For the rest of the day, Nan and Pingping talked about the bully duck, which must have stayed in their yard for a whole night. The drake had been the strongest of the brood, but when it was injured, it had been left to die alone and none of the flock had accompanied it. All the other ducks perched in the shady bushes on the other shore, sleeping, feeding, and mating as usual. Once in a while they'd get into the water, frolicking or catching fish or insects. Their life wasn't in the least disrupted by their ex-leader's absence. Pingping sighed, "It's just like human beings-when you're weak, you're left to die alone."
To their amazement, two days later, the bully drake led the flock swimming in the lake again, its head raised high, and it quacked as lustily as before. Again it would chase female waterfowl. These ducks and the mallards were very fond of the Wus' backyard. They'd bask in the sun on the shore and lay eggs in the clumps of monkey grass. The lake couldn't sustain too many of them, so Pingping left only ten of the duck eggs in the grass to be hatched. She took the rest home and salted them in a jar of brine.
5
TAOTAO had been on a Scholars Bowl team, but his parents made him quit because he'd miss classes, having to travel frequently for the tournaments, and because when they stayed at a motel, two boys would share one bed, which Taotao disliked. Furthermore, he didn't learn much from the answers to the questions-to win, all you needed was a strong memory and quick response. Still, he was unhappy about leaving the team and often threw a fit at home, yelling at his father.
He wrote an essay about the injured drake for his English class and got an A for it. Mrs. Ashby, his teacher, put "Super!" on his homework, which pleased him and his parents. Nan also wrote about the incident, but he couldn't complete the poem, whose ending simply didn't work no matter how hard he tried. By chance Taotao saw a draft of the poem Nan had thrown away. Outraged, he told his father, "That's my story. You shouldn't steal from me."
His parents were stumped. Nan said, "W-what do you mean?"
"I wrote about the duck already. If you did the same, you committed plagiarism."
"What's that?" asked his mother.
"Stealing ozzers' ideas," Nan explained, then turned to his son. "It's our story. We all took part in rescuing zer duck. And I didn't use any of your ideas or sentences and my speaker is zer duck. How can you accuse me of plagiarism?"
"But I've already written about it. You can't use it again."
"Who says I can't?" Nan was losing his temper, his eyeballs throbbing.
"The law says."
"Give me a break! You're not a lawyer."
"Fuck you!" The boy dropped his cereal bowl on the dining table and stood up.
"Say that again!" Nan jumped to his feet and grabbed at his son. Then he stopped and withdrew his hand, just glaring at him.
Pingping intervened, "Taotao, you apologize to Daddy. You curse him first, you must apologize."
Ignoring her order, the boy hoisted his book bag over his shoulder and tore out the door for the bus stop. These days he was often annoyed by Nan, who would in secret search his drawers and book bag every two or three days to make sure he was drug-free, and who would read his e-mail messages whenever he forgot to shut off his account. How many times had he told him not to invade his privacy? But his father just wouldn't mend his ways, treating him as if he were a culprit on parole. What a stupid asshole.
As Taotao was striding away, his mother caught up with him. She grasped his upper arm and stopped him, saying, "You must apologize to Daddy."
"He started it. Ow! Don't break my humerus!" "I don't care who start. You curse him, you apologize." She was still clutching his arm. "No, I won't!"
"He's your father. In whole world, if you can find another man who is better to you than Daddy, you don't need apologize. If you cannot find such man, you must apologize to him."
Taotao looked at her with a knotted brow, then ambled back to the house. Yanking open the screen door, he shouted, "I'm sorry, Daddy, okay?"
"That's fine," said Nan.
Although the exchange with his son spoiled Nan 's desire to work on his poem about the injured duck, he was amazed that during the whole altercation none of them had spoken a single Chinese word. He went out to the deck and swept away the pollen and dust, pleased he had contained his temper this time.
On occasion Taotao still showed animosity toward Nan. One sentence he often hurled at him was "You were never there." Nan knew what he meant-the boy still resented Nan 's absence from his early childhood. Yet Nan would reply, "Who said I wasn't there? I was the first person who saw you coming out of your mahther. Your head appeared first, with sleek hair." That would exasperate his son more.
Without doubt, Taotao viewed Nan as a kind of rival in the household. Whenever possible, he'd strive to monopolize his mother's attention and love, interrupting Nan's conversations with Pingping or sitting between his parents, or pinning blame on Nan whenever something went awry. Nan told him to act his age. The boy was almost thirteen, five feet tall, but he wouldn't change. "You have Oedipus complex and may end up a mama's boy," Nan often told him. That would make matters worse. Enraged, Taotao would call him "douche bag." Nan didn't know this word, nor could he find it in his dictionaries. He assumed that it must be a slang neologism, too recent for lexicographers to pick up. He once asked his son how to spell it, but the boy wouldn't tell him.
Sometimes Nan wondered what it would have been like if he'd had a daughter instead of a son. Deep down, he'd have preferred a girl, who might have treated him with more affection and attachment, and who might have helped him more with the work at the restaurant-not like Taotao, who would feel ashamed of clearing tables in the presence of the kids he knew and would complain to his parents, "Haven't I been a servant boy long enough?" Nan wouldn't respond to that, though he felt Pingping had spoiled their son. If only they'd had a daughter.
6
IN THE SPRING of 1996 Pingping found herself pregnant. The expectation of a new arrival in the family agitated everyone. Taotao was furious and said his parents were outrageous. "I'm almost thirteen. Am I going to be an uncle of the baby?" he blustered.
Nan countered, "Once you go to college, we need anozzer child at home."
"I don't want any siblings."
Pingping remained silent. The boy seemed afraid that the new arrival would become the center of the family. "Selfish brat," said his father. "Shut the hell up!"
Nan throttled his impulse to yell back at his son. In fact, he was the only one in the family who was happy about Pingping's pregnancy, because he imagined that the baby might provide a new focus for his life. He wouldn't mind spending the rest of his years raising the child if it was a girl.
Unlike him, Pingping was frightened, for she was already forty and might not be able to give birth easily. Also, this wasn't like in China, where her parents, both doctors, could help her. Here she was alone and couldn't rely on Nan, who wasn't good at taking care of others. More worrisome, the medical expenses would be enormous since their health insurance covered only emergencies. What if she died in childbirth? Then Taotao would be motherless and Nan would be wretched too. There were so many risks to consider that she had gotten restless. She told Nan about her fear, but he replied, "Don't worry. Everything will work out fine. We have some extra money now and can afford to raise another child."