A Paper Son Read online

  Throughout the morning the sky continued to darken and the rattling of the tree branches grew more feverish, but by lunchtime the rain still had not arrived. I headed for the faculty lounge and found it to be as quiet as I’d hoped. With the specter of the long-ago travelers steaming through my thoughts, I was even less prepared to make small talk than usual. Among the few gathered in the lounge was Franklin Nash, our principal, a massive black man with a gray beard and a gray suit, who made the furniture in his vicinity look as though it had been collected from dollhouses. He noticed me and approached, navigating with effort through the maze of tables and chairs. Whenever I saw him like this, moving in tight quarters, I had the impression that he would have preferred to simply kick things out of his way. Despite the imposing bulk, the kids loved him for his smiles and warmth and for his tie collection. Today’s selection featured ice-cream cones.

  “Peregrine!” he said, enveloping my hand in one of his. He handed me a yellow sheet. “I found this and thought of you.”

  It was a flier announcing the launch of a new literary journal, to be called The Barbary Quarterly. Now accepting submissions of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, it said. A Grant Street address was listed. I had all but abandoned my attempt to assemble a collection of short stories. A few years earlier, I’d managed to finish and send out what I thought were two decent stories: one about a vengeful architect and the other about a deaf poker player. The latter had been picked up by the in-flight magazine of a regional airline based in Indiana, which had since gone out of business. In the heady days following my receipt of the acceptance letter, I’d formulated a plan to put together a batch of fifteen stories or so and submit them for wider publication. If they were good enough for Midwestern puddle jumpers, I figured, they’d be good enough for anyone. I wrote one more, about a vagabond minister, and then I ran out of ideas. I forced myself to finish a story about a haunted mobile home but it was as terrible as it sounds. Since then I hadn’t written much beyond grocery lists and lesson plans.

  “Thanks, I’ll check it out,” I said, forming no plans to check it out.

  He drifted toward another of the seated groups. “Let me know how that goes,” he said, as he went. “I’m still hoping to read something of yours someday.”

  I slid a bowl of leftover lasagna into the ancient microwave and punched in several minutes, which usually wasn’t enough. I had watched it make a half-dozen revolutions on the carousel when a voice asked, “Interesting show?”

  Annabel Nightingale appeared at my side. Her straight black hair fell down on either side of her face and curled in slightly just beneath her chin. Her eyes were wide and as dark as her hair. Her skin was pearlescent; a small jade circle hung from her neck on a silver chain. Faint crescents of pink on her cheek were the only indications of an interior made of blood and tissue, and not snow or cream. She held a red plate, upon which a pair of shish kebabs flanked a mound of yellow rice.

  I tapped the microwave door. “Lasagna,” I said. “It’s a rerun.” Actually, it was to be the fourth consecutive meal (not counting breakfasts) that I would have mined from the pan I’d made a couple of nights earlier. Not wanting to sound like too hopeless of a bachelor, I kept this information to myself.

  Annabel had just joined us the previous fall, and as her “buddy” teacher I’d been unofficially tasked with welcoming her to Russian Hill Elementary School. Every year, each third-grade class was paired with a kindergarten class, and each third grader was assigned a kindergarten buddy. A few times a month we’d get our classes together and give the partners a project to complete. In the process my third graders shared their wisdom and experience with the kindergarteners, earning in return their little partners’ admiration and a sense of maturity that lasted until the moment our classes parted ways. Our first semester had produced among other things some amusing art projects, a treasure hunt, and an afternoon of comical skits, but hadn’t revealed much about the newest addition to our faculty.

  Annabel pulled a fork from a drawer, yanked a skewer from its queue of steak and vegetables, and flipped it toward the trash can. A burst of light caught it in midair; the murmuring groups behind us fell silent. There was a lone gasp, and then the scraping of a chair against the floor. We waited, breaths held, the microwave’s fan the only sound in the room, and then the crack of thunder slammed into the building. The tables emptied immediately, leaving me alone with Annabel. The microwave beeped, and I retrieved my lunch.

  “You’re not worried about your kids becoming lightning rods?” Annabel asked, yanking the second skewer from its contents.

