A Paper Son Read online

  “But anyway,” she said, “I think I’m supposed to be here. You need my help. Or I need yours. I’ve got to find that guy.”

  “You’re going back to New York?”

  “No. He’s here. He led me here. And don’t say I’m paranoid—it’s not paranoia if I want to find him. Besides, I think he’s on our side. I’m going to find him. We’re going to find him.”

  “And then what?” I asked.

  “Hell if I know,” she said. She took a final drag of her cigarette and flicked it into the rain. The butt flashed and vanished.

  I wanted to ask her a dozen other questions, but she didn’t know the answers to those either, any more than I did. But I could feel the weight beneath her words, the weight and the momentum. It had always been like that with her. When I’d faltered, she’d acted. When I’d sought information, she’d sought movement. She was right; I did need her. She might not have known where to take the search, but she would see to it that once a direction arose, we’d follow it to the end of wherever it led, obstacles falling along the way beneath her onslaught of profanity and pepper spray.

  I went upstairs and took a hot shower and pulled on pajamas and a bathrobe. I sat down at my desk with my laptop and found I couldn’t type, so I peeled the Band-Aids off my fingers and left them in a little beige pile alongside the keyboard. I launched into my progress reports, forcing all else from my mind. I made it through one, and then another, and I was halfway through a third when the fatigue of the day’s stresses overwhelmed me. My eyes clamped shut involuntarily; my head felt as though it weighed a thousand pounds. I pushed my computer back, folded my arms on my desk, let my head sink, and fell directly into a dream. In it I was sitting alone and cross-legged in the middle of a hot field of dead, flattened straw, directly beneath a piercing sun. The air tasted of dirt and heat. From my pores seeped not beads of sweat, but tiny red flowers.

  An ache in my bent neck woke me up. The typing, perhaps, had opened up one of the cuts on my fingers, and now I saw that there were small spots of blood on my keyboard.

  The days grow longer and the snow turns to rain, and then it stops. The village comes to life, as though it had been hibernating. Voices grow louder and more cheerful and the children run through town on legs that have been cold and idle for months, searching in the shade for clumps of snow that have yet to melt. The men hitch their plows to the water buffalo and drive them back into the fields, where they sink their tines into the mud and begin their slow treks. When the last terrace is ready they open the floodgates. As it has each year for generations, the community turns out in full strength and before long the planting is finished. The water’s surface settles and the sun migrates across a reflected sky through fields of transplanted seedlings.

  One morning later that summer Li-Yu awakens to find the village humming. She learns that one of the oldest farmers, a man named Peng-tze, who prides himself on being the earliest into the paddies, has discovered a peculiarity in this year’s crop. She rushes into the paddies along with the rest of the village, where they pull the young plants close to their eyes, using their fingertips to turn them this way and that, studying the new panicles, counting the little buds that will become rice grains. There are nearly twice as many as usual. The townspeople wade through the fields, moving as quickly as the mud and water will let them, examining plant after plant. As the reports come back from farther and farther out, the excitement builds. Every plant in every paddy looks as though it will produce nearly twice its normal number of grains.

  The farmers rush to take the news to the elders, the feng shui masters who synchronize the village’s activities with the energies and movements of the universe and the ancestors. Their chief is Hui, a short man with a deeply lined face and eyes that are barely glints. The news does not make him smile. “Such a fortune was not foreseen,” he says. “Perhaps the grains will be half as large.”

  But the excitement is more powerful than Hui’s pronouncement, particularly among the younger farmers, especially when stories begin to spread about a similar occurrence in a village in Guangxi, or maybe it was Hunan, where the grains doubled not only in number but also in size, and the village became the richest in the province. These stories circulate until they become truth, and the village erupts in revelry. An impromptu feast is planned in celebration, and within an hour two pigs and forty chickens have been slaughtered and are roasting on spits. The festivities go on for days. The farmers come out of the paddies each evening, singing. They buy liquor on credit and stay up late, toasting the crop and their farming skills, and then fall asleep at one another’s homes, bottles dropping from their hands.

  And then Peng-tze ventures out into the fields early one windy summer dawn and makes another discovery. Every rice plant ever raised in these fields has borne white flowers, but now he finds tiny red flowers emerging from between the growing grains. He examines another plant, and then another, and finds all the flowers have turned red. He rushes back to the village to report his findings, and again the other farmers fly into the paddies to examine their plants and word begins to come in from one field after another—there isn’t a single white flower anywhere to be found.

  It is one of Peng-tze’s grandchildren, a small girl with sharp eyes, who looks out over the fields and says, “Look, everything is pink,” and she is right—the low sun is making the fields blush, their flowers pulsating like warm capillaries beneath a layer of skin. Before there can be any consternation an explanation quickly emerges, irresistible in its simplicity and cheer: What better to herald this bountiful crop than flowers of red, the color of wealth and celebration? Misgivings are further quieted when men arrive all the way from the university in Canton two weeks later. They offer giant sums in exchange for several days’ lodging, access to the fields, and a few plants, which they take back with them in carefully packaged bundles, wet cloth strips wrapped around the fragile roots.

