World and town : a novel.
by Gish Jen.
For Maryann Thompson.
The American attaches himself to his little community for the same reason that the mountaineer clings to his hills, because the characteristic features of his country are there more distinctly marked; it has a more striking physiognomy.
-ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America.
Although the eye is the first stage in vision, remember that it is actually the brain that "sees."
-NEIL CAMPBELL, JANE REECE, et al., Biology.
With our thoughts, we make the world.
-GAUTAMA BUDDHA.
PROLOGUE.
A Lost World.
It"s the bi shu you"d notice most-the thousand-year-old cypresses-some of them upright, some of them leaning. And their bark, you"d see, if you visited-upward-spiraling, deeply grooved, on these straight trunks that rise and rise. They look as though someone took a rake to them, then gave them a twist, who knows why. Just having that idea about what made a fine tree, maybe. And jumbled up at their feet: acres and acres of grave mounds. Not one succeeding the next, in orderly rows and avenues with each inhabitant duly lined up and noted, but rather newer mounds piled up, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, on top of others, so that as far as you could see it would be Kongs, Kongs, Kongs! All of them descendants of Kngzi-Confucius. Even now, at age sixty-eight, it is something for Hattie Kong, American citizen, to recall. Two thousand years of relatives, plopped down to rest in a single old forest.
Said forest lying in the town of Qufu, in Shandong province, in China-not far from where Hattie grew up, and yet a world away. For Hattie grew up in Qingdao, also in Shandong, but on the ocean-a port city. A cosmopolitan city, occupied by the Germans before the j.a.panese, and a city known therefore for its "charming Bavarian architecture" and for its beer, which its residents drink from plastic bags, with straws.
Qufu is not about beer.
Confucius"s mound, naturally, is the biggest of the mounds-maybe ten feet high-and the most distinct. It"s set off some from the others. There"s some stone this-and-that and scrub gra.s.s around it, but mostly it is an eminent pile of dirt. If you saw it in a natural history exhibit, you might think it a wonder of nature-something the termites made, bugs being so much more of a force than we give them credit for, and so on. Nothing could be more modest, or of this earth, so to speak. It was an anti-monument, really; who knows why Hattie"s mother loved to stop in front of it. But yangren that she was-foreigner-she would pause, tuck her hair behind her ears, fold her hands, and then lower, with reverence, her blue sun hat. Never mind that she was no longer a missionary, but a Chinaman"s wife. Never mind that she had, as people so kindly put it, "gone native." Standing there in her Chinese dress-and she would, of course, be wearing a Chinese dress-she would strike the same att.i.tude she might have had she been standing in a church, and had not been disowned and disavowed by the civilized world.
"This is worth taking in," she would say, in English. "This is worth taking away." Then she would nod as if in deep agreement with herself, and look to Hattie, who-eight years old then, and brown-haired like her mother-was supposed to reply in English. (Her mother not having given up on civilizing entirely, of course, just on the civilizing of strangers.) And so it was that Hattie replied-naturally-in Chinese. Shenme? What? What was worth taking away?
"Hattie! Please!" Her mother waited with her freckled hands folded. "Hattie?"
(And her hands could stay like that a long time, Hattie knew. Her hands could stay and stay and stay.) "Hattie?"
Until finally Hattie folded her hands, too, and said, "Yes?"
"Do you see?"
(The dirt and gra.s.s were dusty, like the air and clouds and sun.) "I don"t."
Her mother frowned at first. But a moment later, the shade on her face drew up; there was a smile of light, and then-look-a real smile. "But of course not." The shade came back down. Hattie"s mother hummed. Then Hattie and her mother dutifully joined the rest of the family in their grave sweeping and clearing, though-modern people that they were-her mother and father were far more interested in Hu Shih and Darwin than in the Old Sage. Ritual! The Five Relationships! What a lot of hogwash it all was. Should women really obey their husbands as children obeyed their parents? And why could only male Kongs and their wives be buried in Qufu?
"That is, if they had hair!" Hattie"s father would exclaim-Confucius, in his wisdom, having specifically banned from the family forest, the bald.
