Home Remedies Read online

  HOME REMEDIES is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Xuan Wang Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  crownpublishing.com

  HOGARTH is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The following stories have been previously published: “For Our Children and For Ourselves” in The Atlantic, “Home Remedies for Non–Life-Threatening Ailments” in The Brooklyn Rail, “White Tiger of the West” as “Grandmaster Wu Eats Glass” in Day One, “FuErdAi to the Max” in Narrative, “Days of Being Mild” and “Algorithmic Problem Solving for Father-Daughter Relationships” in Ploughshares.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Wang, Xuan Juliana, 1985– author.

  Title: Home remedies : stories / Xuan Juliana Wang.

  Description: First edition. | London ; New York : Hogarth, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018038559 | ISBN 9781984822741 (hardback) | ISBN 9781984822758 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781984822765 (Ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Chinese Americans—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Short Stories (single author). | FICTION / Cultural Heritage.

  Classification: LCC PS3623.A4587 A6 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038559

  Hardcover ISBN 9781984822741

  Ebook ISBN 9781984822765

  Cover design by Elena Giavaldi

  Cover photograph by No.223

  v5.4

  prh

  To Mom and Dad, for letting me chase my dreams

  献 给, 让 我 追 逐 梦 想 的 爸 爸 妈 妈

  CONTENTS

  FAMILY

  MOTT STREET IN JULY

  DAYS OF BEING MILD

  WHITE TIGER OF THE WEST

  FOR OUR CHILDREN AND FOR OURSELVES

  LOVE

  FUERDAI TO THE MAX

  HOME REMEDIES FOR NON–LIFE-THREATENING AILMENTS

  VAULTING THE SEA

  THE STRAWBERRY YEARS

  TIME AND SPACE

  ALGORITHMIC PROBLEM-SOLVING FOR FATHER-DAUGHTER RELATIONSHIPS

  ECHO OF THE MOMENT

  FUTURE CAT

  THE ART OF STRAYING OFF COURSE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FAMILY

  Mott Street in July

  Above their sleeping heads hung the wedding photo. It had hung there before any of the children were even born. Walnut, Pinetree, and Lucy would sleep in a row, pressed up against Mama’s soft warmth. The spot on the bed closest to the door was left empty, so that whenever he got home the children wouldn’t stir. That was their baba, of course.

  There they were, Mama and Baba, a part of history. It was still the good part. Mama in a red dress, her hair shiny and voluminous, her lips the color of jewels. With a curl above his brow and the wedding studio’s white suit on, that was the happiest Baba had ever looked. He never smiled like that in real life.

  The family lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the second floor of 24 Mott Street. Mama and Baba with two boys and a baby girl, who started out as toddlers at the Catholic preschool on Mosco Street. As they grew taller, they walked past the screaming babies on their way to elementary school and looked down their noses at those maniacs. Each morning they stood beside the deep kitchen sink that they had once bathed in, tickling one another with their elbows and squishing toothpaste foam between their toes. If the telephone on top of the fridge rang, the tangled cord stretched over their wet heads and together they screamed with delight at the thought of being electrocuted.

  Each afternoon Walnut, Pinetree, and Lucy walked the path through Roosevelt Park, leaning on the partition to watch the kites go up over the shrubs on Forsyth. It did not yet boggle their minds that the insides of those things that fly also look like the insides of those that swim. They had yet to question why the bones of a fish could look like the bones of a kite. They had not known to wonder how far to look back in history for the connection. Instead, the three children raced up the stairs to the window to count the black cars that lined Mosco Street for funerals four times a week, because Pinetree said that the more black cars there were, the more that dead person was loved.

  These streets held their first universe. Under this patch of sky, where melting ice slid over the sidewalks and cars competed for space with supermarket carts teetering with recycling, that was all there was.

  It went on this way for a long time, until the children got their first bunk beds and their world stretched upward to the brass ceiling tiles. When he turned thirteen, Walnut wordlessly installed a curtain across the room with his disproportionately large hands. From then on, the children no longer saw Mama and Baba before they drifted off to sleep.

  But in the years when all five slept on the same pieced-together bed, in the same room, Lucy would often wake in the dark to see Baba climbing under the covers beside Mama, and she guessed that that was the reason why it was she and not her brothers who felt closest to him.

  As their bodies grew larger, the empty space around them grew thick and heavy with riches they brought inside to make theirs. Blue jeans, comic books, two computers, and a stuffed dog that told jokes. Walnut helped Baba make room for a wardrobe that would partly block the doorway to the bedroom, so that they had to turn sideways in order to walk through. There was nowhere for clothes to disappear to, except for when they were drying, which was done either out on the fire escape or up on the black tar roof. Old bricks held on to the nails that carried their washcloths, flyswatters, and supermarket calendars, as well as the antenna that allowed the television to see all the way to China.

  The front door began to stay open, to let fresh air flow through the hallways, past the neon-colored bins where they kept their meager treasures, day after day, until the plastic lost its brightness.

