Fixed beginning

The light in the morning is a bright, lavatorial green. There’s something about how the humidity sifts down off of the mountain, how it blurs through the trees that makes it that way—green like institutional hallway tile, a kind of forced calm I want to run from. I wake up to voices. They're filming a Kung Fu movie down the block and their lilting, jaggy Cantonese boils up the street—it could be a ferocious argument or only shouted directions; the only word I understand is “mn’goy.”
Please…please… please.
By the afternoon they’re gone and there’s nothing to do but click down the Scrabble tiles across from my stepmother or watch television with her daughter in “the den”--the cave my father has festooned with dead animals. I wonder if this, like everything else, is him acting out—if at night, in bed beside my mother, he had dreamed of a room like this—papered in plaid, hung with the head of what’s labeled a “Barooka.”
“That’s not an animal,” my mother says over the phone, while I’m giving my dutious report. “My god,” she whispers. “I’m googling that now and that’s really not an animal.”
Maxine and I watch shows I don’t know: A game show about pandas, a talk show where women bring in their babies. One channel—a Chinese version of Lifetime—reruns a dubbed version of Clean House. It’s the American reality TV show where crews go into ratpack houses, mock the inhabitants, and re-make the place into a Pottery Barn look-a-like. When I ask why on earth anyone would bother to rerun this schlock Maxine is aghast. People here can’t believe what Americans throw out.
“Like that pretty porcelain shepherd,” she says. Or, pointing out another example minutes later, “That velvet blanket.”
I am silent--identifying with the jokey host and all her slight grimaces. I think about my mother’s place: of the hoggy sweatshirts in our stuffed closets, of the pale apricot paint that’s soured to a brand of pink, of the coppery smell of gas that lopes through the apartment—unscourgeable.
“A wooden duck?” Maxine says, laughing. “Why do you even make those?”
“I’ve never made a wooden duck,” I say.

One morning while I’m brushing my teeth I watch Maxine walking down the drive. She’s headed for the film set in little slippers topped with pom-poms like dollops of whip-cream. Over the cord-entangled drive, wearing only a pale pink nightie, she picks her way—holding aloft glasses of ginger juice she exchanges for cigarettes--long, thin ones that are advertised in the subway stations by models who exhale mint-leaves. She smokes, they smoke, and they jab eachother in the sides when she opens he mouth, leaning in closer like they've all got to whisper.
There’s nothing intelligent she could be saying, and I thrill at the idea that one of these days, I’ll go down there and say something intelligent to startle them--drop some comment about what kind of filters they're using to get through all this mossy light, say I’ve met Diana Ross in an elevator once.
But I see myself already, sauntering down--a pudgy white girl in the tourist ensembles my mother packed for me--waterproof shorts, light-weight sport shirts--and I don't bother. I’ve learned that much so far.
Downstairs, my stepmother is in the dining room, sucking on a wedge of lemon. She's reading the morning newspaper, her bare feet up on the chair beside her. There are congee splatters on the mahogany. Breakfast has been cleared away.
"Chen-Li is in the kitchen," she says sharply. "There’s cereal.”

Chen-Li is doing the dishes and laughing at something Maxine is saying. At the dinette table, Maxine is reading from a magazine, her legs crossed beneath her, the weight of her head cantered on her fist. The hanging lamp illuminates her face so that I can see the fineness of the shadows beneath her eyes, beneath her chin.
"...And this hubby is only saying this about the honeymoon," Maxine reads, stone-faced, "It's going to be bananas." She looks up at Chen-Li, who is now doubled over, gripping the apples of her knees.
"Oh, Miss Erma," she starts, grabbing my arm--trying to explain, but not keeping it together. "The movie..." The movie they're filming down the block, Maxine explains, is a about a monkey butler.
"A monkey butler?"
"You know," says Chen-Li, "Like me!" She does a little dance like a monkey clapping cymbals. And then she bursts out laughing again.
Maxine explains: The movie is about a family that trained a monkey to be its servant. When the mother and the father die, the monkey doesn't understand. It goes looking for them. It crosses hills and valleys and seas. But the girl, the daughter of the mother and the father, had no one but the monkey. She misses him so she goes looking. And on the way--"She falls in love with the monkey," Maxine says.
“How does the monkey cross a sea?” I ask. But no one answers me. Chen-Li has buckled over, and keeps laughing quietly to herself--a monkey butler--while Maxine, stone-faced, keeps reading whatever trashy magazine she’s reading. I pour myself a bowl of cereal, which Dad buys for seven dollars a box, imported all the way from America and stale by the time it gets here.

