The Foreigner Read online

  Her mouth wobbled without sound as she fumbled with her chopsticks. In her confusion, she looked suddenly very old, and her arm shook a little, setting her rice bowl chittering against the edge of her plate. Mei Hua drew back, alarmed. Blindly, my mother reached out for her teacup. The hand was brown and disfigured by the heat and pain of arthritis. I put the cup in her hand for her and watched her lift it jerkily, slopping tea in her bowl.

  "I’m sorry, Mother." I touched her elbow.

  She shrugged me off. I said nothing.

  She turned to Mei Hua. "How many years do you have?"

  Mei Hua frowned. "I am thirty-one."

  "Thirty-one." She sniffed. "At your age, I have one son already. A husband. A family. Tell me, what do you have?"

  "I?" Mei Hua looked stunned.

  "You young people," she went on harshly. "You think my life is a joke. You look down on me, you pity me. You think the tradition, the marriage is a burden only. You are the little American child all your life, the little Peter Pan, never to grow up. No obligation. No loyalty. No sense of the future."

  Mei Hua blinked. "I—"

  "I am not feeling well," my mother interrupted. She put a hand to her bony chest abruptly. "I want to go home."

  "Mother—"

  But there was no stopping her. Holding her purse under one arm, she walked unevenly toward the door, trailing pride and hurt behind her like a veil. After a few paces, she turned.

  "I have never like this place," she said with passion.

  "Mother." I tried not to shout. "We’ve been eating here for years. Come back and sit down."

  She shook her head violently, wiping her nose with a tissue. "Too dark in here. Too salty. A disappointment," she said, voice breaking. "Every single time."

  She left.

  The check arrived at this juncture, on a scratched plastic tray. Mei Hua went to the ladies’ room while I paid the bill. The restaurant was nearly empty. All the other patrons had gone home, and the waitstaff had slipped into the insular, chatty world of stagehands, joking, shouting, confessing to one another as they swept the floor and stacked the chairs upside down on the tables. All of them were recent immigrants, and as I sat and waited for my receipt, I had a brief spasm of envy. They weren’t rich, but they knew where their pleasures and loyalties lay. They had memories of a damp summer in Guangdong, repeated over many years; the smell of a Chinese street; the look of a Chinese sun descending over a Chinese shop. All of these things, taken together, defined something true, something uncompromised about them.

  My mother hadn’t waited for her fortune cookie. With a dull, familiar feeling of anomie, I cracked both cookies open and pulled out the little slips. The first one said: LOVE IS LIKE THE SPRING RAIN, TO AWAKEN ON THE UNPRODUCTIVE GROUND. The other said: YOU ARE THE GREATEST PERSON IN THE WORLD.

  CHAPTER 2

  I DROVE MEI HUA HOME AND WALKED her to her door, where she grabbed me by the shoulders and tongued me with some savageness.

  "For your birthday," she said, her breath ragged as she pulled back.

  "Oh," I said, dabbing the corner of my mouth discreetly with a thumb. "Thank you. Sorry about all that. You know, at dinner. With my mother."

  "But she is right," said Mei Hua. "We are so selfish, the young people. We are wanting the dedication to everlasting family. We must start now." She hauled me in for another long kiss.

  "Yes," I gasped, breaking away. "Certainly very selfish. No dedication. Good-bye."

  "Will call you!" Her voice echoed down the little alley of condos as I hurried to the car.

  I debated driving back to the city, but the force of habit was too strong, and instead I went to the Remada for my usual overnight in my old room. When I reached the lot, the lights in the motel office were still on. I knew I should find my mother, should apologize, but I was too tired just then to summon up energy for the wheedling, the coaxing, the thousand little tricks that reconciliation would require.

  I dragged my carryall up to balcony level, let myself in, poured a nip of Jack Daniel’s. Nothing dispelled the day’s melancholy, not the blue light from the TV nor the glow of the bedside sconces. Mei Hua’s strong, bitter licorice taste lingered in my mouth; even the whiskey didn’t chase it. She was annoying, and rapacious, and I felt nothing like love for her. But my body claimed otherwise, and continued to claim otherwise as I unwrapped my Hershey’s bar and sat down on the bed.

