White Ivy(14)
Muddy water, let stand, becomes clear.
PART TWO
4
“WE THINK IT WILL BE good for you to visit your relatives in Chongqing,” Shen said at the dinner table. It was four days after Gideon’s birthday party. The bruise on Ivy’s forehead had turned a pale mottled green, like a rotting lime. She clipped her bangs to the side and sat opposite her mother. She never smiled. Whenever anyone spoke to her, she would look them squarely in the eye, sit up straight in her chair, and respond in a dignified and cordial manner. She chewed her food thirty times before swallowing.
“Your aunt Hong misses you,” Shen continued, “and suggested that you go visit her. You can practice your Chinese and meet your cousins. My cousin Sunrin wants to take you traveling. She’s very educated, you’ll like her. You can spend the rest of your summer there until school starts.”
Ivy paused on bite twenty-three. A shard of panic pierced the fog of stoicism.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said.
“Your flight’s the day after tomorrow,” said Nan.
“Am I going?” Austin asked.
“No.”
“That’s not fair!”
“You’re not getting exiled,” said Ivy.
“We don’t have the money,” said Nan.
Ivy remembered very little of her childhood in Chongqing, but from Meifeng’s stories over the years, she’d developed a vivid picture of her birth country as a terrible place of Communists, farmers, little mud huts, persecution. It was what her parents always threatened when she and Austin were bad: “We’re going to send you back to China,” or “You wouldn’t last a week in China with real Chinese kids.”
On the evening before her exile, Meifeng brought her a hot towel rinsed in a basin of boiling water and dried herbs. Meifeng’s solution for everything in life was a hot towel to the face and a hot water bottle to the feet.
“What’s wrong with you these days?” she asked, placing the towel over Ivy’s forehead.
Ivy remained silent, but she felt a twinge of savage pleasure that her grandmother had noticed something was wrong.
“Good medicine tastes bad. Stop pretending you’re some tragic actress in a play. I get tired just looking at you.”
Hurt rolled over Ivy in hot waves.
“Do you know how much money your parents spent on your trip? Your mother’s been saving up to visit Hong for years, but she’s letting you go instead. She loves you so much she’d rather hurt you to make you better, even if it means you’ll hate her.” Following her granddaughter’s brooding gaze toward the dresser where a stack of CDs used to sit, Meifeng added, “You shouldn’t have had all that junk anyway.”
“It wasn’t junk.”
“How you got it was wrong.”
“You do it.”
“I’m an old ignorant Chinese woman close to death. What do I have to lose? You’re an American citizen.”
Ivy let the hot steam from the towel cover her mouth, nose, lids. She pictured the view from her art classroom at Grove, looking out at a courtyard of wheat-colored poplar trees in autumn, the quiet splash of a quarter sinking into St. Mark’s fountain under the peaceful expanse of a cool blue sky.
Meifeng sighed, a movement that sent the entire bed creaking. Then she began to talk. Ivy thought it would be another one of her grandmother’s nostalgic rants about China, knife fights in damp alleyways, hunger, the mouthwatering taste of a fried egg on New Year’s, poverty—and in some ways it was. But it was also a story Meifeng had never before told anyone, the secret she’d kept for three decades.
* * *
FORTY-FOUR YEARS EARLIER, Nan Miao was born in the village of Xing Chang in the mountainous basin of Sichuan Province, cut through by three rivers intersecting at the mouth of the Yangtze River. It was a lush and fertile valley, with long, hot summers and damp, temperate winters. The rains began in June and stayed until the following spring, after which the fog would roll in, creating a misty beauty perfectly suited for watercolor landscapes, which many painters have tried to render. Due to the high year-round humidity and a diet of mountainous vegetables cooked in vats of bubbling chili oil, the girls grew up with pearly, lustrous skin, not a blemish or dry flake to be seen. Because of this perfect complexion, the beauty of Sichuan women became famous throughout China—they were known collectively as la mei nü, or “spicy beauties.”
Of all the pretty young creatures in Xing Chang, none could surpass Nan. She was born during a monsoon in July, the second of four daughters. When the midwife pulled her out, Meifeng’s face fell with disappointment—the baby was yellow of skin and scrawny of body, none of her later beauty apparent as a child; more tragically, she was a girl. Meifeng and her husband, Yin, named her Nan, the Chinese word for man, in the hopes that she could provide for them in the ways a son would.
Yin raised pigs and chickens on a small patch of land; Meifeng was an underpaid clerk. They also owned an outdoor stall—no more than a glass cabinet on wheels—that sold small items like cigarettes and newspapers and packs of gum. A week after giving birth, Meifeng strapped Nan on her back in a straw basket and went back to work. No one even knew there was a baby inside.