The Chinese Groove: A Novel

by Kathryn Ma

Genres: Asian American; Cultural Heritage; Family Life

Synopsis

Anne Tyler meets Jade Chang in this buoyant, good-hearted, and sharply written novel about a blithely optimistic immigrant with big dreams, dire prospects, and a fractured extended family in need of his help—even if they don't know it yet

Eighteen-year-old Shelley, born into a much-despised branch of the Zheng family in Yunnan Province and living in the shadow of his widowed father’s grief, dreams of bigger things. Buoyed by an exuberant heart and his cousin Deng’s tall tales about the United States, Shelley heads to San Francisco to claim his destiny, confident that any hurdles will be easily overcome by the awesome powers of the “Chinese groove,” a belief in the unspoken bonds between countrymen that transcend time and borders.

Upon arrival, Shelley is dismayed to find that his “rich uncle” is in fact his unemployed second cousin once removed and that the grand guest room he’d envisioned is but a scratchy sofa. The indefinite stay he’d planned for? That has a firm two-week expiration date. Even worse, the loving family he hoped would embrace him is in shambles, shattered by a senseless tragedy that has cleaved the family in two. They want nothing to do with this youthful bounder who’s barged into their lives. Ever the optimist, Shelley concocts a plan to resuscitate his American dream by insinuating himself into the family. And, who knows, maybe he’ll even manage to bring them back together in the process.

Release date: January 24, 2023

Publisher: Counterpoint

Print pages: 304

Sample

1.

Eastward Ho

THE RELATIVES TREATED ME RUDELY, BEATING ME and calling me names, and so on my eighteenth birthday my father buried his head in his hands and cried until the bottle was empty and his tears were spent and he was at last decided. It was time to let me go. Grubs like us didn’t get many chances, and he’d promised Mother before she died that he’d send me, their son and only child, away from this unhappy life and into a brighter world. There was an uncle, he said, conveniently rich, living in San Francisco. I should leave our home in Gejiu, Yunnan Province, the most beautiful realm in all of China, and move in with Uncle and figure out from there foot in the doorand student visa and green card and a score of other words my father called out in the weeks that followed as I cleaned our shoes and boiled our broth and swept our single room, words that made no sense to me but ladled not an ounce of care into my black-haired head. I was all for the plan. Bathed in Mother’s dream for me, I’d been waiting for years to depart. I didn’t want to be like my friends who were lined up to work at the Beautiful Objet d’Arts and World Crafts Tin Factory. Theirs wasn’t the fate for me. My future lay outside those gates, for where in a factory could I become the man I intended to be, which was a cool guy and a poet? I told my father yes.

The relatives hated me for ancestor reasons, which you might think unfair but I well understood because I was born into the despised branch of the family. My great-grandfather, a handsome devil, was known to all as the wayward son of his father’s third wife, a gambler and an opium addict—the son, not the wife, though who knows? Maybe the third wife ate the flower too. In the photo my father has of her, she’s really skinny. My father knew how tough it was to be the bastard son of the bastard son of a bastard—okay, maybe not that many bastards and technically untrue. Third wives were all the rage in the Ancient Days of Yore to those with brains and money. But as far as the aunties were concerned, Father and I were lodged on the lowest rung of the family ladder, and nothing we could do would lift us from the mud. I thank my many cousins for teaching me that lesson, for it was their whirling wallops upside my youthful head and their painful pinches along my bony arms that resolved me with every blueing to move far away, earn a lot of money, and stride the earth as a man. They didn’t mean to do me any favors but in fact they did, as you’re about to discover. From where I stood in proud Gejiu, tin capital of China but lousy with kicking cousins, I couldn’t quit soon enough. I’d hold Father in a warm embrace and promise to make him proud. Then I’d soar straight to Uncle’s house, where my new family was waiting. Cousin Deng, the only one who was ever kind to me though he was five years older, swore to me that poets in the U.S. made a ton of dough, which I was glad to know since I’d promised my girlfriend, Lisbet (right before she left me), that I’d become a poet and write three splendid poems just for her. Cousin Deng told me that poets in America got fancy cars and special housing, revered as they were by their fellow citizens as keepers of the famous American freedoms. Thus my foolproof plan took shape. I’d head to California, settle myself at Uncle’s, polish up my English (already A-plus), and win Lisbet back.

