An Old Hope

When I was fifteen, not that long ago, and forever ago, I fell in love with my aunt’s exchange student. I know this is commonplace, and I know now that exchange students laugh and roll their eyes when—talking to their friends back home or among themselves—they share, with a mix of irritation and smugness, the news that yet another local has found them to be inordinately appealing. Amused, for sure, but they might also feel flattered and excited, and—especially if they are tall, pale, thin, their hair curly in some lights red in others gold, and have come to China—a little bit unsurprised.

Her name was Zofia. When I met her for the first time, she pointed to where she was from on the world map taped to the wall of my cousin’s bedroom, the font slightly smaller than the surrounding letters of Washington, DC, and New York City. She told me it was famous for its liberty, and boxing. She mimed running and then threw her arms up in the air. I’d never heard of that town before, and straight away I forgot the word for it. I remember creeping back into the room later while she was still at the dinner table to look for the name of her hometown again.

I found her endlessly satisfying—the way she clapped and clasped her hands together in front of her chest before answering a question, how she stood sometimes with the soles of her feet facing each other. Is that comfortable? I asked once, pointing at her rolling feet, her twisted ankles. On the street by my aunt’s apartment with her body folded in half, her butt billowing from the holes in a small plastic chair, splashing red oil all over herself as one chāoshǒu after another slid from the grip of her chopsticks, her looks held sway over me and drew the attention of everyone else on the sidewalk too. I liked the way her nose dripped every time she ate anything off the street so that she sniffled and slurped, blew her nose and chewed. I liked the sounds her knuckles made as she absentmindedly pressed on them while scanning the rows of drinks at the convenience store looking for Pocari Sweat, which she had begun to drink every day.

She was nineteen that spring, in her second year of university. The three years of girlhood between us felt insurmountable, and so of course I had no chance with her. But still I spent as much time with her as I could and still she let me. Most of the time my aunt and mother were there too; together we were two twosomes. The four of us went to visit the giant pandas at the Chéngdū Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, going early in the morning before the heat drove them indoors. I watched her watch them, taking photo after identical zoomed-in photo. Of this one and that one, sitting, lying down, gnawing on the stems gripped in their hands.

I tried to imagine finding these lazy, sleepy animals anything but ordinary. We went to Huánglóngxī and walked past dozens of art students painting bridges. The way I saw things was nothing special, but she treated everything I said like it was important, like it had narrative heft or altered her worldview. Once, she told a group of other exchange students as they waited in line outside of a Sìchuān opera performance about something I had said. I wasn’t there, but she told me later that they’d thought what I said was funny too. Another time, after I’d recited a poem every student learns, the famous Lǐ Bái one about looking at the moon and missing home, and translated its meaning to her as best I could at the time, she looked at me, her eyes even bigger and bluer than usual, and said, That was so beautiful, Wenwen.

She shared poems from her language too. Here’s the only one I know by heart, she told me one evening as we were walking around my aunt’s residential complex, ten minutes by foot from where I lived with my parents. The only one? I’d thought, thinking of all the poems my classmates and I were required to memorize and recite. Or, at least, I think I know it by heart, she added. She briefly stopped walking, as though it required every bit of her concentration. Her eyes were fixed on a point in front of us, and her lips moved patternlessly. Okay, yeah, I’ve got it. She turned to me, grinning. I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox. And which you were probably saving for breakfast, she continued, grabbing my hands and looking pleadingly into my eyes as though she had actually eaten something of mine I’d been saving. But the look in her eyes was not without amusement, and in that moment I knew she was letting me in on something that was not just a touchstone of her culture. It was like we were taking part in making fun of something together, though where the humor was directed I was not sure. Forgive me. She shook my hands up and down, her voice rising a couple of octaves and taking on a different accent, her words suddenly turned round. They were delicious. So sweet. And so cold.

Her eyes were fixed on a point in front of us, and her lips moved patternlessly. 

I’d expected her to continue, knew enough to know English poems were often long and difficult, but she dropped one of my hands, holding on to the other, swinging her arm and mine like we were children. Did you forget the rest? I asked, doing my best to sound sympathetic. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye and then threw her head back in a laugh. No, that’s the whole poem. It’s super famous.

Oh, I said, feeling chastised. I tried to think of something to say. I like it.

