A Paper Son Read online

  Li-Yu takes Henry by the hand and leads him through the doorway, with Rose close behind. There is a shout from inside, but she cannot hear what is being said, or to whom. She moves her children quickly down the pathway, waiting to hear the door fly open, or to hear footsteps flying after them, but neither comes. The three of them plunge through the rainy village, and the house diminishes behind them.

  FOUR

  “I didn’t think much of that trip to your mom’s last night,” Eva said to me late the next morning, when I emerged from my room. The rain had persisted overnight and was now falling heavily from a lightless sky. “I mean,” she said, “I don’t think it got us any closer.”

  “To what?” I said.

  She narrowed her eyes and seemed to be studying me. “Where’s your dad?” she asked, after a time.

  “Dead,” I said. “A long time ago.”

  “So what was your mom’s maiden name?” she asked.

  “Bloomfield.”

  “Seriously.”

  “She was adopted. She grew up in Iowa.”

  “So ‘Long’ came from your dad, who was white?”

  “Correct,” I said.

  “But ‘Long’ is Chinese,” she said. “It means dragon.”

  “It’s English, too. It means lengthy.” I walked to the kitchen and started the coffee. The remainder of my Saturday stretched out before me, empty but for rain and a lack of privacy.

  “Regardless,” Eva said. “I thought the trip might have been a little more productive.”

  “I got the box, and we got back in one piece,” I said. “What were you hoping for?” She didn’t say anything. I sat down at my desk. “What does my mom have to do with it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s too bad she was adopted.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Orphans have it great.” But I knew what she meant. She had latched on to my family history, and she was talking about the severance, the discontinuity. My mom had been born here in San Francisco to a single mother who’d died when she was five. All she could remember from before that time was the sound of Cantonese, and in that way she knew she was a descendent of southern China, and probably from a family who had passed through Canton on the way to the States. And that was all we knew. There were no grandparents, no links, no stories.

  “You were up writing last night,” Eva said.

  I retrieved the laptop from my room and set it down on the coffee table in front of her. “I’m going out,” I said. “I’m hungry. Do you want anything?”

  She shook her head and bent down until her nose was inches from the screen.

  Outside there was nothing that hadn’t turned gray and wet—red, blue, and green cars alike had turned gray; the trim on the painted Victorians had turned gray. Even my hands looked gray. I put them in my pockets and headed down the hill toward Polk Street. Before I could settle on a specific destination my phone twitched in my pocket. It was Leonard Shelby. Leonard and I had been roommates at Sacramento State, where he’d studied poetry. He was now a prosecutor in L.A. with a wife and two kids, whose ages astounded me every time I talked to him.

  “What’s wrong with this city?” he asked.

  “Which city is that?” I said.

  “This one. Your city. I’m here. I’m here and it sucks, and I don’t want to hear that stupid Mark Twain quotation again.”

  “It isn’t summertime, so that wouldn’t even be germane.”

  “Good. What are you doing right this minute?”

  He was staying on Post, in the middle of the theater district. We met at a shoebox café and took a table near the window where we could watch the matinee crowds struggle through the rain.

  “You’re a little outside your jurisdiction, aren’t you?” I asked him. In the time since I’d last seen him, he’d almost come to look at home in his suit.

  “I’m working too hard,” he said, with a smile. “Someone thinks my jurisdiction ought to be expanded a bit.”

  “Not enough bad guys in L.A.?”

  “Let’s just say there’s a good chance a couple of nice men in black will be visiting you soon to chat about me.”

  “Feds? Do they know you’re a redheaded poet?”

  “I can’t really hide the hair,” he said, “but I was hoping you wouldn’t tell them about the poetry. It would ruin my career.”

  “I could be persuaded to forget about it,” I said. “Breakfast on you?”

