Pingping scolded her son one afternoon, saying, "Don't be so lazy and watch TV all time."
"Duh, I'm tired." He looked peeved.
"Tired? We're all living fast life here. You must do same."
"That's not proper grammar, Mom."
"What?"
"People say 'We're living a busy life,' not 'a fast life.' "
"I mean burn candle at two ends."
"How can you do that?"
"I mean make two hundred percent effort."
"Impossible!"
"All right, you live busy life. After this show, go back to homework." "Okay, okay!"
Whenever she said something wrong in her unique ungrammati-cal English, the boy would correct her. Sometimes he even did that in the presence of others. She was annoyed but never discouraged him, because she was determined to learn the language. What she and Nan didn't know was that Taotao had been simmering, angry about their awkward English, which sometimes embarrassed him. He was especially discomfited by Pingping. She'd toss out malapropisms right and left, such as "gooses," "watermelon skin," "deers," and "childrenhood." One day the boy threw a tantrum, accusing his parents of having messed up his English, because that morning, his second day in school, he had blurted out the term "peach hair" instead of "peach fuzz," for which some of his classmates had ridiculed him. He knew he had picked it up from his mother. "You're ruining my career!" he screamed at Pingping that afternoon. She broke into peals of laughter after hearing him explain why, and she went into the kitchen to laugh more to herself.
Every day she assigned him some math problems in addition to his schoolwork. However much he complained, she'd make him finish the assignments before they closed up.
8
WHEN they moved to Atlanta, the Wus hadn't known that the children at Peachtree Terrace went to schools farther south, which belonged to another district. This meant Taotao wasn't supposed to attend an elementary school in Lilburn. If there had been a grownup in their apartment to accompany him after school, his parents wouldn't have minded letting him go to Shiloh Elementary in Snell-ville, which had a fine reputation. As it was, the boy would have to join them when he got off the bus in the afternoons, so he needed to attend a school near the Gold Wok. Fortunately, the Wangs allowed the Wus to use their address so that Taotao could go to Rebecca Minor Elementary. When the secretary at the principal's office called the Wangs, Mrs. Wang said Taotao was their grandnephew, who had come to stay with them. Mr. Wang told the Wus that they ought to live closer to the restaurant, to save the time and hassle of traveling back and forth every day. Also, gasoline was expensive nowadays as a consequence of the Gulf War. The Wus realized they'd have to move to Lilburn soon, but this town had few apartments for rent, which were all expensive besides. Every weekday they dropped their son at Rebecca Minor Elementary before going to the Gold Wok, and in the afternoon Taotao would get off the school bus at the east side of Beaver Hill Plaza and join his parents at the restaurant.
At work, the Wus couldn't stop feeling antsy about what might happen to their apartment, because Peachtree Terrace wasn't a safe place. Sometimes at night they heard gunshots in their building. Police cruisers would come, strobe lights slashing the parking lot, and people would gather around to watch the police making arrests.
Whenever such an incident happened, Nan would say they must move out soon.
One night the Wus returned from work and found that a window in the bedroom used as Nan 's study was open. At once Nan flicked on all the lights to see what was missing. The computer and the microwave were gone; so was a pair of Pingping's leather sandals. Other than those, they had lost nothing else. How fortunate it was that they'd kept all their papers in their safe-deposit box in the bank. On the carpet of the living room two pairs of muddy shoe prints stretched parallel to each other, one under eight inches long and the other about a foot. Apparently two people, a grown-up and an adolescent, had committed the burglary. At first, both Nan and Pingping were outraged and cursed the thieves. They wondered whether they should report the crime to the police, but eventually decided not to. The police might summon them to the station, and they didn't want to go through the tedious process. They couldn't afford to lose a whole morning, plus probably a good part of an afternoon. Actually, their loss was minimum, as both the computer and the microwave were already broken. Having calmed down, they couldn't help smiling, amused that the thieves had made fools of themselves and must be racking their brains trying to make those machines work.
"I'm pleased they removed the junk. Good riddance," Nan said. " I want my computer back," wailed their son. "It was already broken down, not worth keeping anymore." "I want it back. It's mine."
His mother stepped in. "Be reasonable, Taotao. This way we won't have to bother to dump them. We just paid those fools a pair of my old shoes."
"It's my computer."
"All right, once we have our own home, we'll buy you a new one," Nan said.
"When can we have our house? I don't want to live here anymore."
His parents looked at each other. Nan realized Pingping was thinking the same thought. He managed to answer his son, "I'll start looking for a new place soon."
"Yes, Daddy will take care of that," Pingping said. "You must stop hoarding things."
Neither Nan nor Pingping could say when Taotao had become a hoarder: he had never let go of anything that once belonged to him, not even a pencil stub or a paper clip. For some time his parents had wondered what was wrong with him. Then one day back north, on his way to work in Natick, Nan by chance listened to a psychiatrist on the radio discussing the psychology of hoarding with a caller whose son had the same problem-"a real dog in the manger," the boy wouldn't even let his newborn cousin wear the booties he had outgrown long ago. The man and his wife had been separated, and the psychiatrist said their shaky marriage might account for their son's obsession-unconsciously the boy wanted to hold things together. The thought came to Nan that Taotao must have been frightened all these years when Pingping and he were often absent from his life. Now the boy must still be afraid of losing his parents, and this fear was manifested in his clinging to all trifles. Look at his duffel bag, full of trinkets: assorted batteries, dead wrist-watches, rulers, a shoehorn, key chains, dog tags, pencil sharpeners, baseball cards, seashells, coins from various countries that Livia had given him. He had even saved every section of comics from the Boston Globe back in Massachusetts; his parents had forced him to dump them before the move, but now he had begun collecting the funnies from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. What puzzled Nan was that Taotao never looked at those pages again once he had thrown them into the pile in his closet, next to the carton containing issues of National Geographic, which his parents had subscribed to for him. The boy's hoarding saddened his parents. Nan and Pingping agreed not to talk about their marital trouble in front of their child again.
"I wonder why the thieves didn't take Taotao's telescope," Pingping said to Nan when the boy was brushing his teeth in the bathroom.
"The computer must have seemed worth a lot of money to them."
"If they'd walked off with the telescope, that would have killed him."
"Maybe we should store it in the restaurant."
So they took the thing along when they went to work the next morning. For the whole day Nan continually looked through apartment books and the "Home Finder" sections of the Sunday Atlanta Journal-Constitution for a safe nearby place, but he couldn't find one. There were a few houses listed for rent in Lilburn, all too expensive.
To Nan's delight, Mrs. Wang showed up the next afternoon and said that she and her husband were going to visit their relatives in Taiwan for at least three months. She would be happy to let the Wus "keep the house" for them. Nan and Pingping understood that also meant she'd want them to pay some rent. They offered her six hundred dollars a month, which Mrs. Wang happily accepted. "Nan, we trust you like a son of ours," she said with feeling.