Hattie"s mother shook her head. It was no better than what she used to teach at the mission school, really, if not worse. Worse! Still Hattie grew up dutifully sweeping the Qufu graves, too-every spring, on Qngming, as well as on her ancestors" birthdays and death days-until one day, when Hattie was fifteen, her father"s mother announced a solution to the problem of Hattie having to be buried elsewhere: She"d found some distant Kong cousins willing to marry their son to a hun xue"er-a mixed blood.
"Isn"t that good news?" finished Ni-nai. Her dry eyes that did not shine much anymore somehow shone; outside the latticed window, even the moon seemed to brighten, and the blue night clouds. And Hattie was glad to behold that brightening, even as she was relieved, a minute later, to hear her mother switch to English.
"I will not see her married off," she said, as soon as Ni-nai left the room. "I will not." People said she was growing more American all the time instead of less-so earnest-and now, as if to prove their point, her knuckle hit the table on "I" and "will" and "not." She leaned forward, her wattley neck straining hard against her collar. "She has to have a choice."
More raps with "has" and "have" and "choice."
Hattie"s father raised his smooth hand. Though his wife was the Westerner in the family, he was the one in Western clothes-pants and a shirt. He wore a length of rope for a belt, and answered in English.
"Excuse me. Teacher." He spoke softly, as everyone could hear everything in their old house-and tuned in, too, of course. "I did not know today we have cla.s.s."
"Very funny."
"No, no. Really." He winked at Hattie. "I haven"t my book."
"I don"t have," corrected Hattie. "I don"t have my book."
Her mother did not even tell her that children, excuse me, did not speak to their fathers that way.
"You are siding with your mother," she said instead-in Chinese, now, though not in the lispy, fat-tongued Qingdao dialect their family all spoke, but in Mandarin.
Hattie"s father nodded. "I"m afraid of her," he agreed disarmingly, speaking Mandarin, too-meeting his wife, as if on a bridge. W pa t. He winked again, sitting back on his stool. They were partners still; they were forging something together. A little family.
They were partners.
Two months later, though, he had stopped wearing Western clothes. He had stopped eating Western food. He had stopped reading the Bible.
Family English lessons had gone up to five hours a day.
And Hattie found herself having a sit in the Qufu graveyard. She had never done any such thing before. But one brown spring day she made herself a seat out of newspaper, set it in a far corner of the graveyard, and then sat herself down on it, with the aim of thinking things through.
The graveyard was no help.
Yet since she was sitting there anyway, she took the place in-the rea.s.surance of it. The appeal of it-a world with membership, it seemed, in an eternal order. She watched the sun move. She watched the shadows darken and grow. She watched the ants work, and the birds zip back and forth-what strangely urgent lives they led. She thought about their all-important nests, their frenzy over crumbs and worms; she thought about her grandparents, and her great-grandparents, and her great-great-grandparents, and her great-great-great-grandparents. People called for her-Hi d! Hi d!-their voices ringing and rising; and yet still she sat. How close she had come to occupying that great peace! How naturally and thoughtlessly she might have dwelt there as a bird dwells in its errands.
For thine is the power and the hogwash.
She stood up concerned mostly about the newsprint on her p-p.
And yet, decades later, when she heard that the graveyard had been dug up, she found herself yelling in her sleep, Stop! But this was the Cultural Revolution; the Red Guards just went on, of course, not only robbing the graves, but stealing the very dirt in the mounds. And there are the villagers, helping-carting the soil out to the field. That soil being rich and unfarmed, after all. They replace the mounds with their old depleted soil-throwing the dirt in every which way, just to get rid of it. Heaping it however, wherever.
Imagine.
Villagers Hattie"s family had thought they knew well-had thought they"d treated well-now shamacr; q teng teng. Seething fit to kill. And there, too"s their handiwork: Thousands of years of tradition, destroyed. Even now, in America, Hattie sees the scene sometimes. The villagers with their trowels; the wagons shuttling back and forth as the old mounds are bitten up. In the side of each roundness, there are new ragged-edged chews. It"s sickening. Though underneath the ancient cracked surface, sure enough-look-there"s something rich and crumbly. Black. Fertile. Many years later, a z zhng will tell the Kongs who went where, that they might try to reconstruct the graves; Hattie and her brothers will hear about it from a great-aunt. In the meanwhile, there is so much dust in the air, the leaves of the trees look to have survived a strange storm. And there is the man whose idea all this was-a coa.r.s.e man, in a new shirt.
