THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020 27
them all, and her favorites were Zora
Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were
Watching God” and Tom Drury’s “The
Driftless Area”; in a few passing con-
versations, she gave me a glimpse of her
childhood, in rural Pennsylvania, with
an alcoholic mother and an abusive fa-
ther; whenever she had time, she would
go to public lectures at the university
where I teach; she was fluent in Span-
ish, and she was learning German—her
two sons were in middle school and
high school then, and she could finally
arrange to take evening classes.
A few times, she talked about her
depression. One evening, she texted me
to say that all she wanted was to curl
up on our sofa with the dog. A month
before she died, she asked me about a
minor character in my first novel, whose
mother, a political activist, was executed
when he was a young boy. “What do
you think he’s like now?” she said. “Now
that he’s a grown man, will he know
more about her?”
I admitted that I had not thought of
the boy after finishing the novel, and
Julia said that I should write a sequel. I
would never do that, but this I did not
tell her. Everything I do, or do not do,
may be explained by Marianne Moore’s
poem “Silence,” which I read at Vin-
cent’s memorial:
My father used to say,
“Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow’s grave
or the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self-reliant like the cat—
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse’s limp tail hanging like a shoe-
lace from its mouth—
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in
silence;
not in silence, but restraint.”
Nor was he insincere in saying, “Make my
house your inn.”
Inns are not residences.Make my house your inn—I can say
that to my characters. They have all
visited, sometimes staying for years, but
inns are not residences.
W
hen I accompanied my father to
the operating room, it occurred
to me that I had been given another op-
portunity to tell him about Vincent. If
I whispered to him, he might not hear
me before he fell under anesthesia. When
he woke up, he might not even remem-
ber, though I had a feeling that he would
not wake up again. There was less than
ninety pounds of him left.
After nine hours of surgery, I fol-
lowed the gurney to the I.C.U., where
my father had to have a second, emer-
gency surgery, right after he arrived. The
double doors of the I.C.U. opened to a
busy waiting area with multiple eleva-
tors. There was no seating. My father
was being treated at the university hos-
pital affiliated with my alma mater. It
was a good hospital, but even a good
hospital in Beijing might not always
provide seating for the family. Wait for
a moment out there, a nurse or a doc-
tor would say, and a moment could be
ten minutes, or an hour. I stood outside
the I.C.U. for three and a half hours.
I understood then why folding chairs
and stools and even chaise longues were
sold along with crutches and wheel-
chairs and adult diapers in the shops
near the hospital. I had seen people sit-
ting in a corner as though they were
picnicking. But even if a shop were open
at midnight I would not purchase a fold-
ing chair. “Is there a piece of cardboard
you can find and sit on?” my sister asked
on the phone. She, too, lives in the
United States and had also flown to
Beijing to see our father, but had not
been able to extend her stay in China,
and had left right before the surgery.
I chose to stand. I was rigid with pride,
which was not far from fear. If I sat down,
I might not be able to stand up again.
If I shed one tear, I might become Alice,
swimming in an ocean of my tears.B
efore I turned six, I cried easily. One
day, my father brought me a mir-
ror. “How sad you look when you cry,
but others won’t understand your sad-
ness,” he said. “If you keep smiling, peo-
ple will think you’re a happy person. You
yourself will feel better.”
A year after Vincent died, one of his
school friends visited my office. She had
just begun to attend the university. She
was in high school when he was in mid-
dle school, and they had sat next to each
other in a language course.
“Back then, I thought, This kid is so
smart, so fun, so imaginative—this kid
is going to change the world,” the girl
said. She was eighteen at most, and theway she called Vincent “this kid” made
me change the subject. I asked her about
her new college life, and she replied with
a poised sweetness. Later, I was hit by
a memory: we had been driving home
from school when Vincent told me about
the high schooler sitting next to him in
Mandarin class.
“What’s she like?” I asked.
“Mommy-like,” he said.
I said I wasn’t sure if she would like
to be described that way.
“But she has a round face just like
you,” he said. “And she smiles all the
time like you do.”
When I was seven, I was terrified of
darkness, which amplified any small
noise into monsters in a cave, or ghosts
in a graveyard. “In a Newtonian world,”
my father explained to me—and it was
the first time I’d heard that we lived in
a Newtonian world—“any sound comes
from a vibration, and a scientific mind
does not make up a story but deter-
mines what the sound source is.”
When I was nine, he taught me how
to use a cleaver, placing its edge at a safe
and efficient angle. “This way, you can
cut anything with your eyes closed,” he
said. For a while, I practiced, cutting cu-
cumbers in rapid chopping motions
without looking. The cucumber pieces
eventually came out paper-thin.
In my last year of high school, I at-
tempted suicide. My father, admitting
that he did not understand me, spoke
again of our Newtonian reality: “Think
of time in classical physics—a linear el-
ement, and perhaps all you do now is
move along that axis. What you cannot
sort out, you may be able to do so when
you’re in college. What you don’t want
is to stop at this point in time.”
The tears I couldn’t stop shedding—
for Julia, for her sons, for our younger
son who had to be told about her death,
for our dog who would not remember
her so would not know to miss her, just
as he would not remember and miss
Vincent, who had named him Quin-
tus, after he became the fifth family
member—all those tears felt like a chal-
lenge to my father’s urging to keep smil-
ing or a challenge to Marianne Moore’s
restraint. More so, they felt like a con-
frontation with my own belief: I was
like the Pequod, with a sperm whale
on the starboard side and a right whale
hoisted on the larboard. I had thought