Six months after my birthday, during which time Cousin Deng employed me so I could buy meat for Father along with our healthy veg, Father told me that he’d gotten the funds I needed from his boss at the bus depot and he’d written to my uncle in San Francisco who’d said okay, but for only two weeks since he was a busy guy and they didn’t have an extra bedroom. Don’t worry, said Father. They’re going to love you so much, they’ll never want you to leave. He wiped his eyes in a tremble of sadness. We agreed that Uncle was being modest about the extra bedroom because all Americans have way more space than they need, except for the chaps who live under the highways and even they have the prairie.

I chose January 3 as the perfect date to depart. Father wanted me to wait until after Lunar New Year, but in San Francisco, 2015 had already started. I didn’t need to wait for the Year of the Ram to begin. Though I’m one of the friendliest fellows you’re ever likely to know and one of the sincerest, circumstances permitting, I consider it my bastard-back-then birthright to buck the mooing herd. Just when every other person in the vast nation where I was born would be making their annual pilgrimage to return to the family pen, I’d be leaping sure-footedly peak to peak, a bighorn sheep, king of the craggy Rockies if the Rockies began where the Golden Gate stood.

I packed in a jiffy. I had no difficulty deciding what to take because everything I owned fit into one suitcase, a sparkly pink affair that belonged to Cousin Deng and before that, to his mother. At midnight, my father came home and threw his arm around my neck and cried fat tears, half salt, half whiskey, that I was going away and he’d never see me again. He cursed the day he’d promised my mother that I would learn English, which she believed I needed to succeed in the modern world, though that was when she was alive and I was little and given how times have changed, can we say it’s true anymore? No matter. What I’m telling you is this: on the eve of my departure, Father cursed the promise, cursed the loss, cursed the grief that held him. He didn’t curse my mother. She was his paragon.

I coaxed Father onto the bed and covered him with the quilted blanket I spread over him every night, talking to him the whole time about how, as soon as money started to flow into my pockets, I would send him enough for his very own laptop and ask Deng to teach him how to use it; that with his new computer, we would talk to each other day or night, for as far as I was concerned, any hour was good for a confabulation, father to son to father.

“Better yet,” I said, “I’ll find someone from right here in Gejiu who is traveling back home to choose a pretty wife or bury a dead parent. ‘Fellow countryman,’ I’ll say, ‘could you kindly deliver straight into my father’s hands this latest Apple device with all the bells and whistles?’ And wherever I roam, Father, you need only to tell it to find me and it will track me to the very pinpoint of globe where I squat. I’ll appear to you so clearly on its magic screen that you’ll smell my zesty breath and want to kiss me on the tip of my honking Zheng-family nose. When you show the relatives the tricks your Apple can do, they’ll gnaw their knuckles in envy.”

I waited. He was supposed to grin and reply, I read you. This was our custom, our coded handshake dating back from when I was a kid and my mother was too sick to scrub my neck or cook my supper. She lay in bed, stifling her groans so as not to scare me while my father warmed my breakfast, buttoned my jacket, cinched the strap on my backpack, amusing me the whole time by telling me how, when my mother was my age, she had speckled legs whenever it rained because she couldn’t resist a good puddle, and how he never would have dared to ask her for a date until she cornered him after school and told him that if he didn’t ask her out, she would tell his mother that he had cheated on the maths test. Which he had. So he did. Father and I were always in balance. I sat on his handlebars as we weaved our way to school and after we parted, me on the school step, he to the bus depot, I waved to him for a full minute, watching the gray square of his jacket glide into the stream of traffic until it merged with all the other grays, from which then would emerge at the end of the school day my father’s face, smiling.

