The Fortunes (29 page)

“No, no, nothing.”

He'd hung up but lain there befuddled with fury—good service was one thing, but calling in the middle of the night!—until he remembered an entry from his guidebook. A prostitute, he thought, a so-called ding-dong girl. He'd unplugged the phone, but by then he was wide awake. He'd gotten up, left Nola to sleep while he sat at the window gazing out at the city—drab and dusty by day, now shimmering with light—through the plate glass.

He tried to work out a new
Kung Fu
plot, something about Chinese railroad workers staging a train robbery, using their expertise with nitro to blow the safe, the loot smuggled back to China amid the bones of the dead, but the details refused to gel; worse, the idea seemed somehow glib here. He'd actually been thinking of naming a character Eastwood Ho.

He shook his head. The opposite of fast asleep, he decided, must be slow awake.

He should have slept on the flight out, god knows, but he never slept on planes. He made an effort to have a couple of drinks this time but succeeded only in getting buzzed and keeping Nola up. “
Falling
asleep just feels wrong on a plane,” he told her. The heavy head drop jarred him awake in a panic. It's not that he's afraid of flying. He flies all the time without anxiety. It's sleeping on planes he's afraid of.

His father, John Smith Sr., had been a pilot (a Korean war veteran), his mother a stewardess (an original Singapore Girl)—they'd met on a layover in the mid-sixties, and she still occasionally referred to her husband affectionately as the Captain—so staying alert in the air was genetic, John claimed. That and his father, who'd taught flying out of his local airport into his seventies, always liked to regale him with tales from “the hairy edge” of everything that could go wrong in the air. The Captain had called his shakier students “Chinese aces” after the old air force joke about Chinese landings—“One Wing Low”—and he'd always considered it a professional affront that so many routes to and from China incorporated the lucky 8's into their flight numbers: “This is your captain speaking . . . cross your fingers!” The old man had died two years earlier, and John wondered what he'd think of their flying China Air.

As they climbed over San Francisco, he felt the shudder of the undercarriage retracting and imagined the wheels like giant balls being drawn back into an abdomen. He made the mistake of telling Nola, but she only gave him a look of forbearance. Everything's about sex with him now, she's noted. He's tried to rationalize it. Friends with kids have said they never have sex anymore, they're too tired. “That's because they have
babies,
” Nola reminded him. “Newborns. It's not like I'll be breastfeeding.”

Still, he can't escape a feeling of something ending, a nostalgia for the life they've lived up to now, for themselves, which has manifested itself as desire. He's tried to make a joke of it, if only to pull the sting of her condescension. On the highway to the airport they passed a sign for an Oriental spa and he lisped, “Me wub you wong time.” “Wrong time is right,” she told him, taking his hand off her knee and then patting it.

“You're already acting like a mom,” he complained.

On the plane he'd tried to stop talking about sex, stared out the window instead as California receded. Below, the winter sun rippled across the windshields of a parking lot like sequins on a dress. A little farther over there was a municipal lot, yellow school buses lined up like pencils in a case.
Is that the reason they're yellow?
he mused. He knew why pencils were that color. Supposedly China was where the best pencil lead had come from in the nineteenth century. His fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Beasley, told him that, proudly—though whether he was proud of his knowledge or thought John should be proud of Chinese lead wasn't quite clear. “I hear you put the lead in yellow pencils,” Jordison, the bully, sneered in the playground at recess. “And I thought you all had teeny dicks,” his sidekick Farley yapped. John shrugged. “I guess I'm not as knowledgeable about dicks as you.”

When he's in the hotel bar in Xi'an drinking with Eric and his partner, Scott, two more prospective parents, he'll feel guilty for this line, the deflection of racism with homophobia, and reckon he probably deserved the bloody nose the bullies gave him (a nosebleed, he'd told his mother). Then again, considering that technically only Eric is adopting, Scott, as far as the Chinese authorities are concerned, only along as a “friend,” they've likely encountered worse. Maybe, John will reflect, he just feels self-conscious about the size of his dick sitting with two gay men. (He asked Nola once, and she gripped him and leered, “It gets the job done,” which wasn't altogether reassuring, actually.)

