The Natural Laws of Good Luck (6 page)

Zhong-hua remained silent after eating two big bowls of noodles. I asked if he was very tired. He looked up, unsmiling. “You think I should be happy? Chinese wife would not send her husband to do this kind of work.” He spoke intensely, so low and controlled that I didn't realize at first that he was angry. His body was stiff and his eyes slivers of black ice. I thought I had done what he asked of me: find him work. But I had done wrong. How? I felt waves of nausea. He showered and went out into the spring night. A few hours later, the roving tip of his cigarette still glowed in the darkness.

I later understood that I had caused my husband to lose face but did not entirely understand why. The modern class-conscious urban Chinese shun manual labor, a throwback to prerevolutionary social values. A successful businessman should not get dirty. These complicated emotions were too steeped in the trauma of the Cultural Revolution for me to fully comprehend. In these first days, what people on the other side of the world might think of him, if they could see him, seemed of unbearable significance to my husband. After the long smoke, he came inside and said this kind of job was no problem. He hadn't known that Americans could do this work and not be ashamed. If this were true, he said, then he need not be ashamed either. He wanted to work. Status and image became abstractions associated with a social milieu involving the buying and selling of steel products on the other side of the world.

I didn't know then that my husband had endured labor a hundred times more grueling than painting inside closets. His poverty- and
famine-ravaged parents could do little more for him than count his head as safely returned along with the others at night. In his youth he had worked side by side with village farmers, standing bare-legged in an icy winter pond hour after hour, scooping out silt for fertilizer. My husband's first nineteen years of life were years of hardship and deprivation inflicted on him by the policies of political authorities. He had achieved an internal equilibrium that was not easily upset. Taking most things in stride as a coping mechanism for prolonged stress with no end in sight—except, for many people, death—was a skill I respected. My own rugged path had been an upstream battle against raging currents of emotion made even more arduous by choices I myself had made or neglected to make. I sought a peace affected by neither the weather outside nor the storms inside.

That first spring, a friend of a friend gave Zhong-hua a job at a small grocery store. The owner was eager for him to learn English quickly and be able to handle the store in his absence. He had heard that Chinese people work hard. As Zhong-hua had no driver's license, the owner went several miles out of his way, picked him up at the house, and brought him home at night. According to Chinese etiquette, my husband invited him in to drink tea. The owner always accepted, not knowing that the correct Chinese response would be to graciously decline. There they would sit, my husband silent, tight-lipped, and tense, and the owner sipping bitter tea and spitting the leaves out in his hand.

The owner tried to make conversation by boldly asking personal questions, which Zhong-hua found very alarming. The owner ventured to comment that I was a nice lady and asked if I was a good wife. Zhong-hua later told me that only a very, very crazy person would say these things. A man should not compliment another's wife, for this revealed that you had noticed her, were possibly even attracted to her. He told the owner he did not like to talk about these things, to which the man replied that he himself found these things very interesting. On the middle ground arrived at, the owner related conflicts with his wife and struggles with his
children in embarrassing detail, and Zhong-hua listened politely while carefully guarding his own privacy, saying only “Oh!” and “Good! Good!” and “Why?” This went on for several months until Zhong-hua got his driver's license.

My husband felt gnawing hunger while at work. The boss, eating an oversized organic cookie, broke off a small piece and offered it to my husband. When Zhong-hua returned home that evening, his face was hard and his eyes glittered coldly. He said a person offering food to another should offer only very good food, not a scrap that he himself had taken a bite of. How insulting! The offering of food to others had a ritualistic importance for Chinese people since the terrible famine in the early 1960s resulting from the sudden collectivization of agriculture and Mao's commitment to massive export of grain. Officials demanded most of the harvest in a desperate effort to fill Mao's production quotas, leaving nothing for the people to eat. Millions of Chinese starved. My husband was still on breast milk at six because there was little other food. His mother finally had to beat him off with a stick and chase him to school. The most common daily greeting in China is still
“Chifan le ma?”
(Have you eaten yet?).

