We’ve stopped at the end of the dried goods aisle, the aisle of staples, and I’m teetering on the edge of the snacks aisle: lychee gummies, shrimp chips, dried squid, mango slices in foil, and three or four rows of Pocky, that bizarre Japanese name for pretzel sticks dipped in coatings of one or another artificially flavored candy. Pocky comes in cigarette-sized packs with flip-top lids, and there is, in addition to strawberry, raspberry, and vanilla, Men’s Pocky, plain chocolate, in a distinguished pine-green. It’s never been clear to me whether this is an elaborate inside joke on the part of the manufacturer or a sincere message to the consumer. There is Men’s Pocky, but not Women’s Pocky. Am I supposed to be reassured, not having to make a choice?
Racial reassignment surgery.
Yeah, of course, surgery. But it’s more than that. It’s a long process.
Meaning, I have to say — I strain to form the words — meaning you were always black. Like a sex change. Inside you always felt black.
Damn, he says. You get right to the point, don’t you? I don’t remember you being this direct, Kelly.
Martin, I say, without quite being able to look at him — I cast my eyes up to the stained ceiling tile, the fluorescent panel lamps dotted with dead flies — we’re not going to see each other again, are we? Isn’t that the point? You wanted a new life. I’m certainly not going to intrude.
Anyone can get a new life, he says. It’s easy to fall off the map. I don’t recall you ever trying to track me down. And all of you guys left, anyway. Am I just repeating the obvious here? I never thought I’d see you back in Baltimore. You get hired by Hopkins?
No, I say. I’m not an academic. Not anymore. I work in public radio.
No kidding? You mean, what is it, 91.1? The Hopkins station?
No, the other one. WBCC. 107.3.
Oh, yeah. Right. Way up at the top of the dial. I always wondered why there were two.
Are you a listener?
Heck no, he says. I listen to XM. No offense, I like the news sometimes, but not all that turtleneck-sweater, mandolin, Lake Wobegon stuff. Not my thing.
Yeah. I understand.
You do? You understand?
I read the surveys, runs through my mind, that’s my job, I know the demographics. I could break down our audience into the single percentiles. Look, I say, I mean, it’s not a secret. It’s a problem. We think about it every day. We want to be a station for the whole city, you know, Baltimore, and we’re just not. It’s an issue. I’m trying, believe me.
He whistles through his teeth. Maybe you’re the man for me, he says. I need somebody to help me with this project. This idea I have. A communicator. He takes a slim billfold from his front pocket — the long, old-fashioned kind, meant to fit in a blazer — and takes out a glossy orange business card. Martin Wilkinson, Orchid Imports LLC.
You changed your name.
You know many brothers named Martin Lipkin?
It’s just one in a long list of inconceivable things I’ve had to conceive of in the last fifteen minutes, so I nod nonchalantly.
And what, you sell orchids?
No, no. Electronics. My wife came up with the name.
Okay, I say, nodding again, a yes-man.
So you’ll email me? Can I buy you lunch?
Is that really a good idea? I ask him. I mean, I know you. Aren’t I kind of a liability? A piece of personal history?
I trust you, he says, staring at me, boxing me in, so that I’m forced to look straight at his coffee-colored pupils — just the same as before, at least as far as I remember. Listen, he says, we can act like this never happened. If that’s what you want. Either way, you’ll respect my privacy. I know that much. So I’m just asking: you want to come with me a little further down this road, Kelly? You curious? You want the whole story?
Keeping my head straight, our eyes level, in this Vulcan-mind-meld game he seems to want to play, I conduct the briefest possible mental inventory of my life: an empty apartment; an enormous, shockingly expensive storage unit out in Towson, filled with boxes I’ll never open; a job, if you can call it a job; a few friends, widely spaced; a 500-page manuscript on two dead poets, gathering dust in its library binding up in Cambridge; a wall of books in five languages I never want to read again.
Yes, I say, yes, I’ll have lunch with you, Martin.
See you then. He pulls his hood back up, hunches his shoulders, and disappears through the door, back into the tepid weather, the diffident sunshine, the blank, anonymous world that seems almost to have created him.
3
When I lived there, in the waning gray years of Deng Xiaoping’s senility, Weiming College was a cluster of dark square buildings with tile roofs, in a kind of sinicized Art Nouveau style, built on a bluff over the Yellow River. The architect, a German named Manfred Schepler, had built the college for Seventh-day Adventist missionaries in the 1920s but, dissatisfied with the design, committed suicide by hurling himself off the roof of the chapel into the river. That was the local legend, at any rate. My apartment, a cavernous space intended to house six foreign teachers, looked out over the river, almost invariably shrouded in mist. Swallows nested on a ledge above my windows, and all day long the shadows of their diving flickered across the walls. I mentioned to Wendy that it gave me an odd feeling, being continually reminded of Schepler’s suicide, and she pursed her lips and shook her head and said, no, that’s not a memory we like to revisit.
Revisit was exactly the kind of word she used all the time when we first met. She added English words to her vocabulary through careful and unselfconscious practice, without the slightest indication of an eagerness, an anxiousness, to learn. In this way, she stood apart from every other Chinese person I knew in Wudeng. There were many, thank God, who were completely indifferent to English, but those who did want to learn looked at me as a kind of mobile language-instruction machine that had to be pumped from time to time with offers of homemade local food and foreign exchange certificates. I barricaded myself in my apartment to get away from them, the first two months I lived there, subsisting on a dwindling supply of macaroni and cheese I’d brought with me by the case from the Park n’ Shop in Hong Kong, and watching the VHS movies the previous teacher had abandoned before leaving for a hard-seat trek to Kashgar.
And then she appeared, with her back to me, having a conversation with one of the secretaries in the Foreign Languages office when I was using the ancient mimeograph machine between classes. She saw me in the reflection of a piece of framed calligraphy, she always claims, and turned to me and said, you are the new English teacher. I hope your tenure here is satisfying.
The sensation of standing on ball bearings: tenure, in the particular place and moment. Where did this woman come from, I was thinking, whose English was better than any of the teaching faculty’s, but who seemed by all accounts to be a student, in gray slacks, too long, with a short-sleeved blue button-down shirt that barely contained her small but noticeable breasts, and a pair of gray steel glasses forked over her long, aquiline nose, that reminded me of an interviewer on a BBC talk show?
Qing Dewen was her name. Wendy, she said. My name is Wendy. I never called her anything else.
—
We were married nine months later, in a small ceremony in my parents’ backyard in New Paltz, and then afterward, the following September, in a riotous celebration at the only restaurant to speak of in Wudeng. By then I had become fluent enough in Guizhou dialect to understand the jokes men made behind my back about the red hair that sprouts from the tips of white men’s penises. We were a star couple, Wendy used to say; everyone in town knew us, and out-of-towners stopped us on the street for pictures. By then we had moved off campus and into an apartment upstairs from her parents. Her father, Qing Xiyun, had been a well-known poet before the Cultural Revolution; he’d gone to college in Shanghai and lived there for some years, working for the Cultural Bureau. When the Cultural Bureau was disbanded, he was sent to work in a tractor factory near Xian; that was where Wendy was born. After 1977 he was allowed to leave, but without a residency permit for Shanghai, he could only return to Wudeng. Now retired, officially, he worked as a night guard at the college. Wendy’s mother, too, was retired, but she worked even harder, making hand-pulled noodles at home with two assistants.