  Soon there wasn’t enough room for all of them inside, and Lucy took her time studying the tiny cardboard iPhones and sports cars in the funeral parlor’s windows, before she walked past Mama, who played poker with the other ladies on the corner of Mulberry and Bayard, under the lights of the twenty-four-hour parking lot. Whenever one of them entered the apartment, they avoided the others’ eyes as a courtesy. Walnut was always chatting on his laptop, and even though he would have liked to be outside, Pinetree didn’t have a fixie bike or a skateboard, so eventually he had to do what Walnut did and play on another laptop. Then Walnut got glasses, Pinetree broke his wrist, Lucy needed braces, and Baba had to take a second job at a mechanics shop deep enough into Brooklyn that they never saw him.

  That was the year they started calling him “Dad.”

  Dad lifted weights at the YMCA, wore a thick gold chain around his neck, and started drinking beer in big glass bottles instead of in cans. He stopped sitting down to the broths and steamed fish that Mom cooked on the stove and would instead lie on the bottom bunk in front of the television with a white Styrofoam container of BBQ duck rice balanced on his chest.

  He ate quickly, his hands blackened from soot, not speaking to them even if they asked him a question. He snapped at them for any reason, as if they were somehow mysteriously to blame for his aching back. Lucy’s brothers didn’t know how to receive Dad’s affections, so they stopped trying to earn them. But while Walnut faced his compu
ter in silence and Pinetree flipped through basketball comics, Lucy studied Dad until he told her to stop. His arms had gotten more tanned and even more muscular. If she and her brothers were changing with each passing day, then her parents must be as well, and even if no one would tell her why, she wanted to know how. She alone searched for the opening into the concealed passageways that wound through each of her parents’ hearts, into the things they didn’t tell her about.

  After all, it was Lucy who noticed the tattoo of a black and red carp that had grown across Dad’s lower belly, the flickering fish tail peeking out from beneath the hem of his white shirt. Lucy imagined the carp swimming across her father’s belly when he turned in his sleep, moving up to his chest to feed on his snores. Maybe the red scales leaped out when Dad was feeling brave and dove deep into his heart if he was ever afraid.

  The fish was born on Dad’s belly in May. Then it became June, and all reports forecasted the hottest summer on record. One humid day led to another, then another. Before the televised fireworks on the Fourth of July, the Asian carp crisis was announced by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. On the news, reporters on the scene described the carp as roughly the size of dolphins and some that had grown to be the size of economy sedans.

  “Like pigs, the Asian carp root around in the dirt for food,” said a Michigan senator to the press. “It’s not just that they’re muddying our scenic lakes, but they’re damaging the integrity of the bio composition of American waters by causing loss of vegetation and agricultural runoff.”

  Discomforting close-ups of the carps’ giant mouths swallowing air above the water played on a loop. Since Asian carp had no natural predators, the reporters went on to explain, they ate all the other fish, as well as the turtles on the bank.…They ate the frogs and the birds, too, if they got close enough to the water.…And they ate a few adorable dogs right off a dock!

  Destroyed leisure boats.

  Killed heritage waterfowl.

  Leaped onto the decks of ferries and terrorized innocent passengers.

  When pressed to share the committee’s possible solutions, the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said with a sad shake of his head, “I wish I could ask our Americans to eat our way out of this mess, but who’s going to want to eat such bony fish! I mean how much gefilte fish can one nation really make?”

  The most charismatic spokesperson of the anti-fish movement was a retired Great Lakes police officer. “I’ve tried trapping them, seining, poisoning them, but even the dead [bleep] carp are stinking our docks. I just can’t [bleep] wait to get rid of them, and they must be gotten rid of. They are to blame for every [bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep]! If they destroy the commercial fishing of our Great Lakes, what will we [bleep] do?”

  The fortune-telling grandmothers on Bayard and Mulberry, who began conversing regularly with a spiritual grandmaster via WeChat, were the first to recognize the urgency. Lucy watched as they dusted the sunflower shells off their puffy vests, stretched their aching joints, and hung a red banner across the benches that lined Columbus Park’s crooked pathways. Wobbling on their folding stools, they ordered the bands of singers to give them their portable microphones and shut up and listen.

  “The Asian carp crisis has appeared in our time to give our people a purpose, you see,” they cried with their toothless mouths, “and the purpose is a worthy one.”

  The oracle with the bent back doubled her efforts at tossing gold-plated joss paper into her burning bucket, which was stationed right in front of a Citi Bike station. Like ghostly butterflies, the paper transformed into ancestral smoke, which floated through the park, reaching the barefoot old men who sang while their wives gyrated to communal aerobics. Her smoke carried a message and the message reached the boys on the basketball court, who sweated out things they did not understand, and even caught up to the deliverymen on their electric scooters, who were riding by as if they were being chased.

  “You are the Fish Generation,” the oracle grandmother whispered into the paper before dropping it into the fire. At least that’s what it said on the banner to those who could read it.

