Transparency

by Frances Hwang

Genres: Cultural Heritage; Literary Fiction; Short Stories

Synopsis

With a deceptively simple yet graceful style, and in the tradition of Lara Vapnyar, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Gish Jen, Frances Hwang captures the thousand minor battles waged in the homes of immigrants -- struggles to preserve timehonored traditions or break free of them, to maintain authority or challenge it, and to take advantage of modern excesses without diluting one's ethnic identity. In Garden City, a weary Chinese couple, struggling to evict their deadbeat tenant, is forced to face the aftermath of their teenage son's death from cancer. And in The Old Gentleman, a daughter becomes alienated from her father when he finds love -- or what he thinks could be love -- in his old age. Frances Hwang is a powerful talent, and Transparency not only showcases her myriad gifts, but also announces the arrival of an exciting new voice.

Release date: September 9, 2009

Publisher: Back Bay Books

Print pages: 241

Sample

As a young girl, Agnes was often embarrassed by her father. Her family lived on the compound of a girls’ high school in Taipei
where her father worked as principal. On Monday mornings, after the flag had been raised and the national anthem sung, he
liked to give speeches to the students assembled in the main courtyard. To get their attention, he stood with silent, aggrieved
humility, his arms dangling at his sides, his limp suit already wrinkled from the humid weather, the front pockets stuffed
with his reading glasses, a spiral notebook, a pack of cigarettes, and a well-used handkerchief. When he opened his mouth,
he did not immediately speak, desiring that slight pause, that moment of breath in which everyone’s attention was fixed on
him alone. He quoted regularly from Mengzi, but his favorite writer was Cao Xueqin. “’ Girls are made of water and boys are
made of mud,’ “he declared. Or “’The pure essence of humanity is concentrated in the female of the species. Males are its
mere dregs and off-scourings.’ “He clasped his hands behind his back, his eyes widening as he spoke. “Each of you is capable,
but you must cultivate within yourself a sense of honesty and shame.” He reminded the girls to rinse their mouths out with
tea when they said a dirty word. He discussed matters of personal hygiene and reprimanded them for spitting on the streets.
Agnes’s father had a thick Jiangbei accent, and students often laughed when they heard him speak for the first time.


When Agnes was eleven, her mother was hospitalized after jumping off a two-story building and breaking her hand. The following
Monday, her father opened his mouth in front of the student assembly, but no words came out, only a moaning sound. He covered
his eyes with a fluttering hand. Immediately a collection was started among students and faculty, a generous sum of money
raised to pay for her mother’s hospital bill. A story was posted on the school’s newspaper wall in the courtyard in which
a student praised Agnes’s father for his selfless devotion to “a walking ghost.”Older girls came up to Agnes and pressed her
hand. “Your poor mother!” they exclaimed in sad tones. They marveled at her father’s goodness, assuring her that a kinder
man could not be found.


Agnes intentionally flunked her entrance exams the next year so that she would not have to attend her father’s school. She
ended up going to a lesser school that was a half-hour commute by bus. Sometimes she rode her old bicycle in order to save
bus fare.


Her family occupied a three-room house without running water in the school’s outer courtyard. Because her mother was sick,
a maid came every week to tidy up their rooms and wash their clothes. The school’s kitchen was only twenty yards away, and
Agnes washed her face in the same cement basin where the vegetables were rinsed. Her father paid the cook a small sum to prepare
their meals, which were always delivered to them covered with an overturned plate. At night they used candles during scheduled
blackouts, and, with the exception of her mother, who slept on a narrow bed surrounded by mosquito netting, everyone — her
father, her brother, and Agnes — slept on tatami floors.


Sometimes when Agnes mentions her early life in Taiwan to her daughters, they look at her in astonishment, as if she had lived
by herself on a deserted island. “That was the nineteen fifties, right?” one of them asks. The other says, “You were so poor!”


“It wasn’t so bad,” Agnes replies. “Everyone lived the same way. so yodidn’t notice.”

