Someone to Live With

By Amy Huang

 

Each time Kuan looked at the postcard taped onto their bathroom mirror, he thought of the wedding photos that he and his wife took almost two years before. They were both in rented wedding outfits – he in a black tuxedo and she in a puffy white gown – and had been asked to pose in a small, brightly lit studio in Chinatown. The tuxedo did not fit him well. It made his shoulders look taller and wider than they actually were and the jacket was longer than it should have been. He had sat on a chair while his wife leaned over his legs, the bottom of her gown spread out like a big umbrella on the floor beside him. The photographer took their picture like that and made them take a few more in other equally awkward poses. He smiled little in all of them and appeared stiff when he stood next to his wife, looking like the man on the postcard who had his arm around a caterpillar with green gigantic eyes.

The man and the caterpillar both stared back at him, looking bewildered, like they were forced to squeeze together, shoulder to shoulder. His wife had bought the card at a gift shop because it resembled the pictures in the books she read to learn English. Odd, he had thought when she taped it onto the mirror. It reminded him of how he felt during the first few months of their marriage – a mixture of surprise, uncertainty, strangeness, and comfort.

“Are you ready yet? Hurry up,” she said, knocking on the bathroom door.

“Almost,” Kuan answered, standing over the sink, his hands holding onto its sides. He felt only half-awake, tiredness still lingering in his eyes.

They were going to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden and he was taking his time getting ready. His wife had suggested that they go somewhere every other Sunday to get to know the wider world, to see places beyond the restaurant and the factory they labored in. They decided that they would go to the Garden because she wanted to see the spring flowers there. “They’re beautiful. A friend of mine has been before. We should go,” she said. He didn’t care for flowers nor did he think it worthwhile to drive forty minutes from Flushing to see them. But he agreed anyway. He felt that he owed her. After all, she demanded little from him as a husband. She did all the chores herself and made him late night suppers. She even stayed up to clean after him. She was considerate, accommodating.

“Let’s go,” he mumbled, coming out of the bathroom and grabbing his keys. He held the door open for her, letting her walk out first. “Be careful on the stairs,” he added as she began making her way down, her pregnant body staying close to the banister.

She was in her seventh month with their first child and he worried about her each day when she walked out the door to work. He worried that she might slip on a piece of cloth or cardboard on the clutter-filled floor of the factory. Or that she might get robbed walking to the subway after work along half-deserted streets. New York could be a hostile place, he’d learned a long time ago. He was robbed once when he was making
deliveries. Two men had attacked him while he was on his way to his car, taking his wallet and his cell phone, the only things he had with him at the time. They had left a bruise on the side of his forehead and another on his stomach. But he couldn’t report them because he didn’t know any English and couldn’t remember what the men had looked like. He only knew that they were black and that he himself might have been arrested for working illegally had he gone to the police.

He became a cook afterward, deciding that at least he’d be safe in the space of a restaurant. He would go to work and then come back, his day an easy routine of two places. On his free time, he would stay in either Flushing or Chinatown. There, he shopped and ran errands. He knew people and could ask for help if he needed it.

***

Kuan admired his wife’s figure as they walked to the car. She was slender, with hips that swayed when she walked. She balanced her weight well, not looking like the other pregnant women he had seen. She moved as though her stomach was simply an inconvenient extension of her body rather than a mass that distorted her figure and caused her to waddle on swollen ankles. She was five years younger than him and had a broad face with pretty round eyes. He had noticed that when they first met. They were introduced to each other by a distant cousin on his mother’s side who told him she was divorced and looking for a husband. Kuan, then too, was looking for someone to settle down with. He was forty-two and had waited until he helped marry off all four of his sisters back in China. He was tired of sharing an apartment with three bachelors and coming home to the stench of grease.

“How long have you been here?” she had asked when they met over lunch.

“Sixteen years. Ten in New York. Two on Long Island. Four in Los Angeles,” he answered.

“Twelve for me,” she said.

Like Kuan, she had been a migrant, moving from the West Coast to the East Coast, going wherever the higher wage was. Kuan was one until he bought his restaurant with loans from relatives. They shared a common disillusionment of always struggling but never getting too far.

