The Fortunes (27 page)

Yin to his yang (if you want to fit it in a fortune cookie).

He's a symbol now. His yearbook picture on T-shirts, posters, his name a rallying cry. And yet he can't symbolize
me.
For him to mean what he means, he and I have to be different.

As the old joke goes:

Two Chinamen going down the street.

One of them walks into a club.

The other one ducks.

Not funny? Maybe it's the way I tell 'em.

Yellow
is what whites call us, of course, and mean it as a slur—skin color symbolizing character. But in fact Chinese started calling ourselves that first, way back around the time of the Opium Wars, to distinguish ourselves from white and black, when the connotations to us (the Yellow Emperor, the Yellow River) were positive.

We'd been sitting outside the McDonald's on Woodward, perched on a raised planter made out of old railroad ties, our panting turning to laughter. We figured we'd lost them. “Your face when he pulled out that bat!” “I thought I was gonna shit myself, okay?” It was becoming a story. I could see us telling it at the wedding. I could see us joking about it for years to come. And it was just the two of us, something we'd always share. Evans and Pitts had ignored Jerry and Mike, after all. They only chased us. We sat shoulder to shoulder, sharing a smoke. In a minute I was going to suggest a Big Mac and fries (Vincent would likely counter with a Coney Dog from Red Hots up the block, another old haunt).

Saturday night, ten something, sidewalks still warm from the sun. Six lanes of traffic came and went in the intersection before us, exhaust rising redly in the taillights.

“First car in Detroit drove down this street,” he said.

“First mile of concrete paving in the country,” I recited from some high school field trip. “First assembly line rolled 'em out right over there.”

“Highland Park Hummingbird!” we chorused, nickname of the famous Chrysler starter motor.

He blew smoke out the side of his mouth. “My dad used to bring me down here to watch the cruising when I was a kid, teach me the names of all the marques. He could still remember the streetcars running. Now I can remember when it was all elms along here.”

The last time I'd seen him, I realized, was at his father's funeral. His father, who'd moved to Detroit, like all our parents, because it was a boomtown.

“I don't even want a Jap car,” he said. “It'd be like a Jew buying a Beamer!”

“Me either.”

“What would you drive if you could have any car?”

I actually wanted an Audi, but what I said was, “Trans Am.”

“Sally Fields in the passenger seat?” he teased. “You always loved them pony cars.”

“What about you?”

Cars were stopping in the intersection again, close enough to smell the hot metal breath of their engines.

“Porsche, man! Black 911 Turbo Carrera. What else?”

We were still laughing when they spotted us. “Sitting there and laughing,” Evans said in court. “It must have been real funny to them.” A joke at his expense, I guess he figured.

Or maybe we were just talking about girls? How fast they were. Their curves. Oil changes and joy rides. Headlights and trunks. I don't remember.

I haven't bought an American car in thirty years. I've never been to a baseball game. I have been back to a strip club once. The night after the final acquittal. This was in Cincinnati. Evans's lawyers had successfully petitioned for a change of venue. It would be impossible to get a fair trial in Detroit after all the publicity about the case—interviews Lily had given, they argued, were “prejudicial”—even though publicity was the only reason the case had gotten reopened in the first place. At jury selection, I'd heard, fewer than 10 percent of possible Cincinnati jurors said they'd ever met an Asian American.

