Beautiful as Yesterday Page 11

  It takes her a while to move these two chests. Her heart flutters, and she can hear her heartbeats. She walks to the kitchen to get a glass of water and returns to the bedroom to take a heart pill. After she feels better, she opens the bottom chest. It is only half filled, mostly with the gifts she and her husband received when they got married in 1962: a square mirror with text in red paint: “I wish you will be together for a hundred years,” a handmade embroidery of a fat baby boy and girl, a plastic-covered Chinese dictionary. Inside the chest there are also a few dozen Chairman Mao badges, in varied sizes and styles, which she and her husband wore in the sixties and seventies.

  In addition to the wedding gifts and the Chairman Mao badges, there is a long, narrow tin box, tarnished and considerably dented.

  She hesitates before opening the box.

  SIX

  September

  ON A SUNNY FRIDAY, Ingrid leaves her apartment for the New York Public Library, bringing her Apple notebook with her. Besides guiding tours, Ingrid does freelance translation and interpretation, Chinese to English or vice versa. She has received several highly paid jobs through an agency this month, including interpreting and proofreading for international conferences in New York, Boston, and Miami. Though she doesn’t have a degree in translation and interpretation, she has built, mainly through word of mouth, a solid client list with premium commissions. But unless she needs money urgently, she prefers projects with flexible schedules, like translating a book or a long article. Now and then, something interesting turns up, concerning history, arts, or social issues, but most of these projects are boring, typically product descriptions, travel brochures, survey questionnaires, or research papers. The brochure she’s been working on since Monday is for a Chinese pharmaceutical company and contains numerous medical terms. That’s why she is going to the library: to look up the terms in a special dictionary.

  Terminology is one thing, writing itself is entirely another. Recently, Ingrid translated a product description for a Chinese electronics company which said that its products had been highly rated by the provincial and central governments—an advertising cliché used in the seventies and eighties in China. It also said that the company owed its success to the Communist Party’s encouragement and support. Yet another cliché. Should she tell them that Americans couldn’t understand these expressions? One would never hear Bill Gates say that Microsoft couldn’t have achieved what it has without the Republican or Democratic Party’s encouragement and support.

  But why bother? She charges by the word. Also, she does this kind of translation only to pay her bills; it has nothing to do with her ambition or passion. Sometimes, she thinks this way. But other times, she remembers why she took up translation and interpretation three years ago: she feared losing her fluency in Chinese. In fact, she has forgotten how to write some common Chinese characters, and without a computer’s help, she wouldn’t even be able to compose a letter without making embarrassing mistakes. It was out of the same fear that she became a tour guide for visitors from China—in addition, this occupation allows her to observe and listen to those visitors, a good way to be informed about what’s happening in her birth country.

  As for her ambition, her most recent thought is to go to graduate school and study art history. Before that, she had considered a law degree and a master’s in library science. She has an inquisitive mind and is willing to try things out. But going back to school doesn’t thrill her because she has gotten used to a flexible schedule; that’s why she has been procrastinating on her decision.

  Ingrid plans to move to San Francisco in a few months to be closer to her mother, during her visit. She has been taking more jobs than she would like. Moving always costs more than one expects, and renting in San Francisco is hardly cheaper than in New York. No, she won’t stay there long, she has decided; she will return to New York as soon as her mother goes back to China.

  Not having seen her mother for eight years, Ingrid wants to make up for it this time. Though she calls every week, hearing her mother’s voice is different from seeing her in person. Ingrid has not told her mother that she freelances and guides tours for a living; her mother has always thought that she works for the government—the ideal job, in her opinion, because it is safe. To her mother, being a contract translator or a tour guide is not a real job.

  How could it have been eight years since she was last in China, attending her father’s funeral? Ingrid wonders. How fast time has passed! She also imagines what it will be like to see her sister, Mary, again. Yes, she was a bit too harsh three years ago with her comment concerning her brother-in-law, whom she actually liked and whom she enjoyed talking to a lot more than she did to her sister. But Mary had started the whole thing, hadn’t she? With her bullshit about not dating blacks or Indians.