  Lucy watched as word spread mouth-to-mouth through the networks of public parks, Ping-Pong associations, karaoke clubs, and gambling leagues. The Asian carp could be lured with moon cakes and rice noodles to swim alongside chartered boats across the ocean, back to the waters where the carp belonged, but it was up to the Fish Generation to guide them back to their rightful home.

  Though her brothers couldn’t be bothered to keep up with neighborhood folklore, they couldn’t argue with the fact that, in the days that followed, dishes no longer came out nearly as quickly from take-out windows, and soup dumplings often broke apart before they even got into people’s mouths. Socks were being mismatched at the WashNFold and, for the first time in anyone’s memory, Chinese food delivery was just as slow as any other food delivery.

  The oracles said that precisely around the time Chinatown’s ancestors sailed from the southern villages of Kaiping to California to work on the railroads, Asian carp were being introduced to American waters. Inspired by the sophistication of Austrian royalty, the princes of the new world imported the prized carp to breed in this vast, previously carp-free land. The bred carp were supposed to clean up the overdeveloping plankton that were turning rivers green.

  Like other immigrants to the United States, each new generation of carp grew to be larger than the previous one. The carp lived and spawned in waters where native fish could not, and would not, live. Since they were entirely dependent on natural food, the carp worked hard to survive. They overcame drained rivers, years of drought, and they conquered the hazards of human and industrial waste. Floods pushed them from rivers into lakes. They moved through the country’s most polluted waters, always striving, improving themselves, and trying their best to live to the fullest extent of their lifespans.

  During the second week of July, Dad walked out the door of 24 Mott Street with a duffel bag of clothes and never came back. Walnut was sixteen, Pinetree fifteen, and Lucy had just turned twelve. Still, none of them followed to find out where he was going. They couldn’t see what road he took to greater desires, and they didn’t know where those roads would lead them.

  Mom called the police. “Can you believe it? He said he never loved me.” She made Walnut translate it to the blank-faced officer at the door. “Not ever. He always loved holding that over me.”

  Lucy thought Mom would be happy that Dad was gone. Hadn’t she always complained that she was like a fire he kept putting out little by little? Shouldn’t she be glad there was nobody left in the apartment who would be upset at her for drinking all the bottles of Hennessy in the glass-fronted cabinet and filling them back up with oolong tea? If she wanted to get into another fight with the shopkeeper downstairs and threaten to chop him up with a cleaver, Dad wouldn’t be there to shush her and drag her home by the hair.

  Yet that night Mom cried for the first time that any of them could remember. She chose to frame the story like this: Mom and Dad had a marriage of love. It was not entirely accurate to say that they enjoyed each other’s company; she never had an opinion he did not disagree with and no slight was small enough for him to simply brush off. Theirs was a Chinese love. It was not about making each other happy. It was about sacrifice. It was a love devoted to suffering for the beloved. They were supposed to sacrifice over and over again for each other, each getting a turn to give up something he or she did not want for the other, until one of them died.

  Lucy always thought of her mom as someone under the sea. She used to tell her friends that her mom was a mermaid, which was the brilliant excuse for why they never got to see her. Whenever she was at home, Mom was on the new cordless phone in the kitchen, speaking in a dialect they couldn’t understand. She was the only one who ever broke the household rule of considerate silence.

  She complained that her children took their lives for granted and tha
t she embarrassed them, and they, in turn, resented her. Even though they saved up to buy her a leather purse last Christmas, she continued to carry the fake designer one she had bought herself from a hawker on Canal Street.

  Lucy appreciated her. She really did. Yet she just couldn’t say that she loved her. Tell her that she was grateful and that she was sorry for the way things turned out. There was too much between them for that. There was no happiness without sorrow, no love without pity. While the cop finished his report, the youngest child touched the top of her mom’s head, and she hated her. And she loved her. She hated her and she loved her.

  What made Lucy feel guilty was that part of her wished that Mom would die. Mom was just so unhappy; Lucy couldn’t understand how it could possibly be worth it to live like that. She was fat as a seal. What fairness was there that Dad got to stay this great sculptural masterpiece and Mom was like some kind of leftover piece of dumpling dough? It was obvious that Dad didn’t love her at that moment, but why did she have to go that far, to say that she was never lovable?

  Lucy didn’t know how to help her, so she thought the best possible solution would probably be for her mom to be dead.

  But Mom survived. Even as the furniture, appliances, and people in the apartment fell apart around her.

  A week later, caravans of roaches ran for cover each time Lucy opened the sticky kitchen cabinets. Holes appeared in the neckbands of their T-shirts. The water in the toilet ran day and night, the lever held together by two safety pins and a paperclip. Pinetree stopped going to school and not one person tried to talk him out of it. One morning the big window popped out of its frame and smacked Walnut right on the head.

  “It’s okay I guess,” he said, in the voice he used when he was lying. “I didn’t feel it in my spine or anything.”

  They lost the dining room table under piles of clothes, so for dinner they held their bowls on top of the newspaper spread over the lower bunk bed, picking at warmed-up take-out food sliding back and forth on a plastic plate.