“We’ll have a whole fish tonight,” he would tell me, “and fresh clams and turtle.”

“And Mother will sit with us at the table,” I’d reply. “And the good food will make her well.”

He’d nod hydraulically, drawing me up like water. I read you, he would say, or sometimes in joking English, copy that. We both knew we were telling each other tales. My mother fondly called them your father’s little stories, not the ancient folktales and legends she knew by heart, but myths-of-the-moment that Father conjured strictly for her delight. She would beg him for one when her pain was just so.

“I’m wearing the iron shoes tonight,” she would say. An iron-shoe night was a bearable night. Not a body-on-fire night, when the pain was so bad that only a pill or three would ease it. On an iron-shoe night, my mother could sit up and listen. She would lean with her head tipped back against the wall, her eyes resting on my father as he assembled a story out of the chapters of his day. He’d start with a detail, mouse-dropping small—an old lady’s sour expression, which made my mother smile, or the scent of jasmine—a sigh escaped her—or the stink of the public toilets; she covered her nose and laughed. If I’d been with him all day and knew he’d not seen such an old lady, or passed by a flowering garden, or taken a piss before we returned home, I didn’t correct him, wanting, as my mother did, to hear where the story would go. Soon that old grandmother transformed herself into an empress, and the scent of jasmine ushered in a beautiful maiden, and in the public toilets a boy a lot like me with a big nose and a yen for adventure stumbled over a dripping mop that flew him high above Gejiu. Every person Father described in a voice that swooped from boom to whisper seemed as real as the room we sat in, and I rushed to bring him water whenever his mouth grew dry. As long as the tale lasted, my mother stayed upright, her breaths light and quiet.

But on my last night at home, Father didn’t read me. He didn’t copy that. He was asleep and snoring, emptied of little stories, as he’d been since the day Mother died. In the morning I rose early, ready to say goodbye and deliver that long embrace, but he had tiptoed out, tucking in his sadness the exact same way that a corrupt official who’s about to be paraded stops to tuck in his shirt. He fools no one, except for maybe himself.

Cousin Deng had said he would drive me to the station, but something important must have commanded his urgent attention because he didn’t show up as promised. I scrambled, hair flying, to catch my bus to Kunming, Yunnan’s capital, City of Eternal Spring. At the airport, a little girl in the departure lounge admired my sparkly suitcase. I sat on the floor beside her and began telling her how Cousin Deng had given it to me free and clear, though first he was obliged to use it to carry away a half dozen yowling cats who’d overrun the courtyard at the lao jia, the old family home. She smiled a tooth-missing smile and showed me a picture in her book of the cutest little tabby, and I would’ve tarried to amuse her some more but an airport attendant rushed over to gesticulate that my plane was about to fly away without me.

“Don’t worry,” I said to the girl. “There were plenty more kitties left over.”

I decided not to mention that Cousin Deng had drowned the suitcased cats in the tin factory effluvium, a deeper and swifter waterway than the nearest river. Not every detail belongs in every story, as you and I well know.

I opened my suitcase and tapped my stash of souvenirs, choosing a genuine Gejiu tin frog-with-the-coin-in-his-mouth. I’d brought ten of them, excellent for gifts as they showed off the magnificent talents of the artisans of the city of Gejiu, but the frogs were making my bag heavy, and the airline attendant had warned me that I would have to pay extra. I gave one tin frog to the little girl and one to the attendant, and I left for California, eastward ho.

THE PLANE TOOK OFF, and it was exactly as Deng had described: a thrilling roar, a mighty lift, and a vista I’d often imagined, my known life falling away and open skies above. I wished that, just once, Father would slip his bonds and send himself aloft so that he might spectate the gape-worthy view, but I knew he’d never venture beyond the confines of his woe. That lesson, too, I’d learned early. By the time I’d turned eight, I had no mother to come home to and soon I was staying out all day, walking for hours after school down crowded streets and narrow alleys and along zigzagging paths in the park to learn what I could from looking closely because poets, like spies, have to be both watchers and seers. At night when I returned, I made sure Father had eaten supper and gone to sleep in his bed. Often his dreams woke him in the early hours and then I’d go out and buy him a bun and come back to make him tea and listen to him sorrow over times long past.