  For Li-Yu, the promise of the crop is a windfall. Mae sends the maids out for new furniture, new fabrics, new dishes for the kitchen. Suddenly there are piles of displaced, forgotten things around the house, with nowhere to go. Li-Yu steals as much of it as she can. She transports sack after sack to Zhang’s shop. She has done this now for so many years without attracting suspicion that she has grown careless, and now among this glut of riches, and with the assurance of her sisters’ promise, she grows almost reckless. Several times she leaves money out in plain sight, in her room. She creates flimsy pretenses to head to Jianghai—there is even talk among the maids that she has taken a lover there. She still does not know what the passage back to America will cost, but she writes a letter to her sisters—I have a little money, she tells them. Maybe we won’t have to wait as long. Maybe now, maybe this could be the time.

  Her children still know nothing of Zhang, or the money, or their aunts’ efforts, or her own steady determination, and now they have been here so many years she has to wonder how they’ll receive the news of the move back to California. The two of them have become fully Chinese over the years, especially Henry. At some point she realizes he has spent more of his life in China than in America. In public, he is indistinguishable from the other boys. He walks to school and back with them, speaking Cantonese as easily as he’d once spoken English, laughing loudly. And he is the heir of a grand household, with its wings and its outbuildings and its servants. They are only rice farmers, but he is a prince among them, the only son of an oldest son. When the time comes, Li-Yu will be asking him to leave much behind.

  Rose’s assimilation has been slow and painful, but she has managed to find a place to survive. She has made friends in the village, and her Cantonese is beautiful—lyrical and rounded, its angularity tempered by the English of her first years. Now she is nearing the age where in America, at least, it would not have been unusual for her to start spending time with boys. The truth is, Li-Yu doesn’t know much about her daughter anymore. The truth is, she realizes, she has let her children slip away from her. She began with th
e best of intentions: the refusal to doom them to the lives of outsiders, as foreigners, and the determination to give them the best lives they could possibly have amid these cruel circumstances. With Henry it had been easy. He had been young, and everyone had embraced him. But with Rose—with Rose she had no choice but to reel her out, to turn away from her so this girl would not be reliant on a mother who could do so little for her. Now, even though they sleep in the same room, they sometimes go for a full day or two without speaking, like strangers. It is the best thing for her, Li-Yu tells herself, on her strong days. Rose has learned to survive; she is filled with a quiet strength all her own. In Li-Yu’s worst moments, though, she wonders if perhaps she turned her back on Rose simply because she could not bear the sadness of it. Or, perhaps, it is her own monumental failure to protect her children that she can’t bear to face.

  And now maybe it has taken too long; perhaps it is too late. What does Henry even remember of California? What could have survived in his memory when she forbade him to speak of it, or to long for it? Rose has her memories, she knows, but how has she transformed them, what ramparts has she built between them and herself, out of self-preservation? Li-Yu remembers forcing them to speak Chinese upon their arrival, all those years ago, and now she wishes she’d let them cling to their English. At least at night, in their room, away from everyone else they might have been allowed to remember. She wants badly to tell them her plan, especially Rose. Do you ever think about home, she might simply ask. But it would betray too much, and she can’t take the risks—either the risk of discovery, or the risk of what might happen if she fails. It will have to wait, she knows. It will have to wait until the very hour it is time to leave.

  Meanwhile the plants continue to grow and though their stalks push toward the sun, their grain-laden heads grow heavy and begin to droop, as though they are too tired to stand. A steady wind blows into autumn, and the plants rattle and knock and sound like a thousand voices conspiring.

  ELEVEN

  That night I dreamed Kevin hadn’t made it out of the shed in time.

  ***

  By the next morning, San Francisco was a tangle of public works projects: a broken water main in the Haight, stopped-up sewers in Hunter’s Point, a sinkhole in the Outer Richmond, flooding in China Basin. The city would not be listing our retaining wall high among its priorities. The extent of governmental involvement thus far had been to ship out some intern from their engineering office who declared the hillside stable. A single strand of thin yellow tape now stretched between the tetherball poles at the edge of the asphalt, forming a childproof barrier and guaranteeing everyone’s safety.

  I didn’t know what Franklin had said to the parents yesterday, but few of them came to my door during the drop-off, and those who did were polite, deferential. Kevin was a celebrity in the hallways. Even after he’d made his way to his desk I’d catch groups of kids from other classes standing in the doorway, pointing and whispering.

  Eliza came to my desk and asked me what would happen if the rest of the retaining wall were to crumble.

  “The city says it won’t,” I said.

  She informed me that in 1966, a mudslide in Wales had buried a school and killed more than half of its students.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “That’s not going to happen.”

  “Good,” she said.

  At lunch, Franklin Nash slipped into my room, just as my last kid slipped out. “Hello, Peregrine,” he said. “Got a few minutes?”

  “Sure,” I said. I started to rise from my desk but he motioned for me to remain. I set down my pen.

  He closed my door, sat down on one of the desks in the front row and looked me directly in the eye. The winged pickles on his tie did nothing to diminish the solemnity of his gaze. “How are you holding up?” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. “A little rattled, I guess.”

