Home Remedies Read online

  “I used to be beautiful,” Mom told them one night. “You don’t even know! All you see is this ugliness. I don’t blame you. I never finished school. I don’t know anything. I feel bad that I couldn’t show you anything else.”

  They half expected Mom to say something delusional like, “When your dad comes back, we’ll be one big happy family.” But, to their relief, Mom just sat at home, lifting her foot up if any of them had to walk past her, staring at them without even raising one of her going-blue tattooed eyebrows.

  Then one morning Mom put on makeup, crossed the intersection at Bowery and Division, and took the bus to Atlantic City to gamble at the Tropicana casino.

  That night she came home with a different hair color and a completely new set of clothes, drifting through their front door on a cloud of stale cigarette smoke with her winnings in one hand and a casino burrito in the other.

  Lucy watched her, mouth opened by the front teeth she’d yet to grow into, as Mom jumped on the bed without taking off her shoes.

  Mom said that an oracle grandmother on the bus told her that the tide in her fortune had changed and now she was lucky. Her good mood was a relief to all of the children, even if it made them realize that their mom didn’t belong to them, not entirely.

  It got so hot that summer someone mercifully broke open the fire hydrant in front of their window on Mott Street. Water drenched the neighborhood until shivering children ran home to sleep, as the asphalt washed itself into the drain. The water hitting the sheet-metal roof of the makeshift store below didn’t wake them, nor did they stir with the passing of garbage trucks at dawn. In her sleep, Lucy heard nothing but the rhythm of her brothers’ breaths, their comfortable shifting bodies. She must have imagined her mother kissing them on their foreheads before leaving because somehow she already knew it would happen. Just the way Mom always threatened she would. She thought they all did.

  What day of the week was it? Lucy didn’t know. Had she kept track, it would have made her complicit. After washing the sleep from her eyes, she noticed some bath towels were missing. A few photographs were gone, too, along with her mom’s passport. She woke up her brothers and the three of them collectively decided to lie back down to take in this information: Walnut on the top bunk staring at the ceiling; Lucy staring at the wall, Pinetree staring at the back of Lucy’s head, and pigeons cooing behind the walls. Their own secret birds cooed inside each of their chests.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” said Lucy. “First they get the fish tattoo, then they joined the Fish Generation.”

  Her brothers did nothing to encourage her to continue. Walnut threw a sock at the ceiling and caught it with his knees.

  “After Baba got the tattoo, they packed up their things, stifling their feelings, and left in secret without any promises to return,” she said. “That’s the Fish Generation. That’s just what they do.”

  Lucy chose to frame the story like this:

  Mama followed Baba, who followed his heart.

  Fish followed the river, the father followed the fish, the mother followed the father, and the children, holding their arms out, did not have a past to chase. Love could be a burden, too. That night, in the room Lucy had slept in all her life, she wondered if their father would be sad to have to kill the fish. If their mother would be motion sick. What must it feel like, being on those waves repeating themselves across all the oceans, pulling away and then coming back again, spilling forward up to the edge of the horizon?

  The fish themselves must be confused, too. The carp hadn’t done anything wrong. They weren’t even genetically modified. They lived for more than a hundred years in these American waters and felt a lot of anguish and confusion, which they passed down to their own fish children. Being brought here and then raised to feed a burgeoning population, they thought they were performing a noble duty. They had a purpose. It was not their fault they adapted so well. Their fish souls must be aching with unanswered questions. They had come so far and done what was asked of them; now they were unwanted.

  Sometime later the three of them sat down by the window ledge and watched a funeral procession pass by on Mott Street, but if Lucy blinked, she could see that morning’s new bride stepping out of a limo in front of the Church of the Transfiguration. If she blinked again, she could see the big black hearse rolling past.