I've been here for the summer because my mother thought it would be good for me, or really because at first she thought she wanted the time for herself, or because she wanted to feel like a saint, like the kind of mother who happily sends her daughter to her ex. "It's good to go abroad," she kept saying in the airport, as thought she were the one going. She kept telling this story of how, as a girl, she had lived in France for a year. "The family never had any meat. Vegetables every night," she said, shaking her head. "Makes you realize."
From Queens to Hong Kong there had been seven meals in a row, perfectly spaced with about three-and-a-half hours between each one and all of it airplane food, stuff to be crammed into the mouth without grace. But on the last flight, from London to Hong Kong, the ostentatiously beautiful stewardesses had served little shrimp cocktails in plastic bowls, the tails already removed. The lady beside me nibbled one, and didn’t touch the rest. “It’ll be better in Hong Kong,” she said, popping a sleeping pill. “Trust me sweetie.”
I ate all of them.

Dad’s house was three-quarters up the mountain that made up Hong Kong, and the cab had to follow a ribbon of switchbacks to get there—cantilevering from side to side as it twisted, making me cling to the door as I watched the towers below recede.
The hill was forested, tropical, studded with apartment towers rising like teeth in the gums of the mouth. A small road led off from the others and then the cab stopped. Shadowed by trees stood a stone house with a glowering, petulant face—sills like pouty lips and moss glomming up the cracks. A gardener sprayed a stream back and forth over a rectangle of lawn edged in orange flowers.
We were let in by the maid—Chen-Li—who wiped her hands on her skirt and gave the driver paper money the color of lipstick. Inside you could feel the air pressing down from the high ceilings. It was late afternoon. The hallways were dark and I could hear a woman upstairs running down.
I had only seen Constance in photographs—photographs of Constance and my father on boat decks, photographs of Constance and my father sitting for grandiose meals, the photographs of their wedding—hazy and soft, professionally sappy. The real Constance had makeup in all the cracks of her face, hair pulled tight, a light, jumpy body barely obscured by a forest-colored sweater softer than any I had ever owned.
With long pale handsshe unlocked the door to my room—an ice-colored wedge at the front of the house. Above the bed hung a modern painting--a round black "O" swished onto a white canvas--and I fell face-down below it into the feathered duvet, feeling as though I have given up all will and been spiraled here, like a coin dropped in a funnel that rolled, ever and ever, toward the mesmerizing drain.

While I had slept my mother had left a message with Constance: She had called, and wanted to know that I had landed safely. I called her back on a rotary phone in the hall that Constance had to show me how to use. “Hi Honey,” my mom said, groggy. “It’s the acceptable-to-call hour of 5.30 in the morning.”
“I thought you wanted to know I’m safe,” I said, “Though obviously I am since I’m on the phone.” I told her that anyway, the flight was fine. There was even shrimp. And I had nothing more to say.
“Really, I’m happy you called,” she said, and told some long story about how yesterday, after she closed the store, she had gone over to Aunt Elsie’s to babysit the brats. They watched Home Alone, and she couldn’t understand it at all. “How could they have gotten on the actual plane without him?” she asked. “There would have been a boarding pass or—“
“And you’re asking me ‘cause I just took a plane.”
“I’m asking you because you have opinions about everything,” she said.
I don’t say anything to that. “They combined two families,” I explain, suddenly gentle. “There were two families, and they brought them together. They thought the one kid was with the--”
“But both families go on the plane.”
“Everyone thought everyone was taking care of everyone else.” I say. I say that I think it’s like in science—when the atoms come together, they shove off that one extra electron.
Constance is looking at me over the lip of her newspaper from the hallway settee. “Listen,” I say, “I’ve got to go.”
“Bullshit,” my mother says. “It’s your father’s money. I’m going to chatter my head off.”

