Good Chinese Wife Read online

  I stood back against the wall where I had waited for Cai. Now I watched his graceful dance moves as he tangoed with a couple of older, married women in his department, one after the other. A couple decades younger than these women, I didn’t mind that Cai danced with them. They seemed kind and gentle. If I had been in their place, I would have appreciated someone like Cai taking time out to dance with me.

  At the end of a Hong Kong ballad, he nodded to his partner. Instead of heading toward me, he turned in the opposite direction, away from the front door. Cai started talking with Yang Xiaoxun, the man he was with the night we met. My eyes bulged in disbelief as he proceeded to teach Yang to cha-cha, swinging his legs along an invisible line on the sidelines.

  My first inclination was to storm out, but instead I took a deep breath. I could not let myself come across as needy and immature, although that was exactly how I felt at the moment. As Cai continued to cha-cha with Yang, I tried to stay calm. I couldn’t throw away the rapport I’d developed with Cai over the last month just because I felt alone—and abandoned, if I was honest with myself—in a room full of people I barely knew.

  The last song, “I Love Beijing Tiananmen,” finished and someone flipped on the lights. Now that the dance was over, I remained standing alone, numb. My head throbbed in confusion. How could the first dance, when I couldn’t take a breath between songs, differ so drastically with this one, when no one except Cai talked to me? And more importantly, why had Cai only asked me to dance twice this time? Had I unwittingly offended him? Had one of the students told him that I looked miserable before he had arrived?

  I loitered around the entrance of the common room while Cai stuck to Yang Xiaoxun’s side. When they reached the door, Cai said a quick good-bye to Yang. In silence we ascended two flights to the concrete bridge connecting the lower graduate dorm to the upper one. A fishy aroma wafted up from the Tolo Harbour, the November sky clear and dry. Was Cai going to explain why this dance contrasted so much from the first one? But he remained silent, his eyes directed ahead into dark shrubbery. I couldn’t return to my dorm with these matters unanswered.

  “Cai,” I said, careful to avoid asking a direct question that would be perceived as a personal affront, “it was kind of weird that no one else asked me to dance tonight. Not that I wanted to, but it was so different from last month.”

  He stopped and looked off to the side, toward the sea below. In the moonlight, his eyes appeared tired and worn. “The mainland students have been talking about us.”

  “What do you mean, ‘talking about us’?”

  Cai continued to look away. “They think we’re dating.” His tone was serious with a sprinkle of embarrassment.

  Dating? This was news to me. Of course it was good news if Cai wanted to date me, but humiliating and possibly friendship-ending if he didn’t. Was he bothered by this gossip? Was that why he couldn’t meet before the dance and why he was so late? Or was he telling me about these students because he really was interested in dating? Were we dating?

  I wanted to discuss it at length—like I did with Janice—but as with most heavy questions, I was afraid of the answer. After all these weeks of meeting in my room, I was developing an attachment to him that I couldn’t think about severing now. I couldn’t say anything to turn him away. On the other hand, if he told me about these students, he must have an opinion.

  We started again toward our dorm, walking in silence. In the elevator, he hesitated when it reached the fourth floor. “Are we still meeting tomorrow night?” Cai stood waiting for my answer, his eyes wide in anticipation. Something about his look made me think that he doubted I would want to continue our tutoring.

  “Yes, of course.” I tried to muffle my enthusiasm. Cai smiled and waved good-bye before walking toward his room.

  As soon as I reached the eighth floor, I stopped at the hall phone to call Janice. I couldn’t wait to tell her about these latest developments. But just as I picked up the receiver, I remembered she was at a party on Lantau Island. There was no one else I could call, so I dozed off on my top bunk, reflecting on how the other students talked among themselves about Cai and me. Together. Dating.