What she remembers most from that time was following a boy in her choir whom she had a crush on. When she passed by him on
her bicycle and the wind lifted her skirt, she was in no hurry to pull it down again. Some days, she picked up the cigarette
butt that he tossed on the street and slipped the bittersweet end between her lips. She kept a diary, and it was a relief
to write down her feelings, but she burned the pages a few years later when not even the handwriting seemed to be her own.
She did not want a record to exist. No one in the world would know she had suffered. Agnes thinks now of that girl bicycling
around the city, obsessed and burdened by love. It isn’t surprising that she never once suspected her father of having a secret
life of his own.


Her parents moved to the United States after her father’s retirement, and for nine years they lived in their own house in
Bloomington, Indiana, a few miles from her brother’s farm. After her mother’s death, Agnes thought her father would be lonely
by himself in the suburbs and suggested that he move to Washington, DC, to be closer to her and her daughters. She was a part-time
real-estate agent (she made most of her money selling life insurance), and she knew of a government-subsidized apartment building
in Chinatown for senior citizens. At Evergreen House, he could socialize with people his age, and when he stepped out of his
apartment, he had to walk only a couple of blocks to buy his groceries and a Chinese newspaper.


Her father eagerly agreed to this plan. Six months after her mother died, he moved into Evergreen House and quickly made friends
with the other residents, playing mahjong twice a week, and even going to church, though he had never been religious before.
For lunch, he usually waited in line at the nearby Washington Urban League Senior Center, where he could get a full hot meal
for only a dollar.


At seventy-eight, her father looked much the same as he did in Taiwan when Agnes was growing up. For as long as she could
remember, her father had been completely bald except for a sparse patch of hair that clung to the back of his head. By the
time he was sixty, this shadowy tuft had disappeared, leaving nothing but shiny brown skin like fine, smooth leather. Her
father had always been proud of his baldness. “We’re more vigorous,”he liked to say, “because of our hormones.”He reassured
Agnes that he would live to a hundred at least.


Every day, her father dressed impeccably in a suit and tie, the same attire that he wore as a principal, even though there
was no longer any need for him to dress formally. “Such a gentleman!” Agnes’s friends remarked when they saw him. He gazed
at them with tranquillity, though Agnes suspected he knew they were saying flattering things about him. His eyes were good-humored,
clear, and benign, the irises circled with a pale ring of blue.


If anything, Agnes thought, her father’s looks had improved with age. His hollow cheeks had filled out, and he had taken to
wearing a fedora with a red feather stuck in the brim, which gave him a charming and dapper air. Maybe, too, it was because
he now wore a set of false teeth, which corrected his overbite.


Every other weekend, he took the Metro from his place in Chinatown to Dunn Loring, where Agnes waited for him in her car.
He would smile at Agnes as if he hadn’t seen her for a year, or as if their meeting were purely a matter of chance and not
something they had arranged by telephone. If her teenage daughters were in the car, he would greet them in English. “Hello! How are you?” he said, beaming.

Her daughters laughed. “Fine! And how are you?” they replied.

“Fine!” he exclaimed.

“Good!” they responded.

“Good!” he repeated.

Agnes supposed the three of them found it amusing, their lack of words, their inability to express anything more subtle or
pressing to each other. Her daughters were always delighted to see him. They took him out shopping and invited him to the
movies. They were good-natured, happy girls, if spoiled and a little careless. Every summer, they visited their father in
Florida, and when they came back, their suitcases were stuffed with gifts—new clothes and pretty things for their hair, stuffed
animals and cheap bits of jewelry, which they wore for a week and then grew tired of. Their short attention spans sometimes
made Agnes feel sorry for her ex-husband, and she enjoyed this feeling of pity in herself very much.