The place was called Sin City. Nicer than the Fancy Pants, it smelled of Windex and warm vinyl, a chemical new-car whiff, but I figured I could still get in trouble there. I was the one spoiling for a fight now, fantasizing about Evans and Pitts walking in to celebrate, tightening my grip on the neck of my beer, feeling the pulse in my fist. I watched the girls—one reminded me a little of Lacey—and I watched the men watching them. But no one seemed to notice me. The mood was mild—sappy, even. Worn, lonely men in rumpled sport coats, eyes wide and watery from drink, grinning like kids on Christmas. I wondered, could that have been Vincent if he'd lived? Lacey had said he was always smiling. By contrast, I was the one sourpuss in there, and the girls seemed to know to steer clear. If anyone was going to start something in there, it was going to be me, but I understood after a while I'd simply be too embarrassed to make a scene. The rowdiest it got was some joker waving his lighter in the air, shouting
Freebird!
until a bouncer shushed him primly, a finger to his lips. The crowd was mostly white, the bouncers all black, the girls a mix, even one Asian girl dancing to “Turning Japanese” (a euphemism for masturbation, so I'd heard, though it might have been BS). She came out like a geisha, mincing in a shiny kimono; by the end all she was wearing was white makeup and bright red lipstick. I found myself blushing for her, unable to watch except out of the corner of my eye, but then it came to me I was ashamed for myself, praying she wouldn't see
me,
come over. Expose me.

She couldn't have made me out in the gloom, I told myself. We men must have just been a constellation of cigarette tips from the stage.

Thirty minutes later she was back, this time in a thigh-length cheongsam and sleek black bob but dancing to the same song, I thought—both start with that cheesy Oriental riff just like “Kung Fu Fighting”—until I recognized Bowie's “China Girl.” And then I did study her, her face, trying to decide.

Toward the end of the set, when she was naked, she met my eyes and I realized she'd known I was there all along, had seen me during her first set, or from backstage. Afterward she came up to me at the bar, wrapped in a short robe, nipples showing through like rivets. I shivered, reminded of how chilled the place was. “Don't I know you, hun?” I swallowed my drink, shook my head, made to leave, but she put her hand on my arm. “What's your name?”

“Vincent.” It just came out in my panic. I might have flinched, but if she noticed, it was only because she was used to people lying.

“Well, Vinny, I'm Cindy. Wanna buy me a drink?”

“Can I ask, are you Chinese or Japanese?”

“Whatever you want me to be, baby.”

“No, really. Tell me.”

“You wanna guess?” she asked, still teasing.

“No!”

“Okay, baby, okay.” She was calculating, I thought, trying to decide what I wanted to hear, even though I didn't know myself. And something else—as reluctant to reveal herself as she'd be to tell me her real name.

I tried to imagine Vincent in my place: older, a little paunchy maybe, hairline receding. And suddenly I didn't want her to have to lie.

“It's fine,” I told her, finishing my drink. “It doesn't matter.”

But she smiled, put a hand on my arm. “All-American, baby. We're all American here.”

It felt like something to cover ourselves in, that word, its warm anonymity. And I nodded, sank back on my stool, bought her that drink.

 

IV

The world is yours, as well as ours, but in the last analysis, it is yours. You young people, full of vigor and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning . . . The world belongs to you. China's future belongs to you.

—
Mao Zedong

It's a little before one a.m. by John's watch.
Gotcha Day!
as it's listed on the agency itinerary, the day they'll get their baby. Mei Mei, he reminds himself. This is likely to be his last uninterrupted night's sleep for a while, but one a.m. in Guangzhou is one p.m. in Michigan and he's wide awake. Ancient Chinese cities, he's learned on their trip, had a bell tower and a drum tower to announce the hours—the bell for the morning hours, the drum for evening. Or was it the other way around? All he knows is he's hearing bells instead of drums, drums instead of bells.

In fact, his pulse in the scratchy hotel pillow sounds like nothing so much as footsteps in snow.

Beside him, Nola has earplugs, an eyeshade, her bite splint in. Her breath stinks of melatonin. He wants to wake her, out of loneliness or spite, he's not sure which, but when he presses against her she shrugs him off with an irritated mewl. He touches himself halfheartedly instead.

In the corner the minibar gives a little glassy shiver.

Gotcha Day. There's been some murmured debate among their group of parents-to-be about the phrase. Stan and Bev, who already have an adopted daughter, use it unselfconsciously. Lily, their eldest, back home in Knoxville with “Paw-paw” and “Ma-mee” (John recoils from the infantilization of such terms, swears he won't be the kind of parent who slips into baby talk), just adores Gotcha Day. It's like a birthday and Christmas all rolled into one, and only adopted kids get to celebrate it. “Their birthdays are just guesstimates anyway,” Bev explained on their river cruise earlier that evening. “Last year Lily tied a big red ribbon in her hair and had me undo it. ‘Like you're opening a present!' Of course, then she wanted to open her own presents.”