“Have you heard about the changes at home?” she asked, after telling Kuan about her work history.  

“Yes. My mother talks new roads, cars, and big condos each time I call. Have you been back?”

“Twice. Once after I got my green card and then again when my father died.”

“You’re lucky. I haven’t been back since I came. I don’t know what things look like anymore. I couldn’t even be at my own father’s funeral.”

His father passed away seven years after Kuan left. He had watched the funeral on tape and cried when he saw his oldest brother-in-law taking his place in front of the funeral march.

“Everyone’s living life while we seem to be stuck,” she said, shaking her head.

“I know. It’s a one way ticket here.”

They went out for dim sum and shopped together a few times. She never ordered more than what she could eat and was good at hunting for bargains. She took him to stores with American brand names, stores he avoided because he didn’t think the clothes there would fit him. She picked out a few things for him: a light, brown sweater, a pair of dark trousers, boots with good traction on the soles. “They’ll keep you warm without slipping in the winter,” she said, fingering the laces on the boots. All the things she picked were on sale and they made him look sharp like the handsome, middle-aged men he saw on commercials. He got along with her and liked the fact that she could see what suited him. Their families approved their match and they were married three months later.

***

In the car, his wife took out a book to study from. It was something she did each time they drove to go somewhere. It was her way of being productive, of not feeling restless and bored while strapped to a seat. The book was for children. He could tell by the colorful pictures and the few lines of words it had. She was reading it with the help of an electronic bilingual dictionary. In their room, there was a set of similar books arranged on a shelf near their bed. Many times she tried teaching Kuan to read from them, but it never worked because he would give up after a few attempts at pronouncing things.

“I don’t have the memory for this. I’m too old,” he said. The language was just too different, too foreign. He couldn’t grasp the sounds of the alphabet, the Xs, the Rs, and the Zs, sounds that his tongue could not get right no matter how many times he tried to articulate them. His wife never believed that he tried hard enough, but he did, he really did.

They argued last night about whether to send the baby back to China for his mother to care for after its birth. He knew how much his mother had prayed for him to have children, how much she had wanted a boy to carry on his family name. She has had too many waisun, sons of his sisters whom she never considered proper heirs of the family. Kuan had hoped that sending the baby back would compensate for the years he had been away. His wife, however, wouldn’t agree. She wanted to stay home and care for the baby herself.

“I don’t want my child spoiled by your mother. People in China treat American-born children like emperors. My friend sent hers back and they came back like they’re not hers anymore. They cried for their grandparents all the time. She had to beat them to get them to listen,” she said.

“But the child will grow up learning Chinese. It’ll know its grandparents,” he asserted.

“It’ll be too young. It’ll forget everything once it comes back to the States.”

He paused, not knowing how to fight back.

“The child can learn Chinese later. English is what’s important,” she added.

“I want it to learn Chinese. I want it to be raised at home,” he insisted. China, not New York, was home to him. It was where everything he knew was.

His wife glared at him. He knew she was angry at his hard-headedness, his inability to see reason. The look she gave him made him feel small. It carried a sharp hint of resentment that made him wonder whether she regretted marrying him.

She came from a good family in the city near his hometown. She had a green card and was hard working enough that she supported herself and helped her family buy their house in China. If it weren’t for the fact that she was thirty-seven and divorced, she could have married another man, a man with better terms than him. She never told him why she had chosen him or what her first husband was like. She just said that they separated because they couldn’t get along and that they’ve never had children. If he tried asking her about him, she would say, “No use in talking about him. Things have already passed.” But Kuan still wanted to know and he wished that she would tell him.

He stopped at a red light and glanced over at his wife who was still engrossed in her book. She was thinking with her eyebrows scrunched, stroking her chin with the tip of the pencil she held. She took notes, checking the words in the book against the dictionary in her other hand.