  “We’re doing the old key-on-the-kite-string experiment this afternoon,” I said. “It’s good practice for them.” I usually managed to be slightly more witty than normal when I was around Annabel—or maybe she just felt she had to humor me until she got settled in. “What about you?” I said.

  “I teach kindergarten, remember?” she said. “My kids are sitting on their mommies’ laps with cocoa and cookies right now.” She took my place in front of the microwave and slid her food into the hot lasagna-scented interior. “When yours get out of the burn ward later this week, you should come over,” she said. “We’ll have a New Year’s thing.”

  “Sounds good,” I said. “Friday?”

  “It’s a date,” she said. She looked over my head toward the window and the blackening sky beyond. “I should put my schefflera outside,” she said. “It loves rainwater.”

  ***

  It didn’t rain, though, not yet. Lightning continued to fracture the sky and thunder buffeted the hill but the ground was still dry by the time I closed up my room. As I walked back home, the air was as heavy as a pendulum. I stopped at the edge of Ike’s puddle and looked down. The phantom hat was back on my head, but I only had a second to consider my reflection before a great fat drop of water crashed into the surface and scattered the image. Another fell, and then another. Within seconds, the puddle was roiling. I continued home without hurrying.

  My one-bedroom apartment was on the top floor of a five-story building near the bottom of the hill. I’d lucked into it nearly ten years ago, and I had never wanted to live anywhere else. It was a beautiful building—a lobby with forest green walls, dark wood and brass trim, double-decker rows of bronze mailboxes. The elevator smelled like wood polish. Even the stairwell was carpeted. The color of my walls were cream at midday, and took on the color of sand on sunny late afternoons, so I didn’t mess them up by hanging art. The floor plan was simple: a living room ran through the middle to a sliding glass door and a small balcony. On one side of the room a wide arched doorway led to the kitchen, which was full of windows that looked back up the hill. On the other side a short hallway led to the bedroom, bathroom, and a big closet I would never fill. I had a bed and a pair of nightstands (one of which I used and the other of which I didn’t), and a dresser with a small TV on it. In the living room was a couch and a bookcase that held a slightly larger TV, novels and biographies, a few old college textbooks, and some framed pictures: my sister and me in the snow; my mom and the two of us in the wooded mountains near her place; an old one of all four of us when Lucy and I were still kids. By the balcony door sat a small round table with wooden grinders for pepper and rock salt. My desk was in the corner.

  My last girlfriend, a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, told me that my apartment reminded her of a fancy hotel suite. “Like for a banker,” she had said. Her name was Joy, which even she found ironic.

  “That doesn’t sound so bad,” I said.

  “It’s the worst thing possible,” she said.

  “This is how I like it,” I said.

  “No,” she said.

  A few days later she brought me a half-dozen paintings and prints, of various sizes and subjects.

  “I’ll put them up for you,” she said.

  “I’ll do it later,” I said. After a week or two I hung them all above my headboard, so I wouldn’t have to see them while I was lying there. Joy sa
w them, looked around at all the other empty walls, and put her hand over her mouth. She dumped me a few days later. We had the big talk at her loft, after a tense lunch of pho and spring rolls. Collage was her medium—she built reproductions of corporate logos out of combat photographs. A Chevron logo made of mass gravesites loomed on the wall above us as we sat on her couch; across the room, the golden arches comprised assault rifles. It was the standard break-up conversation until she told me that she really liked the concept of me, but she had misgivings about the execution. At that point I knew it wouldn’t be too hard to get over her. She collected the paintings and prints and I puttied and painted over the holes they’d left in my wall, and went back to being content.

  Now in my banker’s suite I tossed Franklin’s flier onto my desk beside my laptop, and prepared a cup of tea. Outside the storm attacked with the frantic energy of a novice fighter in the first round. I felt strangely calm now, and ready for the family at the railing. I had an idea now of why they were there, and what I was going to do with them. The water settled and there they were again, with the twilit city spread out in front of them. The woman’s name was Li-Yu, I decided. Her children would be Rose and Henry. Her husband would be called Bing. The city wasn’t San Francisco—it was too dark, too far away. I decided on Canton, the origin of uncertain journeys somewhere in my own family’s distant past. The year would be 1925. I opened my laptop. From the deck of the steamer, I wrote, they can see what must be nearly all of Canton.

