Across a Green Ocean

by Wendy Lee

Genres: Asian American; Family Life

Synopsis

A widow and her two grown children search for answers about the past in both America and China, in this insightful novel of an immigrant family’s journey. After a lifetime of sacrifice, Ling’s husband has passed away. Though she has both a son and a daughter to comfort her, she has struggled to understand how they live their lives—Emily, an immigration lawyer in New York City, inexplicably refuses to have children; and Michael is unable to commit to a relationship or a career. Michael yearns for a deeper connection to his family, but has never been able to find the courage to come out to them as gay. But when he finds a letter to his father from a long-ago friend—written mostly in Chinese except for a mysterious line at the end: Everything has been forgiven —he impulsively travels to China in the hopes of learning more about a man he never really knew. In this rapidly modernizing country, he begins to understand his father’s decisions—including one that reverberates into the present day. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Ling and Emily question their own choices, trying to forge a path that bends toward new loves and fresh beginnings. From the author of Happy Family, named one of the top ten debuts of the year by Booklist, this is a powerfully honest novel that captures the complexity of the immigrant experience, exploring one family’s hidden history, unspoken hurts, and search for a place to call home.

Release date: February 1, 2015

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 289

Sample

Ling Tang sat on the back porch, waiting for the right time to come. It wouldn’t be long now; the late-afternoon sunshine had already crested the fence between her house and the next-door neighbors’, stretching across the lawn like strands of honey. Since her husband, Han, had died last year, Ling had not gone out into her own backyard. With no one to cut the grass, it had grown lush and thick, full of bugs that rose in a haze over the greenness. During the time her husband was alive, he’d cut the lawn every two weeks in the summer, pushing a mower through the grass with a firm hand. Dandelions, evening primrose, and clover would fall evenly in his wake.

Once, Ling had looked out the kitchen window to see Han standing still in the middle of the lawn, the spring air ruffling the hair around his ears. He bent so swiftly to the ground that she’d run outside, alarmed that he had hurt himself. When she reached him, he motioned for her to crouch down. He parted the grass around a nest of what appeared to be mice that had frozen in the cold. They were larger than mice, though, with soft brown fur and tiny, pointed ears. As if suddenly recognizing a face, Ling realized they were baby rabbits. An inexplicable sadness came over her, and she looked at her husband for some response, some guidance for what to do. But Han covered the nest as quickly as he had discovered it with the cut grass, where it lay like a secret.

Underneath that luxuriant wave of grass lay other memories. Ling recalled how her daughter, Emily, then fourteen years old and newly impressed by a home-economics class, had tried to plant a vegetable garden next to the fence one year. For weeks Ling fixed salads with lettuce leaves that looked like pieces of lace, tomatoes riddled with holes, cucumbers that tasted like water. Ling tried to tell her daughter that it was okay, nobody was perfect at everything, but Emily had yanked out the plants. All that remained of that horticultural experiment was a slight depression in the earth.

Ling remembered another time when Han had shouted at their son, Michael, when he had been twelve, for something he had done in the backyard. Michael had been balanced on the weathered gray fence that separated them from their neighbors on the right, the Bradleys, trying to see—what, Ling wondered, the Bradley girl hanging out by the pool?—and Han, arriving home from work, had caught him. He’d yelled something that she couldn’t hear through the kitchen window, something she imagined to be worse than a reprimand, because Michael had jumped down onto the lawn so quickly that he’d twisted his ankle. As Ling had wrapped a bandage around his foot, she’d noticed how Michael bit his lower lip, trying not to make a sound.