  My mother pervaded the room. She was in the stiff curtains and dark ruched bedspread, the caustic smell of ammonia; you breathed her in wherever you went. I could have been married years ago, if my mother hadn’t interfered. J, the love of my life, twenty years older, sex and mystery embodied in her languorous, full form. That American girl, my mother called her.

  I took another sip of whiskey. In time, I might have made J love me—though my mother would never believe it. The old argument between us had never been laid to rest; it ran like groundwater under every word and gesture. You can have American friends, my mother would say, and American neighbors, and American boss, but when it counts, for the family, you marry a Chinese. What does the foreigner know about love? she would ask. What means love to them? What means marriage? No amount of reason would shake her faith in the unbridgeable distance between the ways of loving. If I argued that, at least, the Americans were happy, her response was always one of great scorn: "Happiness! If all you want is happiness! If you want to settle for happiness!"

  But what else was there? I fumbled for the whiskey, knocking over my glass.

  The answer came tiredly, inevitably, from the history of our long dispute: an idea, she would say—just an idea, and nothing more, as if this should explain everything, should counter all loneliness and longing.

  "Bullshit," I muttered. "I can’t live on an idea." I got down on my hands and knees and found the highball under the bed. "What do you want from me? I gave up my life to be with you. Friday night dinner. Half your health care premium."

  I remembered J in the dim parking lot, the luminous white curve of her shoulder showing in the dark, the feel of her fingers brushing up against mine in secret. I had worshiped her, my first—my only—love.

  Still, given time, I might have gotten over her, if not for the other treachery. My mother. I took another swig of whiskey. It had been years before my mother had confessed to me what she had done with the letters J sent me after I left: how she had secretly removed them from the mail and sent them back, marked PERSON UNKNOWN. By the time I discovered this, J had moved, seemingly disappeared, and I couldn’t find her. Too late to ask now what she’d wanted to say to me. The possibilities sometimes tormented me at night: she loved me; she was lonely; she thought of me constantly. Or maybe it had been bad news: she was in love with someone else; she was getting married—some other man, more worldly, less timid, less weak.

  But it didn’t matter anymore. The chance was gone, and that uncertainty, that idea of an alternate life, would always be with me. I’d never said a word to my mother about her betrayal. Useless to be angry, I had thought, when all that was so long ago—but somehow I couldn’t let it go, not quite. I hated, suddenly, my old bedroom, its hybrid look of anonymity and home: the individually wrapped cups by the sink, the water-stained carpet, the old crack running down the wall. The crack used to resemble a map, the shape of Brazil, or Africa, or some far-flung river. Now it was just a crack in the plaster, in the room I had never left.

  "Such a disappointment," I repeated. "Such a disappointment."

  I tossed the whiskey bottle away, grabbed my trousers, and flung open the door. Some kind of conviction or decision had taken root, so deep that even I didn’t know what it was. But it would begin with an accounting; it would begin with a confrontation of facts.

  I stormed down the stairs to the parking lot and unlocked the front office, slamming the door behind me.

  "Mother!"

  Somehow, the night had passed into early morning, and the lucent predawn light showed weakly at the blinds. The back room w
as dark and studded about with glass jars full of her medicinal herbs. On the far windowsill, a large, warty piece of galangal hung suspended in its matrix like an embryo, while a ceramic plat on the sideboard labored under ten tiers of lucky bamboo. The wooden sofa, the carpets, the love seat—she had draped everything in plastic; she had covered the floor with protective vinyl sheets.

  Raggedly, I ripped the plastic sheeting off the armchair and struggled to tear it to bits, knocking into the bamboo and stumbling over the coffee table. A jar of dried rose hips fell and shattered on the floor. Panting, I drew up short and wrenched open the connecting door to her apartment. "Mother!"

  The narrow hallway was clean but dark, and the garlanded portraits of her parents hung at the end, stern, impassive, the candles on the shelf beneath them blown out.

  "Mother!"

