Once upon a time, Christmas was just another day, and so were Valentine’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. In celebrating these days now, and the more personal ones — the birthdays of Lois and their two children, their wedding anniversary, the day the family adopted a three-legged King Charles spaniel — Feng Chen found satisfaction in buying and giving: cards, flowers, cakes, chocolate, presents, dinners. These things, he knew, did not bring happiness, but like other everyday necessities, they provided a solid base for normalcy, without which his family, he suspected, would look askance at him, asking who he was, and why he was there.
Middle-age, contentedly married and moderately successful, he prided himself in his ability to make the optimal, rather than the right, decisions in the arenas of both his professional and personal lives. That he was sitting here at the bar of a boutique hotel in Beijing rather than in the den of his Connecticut house, watching two women decorating a Christmas tree with crystals sponsored by a jewelry retailer rather than listening to Eric practice the saxophone for the winter concert or watching Luke write fat letters on the homemade holiday cards for his teachers — this in itself was a strategic decision.
Eric would be disappointed, Lois had reminded Feng when he called her about the postponed return.
Yes, he knew, Feng said, but what if he could reconnect with this cousin who had businesses in Beijing and Shanghai, and in a year or two perhaps Eric could spend a summer as an intern here? Think how it would look on his college application, Feng said, and knew that Lois, sighing aside, was already agreeing with him.
Yumi Lin had booked the hotel room even though she
had three places in Beijing, a flat in the CBD and two villas in the less-polluted countryside. A hotel provided her a position of both advance and retreat. Meeting Feng on her terms was how she wanted things to go between them now.
They were not related by blood: After her father’s death, her mother had married Feng’s uncle. The two families lived in the same alleyway, and when she transferred to his school, he was her protector and best friend. They were 12½ then, and that they were not real cousins had been on both their minds when, for the next five years, they shared a secret dream of marrying each other.
The outside world offered little in teaching them about love. His parents owned a television set, its antenna made of tinfoil good enough to receive the two local channels. On Saturday nights, they were allowed to watch the programs until a good-bye message came on at 11 o’clock, followed by flickering black and white static signals. If a man and a woman kissed on screen — often in a movie or a television drama imported from America or other countries you would see such a shot — a grown-up would cough in the room, and he and she would both turn their eyes away from the screen, not looking at each other yet feeling the secret of their closeness. They had no more than held hands a few times, but starved love, like a plant that had mis-rooted in the crack of two rocks, could nevertheless prosper and blossom.
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