The Bradleys had lived in their house almost as long as Ling and Han had lived in theirs, and they were about the same age, in their late fifties. Their children, also a son and daughter, had known Emily and Michael in school, but aside from one time when Ling had asked Mrs. Bradley to babysit, the parents had not interacted much. There were none of the neighborly activities that she had seen on television or read in books, no borrowing of eggs to make a cake, requests to take in the newspaper during vacation, or the necessity of jumper cables to start a car. Neither she nor Han had ever been invited over to the Bradleys’ house or to so much as dip a toe in their pool. At Han’s funeral, Mrs. Bradley had brought over a pot of chili that was so spicy that it made Ling’s eyes water. Which was odd, because she hadn’t even cried over her husband yet.

Since the funeral, though, Ling had watched the Bradleys with renewed interest. She wanted to see their lives unfurl before her eyes, as hers with Han should have. She wanted to see the bare bones of what it meant to take care of and comfort someone; the way a husband might reach down to pick up something his wife had dropped, or how a wife might place a sweater around her husband’s shoulders. But the Bradleys were private folk and kept their blinds drawn; the trees on the other side of the fence remained untrimmed, hiding their daily existence behind a scrim of leaves. Ling couldn’t help but feel cheated, deprived of not only an experience that should have been hers, but even of being able to witness it secondhand.

If the Bradleys were an alternate future of the Tangs, Ling’s neighbors on the left were a version from more than thirty years ago: a young couple named Jerry and Marta Katz, and their baby son whose thin, wailing cry could often be heard from next door. When the Katzes first moved in nine months ago, Ling had watched Marta walk around in the backyard, raking leaves until she could barely bend over the swell of her stomach. She reminded Ling of herself when she and Han had first moved to New Jersey from New York City, Emily just a bump beneath Ling’s knitted poncho. Ling wondered if Marta had felt the same queasy blend of anticipation and fear that she’d had years ago, the sense that her life was finally starting.

Today, Jerry Katz must have come home early from work, for he was out inspecting his own lawn. He took a few steps, plucked a blade of Kentucky bluegrass, and held it up to the light. He seemed displeased, although compared to the veritable jungle next door, his lawn looked like it had been ordered from a nursery catalog, each blade straight as a solider in a battle against overgrowth and disorder. He mowed once a month with a huge power mower that would have both impressed and mortified Han Tang.

“Hello, Jerry,” Ling called out. She was careful to pronounce his name clearly. Her command of English was excellent, but she sometimes found herself stumbling over certain vowels or forgetting common phrases at the most inconvenient times. The other day she had forgotten how to say stamp at the post office and instead the word in Mandarin Chinese, youpiao, radiated in her mind.

“Hey there, Mrs. Tang,” Jerry said, pronouncing her last name like the drink favored by astronauts. “Hot enough for you?” He lifted his baseball cap, leaving a fringe of hair dark with sweat over his forehead.

“Yes, very hot,” Ling agreed, and fanned herself for emphasis, although she did not find it particularly warm. In fact, she wasn’t even perspiring. But sometimes she found it easier to go along with other people in these matters, to be agreeable for the sake of being agreeable. If she wasn’t careful, these little moments of acquiescence would build up, but she figured talking about the weather was harmless. “How is the baby?” she asked.

“He’s doing fine,” Jerry said. “Hope he isn’t keeping you up at night.”

“Oh, no,” Ling assured him.

Another acquiescence. But she didn’t think it was appropriate to say that she actually enjoyed being woken up in the middle of the night by the baby’s cry. Sometimes when that happened, Ling thought it was one of her own children—Michael had had colic; Emily, bad dreams—and she would half-rise to go to the next room. It was probably even less appropriate to admit that she sometimes sat at Emily’s old bedroom window and watched Marta’s shadow as she paced with the baby slung over her shoulder like a little sack of rice, her hair backlit so that it formed a halo against the curtain.

“Hey, Mrs. Tang,” Jerry said, looking over the fence that separated their property, “why don’t you let me mow your lawn for you? It’ll take twenty, thirty minutes, tops—”

“No!”

Jerry tugged confusedly at the bill of his cap.

“I mean,” Ling said, “it’s too hot right now. Maybe later, when it’s cooler.”