At least Confucius"s steles have been saved-"tombstones" they"d probably be called here, though they are bigger than that. Steles. They"re broken, sadly, but at least the pieces have been saved. And though this villager and that claims to have gotten hold of some bones, some poor ancient bones, the bones have only lasted days, people say, before disintegrating.
Is that true? Did the bones really disintegrate, just like that? The former scientist in Hattie-the former researcher in her, the former biology teacher-can"t help but think, Hogwash!
Though, well, blessed be decomposition, if they did. Today for a couple of hundred yuan, Kongs can be buried in the family forest again. Yet here sits this bag of protoplasm still, mulling over those two thousand years in Qufu. A misogynist tradition, a gerontocratic tradition; and what an obsessive-compulsive, her ancestor, in truth. If the mat is not straight, he does not sit on it. A nut. Confucius did, to be fair, speak of sincerity, too, and humility. Integrity-what made a n.o.ble man. (There were no n.o.ble women, of course.) And as an important counterweight to ritual, human-heartedness-ren. Goodness, capital G, that was, which people were born with but, in his sensible view, needed training to hang on to; today Hattie, too, is in favor of people cultivating their ren. All that clutching of the past, though-all that resurrecting of ancient rites and texts, some say for his own purposes-was he not a kind of fundamentalist? A G.o.dless fundamentalist, but a fundamentalist nonetheless.
Well, never mind. Hattie looks at herself in the mirror now and sees her parents" break with all that-with the old ways in general. It"s in her face: in her pale skin and flat nose. It"s in her straight hair (bright white now, and trimmed even all around, like a topiary tree). Thanks to her father, she is not as wrinkly as she could be-she has some of that Asian fattiness to her skin. And she has him to thank, too, for her tadpole eyes-or should she say her formerly tadpole eyes. What with her eyelid fat breaking down a little now, her eyes are actually growing rounder and larger all the time. (And of course, they always were, like her mother"s, hazel.) Not that this is what Hattie sees when she looks in the mirror. What Hattie sees, when she looks in the mirror, are her parents" youth and hope, even as she feels the pull of all they pushed away. For what has there been to replace that old world, with its rituals and cert.i.tudes, its guide posts and goalposts? Where will Hattie be buried, when her day comes?
It"s a question, since her husband, Joe, had his ashes sprinkled from a hang glider, and her best friend, Lee, had hers dug into a peony bed. And since her closest companions these days-closer by far than her globetrotting son-are her dear dogs: Cato and Reveille and Annie, her puppy.
Maybe she should be buried in the pet cemetery?
Hattie I: I"ll But Lie and Bleed Awhile.
Last week, a family moved in down the hill-Cambodian. They plan to build themselves a little house, people say. Hoping that that house will-ta daah!-become a home. Well, that"s not so simple, Hattie happens to know. But never mind; this is an age of flux. She, Hattie Kong, came from China; her neighbors from Cambodia; is there anyone not coming from somewhere? And not necessarily to a city with a cozy unhygienic ghetto, but sometimes-if not immediately, then eventually-to a fresh-aired town like Riverlake. A town that would have pink cheeks, if a town had cheeks. Riverlake being a good town, an independent town-a town that dates to before the Revolution. A town that was American before America was American, people claim-though, well, it"s facing change now, and not just from the Cambodian family. Of course, there"s always been change. In fact, if you want to talk about change, the old-timers will tell you how Riverlake wasn"t Riverlake to begin with-how Brick Lake overflowed its banks a hundred years ago and came pouring down in a flood to here, and how the resulting body of water had to be renamed to avoid confusion. Riverlake, they dubbed it then-a lake born of a river. And the town that went with the lake was called that, too. Riverlake-a town born of change.