  Ingrid gets off the subway at Fifth Avenue. She stops by Saks Fifth Avenue and, though she thought she’d only take a quick browse at Max Mara’s new arrivals, she ends up purchasing a top and a skirt. Great, I’ve broken my promise not to buy more clothes this month, she says to herself while paying.

  Before she goes into the library, she decides to stroll around Bryant Park, one of her favorite places in midtown Manhattan. When the weather is nice, she sometimes brings her translation work here and sits in one of the portable chairs the park provides. She’s watched many free movies in the park and has learned how to ice skate and play pétanque here.

  The lawns are crowded. Unlike on weekdays, when businesspeople with laptops can be seen here and there, some holding serious-looking meetings, today’s mass of humanity is mostly here to enjoy the view and the sun. The grass is very green, unusual in a public park, suggesting a recent renovation or special care. Ingrid finds an empty chair near the end of the lawn. In her immediate vicinity, a few girls in bikinis are sunbathing on colorful towels, facedown, arms at their sides, the thin straps on their backs untied. A young couple has fallen sleep, the woman’s face against the man’s chest. Three old men with walking sticks sit on the park’s portable chairs, chatting gaily about a recent cruise to Alaska. Ingrid looks farther. Several kids are chasing one another on the walkway with water pistols in their hands, their wet faces glistening.

  She assures herself that she is happy in New York, and though she hasn’t found her career yet, at least she doesn’t hate what she is doing. Being adrift is not that bad, considering its freedom. If Mary hadn’t forced her to study accounting at San Jose State University, she might never have lived in New York, might never have chosen to be self-employed. The idea of thanking Mary for what she’s enjoying right now amuses her. Ironic, really, she thinks.

  Perhaps she shouldn’t have listened to her older sister’s insistence that she study accounting, but did she have a choice? She was only twenty, a college junior, and she was desperate to leave China. When Mary sent Ingrid the financial aid documents, she sent along the application form from San Jose State University’s accounting program. As a history student, Ingrid had no interest in accounting, but she completed the application and mailed it. She was lucky to get a student visa, and later, under Mary’s pressure, she finished the bachelor’s program. Not a day went by while she was studying accounting that she didn’t hate Mary’s manipulation. But she had to listen to her long lecturing, for her sister was paying most of her tuition and expenses.

  As an outlet for her frustration, Ingrid began to wear bohemian clothes and dye her hair in bright colors, she drank and smoked; all this, she knew, her churchgoing sister disapproved of, and when she saw Mary’s sad face, she felt a taste of victory. She never followed Mary’s advice—get a scholarship, take extra classes, prepare for the CPA exam; quite the opposite, she skipped classes often and did only the minimum on homework assignments.

  After trying smoking and drinking, she used marijuana. It was not difficult to get it at weekend dorm parties saturated with beer, dim lights, and throbbing hip-hop music. The first time she smoked from a pipe handed to her by a classmate, she only felt dizzy and
a little nauseated, like having jet lag. She tried a second time. She still felt okay at first, but as she stood to get a beer, the music suddenly sounded very close, like a band playing right next to her. A light seemed to sparkle inside her brain. She sat down, staring contentedly at a table fountain and a lit candle, and in her reverie, she saw herself sitting next to a tall waterfall, her body light as foam. She felt lazy, she wanted to fly—she imagined herself flying. Barely a week had passed before she bought LSD from a “pharmacist,” a senior student. She took some while reading George Orwell’s 1984 on the sofa in her dorm room.

  The effect kicked in half an hour later: before her eyes, the sofa fabric separated into individual threads, slowly and audibly, then the threads inched toward her and climbed onto her arms, her legs, and her stomach like snakes. Paralyzed by fear, she couldn’t make a sound; her breathing was heavy but hollow. To add to her fright, the book in her hand started to melt, the words falling off the pages one by one, turning into sharp knives as they hit her thighs. After this nightmarish experience, she never touched drugs again.