“I don't even know what an Oriental massage is,” he'd told her on the plane. “And is that the last remaining use of
Oriental
?”

“Perhaps they mean shiatsu,” she offered, slicking through her magazine.

“Is that the one where they rub you with little dogs?”

“Shih tzu,” she corrected.

“Bless you!”

She'd rolled her eyes, taken her Ambien.

But she's obsessed too, he knows. Hours later, when the pilot had announced, “We're starting our descent,” she'd nudged him, rested and gleeful: “Us too!”

He was filling out their landing card. Their flight number, 88, was especially auspicious, since it looked like the characters for double happiness, but as much as he believed in bad luck, he wasn't yet sure of good fortune.

Somewhere behind his head a child—perhaps several, a whole nursery, coals to Newcastle—had begun wailing, and he leaned into Nola, whispered, “Mayday! Mayday! We're going down.”

May Day. Gotcha Day. Gotcha Mei. This is the form his insomnia takes, words chasing around his head.

It makes him think of the little girl he'd read about in one of the adoption books who, asked where she was from, proudly announced, “My mommy's Va-china.”

Where are you from?
It's a question he's heard all his life. It's the question they all get, he knows, Asian Americans, and John has taken some comfort in this shared burden down the years, but this trip is reminding him that they don't always share the answer. He felt it in Chinatown in San Francisco. They'd laid over for a day between flights. It had been his idea, a little fling before parenthood, and Nola had gone along. But once they were there, she had wanted to go to Chinatown for dim sum. Back in Michigan they used to drive over the Ambassador Bridge into Windsor, Ontario, for cheap dim sum, but they'd skipped it since the border crossing became more involved after 9/11. He'd tried to dissuade her—“We're on our way to
China-China
”—but she said it would get them “in the mood.” Maybe it worked for her—all the Chinese faces, the flavors and smells of the food—but it made John feel uneasy, out of place. People spoke to him in Chinese and he shrugged, a pantomime of idiocy. When he tried to order dishes by name and the waitress returned the same shrug, it still felt like his failing. She flipped the laminated menu in front of him and pointed to unappetizing, overexposed pictures while he nodded like a tourist.

Outside, at one point they heard cymbals and drums and then a lion danced past the storefront. A new business was opening next door. Lion dances, with their lunging and shivering of the great paper head, always made him imagine the lion was rabid. He knew the performance was meant to scare away demons, but as a young child he'd burst into tears the one time his mother had taken him to see a Chinese New Year parade. “He thought the lion was the demon,” his mother had laughed afterward, exasperated. This lion was accompanied by firecrackers, which shook the plate glass beside them and set car alarms blaring up and down the street long after the last explosion.

And that's me,
John thinks in bed, his limbs tingling with tiredness. One of those car alarms—answering the call, but not understanding it, reacting defensively.

2:23. Another half hour gone. Nola snoring like a train puffing uphill.

What's the opposite of wide awake? He gazes into the grainy darkness. Thin sleep? He'd settle for that now.

“You're like a groom before the wedding,” Nola said before she nodded off tonight. “It's just cold feet.” He wanted to tell her he hadn't had cold feet before he married her, but she already had her earplugs in. All his thwarted desire, he wanted to tell her, it was loyalty. He rests his hand in the warm valley between her hip and belly, aches to stroke the silky curl of pubic hair over her clitoris, makes himself roll away.

He stares at the phone beside him, sits up heavily. It's no use. He feels for his clothes in the dark, his sweater sparking with static as he draws it on. If he stays here, he knows he'll eventually wake Nola, and they'll fight. He's not sure whether he's leaving to spare her or himself. Either way, it's not how he wants to start Gotcha Day. He has a walk in mind, but at the last moment he slides a book from the bedside table—
Quotations from Chairman Mao
—and tucks it in his pocket.