  Chapter 5

  Sharing Secrets

  In the two weeks since the second dance, Cai and I hadn’t spoken any further about our dating status or even about the other students’ gossip about us. January loomed on the horizon, and I started to panic that he would end our meetings after his presentation. Or perhaps he had become uncomfortable after revealing that the mainland students were talking about us. But the days passed as usual and he continued coming to my room on a nightly basis, as if the second dance had never occurred. I tried my best to act natural and not show Cai that I worried about the future of our friendship.

  Then one evening in early December, as Cai was about to leave my room, he hesitated at my door.

  “One of these days, I should tell you a story.” He smiled demurely.

  A story? Was it the one I’d been waiting to hear all these months, the one that would finally reveal the details of his personal life? Cai couldn’t dangle that and leave me hanging. Too anxious to move, I remained in my chair, worried he’d notice my right leg twitching. “Can’t you tell me now?” I stammered.

  He walked back toward Na Wei’s chair and sat down. Smiling, he said, “Guess.”

  Yes, it could only relate to his personal life in China. Nothing else would be so remarkable that he couldn’t just tell me casually. I felt we’d covered every topic except our previous relationships. So I took a quick breath. “Are you married?”

  He looked away. “I was.”

  “You were?”

  “I was married for five years.” He looked down again. “But I’ve been divorced for two years now.”

  A wave of relief swept through me. He was available. No one in my immediate family was divorced, but it seemed a far better answer than if Cai had revealed he was married or even separated.

  But when I looked into his eyes, he suddenly appeared weary. Maybe the divorce hadn’t been his idea and he was still trying to get her back. Was she the one he wanted to call the night we met, the night he meant to buy a calling card at midnight? “Do you still love her?” I asked.

  “No!”

  Phew. But why would he look unhappy? Most of the married students in our dorm had both a spouse and child back in China. So when I saw dejection on Cai’s face, these other students came to mind. Before I could think how best to phrase my question, I blurted out, “Do you have a child?”

  “Yes, a daughter.” He paused and then smirked. “Too bad, huh?”

  I stared at him blankly. It was socially expected for young married couples in China to have a child, so that in itself didn’t come as a surprise. My father had been a widowed single father when he met my mother, so the fact that Cai had a daughter wasn’t a deal breaker for me. But his comment about his daughter: Did he really think that?

  As if guessing my thoughts, Cai chuckled. “I’m only joking about that last part. If you have time now, I can tell you the whole story.”

  “Of course.” I would stay up all night to hear his story.

  Before they divorced, Cai and his ex-wife, Wei Ling, had lived in Wuhan with their daughter Ting-Ting and a teenage nanny from the countryside. Out of the blue, Wei Ling announced that she planned to move south to Zhūhâi, a special economic zone—one of several areas designated in the early 1980s as an experiment in free trade—a couple of hours by boat from Hong Kong. She’d found a teaching job there, where salaries were higher and the climate was subtropical.

  At the same time Wei Ling announced she was moving south—alone—Cai was waiting for his Hong Kong paperwork to be processed so he could study for his PhD. Wei Ling was aware of Cai’s plans to leave Wuhan for several months at a time and only to return for holidays and during the summer.

  Because Wei Ling hadn’t told
him about her decision to move south until after she’d committed to the job, Cai asked Wei Ling if this meant she wanted a divorce. She answered yes. But he told me the divorce didn’t come as a surprise, since his marriage had been strained for some time. Even his friends could see it. His family never understood why Wei Ling refused to travel with him to Hidden River even before their daughter was born.

  According to Cai, it wasn’t until after Ting-Ting came along that Wei Ling started going out at night with her friends, often returning home past midnight. The first time she stayed out late, Cai worried she’d fallen ill or had been robbed. This was well before the time when cell phones—or even private landlines—were common in China, and they didn’t have a telephone in their apartment.

  He would pace their compact, one-room apartment with no way to reach her and wasn’t able to sleep until she returned safely. The teenage nanny provided no reassurance, as she was a child herself and worried about her employer’s safety. But when Wei Ling finally walked in the door, Cai saw that she was fine. Wei Ling continued to go out as she pleased, leaving Cai at home with Ting-Ting and the nanny.