  On the apartment walls, underneath the white paint thick as fabric, was blue paint, green paint, and white paint again. The fluorescent bulbs that came in coils went from yellow to orange, then flickered out, and new ones were purchased at the hardware store. Dusty, tangled plastic blinds got replaced with supermarket calendars. The smell of herbal soup, rich with long-boiling ginger root, grabbed ahold of the clothes that would become too small for them and have to be given away.

  They would have liked to ask Mom and Dad what they thought they’d lost out on by living as a family all these years, but Lucy knew she wouldn’t be able to. What if they knew exactly? What if they didn’t?

  A handful of days remained in August, and after those were over, it would still be summer.

  Scribbled postings appeared on the doors of restaurants, looking for new noodle pullers and deliverymen, and those jobs were quietly filled. Nobody was expecting the children and they had nowhere to go. They were still small and stooped and unacquainted with rooms big enough to fit them. It would take more time to figure out what all this new freedom meant.

  Lucy believed what the oracle grandmothers said: There was a saying, centuries old, that every thirty years, fortunes changed completely. If you looked hard enough you might find specific instances that proved it in the personal history of every family. Paid-off properties suddenly got confiscated and the owners were tried for corruption. A good son built a soy-sauce business, but then his own son was kidnapped and returned without earlobes. An old man buried all his gold in his backyard, only to forget exactly where. Ugly children grew to be as handsome as movie stars. Their children’s children married charismatic artists and acquired their debts. Naughty boys yelled next to their grandfather’s hospital bed, his conscious mind rocking around his unconscious body that couldn’t block out the question, “Where did you bury all our money?”

  The siblings knew about secrets. They were familiar with truths no one else believed in. Living in such close proximity, they knew there were real reasons and fake reasons and double reasons for everything. Where the official temple was and what building the unofficial one currently occupied. The real bank that looked like a fake bank and the fake bank that was actually a fake bank. Where the gang members hung out and where they pretended to hang out. The siblings knew that they had a story worth believing, something they could hold on to in case they needed it, until they didn’t.

  Lucy thought that meant somewhere in the world there was a Samoyed that was irritably hot, its entire life spent in Arizona, but his puppy’s puppies ran free in snowy pastures on a ski resort. Then it was possible that Walnut would one day move to Brooklyn and meet the white girl of his dreams, and Pinetree would wake up in a dorm room so big he wouldn’t be able to believe it, and she could sublet their apartment to an overzealous hipster couple. But how was she supposed to calculate which generation she and her brothers belonged to? Which generation did their mom and dad? Where were the three of them in the process? How would anyone know when to start counting?

  In a future July, Lucy’s twin boys would learn to read, at the same moment her parents’ eyes would no longer see. Just when her sons learned to like the taste of bitter melon, her own parents would forget how to swallow. In time it became clear to Lucy that there were some things about love she could grasp, but that other things might be forever out of her reach.

  Rumors continued to reach the siblings that the mass relocation of a problematic fish population, so cleverly devised by retired sailors, had mobilized a nationwide community of immigrants. Lucy was shocked that the citizens of Chinatown carried on as they a
lways had. They grumbled about their commute; they socialized their dogs; they waited in line for fresh tofu.

  Walnut found an article about it on Grub Street. From uncredited sources, it said that the main methods were spearing and shooting—with only a small mention of netting. Sure, the carp were just “beyond natural biomass,” but that just meant they were “well fed” and the very definition of organic and thereby perfectly edible. Someone in the comment section wrote, “Those Chinese, they will eat anything, apparently.”

  Around this time, an Australian backpacker disappeared on a trip to the Three Tigers Gorge, an airplane carrying two hundred people disappeared from radar, and the media began reporting on pregnant women appearing by the dozen on the suburban streets of Los Angeles. The news channels showed ladies walking in rows under brightly colored umbrellas when there was not a cloud in the sky.

  One day the fire hydrant got turned off and men in hard hats brought a cement truck and the road was fixed. A breeze carried with it the first chill of autumn. Squirrels chased each other up trees. School would start again in the fall and concerned adults, without the benefit of luck or magic, would eventually get involved in their lives. But before that had to happen, Walnut, Pinetree, and Lucy saw their parents one more time.

