Beautiful as Yesterday Read online

  Many days Mary and Ingrid were left home alone since their parents both had to work. Mary was Ingrid’s babysitter. Behind their parents’ backs, Mary pinched her little sister’s cheeks, kicked her, and drew on her face with pens. Their age difference made it easy for her to bully Ingrid with tricks and punishments, though she was careful not to make her sister cry—somehow Ingrid’s tears would soften Mary’s heart and make her realize their kinship. Whenever Ingrid was about to cry, Mary mimicked the mythical characters such as Monkey King or Pigsy, or danced around like a manic wizard; then Ingrid’s tears would freeze in her eyes and she would laugh and clap wildly at her older sister’s performance.

  Now Mary is thirty-seven and Ingrid thirty-one, yet they’re like strangers to each other. Mary sighs at the thought but changes her sigh into a smile when she sees Alex’s bright eyes gazing at her. “Mom, are you okay?”

  “My little angel, want to help me clean the table?” she asks and winks at her son.

  Bob is still not home; earlier he’d called again, saying that he wouldn’t be able to leave the office until ten or later. “Both the founder and the CEO are here. That corrupted database contains a lot of advertising data, and it’s crucial to fix it,” he told Mary. His voice sounded stressed.

  Alex sits at the piano for his daily forty-five-minute practice, with Mary next to him. Alex has been taking piano lessons for a year, but his progress is slower than that of the kids who started at the same time; his teacher blames his lack of interest and his inability to concentrate.

  “You just skipped these two legatos.” Mary knocks on one side of the black Yamaha upright piano. Alex is playing a piece by Bach. He purses his lips and mumbles a complaint then restarts the piece.

  “Your little fingers are sticking up. Also, press the keys with your fingertips, not the flats of your fingers. Teacher Li said that if you cannot correct your posture, she won’t teach you new songs.” Mary has to interrupt Alex again a little later. Then, again. Finally, a fourth time.

  “Mom, I don’t want to learn how to play piano.” Alex turns around to face her and speaks defiantly. “I don’t like any other musical instruments, either. Why must I do this?”

  “Music is very beautiful. People who know how to play an instrument are happier and more inspired than those who don’t. When I was little, I dreamed of having a piano.” She strokes Alex’s head. “Teacher Li said you’re very talented and all you have to do is concentrate on your playing. I’m sure you’ll catch up with Amy and Jenson soon.”

  “But if playing the piano doesn’t make me happy right now, how can it make me happier later? And I don’t like Teacher Li. She’s too strict. She always scolds her students. She even hits us. Last week, she slapped Leo’s hand and said it was as clumsy as an elephant’s foot.”

  “Teacher Li is strict because she wants her students to be good and play well. She used to teach at the Central Conservatory of Music in China and performed solos. A lot of kids want to learn how to play piano from her. You’re lucky to be her student.”

  Alex sighs like an adult. “Jenson told me last week that he’d put his hamsters inside his piano and let them chew through all the strings. He hates playing piano.”

  “Jenson was just joking. I met his dad two days ago and he said Jenson played for an hour and a half every day and planned to take a test next year.”

  “Really?” Alex pouts.

  Mary feels guilty about her lie, and as a way to make up with Alex she says, “Okay, you can take a break today. Want to watch the cartoon movie Dad bought yesterday?”

  “Of course, yes!” Alex jumps off the piano bench and drags her by the hand to the family room.

  After the movie starts, Mary walks to the master bedroom and turns on her work laptop—she has to compile some data for tomorrow’s conference call with Europe. Barely five minutes into working, she returns to the family room, checking to see if there is inappropriate content in the movie. Bob always laughs at her concern and says she is oversensitive. But Alex is only six, and she must make sure he’s not exposed to any violence or indecency. Even if it’s a cartoon, it may contain content inappropriate for children.

  Since the shooting at Columbine High School, she no longer buys toy guns for Alex. Every time she meets Julia and her other Chinese friends who have kids, she share their worries. They have endless worries: when their children were small, they complained about the loose curriculum at school, fearing that their children would learn very little compared with kids in the same age-group in China, whose curriculum was much stricter, whose school bags were filled with textbooks and homework, and who wrote compositions by age six or seven. In the United States, Mary’s friends said, it was not uncommon that kids couldn’t recognize all twenty-six letters of the alphabet by the time they needed to go to primary school. How absurd! they exclaimed, feeling ashamed for America’s public-school education.

  They lectured Mary on the importance of starting Alex’s education early, telling her she had to develop his intelligence and talent; send him to after-school tutoring to learn math, chess, English, history, and geography; enroll him in a Chinese-language school and classes to learn music, dancing, swimming, or drawing. Some of them have sent their children to private schools, paying thirty thousand dollars a year just for tuition despite the fact that they live in a neighborhood with good public schools. Sometimes, Mary was afraid to talk with these parents, for they always gave her the feeling that she should have done more for her only child. It was a competitive group, no doubt. When these children reached their teens, their parents began to worry about whether they will do drugs or date too soon, whether their sons will make a girl pregnant or their daughters will get pregnant. Last month, Julia told Mary pensively that her son had not dated, nor had he brought any girl home.

