After a moment San-xiang gets up and goes back into the kitchen and returns with a plate full of peanuts, candied walnuts and ersatz quail eggs. I hate ersatz quail eggs, but I carefully taste everything.
I am relieved that I have to get up early tomorrow, it will provide me with an excuse to leave early.
Dinner progresses pretty much as the rest of the evening has, that is to say, laboriously. The food is good; pork stuffed with hard cooked eggs, dumplings, a fresh salad, and lastly soup. Foreman Qian and I talk business and in the course of the evening San-xiang says hardly anything to me. I keep waiting to hear her speak. Her voice, when she does speak, is high and soft, a little girl's voice. I know she is in her early twenties. A very sheltered girl, I think.
At nine I apologize and say I must be at work early the next day, I have a strict boss. Foreman Qian laughs. "It has been good to have you, we don't have guests often."
I am not surprised, considering that they seem to have little social grace. "I have had a wonderful evening," I lie.
"I realize that you two have not had much chance to get to know each other," Foreman Qian says. "Next you must spend some time together."
San-xiang glances sideways at her mother. I feel the color start to rise in my face. Why does his suggestion sound somehow illicit? Not sexual, but I feel compromised. "Yes," I agree. "Perhaps next time we will have more chance to talk."
"Perhaps on Saturday, you two might take the time to get to know each other."
Lenin and Mao Zedong. But I beam like an idiot. "That would be very nice," I say. "Saturday."
"Fine," Foreman Qian says, "you decide what you should do. And I will see you tomorrow."
The door closes and I am standing in the hall. I stare at the closed door.
Oh shit.
"Perhaps," I suggest to Foreman Qian, "your daughter would like to go to a vid with me." This is a nasty comedy we play, one of Shakespeare's problem comedies, like Measure for Measure. A tragedy that has lost it's nerve and is trying desperately to pair principals who have no business with each other.
He nods, he is doing accounts. After he has finished whatever he is writing he looks up at me. "I think you with her to kite race go. Often you tell me you to kite race go. Hao buhao?"
"I don't know. Maybe kite race have no interest," I say, falling into Chinglish.
"This time, first time my daughter to kite race go. She tell me it have interest."
"Ah, good," I say. "We to kite race will go."
I don't want to take her to the kite races, they don't start until 9:30 and if I took her to a vid I could take her at 7:30 and have her home by 11:30, midnight at the latest. If she's as charming as she was at dinner it's going to be a night that will feel like six months anyway.
So Saturday I again present myself at Flat Sixteen at the building on Bay Shore. The door is opened by Liu Su-ping, San-xiang's mother, and I am forced to make small talk while San-xiang finishes getting ready. She finally appears in tights and a long red jacket. She has nice taste in clothes but the night already has the same out-of-synch quality as all those times in Middle School when I took a girl out. At least now I am not hoping that something will arouse some sort of latent heterosexuality.
We are told to have a good time and leave. She watches the floor, and then the numbers in the elevator. I resist the impulse to say, 'Nice weather.'
We walk towards the subway and suddenly she says in English, "I want to tell you I'm very sorry about this."
"Nothing to be sorry about," I say brightly.
She glances up at me, that same sidelong glance she gives her mother. "I know you didn't plan to spend your Saturday night dragging me to the kite races. I know you are doing this because of my dad. You probably have a girlfriend." The last with such bitterness I am taken aback, even as I find myself thinking her English is good.
"No," I answer honestly, "I don't have a girlfriend."
"Look, we'll go to the kite races for awhile, then I'll take a cab home and you can do whatever you want to do."
The world is unnaturally cruel to ugly girls. "Why don't we just go to the kite races and not worry about it," I say. "Have you ever been?"
"No, I've only seen them on the vid."
"Well, they're better when you're there."
I pay her way into the subway and we head for Manhattan and get off at Union Square. We don't talk on the subway but then the subway is loud. At Union Square we head for the Huang Tunnel pedestrian walkway and come up in Washington Square Park, where the race begins and ends. Washington Square is packed on Saturday night. I buy us a ticket for the stands because I'd much prefer to jack in. "Would you like something to drink? A beer?" I ask.
She shakes her head.
"Don't be polite," I say, smiling, "I'm a New Yorker. I'm going to have a beer. Did you eat dinner?" She lets me buy her a beer and I get a bag of finger dumplings and find our seats. I even buy two programs, although usually I just use the board.
We sit down, she holding her beer carefully. I watch for awhile but she doesn't drink. Maybe she doesn't like beer.
"How old were you when you came to New York?" I ask.
"Nine," she says.
"Do you like it?"
"I hated it at first, but I guess it's all right." She shrugs, "Places are pretty much the same, underneath."
"Do you think?" I ask. "I've never been anywhere but New York, except once when I was six and we went to San Diego to see my grandparents. It seemed different."
"Things are different from place to place," she says. " New York is really very different from China, not as-" she pauses, diplomatically searching for the word.
"We're backward," I supply, grinning.
"Not backward," she says. "Things are less advanced, maybe. I used to think I was unhappy because my father was in trouble and we had to come here, but now I don't think it makes any difference. If you're a certain kind of person, you'll be unhappy wherever you are."
I have no doubt she considers herself that certain kind of person.
"Are you happy?" she asks.
"Do you mean at this moment, or with my life?"
"With your life. Answer the first thing you think."
"No," I say.
"Do you think you would be happy in China?"
"I don't know," I say, "I've never been to China."
"Do you want to go?"
I wonder if she is playing a game. Does she know that her father has dangled China in front of me as her dowry? "Sure," I make it sound as nonchalant as I can, "I wouldn't mind going to China. I'd like to see China."
"Would you like to live there?"
"Go to school there? Live there forever?" In China deviance is a capital offence, I don't know about living in a country where my natural tendancies could see me end up with the traditional rememdy of a bullet in the back of the head.
"It doesn't make any difference if you did or you didn't," she says, "because you would still be you. And if you were unhappy here, you'd be unhappy there."
"But much of our unhappiness is caused by social conditions," I say.
"That's naïve socialism," with some disgust.
Actually it's evasive on my part. What started us on this conversation? Perhaps my expression gives away my unease.
"I'm sorry," she says. "I was just trying to explain."
She is fascinating to look at. Her teeth are straight, her hair nice, her clothes lovely. But she has no delicacy of feature. Her nose is too broad, her lips are narrow, her forehead too low. And she has no chin. It is an amazingly simian face. I find myself drawn back again and again to studying her. Where did that face come from? Foreman Qian is not handsome, but his face is rounder. And her mother, Liu Su-ping, is no beauty, but she doesn't seem to possess any of the features I find in her daughter's face.