“Okay, when it’s cooler,” Jerry agreed. “Marta and I owe you for those baby clothes you brought over for Ephraim.”

Ling waved that away. “Old clothes, they go to waste if not for Ephraim.”

“Well, thank you, anyway,” Jerry said, and moved away as he continued his lawn inspection.

Ling had been saving the clothes for her own grandchildren, but when she had heard that Marta had had the baby, she had gone down into the basement and looked through her children’s infant clothes, most of which were spit-stained beyond possible reuse. Ever practical, Ling had dressed Michael in some of Emily’s more neutral onesies and jumpers, although occasionally a pastel or flowered garment slipped through. One of the items she had bought especially for him was a tiny blue sailor suit, and he had outgrown it at once. Since it was almost new, she decided to give it to Ephraim.

What an odd name the Katzes had chosen for their child, Ling thought. It was a Jewish name, Marta had told her, that of her maternal grandfather; she herself had been named after her grandmother, who was of German ancestry. Ling didn’t know how Marta’s grandparents had possibly gotten together. It was what an old aunt of hers had said of a second cousin who had married a Japanese man: impossible.

Although, Ling supposed, it was a more valid reason than those behind her own children’s names. She and Han had decided that their children would grow up with only English names, so as to better fit in the country that would be their home for the rest of their lives, but they did not know what the popular names were at the time. In the end Ling had named their daughter after Emily Brontë, her favorite English author when she was a student in Taiwan, and their son Michael because it was from the Bible. Ephraim, she had an inkling, was a biblical name as well, so maybe that was okay. She hoped Emily and Michael would be similarly inspired when it came to naming their own children, although who knew when that would be.

Ling still had hope for Emily, who was thirty-two and had been married for seven years. The trouble was, Emily worked long hours as an immigration lawyer, and there was little sign that she intended to slow down. Ling couldn’t understand why her daughter chose to work in Chinatown, the very place from which Ling and Han had escaped, alongside the kind of people they had tried to distance themselves from. There was something about her selflessness that troubled Ling. It reminded her of when Emily was a child and she would bring home stray cats and dogs, whether they needed saving or not. But at least Emily was married, whereas Ling did not know whether Michael was dating anyone. She wasn’t even sure what his exact address in the city was anymore, since he moved around a lot; who his roommates were; or what he did at his job. She only knew he was a graphic designer at an ad agency, which meant, she suspected, that he drew pictures on the computer all day in the same way he had drawn pictures as a child.

Michael had always been secretive, especially as a teenager. He’d spend hours next door with the Bradley girl, hardly speaking to his parents, until one day Ling decided to go through his room. It was, she had a faint suspicion, something that was not considered acceptable in this culture; you were supposed to trust your children and give them privacy. Whereas, when she had been growing up in Taiwan, Ling would have never thought to hide anything about her life from her sisters, let alone her parents. She didn’t know what she expected to find—cigarettes or dirty magazines, she assumed—but instead discovered some drawings in the bottom of a desk drawer. Most were abstract, but some were sketches of people whom she assumed were classmates. Then, to her surprise, she discovered a picture of herself at the kitchen sink; Michael must have been sitting at the table, watching her, without her fully realizing it. And another, a more detailed portrait of his father, a disembodied head in charcoal. But, somehow, Michael had managed to capture exactly the droop of Han’s right eyebrow, the weary curve of his chin, so that Ling could imagine the way these features felt in real life as she traced the line on the paper with a fingertip. How was it that Michael had been able to observe his father so closely? How could he have known, if only instinctively, what his father had been feeling? Suddenly, as if she were an intruder, she put the drawings back into a folder and shut the desk drawer.