He sometimes felt like the things she wrote in her books were more than what she had said to him. When he came back to her at night, they talked about work and their families back home who saw their wedding on tape. They talked about decisions, bills, things that they had to do to make sure that life was on track. They never talked about their marriage or how they felt having a child at their age. It still seemed like a miracle that his wife was pregnant. He had been worried at first when she did not conceive after the first year of their marriage. He was afraid that they were too old to have children, that one or both of their bodies have already progressed into the final stage of a deterioration they couldn’t see. When she told him one night that she was pregnant, his surprise and relief were so great that all he could say was “Great.” That the next day he spoiled an entire pot of soup by adding too much salt and mixed up five orders during rush hour.

Glancing at his wife, Kuan felt an urge to reach over and touch her like he had that time, when they were in an exhibit at a science museum. The exhibit was in a dark room where they could not see themselves. It was an exhibit about the galaxy and it simulated the experience of looking at something without being capable of touching or understanding it. You could only marvel at the studded lights twinkling above you, the imaginary stars and planets that hung beyond your reach, some bigger and shining brighter than others. Looking up at the tiny lights, Kuan experienced a sensation of dizziness and falling. He had put out his hand then and grabbed his wife’s elbow. He had wanted to make sure that she was there, needing the feel of her that told him he was still standing. He placed his hand behind the headrest of her seat and gently touched the tips of her hair, letting go as the light changed to green. His wife barely looked up from the page of her book.

***

They got to the Garden at about eleven and waited on line to buy their tickets at the gate. It was a nice, breezy day in early May when rain was unlikely but the sun remained obscured by slow moving masses of grey clouds. His wife was in a pink shirt and jeans, her permed hair tied in a ponytail. Her bangs covered the faint lines on her forehead, lines that he would see when she combed back her wet hair after a shower. She wouldn’t take the light jacket she had in the car as he told her to and he was annoyed because it seemed obvious to him that it would get windy later. He insisted on the jacket and told her that she should be more careful now with the baby, but she brushed him off, telling him that he was worrying too much.

They stepped up to the ticket window and he stood there with his hands in his pockets as his wife spoke to the woman behind the desk.

“Tu teegets pleese,” his wife said, giving the woman a twenty.

“Koode we haaf a mop pleese?” she asked when the woman handed her the receipt.

The woman gave her two copies of the map, smiled, and wished them a good day. Kuan knew his wife was pleased with herself, having been understood. She did all the talking when they were at these places. They were good practice for her English, she said.

He admired her confidence, her boldness. On their wedding night, she had surprised him by taking him to the Hilton in Manhattan. She made it their honeymoon and had them walk into the lobby in their wedding clothes, he in his tuxedo and she in a glowing red qipao. She had addressed the receptionist wearing full makeup, her face glittering in the light of the lobby, her hair piled in a mound of curls. He felt pleased then and stood beside her with his hands in his pockets, grinning in spite of himself. In the dimness of their suite, they had changed into their robes. “This is what living feels like,” she had said as they showered and settled into bed. He fell asleep that night smelling the lingering scent of soap on her skin. For several weeks after, he would reach over in bed and curl up against her, finding himself reassured by the being of her body, its warmth startling him into uncertainty, into wondering whether she minded that their bodies touched. It had taken them sometime to get used to the presence they made in each other’s lives. And when they finally made love, he was cautious as he embraced her and allowed himself to be cradled between her legs.

Kuan looked at the map and tried to figure out how long it would take for them to walk through the entire garden. He was still not used to these trips. So far they had only filled him with boredom and frustration. He hated the dull placards that indicated each thing they saw. They were all meaningless lines of words, muddled and indistinguishable, like living under a blanketing blindfold. They weren’t color-coded, easy-to-read like the menus in his restaurant that had Chinese in red and English in green. They flustered him when he looked at them and made him feel like a naive child from whom everything was kept. He didn’t have his wife’s curiosity. She would scan each label and try to see what she could recognize. She would relay to him whatever she managed to decipher, bits about the origins of an animal, the history of a painting, or the artist who painted it. He tended to move from exhibit to exhibit, his eyes flitting here and there until enough time had passed that he could tug his wife on her sleeve and tell her to move on. 

