Preparation for the Next Life (20 page)

As he talked, he had his tattoo-lettered arm around her and held his burning cigarette away from her while he smoked. He had played high school football, he said, and he remembered the stadium and the numbers on the score cards and the all-black team they played from the gangbanger area up the hill. A gas station outside the stadium was where they turned. All the white cars went down the hill to the white bars, and all the black cars went up the hill to the black bars on Lafayette Hill.

Did you have a lot of boyfriends?

No.

How do you say that?

Nanpengyou.

Nan-pong-yow. Did you?

No. I fight with boys. What about you father?

What about him?

You don’t tell me about him.

Skinner told her that once when he was seventeen, thereabouts, he was in a bar across the river and he realized the guy taking a leak at the urinal next to him was his father. He pictured him: Carhartt jacket and pants, incredibly hard hand when they shook hands, drinking with two women at the bar. That was his father. What about yours? Oh, yeah, I forgot. You told me all about him. The Chinese soldier. But girls? said Skinner. There’d been this one girl he’d liked, and the whole school had known he liked her. It had become a story that everyone talked about. It was the closest he ever came to being famous. When he would see her in front of school, they’d stare at each other with all this social pressure on them. She would just say hiiiiiiiiii, Brad. Nothing more than that ever happened. He never told her, I like you. There was no point in saying this since everyone else already knew it, including her. It was fifth grade and it was the beginning of the rumor mill.

Did she break your heart?

Oh yeah. She tore it in two.

She weighed whether to tell him she had been to jail. You know, I am surprising that you like me.

Why’s that?

Because I am old.

No, you’re not.

The immigrant.

So?

You can have American girl. The yellow hair. The tall beautiful woman.

I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m not that tall. Nobody like that’s gonna go out with me.

Yes, she would. Of course. She will love you.

Love’s what makes the world go round for some people, Skinner said.

What makes the world go round?

To be honest with you. War.

War?

Actually, I’d say money first. Money, then war. Everybody’s all, like, patriotism, the flag, all this happy horseshit.

Society need brave men and women to fight.

At her request, he rolled over so she could look at his scar again.

She said she saw it getting better.

She put her foot behind her on a park bench and did one-legged lunges, carrying her weight on the working leg, hands clasped behind her head, eyes looking up at the sky over Queens, whispering the repetitions, seeing if she would do them all today. She had strong legs. She did not have a gym, she had the park. She had a schedule of exercises, days, sets, and reps, a page from Skinner’s magazine with Ms. Fitness on it folded in her bag at home. And she would learn from anyone she saw, and there was a lot to learn that people had invented when they had nothing else but their imaginations. The Latins brought work gloves to the park and did calisthenics routines learned in correctional facilities, different kinds of chin-ups, pushups with the hands wide, hands out front, lat pushups, diamond pushups, one-armed pushups, Cuban pushups, incline pushups with the feet up on a bench. And then they jogged around, arms beefed-up and swollen. She did pushups and step-ups on a bench and back extensions by the bars and then she got down on the concrete and did a splits, holding herself off the ground, and then jumped back up, her thighs tight.

Dirty guys kicked through the weeds looking for dope bags, swinging their legs like scythes. Women in sagging sweatpants walked their pit bulls, talking to men from the houses on Elder Avenue in rasping voices, smoking while they talked. He’s a Red-nose. Half Rednose, half American pit. They’re twins. The other one is Lucky. This is Flash. He wants his mommy. Be careful. He’s a sweetie, but he bites.

Through the diamond fence, a woman with a hospital cane and a purse began yelling at an old stooped woman half her size. You lost my keys! You lost my keys! I can’t get in without my keys.

The Chinese arranged themselves in military ranks and played waltz music. A recorded voice said: yi… er… san… si… They spread their arms and lifted imaginary handfuls of water, earth, raised their arms and spread their fingers and let it rain down on their upturned heads, to cadence. In the cities of China, travelling monks climbed off grain trucks and performed in putties and slippers. They broke bricks over their shaved heads and hit each other in the stomachs with sledge hammers. They directed their qi to a point over their hearts and bent swords against their chests. Feral teenaged disciples walked on their hands for a furlong, performed handstand pushups, did them clapping with screams of effort. Villagers watched open-mouthed, the roots of their teeth showing in sun-wizened faces. The Chinese police watched the villagers to make sure that not too many of them were gathering in one place at one time and that all their activities were healthy, politically healthy.

For the first time in her life, Zou Lei saw the members of a banned sect, the Falungong, in Kissena Park. They were wearing matching white tracksuits and stood in a ring and they turned the dharmic wheel to New Age music playing on an audio player. This wheel was an orb that existed in the cosmos, and they also had miniature wheels in each of their abdomens. They believed that the act of turning the wheel would bring them health, cure their cancer, and change history. In Queens they were free to change history. In China they went to detention centers, labor camps. Ultimately, through their exercises, they would be able to throw the business-suited men, those bestial criminals, in Beijing right out of power, they said. The sect members had a great deal of literature and photographic evidence of what the Chinese authorities did in the name of state security—the kidnapping, sexual torture, organ harvesting, and so on.

14

O
N
C
ANTONESE RADIO, SHE
heard an ad for a shopping center called the Flushing Mall, located on 38
^th
Road behind the Sheraton LaGuardia. The boss-wife said that’s where they’re making money. After work, Zou Lei went against the crowd towards Roosevelt Avenue and cut through a parking lot. She crossed the street and went inside a building—a general purpose office-retail space—with gold characters on the roof next to an Indian-run Holiday Inn.