These days, whenever Ling asked Emily about Michael, Emily’s reply would be, Oh, cut him some slack. He’s only twenty-six. He lives in a city where women vastly outnumber men. It makes sense he’s not going to settle down. Besides, people his age don’t really date anymore, they just hook up. What did that mean, anyway—to hook up? Ling thought of two trains, the back of a dress. All she could think of was one of the first voices she had heard after she had moved into her house. She had been in the middle of unpacking boxes in the kitchen when she heard a tinny, disembodied voice, which for a second she thought was that of someone calling through the window. She followed the sound to a receiver that had been accidentally knocked off the wall, where the voice told her that the phone was off the hook. But you did not hook up a phone, you hung it up.

The truth, Ling realized, was that Emily knew as little about Michael’s personal life as she did. She had always wanted her children to grow up close, as she had with her own sisters, but was afraid that the six-year interval between her two children forever doomed them to older sibling–younger sibling rivalry or worse, indifference. She just wanted them to be happy, that was all. And for them to be happy, they had to have families, spouses, children. These things were what had made Ling happy, although, as her own children were growing up, she had never considered the question of whether she was happy or not.

Jerry Katz had gone back into his house, and the sunlight had traveled clear across the lawn now. Due to how it reached halfway up the fence, Ling figured it was around seven o’clock and finally the right time to try calling Michael. It was late enough so that he would have left work, but early enough so that he wouldn’t have gone out yet. Calling her children could be such an ordeal. Emily didn’t want Ling to call her cell phone since she also used it for work, but if Ling called Emily’s home number, she almost always reached her husband, Julian, instead. She didn’t mind making small talk with her son-in-law. In fact, she enjoyed discussing with him the improvements he was making to the house, or, more recently, what late-season vegetables were growing in the backyard (unlike the teenage Emily, Julian appeared to be an adept gardener). At first she had thought it strange that he always was at home, but now she had come to accept it as just another aspect of her daughter’s marriage she didn’t understand.

Julian had a profession. He was a documentary filmmaker who, as far as Ling could tell, worked sporadically on other people’s projects and occasionally on his own. So far he had made a ten-minute piece about a bunch of trust-fund artists who scorned their parents’ support, that had been in a minor festival. It was, Ling suspected, based on his own life, except that Julian did use his family’s money; that was the only way he and Emily could afford their house in Westchester. Ling had been so excited when Emily had announced just before her thirtieth birthday that they were buying their own place, although she was slightly disappointed that it was so far away from her—about equidistant from the city, but in the wrong direction. It would be very inconvenient for Ling to help out with the baby she was certain Emily would shortly announce she and Julian were expecting. But two years had passed, Han had passed away, and still no sign of a grandchild.

Julian wasn’t a bad son-in-law, Ling acknowledged. In fact, she quite liked him. Yes, he had once brought her white roses, not knowing that white was the color of mourning in most Asian cultures, but that was forgivable. He and Emily looked good together as a couple, and would provide her with adorable mixed-race grandchildren. But Ling was afraid that Emily gave too much to everyone but those closest to her and that one day her husband would ask her for something she was not able to provide.

Now, Michael was just as hard to reach but for a different reason. He only had a cell phone, which Ling supposed was the trend among young people nowadays, but it caused more problems than if he had a landline. Strange how the more convenient technology made it to talk to people, the more difficult it was to find them. Ling had been trying to reach Michael for the past week; since Monday. She wanted his advice on what it meant when you went to a restaurant with a man and he paid, when you had long conversations with him and he listened intently, when at the end of your outings together, he gazed into your eyes and said he looked forward to seeing you again soon. In short, she wanted to know about dating.

Ling didn’t know how much of an expert Michael was on this subject. Of course, in high school he had been oddly close to the Bradley girl, and once he had brought home a girl from college who wore a bowler hat. But certainly he was a better option for a confidante than Emily, and not only because Emily was so loyal to her father’s memory. Ling was afraid that Emily might start asking uncomfortable questions, or worse, think that her mother’s real motivation for calling was to ask when she and Julian were planning to have a baby. Children could be so selfish, thinking the world revolved around them.