  In the kitchen, a plate of sliced apple sprinkled with salt browned on the counter. The bathroom was freshly scrubbed, and her false teeth kept silent counsel in a dish of mineral water. She had mended and washed a pair of panty hose and hung them to drip-dry on a makeshift line across the tub.

  In the bedroom, a hand—bluish, cold, fingers curled toward the baseboard. She had been putting a handful of fake flowers in a vase, the stems now scattered violently across the floor.

  "Mother?"

  I walked over to her, stooping down to gather up the broken bouquet. Carefully I placed it back in her hand and closed the fingers around it.

  Sirens approached. The noise grew louder and louder, until it seemed to be right inside my head. On and on it went, the snarling, the horns, the high-pitched wailing, and then, just at the point of pain, it passed. Perspiration ran like tears down my face. I got up and found the phone in the front office.

  "Nine-one-one," said the dispatcher. A pause. "This is 911. Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?"

  I opened my mouth to give her the address of the Remada Inn. But instead I heard a flat voice issuing a strange, fragmentary bulletin.

  "My mother is dead," it said. "My mother is dead."

  CHAPTER 3

  OF COURSE SHE WAS NOT DEAD, not exactly, or—rather—not yet. The paramedics arrived in a welter of lights and noise that drew all our customers out of their rooms; they milled around the parking lot in varying states of undress. As they watched, the attendants wrapped her up, lifting her into the ambulance with a professional efficiency that stunned me, for it seemed to make light of the pale transformation lying silent on the gurney. One paramedic even hummed as we sped to the hospital.

  The diagnosis was heart failure, a stopping of the heart that left her comatose, her body curled into a faint fetal position in the hospital bed. I stayed with her, dozing on the couch, watching the brisk rotation of nurses come through.

  At work, the annual reports swam before my eyes. A week, two weeks passed, and she didn’t wake up, although sometimes she spoke, a broken Chinese word here or there that I couldn’t understand. I checked in on the motel, where her rooms and mine remained exactly as we had left them: the scattered flowers on her floor, my empty whiskey bottle and unmade bed.

  This white period of waiting might have gone on forever, except one evening the doctor came in and closed the door deliberately behind him. I had just arrived at the hospital after a long, hazy day of meetings and could not quite register what the man was saying as he put a piece of X-ray film in my hands.

  "What’s this?" I asked.

  Again he spoke, urgent, directing the film toward the overhead light and moving a pencil across it. The image was indecipherable to me, tissues of white on black, like galaxies.

  "Her pelvic bone," said the doctor. "Eaten away. There. And there."

  I stared, could not make sense of it. "And?"

  " ’And?’" The doctor withdrew the film, blew out a breath. "Mr. Chang, why hasn’t she come in before? With a cancer this advanced, we don’t know where to start."

  "I didn’t know," I whispered. "She never said a word."

  "No pain?" He sounded skeptical. "No fatigue?"

  "She wouldn’t have said." I thought of her trembling hand around the teacup the night of my birthday dinner. "She was taking herbs. Chinese medicines. I suppose she was treating herself."

  "Herbs?" He looked like he was going to kill me.

  His pager went off. He glanced down at it briefly, moved toward the door. Then relented, slightly. "I’m very sorry, Mr. Chang. I’ll be in tomorrow morning to go over her course of treatment with you."

  "Wait!"

  He paused, half out in the corridor.

  "You said… Is she… in pain?" I asked. The idea had bothered me since the night she had been admitted.

  "Maybe," he said. Then, reluctant: "Well, yes. Probably." He ran a hand over his thinning hair, came forward, patted my arm reassuringly with a big paw. "But she’s too far along to know it."

  When he was gone, I drew my chair up to the bedside and took her hand. The nurses came and went, their footsteps sharp and echoing in the halls.

  I don’t know how long I sat there. At dusk, I thought I felt her stir a little. She made a small sound in the back of her throat.

  "Mother?"

