That year was the happiest I have ever had. Wudeng then was still a small town, and we woke up with the roosters, the shouts of fruit sellers and dumpling vendors on their early rounds, and gusts of cold air through the windows that smelled like the river. We had a tiny table I’d nailed together out of two packing crates, and every morning we brewed a pot of Nescafé and sat together, reading, grading papers, listening to Bach or Brahms on my CD player from home. In the afternoons, after my classes, I sat with Xiyun on the front stoop, drinking tea out of glass jars, watching the children running home from school. He could quote long passages from Du Fu, Li Bai, Su Shi, and Li Qingzhao, but his favorite was Tao Qian, the first and greatest recluse of Chinese poetry:
From the eastern hedge, I pluck chrysanthemum flowers,
And idly look toward the southern hills.
The mountain air is beautiful day and night,
The birds fly back to roost with one another.
I know that this must have some deeper meaning,
I try to explain, but cannot find the words.
What I loved the most were the times when an old woman from the neighborhood would stop with a load of vegetables on one shoulder and complain loudly about her arthritis, or pass on a shred of gossip, without giving me a second glance, as if my presence was no more remarkable than anyone else’s. I felt almost as if I had grown a second skin, or passed into some ghostly state, a hologram. Of course, that was a fantasy. Everyone knew we would leave, eventually, that Wendy had married me to leave. It was almost a point of pride. But in that process, somehow, I had become part of the story.
Would I have wanted it any other way? Would I have wanted to stay for good? It’s pointless to dwell on hypotheticals. Modern Chinese law does technically permit foreigners to become naturalized, but the spirit of the law is jus sanguinis. The law of blood. Foreign-born children of Chinese parents can give up their citizenship and return, with difficulty, but no Westerner has ever actually become a Chinese citizen. There are permanent residency cards for a tiny privileged few — millionaire investors, tenured professors — but for anyone else, for me, to stay in China, even if I could keep a job, would have meant a yearly trip to Seoul to renew my visa. A permanent temporary worker. Wendy and I could have had ten children and it would be the same. Beyond all that, I wouldn’t have been able to stand it, as the only one, the Wudeng laowai, the Pearl S. Buck of the village — a freak of nature, like an albino, or a six-fingered man. I loved it, but only in the most impossible way; and then I took Wendy away with me. Though she knew it was a terrible cliché, and it was hideously embarrassing, especially in front of my friends, she never tired of saying America is my dream come true. We lived in the States for eight years, and never went back to China, even after she got her green card. I don’t need to, she said, when I questioned her. I’ve had enough China for one lifetime.
—
The great miracle of our relationship was that we rarely needed to discuss anything, our lives so perfectly intertwined. At least that was how it seemed to me. When we moved to Cambridge, on one student stipend and a loan from my parents, she walked into the Yenching Library and was hired as a cataloging clerk on the spot, complete with an approved work visa. Three years later, after I finished my general exams, in the fall of 2000, she said, I want to go off the pill; we conceived Meimei just after Christmas.
It’s true that she was extremely quiet, eerily so, by American standards, and I had to press her to tell me what she was thinking. At times I grew exhausted and snapped at her, sure she was silently judging me, playing the passive-aggressive. But for the most part she was just watching. The world was new to her. I’ve never met anyone less inclined to make up her mind about abstractions. In day-to-day life she simply never needed to deliberate.
There’s something about you, she said to me, once, after we’d been in Cambridge six months. You’re not like other Americans. It’s a surprise to me. You’re — what is it? Quiet? Cool? Calm?
You tell me.
Bland, she said. Is that right? Not as an insult. As a compliment.
Are you saying I’m more Chinese?
Don’t be ridiculous. What does that mean, more Chinese?
More like a typical Chinese person.
I don’t know any typical Chinese person. But I think I understand you. You’re like a character from an old story. Like a monk. A Taoist monk. Passive.
That’s not a compliment. To an American, anyway.
Careful. Can I say that? Careful?
I am careful. That much is true. I hold back. I reserve judgment. I take more time than I should to consider the consequences, you could say. I was that way in college, before we met, all through our relationship, in the aftermath, and now. My entire adult life.
There’s a reason for that, I should have told her. Though I never did. And I can’t tell you, either, quite yet.
—
My apartment — the upstairs floor of a town house on Palmer Street, in Charles Village — is really still just our old house, re-created in miniature. She bought the furniture, re-sanded and re-stained it; she chose the gauzy curtains, the kilim in the living room, the calligraphy scrolls, the old Shanghai movie posters framed above the dining table, souvenirs Xiyun picked up in the Fifties. In the kitchen I’ve framed three of Meimei’s paintings, from what we called her green phase: pictures of horses, elephants, mice, cars, all made of neat green balloons and labeled, helpfully, in her three-year-old scrawl.
• • •
The circumstances of the accident were never fully explained, at least in a way I could understand, but the bare outline is this: Wendy and Meimei were driving east on Storrow Drive, on a wet November day, in a car she’d borrowed from a friend, an old Audi station wagon. The brakes failed, or the car hydroplaned, or probably, most likely, both: it crashed through a guardrail, rolled over a narrow strip of grass, and went into the Charles, and they drowned. There’s no way to avoid saying it. Wendy managed to get out of her seat belt and into the back, and their bodies were intertwined, of course; she was trying to unbuckle Meimei’s restraining harness.
For a month I hardly left the house. My bosses at WBUR — I’d gone to work there two years before, while still working on my dissertation, and had put off looking for an academic job until I realized I no longer wanted one — had given me six weeks’ paid leave, and I spent most of it in my attic study, or on the living room couch, compulsively reading. I read War and Peace, The Man Without Qualities, The Tale of Genji, the complete Journey to the West, The Dream of the Red Chamber. At night, to relax, I watched two or three movies in a row. One night I watched Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, all nine hours, and woke up on the couch at noon the next day, freezing, the blanket fallen off, hardly able to move. A friend of mine from graduate school, now a professor at the University of Hawaii, sent me a care package of his own hand-grown hydroponic indica packed in Kona coffee cans; I smoked it twice a day, at eleven and six, to give myself an appetite, and then went out and ate unbearably spicy meals. Shrimp vindaloo, extra-hot. Jerk chicken with pickled Scotch bonnet peppers on the side. Guizhou-style lamb hot pot. Otherwise I couldn’t taste anything at all.