I began to see her in places where she could not possibly be, for example, in my memories of the past. I started taking piano lessons when I was six years old. My teacher was a young man in his twenties when we began. In my earliest memories with him, he had big round glasses and a ponytail. Suddenly Zofia was there, watching one of my lessons. She looked the same, transcripted from my waking hours, tall and teenage, but my teacher had his ponytail and when I looked down at myself in this dream, I couldn’t see what I was wearing or what my body looked like, but I knew I was a small child again and Zofia was watching me learn my first chords. Sometimes I would have a dream in which someone, whom I knew to be Zofia as a child, was pumping her legs on the swing beside me. I could see flashes of doughy, robust limbs from the corner of my vision, and I was a child too, lying back and letting all the energy I’d exerted moments before push my head down and lift my legs up. She was laughing at a joke I had made, and somehow we were young elementary students together, and she could understand my jokes, and hear clearly the sense of humor I could, at the time—that summer—only summon in my native tongue.

There were daydreams too, scenes I imagined vividly while washing dishes or walking to school. I imagined being with friends and having, for some minor reason or other, to leave for a moment. As I was gone my friends might stumble upon Zofia and tell her about all my admirable qualities—about the time I had taken the blame for one of them after she broke one of her mother’s decorative vases when we were playing because her mother could get only so angry with me; about the time I had maintained my composure when another one of them had accidentally elbowed me in the face, even as blood from my nose spouted everywhere—things I couldn’t very well tell Zofia about myself with the same flavor as a friend could on my oh-so-humble behalf, and when I’d get back from whatever I was doing in those minutes they were sharing good things about me, Zofia would look at me and think, Wenwen is so wonderful.

In a particularly replayable scene, we were adults. It was sometime in the future and we were at a dinner party like the ones I imagined happened in Greece or the south of France, one of those places archived in my imagination somehow: Bright blooms framing an arched doorway, a courtyard where more flowers hang down from a trellis, the setting sun casting a yellow glow over a long wooden table, everyone apart from Zofia and me backlit so we can’t see them but can hear their background chatter. And then a woman’s voice would arise. A vaguely European accent. And though I never could see her, I pictured this voice with brown hair, wearing a halter top over tanned, freckled shoulders, smoking a cigarette—but in the background always the knowledge that it was just my voice of course, talking to myself in my head. This voice would ask, How did you two meet? Imaginary adult Zofia and imaginary adult me would turn their heads to look at each other and smile. Zofia’s gaze would settle on my lips without even realizing it, but that she had looked first at my mouth before meeting my eyes was visible to the voice sitting across from us and instantly recognizable to her as one of love’s reflexes. Because my mind represented all parties, I as the nondescript European woman would feel a rush of joy and envy at the same time as my imaginary adult self would feel safe and desired. But I could only sustain the fantasy’s vividness up to a point, before the chatter would fall away, the farm-chic table would vanish, and we would never get to hear Zofia’s answer.

A week before she flew back to Philadelphia, Zofia arrived at the side entrance to my apartment complex, the one too small for cars to enter, where we would always meet. We nodded at the security guard who idled there and then set off to the bakery she most liked, where she would stare at the cakes with empty customizable placards of chocolate stuck in them and glossy cubes of fruit resting on the frosting before ultimately ordering the same thing as me, a bun with flossed pork stuck to the top like clumps of hair pulled from the drain after a shower. Years later she’d tell me she remembered them as the pubic-hair buns, that while at university she found an Asian market nearby and wandering the aisles had found a plastic tub of the pork floss. Turning to her friend, she’d yelled, It’s the pubes! much to her friend’s amusement and confusion. He had no idea why I found it so exciting.

As we walked she told me about her bike ride over, about the three boys she’d seen squeezed onto one motorbike, going slow. A fourth cycled beside them on a normal bicycle, his legs pumping fast to keep up. Then one of the boys sitting on the motorbike stretched out his hand in an offering; the boy peddling on the bike stretched out his hand too. Holding his friend’s hand, he could stop pumping his legs and—pulled along by them—rest.

What she said next I remember word for word, as I wrote it down as soon as I returned home that night: Watching this easy display of friendship made my tender piece-of-shit heart so happy. So happy that she had pedaled faster to keep them in her sights until they turned off onto their university campus.

In previous pages of my journal, what I had remembered of the poem she’d shared with me, I jotted down: You have eaten the plums I put in the icebox and which you knew I was saving for breakfast. I forgive you. You are delicious. So sweet and so cold.

It was decided, unspoken, because her flight was not until nearly midnight, past my bedtime, that on the day she left I would not send her off at the airport. Her semester abroad was over and I was relieved, wanted to get the goodbye over with and return to my rippleless existence. As she left, flanked by my aunt and uncle, my father, mother, and I stood and watched them pull on their shoes, and I looked down at my feet, bouncing on the raised threshold of the doorframe. Balancing on one foot, I waved the other one in broad strokes in front of me on the landing. This required concentration, and I did not look up until I felt my mother’s hand on the back of my neck and heard her say, Alright, we won’t be seeing you off then.