One thing will become another; and Hattie"s neighbors are at least living for now in a double-wide trailer such as many around here would not sniff at. For some flatlanders bought property on the lake with this trailer on it; and seeing as they were going to build themselves a vacation place with radiant heat and a standing-seam roof, they gave the thing to the Cambodian family for free. Worked with the powers-that-be on the Internet, it seems. Had an interest in that part of the world, having marched-and marched and marched-against this and that in their youth. (As did Hattie, too, by the way, it wasn"t such a big distinction.) The powers-that-be contacted a church, which in turn had the trailer moved to that triangle field at the bottom of the cliff behind Hattie. An odd lot the church was left in an odd will, and which odd lot the church has been trying to sell off for way longer than Hattie"s been living in Riverlake, anyway. Which would be-what?-some two years now. Ever since Joe died and then Lee, in a kind of one-two Hattie still can"t quite believe. It was like having twins; at one point they were even both in the recovery room together. She got to book the same church with the same pianist for both funerals, and did think she should have gotten some sort of twofer from the crematorium. And now, well, Come back, come back, she still begs them, in her half-sleep, sometimes. Come back. Come back. Though sometimes she"s as mad at them as if they"d gone and had an affair on her.
How could you? How could you?
As if they could explain it.
And, What now? What now?
There being whole days, still, when she more or less lives to feed the dogs. Hers is a loneliness almost beyond words.
What now.
As dear Lee, that fountain of pith, used to say, The unlived life isn"t worth living.
Her new neighbors.
And that lot, which was still the Lord"s free and clear, awkwardly placed as it was-right in the crotch of a three-hill scrunch-up. It wasn"t like Hattie"s place, open and cleared and up on a granite knoll, with a little lake view. There was some clearing, but mostly the place was woods, and not the picturesque kind. These were real woods, impa.s.sable woods, with trees leaning and lying all over. A lot of sodden logs and lichen and toadstools, and even on the live trees, dead branches that stuck out all around the trunks like thorns. There was no view, and no light. And being sunk in a pocket like that, most of the clearing, aside from the trailer site proper, was wet. What the place really needed was divine intervention in the form of an in-ground dehumidifier. That did not, unfortunately, seem forthcoming. The good Lord did appear to be providing, though, if not for deliverance exactly, then a use for the place-about which, living as close as she did, Hattie was not thrilled. But, well, who could stop Him?
Hattie having heard that the church was going to do something someday, but having somehow envisioned that someday to be like the Rapture-a day that might or might not be on the immediate horizon. One week, though, the trailer sat as normal in its old site near town. The next its yard looked like a truck trade show. Hattie, out walking the dogs, stopped more or less dead as a churchload of folks jacked up the trailer and split it right down the middle, then with considerable adjusting and cranking and readjusting, opened it up like a child"s pack-"n"-go dollhouse. Things snapped and sank; things leaned and bowed and split. This was not the growth of a crystal or a protein-some natural process bordering on dance. No, this was manmade inelegance itself. Still, only one worker swore (cussed to make the heavens blush, Hattie"s mother would have said), namely baby-faced Everett, husband of Hattie"s walking-group friend, Ginny. Whom someone had up and volunteered, unchurched though he was, on account of his size; never mind that the poor man was bound to incur more ambivalence than grat.i.tude for his pain. Hattie knew him as a guy who would shovel her out in a storm-a man who"d show up without her asking and refuse to be paid, and a regular snow mason to boot, who over the course of the winter would produce path walls so plumb, you could have checked a spirit level against them. He was a kind man, an obliging man. And yet said kind and obliging man would not leave off cussing when people gave him the eye, quite the contrary. Said kind and obliging man seemed, if anything, to cuss all the louder for the looks-a man after Hattie"s own heart in that way, but less dear to his coworkers, she could imagine, as the day wore on. For hear tell a jack gave, a hitch snapped. The coffee ran out. The cold got colder. One man just about took his thumb off, and had to go to Emergency with his hand in a bandanna tourniquet. So who knows but that Everett"s mouth might have proved contagious-who knows but that he might have led others into Error-had the Lord not eventually gotten those trailer halves up on wheels.