Zhong-hua's problem of hunger at work was ongoing. Employees were allowed to help themselves to bread and butter and juice, but in moderation. For my husband, the word
moderation
had connotations sloping dangerously into the trough of emptiness. The more he felt the boss's eyes, the bigger his hunger—until an unlimited amount of outdated granola offered a solution. My husband discovered that by eating a saucepan full of granola and milk, he would not be hungry for many hours. He quickly gained ten pounds on the granola diet. Once he brought home two bushels of organic spinach, which the boss had thrown out because it was too dirty. Dirt was no challenge for a Chinese cook in the habit of meticulously scouring all meats and vegetables before using them, scraping off every stubborn hair and routing out the smallest speck of sand. We were also blessed with cases of outdated tofu dogs, soy yogurt, flaxseed, and cod liver oil.

The taboo on saying “good-bye” or “hello” to one's wife ranged from disconcerting to extremely distressing. I routinely thought Zhong-hua was still home when he had actually left, or thought he was out when he had returned. Humming aimlessly while believing myself alone in the kitchen, I would turn to reach for something and bump right into him, yelling in fright. However often it happened, I could not adjust my emotions.

One evening in June, my husband did not return from work. About ten o'clock he appeared at the kitchen door, clothes covered with blood and face bathed in sweat. His eyes danced happily. “You come see!” He had been in the barn skinning a deer that had been hit by a car and left to die. Zhong-hua could not fathom why American people left dead deer by the side of the road. In China, deer were found only in the southern forests, and the meat was a highly prized and expensive commodity. We brought up the seven-gallon tripe-boiling kettle from the cellar and boiled the deer meat.

Zhong-hua carefully skinned the penis and sank it in a bottle of Chinese wine we kept on the shelf. He said it should steep for a few months to increase the medicinal efficacy. The next day he went off to work with two hunks of dark red deer meat the size of fists wrapped in brown paper in his jacket pocket. After that a leg or several vertebrae sufficed as a daily portion. I don't know what the boss made of that. Because it was a New Age health food store and they didn't wish their image tarnished, they bade him smoke in the back alley rather than out in front. Deer meat was organic, but a man sitting at the white wrought iron table by the entrance gnawing on a giant leg bone might still offend the sensibilities of certain customers.

Some months later, Zhong-hua was on the way to work when the motorist in front of him struck and killed a doe but never stopped. Again refusing to see this excellent nourishment go to waste, Zhong-hua put the doe in the trunk and continued on to the grocery store, where he stashed her in the walk-in refrigerator
for the day. The boss usually called me if he was upset with my husband, but he never called about finding a deer in the freezer. The guest had escaped his notice.

Zhong-hua reported that moderation was also the rule at the grocery store where the toilet was concerned, and that the boss rapped impatiently on the bathroom door if he were taking too long. This strange behavior disturbed my husband greatly. The grocery store job provided ample opportunity for misunderstandings and inadvertent insult between the boss and my husband. One day we needed to go to an appointment at noon, so I picked my husband up at work. We returned several hours later and were met in front of the store by the boss, red-faced with anger. As I drove away, I saw him gesticulating to Zhong-hua wildly with both arms above his head and jumping into the air.

I got a call from the boss that night. Zhong-hua had never mentioned that he had an appointment and would be gone for a while. Zhong-hua did not understand the upset. He reasoned that since he worked there and had certain things to get done, then obviously he would be returning to do those things. Why would the boss assume anything else? Since he was a grown man, he did not need to ask permission to come and go. After that, the boss insisted on my husband's reporting to him if he needed to go to the bathroom or out in the alley for a smoke. My husband said to me, “I don't think need do this.” That incident was the beginning of the end of this job.

