Face (29 page)

“Next day I-fang return to fight again, but finds only a peach tree with this writing:

When Jade Maiden long for earth

Immortal turns to flesh.

But fire send the fairy home,

Peach Blossom Village, Paradise.

“I-fang travels high into mountains, across deep, icy river. He sees palace of white jade near the clouds. Here gamekeeper
Chu and I-fang’s beloved sit in rich silks on golden throne. When I-fang comes before them, Chu tell him kowtow lower, lower,
until the lady begs for mercy. Only for Jade Maiden, Chu lets I-fang go. But he tell him, ‘Your fondness
for violence has cost you your place in heaven. You must leave alone, never enter paradise again.’

“I-fang travels only one month home, but when he arrives, sixty years have passed. Wu Chi and his family have ascended to
the skies. Only horse Fortune remains. This horse carry I-fang to an herbalist who gives him one hundred thousand strings
of gold cash. I-fang use this to build new homes and roads, feed the poor. He is good and generous, soon is appointed viceroy
like Wu Chi.

“One day a chariot of cranes brings Lao Chu back to earth. He tells Wei I-fang, ‘You have waited long to know the truth. I
am Chu the Ancient, Elder Immortal of Eternal Joy. My bride is Jade Maiden of the Upper Heaven. Her home is in Paradise, yet
she longed for earth. The Celestial took pity, allowed her to go, but as she grew older He feared she would be defiled by
mortal men. I was sent to rescue her and bring her back to the sky. You were wrong to oppose the will of Heaven. She could
never marry you.’ When finished speaking he make a sign with his hands, and fairy cranes carry him back through the clouds.

“Wei I-fang lived long and peaceful life. But he did not marry. He did not love again. And not even after death he could persuade
gods to reunite him with his Jade Maiden.”

A murmur runs through the audience as the players step forward, hands clasped, squinting past the lanterns. Jade Maiden, he
called me. I looked it up once. It’s an honest translation. Mei-bi. Little sister of Jade. He feared she’d be defiled by mortal
men. But the confusion between heaven and earth, protector, beloved, mortal and god, what the maiden herself really wanted—all
the rules seemed backward and suspect, and trying to figure them out made my head swim. Perhaps that’s why, of all the stories
Li told me, this is the one I most fully forgot. Though the outcome is true to form. For Li, true love never triumphed in
the end.

Why, then, his matchmaking? To spare me from heartbreak? Or to force it on me? He reminded me of his pleasure-pain principle
often
enough. The thought of my old friend wishing—no, engineering—despair for me… But it is not impossible.

The actors blink and bow, remove their masks one by one. I recognize some of them. That’s David Ling who played the viceroy
and I-fang. The young woman from the bus protest. She was Jade Maiden. And Tommy.

Holding the streaked, demonic mask of Lao Chu.

I drop the camera into my bag and turn to get away before he sees me. Everywhere people are folding chairs, blankets, lifting
babies over their shoulders, moving quickly and silently. I try to slip between them.

“Maibelle.” The sudden closeness of his voice makes me pivot, nearly striking him. He catches my hand, holds it as if we are
about to waltz.

He sees my face. “I have stage fright. If you’d known, I’d have been a mess.”

“Other people knew it was you.”

“Yes.”

He runs his tongue across his upper lip. My right arm, clenched around the strap of my camera bag, is throbbing.

“Come to a party with me?”

I glance at the fleeing spectators. Soon the park will be empty except for the crew tearing down the stage. I concentrate
on relaxing my arm.

“Party.”

He grins and pulls the gown over his head. Underneath he wears a black T-shirt with “I
, Lubbock” printed in Day-Glo
pink.

“Lubbock, Texas?”

He shrugs. “I have a friend who gets cards and gifts sent from weird places. She’s never been out of New York. You’ll meet
her at the party.”

“I didn’t say I’d go.”

“It’s not a date, Maibelle. When we get there, I have something to give you.”

“No.” I catch myself. “No. I know it’s not a date.”

He nods, hands me his robe and mask, and picks up a backpack
from the side of the stage. “Stay here a minute. I have something to take care of. Then we’ll go.”