Thank you so much for your kind welcome and hospitality. I’ll never forget it as long as I live, Zofia said, replying to my mother, also in Chinese. Her Chinese—still at times overly formal but no longer quite so exaggerated in its efforts to hit every tone, even on the words whose tones were neutralized when used in a naturally flowing sentence—had improved greatly that summer, more than my English had, though the improving of my English must have been one of the reasons my aunt and uncle had continued taking on exchange students even once they no longer had a child of their own. We had all fastidiously avoided speaking in dialect around her once it became clear she was hanging on to our every word, instead of tuning us out as some exchange students did.

I slid my gaze forward, conscious of everyone around. Zofia’s feet came closer to mine. I watched her hand leave her side and felt it gently grab mine and turn it over. The heat of her palm, the humidity of the day, her touch was warm and faintly damp. This was a penny, she said, and I looked up at her finally but she was looking down. It used to be worth one cent and now it’s worth nothing.

It was stretched horizontally, the shape of a plate meant to hold an entire fish. Our eyes finally met, somewhere over my outstretched hand, and she said, It’s a silly tourist thing, a machine that turns regular pennies into souvenir pennies. If you come to Philly, I can show you.

I felt in that moment the certainty that we would meet again. Surely, we had to. Though I had felt this about the other students as they were leaving too, the students that my aunt and uncle started taking in once my cousin reached middle school. Some of them had stayed for mere weeks; one had stayed for an entire year. Even after I forgot their names and their faces blurred, that it was possible to have seen someone for the last time felt impossible, unreal.

Zofia was the last exchange student I befriended. After Zofia, my aunt and uncle stopped taking in exchange students: I had to study for the gāokǎo, and my aunt was pregnant. The day before her forty-fifth birthday, a few months after Zofia left, she gave birth. She had been gone for two years at that point, my cousin. And other than those days a couple times a year that we visited her grave—walking single file along the mountain path to the quadrant where her stone was, where my aunt wept, the sounds of it so fearsome, and my uncle stood, his posture perfect, a few steps apart, and my mother crouched beside her sister-in-law with tissues and comforting words as her own face quietly wettened, and my father stood beside me with his arm around me—we didn’t acknowledge her. So I was surprised when, at the hospital, my uncle—looking down at his sleeping son, who had been in the world only a few hours and was pink with swollen eyes—began to shake. He rubbed the baby’s small, nearly translucent left ear, the ear not tucked into the baby’s little newborn cap. His other hand ran back and forth along the tips of the baby’s fingers. They were configured strangely, some of the tiny fingers completely straight, others curled completely in, touching his tiny palm. My uncle’s finger slowly and meticulously traced these ridges. He looks just like Tiàotiao. Hearing her nickname, Jump Jump, given because she wriggled so much in her crib, which had fit her even after, so lively and energetic she had been, I ran from the room.

I felt in that moment the certainty that we would meet again. Surely, we had to. 

She’s obsessed with having a baby, I heard my mother say once, a few months after the accident, as I crept down the stairs at an hour past my bedtime. It’s not healthy at our age. At this, my dad defended his sister. What would you do in her position? I could anticipate my mother’s response, and then it came, spat out indignantly. How dare you suggest such a misfortune. My father then, in his conciliatory tone: Of course, of course, I am just saying it is lucky she is young enough to at least try.

This time I was able to watch my aunt dote on a baby, the way she must have done with my cousin too. She narrated back to him his movements, commented on his talkativeness when he started to babble and squeal. Each time he laughed, she’d laugh too and respond with, That’s funny, isn’t it? But I was in my final years of high school then, always studying, and so in my mind he remained always a baby, in my most bitterly sad moments I thought of him simply as the government-sanctioned replacement child, and each time I saw him, that he was bigger and with more abilities than I remembered, startled me anew.

I never told Zofia, or anyone, this; that there was a time, after my cousin died, when I thought, if there was any poetry in random occurrence, then it should have been me. It was not just because she, as everyone knew, contained so much promise. The worth of one’s life, I thought, could be measured by how much had been built around it, how much of another’s existence-scaffolding would crumble were that life to vanish. My mother had a child because not to be a mother would have been abnormal, and to be out of the ordinary was something she could not bear. If I were to tell Zofia this, she would turn to me, her eyes filling with sadness, and tell me to stop being tragic; she would tell me that I am being ridiculous. That my mother loves me, that after all she has accepted our relationship when Zofia’s own parents could not.

