loosen his belt, paying for everything with the extra cash his father had given him.
“Is it true each man goes to university?”
“Is it true everybody has a car?”
“Is it true they eat meat like we eat rice?”
Richard grunted in the affirmative, turnip cake in his cheek. “Yeah, but sometimes they get tired of hamburgers. Why else would they eat Chinese food?”
Happy to hear their food was so respected, even in America, the peasants nodded.
The villagers had only ever taken wagons on the road, but Koon Lai had provisioned for private cabs. Like rich people, they hailed taxis and paid large sums for the ride to the country. Richard was introduced to the laborers hired to work his father’s new field, and then forced to watch them whack a fish to death to demonstrate the freshness of his coming dinner.
After this, his mother laid a plate of boiled chicken on the altar and urged Richard to bai for the ancestors: Ngen Ngen and Bak Geng and the great-aunts and great-uncles who had pestered him daily in his Brownsville adolescence. He’d seen less of them since the navy, and he’d hoped they’d finally come to their senses and realized he was too American for this type of attention. Still, he was pleased when he lit the incense and the ancestors gathered quickly, theirragged spirits ballooning with the vapors of the meal. “Finally home,” they whispered. “Look at him, a warrior!”
It was strange; he had long felt shame about his origins, and yet there was nothing so bad about the place.
Koon Lai had made special arrangements for the third day, but Richard’s mother delayed these for as long as possible. Instead, she doted on Richard, serving him bowls of lychees, folding his blankets, washing his feet. Richard was amused at first, then unsure how to return his mother’s affection, then increasingly uneasy. The longer he stayed and the more she pampered him, the sadder and weaker he became, like he was tumbling backward twelve years. It felt like if he didn’t stand up and assert himself, he might crumple into a damaged thing. He couldn’t risk this, and so after three weeks, he decided that his father likely needed him back at the restaurant, and told her so.
“Your baba,” she responded, flat-toned. “Your baba can come to China now and find a bride to take to America. He should find a young girl. He’ll like a young girl.”
“Baba?” Richard was taken aback. “Baba didn’t fight in the war. And he’s afraid of women! He works and he sleeps.”
They were both speechless after this exchange.
It was one day later that the curtained litter arrived from Ng village: a schoolteacher and his nineteen-year-old daughter.
“A nice pretty girl,” his mother said. “Why not take her into town for tea?”