There they were, though, finally, up up-at last-hallelujah! The group disbanded; heathen Everett disappeared. Then down the road the trailer halves rolled, one after the other, their private parts all in public. Did not a body have to wonder how intelligently designed we can be when none of us has so much as a wheel-like option? Well, never mind. The most intriguing part of all this, to Hattie"s mind, had nothing to do with the brute grunting and heaving-ho-or even the dawning realization that the halves were headed toward her house. (Which was not intriguing, by the way-which was a shock!) It was rather when one of the trailer halves pa.s.sed her on the road. For in the kitchen, as it rumbled by, was a blink of a girl, holding up the cabinets. Young-fourteen or fifteen, Hattie guessed-a tea-skinned pipsqueak of a thing with a swingy black ponytail and a shocking-pink jacket. Some cabinets had gotten knocked loose when the work was being done; the girl was put in there, it seemed, to keep them from coming down completely. Never mind that her spindly legs were wholly inadequate for the job-there she was all the same, gamely holding them up. Having taught high school for the better part of her life, Hattie waved at the poor thing; this being one of the things teaching"s made of her, besides a habitual h.o.a.rder of chalk: a compulsive supporter of gumption. True, she"d retired right after Joe and Lee died. (As she had had to, being unable to bear the campus at which they"d all taught-being unable to climb the hill with the crocuses, or to set foot in the teachers" lounge, anything.) But never mind. That the girl did not wave back is the thing-that she could not begin to think about waving back, probably. Still, Hattie waved anyway-as the girl might never have even noticed, had the trailer not happened to hit a pothole.
A well-known pothole, this was, more famous in these parts than any movie star. It was top of the summer list for the road repair crew-a gap big enough to make you fear for your car axle. If locals had drawn up the map, this thing would have been on it in red. But that driver hailing from parts unknown, he failed to slow down-making for a jolt. The top of the trailer tilted like a fair ride; the girl was slammed askew. She lost her footing; a door sprang open; some cabinets tore off and a drawer shot out, sailing with surprising aplomb out onto the road, where it landed, spinning.
"Help!" the girl shouted.
"I"ve got it!" Hattie called back.
Did the girl hear? In any case, as the trailer pulled back level, the dogs and Hattie went and rescued the drawer-a wood-veneer affair, with a pitted, copper-tone, Mediterranean-look pull. Empty. The sort of thing you don"t even see as a thing unless it"s lying in the road and about to get run over. The dogs sniffed it immediately, of course. Wise Cato dropping his tail even as Annie the puppy attacked it; Reveille the glutton nosed an inside corner. For the thing did smell of cinnamon-someone"s exspice drawer, guessed Hattie, as she picked it up. A thing worth something on its own, but a thing you"d have to say had suffered a loss, too. Its fellow drawers, after all-not to say all the cabinetry it had ever known.
Ah, but what has happened to her that she can find herself feeling sorry for a kitchen drawer?
Hattie gone batty!
Anyway, there the thing was, still in one piece.
She would have brought it back the very next day, except for the rain attack-these huge drops leaving the sky with murderous intent. Anyone foolish enough to pit an umbrella against them would only meet defeat even before the onslaught turned, like this one, into something resembling concrete aggregate. Of course, it will let up soon enough. Soon enough, Hattie"s friend Greta will be whizzing by again, her white braid flying and her back baskets full-honking Hi! at Hattie"s house, midwestern-style, as if to remind her of the music series, the dam project, the water quality patrol! So many ways to Get Involved, so many ways to Prove an Exemplary Citizen!
For a blessed few days, though, Hattie the Less Exemplary sits painting bamboo. One stalk, two.
Wind. Sleet. Hail.
She dips her maob in the ink.
Rain.
Until finally comes a big blue sky, solid as wallboard.