  Ingrid blamed her cowardice (as she thought of it then) on having grown up in China, where she had never seen drugs, let alone used them. She and her teenage friends, compared with their American peers, were like sheets of blank paper, ignorant of sex and drugs. When they watched a movie, if there was a kissing scene, even if it showed just a light touch on the lips, they would blush and their hearts would race. She was thought adventurous and bold by her friends in China, but she did not kiss a boy until high school. As for sex, it didn’t happen until she was twenty, already in the United States. From China to the United States was, to her, a big leap, as if a homebound country girl was entering a dazzling city for the first time.

  She’d had so many firsts here: using a clothes dryer; watching a baseball game; drinking vodka; taking a tub bath; eating a hamburger, cheese, and pizza; using a microwave oven and a vacuum cleaner; owning a credit card; wearing lace underwear; having her ears pierced; and letting a boy kiss her in public. Of course, she remembers vividly the bewilderment in her first American boyfriend’s face when she told him that she was a virgin.

  And the first time she read porn. A classmate had told her that the college library carried Playboy; it was not displayed on the open shelves, but all she needed to do was ask. She was tempted, having heard about the magazine in China, where it was considered incontrovertible proof of a corrupt and doomed capitalist society. How obscene could it be? She finally asked, when the librarian was alone behind the counter, presenting her query cleverly, as instructed by her classmate, for Jimmy Carter’s interview in 1976, in which he famously admitted that he had looked on many women with lust. She was researching a class paper about left-wing political interviews, she claimed. She got a copy of the interview, as well as the latest issue with missing centerfolds, and read them in the dimly lit archive room. Though the first few nude or seminude photos, including the bikinied Barbi Twins on the cover, were shocking and arousing, she quickly came to feel jaded. This was tasteless and demeaning, she concluded. And it was simply beyond her comprehension that the same issue, with its shameless focus on enormous breasts (were they real? she wondered) and buttocks featured an interview with the governor of Virginia. It was like saying that porn and politics were in fact one big family, that porn revealed too much, while politics hid too much.

  Despite her low opinion of the magazine, Ingrid was stimulated, much to her surprise, and in the following days, she was obsessed with sex, making love to her boyfriend incessantly, being unusually restless and aggressive. Was it because of the lingering impact of the porn, or the exotic and forbidden act of reading porn itself? She didn’t know. As she lay on the bed after a satisfying orgasm toward the end of her sex marathon, barely able to move, it struck her that what she had been doing was an attempt to sever her ties with her past, with her innocence, ignorance, and naïveté, everything in her that wasn’t American.

  America was a huge whirlpool, taking her down gradually; she knew she would never be swallowed completely, yet she couldn’t seem to escape, either.

  It was not until she came to New York, until she met Angelina, that Ingrid began to like herself, feeling more at home in Angelina’s Latin culture than in her own, which seemed to her too pragmatic, formal, and restrained. Also, by hanging out with Angelina and other non-Chinese friends, she felt free from the burden that had weighed her down. Occasionally, it occurred to her that she was like a hermit crab in a tight shell looking for a well-fitting one to protect herself better and let her self grow faster. It was an unpleasant thought, but it didn’t bother her the way it used to, for she had begun to consider herself a global citizen who travels, experiences, and enjoys various cultures, and calls everywhere home.

  But in the depths of her mind, Ingrid knew her concept of a global citizen was just an illusion.

  Ingrid senses that she is being watched. She looks to the right and meets the gaze of a pair of brown eyes a yard away: the Asian girl looking at her is wearing a red, hooded windbreaker and has a black sack under her chair; she is drawing something in a notebook with a pencil. Seeing that Ingrid has noticed her, the girl puts her notebook down on her lap and beams nervously. This girl was sketching her, Ingrid speculates. She’d like to see the drawing.

  As if guessing what is in Ingrid’s mind, that girl stands and walks to her, the notebook under her arm. She has short hair and tanned skin, appears to be in her early twenties. “I’m sorry. I sketch you without permission. I hope you not mind.”

  “Oh, really? I didn’t know I could be a model,” Ingrid says, sizing up the girl. Now she can see four holes on both her earlobes—only the two in the middle bearing tiny silver rings. She also detects the girl’s Chinese accent.

  The girl hands Ingrid her notebook. “I’m not done yet,” she explains. “I haven’t drew your shoes.”