In March, her father visited a former student of his in San Francisco. He came back two weeks later overflowing with health
and good spirits. He gave silk purses to the girls and a bottle of Guerlain perfume to Agnes. It was unlike her father to
give her perfume, much less one from Paris. She asked him how he had chosen it. “A kind lady helped me,”he replied soberly.
Agnes thought he meant a saleslady at the store. But later, as she was going through his suit pockets, emptying them of loose
change and crumpled tissues and soft pads of lint—she planned on going to the dry cleaner that afternoon—she found a sliver
of light blue paper folded into eighths. It was a rough draft of a letter, without a date or signature, addressed to a woman
named Qiulian. Her father wrote in a quaint, tipsy hand. His characters were neat though cramped, etched on the page, as the
ink from his pen was running out.


You cannot know how happy I was to receive your letter. I hope you are well in San Francisco, and that you have had restful
days. I think of you often, perhaps more than I should. Like this morning, for instance, I wondered when exactly you had lived
in Nanjing. Is it possible we lived in that city at the same time? I like to think that we passed each other on the street,
I, a young man in his early thirties, and you, a schoolgirl in uniform with your hair cut just below the ear. We walked past
each other, not knowing our paths would cross again—so many years later!

The cherry trees are in bloom here along the Potomac. I often find myself conversing with you in my head. Look at the falling
blossoms, I say. Beautiful, yes? Some people, I know, don’t have the courage for anything, but what is there to be afraid
of? I thought I would spend the rest of my days alone. I can’t help but think of the poet Meng Chiao. “Who says that all things
flower in spring?”

A few characters had been blotted out, a phrase added between the vertical lines of script. Agnes couldn’t help but laugh,
even though there was a slight bitterness in it. How ridiculous that her father should be courting someone across the country.
To be thinking of love when he should be thinking of the grave. She called up Hu Tingjun, her father’s student in California.
“So who is this Qiulian?” she demanded when he picked up the phone.


“Ah!” Tingjun said, his voice wavering. He had always been a little afraid of her since that time she had thrown a glass of
water in his face. But he had a loose tongue, and Agnes knew he would not be able to resist the urge to gossip. “A real beauty
from the mainland,”he declared. “Your father has good taste.”


Agnes allowed this remark to pass without comment. “And why is she so interested in my father? He doesn’t have any money.”

Tingjun laughed. “You underestimate your father’s charms.”He paused, and Agnes could hear him sucking his teeth. “I think
she’s had a sad life. You know what they say—every beauty has a tragic story.”


Agnes frowned, switching the phone to her other ear.

“Her husband was an art history professor at Nanjing University,”Tingjun said. “Struggled against, of course, and died in
a reeducation camp. She married a second time, but this husband turned out to be a violent character—he beat her, I’m told,
and she divorced him after a few years. She has two children from her first marriage, both of them in Guangzhou. She came
here on a tourist’s visa and is staying with an old friend from college.”


“So she’s been married twice already,”Agnes said, “and wants to marry again. She doesn’t have a very good track record.”

“Have a heart, Shuling. What’s so wrong with your father finding comfort in his last days? It’s no good to be alone. No good
at all.”


“I never thought you were a sentimentalist,”she said. “I wish I could hand you some tissues!”

Tingjun sighed. “You’re always the same, Shuling.”

When Agnes hung up the phone, she couldn’t help but think of her mother, whom she had always loved more than she loved her
father, just as you love something more because it is broken. Her mother had lived to the age of seventy-one, longer than
anyone had believed possible, defying the prognostications of doctors, the resignation of her children, and even her own will.
Her father had never murmured a word of complaint in all the years he cared for her. In the mornings, he prepared a breakfast
for her of pureed apples or boiled carrots. At night he brought her three pills — one sleeping capsule, two that he had filled
with sugar—and a tall glass of prune juice. Everything her mother ate had to go into a blender first. She chewed the same
mouthful over and over again with slow awareness, sometimes falling asleep with the food still in her mouth. She once told
Agnes that every bite she swallowed was like swallowing a small stone. The only thing she enjoyed putting in her mouth were
her sleeping pills, and these she swallowed all at once without a sip of water. Perhaps Agnes respected this sickness in her
mother more than she did her father’s health, his natural exuberance, and his penchant for histrionics.


