The Train to Lo Wu - Jess Row [58]
Look, Mei-ling tells her sister, flipping the pages of a fashion magazine. In July she will go to Paris, to finish her last year of high school at the American University there. She stabs a finger at a picture. It’s where all the models live, she says. In the fifth arrondissement.
Mei-po looks curiously over her shoulder. I thought you said Monaco, she says.
That’s for the winter. In the spring you have to be in Paris. Everyone knows that.
I raise my head. Don’t get any ideas, I say. You’re going there to study. Not to have men taking pictures of you.
I know that, she says. I know. Her eyes flicker across my face and she turns her head away. Old man, I hear her thinking, what more do you have to say to me? Tell me something I haven’t heard before.
And I have an answer for her, too. That’s the worst of it.
After they’ve left, in the pale morning light, I put on my favorite CD—Rostropovich, the Bach unaccompanied cello suites—and pace the floor in my socks, soundless. Outside my windows the March sun burns away the mist, and if I wanted to, I could look out all the way across Tolo Harbor to the eight peaks, the Eight Immortals, their broad green slopes dappled with cloud shadows. But I don’t. I’ve lived in Hong Kong for thirteen years, and it has always seemed unreal to me, so clean and bright, like a picture postcard some clever photographer has retouched. In my study there are stacks of papers to grade, books I should have read and reviewed months ago, but I have no concentration: the time slips through my fingers like water. I whisper my daughters’ names to the air and say, Listen. Listen to me.
When I was your age, I was just like you. I thought that everythingin my life had happened by accident. I decided that when I was old enough I’d go to the other side of the world. Everyone said that it was impossible, but I worked hard, and waited, and finally my chance came. And then—
And then?
Why should it be so difficult to explain?
In the fall of 1982, when I was nineteen, I went to New York City from Wuhan, China; I had won a government competition and received a special scholarship to study at Columbia University. It’s hard for me to imagine, now, how innocent I was. New York then was not like those television shows my daughters watch, where young people stroll the streets, laughing and making jokes. At that time muggings were so common that no one went outside unless they had to, even during the day. After sunset the shop owners pulled grates over their storefronts to keep robbers from breaking the windows; even in the dormitories we locked ourselves into our rooms three times over. On warm nights that September I stuck my head out my window in the International House and looked up and down Claremont Avenue, searching for a single person in the street. The buildings were as faceless as prisons. I knew New York was the biggest city in the world, that there were twelve million people hidden behind those walls, and yet I felt as if I had been locked in an isolation chamber. I thought, Either I’ll go insane in here or I’ll be killed by a madman on the street. How can anyone live this way?
The problem was that I had to make money. Even with my tuition and my books and my room paid for I didn’t have enough to eat three meals a day. Though it rained all through that first October, I couldn’t buy an umbrella, or new shoes to replace the ones I’d brought