  Cai and Wei Ling often argued. He didn’t think it was right for her to go out so late when she had a baby—and a husband—at home. Wei Ling claimed she simply spent time with a group of men and women at a restaurant. She never confessed to having a boyfriend.

  After they split up, two-year-old Ting-Ting moved in with Wei Ling’s parents. Cai agreed to this arrangement because he knew he couldn’t take care of her once his Hong Kong visa was ready. He didn’t mind Ting-Ting living with her grandparents because it was a common arrangement in China when parents worked or studied in other parts of China or even abroad. The official who presided over their divorce required Cai to pay a one-time child support fee of 10,000 Chinese yuan, or about $1,250 U.S.

  “So do you visit Ting-Ting when you return to Wuhan?” I expected bittersweet stories of father-daughter outings to large, run-down Chinese parks, the paint from the simple playground equipment faded and peeling away.

  Cai looked at his hands. “When I tried to visit Ting-Ting last summer, Wei Ling’s parents wouldn’t even let me in. Her father said Ting-Ting had a good life and should be left alone.”

  He hadn’t tried to contact Ting-Ting since.

  I wanted to hold Cai tightly, to assure him that his luck would change. Maybe he just needed a boost of confidence and a little push to give it another try. If he continued to let me into his life, I would try to gently persuade Cai to visit his daughter. Ting-Ting needed a father, no matter where he lived.

  “I hope I haven’t shocked you. It’s just something I wanted you to know. I haven’t told anyone else at the university except a couple of people in my department. So if you didn’t say anything—”

  “Of course, I won’t say a word.” I felt so honored he’d confide in me.

  In my upper bunk that night, I thought about my father, who had lost his first wife to breast cancer twelve years into their marriage. I understood that people could still hang on to precious memories of a former spouse even years into a new marriage.

  But Cai’s case was different. He seemed adamant that he wasn’t still in love with Wei Ling, so it wasn’t likely that he still hoped they’d get back together. In fact, I wondered if he was ever in love with her. From what I was learning about Chinese marriage, I could see how he had felt pressure to marry in his late twenties. So the divorce didn’t bother me. The one I couldn’t stop thinking about was Ting-Ting.

  I’d always pictured myself having a child and could imagine how Cai must suffer from not being able to see his daughter. Did she know he’d tried to visit her last year? I worried for Ting-Ting’s happiness if she wasn’t allowed to contact her father. Some childhood friends had divorced parents and had become justifiably bitter toward absent fathers. In my own family, I knew what it was like to see a sibling estranged from his family. When my father lost his first wife to breast cancer in the late 1960s, it was difficult for him, but even more so for their adopted son, Danny.

  My dad quickly remarried and had two children—myself and my brother, Jonathan. Soon Danny started acting out and threatening my mother, prompting my parents to send him to a special school for children with behavioral issues when he was eleven years old and I was five. Danny never lived with our family again, nor did he have close relationships with either of my parents. Cai needed to fight to see Ting-Ting before it was too late.

  I tossed and turned, the gloom of his story weighing down my waking hours. I tried to visualize Cai, Wei Ling, and Ting-Ting as a family back in Wuhan, but the only picture that crept into my mind was a worried Cai pacing the apartment while Ting-Ting slept in a bassinet off in one corner. He must have felt helpless back then.

  To clear my head the next morning, I headed to the one place where I knew I could think clearly: the waterfront promenade in Tsim Sha Tsui, the tip of the Kowloon Peninsula. When I was an exchange student and new to Hong Kong four years earlier, I often rode the train forty-five minutes down to the Kowloon harbor front to stand before the dense clusters of modern skyscrapers rising from the base of the island to halfway up the mountain.