They walked along a paved path among other visitors. His wife paused to take some pictures of the flower blossoms. She liked to catalogue the things they saw on these trips. There were already hundreds of pictures on their computer of paintings and historical objects. She motioned him to stand next to a bush of roses. He forced a smile and she took a shot of him in his vinyl jacket and beige trousers. They switched places and he took one of her next to the same bush of flowers. Further down the road she asked a white woman to take a picture of them together. Kuan placed his arm around her waist and forced another smile. These pictures were more for their families than for them. They would send them home to supplement the phone calls they made to give their mothers an idea of how they lived.

“It’s nice today. I’m glad we came,” she said.

“Hmm,” he answered.

“What time do you have to go back to the restaurant?”

“Nine or a little later. Old Kong and Han should be able to handle things there by themselves.” He owned a small takeout place that didn’t require him to work on Sundays. He only needed to go in at night to help with cleaning and closing up.

“Do we need any groceries?” he asked.

“Some. We should stop by Chinatown later.”

He nodded.

She kept track of what was in the fridge since she did most of the cooking on weekdays. But on Sundays, Kuan would be the one to cook and they would have a quiet dinner in their apartment before he had to leave for work.

They picked a stone bench past the rows of cherry trees and sat down for a break. His wife unpacked from her bag some water and meat buns she bought early that morning from a bakery on their street. They always brought their own lunches. The snack stands and cafeterias in these places charged too much. “I can buy more than that with that amount,” he had said the first time he saw a plastic-wrapped sandwich at a museum café for seven dollars. His wife had hushed him even as she agreed. They were both savers. They lived simply and pinched for bigger things, like a house of their own.

They looked at the colors around them – rows of pale pink, bushes of orange-yellow, and patches of red and purple. His wife sighed.

“It’s back to the cage tomorrow,” she said. She worked in a room with grey floors and white walls, a room that was twice the size of his restaurant. He had been there a few times and saw rows of women sitting by their sewing machines, all bent over and running inches of cloth under quick-moving needles. The raw plastic smell of processed fabric filled the room, and he had found the place stifling.

“Yeah. I’m tired of it too,” Kuan said. He thought of the smoke breaks he took at work after rush hours. He would sit at the doorway of the restaurant’s backyard and take deep pulls as he stared at the walls in front of him. Smoking relaxed him and helped him tolerate the monotony of work. “Why don’t they have the brains to stay home? Look at us – we do nothing but stand around a pit of fire all day,” he often said to his cook Old Kong when he read about people getting caught off the coast of California. And Old Kong
would tell him that they were all dying to be meiguoke, that they were all slaves for money.

“Let’s go,” Kuan said to his wife. It was getting warmer and he felt impatience rising in him again. They finished eating and continued their stroll down the path. Their arms linked for a little while before his wife broke away to take some more pictures of flowering trees.

***

She started coughing when they were in a small enclosed garden off the main path. It was about half an hour after they had lunch and she had walked a little ahead of him to allow herself more time to take pictures before he would catch up with her. Kuan rushed up to his wife when he saw her stopping in front of a bunch of yellow flowers, her hand on her chest.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

The cough quickly became wheezes. His wife held up her free hand, signaling for him to wait as she tried catching her breath. Her face was growing red now, and she was staring right at the ground, panting.

“What’s wrong? Are you all right?” he asked again, bending over to try to see the expression on her face. He felt his own blood rush to his face, his body breaking out in a sweat. There was no one else around them and he couldn’t think of what to do to call for help.

She laid a hand on his shoulder and wrung his shirt. “Go. Go out,” she said between broken breaths and began turning in the direction of the main path.

Seeing how slowly she moved, Kuan picked her up and almost dropped her when he found how heavy she was. He had never lifted her before, not even on their wedding night, and he didn’t think that carrying a baby would add that much weight to her. He started walking as quickly as possible out of the garden, his eyes on the road in front of him. He huffed, thinking only of them getting out of there.
           
Once they were out on the main path again, Kuan set his wife down and began smoothing her back. His heart thumped and his arms hurt from the strain of her weight. By then, her wheezing had lightened and she had started to catch her breath, breathing out of her mouth in slow, audible gasps. A few minutes later, she retched on the ground beside the garden’s entrance and coughed. Her face was still flushed, but at least now she was able to hold her body erect, her hands no longer gripping her knees.