  But it was nothing, only a catch of her breath. She lay there, sleeping deeply in her bed, beneath the surface of consciousness, like a person floating just below the waterline in a river. I felt, suddenly and very surely, that I could wake her up if I wanted to; I could call her up out of that subterranean world of dreams. But then whatever pain she was suffering would become real to her, reclaimed along with her motel and her account books and her pride and sorrows. Already, perhaps, she had suffered for months without saying so.

  The room had gotten colder; shadows drew close around me. In retrospect it seems that a hand other than mine had grasped the tubing and loosed the clamp enough to allow the morphine drip to accelerate—1.00, 1.50, 1.75 milliliters. The evening sky had darkened the room enough that objects appeared gray and impersonal. I have no recollection of intent. I remember carefully removing my shoes and then lying down on the bed next to my mother, trying to warm her thin, curled body.

  And when, in the morning, I awoke, she was staring at me, head fallen to one side, looking into my face with uncharacteristic fondness, a soft, cloudy expression. Her lips were parted as if to speak, but whatever she meant to say to me I would never know. Years ago, in the motel parking lot, I’d come across an injured gypsy moth, hand-size; ants had swarmed around it, industriously breaking down the feathered body and fins while the great laboring creature flexed its wings mightily, like the slow blink of an eye, or the beat of a heart, failing. Each day there was a little less of it. Like the death of an emperor, or the slow passing of a legend into nothing—a thready skeleton, its splendor now gone.

  "EMERSON CHANG?"

  The receptionist looked up crossly from her desk, a cigarette in hand.

  "Yes?"

  She puffed at me. "You can go in. Mr. Carcinet is ready for you."

  I was at the lawyer’s, a week or two after the memorial service. My mother had named Pierre Carcinet the executor of her will. The man had been a friend of my father’s when my father was alive, and although my mother had never liked Mr. Carcinet personally, I suppose she had named him executor because he was a lawyer, and she had always liked the propriety of doing things through official channels. I had met him at the service. A tall, cadaverous man with a voice that rasped like a twig. The receptionist directed me toward an inner door.

  Mr. Carcinet sat behind a massive ebony desk, smoothing his tie as if it were a pet. He was long and sallow and angular, bald as a skull, with something fastidious about his ashy-looking mouth.

  "Ah, Mr. Chang." He stood up and indicated a chair, moving an enormous pile of papers to one side of his desk in order to look more directly at me. As I sat down, he put his fingertips together and regarded me silently over their tented peaks, once in a while putting the tip of a gray tongue to his top lip, as if perplexed. His huge bony elbows jutted out on the arms of his
chair as he rocked back and forth minutely.

  "Well," he said at last. "I’d like to say I’m sorry once again for your loss. I understand that you and your mother were quite close, and this must be very hard for you."

  "I suppose so," I said, resenting the sympathy. His vast, shiny black desk was out of proportion to the tiny airless room. I could see my face distorted and reflected in the glossy finish. I hadn’t shaved since the service—had not been out of my apartment at all, in fact. A sparse, erratic beard stuck out in strands from my chin, and my suit was rumpled; my hair was too long and matted like a thatch.

  "As it involves the motel," Pierre Carcinet was saying. "The"—a shuffling of papers—"the… Remada? Inn? The will must be probated in order for any transfer of property to take place. This can take a while, I warn you, so the sooner we get the process started, the better, yes?"

  He paused for a moment. Then for some reason he lowered his voice.

  "You have a brother, correct, Mr. Chang? But I understand he hasn’t been, shall we say, very close in some time?"

  "I haven’t seen my brother in almost ten years."

  I felt suddenly cold at the mention of Little P. It had been so long since I’d discussed him with anybody that, without quite knowing it, I had come to feel proprietary about his existence. It had never occurred to me that my mother would discuss him with anyone else. I saw his dark face fleetingly, almost Russian in its long proportions. The memory gave me an unexpected wrench.

  "…tied up in property," Pierre Carcinet pronounced, looking at me expectantly. When I didn’t say anything, he put his hands on the desk and leaned forward.

  "This means," he said, enunciating, "that you and your brother have quite a responsibility on your shoulders. If you should decide to sell the motel, I hope you will confer with me from time to time in order to make sure there are no complications."