  Not much of a seafarer, I nonetheless enjoyed watching the boats in the harbor. They came in all sizes: some as small as wallah wallahs and some as massive as cruise ships or naval carriers. The harbor had long since become polluted and unsafe for swimming, but one day I noticed a middle-aged Chinese man splashing in the water next to his little sampan. He smiled and waved up to me like an old friend.

  With Cai’s story on my mind, I gazed out at the green and white Star Ferries chugging across the harbor and wondered how he and I would interact the next time we saw each other. Had Cai felt like he’d revealed too much, only to retreat inward? My worst fear was still that he’d stop coming to my room for our tutoring sessions. Drawing from my limited experience—and what I thought Chinese culture dictated—I felt like my only choice was to wait to see what Cai would do.

  Heading back toward the train station, I almost stopped at a phone booth to call Janice at work so I could tell her about Cai’s divorce and Ting-Ting. But then I worried she would form a worse opinion of him if I revealed this new information. It was premature, I reasoned, to discuss these developments with her before I knew if Cai was interested in dating.

  On my return to the dorm to pick up my books for my state and civil society class, I entered the lobby and turned toward the elevator. Just then, Cai walked out of the cafeteria.

  “Good morning.” He spoke in English, a change from our usual Mandarin, and stepped closer, brushing his hair away from his eyes. “Do you still want to meet tonight?”

  “Of course.” I switched to Mandarin out of habit. “Thanks for talking to me last night. I’m so glad you told me.”

  “No problem. I’ll see you after dinner. Same time, same place.” He winked and walked toward the front door.

  As I rode the elevator alone to my room, I felt giddy with the anticipation of meeting Cai that evening, of keeping his secret, and of seeing our friendship grow.

  Chapter 6

  “China Is My Home”

  Days after he told me about Wei Ling and Ting-Ting, Cai spoke of his postgraduation plans during our nightly tutoring session. It was the first time we’d discussed the future.

  “I don’t want to move to America. China is my home and I want to return there and teach.” He sounded more serious than usual, sitting up straight in Na Wei’s chair.

  “What about Hong Kong? Would you want to stay here?” It didn’t bother me that he wasn’t interested in moving to the United States. I had no plans to return there anytime soon and hoped to find a job in Hong Kong after graduation. If he wanted to do the same, we might have a future together.

  “I can’t. Mainland students aren’t able to stay here after our student visas expire. In any case, Hong Kong has no culture. I want t
o go back to China.”

  My stomach fell. I could hear what was coming next. Cai would say he liked me but it would never work because he wanted to move back to China and couldn’t ask me to give up the comfort of Hong Kong or the United States for a life of harsh conditions. It wasn’t difficult for me to picture Cai returning to the motherland, teaching for low wages and serving the people.

  However, from my trips to China, I knew I’d feel too isolated to live there long-term, cut off from everything familiar. That’s why I had chosen to move to Hong Kong, which to me was a perfect mélange of East and West. But why was I thinking about our future together when we weren’t even dating? Janice was right; I couldn’t let myself jump ahead like this. He probably wasn’t going to discuss a future together with me.

  But he did continue speaking. “I just wanted you to know that—and that I have a child—in case we start dating and get married.”

  Wait. Dating? Married? With me? Had he really just asked me about either, especially to possibly marry him? Everything in my room suddenly seemed to blur. Cai continued to speak, but I couldn’t hear him. Time had suspended with those words “dating and get married.” My mind raced back to the night I met Cai in the dorm lobby, the day he asked me to tutor him, the short discussion about dating after the second dance.

  I slowly tuned back into the conversation to hear Cai say, “In China, couples traditionally date only if they plan to marry. It’s not like in the United States where people date casually until they meet someone they want to marry.”

  So this was normal, talking about dating and marriage in the same sentence. It was the first time I had heard of this custom, but I trusted Cai. The Chinese way was so different, so straightforward and risk-free. I couldn’t imagine finding someone more kind or attentive than him. And by agreeing to marry him, I’d no longer worry about whether he’d still want to meet every night or if he’d run away after he told me about his daughter and failed marriage.