When Nan told the Wangs that he wanted to buy the restaurant, they looked relieved. Then began the bargaining. Nan managed to beat down the price by $3,000 on the grounds that he didn't like the horse murals and the Formica tables in the booths. This was the first time in his life that he had ever haggled with someone, and he took great pride in the result, feeling like a real businessman. The amount he'd saved translated into 25,000 yuan, thirty times more than his annual salary back in China. Somehow, whenever Nan handled a large sum of money, he couldn't help but convert dollars into yuan in his mind, and the habit made him very frugal. At times, though, he wished he could grow out of this mind-set, because he believed that here people got rich not just by how much they saved, but more important, by how much they made, and that in America one should live like an American.
" When will you come and take over?" Mr. Wang asked Nan with a little chuckle.
"Probably in a month or so."
"Too long. How about two weeks?"
"I'll try. It shouldn't be a big problem. I'll let you know soon after I get home."
Nan wrote him a check for $2,200, a ten percent deposit. The Wangs asked that he keep Tammie, who had been working for them since her late teens, almost a decade by now. "That's fine," Nan promised. He was going to need help anyway. Currently they paid her one dollar an hour because she kept all the tips.
That afternoon Nan hit the interstate, heading back north.
3
HE RETURNED to Woodland two days later. Pingping was overjoyed to hear about the restaurant and the Atlanta suburbs. They were both pleased to know Mr. Wang was from Taiwan, for generally speaking, the Taiwanese were more trustworthy than the main-landers, who often ignored rules and laws. The Wus knew some people who'd been swindled even by their fellow townsmen from the mainland.
One thing Nan and Pingping had forgotten to consider was where to live. Nan had noticed some apartment buildings in Norcross, a neighboring town north of Lilburn, but he hadn't brought back any information on housing. So the following day he called the Gold Wok and asked Mrs. Wang about affordable housing in the vicinity. The old woman said she was going to mail Nan an apartment book. " There are some copies outside. They just arrived," she told him.
He remembered seeing a red wire rack beside the entrance to the restaurant that held several kinds of booklets and leaflets. "Can you send it along right away?" he asked.
"I'm going to do it today."
Everything seemed to have fallen in place, and the Wus began planning to move. Even Taotao had to decide what toys and books to take and what to donate to the thrift shop behind the town library, run by the Unitarian church.
The main difficulty was Nan 's books, most of which were in the boxes stored in the small shed attached to Heidi's garage. Years ago when Nan still planned to return to China, he had collected more than forty boxes of used books, determined to establish his own library once he went back. But when they had come to stay with the Masefields, Nan had had to leave the books behind in Watertown. He'd talked his landlord, Mr. Verdolino, into renting him a basement room for sixty-five dollars a month and had kept his three thousand volumes there for two years. Later he realized that the amount he paid for the rent would eventually buy him those books again. Ping-ping urged him to get rid of them, since he couldn't go back to China anymore. Nan took some boxes of the books to local libraries and bookstores, but no one wanted them, all telling him that the titles were too specialized. Indeed, who among general readers could use a book like Anna Akhmatova's Complete Poems in the Russian or Hans Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations? Heartbroken and having nowhere to send the books, Nan had just left the few boxes next to a bunch of trash cans on a sidewalk lined with dirty snowbanks. The following week he threw away another three boxes.
For a month afterward he felt miserable, almost ill. If only there were a way to keep those books. Try as he might, he couldn't steel himself to dump them all. Fortunately, a friend of his who was returning to China came and picked thirteen boxes from his collection. Nan helped her pack them up and even drove a van with her all the way to New Jersey to have them shipped to Tianjin City by sea. Then he persuaded Heidi to let him use a little space in her shed in which to store the remaining eleven boxes. Now, to save postage, he would have to get rid of some of them again. In America every town had a library; why should he keep hundreds of titles at home? After carefully going through them, he kept about two thirds of the books, seven boxes in all, and discarded the rest.
Everything else was easy to pack; the Wus didn't have many belongings. Pingping phoned Heidi, who was on Cape Cod with her children, to let her know of their imminent move. Heidi sounded excited and also relieved. Two days later she returned to Woodland. She gave Pingping $1,200 to buy mattresses-twelve one-hundred-dollar bills in an envelope-since the Wus couldn't take along the ones they had. She also told her to clean their attic apartment before they left. Livia had come back with her mother too, and on the way she'd bought Taotao a Rubik's Cube. Now, as the adults were talking, the girl and the boy were in the living room, Livia showing him how to work the puzzle. The girl had an appointment with her orthodontist at eleven a.m. to adjust her braces, so a few minutes later Heidi called her out, ready to go.
"Keep in touch, Taotao," said Livia as she followed her mother to the passenger van.
"Sure." The boy nodded.
"Remember, I'm your friend." She waved her thin, short-nailed hand. Her flip-flops seemed too big, pattering on the driveway. "Sure, thanks for the cube."
The Wus waved as Heidi's van drew away. The boy returned to the living room, to the unsolved puzzle.
The Atlanta apartment book arrived, a thick volume containing hundreds of listings. Pingping and Nan were impressed by the rents, which were much more affordable than in the Boston area. They folded several pages that showed housing in the eastern suburbs. But to their dismay, there was only one listing in Lilburn, and that place was too pricey, so they had to look for an apartment in an adjacent town. They noticed that housing was much cheaper in some areas near Stone Mountain, a town six miles south of Lilburn in Dekalb County. Nan phoned two of those places. Without difficulty he rented a three-bedroom apartment at Peachtree Terrace, which was within Gwinnett County and, according to the map, just a fifteen-minute drive from the restaurant. Nan wanted a study for himself, hence the third bedroom. Ideally, Pingping had hoped they could walk to work, but Nan told her that unlike Boston, the city of Atlanta sprawled in every direction, one having to drive to get around, so they'd better stay at Peachtree Terrace. The rent was a reasonable $550 a month.
A UPS van came to pick up their boxes. Altogether there were thirty-five. The driver was a tall woman with a squarish jaw and a tanned face. She wore the brown uniform, the short-sleeved shirt showing her muscular arms and bulging chest. Nan helped her load the shipment and was impressed by the ease with which she lifted the heavy boxes and lodged them onto the shelves in the van. He liked to see the woman work with her sinewy hands and could feel energy radiating from her sturdy body.
When everything was loaded, she assured him that the whole batch would arrive intact. With a ballpoint attached to a clipboard she scribbled an X at the bottom of a form for his signature, then handed the paperwork to him. He signed it and asked her to handle their boxes carefully, though he didn't reveal that the shipment contained a microwave, a roaster, a computer, even a TV set. He gave her a ten for tip, and she beamed, panting a little. She promised to stick fragile labels to all their belongings when she got back to the local UPS headquarters.