He walks away from the light toward the chess tables at the far end of the park. It looks at first as though the area is filled
with fireflies. Then I realize the tiny lights are cigarettes. Behind each one crouches a barely visible shadow. The pink
glow of the heart and lettering on Tommy’s T-shirt flashes briefly. Then, either turning or bending forward, his shadow becomes
indistinguishable from the others.

Watching him disappear, I feel the same surge of panic that seized me before the play. Breathing on the back of my neck. A
barely perceptible rise in temperature. Close behind me a hand spread ready to clap over my mouth. As if my brain is sweating.

“The nightmare.” I say it out loud. But it’s more real than that. More like déjà vu. My reaction is the dream.

I picture myself throwing the robe and mask to the ground and running from the park toward the lights of Canal Street. Uptown
through Little Italy. Slowing as I reach SoHo. Walking West Broadway to Johnny and his mourning doves. Flying away with him.

My arms part. He takes something from me. He is talking. His left eyebrow has gotten tangled in itself, coarse dark hairs
twisting every which way. I reach up and smooth those strands back into place.

“Lucky money,” he says firmly, taking my hand. And leads me away from the shadows.

“Lin Cheng, this is Maibelle Chung.”

A woman in her fifties with short salt-and-pepper hair and energetic black eyes stands in the center of a crowded loft kitchen.
A best-selling cookbook author, she went to Sarah Lawrence, also works as midnight chef at Silk Road, one of the trendy new
Chinese restaurants uptown.

She spots the camera bag over my shoulder.

“I need a shot for my new book. Tai says you’re a professional.”

I frame her against the stove with steam rising in spirals on either side. She looks like one of the witches in a Chinese
production of
Macbeth,
and I’m not sure if she’s serious or joking but am glad for the assignment
because it gives me something to do with my hands. Tommy spent the walk up describing everyone I’d meet tonight, and I haven’t
retained a single detail.

“Okay, you’re in!” She waves us forward. “Go join the others. We’ll eat as soon as David and Lon get here.”

Tommy drops his backpack in the corner, guides me past two sawhorse tables laden with food and into a dimly lit space filled
with easels, painting paraphernalia, and canvases of ominous, amoebic shapes against red, white, and blue wave patterns. An
assortment of old globes painted into a new world order, with whole continents shifted. I hear talking and music from the
other side of the partition, but we’re alone in the studio.

“Lon is a painter, too.”

Lon. I grope for the connection I know I’ve been told. Lin Cheng’s husband. He directed the play.

“Why didn’t he take a bow?”

“Prefers to stay behind the scenes. Typical Chinese.”

I glance down at the Leica still clutched in my hand. “What about you? Are you typical Chinese?”

“I’m joking. He’s a professional actor. Doesn’t want to get too attached to this amateur stuff. Especially not in Chinatown.”

“No, I mean it. Which side do you prefer?”

“Of the curtain? Or my race?” When I don’t reply, he says, “I prefer having a choice.”

I think about that for a minute. Not what he means by it. Not even what I was really asking. Just the statement itself. A
choice means multiple possibilities. Ways to go. To act. We all make different choices, and the only ones that count are those
we make alone. I still don’t know if I believe that.

A strong golden light slants through the doorway from the room beyond. People are dancing.

“Come here.” I pull him by the shoulders until the line cuts his face in two. Half light, half dark. “Don’t move. I’ve got
fast film, but this will still take a minute.”

I shoot. Again. And again with the frame wider, the exposure even longer. He plays along, looking straight through the lens.
As if he can see me.

“Tai.”

“What?”

“Your name. What does it mean?”

“Depends. Different intonations, different dialects, give it different meanings.”

“Which do you like best?”

“Tai. Like that, with a falling tone. Means ‘voice.’”

“Voice. That’s a good name for a writer.”

“Yes, Jade Maiden.” He smiles. “Yours suits you, too.”

“Tai.” I push out my hand as if meeting him for the first time. He accepts, and we shake on it.