My father was always going on business trips to Hong Kong.
He would come back to us with the same presents—my mother would get flowers made of paper, intricately so, so that within the blossom one could see the bud, jittery as a spider. “Oh the poor ladies who suffered to make this,” mom would say say, pretending to smell it, pretending to put it into a vase and spray it with water. What I would get changed: I would open a paper box and find paper dolls shoes, a paper toy piano, even a Nintendo gaming system with paper buttons that wobbled in their cradles.
It is strange to think of your father in a foreign country. He is in an office somewhere, sitting at a grey desk, looking at numbers on a sheet of paper. He is in an elevator falling downwards, the numbers over the door ring-dinging down, down, blinking and blinking. He is on the subway, holding a red bar, being jostled by the movement of the car. He is somewhere else watching something else: a poster, a panel of glass. I had looked up Hong Kong in the World Book and knew nothing more—there were alleys there that trickled toward the water, skyscrapers covered in glass. Women in the markets pawed over the fruit, feeling for ripeness.
“Business,” I said, when someone asked me why he went there, and I learned a sentence to say about the taxation codes, about how things were freer there. There was no sentence to say when my parents broke up, when he moved there, when he married Constance and e-mailed me the wedding photos—Constance in a pale-pink veil, standing before an ocean whose name I did not know.
One day I come home to see Maxine putting the same paper flowers into a vase on the piano. I ask her where she gets them. I think I would like to go there and walk along the aisles of false flowers, thinking of how my father must have felt when he walked there, thinking of us.
She tells me I can get them at the cemetery.
“The cemetery?” I ask.
“They’re for the dead,” she says. “At the end of the week, we’ll burn them.”

I barely speak to my father. I have nothing to say to him. He works during the day—even on the weekends--and we meet him somewhere downtown for dinner. The streets are loud, it’s impossible to park, and then we enter the restaurants—quiet, and dimly lit, with lamps hanging from the celing like tender, dropping fruits. Hosts greet us. “Very good, very good,” they say, and shove us off to mill near the bars, where beautiful women sit between the men, sizing eachother up. Dad orders us drinks while we wait for a table. "It's nice to have a daughter who's finally underage," he jokes--the drinking age here is 17 and Maxine, he assures me, has been drinking since she mistook her mother's white wine for apple juice.
“It’s not true,” Maxine says, sipping selzer, and I believe her.
There's something about drinking with my father that I don't like. He has a glimmer in his eye, an appetite for something, as though he’s play-acting at being the corrupting uncle. Over the heads of us three women he watches the sports playing on the bar TV. "Oh!" he yells out. Someone scored. My stepmother ignores it, asks what everyone’s having.
There is a gulp of air between my thought of him and what he’s like here. He has a sour way of treating wait-staff, more hair on the back of his hands. At home, at night, in the dark of my room beneath the empty, modern painting, he gives me a backrub. He asks me if I know how happy he is that I’m here. “Uh huh,” I say, watching a trapezoid of moonlight that’s roving the floor. I am determined to watch it until it hits the other wall—but it never does.
“You know I love you very much,” he says.
“Uh huh,” I say.