Hattie admires the mountains as she crosses her side yard-the mountains in Riverlake being neither the highest hills around, nor the most dramatic, but quite possibly the most beguiling. Folding into one another like dunes, if you can imagine dunes dark with trees and sprinkled with farms. The west side of the lake, where Hattie lives, tends to the plunging and irregular-irrepressible granite heaves with drifts of unidentified other matter in between. (Including, this time of year, a few last gray amoebae of snow.) The east side, though-which she can see from her side yard and back porch-is rolling and dotted with some of the big old farms that used to be everywhere around here. They"re squares of spring green today, like handkerchiefs dropped down from someplace they use green handkerchiefs; Hattie likes the barns, especially. It"s hard to say why plain nature would be improved by a red barn or two, but she does feel it so. Maybe it is just the Chinese in her, always partial to the civilized, but she likes silver-capped silos, too, and farmhouses.
Peace.
Though look what"s floating from the crest of the hill today: the trial balloon for the proposed cell phone tower. A long long string with a white balloon bobbing at its top-the whole deal a-waft like a ghost in a kids" play now, but just wait until it"s a lunky metal affair with trusses and uprights and baubled appendages. There"s a family hoping to make a killing on the thing, people say, as well as a big select board meeting on the subject coming up, to which-meeting-ed out as she was by her fervent youth-even Hattie will go.
But first, her neighbors.
The land is a swamp, but the trailer site itself isn"t bad. As n.o.body has built steps up to the front door yet, though, she has to step up onto a milk crate to knock, and even so finds herself knocking at the door"s knees. An awkward thing to do while holding a drawer, especially if you have a bag of cookies set in the drawer, as she does-b.u.t.terscotch chip, nothing too extraordinary, though Hattie did use turbinado sugar in them instead of regular, seeing as how it was on special one week. Whatever turbinado even is or means. Anyway, the sugar gave the cookies a chew; and now here the door is opening, with a sc.r.a.pe-a half-gone hinge. The air has the mushroomy smell of rot.
"h.e.l.lo," she says from her pedestal. She hoists the drawer before her like a popcorn vendor at a baseball game. "I"ve come to welcome you to the neighborhood."
Her audience being a half-stick of a man-looming over her at the moment, but not actually much taller than she is, which last she dared measure was all of five foot two. He has on a blue b.u.t.toned-up polo shirt, a black leather belt, and blue denim pants that look as though they are meant to be jeans but somehow look like slacks. His hair is white and thin, his skin pale and loose, and his face the fine result, she guesses, of a Pol Pot facial: One of his cheekbones sits a half-step high. She shivers. The man"s nose is likewise misaligned; his pupils are tiny; and his gaze has a wander, as if possessed of a curiosity independent of its owner. Nystagmus, she thinks-damage to the abducens nerve. (Recalling old science terms more easily than she recalls her grocery list, naturally.) His gaze lists left, like a car out of alignment, then jerks back-left left left again, and back. It is strange to think him around her age-younger than her, even. Mid-sixties, people have said. He looks, she thinks, to belong to his own reality; and who knows but that he thinks something similar of her, for he beholds her with a blankness so adamant that the closed door he"s replaced does seem, in retrospect, to have been friendlier.
"h.e.l.lo," Hattie says, all the same. And, when he does not answer, "Do you speak English?"
He gazes at the top of her head as if she is growing something there.
"Do you speak English?" Slower this time.
A pause.
"Lit-tle," he says finally. He p.r.o.nounces the word with equal stress on both syllables.
"Well, welcome to town," she says, trying not to speed up. Half the trick with English language learners, she knows, being the maintenance of a certain stateliness. "My name is Hattie. Hattie Kong. I live across the way, in the red house. See it over there? The red one."
She inclines her head in the general direction of her place-a two-bedroom cottage, one floor, with aluminum roof flashing that does, well, flash in the sun. She isn"t the kind of city close where you can chat just fine without availing yourself of a phone, but by country standards they are cheek by jowl. n.o.body would have picked it. Her neighbors" front door faces west, like hers, and if they"d been set the same distance from the road, she"d probably have found it intolerable. It is just lucky her new neighbors are set downhill and a little farther back than she is. They can"t see into her place; nor she, she doesn"t think, into theirs. Of course, with a little figuring she could probably set a basketball to roll from her back porch down to the milk crate, but never mind.
"I came to say h.e.l.lo and welcome," she says again, politely enough. "And to give you back your drawer."