As Nan was coming out from the kitchen, a young man wearing aviator glasses and a gray jersey strolled in, clamping a toothpick between his lips. Nan stepped aside to let him pass. Without a word the man went straight in. Presently Nan heard the brisk ring of a spatula scraping a pan.
" Like I told you, this place is perfect for a family like yours," Mr. Wang said to Nan.
"Does your wife speak English?" asked Mrs. Wang, a waistless and short-limbed woman wearing a seersucker shirt.
"Yes, she can do anything. By the way, I haven't seen lots of customers. There aren't many, are there?"
" Tuesday is slow," she replied.
"Can you cook?" Mr. Wang asked Nan.
"I'm a chef."
"Excellent. That will make all the difference. I can guarantee you that you'll get rich soon." "Well, I'm not so sure."
" Look, I pay the chef, the fellow in the kitchen, eight dollars an hour. I used to cook myself, but I'm too old to do that anymore. If you and your wife both work here, all the profits will go into your own pocket."
" You use a chef?" Nan was amazed, not having imagined this place could make enough to pay that kind of wages. He had taken the man wearing glasses for a family member or relative of the Wangs.
"Yes. You can go ask him how much I pay him. That's why we can't keep this place any longer-most profits end up in his wallet. It's like I'm just his job provider."
This was encouraging. If they could afford to hire a cook, the restaurant must be doing quite well.
The old couple invited him to stay for lunch, saying this was the minimum they should do for a guest from far away. Nan accepted the offer and, together with Mr. Wang, sat down at a table. He poured hot tea for his host and then for himself, and they went on talking about life in this place. The old man assured him that Gwinnett County had excellent public schools. A girl in his neighborhood had gone to Berkmar High and was at Duke now, a premed. Nan was impressed. Mr. Wang also told him that compared with the other counties in the Atlanta area, Gwinnett had a much lower realty tax. That was why many recent immigrants from Asia and Latin America preferred to live here.
Ten minutes later, Mrs. Wang stepped over gingerly and put before them a lacquered tray containing a bowl of pot-stickers, a plate of sauteed scallops and shrimp mixed with snow peas and bamboo shoots, a jar of plain rice, two pairs of connected chopsticks, and two empty bowls. "You can have a bite if you want," she told her husband.
"Sure, I'm sort of hungry." But the old man just picked up a pot-sticker, saying to Nan that he didn't eat lunch nowadays.
Nan broke his chopsticks and began eating. He wasn't impressed by the quality of the food. The pot-stickers had the stale taste of overused frying oil.
Then he asked Mr. Wang about the lease, the various taxes, the cost of utilities, and the service of the local distributor that delivered vegetables, meats, seafood, condiments. Meanwhile, three customers showed up. One ordered a takeout, and the other two, a middle-aged couple, were led by Tammie to a corner booth. The wide-eyed waitress kept glancing at Nan as if she wanted to speak to him but withheld her words.
After lunch, Nan took leave of the Wangs, saying he would come again the next morning. He tootled through several residential areas in Lilburn and Norcross, mainly along Lawrenceville and Buford highways and Jimmy Carter Boulevard, and he saw numerous homes for sale. Most of them were new and had four bedrooms and a brick front, priced between $120,000 and $130,000, but outside those subdivisions developed recently or still under construction were older houses, some priced even below $80,000. He hadn't expected that a brick ranch would sell for under $100,000. In the Boston area, a three-bedroom house of this kind would cost at least three times as much.
Nan 's car had no air-conditioning, and time and again he drank Pepsi from a bottle lying on the passenger seat. It was hot and humid, waves of heat lapping his face whenever he stepped out of the car. It was so muggy that his breathing became a little labored. For the first time in his life he physically understood the word humid. Back in Boston, when people said "It's so humid," he hadn't been able to feel it. Now at last his body could tell the difference between dry heat and damp heat. Yet the sultry weather shouldn't be a problem if his family lived here, because there was air-conditioning indoors everywhere. Back in China, he had once stayed in Jinan City for a month in midsummer; whenever he walked the streets, his shirt and pants would be soaked with sweat, and it had been hot indoors as well as outdoors. There you simply couldn't avoid sweltering in the dog days' scorching heat, but this Georgian humidity and heat shouldn't be a big deal. More heartening was that there were indeed many Asian immigrants living in the northeastern suburbs of Atlanta. Within four or five miles, Nan saw one Chinese and two Korean churches. Without question this was a good, safe place.
That night he called his wife and told her what he had seen and heard. Pingping was so impressed that she urged him to clinch the deal with Mr. Wang the next day, paying a deposit that should be less than twenty percent of the agreed price. Also, she warned him not to haggle too much. One or two thousand dollars wouldn't make much difference as long as the business was solid.
Before hanging up, she said in English, "I miss you, I love you, Nan!" Somehow her words sounded more natural from a thousand miles away. He hadn't heard her speak to him so passionately for a long time.
"I love you too." Despite saying that, he wasn't sure of his emotions. He still didn't have intense feelings for her, but he felt attached to her and understood that they had become more or less insep-arable-neither of them could have survived without the other in this land, and more important, their child needed them. If they moved to Georgia, it would mean they'd have to live more like husband and wife from now on. In a sense he wasn't displeased with that prospect, since whenever he was with Pingping, he felt at peace. Still, these days his thoughts had often turned to Beina, who seemed to accompany him wherever he went, enticing him into reveries. When he closed his eyes at night, her vivacious face often emerged, as if she were teasing him or eager to talk with him. Then he'd again smell the grassy scent of her hair. If only he could love Pingping similarly so that she could replace that woman in his mind, who was, he knew, merely a flighty coquette.
Late the next morning, toward eleven, he went to the Gold Wok again, but he didn't immediately go in. He parked a short distance from the restaurant and stayed in the car, waiting to see how many customers would appear. It was drizzling, the powdery rain blurring the windshield. It wasn't hot, so he didn't mind staying in the parking lot for a while, listening to a preacher on the radio. The man was speaking about a verse from Matthew, expounding on the necessity of "fresh wineskins for new wine." Nan was fascinated by his eloquence and passion despite the man's oddly hoarse, croaking voice. Meanwhile, in less than half an hour, five people turned up at the Gold Wok, three of whom appeared to be Mexican workers from the construction site nearby. They looked like regulars, and when they came out, they each held a tall cup of soft drink besides the food in Styrofoam boxes.