  “Isn’t it great? George is focusing on school,” Mary said.

  “But what if he’s a homosexual?” Julia said. “One day I found an opportunity to chat with him about homosexuals, but before I could finish he squinted his eyes and said, ‘What’s wrong with being homosexual? They have their opinions, their rights. They’re cooler and more stylish than heterosexuals.’ You tell me, shouldn’t I worry? I didn’t dare tell his father what he said. His father wouldn’t let him step into the house if he turned out to be a homosexual. And his grandparents…oh, I can’t imagine.”

  The next time Mary saw Julia, Julia talked about her son again, but this time she looked cheerful. She said that she had checked his computer when he was not at home and found pictures of female movie stars and singers. “At least he’s interested in girls. He’s normal,” Julia said with relief.

  Julia’s concern seems ridiculous to Mary, but she can still empathize with her.

  The cartoon movie looks fine, so Mary returns to her room. After working a little longer, she pushes away the documents on her desk, the numbers on the computer screen staring at her like malicious eyes. She decides to take a break by cleaning Bob’s study, which will be her mother’s room during her stay. She begins to tidy the desk, where files, software, and music CDs pile up. The floor around the desk is just as chaotic. Though Mary tries to clean his study every week, she doesn’t want to mess up Bob’s belongings, so all she can do, usually, is dust the desk and vacuum the floor. Today the messiness irritates her. She has asked Bob more than once to empty the room for her mother’s stay, but he has done nothing yet. She takes an empty plastic container from the garage and dumps the cascade of files and CDs into it. If there was one more room in the house, that would be nice, she thinks.

  Two nights ago, Bob told Mary that he had just been granted a significant number of new stock options.

  “Do you know what these shares mean?” he asked, waving the letter excitedly.

  “We may become millionaires overnight,” she said.

  “You don’t look like you care. Isn’t it your dream to buy a house in the best school district? Wasn’t it you who urged me to join a pre-IPO start-up?”

>   She was slightly hurt: he sounded like he was doing all this for her, instead of for the family. But she feigned a smile, like she always did when facing a possible confrontation. “Of course I’m happy. After your company completes its initial public offering, we’ll buy a big house in Palo Alto. Two-story, with a nice garden and an in-law unit. Alex can go to Gunn High School and attend Stanford University someday.”

  She didn’t care so much about money, but if her mother emigrated to the United States, they would have to buy a house with an in-law unit to accommodate her. That was the plan they had agreed on before she started to prepare immigration documents, so Mary could take care of her mother while they still had their privacy. She felt fortunate that Bob had agreed to her plan despite some hesitancy; she knew that this kind of living arrangement was unusual among Americans, who, in her eyes, weren’t sufficiently committed to caring for their elderly parents. But since their initial discussion, years ago, they hadn’t talked about it seriously again; a few times she’d brought it up, but Bob had put her off. Now, with her mother visiting soon, they need to talk about it without delay. It takes time to save money and find the right house.

  She shouldn’t have asked him to join a start-up, Mary reflects gloomily as she continues putting files into the plastic container. They don’t need a million-dollar house in Palo Alto, she tells herself. Somewhere in Cupertino or West San Jose, where the school districts are excellent yet houses are less expensive, would be more realistic. Of course, it still costs more to buy in these communities than in Sunnyvale. But at least there’s a possibility they could afford a house there, if they can sell their current house at a good price. She suddenly becomes agitated. If Bob was more involved in running the house, she’d be less stressed. It’s time for her to sit down and have a good talk with him.

  She goes to the kitchen and drinks a glass of iced water. Feeling better, she returns to Bob’s study to finish clearing up—when she starts something, she wants to get it done. Also, besides tending the garden and cooking, she likes to clean; it feels good to see the house tidy. She pushes the container into the hallway and begins to vacuum. There is a futon under the window. She opens it and lies down, bouncing to test its firmness. It’s a Simmons and fairly firm. She figures she’ll let her mother try this first; if she doesn’t like it, Mary will buy a real bed. She takes a set of sheets and pillowcases from the dresser in her room and makes the bed, then empties the closet, finding a few of Bob’s sweaters that are fairly new but that he no longer likes. She folds the sweaters, puts them in a half-filled plastic bag in the garage, and takes the bag to the sidewalk. Tomorrow morning, a Salvation Army truck will stop to collect donations. She looks into the distance for a while, in the direction from which Bob usually drives home. She has to ease up, she thinks, as the night deepens and the air gets chillier.

  TWO

  August

  WANG FENGLAN FINALLY RECEIVED her passport: a crimson cover, twenty-eight pages, a poor photo. Few people in this small city have ever needed a passport, and as she took hers from the uniformed girl behind the glass window at the local police station, the girl said to her, “How lucky you are!”

  Two days later, she bought the train ticket to Guangzhou to apply for a visa from the consulate of the United States there. When she checked in at a hotel near the embassy, as suggested by her older daughter, she heard a conversation between two people sitting on the antique-looking sofa in the lobby. They spoke loudly, as if wanting to be heard by everyone in the immediate vicinity.