  His wife—Sydney—was well, and the kids—Caleb and Patrice—were already eight and five, somehow. There was Little League baseball, soccer, gymnastics, judo. Potlucks with neighbors and their kids and trips to preposterously expensive amusement parks. The rest of the guys we’d known together were fine, doing the same sorts of things with their corresponding sets of wives and kids and neighbors. He worked his way back up to the present, and his recruitment by the Department of Justice. “I’m excited about it,” he said, “but I have to admit I’m a little bit conflicted. The assholes in law enforcement are a lot more aggressive than the assholes in poetry, and now I’ll be dealing with national-level assholes.” He waved for more coffee. He had become the sort of guy who could do that, and know that his cup would be refilled within seconds. “In fact, I can’t really stand any of the people I see regularly. The DA, the other prosecutors, the defendants and their lawyers. Judges, jurors, bailiffs, cops, you name it. And don’t even get me started on the fucking stenographers.”

  A show had just let out somewhere nearby; the sidewalk was a mass of raincoats and umbrellas. Taxis gridlocked the street. Making his way along the sidewalk through the crowd, I noticed, was one of the actors from a nearby production. He was dressed in an old dirty soldier’s costume and he wore a rifle over his shoulder. As I watched him approach, I noticed he seemed to still be in character—he looked as tired as his clothing, and walked with a limp. He seemed impervious to the rain.

  “But you know what?” Leonard was saying. He skewered several pieces of fruit on the tines of his fork. “I love my job. I love practicing law, and I love beating all those other assholes at it. It’s a life of extreme passion and drama, which is all I ever hoped for.”

  “Look at this guy,” I said, pointing to the actor outside.

  “Who?” Leonard said.

  “The actor,” I said. “Right there, the Chinese guy with the rifle.”

  Leonard scanned the pedestrians, shaking his head.

  “There,” I said, pointing, but the crowd was already swallowing him and then he was gone, his rifle hidden in a river of umbrellas.

  “That’s the difference between L.A. and San Francisco,” he said. “In L.A., that would have been a real rifle. What about you, anyway?”

  I was good. Teaching still, and living in the same place. Writing some and swimming a little.

  “Jesus,” he said. He tracked down his last glob of scrambled egg whites with a corner of sourdough toast. “That sounds magical. Plane rides are about as close as it gets to downtime for me these days,” he said. He swallowed his last bite, threw down his napkin with finality, and wrapped a hand around his coffee cup. “I’m not complaining though. I wouldn’t trade any of it for anything. But I’d be bullshitting you if I didn’t admit that I felt like something’s been lost. The potential for spontaneity, maybe. Like coffee in Tahoe? That sort of thing.”

  He took a sip from his mug and let the memory swell into the silence. In the middle of some sleepless winter night our freshman year we’d decided we wanted to have coffee with a view of something less depressing than the interior of the local Denny’s, so we packed supplies into his beat-up 4x4 and drove through the snow to Tahoe City. We set up folding chairs and a camp stove on the frozen shore and drank coffee and watched the stars working to penetrate the diaphanous layer of clouds that hovered over that great black lake. We made it back to Sacramento well before dawn with several giant garbage bags of snow and left a seven-foot snowman blocking the door of our dining hall. We awoke a few hours later to the sounds of an all-o
ut snowball fight.

  He looked at me over his mug; we were both grinning. “Your idea to grab those garbage bags and that shovel on our way out of town remains the single greatest piece of inspiration I’ve ever witnessed,” he said. “And that’s what I’m talking about. Spontaneity.” He shrugged and gave me a self-conscious half-smile. “Do you realize my new job comes with the license to carry a concealed firearm? I could be packing a Glock, sitting here eating eggs. That’s the opposite of poetry.” He set his mug down with a thump. “Fuck it,” he said, standing. “I gotta go get some bad guys.”

  We paid, headed out to the street, and parted ways. I looked up the sidewalk, the way the soldier with the rifle had gone, as though he might have left some sort of trail through the storm.