  They were on their way to Rockaway Beach. As the express train rushed through the tunnel, the local train going in the same direction pulled up alongside. In those moments, the two trains were racing side by side. Lucy was the first to spot them and she grabbed her brothers; they pressed their faces against the glass.

  Mama and Baba.

  For a moment they looked exactly as they had in their wedding photo. Lit up with life and color. For just those few seconds, the five of them were together in motion, so close. Then the two cars diverged onto different paths, the parallel car became just a memory, and the children saw the water, the bridge, and the sun.

  Days of Being Mild

  It takes real skill to speed down the packed streets of the Zhongguancun district of Beijing, but the singer with the mohawk is handling it like a pro. His asymmetrical spikes are poking the roof of his dad’s sedan, so he’s compensating by tilting his head slightly to the left.

  We are meeting with a new band to talk about shooting their music video. Sara is here to deal with the script details and she is leaning all the way forward to talk concept with the two guys up front. Sara’s long platinum blond hair is wavy and tumbling down her skinny back and Benji’s got his fingers in her curls. His other arm is pinching a cigarette out the window.

  I’m staring at the women rhythmically patting their babies while selling counterfeit receipts and listening to taxi drivers ask about one another’s families as their cars slide back and forth. Teenage part-timers are throwing advertisements in the air like confetti and somehow we’re managing not to kill anyone.

  The band’s name is Brass Donkey and they’re blasting their music from the tiny speakers of the sedan. They sound a lot like Jump In on Box, the all-girl orbit-pop band that just got signed to Modern Sky Records. I’m digging the sound, but nobody asks for my opinion.

  We finally make our way to the singer Dao’s apartment and more band members show up. He sits us down on the couch, and even though it’s only noon, he offers us Jack Daniel’s and Lucky Strikes. There are piles of discs everywhere and stacks of DVD players that the bootleg DVDs keep breaking.

  “So this video, we want it to really stand out. We’re really into Talking Heads right now, you know them? Talking Heads?”

  The drummer turns on the TV and David Byrne appears, jerking his head back and forth to his own beat. All the band members are talking to us at once.

  “We’re no-wave Funstrumental, but we sound Brit pop.”

  “For this video we want something perversely sexual, like really obscene.”

  They look expectantly at Benji and Sara.

  “Yeah, like really fucking sick, you know?”

  “The more perverted the better!”

  “Then we want this video to be blasting in the background during our debut performance at the next Strawberry Festival, on the big monitors.”

  I smoke their cigarettes. “Aren’t you afraid of the police coming in and shutting it down?”

  “That would be spec-fucking-tacular! It would be great to be shut down, even better if you could get us banned. Actually, let’s make that a goal,” says the singer, sinking back into his chair and turning up the music.

  I watch Sara look down at her notes and then look up at me. I shrug. Benji stands up to leave and shakes everybody’s hand. Then we’re out of there. I can’t wait to tell JJ and Gangzi, they’d definitely get a kick out of this story.

  As for the video, we’ll do it if we feel like it, see how it goes.

  We are what the people called Bei Piao—a term coined to describe the twentysomethings who drift aimlessly to the northern capital, a phenomenal tumble of new faces to Beijing. We are the generation who awoke to consciousness listening to rock and roll and who fed ourselves milk, McDonald’s, and box sets of Friends. We are not our parents, with their loveless marriages and party-assigned jobs, and we are out to prove it.

  We come with uncertain dreams but our goal is to burn white-hot, to prove that the Chinese, too, can be decadent and reckless. We are not good at math or saving money but we are very good at being young. We are modern-day May Fourth–era superstars, only now we have MacBooks. We’ve read Kerouac in translation. We are marginally employed and falling behind on our filial-piety payments, but we are cool. Who is going to tell us otherwise?