The day before her mother’s funeral, Agnes remembered, she and her brother had gone to a store to look for watches. They had
selected a gold watch with a round face, and her brother had asked the salesclerk if there was a warranty, which struck Agnes
as funny because the watch was going on her mother’s wrist. “Who cares whether it runs beneath the ground or not?” she said.
Nevertheless, her mother had always liked to wear a watch. They bought it for her because her old one was broken.


Then Agnes saw her mother lying in her coffin, the new gold watch ticking on her wrist. The sight of her mother lying in such
a composed state, looking more content and peaceful than she did when she was alive, made Agnes desperate. She brushed her
mother’s cheeks and smoothed out her hair with increasing violence, clutching her hand and kissing her cold lips, all the
while smelling her powder and the undertaker’s handiwork beneath the cloying scent of lilies.


At the funeral reception, her father positioned himself on a stool at the front door of his house so that anyone who passed
by had to confront him. At one point, he sprang off his stool and ran across the yard to speak to his neighbor, who had just
come home from the store and was holding a bag of groceries. Agnes watched as her father waved his arms, his new suit a size
too large for him, the cuffs dangling over his hands and flapping about his wrists. He squeezed his eyes and cried like a
child, beating the side of his head with his palm. His neighbor set her bag down, took his hand between her own, and nodded
in sympathy, even though she could not understand a word he was saying. Agnes’s brother finally intervened, leading their
father away so that the neighbor could go inside her house.


“Try to control yourself,”Agnes told her father.

“You don’t know what it’s like to lose someone you saw every day of your life,”he said, wiping his eyes.

When the reception was over, after the visitors had departed and her father had shut himself up in his bedroom, Agnes and
her brother stood in the backyard, looking at their father’s garden.


“The two of them lived in their own world together,”her brother said.

Agnes looked at the glossy tomatoes that hung like ornaments from the vines. The winter melons sprawled on the grass like
pale, overfed whales. Above them, the sunflowers rose, their faces somehow human, leaning from their stalks. For the first
time, she wondered about her parents, the quiet life they had lived in that home.


Agnes never asked her father about the letter she found. In October, he informed her that Qiulian would be flying down in
a month and that they would be married in a civil ceremony at the courthouse. He wondered if Agnes would be their witness.
Also if there was a restaurant in the area suitable for a small wedding banquet. No more than three tables, he said.


In the marriage bureau, tiny pictures in pastel frames—a cheetah running, an eagle spreading its wings—decorated the walls
of the waiting area. There was a sign in the room prohibiting photographs. Agnes sighed as she looked at her watch. Her daughters
would be home from school in an hour and would be catching a ride to the banquet with Agnes’s friend. Her brother wasn’t coming.
He had been depressed by their father’s news and told Agnes it was too difficult for him to leave the farm. Agnes got up from
her seat and inspected a picture of a sailboat skimming moonlit waters. The caption read: You cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore. It made Agnes laugh out loud, and the receptionist glanced up at her from her desk.


Her father arrived a moment later with his bride. He was beaming, handsomely dressed in a dark gray suit and platinum tie,
two red carnations fastened to his lapel. He introduced Agnes and Qiulian with mock solemnity, exaggerating the tones of their
names, lifting himself in the air and falling back on his heels. Qiulian smiled and told Agnes that her American name was
Lily. Everything Lily wore was white. There was her opaque white dress suit with its faintly puffed sleeves. Her pearl earrings
and two strands of pearls wound closely around her neck. A corsage of white roses enmeshed in a swirl of white ribbon pinned
to her chest. She had decided on white just as if she were a first-time American bride, even though white was no color at
all, what you wore to another person’s funeral. Perhaps it was a sign of Lily’s true feelings.


Agnes grasped her father’s arm and pulled him aside. “How old is she, by the way?” It infuriated her that this woman was closer
to her age than she had expected.


“That’s top secret,”her father said, . . .