Others are less easy with the term. Alice says it makes her think of her daughter as a thing, a possession, something bought and sold, which is what many of them feel, though they wish Alice wouldn't be so blunt about it. “She's so militant about everything,” Nola says when they're alone. “But she never calls her daughter by her Chinese name, do you notice, always Gertie.” Short for Gertrude, Alice likes to note meaningfully, waiting heavily, like the adjunct professor of English she is, for people to get the reference. (There's a Lost Generation gag to be made here, but John has resisted.) Alice has a photo of Gertie printed on a T-shirt which she wears every day (perhaps she has several, the group hopes). It's not much worse than the rest of them, with their laminated photos on lanyards or in wallets, though she does have a disconcerting habit of yanking her windbreaker open to reveal the picture whenever she mentions Gertie. “It's a bird, it's a plane . . .” John whispers when they see her across the hotel lobby.

John and Nola, like most of the others in their party, are careful to refer to Mei Mei by her Chinese name, though they all have Western names picked out, ready to bestow. Anna, in their case, though they'll keep Mei as her middle name.

And yet why don't they use them, these new names? he ponders. Out of respect? To
curry flavor,
in his mother's malapropism? (Some old line—
How do Chinese parents name their children? They toss crockery out the window: ching! chong!
chang!
—flits through his wired mind.) Or more likely some cringing deference toward the Chinese authorities? Some tiptoeing sense that they don't own their children yet? Or perhaps out of some reserve, some hesitation to fully possess them?

Probably they're just embarrassed by their choices, he tells Nola.

Such as?

Connie! Or Amy. No, no Vera and Maya. Maxine!

Maybe, Nola suggests mildly, it's just the same superstition that makes biological parents not share a name with others before the birth.

It puts John in mind of the Chinese tradition of calling children by derogatory nicknames—Little Pig, Ugly Dog—endearments intended to disguise how precious a child is from the demons that might steal it away.

Though aren't we those very demons?

And this is why he doesn't like “Gotcha Day” as a name. This whole experience feels like an elaborate trick, some setup, just waiting for that gotcha moment when the rug of their hopes will be pulled out from under, the floodlights illuminating the city turned glaringly on them.

But then, he reminds himself, they wouldn't be here—he, Nola, most of their party—if fate hadn't already had a laugh at their expense.

They had found themselves in their midthirties, secure and, if not quite content, then cheerfully resigned to their lot. Nola was a preschool teacher by then, John a writer. He'd published a few stories in decent journals, sold a collection entitled
Ancient Chinese Secrets
not long after graduate school, and secured a college teaching job on the basis of it. But then the historical novel he'd promised his publisher about the building of the transcontinental railroad got bogged down.
It's taking longer to finish than the railroad took to build,
he used to joke,
though to be fair, there were more Chinese working on the railroad.
But the joke stopped being funny when the publisher canceled his contract. The trouble—more intractable than the twelve-foot snowdrifts or the granite outcroppings the railroad encountered—was a reading he'd given at his new college, a year or so after his first book had come out. He had thought it went well, been flattered by a good turnout (though he gathered afterward it was the last reading of the semester and all the undergrads were belatedly satisfying a requirement). A Chinese student, crisp white shirt buttoned to the throat and wrists, had raised his hand during the Q&A. “In your lecture,” he began, and John had smiled into the microphone and corrected him—“Story”—and the student had nodded and proceeded to list instances of Chinese words John had misused or mispronounced in his story. A long list. There'd been a murmur of amusement, then silence spreading through the crowd like a stain. “Also, please, this one word,
gu gu jai
—it does mean penis,” the student said with as much distaste as he might handle one, “but I think is
baby
penis, what you call baby talk, what a mother say, not so . . .
romantic
between two lovers.”