What I did confess: I had often been jealous of my cousin. She was two years older. While my mother took me to piano lessons, English lessons, tennis lessons, swim lessons, ballet class, picking me up from school and taking my backpack from me as we walked to the subway, eventually, when I was in middle school, to our newly purchased car, with admirable dedication—and as I grew I became more aware of and impressed by the time and sacrificial energy it had taken on her part—my aunt was different. As a result of her displays of boundless energy, my cousin had been enrolled in gymnastics class, where she excelled, until one day she decided she’d had enough of it, and my aunt said, Okay, have a think about what you’d rather do. Then my cousin trained with a sǎndǎ master, she played basketball; when my aunt suggested she try something that required sitting down and being patient, she took up drawing and spending hours watching májiàng and xiàngqí at the park. My aunt called my cousin xiǎo bǎobèi; she called my uncle dà bǎobèi. We joked that when my cousin had a child of her own, she’d call that child xiǎo xiǎobǎobèi.

Ultimately it was Zofia who made us happen. After graduating from university she moved to China to teach English and study Mandarin. She had kept the QQ number I’d scribbled down for her years before. Through that we became WeChat friends, then at some point discovered we were both in Běijīng. I was in graduate school studying English and literary translation. She was the supply chain and e-commerce manager for a small gourmet honey brand. I became Zofia’s girlfriend and, after she got a job back in her country and same-sex marriage was legalized there, and we’d had the conversations and arguments—both agreeing to become the beneficiaries of each other’s digital archives if the other were to die first (she would want her Facebook account contents downloaded then deleted; I, as a mere social media spectator, could simply be deleted); having our first big fight when I offhandledly mentioned I loved her more in absence, that when I thought of her in abstraction once she had left a room, I found the thought of her to be very tender and affectionate, which she found offensive, upholding that she preferred me in my close-at-hand reality—her wife.

Now, she wants to have a child. We’d had that conversation too of course, accompanied with the requisite conversation about how we thought we might fare were there to be a total systems collapse with me saying that I could picture myself with a child, though were it to be biologically related to one of us, and created in the understanding we were in a committed, mutually exclusive-of-others relationship, they would need to be created before total systems collapse, for obvious reasons. She didn’t find that charming, and so I hadn’t mentioned that I could also picture myself as an Olympic-gold-medal-winning figure skater, as a photojournalist with a Pulitzer prize for taking photos of people disfigured by drone warfare, as the scientist who somehow managed to cure all the diseases we nebulously clump together as cancer and therefore could be hailed has having cured cancer (“this is why our country is stronger for having immigrants!” the papers in our city would say somewhere in the article, maybe even in its headline), any number of things I had no hope of ever being, and would likely not enjoy most of the tasks associated with getting to the pinnacle of.

It’s finally possible. We’re old enough, we’ve got enough savings, she says. She proposes using her eggs or mine. It doesn’t matter to me. I just want to experience being pregnant.

She’d described this feeling of wanting to be pregnant to me when we’d had that first talk about children, when it was all still theoretical. As soon as I turned twenty-five, this would have been just before she’d moved to Běijīng, when she was living briefly in Copenhagen, learning urban farming, a few things—rather abruptly, I would say—shifted within me. The first and most startling: Upon seeing a man with a child, presumably his own, particularly if that child is a little girl—her backpack slung over his shoulder, a large hand with well-endowed veins steadying her scooter as they wait for the crossing light to change, or else her legs slung over his shoulders, his hands protectively grasping her little rainboots—I no longer felt the twinge I’ve grown accustomed to, that “aww I wish I had a good relationship with my dad” feeling. Instead I’d see him and think, I want to fuck that dad. When I saw a man walking toward me with a baby carrier hidden inside his double-breasted check overcoat, a tiny plush beanie nestled in the lapel, I’d work to slow my walk in a way that was imperceptible to onlookers but could notably slow the blur of his passing by. I can only imagine that these childed men of hipster Scandinavia in their already-fathering state had proven themselves motile of sperm, and something about that presumption niggled its way into my ovaries through some hardwired biological circuit, ultimately moving farther down to cause a stir in my loins. She’d stopped here to look at me, her eyes doing that thing I loved most about them, alighting with a joke she was about to tell. Which was weird, since I’m a lesbian.