  ***

  Upon returning from my mom’s the previous night my only plan had been to drag myself upstairs and fall straight into bed, so I’d left the box sitting in my car’s back seat. When the cab dropped me off after my breakfast with Leonard I trotted across the street to retrieve it. The inside of my car was beginning to smell like a goldfish bowl. I pulled the box out, slammed the door, and hurried through the rain, trying to shield the box beneath me. Eva wasn’t on the couch. After shrugging off my raincoat I cleared a spot on the coffee table for the box, sat down in front of it, and pulled the flaps open. On top of the pile was a faded red folder full of drawings. In bright crayon outlines, dinosaurs fought one another; a caveman battled a giant gorilla; spacemen with laser guns dueled with aliens.

  Eva emerged from the hallway and circled around to the other end of the couch. She didn’t look at me. “So I read those pages,” she said.

  Beneath the folder of drawings lay my collection of old greeting cards. I opened the first couple and then scooped the rest out and piled them on the floor. “So?” I said. “Do you have a reaction?” Another red folder appeared beneath the greeting cards. I opened it up to find my mazes. As a fourth-grader, I’d been able to sit for hours with my mechanical pencils and a drafting kit I’d gotten for Christmas, devising intricate and dense mazes. I would carefully ink them and then I would refuse to let anybody deface them. They had been sitting in my folder ever since, unsolved.

  “No,” Eva said, quietly. She was sitting very still, her hands folded in her lap. A twitch, nearly imperceptible, rippled across her mouth, and then touched the corner of her eye.

  “No?” I said. “No what?” I spread a few of the mazes out on the table. I’d spent hours on each one, and they were beautiful. Nothing I’d done since had been as artful, or exhibited as much focus or determination. Maybe I’d reached the height of my artistic powers as a ten-year-old.

  “No, I don’t have a reaction.”

  “What does that mean? Of course you do.”

  She took a deep breath. “They were okay.”

  “Okay? That’s it? What about the story? You don’t have a new round of accusations for me? Predictions? Aren’t I still stealing your story?”

  Eva grimaced. She picked up one of the mazes and began to rotate it, as though searching for the top. “When do you think you’re going to write some more?” she said, after a time.

  “You have nothing else to offer at all? Just ‘okay,’ and that’s it?” She continued to spin the maze on her lap. “It doesn’t matter how you look at it,” I said. “You go in one end and you find a way to come out the other end. It’s the same problem, no matter which way you want to turn it.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “Haven’t you ever seen a maze before?”

  She traced her finger back and forth across the lines of the maze. “So if you’re not a historian, that means I have to figure something else out.”

  “Why won’t you talk to me about those pages?”

  She tossed the maze back on the table. “We need to go see the mahjong ladies,” she said. She sank back into the couch and closed her eyes.

  “Who?”

  “The mahjong ladies,” she said. “They’ll know what to do.”

  “About what?”

  She waved her hand in a way that took in not just the stack of mazes, but me, and my apartment, and everything in it.

  “About what?” I said again. But she wouldn’t say anything else.

  The rain worsens as Li-Yu, Henry, and Rose join the main road and follow it away from the river, along the narrow strip of uncultivated land that separates the large, open paddies of the valley’s floor from the terraced paddies of the hills. Li-Yu can’t help but marvel at the evident transformation—every bit of land everywhere, up to the steepest flanks of the hills, has been flattened, walled off, waterproofed, irrigated. It is the sort of work that can only be done over the course of generations, with a single-mindedness that passes from parents to children in a steady unbroken stream. Despite her misery in Xinhui, Li-Yu finds herself curious about the spring planting, and the growth that will follow.

  They make slow progress now—the roads are marred from the hoof prints of oxen and the wheels of oxcarts, and wide puddles force them to weave back and forth. There is other traffic: Boys walk in their same direction, nearly all of them, Li-Yu notes, accompanied by their mothers. Farmers circulate among the fallow rice paddies. Oxcarts trundle past, their woodwork creaking, the oxen breathing and emitting soft grunts.