I watched the clouds pass, blanket rucked at my knees. A black fish wriggled in my tummy over how I was going to tell my rich American uncle that I was staying forever, which was longer than two weeks. Now that I’d finally been freed, I couldn’t face going back.

I must’ve looked like I needed a friendly word because a gentleman in a shiny necktie and a fine blue jacket appeared and handed me a can of Sprite. I tried to hand it back, telling him I couldn’t pay, but he insisted that it was free and I should take it. This got me thinking about the Chinese groove. The drink couldn’t have been free, and yet the gentleman told me it was so that I could accept it without embarrassment over the fact that I couldn’t pay him. Since both of us understood that this was his true purpose, there was no need to spell it out. The groove had made things clear between us, leaving us both undisturbed.

Surely my uncle knew all about the Chinese groove. Even though, sadly, he no longer counted as a countryman, being the son of a son who had journeyed to Gold Mountain, his Chinese-ness couldn’t have completely leached away after a mere two generations. No, that kind of knowledge, passed wordlessly through the ages and residing in the bones, doesn’t vanish from a man’s corporeal being any more than his marrow does, or his spermatozoa. His father, once a citizen of Yunnan who’d been sent at sixteen to the U.S. after the war, would’ve lived by the groove, same as mine did, and would’ve conferred upon his son the groove’s awesome powers just as Father had done for me. I sipped my Sprite and my worry swam away. When he’d protested to my father that he didn’t have room for me, my uncle had meant exactly the opposite. It was his duty to apologize, as every host does in advance and ever after, for the hard bed, the meager supper, the inadequate prospect of his garden view. What I was meant to understand was that when I arrived, he and his wife would greet me, arms opened wide. I drew up the blanket and fell asleep for hours until the ocean vanished and the land was rushing up. I paused in my elation to blow a last kiss to Father. Then I made myself tidy for Passport Control and hugging.

 

2.

Arrival

THERE HE WAS, A ZHENG IF I EVER SAW ONE. HE WAS tall and lanky with my same big nose and stalk neck and hands that looked like they’d been assigned too many knuckles. Clean-shaven, puffy under the chin. He had the smooth high forehead of an educated man, the thinking sort with a head full of troubling notions that disturb him to distraction and bother no one else. His face looked worn, his eyes a little dull. The black mole on his right earlobe resembled a feasting tick, a family trait the two of us shared with Cousin Deng and all the pinching cousins.

“Uncle!” I cried. I galloped to him, pink suitcase careening.

“Hello,” he said, backing up and sticking out a hand. His teeth were so white! “How was your journey? Did you take a pleasant trip?” Up and down his eyes swiveled as he took my measure from the crown of my head to my shoes, a brand-new pair of trainers presented to me as a good-luck gift from my friend and classmate Yu, who was Cousin Deng’s girlfriend. Uncle seemed surprised that I stretched as far as he did.

“I’m afraid I’ve just used up all the Chinese I know,” he said, switching to English. “I hope your English is better than my Chinese.”

“Best in show,” I assured him. A snort escaped him. “Best in class,” I corrected, trying to settle my nerves. In school and on my own, I’d studied English for years, my teachers a mumbling, amateur lot except for the last, Miss Chipping-Highworth, who came from a place called Sussex. Yu was her pupil too. We loved Miss Chips with her hoarfrost hair and flabby Churchillian dewlaps. She gave me the name Shelley, her favorite poet. “Shelley, sing away!” She spoke exclusively in English and demanded we do the same. Hoarfrost, she taught us, dewlaps, farting. Hugger-mugger. Bric-a-brac. We recited Shakespeare—“fear no more the heat o’ the sun, nor the furious winter’s rages”—and sang Christian hymns, not, Miss Chips said, because she was a believer, but because the words were so simple that any church fool could learn them. Every other Saturday, she took Yu and me for tea and cakes, the Gejiu version. When she left, she gave Yu a leather-bound diary and me her very own copy of a book of English poems, for Shelley, she wrote, poet pupa.

