Across a Green Ocean. Wendy Lee
her to put on, even though she herself was wearing an old black knit thing that made her look like she was wearing a tube.
After the funeral, most of the people who had come to pay their last respects were Chinese families from church or Han’s coworkers, the majority who were also Asian. The only white people in the room besides Han’s old boss and his wife were the Bradleys from next door—Mr. and Mrs. Bradley and their daughter, who now lived in Boston—and Emily’s husband, Julian.
Most notable among the guests was the lack of relatives. Ling’s family still lived in Taiwan, and Han had no living relatives that Ling knew of. For the eulogy, Pastor Liu had only been able to say, Han Tang, beloved husband to Ling Tang, beloved father to Emily Tang and Michael Tang. Of course, Han had also been someone’s son and someone’s brother, but he rarely talked of his parents or siblings in Beijing, and Ling assumed that he chose not to tell her about his past. She knew her own childhood in Taiwan could not compare, where she had grown up the middle daughter out of three girls. The family had been a political one that had come over from the mainland in 1949, and so had been spared the twin ravages of famine and fanaticism. The children were cared for by housekeepers and maids rather than Ling’s beautiful, indolent mother. Because none of them were boys, their father largely ignored them. Occasionally, Ling felt the sting of her parents’ disinterest, but she had never known the pain of separation or persecution, like her husband must have.
Not that you would have been able to tell what Han had suffered by looking at his picture at the funeral. Sitting on the mantelpiece in the living room, the framed photograph, which had been taken at Emily’s wedding, depicted a close-lipped, square-jawed man whose eyelids were beginning to sag with age, but whose stiff-bristled hair was still black. It occurred to Ling that if you looked around the room at its occupants, most of them immigrants, you would not be able to discern beneath their smooth façades what their previous lives had been like.
Every time someone came up to offer their condolences to Ling, she grew more irritated, even sarcastic.
He was a dedicated employee. . . . This was from Han’s old boss, whom Ling hadn’t seen in nearly ten years. Standing next to his faded wife, he didn’t look as imposing as she’d remembered, or maybe he’d been diminished with age.
He was a wonderful person to work with.... A female colleague, who appeared to be past retirement age but who was probably still working because she had no husband or children to support her.
May God watch over him. . . . From one of the newest members of the First Baptist congregation, a young woman just arrived from mainland China, the cheap, shiny material of her clothes screaming fresh off the boat.
We’ll miss having him next door.... Mr. and Mrs. Bradley, unctuous in their carefully pressed clothes. Mrs. Bradley had a green casserole dish tucked under her arm like a football.
Ling directed Mrs. Bradley toward the kitchen, thinking fiercely all the while, You will not miss him. You never knew him. I never even knew him.
She walked through the living room, making sure that drinks were topped and plates were full. The food laid out was a mixture of Chinese comfort foods—sticky rice with sweet sausage, lion’s head meatballs, soy-sauce chicken—mixed with more mundane meat loafs and salads. She’d never be able to eat it all, even if she made her children take some back home with them.
Emily and Michael were in the kitchen, where the dishes that couldn’t fit on the dining room table had been placed. They were looking at one item in particular, Mrs. Bradley’s casserole dish. Michael lifted the lid, and he and Emily and Ling peered inside to see a lumpy red-brown concoction of beef and beans. At the same time, something wafted forth that stung the insides of Ling’s nose. An unaccustomed sensation overcame her, and it was a few moments before she realized that tears were forming in the corners of her eyes. She turned aside so that her children wouldn’t see her cry. Judging by the crinkled look on their faces, they felt it too. Phew, Emily said, and dumped the contents of the pot in the trash.
Both of her children had offered to stay a few days after the funeral, but Ling knew that Emily was itching to return to work, and Michael probably wanted to be back in the city, too. They promised to visit more often, to take turns calling her so that she would hear from someone every day. To her surprise, they actually did this, at least for the first month or so, and then went back to their usual rare calls. During this time Emily also made several trips back to put her father’s finances in order. Once again, Ling was grateful for her daughter’s ableness. As far as she was able to understand these matters, there was no mortgage or debt that Han had left her to pay off, and there seemed to be enough in his pension plan so that she would be taken care of for the rest of her life. If she lived the way they always had, without a penny or a second wasted, she wouldn’t have to worry about a thing, or so Emily told her.
Before they left, Ling had asked her children to take whatever they wanted of their father’s. Emily asked for the photograph that had been on the mantelpiece. She didn’t seem to recognize it until Ling told her that it was from her and Julian’s wedding. Ling had cut herself out of it, so maybe that was why it looked so strange. What Michael took Ling wasn’t sure, although he had spent hours looking through his father’s papers. Ling didn’t know why he was so interested, as most of them were legal documents. There was very little writing that had been personal, as Han was the kind of man who hadn’t seen the point of putting anything down on paper. His legacy was in the house he had paid for with his hard work, in the funds he had left his widow, in his children, and what they would accomplish with their lives.
After Emily and Michael had left, Ling had packed her husband’s clothes and few possessions—the black comb he had used every morning, the alarm clock he had always set at night, even on weekends—into boxes in the basement. She was surprised by how little impact he had made within the house itself. She’d never noticed how much the rooms had been filled by her own things and the children’s. The hallway had rung with the sounds of their voices; the walls had shook when they’d slammed shut the doors to their bedrooms. Han had always been more of an afterthought, the kind of man who never made much of an impression when he entered a room, not even a room in his own house.
The following year had passed quietly, and Ling was surprised by how much she missed her husband. Now she was too aware of herself, how it took longer for her to climb the stairs at night, the strange little pains that greeted her in the morning, the way her very bones ached after drinking a cold glass of water. Maybe things would have been different had she been in Taiwan, surrounded by relatives, but this was the path she had chosen. Han was the man she had chosen, and she would stay by her decision, and its consequences, even after his death, for the rest of her life.
Outside the kitchen window the sun was setting, casting shadows that reached into the farthest corners of the backyard. With cold fingers Ling dialed Emily’s cell phone. Her daughter answered on the first ring.
“Hi, Mom,” Emily said. “Is everything okay?”
Ling was silent.
“Mom.” Emily’s voice was worried now. “What’s happened?”
Ling realized that the last time she had called Emily’s cell had been a year ago to tell her about her father. “Have you heard from your brother?” she asked.
“Michael?” Emily almost sounded relieved.
As if you had another brother, Ling thought.
“I haven’t talked to him in a while,” Emily continued. “But you know how he is. It’s impossible to get ahold of him.”
“He doesn’t pick up when I call him.”
“Do you leave a message?”
“No.”
“Mom!” Now Emily was getting that exasperated tone to her voice. It usually happened whenever she talked to her mother, just not so early in the conversation. “It’s really annoying when you do that. Why don’t you just say you want him to call you back?”
It would be impossible to explain to her daughter the different tightropes she walked with