  She has not left the village since their arrival, and to Li-Yu there is something secret and ominous about the terrain. When they have walked a mile or so the road splits. One lane continues around the edge of the valley floor but the other rises up the hillside, climbing toward a saddle in the ridge. They have been told that it’s a fifteen-minute climb to the ridge, and then another twenty minutes into Jianghai, the nearest village large enough to have a school. The road narrows as it rises and Henry and Rose slow their pace a bit. Other children overtake them easily, catching them with quick sideways glances as they pass. Some of them carry umbrellas.

  A half-hour passes before they attain the ridge, which is wrapped in clouds. The mists close in around them and the paddies below disappear. The trail levels out for a time, and just when it begins to descend they come upon a group of three men, each of them walking with the slow, lilting gait of sleepwalkers. Rifles hang from the hunched shoulders of the first two, and their heads are down. Their uniforms are mismatched and dirty. The third, an older man, trails a bit behind them. The other children pass the men quickly, without a glance, but Henry and Rose cannot help but stare as they pull even with the last man. He looks down, sees Henry, and smiles so broadly it startles Li-Yu. Nobody has smiled at any of them that way in weeks.

  “You look just like my littlest grandson,” the man says.

  Henry smiles back. Rose is immediately warmed by this flash of friendliness, and speaks. “Where are you going?” she asks.

  The man shrugs, but his smile does not wane. “That way,” he says, nodding toward the road ahead of them.

  “Are you going to a war?” Henry asks, looking at the rifles. It is unlike her children to be so outgoing with strangers, but Li-Yu can see why. His smile has the same shape and warmth as their grandfather’s, back in California.

  He thinks before answering. “There are some men doing bad things,” he says. “We’re on our way to ask them to stop.”

  “What are they doing?” Rose asks. “Where are they?”

  “Lucky for you, and unlucky for us, they are far, far away,” the soldier says.

  “Why don’t you have a gun?” Henry asks.

  “We don’t have enough!” he says, his smile still broad. “But that’s okay. I have a different job.”

  “What is your job?” Rose asks.

  He points to the men ahead of them. “They don’t know where they’re going,” he whispers, with a wink. “They need someone to show them the way.”

  “Really?” Henry asks.

  “Yes, really. Funny, isn’t it! But what about you? Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to school,” Henry says.

  “A
h, I have something for you, then,” the man says. He reaches into his jacket. Henry’s eyes widen.

  “It can’t get wet, though,” the soldier says, “so when I give it to you, you need to quickly put it somewhere dry. Are you ready?”

  Henry nods. He has been holding Li-Yu’s hand, but now he releases it, readying himself. The soldier produces a book with a tattered red cover. He thumbs through it quickly, rips out a page, folds it in half, and hands it to Henry.

  “Quickly now, inside your jacket,” he says. “Poems need to be kept warm and safe.”

  Henry stuffs the page through one of the openings between his coat buttons and then takes his mother’s hand back. He beams up at the soldier. “Do you have one for Rose, too?” he asks.

  “Of course I do,” says the man, studying her with a look of exaggerated thoughtfulness, “but this one is a little trickier.” He thumbs through the book again, glancing back and forth from Rose to the pages, his eyes bright. Eventually he slaps a page with his palm. “Perfect,” he murmurs. He rips another page free of the book and passes it to her. “Keep it dry, now,” he says. “Don’t let the words wash away.”

  His companions have stopped by the side of the road and are now hunting through their pockets as they wait for him. “It must be breakfast time,” the man says. He squats down in front of Rose and Henry and looks at them earnestly. “You be good now,” he says. “Make your mother proud.”

  They thank him and tell him goodbye and continue their descent. Soon they emerge from the mists and a new valley appears beneath them. Its floor and foothills are covered with a patchwork of rice paddies and terraces, just as in their own valley. In its center sits a village, three times the size of Xinhui. It takes them twenty minutes to make their way down the hill, through the paddies, and into the village’s outskirts.

  Although the houses here are also made of mud bricks, they are larger than the homes in Xinhui. Women lean from their front windows, calling out menus or the names of things for sale. Small clusters of shops and restaurants sit on the corners. Li-Yu, Rose, and Henry follow the other children into the heart of town.