The Leavers(49)

Minjiang was obsolete. The twisting alleyways, the fishing boats with their sagging nets, the peeling paint on the side of the houses, the faded green curtains hanging from our windows—like me, they were finished. On the wall of a building was a chalk drawing of one larger cat and two small kittens. I remembered a stray cat I had seen in the city, surrounded by a litter of blood-pink kittens, and how it had lay, defeated, accepting, as the kittens scrambled over one another in order to suck at its nipples.

I walked to one of the new mansions and pressed my face to the gate. The tiles smelled like rain and dirt. I backed away, a smear of dirt on my nose. At the river, I pushed a stick against the dirt, scratching an itch in the earth, trying to see what hid beneath the water’s surface. The undersides of dead leaves. Fish. I passed the docks where the fishermen tugged at their crotches and talked about the girls they claimed to have plowed. One elbowed his buddy as I walked by, said he liked his chicks with extra meat. His friend shushed him. “That’s Old Guo’s daughter, you idiot!” At the produce market, I saw Teacher Wu’s wife, the head of the family planning cadre, haggling with a vendor over a cabbage, and I hurried back to 3 Alley.

One week passed. I slept all the time. I’d fall asleep at the table or standing at the sink, wake with a loud snore or when my feet wobbled. Sleep took over, sleep wiped me out, but in the moments before I succumbed, dark truths arrived. I’m fucked. I’ll have to give in and marry Haifeng.

I awoke to the sound of Haifeng’s mother and Yi Ba talking outside in the alley.

“She must be tired from all that work,” said Haifeng’s mother. “Haifeng says they work eight, nine hours at the factory.”

“Eight? That’s nothing,” Yi Ba said. “The city’s too harsh for a young girl. But I knew she’d come home sooner or later. So many people are going abroad now, it’s good she’s come home.”

“She’s grown up. She knows where she belongs.”

“The factory was only a phase. Testing her freedom.”

Haifeng’s mother laughed. “You can be glad that’s over.”

I sat up in bed. Yi Ba had taken the money I sent home and never complained. I heard him say, “Should I call you sister-in-law soon?”

“Not so fast,” said Haifeng’s mother. “I want a big dowry.”

“Hey, who says my dowry isn’t big?”

Two weeks passed. An Incredible American returned to Minjiang and had a party. He hadn’t been born an Incredible American but a mere villager like the rest of us, but had become an American by taking a train to Kunming, walking through the Burmese mountains, flying from Thailand to America, where he landed a job in a restaurant in Los Angeles, married an American—she was Chinese but had legit papers—and gotten naturalized, saved enough to pay off his debt and finally come home for a visit. His family was throwing a party at the mansion he built for them. I told Yi Ba I would rather scoop chicken shit than go, but he said it would look bad if every family showed up but us.

In school, I had known this Incredible American as Jing, a bully of a boy who’d been tight with the rest of the cadre sons and liked to sneak up behind girls and give them wedgies. At the party he did a poor job of pretending to not recognize me and Yi Ba. We stood in his mother’s living room near a fake marble statue of a young boy petting a fawn, the statue rotating on a battery-operated disc painted gold. I saw his eyebrows go up, followed by a calculated removal of this expression of recognition, his features settling into a parody of blankness. “Oh, that’s right, Peilan! From primary school. Now I remember you!”

“How are you, Jing?”

“John. My name is John now.” He was only two years older than me but already had wrinkles around his mouth.

“How’s America?”

“Oh, it’s paradise. It’s another world.”

“How much debt do you have?” Yi Ba asked.

“Very little, now. Started as twenty-five thousand, though the going rate is more these days. But the travel is easier, quicker. If you’d like to know more, I can introduce you. She’s here today.”

Jing-John pointed at a woman with a faded caterpillar of hair on her upper lip, talking to some of the neighbors. Yi Ba had mentioned the lady with the mustache who arranged for people to travel abroad, and how she was responsible, indirectly, for the new mansions in the village. I said no thanks; didn’t want to give Jing-John the satisfaction. But Yi Ba accepted a slip of paper from him with the lady’s phone number.

Back at home, Yi Ba fell asleep. I noticed a hole in his socks, a pair he’d already mended several times. I walked around the room. Here were the bowls and chairs and pots from my childhood, which my mother had used before she died, the bowls now cracked, the pots burned on the bottom. I could stay here. Have the baby, take care of Yi Ba, have him take care of me.

Outside the window, I could see Haifeng’s house. There was a light inside, the shadow of Mrs. Li moving around in her own kitchen. I stepped away so she wouldn’t see me. Soon Haifeng would have to come home, too.

I saw myself in a new country, with my own apartment, like Qing’s cousin in Fuzhou. Xuan said in America, you could live anywhere you wanted to; it didn’t matter if you had rural or urban hukou. They wouldn’t care about things like pregnancy permits either.

Never mind the debt, so astronomical it was unreal, like the fake money burned graveside at Qingming holidays. Forget the grueling journey, which didn’t seem real either, the distances and destinations nothing but nonsense words to me. I’d go where Haifeng would never go.