  From the deck of the steamer they can see what must be nearly all of Canton. In the day’s last light the city’s buildings look secretive and dangerous as they crouch inside a smoky haze, their haunches illuminated by diffuse, flame-colored lights from unseen sources. The wharf uncoils and reaches toward the ship like a dirty claw. The air is cold, and smells of fish and garbage. So this is it, Li-Yu thinks. The fabled heart of China.

  It has been hours since they steamed past that outer armada of islands, past Hong Kong, and were swallowed by the hills and plains of Guangdong. The Pearl River, Bing said, looking inland, northward, his excitement clear. Li-Yu had spent weeks at sea, and weeks before that, trying to absorb some of this excitement, but none of it had settled in her. Even now, with the end of their journey so close, and the oppression of the ship’s steerage compartments nearly behind them, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was offering herself and her children to the throat of a hungry dragon. She watched the hills and rice paddies glide past, wondering what sort of river could so easily consume a ship like this.

  She knew well a version of this country, one she had pieced together from thousands of miles away, from her parents’ stories and from clues like the smell and feel of the clothes and the few things that had survived their trip across the Pacific, the year before Li-Yu was born. In her mind the countryside was dotted with mist-shrouded mountains and temples with roofs curling like phoenix wings, its halves divided by that stupendous wall. The government consisted of soldiers, their columns bristling with rifles, marching through the grainy landscapes of news clips and magazine photographs, and of the boy Puyi in his embroidered silk robes, with his hat and his haughty stare, an emperor without an empire, and now nothing more than a commoner. Before seeing this view of Canton she felt she might have known something about its cities, having been raised in the Chinatowns of Stockton and Oakland and San Francisco, where her sisters now live, far behind her. She knows the sound of twenty men speaking Cantonese all to each other at once, and she knows the smells of roasted duck and dumplings and the steam of rice. She knows the shops and their wares, and the textures of jade and ivory and bamboo and silk. But there is nothing familiar about this city that now reaches for them with its claw of a wharf and pulls them into its shroud of twilight and smoke. The quays teem with cargo and equipment, and the sounds of hundreds of shouting voices rise up over the growl of the ship’s engines. The mouths of streets appear, revealing narrow corridors that twist from the docks into the city’s interior.

  Li-Yu tightens her grip on Rose and Henry. Bing turns from the railing, where he has been smiling and breathing in great draughts of the smelly air. He squats down next to the children. “This is China, our home,” he says, steadying himself with a loose hug around their legs. “What do you think?” Neither of them speaks. He looks back and forth at their blank faces. “You’ll love it,” he says. “Ask your mother.” He looks up at Li-Yu. “Tell them,” he says.

  Neither of her children looks to her, and Li-Yu offers nothing. Bing stands and leans toward her ear. “I thought we were supposed to be together,” he says.

  “We are,” she says.

  “I thought you were going to talk to them,” he says.

  “What can I tell them?” she says, looking out across the dark city. “What do I know?”

  But Bing has already stopped listening; he’s gazing down at the wharf, which is now just beneath them, and crawling with people. The ship docks with a bump and a heightened groan as the engines work to check the rest of its momentum. The deck rings with footfalls as the passengers clamor for the stairs. Li-Yu gives each of her children a small canvas bag to carry, tells them to hang on to the back of her coat, and hoists her bags. Bing takes his own suitcases and plunges into the crowd. Li-Yu chases after him, and though she can feel the tug of both children’s hands, she imagines how easy it would be for them to be pulled away into the crowd, like fruit plucked from a tree. They make it onto the dock without getting separated, but Henry is fighting tears, and Rose’s jaw is hard and set. The wharf is nothing like Li-Yu imagined. The signs are in Chinese, but the faces are from all over the world. She hears a dozen different languages before they have gone a hundred steps. Bing is jubilant. He is congratulating strangers, laughing, turning and calling things out to Li-Yu and the kids, his words garbled like he’s been drinking. At one point she loses sight of him completely. She stops, gathers her children against her sides, and searches the crowd before her. Just when she is about to panic he comes bounding in from the side.