Every day this past week, when Ling had dialed Michael’s number, the message had gone to voice mail. She supposed he must be terribly busy, or else he would have called her back by now. Cut him some slack, Emily had said, and Ling had spent the past few days cutting it, whatever slack was. But now she picked up the kitchen phone and pressed the buttons, willing a human to pick up on the other end. We’re sorry, the mailbox is full, answered a voice that could never have belonged to a real person. The messages couldn’t all be from her, as she’d just called once a day. And besides, she had not actually left messages. She never liked hearing the sound of her own voice being played back, with its accented English even after almost thirty-five years of living in this country. The one good thing about cell phones, she supposed, was that she didn’t have to leave a message for someone to know she had called.

She hung up and sat for a while in the kitchen, her fingertips cold. It was not unusual for Michael to let his phone go to voice mail or to not call her back for a few days, but for his mailbox to be full? This must mean other people were trying to reach him without success, that he wasn’t calling anybody back. To make sure she had heard right, she called again, and once more received the same, disembodied message. As if on their own, her fingers punched in the number again and again, until she forced herself to stop. She sat there clutching the receiver, as though it was the only thing grounding her.

The last time she had felt this way was almost a year ago, when the hospital had called to tell her that her husband had had a heart attack.

Han’s death had occurred quite suddenly at work. He had been a laboratory technician at a pharmaceuticals company in Trenton. Ling did not know exactly what he did—whenever he had tried to explain it, her mind felt overstuffed, like when she was first learning English—but she knew he cared enough about it to the point that he rarely took a day off. She remembered noticing the strain of his back through his shirts, worn thin from too much washing. He had been fifty-seven years old.

By the time Ling had gotten to the hospital, he was already gone. It was heart failure, the doctors had said. She hadn’t believed them at first. Wasn’t heart failure caused by too much weight, too much food, too much drink, too much of everything? Her husband was as slim as the day she had set eyes on him, and he never touched alcohol or smoked a cigarette. He was the kind of person who got up at dawn to take a brisk walk around the block, and he went to bed at ten thirty every night, without a minute or two’s deviation. She wanted to tell the doctors this, as proof that there had been some mistake, but for some reason her English came out all twisted, and they were more interested in whether she needed to be sedated.

When Ling called Emily’s cell phone to tell her what had happened, she added that she and Michael shouldn’t hurry to the hospital. Don’t you want us to be with you as soon as possible? Emily had asked. There was no point, Ling had said, since it was too late to say good-bye to their father, surprising even herself with her calmness. When Emily did arrive, Ling thought that her daughter looked like she was working too hard. There were dark smudges under her eyes, and her shoulder-length hair badly needed a trim. It also didn’t help that she had inherited her father’s dusky complexion, his wide-set eyes and generous mouth. Ling knew her daughter had more important things to worry about than her appearance, but surely a little makeup wouldn’t hurt. However, she knew if she mentioned this, Emily would respond tartly that she shouldn’t think all lawyers looked like those on television.

Michael, however, took after his mother—tall and thin and pale, with delicate features and long, sensitive hands and feet. When he was young—perhaps because she knew there would be no more children after him—Ling treated him like a piece of porcelain. She picked him up whenever he cried, chose the best bits from her own plate to feed him, took care to leave on a night-light in his room. This irked Han, who thought she babied him, and he insisted that his son should grow up tough, as he had. How tough, Ling didn’t know, although she was aware that life in 1960s Beijing must have been difficult.

At the hospital Michael sat with her quietly, holding her hand, while Emily flew about interrogating doctors, browbeating nurses, commandeering cups of coffee that no one wanted to drink. In that way she was her father’s daughter, capable and methodical, even to the point of lacking an imagination, Ling sometimes thought. But Ling could not be more grateful for her daughter’s help. Emily was the one who had made the funeral arrangements, organized the gathering at the house afterward, picked out a black silk dress from Ling’s closet for 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 l. . .