  “That’s to be expected,” he said. “I’d have to wonder about you if you weren’t.” He glanced through the window, at the spot where the shed had been. “Kevin seems to be doing well, all things considered. He’s holding court out in front of the bathrooms, with about half the student body. Seems to be making the most of his newfound celebrity.”

  “He’s a good kid,” I said.

  Franklin nodded. “They are resilient at that age. But these things can have consequences that reach far beyond the immediate fallout. As you know.”

  I nodded.

  “Dr. Eliot will be working closely with him and his parents, who fortunately understand the need for such conversations in times like this. And she’ll be depending on you to keep an eye on the rest of these boys and girls and to bring it to her attention the first time you have a suspicion of something amiss.”

  “Of course.”

  “Great,” he said, opening his arms as if to hug me, though he was half the room away. Briefly I wondered if I was supposed to get up and go to him, but then he brought his hands back down and pushed himself back to his feet.

  “Thanks for helping me out yesterday,” I said.

  “Anything less would have been a dereliction of duty,” he said, with the smallest of smiles. When he was nearly to the door he stopped and turned back around. “Peregrine,” he said, “on a similar but related note. I’ve been at this a long while, and I know that some teachers come to school, teach, go home, correct their students’ papers, make dinner, and go to bed. Others go home and do other things. Pedagogy is a noble and crucial profession, but I do not pretend that it has to be all-consuming.”

  I nodded. I wasn’t sure exactly what he was talking about, but I had the sense that something inexorable was bearing down on me.

  “I make it a policy not to stick my nose into the private lives of my faculty,” he said, “but sometimes factors outside campus can become distracting. They can become . . . .” He paused, as though searching for words. “They can become detrimental to a teacher’s ability to teach at the level of his or her full potential.”

  I picked my pen back up and put it down. There was an itch on my neck; I resisted scratching it.

  “I mentioned the assistance that will be provided to Kevin and his family. Well, the district has similar resources available for faculty. Of course, I hope my teachers will think of me as one of those resources, but I’m certainly not the extent of it,” he continued.

  “Okay,” I said, so quietly I don’t think he could have heard me.

  He pulled the door open. “Don’t want anybody twisting in the wind,” he said over his shoulder. He reached up and knocked on the door frame, twice. “Take care now,” he said.

  ***

  I don’t know what impelled me to Pier 23 when school let out the next day. Maybe it was the instinct we all have to retrace our steps when we reach dead ends. Maybe it was a sense of the unfinished—Lucy’s phone call had frozen me on the threshold of that strange workshop, before I could take it all in. Perhaps there was nothing there—a storage room for some antiquated equipment, some people with no better place to meet. But there were also those quadruplets to consider, whose existence Annabel couldn’t explain.

  I zipped up my raincoat, pulled my hood up, and headed for the waterfront. Even in the sheltered bay the water was tumultuous. Gray waves churned together, their tops white and foamy. Sprays of water leapt up above the pilings and beat into the wharves. Pier 23 soon came into sight. Its big door was open and the windows of the building inside were full of light. Forklifts crisscrossed the road that led down the center of the building, shuttling into and out of the cones of orange light cast by the giant hanging fixtures. There were distant shouts, the quick beep of a horn, a faint strain of music.

  The office was empty. It looked more or less like I remembered it—clipboards, stacks of paperwork, calendars. I headed for the stairs, trying to decide what I’d ask the mahjong players if I found them there again. A doorway in the back of the building led into another lighted room, where a man in coveralls sat, hunched over a desk. When I reached the bo
ttom of the stairwell he saw me and rose suddenly.

  “Can I help you?” he said, in a way that made it clear he wasn’t offering help. He circled his desk with surprising speed. He was Chinese. The top of his head was bald, but a sweep of shoulder-length hair hung down from the sides and back and bounced with his steps. He had a thin curving mustache and his eyes were hard and sharp.

  “It’s okay, I have an appointment,” I said, heading up the stairs.

  “No appointments,” he said, quickening his pace.

  “Yes, they’re expecting me,” I said. I started to climb two at a time. I had to see that room.

  “Closed area!” he yelled at me. I expected to hear his footsteps running after me, up the stairs, but they didn’t come. I made it to the top of the stairs, hurried down the hallway, and threw open that final door. There was no machinery, no table, no women. It was nothing more than a cluttered storeroom, a fraction of the workshop’s size. Junk spilled out of metal shelving units. A photocopier half-blackened with dirt and toner stood against one wall. Parts of office chairs had been tossed in a heap. There were stacks of cardboard cartons in various states of deterioration, an upright vacuum cleaner with a cracked housing.

  Then came the burst of footfalls and the man appeared at the top of the stairs, breathing heavily, a length of iron pipe in his hands. Something about the way he held it made me think he’d actually hit people with it before. He saw I was only staring at the garbage in his closet, so he stopped where he was. He watched me carefully over the course of three or four heavy breaths. “What the fuck you doing?” he said. It was not a rhetorical question. He was genuinely perplexed.

  I pointed into the storeroom. “The other night, I thought,” I said. “Maybe a different room? Four women? A workshop?”