“How was your flight?” Uncle said. He looked confounded and I knew exactly why. My left eye wanders; it’s impossible to look into both my eyes at once. The left one wants to head to the moon while its partner charts a course for the horizon, which means, to my good fortune, that I carry my comedy with me. Beady stare, murderous look, worried gaze, sarcastic squint, they all lose their way before they reach me. I wait patiently, tickled inside, while people figure out that no matter how precisely they try to aim their vector, they’re not going to pin me.

“The airplane ride was very nice,” I said. I was grinning like a demon and looking around for his wife, Aviva. I needed to charm that auntie posthaste if I was to stretch two weeks into many.

“Let’s get you home. Are you hungry?” Uncle asked.

Always.

“I meant to take you to lunch but there isn’t time. No worries. We’re stopping to load up at Costco. Can I help you with that? You need something?”

I was squatting next to my suitcase, pulling out a Gejiu frog. I stood and faced him. “Thank you, Uncle, for welcoming me to San Francisco.” With both hands, I offered him my grandest bullfrog, silver-colored and shiny. After a second, he took it.

“Thank you.” He hefted, then hoisted. He held it at eye level and studied its winning grin. “Wow, that’s really something.”

“Genuine Gejiu tin. Very special. The coin in his mouth means lucky.” I squatted again and rummaged. For Auntie Aviva, I had other lovely things.

“That’s okay,” he said quickly, “we can do that later. We better go; they’re waiting.”

“Auntie?” I said, jumping to my feet. I’d met her once before, on the day of my thirteenth birthday, when Uncle and Auntie and their son, Eli, had visited Kunming. A minibus of relatives had jockeyed at the airport to be the first to say hello, their arms full of gladiola stems as long as a soldier’s rifle. Father would’ve been there too, had he been invited. I was summoned at the very last minute to tote Cousin Deng’s photographic equipment, pride of the Japanese, the best that money could buy or, in Deng’s case, acquire.

At my mention of Auntie Aviva, Uncle cleared his throat. “She’s at home. With the others.” Ah, I thought. Uncle is apologizing for his wife’s poor manners. He does live by the Chinese groove.

“We’re having a little party, so Aviva’s got her hands full. We better get to Costco before all the good stuff is gone.”

A party! For me! A warm-welcome gathering to honor my humble self. A very good reason for the skimpy airport greeting, and the way he’d said home, taking it for granted, made my glad heart sing.

Uncle checked his watch. “Better hurry,” he said.

WE GOT IN UNCLE’S car, the crapmobile he called it, though to me it was very nice, having four wheels and two axles, and drove to a store so monumental that Gejiu’s half million could’ve supplied themselves for a year. I realized he’d been making a dry-witted joke about all the stuff being gone, and I put myself on alert to Uncle’s humors. For the next thirty minutes, I scouted the rows and sniffed the air like a hunter, tasting inside my nostrils the perfumes and garden scents of cleansers and refresheners and an elegant scalloped box of something called vaginal tablets. I ate well, too, out of little paper cups handed to me by smiling ladies. After two dozen, I was ready for a meal. Down the aisle, I saw Uncle looking relieved as he crossed off the last item on a list from Auntie Aviva written in purple ink and dotted with exclamations. He signaled me and we bushwhacked to the exit.

I admit to you now that I was feeling nervous. Uncle, being family, was bound by the rules—the Chinese groove—to play host, even to me, the renegade’s weevil, but his wife might resent the fact that I’d stuck my flag on their map. I wished that I knew more about her since the mistress of the house could make things go roughly or smoothly. The real source of my worry? She wasn’t Chinese—she was white. The relatives called that American.