He tiptoes past all the other doors on their floor, imagining all the other prospective—never
expectant
—parents sleeping behind them (the agency has a block booking). It's a long corridor, and by the end he's sprinting—lightly on the balls of his feet, calves still tight from the steep slopes of the Great Wall—as if to outrun the fear of waking anyone. He pauses to catch his breath by the elevators, looking out at the city, feeling somehow as if he's guarding them all. From what, though? Everything, nothing. What if, he thinks, this—this watchfulness, this free-floating anxiety—is what being a parent is?

They're on a high floor above the drifting veil of smog. He glimpses a floodlit snippet of river between two nearby buildings but searches in vain for the other sights they saw on the tour today—the petals of the flower pagoda, the lissom twist of the half-complete Canton Tower. Instead, overhead, he fixes on a plane ascending, a silver needle flashing in and out of the darkness. He is a child of the jet age, his mother told him once, meaning that their family—
he
—couldn't have existed before easy international travel. “Your father and I would never have met.” She was from a wealthy, traditional family, the black sheep owing to her job, and even disowned briefly for marrying his father. Nice girls didn't marry white men; only tramps married across races (
back
then,
she added, for Nola's benefit).

When he'd told his mother about their plans, she had pursed her lips and nodded. “Not a son, but at least Chinese. No one need know she's adopted.” She'd feared, she confessed, that they would adopt from Central America.

My mother's an aspirational racist,
he told Nola.

The Captain, by contrast, had been a casual, even jocular racist, the kind who used phrases like “Chinese fire drill” and called them “sayings” if challenged, or told lame jokes to “lighten the mood” and “see if people had a sense of humor.” Sometime in the eighties he'd developed a line of multiethnic jokes that he thought were PC.
Heard about the new German Chinese restaurant? The food is great, but half an hour later you're hungry for power.
Or,
Hear the one about the Chinese godfather? He'll make you an offer you can't understand.
Or,
What do you call a guy who's half Mexican and half Chinese and only wears one sneaker? Juan Chu!
Like a lot of kidders, he couldn't take a joke himself; the movie
Airplane!
had incensed him, and John, in his teens, had taken to calling him Roger.

“How does every Chinese joke start?” the Captain asked once, and John made the mistake of thinking he was really asking. It went back to the Gold Rush, the building of the transcontinental, he began. But his father's eyes just glittered with amusement. “By looking over your shoulder!”

How they all started, John decides now, is that some asshole came up with them. An author of sorts, even if they weren't written down. And yet no one claimed such jokes. They disowned them, rather. Orphans of another sort. Mind you, John has told the hungry-for-power joke himself more than once, whenever anyone has raised the old canard about Chinese food leaving you hungry.
I
can tell it,
he figured, but then that was probably what the Captain thought too. John's heard a theory somewhere that it's only true of Chinese American food anyway, a corollary of Westerners not eating enough rice with the dishes. If so, it seems oddly fitting to him, this dissatisfaction, this hunger at the heart of Chinese American life.

He is distracted by movement. Down the corridor, in the opposite direction from his room, a young man in a suit is bowing as if in prayer before each room. Slipping bills under doors, John realizes.

He takes one more look out over the glistering city, the colorfully lit towers crowded together like stacks of poker chips, emblems of the new gold rush, and pushes the call button for the elevator.

He'd pointed out to his mother once that the enemies his father had flown sorties against in Korea were Chinese, but she'd just shrugged. “Different kind of Chinese,” she said. “Mandarin-speakers?” he asked. “No, silly. Communists!”

John understands Nola's desire to visit Chinatown now in the context of the others in their party, some of whom seem here to adopt not just children but a whole culture. Several are already taking Chinese lessons and speak more of the language than John (though that's not hard). Others are reading Chinese literature. While they've waited for flights he's seen everything from Pearl Buck (who, Nola has informed him, established the very first adoption program from China, after
her
first child was diagnosed with a genetic disorder) to
The Dream of the Red Chamber,
names and titles he recognizes but has never read.