Most days left them both feeling at the least vaguely injured and sometimes very upset. The grocer once called me, for instance, to complain that my husband had stacked all the caramel Luna Bars on top of the lemon Luna Bars. “Is he trying to drive me crazy?” I could tell by the man's exasperated whine that he believed he was being deliberately tortured. In fact, my husband had been told by the supervisor in charge to dump all the Luna Bars in one box. He never told this to the boss. When reprimanded for this or any other offense, my husband offered neither
explanation nor excuse. He just said, “Sorry, sorry. I make mistake. No problem.” I read in my husband's face when he returned home that he wasn't sure whether his boss had been disdainful or congenial, generous or grudging. The more he doubted his surroundings, the harder he worked to erase all doubt, at least in his own mind, that he had done his best.

Based on his years as a manager for a large steel building products company in China, Zhong-hua had his own standards for what constituted fair treatment and what a hard worker was worth. Every day he came home from the health food store unspeakably tired. He was the lowest-paid employee. The others read the newspaper while he mopped up at night and stood by while he moved crates of milk into the cooler and stocked overhead shelves with heavy sacks of rice and flour. The boss called Zhong-hua on his day off to unload truck deliveries. He drove fifty minutes each way and was paid one hour's wage.

Zhong-hua found his boss arrogant, stingy, and uncouth, but also fascinating. “You know, today boss very interesting. He told me I don't need get paid as much as the other workers because I can bring my lunch. Never need eat in restaurant. He said he think seven dollar enough. This boss very crazy, very interesting. Boss want me come his house tomorrow clean out yard, burning some stuff. I say, ‘OK, no problem.' I don't ask him if he pay, not pay. Just let him do his way.” In English class my husband wrote that this boss man was his best friend, like a brother. This was either Chinese satire or a true expression of love for the cosmic stranger.

Paroda got Zhong-hua another part-time job at Panera Bread Company, a bakery and sandwich shop where she worked as a cashier. They put my husband in the back, slicing meat. Employees were supposed to pay for their food at a discounted rate. This fell under the category of “I don't think need do” in my husband's mind. He had an enormous appetite. He ate roast beef and tomatoes all day as he sliced them. The manager would stroll by and say, “Mr. Lu, you must be very hungry today. You are eating a lot.”

“Yes, yes, I am very hungry!”

“OK, OK, you eat more, then.” So that was that. When he was not at work and happened to be doing errands in the neighborhood, he would stop in and make himself a big sandwich. Again, the manager would ask, “Mr. Lu, are you working today?”

“No, I just need go Home Depot. Very hungry!”

“You should eat a sandwich. Do you want a soda?”

I don't know how he got away with this, but he often inspired generosity. This did not apply only to food and drink. Whenever we went to a public museum or show for which an admission was charged, I had to pay and my husband walked in free. He would walk up to the ticket taker and say something like, “Do you need me give you money?” Invariably the person would smile kindly and say, “No, no, sir, you can go in,” and then look very pleased with himself or herself, having exercised a gatekeeper's prerogative. There were, however, less cosmopolitan venues, like the auto scrap yard and the barbershop, where the gatekeeper could not be won over and Zhong-hua paid full price.

Zhong-hua's reasoning on food matters was very practical: if food is being thrown away by the Dumpsterful, then there surely is no problem with employees taking some little bites to keep their stomachs from rumbling. A bread company must serve freshly baked bread every day. Huge bags of perfectly good gourmet bread are tossed into the Dumpster each night. My husband could not understand this. At first he could not resist and returned home with the car completely full of bread. We ate bread constantly. The dogs ate focaccia. The bull fish and turtles in the pond ate French sourdough boule and seven-grain health bread.

My husband munched on a variety of foods away from home, but deep down he felt that, to be truly nourishing, food had to be prepared and consumed at home. My friend Adrian wanted to meet my husband. She invited us to dinner. I mentioned this to my husband, and he became silent and worried. “Why?”

“Just to be friendly.”

“Another person can come here—I give them friendly. I don't think need eat outside the home.”

I let it go, but the fifth time she asked, I said yes. Zhong-hua agreed, but with the same look of consternation. Evening came, and it was time to go over the mountain to my friend's house. Zhong-hua was clattering pans and chopping green onions, ginger, and fish.