It was mobbed with kids, fifteen-year-old girls shouting, marching with their arms straight, screaming, telling off boys. They sat on the tables texting, wearing Eskimo boots, their jeans riding low. Adult men lifted their heads like horses, their long, hollow-cheeked skulls, staring. Putting their faces back in bowls, eyes over the rim. Plastic bags, black hair, and sneakers, eating with their long sharp fingers. The counters were spot-lit. You could see the wooden faces of the women in aprons, standing, waiting, waiting to serve somebody, and, behind them, the kitchens steaming like public showers.

She went up to the first counter and said she was looking for a job.

Talk to him. To that one.

The boss had his hair Brylcreemed back. He was sitting in front of a tray of soaking wadded paper napkins, tendon, lotus, coughed-up tripe, wearing a pink shirt with the collar up. In the open V of his collar, he had a piece of jade. My name called Polo, he said. Coughed. Wiping his mouth and reddened nose. He had bracelet of wooden beads, the large hands of a northerner. He was slim and tall and placid.

Where you work before?

I work everywhere before. From here to Carolina. Fast food. I learn everything, work very hard. I’m fast, running. Open gate, light fire, pour oil, put the kettle on, dice meat, mince meat, parse meat, make rice, make sauce, pick greens, make dough, make dumplings, make french fries, carry in goods—because I’m strong, even though I’m female. I’ve had military training. Take order, shout order,
deliver takeout, count the till, dump trash, sweep floor, mop floor, wipe counter, wash dish, bowl, pot, dipper, cleaver, shovel, chopstick, spoon, turn out the fire, shut the light, lock the gate. Every day, work hard, sleep sweet.

You understand Cantonese?

Of course, she lied.

He stood up, leaving his tray. She picked it up and dumped it for him.

That doesn’t matter, he said.

I like to work, she said.

He led her in past the counter. The other women stared at her. She had a glimpse under the lights of wolf hair, eye shadow.

I need people who can handle the big menu. We expand the item. His voice was drowned out by the exhaust fan as they went through the kitchen. Someone, his forearms pale and wet with sweat, jerked a wok, heaved it, and a burst of flame came up.

They went out the back into a corridor that smelled like garbage, barrels of it, guts and rice. Kick marks, shoe treads on the walls. The caramelized filth, the dumpster. She followed him inside a storeroom where he started digging through papers in an empty Sun Disc vegetable box.

You want the job, right?

Of course.

There was a health inspection certificate taped-up next to the Han May calendar. The typed-in name was Eugene Cheung D.B.A. Fong and Associates. Through the walls, she heard the people working on the other side.

What is your surname?

Zou.

Given name?

Lei.

She watched him write it on a piece of paper that already had handwriting and phone numbers all over it, underlined, circled, and crossed-out.

Not that Lei.

Not flower-bud Lei?

No. No grass top.

This—lightning-thunder Lei? He wrote well.

Yes.

That’s not right for a girl. Are you a boy?

That’s the way they named me.

They want the son, I think. Or they do not recognize literacy. Many Chinese don’t recognize literacy. Right?

She didn’t say anything.

The Chinese people want a son. In America, girl power, right? You hear about it?

Man-woman equality.

You believe the girl power?

Yes, she said.

I think so, he smiled. The business expanding. This area getting bigger. A lot of money comes in. This just the beginning, so we try to change, capture the new wave. We import the ocean flavors, beef, eel, everything sa-cha. We want the team, like the army. He made a claw to show what he meant. Take over the market, make the market share bigger, bigger, bigger—

spreading his fingers wider each time. He seemed to be conducting music. This is the time opportunity, real opportunity. You look: the Olympics will be to China. How great!

What is the pay like?

It is rational, he said.

Minimum wage?

Of course. That’s the law. I have to obey the law. You have to obey the law. Everyone has to obey the law in society.

He asked for her working papers, knowing all along, she thought, that she didn’t have them.

This is a very severe problem, he said. If I hire you, I have risk.

Right? he insisted, when she remained blank.

I have risk. Very serious. If I have risk, who is responsible? You have to be responsible. If I give you the break, you give me the break. Only fair. So the salary will be adjusted. He wrote it on the paper, circled it. This salary.

She did the math in her head.

One more dollar, she said.

He smiled, no.

I give you break, he said.

Really. Do not be disappointed. I tell you something, the truth. This a lot of money.

15

H
ER FIRST DAY
, Z
OU
Lei arrived in the food court early and had been waiting for half an hour before she heard the exhaust fans come on in the kitchens in the back. Then, with a snap, the lights came on. She heard a rustling plastic bag and someone banging things around and then saw a woman with a mask-like face moving around under the lights.

Good morning, Zou Lei said. I’m here to work.

The woman snorted and took a drink from a plastic tub of yellow liquid. Zou Lei looked around. She waited. She couldn’t see the man who had hired her. She ducked in under the counter.

Nobody invite you, the woman said, a wonton hanging from her lip.

I’m here to work.

You just remember that.

They made her wait. The register girl came in and said, Could you move? Flung her purse on a shelf under the counter. In the back, a wok was getting beaten with a shovel. They brought the fish-tofu out. Stinky tofu is mad good, the register girl said, glitter in her wolf hair. She held the skewer between her acrylic tips. They talked in slang she couldn’t follow. Everything was number nine. She would learn it meant cock or dick. You can’t stand there. Zou Lei moved again. The cook came out and slammed another tub into the steam table, purple burn marks on his arms.