PART FOUR
1
SPRING in Georgia was miserable for Nan and Pingping, both allergic to pollen. The air turned yellowish in daylight, and even the surfaces of roads changed color in the mornings, dusted with the powder from trees. Every day before going to work, Pingping would sweep their deck clean of the yellow dust. Once she couldn't find their car in the parking lot of Winn-Dixie, pollen having coated all the vehicles parked there and dulled their colors. Here the pollen season was much longer than in New England, usually from late February to mid-May. Whenever Pingping went out, she'd wear a mask, a nose piece, regardless of the attention it drew, whereas Nan wouldn't do that, so his nose had swollen to twice its normal size. How eagerly they looked forward to the next rain, which might cleanse the air for a few days so that they could walk outside again. To fight the allergies, Pingping made Taotao and Nan take tablets of bee pollen every day, which helped some, though Nan would have gastric pain if he swallowed them on an empty stomach. The Wus also took plenty of vitamins to build up their resistance to the allergies. Not until mid-May when a drought set in did they begin to feel better. Miraculously Taotao's allergy had subsided considerably this year. Back in Massachusetts pollen had tortured him, but now he could play in the open air without a runny nose or itchy eyes. Nan joked about him, saying the boy had acculturated so well, he would become a redneck eventually.
"I ain't a redneck!" his son protested, imitating some of his classmates, with an upswinging lilt on the last syllable "neck."
"Don't use that kinda language," his mother warned him.
"Yes, ma'am."
They all laughed. Actually, like Taotao, Nan and Pingping had begun to adapt to life here as well. Sometimes Pingping made grits for breakfast, and they often ate kale and collard and mustard greens. Nan and Taotao also liked pork rinds, boiled peanuts, fried okra, hush puppies, barbecue sauce. But the boy disliked the cheese here, which indeed had a dull taste compared with that in the Northeast. Corn bread had become a favorite of theirs, like a kind of pastry, and they'd buy it whenever it was on sale. Back in China, Pingping and Nan had lived on corn buns for many years, but that was a different kind, with no sugar or milk mixed into the cornmeal. It was pure corn, one hundred percent. One day Pingping cooked a few corn buns-the Chinese type-for Taotao, who had asked her for them several times, but the boy, after taking a bite, wouldn't touch it again. "Tastes like crap!" he said.
Unlike him, his parents each ate a whole bun with relish. They also brought one to Tammie. At the sight of it, the waitress got excited, but after having a morsel, she frowned and said, "You mainlanders always insist on the reunification with Taiwan, but I bet no Taiwanese wants to eat this stuff. You should eliminate this sort of corn buns before you talk about the reunification. This is absolutely not for human consumption."
Despite saying that, despite eating only a quarter of the bun with a piece of smoked herring as Pingping suggested, Tammie was pleased by the Wus' sharing it with her. She wrapped the remainder of the bun and took it home to show her roommates.
2
FOR TWO YEARS Nan had often feared that his wife or son might fall ill, because they had no health insurance. Nan had once known a young man living in downtown Boston who was a Canadian citizen; the fellow had never bought any medical insurance, so if he had an illness, he'd go to Montreal to see his doctor. Nan wished his family could do that.
He talked with Jinsheng Yu, who had once served as a captain in the Chinese People's Liberation Army and was now a reputable insurance agent used by many Asians and Latinos in the Atlanta area. Jinsheng told him that it would cost $860 a month to get the standard health insurance for his family. There was no way the Wus could afford that. At the suggestion of Jinsheng, Nan bought only the emergency coverage for his family for about $90 a month. This was the best he could do. Such a minimum protection, however, did calm him down some. He knew that a lot of Asian immigrants had no medical insurance whatsoever. If they were ill, they'd first go to an herbal shop. With few exceptions, Chinese herbalists are also doctors and can treat ailments and prescribe herbs. Some of them in the Atlanta area had been professors in medical schools back in China, but they couldn't practice here because they specialized only in Chinese medicine and couldn't speak English, so were unable to pass the professional exams. Apprehensive of lawsuits, many of them avoided treating whites and blacks, to whom they sold only herbs and patent pills and boluses.
The Wus didn't believe in Chinese medicine despite its holistic approach, despite its emphasis on the balances between yin and yang and between hot and cold winds in the body, but their friend
Janet often asked Pingping about herbs. Janet had once been treated by an acupuncturist for her back injury, so she was fascinated by Chinese medicine. In addition, she also wanted to know if there was an herbal remedy for infertility, of which Pingping wasn't sure.
One afternoon, toward the end of May, Janet came to the Gold Wok, wearing pedal pushers and a thick ring on her second toe. Unlike other days, she overstayed her midafternoon break. She and Pingping were sitting in a corner booth, chitchatting and tittering while Tammie was wiping with a sponge the cruets and saltshakers on the dining tables, a basin of warm water on a stool beside her. On the wall beyond them pranced and frolicked the horses and foals in the mural painted a decade before. Putting her long-fingered hand on Pingping's forearm, Janet said, "I have something to ask you."
"What?"
"Would you like to have another baby?" "I love babies, but I can't."
"Why?"
"I must make money and help Nan and Taotao. Nan like to have a lotta kids, but we can't afford."
"What if somebody gives you money, lots of money?" "What you mean?"
"I mean, I'd love to pay you to have a baby for Dave and me." "I don't understand."
"Dave and I cannot have a baby no matter how hard we try. It's my problem, my eggs are no good." "How can I have baby for you?"
"There are two ways." Janet grew animated, her eyes fully open and glowing. "You and Nan have another baby for us, and we'll pay you ten thousand dollars. Or you and Dave have a baby, and we'll double that."
"That's disgusting. How can I have Dave's baby!" Pingping was blushing to the ears and felt insulted.
"Don't blow your top. You must've misunderstood me. Haven't you heard the term 'surrogate mother'?" Janet scratched her own freckled arm.
"I heard it on TV, but what it mean exactly?"
"The doctor can inseminate a woman's egg with a man's sperm, and then put it into her uterus. That'll make her pregnant." "Then what?"
"After the baby is born, the father has the right to it."
"So the mother can't see her own child again?"
"In most cases she can't. She has to abide by the agreement she signed with the man and his wife before she went through the artificial insemination. But biologically she's still the mother." Janet's face tensed up, as though she were holding back a smile. "If I could get pregnant like you, I'd have a small army of kids and let them populate a whole town."
"This is hard, Janet." Pingping crimped her brows, then muttered, "Why can't you adopt baby? Lots American couples have Chinese girls."
"We've thought of that, but ideally we'd love to have a baby from you."
"Why you give me such big problem? This is very hard for me."
"Look, Pingping, you're so pretty and healthy that we'd love to have your baby. You're just a year or two younger than me, but look at you-your skin and figure are like a young girl's. You can easily pass for twenty-five."
"You don't understand, Janet. Chinese women don't get old very quick like white women before we are fifty. Chinese girls grow up slow. I have my first period when I was sixteen. But after we're fifty, we suddenly become old woman, very, very old."