I work during the days as an intern in Maxine's office. She got me the job. "Okay?" she asked, happily, over the phone after she had pitched it to me. "Okay?" My mother thought it might be a good idea.
"Office experience," she said, spooning Ben & Jerry's straight out of the freezer into her mouth. "That's what you need."
"But you don't have any office experience."
"And look at me now," she said, "Ice cream straight out of the bucket."
Maxine is an appraiser at Sotheby's and wears a kind of tart perfume to work, sprayed around turtleneck sweaters over which she lays strings of gold jewelry. I wonder what my father did and did not give to her, what other men did. There is one pin—a balking parrot, inlaid with blue stones—that I can imagine no man giving her, that I like her better for owning.
She's gruff in the office, has a loud laugh you can hear down halls. I see her leaning on cubicles, winking at the fat, sallow men who pull on their ties when she walks in. Or, in the breakroom, speaking with the other women, touching their shoulders lightly, blowing on her tea before she takes a sip, cackling like she doesn’t with my father.
She is an expert on early clay pottery from the mainland--brown, salt-glazed urns, white horses that pull emerald-colored wagons, women with flat faces and hairdos that whorl around their face like a storm around an eye.
The office is cushioned and beige, floored in a rattan carpet—as though to delude us into thinking that we’re all at the beach. I sit in a fake-wood cubicle with the other intern, a quiet local girl who comes to work in the uniform of her summer program. Together we type into a computer database what’s written on index cards: At the top of the card is an abstract name: "Swimming in the River," "The Seventh Urn," "To Julia" and then below, a list of hard terms: "Type: PAINTING," "Type: URN/CERAMIC," "Type: LETTER" Then there is the material, the weight of the thing, the dimensions, the price it sold for. It's boring work and so we have started writing poems to each other in the "Notes" section of the database, switching off line-by-line, sending them through the computer system but never speaking aloud.
The Seventh Urn
Was a thing I saved for you but would never give
Thinking only, that I had six, and six was not enough
And I needed the last one. I needed everything.
When we're done with one, I print it out and fold it and put it in my pocket and take it home with me. In the car, I fold and re-fold it, making a kind of origimi of nervous disgrace. If it were an animal it would be one of the Pomeranians the Polish men walk in Queens—the small, cloistered dogs of their wives that they’ve given up the shame of owning.

Maxine has had this job before. "It's so dull, isn't it," she says. She is sitting sideways on the living room armchair, so that her delicate little feet flop over the armrest—as though she’s too good to sit in the chair as it was intended to be sat in. Something is playing on the television that involves pandas, but I don’t know what it is. "Though sure, the first day is always the worst.”
Maxine works downtown at the Lane Crawford, which she explains is the "Barney’s of Asia,” though it's not such a great explanation--I've never heard of Barney's. Maxine rolls her eyes over at me; she's performing for an audience that's not here--and she looks back at the television.
That night online I look up Barney's. On the page, a woman in a red felt coat winks. The coat is for sale. It's just a store.

One Saturday I sleep in. Usually I’d head down the hill in a $1 dollar cab ride and walk around. There are still temples I haven’t seen, ferry rides I haven’t taken. I bring books, read a lot, spend my money in the most atrociously dirty restaurants I can find—having deemed them more authentic.
But when I go downstairs Constance asks me if I wouldn't like to get out of the house with her--it's nearly noon, and she was thinking we could do some shopping, maybe surprise Connie at the store where she’s working. I say sure. I pour a bowl of cereal. Connie continues to look at me, to watch me eat. I look up at her.
“I was just thinking,” she said, “Have you heard about that auction?”
I’ve heard of it. The other intern had to type up the name-cards; A Mrs. Smell had been invited and we had giggled. I say, “Yeah, I think so.”
“Well they need more girls to volunteer, to help them out,” Connie says. “And god knows Maxine’s friends are all too rich to spend their summer breaks at home. I’ve been phoning around but it’s useless. It would just be this evening. And many evenings later if you enjoy it.”
Connie explained that basically, the auctioneers at the hotel, where it was being hosted, just needed girls to carry the things around to the different tables. I wouldn’t be paid. But it would be good experience. And it was at a fabulous hotel—the Mandarin Oriental—and all of the volunteers would get a free dinner and everything just for carrying the little things, which were very beautiful and worth seeing anyway. Plus,there was a kind of shrimp glazee that they did very well there and she had been dreaming about it for a week.
“Sure,” I said, “Sure.”
Connie looked me up and down. “Well terrific,” she said. “Then today we’ll need to buy you a nice dress, some makeup, voila!” I look up at her, as though to say—are you serious? She’s giddy.