  Ingrid takes the notebook and looks at it. It’s her, beyond a doubt: her hair, eyes, mouth, black top, and long, pleated skirt. She has never had a portrait of herself drawn, and it surprises her how much the drawing resembles her; she likes it. She raises her eyes from the notebook to the girl’s face. “It’s very good.”

  “I hope so.” The girl seems skeptical of Ingrid’s praise. “You must been thinking of something serious. Your eyes…I don’t know, they were intriguing. In-tri-guing, did I pronounce it right? Anyway, could be better. If you want it, it’s yours. But let me finish your shoes. You have time?”

  “Sure.” The girl looks so eager that Ingrid feels she has to say yes.

  The girl runs back to her chair and moves it to a spot facing Ingrid, a step away. Ingrid gives the notebook to the girl and watches her as she draws. After the girl draws her shoes, she does more work on her eyes. Then she holds the portrait up in front of her and tilts her head sideways, studying it. “Well, could be better. I don’t know what’s wrong with me today,” she says to herself, obviously disappointed. She signs the sketch, tears it out of her notebook carefully, and hands it to Ingrid.

  “You’re Chinese?” Ingrid says, now in Mandarin. The girl’s signature is in Chinese.

  Excited, the girl replies in Mandarin, “Are you Chinese too? I wasn’t sure. You don’t have an accent. I’m Bing’er, living in Toronto. I’ve been there for two months. I emigrated there from Hubei Province. It’s so nice speaking Mandarin.”

  “Only two months? Your English is good.”

  “Thanks. I studied English a lot before I went to Canada.” She looks proud. “I listened to the Voice of America radio program every day for more than two years. You know that program, right?”

  Ingrid nods, remembering how unclear the program was because the transmissions were interfered with by the Chinese government. She had to carry her radio to her dorm’s rooftop and listen to it there; even so, there was constant static in the background and she had to walk around with the radio and adjust its antenna often to hear better.

  “I didn’t dare listen to it
in my dorm. You know, I lived in a government-assigned dorm,” Bing’er continues. “Luckily, there was a school playground nearby. Oh, what’s your name?”

  Ingrid tells Bing’er her name and what she does for a living. Then she asks, “Toronto? Why there?”

  “It’s a long story. Anyway, I went there as a chef. I was told by my friends that it was easy to emigrate to Canada as a chef. But, of course, I wasn’t a good chef. I took some classes and got a certificate. But that kind of certificate is easy to get. You might even be able to buy it from a street vendor for several hundred yuan. God knows how my case was approved. I think I was just lucky. Or Canada must be desperate to increase its population. You know, there’s so much land there, with so few people. Have you been to Canada?”

  Ingrid says that she has visited Canada at least six times.

  “Six times? So you’ve been to a lot of places in Canada then. I love those little towns and have done a lot of sketches of them. Do you travel much? Where have you been?”

  Ingrid mentions some of the places she has visited. Bing’er leans forward, eyes wide with admiration, feet tapping lightly as if she wanted to fly to those places at this very moment.

  “Even Egypt and Ghana? That’s so cool. I need to pay off my debt first, then I can start to travel. You know, I borrowed a lot of money for my emigration application and the plane ticket,” Bing’er says. She moves her chair closer to Ingrid, as if saying “Now, you’re my pal.”

  “What did you do in China? Why did you move to Canada?” Impressed by Bing’er’s portrait of her and also liking the way she talks and acts—she looks candid and natural—Ingrid finds herself drawn to the girl, whose eyes are restless, glancing with curiosity at the people passing.

  Bing’er tells Ingrid about her boring typist job at a government bureau after she failed to go to college; quitting to sell clothes with her best friend, Tingting; her longing to travel abroad; waiting on tables to make a living in Toronto. All this Ingrid takes in with immense interest and unwittingly compares her own experience with Bing’er’s. Though there is something in common between them, she sees more differences, the unfamiliar characteristics associated with the new generation in urban China, the generation born after the Cultural Revolution, who have little recollection of the poverty and dogmas of the seventies and eighties. A generation free from the burden of that history.