  “Sixteen people passed today.”

  “Passed what?”

  “Aren’t you here to apply for a visitor’s visa to the U.S.? Most people in this hotel are here for this purpose.”

  “Yes, yes, I’m here for a visa too. My daughter lives in Chicago and is doing her postdoctoral studies at a university there. My wife and I haven’t seen her for almost four years.”

  “I’m planning to visit my son in Boston. He practices law there. He and his wife just had their first baby. I hope I’ll get a visa.”

  “Is sixteen people a lot?”

  “Well, two more than yesterday, but three fewer than the day before. It depends on the visa officers’ mood, I guess.”

  “When do you plan to go to the embassy?”

  “This morning I arrived at seven, but there was already a long line. Before it was my turn, someone came out and told us to go home, saying that they already had enough applications for the day. What the hell!”

  “Doesn’t the embassy open at nine?”

  “You won’t stand a chance if you go there at nine. There’s always a line.”

  “My heaven! The line must be longer than that one for food during the Three-Year Natural Disaster in the late fifties. Remember that? I thought that was long.”

  That evening, Fenglan went to bed early but couldn’t fall asleep, thinking of the conversation about the long line, afraid that she would oversleep. Guangzhou is much more prosperous and busy than her hometown. It was one o’clock in the morning, yet cars and motorcycles were still whizzing by. The neon lights from the nearby skyscrapers penetrated the gap between the linen curtains in her room and danced on the walls. If she listened carefully, she could hear a woman’s dreadful singing from a karaoke bar somewhere nearby.

  After tossing on her bed for a while, she began to think about her late husband, wishing he was here with her; his mere presence would have calmed her down. She got up and turned on the TV, just in time for the rerun of the seven to seven thirty daily news by Central Television: during that half hour, every channel broadcasts the same news. The first few items were about the Party leaders’ trips and their meetings with several foreign leaders, who praised China’s economic and social developments and asserted their support of the One-China policy on Taiwan. Then came the news of important Party conferences. The two formally attired anchors, one male and one female, read the lists of attendees, all high-ranking Party officials, whose names and positions were so familiar, having been mentioned day after day and year after year on the TV, that Fenglan remembered each of them. After news of the conferences, she watched the achievements of provinces or cities in manufacturing, agriculture, and trade. Nanyi, her city, was mentioned, to her surprise and happiness. The anchors and journalists commented that these achievements had come from following the latest instructions from the Party. Everything was rosy, positive, promising, not a negative word. And the two anchors’ familiar faces were reassuring; they had been broadcasting the seven p.m. news since before Fenglan retired from her factory.

  She was glad that she hadn’t missed the news. At home, she watched it every day, despite its formulaic content.

  A comedy starring a popular Hong Kong actor was now playing, a terrible movie, but she watched it till “The End” appeared on the screen. Then she opened her suitcase to check her visa-application documents, placed inside a used DHL envelope: passport, personal identity card, retirement certificate, invitation letter from her older daughter, and other required paperwork. What if she couldn’t get a visa? she asked herself, gripped by anxiety. As she squatted to close her suitcase, her heart palpitated. She remained squatting until her heartbeat returned to normal, then walked slowly to the bed and lay down.

  At six the next morning, she arrived at the embassy, finding a line of more than one hundred people. Some sat on the ground, dozing, their heads resting on their tucked knees, but most were talking. A woman in her fifties complained about the embassy’s inefficiency, fluttering her arms wildly as if she were about to hit someone. An old couple said that it was the fourth time they had applied for visitors’ visas to see their son in Ohio. “We don’t even know why we got denied the first three times. What’s the trick of getting a visa?” the wife asked. All sorts of advice was offered. One person remarked that it was crucial to be confident so the visa officer knew you were not desperate. Another said that a few family photos would certainly help, for they would make the officer sympathize with you for
not having seen your children for such a long time. Who didn’t have a family, after all?

  “That’s useless!” a man wearing a hat with the Great Wall printed on it declared authoritatively. “Those visa officers don’t even look at your application. They deny you right away, saying that you intend to immigrate to the U.S. In their eyes, all Chinese who want to visit the U.S. plan to stay forever.”

  His words received a lot of eager nods of agreement.

  “There’s no shortcut,” the man continued. “In my opinion, it’s all about being persistent. You try again and again. Just don’t give up. The wife of one of my neighbors went to study in New York two years ago, and her husband didn’t get a visa to visit her until his sixth attempt.”

  “All in all, you just have to meet a nice officer,” a red-faced woman sitting on a stool chimed in. “I heard that the officer wearing silver-framed glasses has issued a lot of visas. The meanest officer is a short, old black woman. Her face is as dark as ink. You can bet a person with that kind of face is never in a good mood. Keep your fingers crossed that you won’t end up at her window.”

  Fenglan listened carefully, seeking tips. She worried that her immigration application would make the officer deny her the visa, but there was nothing she could do about that now. At this moment, someone from behind patted her shoulder. She turned and saw a girl in her mid-twenties in a Chinese-style white blouse with butterfly-shaped buttons and a suit skirt.

  “Old Aunt, why are you going to the U.S.?”