“Are you sure his wife will let me stay?” I’d asked Father before I left. “What if, like the aunties, she looks down on those who are different?” They disapproved of Uncle’s marriage, or, more precisely, the mix. After his education was complete, his father should’ve sent him home to us. We would’ve found him an excellent wife.

“The aunties, bah. What a vicious lot. Why would Uncle’s wife cast you out? She married a Chinese man, didn’t she?”

Chinese American. I hoped a minor distinction.

“Don’t forget the sadness she bears,” Father had warned me. “With her poor son dead, you’ll have to tiptoe about.”

He’d been killed, you see. Their son, Eli, along with Uncle’s mother, a couple of months after Uncle, his wife, and Eli had visited Kunming. The news gave the aunties a transpacific thrill. A carjacking, they said, or was it a school shooting? They didn’t have the details but at least they had a tragedy to hand round and round.

“That was five years ago,” I said to Father. Five years seemed a long time by my barely-wound clock, the faulty timepiece of the young. Now that I’m older, Perspective and I are friends. “Why didn’t they have another kid?”

“Too old. Don’t bring them fresh pain. Say nothing about the boy.” Tears filled his eyes; he was thinking as always of Mother. “Anyway,” he said, “Uncle’s wife is Jewish. She believes in family. She has to take you in.”

I felt sad for Uncle and his wife. The aunties had been sad too, but only for a minute. Maybe they’ll divorce and next time around, he can marry a Chinese. When I mentioned this to Father, he erupted.

“The aunties are wrong! Wrong about everything but especially wrong about love. If there’s love, what does it matter when races bind themselves together against the family tide?” My tenderhearted father! Storyteller, weaver of dreams, the kite that Mother had flown. When she was alive, I used to hear Father murmuring to her after I’d gone to bed about his hope for a Shangri-la, a Peach Blossom Land where strangers were welcome and love drifted down like petals and everybody, high or low, clever or stupid, rickety-boned or oxlike, everybody got along. He sympathized with strays, outcasts, and misfits, more kin to him than family.

“Once your choice is made,” Father assured me, “you never want to have to choose another.”

UNCLE’S PHONE BUZZED. “That’s a message from home,” he said. “Aviva can’t wait to see you.”

A squeeze in his voice made me look for the Zheng mustache. It’s a little squiggly line that shows up sideways between the nose and the lip when a Zheng man is temporizing. Yes, there it was, a crease right under his nose where a mustache would’ve sat if Uncle had been a pirate. It appeared at stressful moments on Father and me and half the Zheng family men, though Cousin Deng had foiled my detections by growing a real mustache which in sunlight looked coppery red, so who was really the bastard? The telltale mark on Uncle told me I was right to be worried about Auntie. Soon she’d be heaping on me the same condemnation I’d received my whole life: how I was a worthless fellow with his head in the clouds like Father, and whatever her husband had promised, I’d better not think of attaching myself like ivy. I thought sadly of my suitcase full of gifts that I was about to offer into her cold-palmed hands. Maybe I should hide them and bring them instead to strangers who would find me a straw mat and a place to lay my head. But when we pulled up in the crapmobile in front of a white house with orange trim, the door at the top of the steps opened and my Auntie Aviva flew out.

“Let me give you a hug,” she said, and before I could say a word, she clasped me to her as though I were one of her own. She was short and soft and round, with rich brown hair as curly as a lamb’s.

“It’s wonderful to meet you,” she said.

“To meet him again,” Uncle corrected. “You met him before, on our trip to China.”

“As if I could remember all those people,” she said, laughing. She drew back and looked at me in appraisal. “I see the family resemblance. Ted, do you see it? No, you wouldn’t. You hate looking at yourself.” She linked my elbow with hers and bustled me forward.

“Straight on up the stairs,” she said. “Everyone is here.”