Kuan grabbed the bag that was hanging from his wife’s arm and searched through it for some tissue. He felt people staring as they stopped to see what was happening. He handed his wife the tissue and waited as she wiped her face, keeping his eyes on her so that he wouldn’t have to acknowledge the curious stares of the passersby.

 “Is she okay?” said a man in a light sweater, pointing at Kuan’s wife. He was with his own wife, who stood right next to him. They both looked past fifty, with dark skin and grey hair.

“You should get her some water,” the man’s wife said.

Kuan didn’t quite understand them. He nodded his head and answered, “Okay, okay. Water, okay.” His wife had recovered enough by then that she gave the elderly couple a slight smile and waved them away with a small nod. “Let’s go home,” Kuan muttered in her ear as he took her by the elbow and steered her towards the nearest exit. She gathered herself and walked in small steps with one hand supporting her back and the other on her stomach. He looked back on the splatter she left on the ground and was ready to run out of there, his adrenaline rushing through his body.

***

It took them ten minutes to reach the nearest exit. A sudden asthma attack, his wife had said to him on the way there. It was only asthma, caused probably by some pollen. He told her to wait as he ran back to the other side of the Garden to bring the car around.

“I used to have really bad spring allergies. They’ve disappeared for a few years now and I thought I wouldn’t have to worry about them anymore,” she said when they were back in the car. She sounded congested, her voice thick with sniffles.

“You should have told me this before,” he said, realizing how much of a stranger she still was to him. She had never mentioned that she was allergic to anything. He didn’t know her medical history and he was never with her when she went for her checkups at the doctor’s. They moved on different schedules and rarely spoke in the mornings. She would get up early and leave for work an hour and a half before him. He would only hear her wake up and slip out of the room with a slight creak of the door. She would reset the alarm for him and leave quietly, making sure that he was not disturbed.

Kuan made her sit in the backseat to give her more room to stretch out and rest. He thought something worse could have happened back there. He imagined himself calling for help in Chinese with no one answering. He imagined dialing 911 and stuttering on the phone as the person on the other end waited for him to explain himself. He wouldn’t have known what to say. “Waif. No speek English. Come. Pleese.” Those would’ve been the only words that he could piece together in panic. He would have made coughing noises and gestured wildly, trying to tell the person what was happening and forgetting that he was on phone, that he could not be seen. Desperate, he would have ran out and grabbed someone, beckoning and pulling them to follow him and getting there when his wife would have already been on the ground.

His hands trembled on the steering wheel. It brought him back to the night the two men robbed him. They worked quick, covering his body in punches and kicking him in the legs as hands grabbed his wallet and phone from his pocket. By the time he was ready to punch back they were already gone. They left him standing on the empty street, full of suppressed shock and anger that made his muscles twitch. He was thirty-eight and cried out of the humiliation and uselessness he felt. He got back to his car and sat in front of the wheel for half an hour, replaying the scenario in his mind before he drove back and told his boss what happened.

Kuan passed a hand over his eyes, wiping away the film that had gathered there. “I’m taking you to the doctor,” he called to the backseat.

“There’s no need. I’m fine,” his wife said.

“Just listen to me and go.”

“I told you, I’m fine. There’s no need.”

“We’re stopping by Chinatown anyway. The doctor’s right there.”

“Don’t be a pest and waste money. I know my own body. I don’t need to go.”

“Don’t be your own doctor. Listen to me and be more careful with yourself,” he retorted, his tone rising.

He was frustrated that she had taken this so lightly. She couldn’t see why everything was so much more terrifying for him, always dismissing his cautiousness as nagging, as a flaw in his character that annoyed her. He told her about the robbery during one of their late night conversations and she didn’t see it as more than an unlucky happening that he needed to get over. He felt warm, like suddenly his body was a furnace that he needed to escape from. His skin itched where his seatbelt was, keeping him tight and sweaty in his seat.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” his wife said, frowning at him in the mirror.

“Please. Don’t worry me anymore.” He sighed, releasing what he felt in an urgency that hung on those words.

He waited for a response, another refusal from her to tell him that he was being ridiculous. But it didn’t come, and instead, she said okay.

 

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