  “Over here,” he says, smiling, pulling them toward the edge of the crowd. There is an open-air restaurant, little more than a cart with a few upturned wooden crates around it. Bing gestures at them to squat and after a quick exchange with the cook he returns with bowls of rice porridge, slices of grilled pork, boiled peanuts, a dish of lotus root and tree fungus in a rich brown sauce.

  “Eat, eat,” he says, spreading the dishes on the crates, beaming as if he has just cooked them himself. He tousles Henry’s hair. “Real food!” he says. “Eat up, we only have half an hour.”

  “Until what?” Li-Yu says, picking up her chopsticks.

  “Until the boat to Xinhui!” he says. “We’ll be there before the sun sets tomorrow!”

  Li-Yu shakes her head.

  He points somewhere, vaguely inland. “Nearly there now!” he says.

  “Not tonight,” she says. “The children need to rest. I need to rest. Even you need to rest.”

  “We’ll rest! What could be more relaxing than a quiet boat ride? We’ll look at the stars, and the river will rock the children to sleep.”

  “I’ve been on a quiet boat ride for weeks,” she says. “We’re staying here.”

  He jabs at the crowd streaming past them with his chopsticks, sauce dribbling from the corner of his mouth. “This is rest?” he says. “Nobody sleeps here. You’ll see.”

  “Henry is nearly asleep in his jook,” she says. “We stay.”

  Bing curses through a mouthful of mushrooms, drops his chopsticks on the crate, and storms away. One of the chopsticks clatters to the ground. Henry picks it up, places it neatly alongside its mate, and attempts a smile at her.

  “Where is Dad going?” he says.

  “He’ll be back,” she says.

  He returns minutes later and points up one of the narrow serpentine roads that fan out from the wharf. “Let’s go,” he says.

  Once in their bed the children fall asleep instantly. Bing seems to forget abo
ut the delay. He holds Li-Yu and talks on and on about all the things she and the children will love in Xinhui. His voice grows quiet, his words soft and far apart as he tires and fades. Li-Yu stays awake until very late, listening to the breathing of her children and her husband, and to the sounds of voices outside, and wooden wheels rolling on stone.

  ***

  While I’d been writing, the storm had continued its siege on the city. A wind had risen and now my windows hummed and rattled. My teacup sat where I’d left it, untouched, its heat gone and its mysteries inert. My computer’s desktop was littered with a dozen open browser windows: maps and images of China, articles on its history and geography, articles on steamships and Pacific crossings. I closed them all and centered my document on the screen again. I checked the clock. I knew I was supposed to be hungry by now, but when I thought about looking in the refrigerator or in the cupboard all I could see was Li-Yu, lying awake in that room, listening.

  ***

  The next morning Bing awakens them early. After a breakfast of steamed pork buns from a street vendor they return to the waterfront, where they wait in a thick dark fog for the water taxi. By the time it is fully light they are underway. The city seems as though it will never end but finally it shrinks and clears, and soon the little boat is plying up a wide avenue of water that runs through an endless patchwork of fallow rice paddies, which are empty but for puddles of rainwater and small piles of rotting stalks left from the fall harvest.

  Rose and Henry say almost nothing, except when they lean in to whisper to Li-Yu that they have to use the bathroom. The other children on board stare at the scenery for a time, but then they scatter to find other diversions. Hills emerge from the fog, ghostlike, and then disappear back into it. The air grows colder. A breeze pushes against them. Li-Yu gathers her children and squeezes them against her sides.

  “We’re almost there,” Bing says, smiling broadly. “Just one more night.” He drops to a knee in front of his children and points to the empty rice paddies all around them. “You wouldn’t know it this time of year, but the fields of Guangdong are where the best rice in China grows. And since the best rice in the world grows in China, what do you think we’ll find growing here next summer?”