I’m working on a passage when she comes in without knocking, as usual, and tells me she’s narrowed our choices down to one, that she has found the ideal sperm for us, a Chinese American UCLA graduate working in finance. The book I’m translating is propped on a wooden stand open to the page I’m working on. Though normally I translate English to Chinese, I am translating a story from Chinese to English, a story written by a friend of a friend; it follows a girl from childhood to old age all in the span of only a few pages. In the flower bed at the entrance to the school, bursts of red oleander bloomed. No, I decide. In the flower bed at the entrance to the school were bursts of red oleander, all blooming. Next. Cui Meirong plucked some red, sucking at the heart of the flowers; the slightest sweetness. Not right yet, but I can come back to it. What is the smell of oleander flower center? she wondered. Or could it be instead, Does the center of the flower have a smell? she wondered. Then, with this thought, her nose greased with blood.

Years ago, on what could be said was our first date, walking around Hòuhǎi and then smoking hash on her balcony, Zofia taught me the word palimpsest. She told me an origin story, how, when writing surfaces were more rare than they are now, they were often used more than once, and documents were erased to make room for a new one when there was a shortage of parchment. Fortunately for modern scholars, the erasing process wasn’t entirely effective, so the original could often be distinguished under the newer writing. In your experience, is translation like that? she’d asked. Later, she admitted to researching topics related to translation before our meeting in case there were awkward silences.

When my cousin and I were little, we spent so much time together that her face grew more familiar to me than mine. I’d look in the mirror and startle, since it was her face that had somehow swallowed my imagined view of myself, even though I knew better, knew I wasn’t her and that we weren’t identical. When I first moved with Zofia to the US, I started going to Pilates almost every Tuesday morning. The instructor, I noticed immediately, was also Chinese, though I could tell from the way she stood and walked, even before I heard her talk, that she had not been raised in China. Zofia had been pushing me to make more friends, but I found it difficult, for reasons of language—the two of us spoke in a mix of English and Chinese, and my English, which was highly proficient by any on-paper measure, was stage-frightened and habit-rutted—but also because I was adjusting to, for the first time, being an ethnic minority, something I’d realized with a start I was in this country, and I felt both embarrassed to never have considered what that must be like for others in my own and wary of its implications for me now in this one, and I didn’t want to speak either to others whose gaze would alight on me with a well-meaning patience as I searched for words or to those who had come all the way from China to make friends with other Chinese people. Melanie, the instructor, who said things in class like the way you are with your practice and body on the mat is how you are in the world and what will you do with this, your one last wild and precious chance this hour to do leg raises, seemed like someone who could be, if not a friend, a practice run for making them. She mentioned growing up on a farm when we got tea together after class one day. Your parents immigrated from China to farm? I’d asked, the excitement of encountering something unusual rising in me. No, I’m adopted, she’d said. I thought I was white when I was little. I mean, I imagined myself as looking like my parents. Even after I knew I looked different from them, rationally. Sometimes I’m still surprised to see this face looking back at me. She’d said it very confidently, without a hint in her voice that this caused her pain, and so I said, I know what you mean. I don’t have any idea what I look like. I find it hard to believe anyone does.

He’s the one. Just listen to him! Zofia says as she begins to play a clip. Of the sperms, we learn mostly just facts, but we get a baby photo and a recording of them speaking off camera. He’s so well-spoken, Zofia continues, though in her excitement she shakes her phone around, making it difficult to concentrate on the sounds coming from it.

I don’t think that is hereditary, I reply, to which Zofia responds with a slap, light on my shoulder.

Zofia, sitting beside me, cranes her head all the way around so that her body is contorted and her head faces mine, a straddle with no leg involvement. What is going on in that head of yours? she asks. Her tone is light but her eyes are probing, her pupils—their every movement and contraction so visible—moving quickly, almost imperceptibly, to take in my whole face. To be honest, my head is still in there, I say, gesturing to the stand, and the incense holder I’ve tipped onto its side, leaned against the book to keep it open. She rolls her eyes. Well then, let me tell you a compelling story that can compete.

Sometimes I tell Zofia not to get her hopes up, it’s dangerous. There are always many steps unforeseen between imagining and realizing. Other times, I feel as though somehow I willed this all to happen and so when new unattainabilities appear atop the old ones, and in them Zofia has been replaced, or never appeared, I have to be careful not to get ahead of myself.

But always, there’s more that I don’t tell. Like that I was my mother’s daughter. And that, if given the choice to be biologically divorced from the standardized narrative I’d been taught—the marriage, the child, the inevitable tragedy of loss in some shape or another—why wouldn’t one rejoice?

Zofia clears her throat and begins. Here, imagine this, will you?

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