Lin Cheng’s other dinner guests include Donna and LiLi, two small women who smile a lot and announce themselves as best friends,
though Donna dresses like Loretta Lynn and LiLi like Laurie Anderson. Donna was the source of Tai’s Texas T-shirt. LiLi is
married to Ben Ying, nicknamed Dr. Shoe because he dropped out of medical school in his third year and has been selling shoes
ever since. Ben entertains the ladies with yo-yo tricks. His voluptuous black hair hangs below his shoulders and he wears
his pink broadcloth shirt open to reveal a gold St. Christopher medal.

Then there are Bonnie and Gene, the pair sitting cross-legged across the room arguing immigration policy. Tai whispers their
story before introducing me. They were arrested three years ago for bringing recreational pharmaceuticals into the country
from Hong Kong. Gene had
refused to pay
a tong “rent tax” on his apartment, so the associations framed him. He and Bonnie ended up being investigated by the CIA
for conspiracy to dose Manhattan’s water supply with Valium. They got married because their lawyer told them it would help
their defense. Then the charges were dropped.

“Would you mind if I took your picture?” I ask them.

“As long as you don’t publish it in Chinatown.”

They pose face-to-face, like one of those figure-ground illusions; you focus on the background and see the outline of a table,
the foreground a man and wife.

And suddenly everyone wants a portrait made. Kai, “the Fat Man,” who runs a program for disabled children, flexes like a circus
muscle-man. Lee, who grew up in Staten Island and lost a brother in Vietnam, wants to be photographed doing a handstand. David
Ling returns with the others from the drama troupe, and strikes the pose of Rodin’s
Thinker.

“Use a flash on me,” begs Wendy, the bus protester who played the viceroy’s daughter. “Go on. Right between the eyes. I’m
sorry we insulted you.”

What I’d feared would be viewed as a date spontaneously becomes a working session with Tai fading farther and farther from
view as I spin from one set of readings to the next, establishing, however briefly and perfunctorily, a visual bridge with
every person in the room. This is the first time since high school that people—friends—have asked me to take their picture.

I am dancing with Wendy, flash firing madly—friendly fire, she calls it. As she bends backward into a limbo, the Temptations
break into “Ball of Confusion.”

“Ball of Confucian,” warbles David. Wendy falls on her back laughing.

“What! Is this disrespect for our most illustrious ancestor?” a short square man in a mauve jogging suit roars from the studio
doorway. Deep furrows radiate from his eyes. His smile is like a cartoon sunrise.

“Lon,” Tai explains. “Artist, director of
The Fairy’s Rescue
and voice of Dynamo the Wonder Dog. You know, that collie in the dog food commercials?”

“The typical behind-the-scenes Chinese?”

“The very one.”

“I spend twenty years doing small theater.” Lon claps his broad hands over mine in greeting. He has a resonant, not remotely
doglike
voice. “I take acting lessons, go out on calls. Nothing. Then some Latino women’s group pickets the advertising agency for
hiring only whites, and suddenly my phone rings. If I can talk like a dog, I’ve got a job. Only nobody will ever see me. Nobody
will know it’s an Asian dog. Hah! Hah!”

He throws his head back, stretches his mouth to let out the laugh. His eyes vanish into a nest of wrinkles. “My big chance!
Hah! Hah!”

It is my father’s laugh. A Chinese laugh. So vast and hard it seems to crack wide open.

Instead it melts into the sound of a dinner gong. Lin Cheng calling us to feast.

It surpassed even those New Year’s celebrations my father and I used to watch from our Chinatown balcony. “Ants climbing trees,”
Lin Cheng announced, holding a platter of crispy fried bean threads dotted with ground pork “ants.” The same threadlike noodles
formed the petals of “chrysanthemum flowers,” which sprouted from pods of chopped prawns. Her jade rice was dotted with bright
bits of spinach and pork, and in honor of the play her clear green winter melon soup was afloat with shrimp balls “pale as
pearls.” But the crowning glory was a whole glazed Peking duck surrounded by mounds of rice topped with cloud ears—an edible
Paradise Village.