  Five of us live in part of a reconverted pencil factory outside of the fourth ring, smack in the middle of the 798 art district. We call our place The Fishtank and it covers four hundred square meters of brick and semi-exposed wall insulation. Before it became our home, it used to function as the women’s showers for the factory workers. As a result, it is cheap and it is damp. The real Beijing, with its post-Olympic skyscrapers, stadiums, and miles of shopping malls, rests comfortably in the distance, where we can glance fondly at the glow of lights while eating lamb sticks.

  Our roommates include JJ, the tall, dark-skinned half-Nigerian from Guangzhou, who is loudmouthed and full of swagger. He keeps his head shaved, favors monochromatic denim ensembles, and is either drinking or playing with his own band Frisky Me Tender. The resident cinematographer is Benji, who is so handsome waitresses burst into fits of giggles when taking his orders. He is working on a series about migrant workers whom he dresses in designer labels. Benji, whose Chinese name we’ve forgotten, was renamed by his white girlfriend, Sara, a former research scholar who has since found it impossible to leave. Sara, with her green eyes and blond hair, speaks with an authentic marbled northeastern Chinese accent, and somewhere along the line she became one of us as well. There is Gangzi from Wenzhou, the photographer who shoots product photos of new consumer electronics as well as an ever-rotating roster of models from Russia and Hong Kong. Some of them keep us company when they are sufficiently drunk. Then there’s me and I’m short like Gangzi, but sometimes I can’t help but feel like someone accidentally photoshopped me into this picture.

  I’m a so-called producer and what that really means is that I just have more money than the rest of them. Actually my dad does. My family’s from Chong Qing, where my dad made a fortune in real estate and has more money than he can spend. After I dropped out of the Beijing Film Academy, I’ve been hiding from my dad for more than a year and living off the money I got from selling the BMW he gave me. I said I’d try to make it as a filmmaker, but I’m low on talent. Lately, I’ve been watching a lot of porn.

  Our apartment is just around the corner from our new favorite bar See If, and that’s where Benji, Sara, and I go after our meeting. See If is three stories of homemade wood furniture and plexiglass floors. The drinks are named If Only, If Part, If Together, If No If, and so on. The alcohol is supposed to suppl
ement your mood, but it basically all tastes the same. JJ and Gangzi and a bunch of part-time male models are all there jamming together. JJ is walking around suggestively strumming everyone’s guitar.

  Benji says to the group, “Hey, you have to hear the story about our meeting with the Brass Donkey guys. I think they want to get publicly flogged.”

  I get passed a pipe and smoke something that makes me feel like I’m vaguely in trouble. I concentrate on looking at my friends and feel swell again.

  JJ cuts in. “Dude, today a cabdriver point-blank asked me how big my dick was.” We listen to that story instead. Being a half-black Chinese guy, JJ is used to attention.

  With the 2008 Olympics finally behind us, Beijing is getting its loud, openmouthed, wisecracking character back. The cops stopped checking identity papers on the street and all of us Bei Piao are letting out a collective sigh of relief as life goes back to normal.

  But then this thing happened. Last week I received an email from my father. He was going to give me, his only son, the opportunity to make my own fortune. He purchased a dozen oil rigs in Louisiana and is getting the L-1 investment visa ready for me to move there and manage them. It has been decreed that my piece-of-shit ass is going to move to the United States and make use of itself. In his mind, what was I doing drifting around in Beijing with hipsters when there’s an oil field in Louisiana with my name on it?

  In the spring, we test-shoot the music video on our roof and even though it’s a Wednesday, I make a few calls to modeling agencies and within the hour half a dozen models are strutting across our tiles wearing nipple pasties and fishnets. Sara’s the one posing them in obscene variations, asking them to take their clothes off. She can get away with almost anything because she’s a white girl who speaks Chinese and everybody likes her. Benji’s doing the actual filming while Gangzi takes stills. Sometimes I load some film, but mostly I just drink beer and enjoy the atmosphere.