Part 18 (1/2)

They were as interested in Confucius as her mother's family had been in soy. She tried to explain that her family was only pangzh-a side branch of the family tree, or not even that. A twig. She tried to explain that her parents were from Qingdao-a big city, a port city. The Germans, she tried to say, the j.a.panese. Occupation. The Communists. The Hatches listened. But things Confucian had a special handle for them-Miss Confucius, they called her. ”What would Confucius think of Kerouac?” they liked to ask. ”What would Confucius think of Brylcreem?” It was just how American families were, she thought, full of banter; and how much better to be bantered about than not, especially since, as the reality of her situation began to dawn on her, she could not always leave her room. Then what a blessing it was that one of the boys would eventually knock on her door-dispatched, of course, by Mrs. Hatch-and demand a Chinese lesson.

”Miss Confucius!” Reedie or Carter would cry-it was never Anderson, always Reedie or Carter. ”I've forgotten how to write my name again!” And with increasingly outlandish pleas of ignorance, they would slowly coax her out.

Why did she really try to teach them something? Anyway, she did, though how strange to break down her native tongue into something foreign to herself. Sounds, tones, vocabulary. Was this how her mother had felt, teaching English in China? It was like performing a dissection on herself, and not even for herself; it was like performing a dissection on herself for a bored and antsy cla.s.s. Thank goodness for her Englis.h.!.+ People said she spoke so well, they forgot she was Chinese, or half Chinese, or whatever it was she was. Yet even as they forgot, she remembered that she was whatever it was she was. A person away from herself. With what she guessed must be Chinese ideas and what she guessed must be Chinese feelings. She was pretty sure she dreamed in Chinese. And she craved Chinese food, of course. Mantou. She craved mantou. Locu hushng-peanuts generally. Cu-American vinegar was not vinegar. She missed sea cuc.u.mbers, squid. Spicy clams. Before this she had known that her mother was American, but not that her father was Chinese, really.

Now, every day, she knew: Her father was Chinese. She was raised in China.

And yet she was not her old self, translated. Neither was she a Chinese in America. She was just foreign-wailaide.

What she had always been-wailaide.

From elsewhere. A stranger.

She wrote things in Chinese, just to see things in Chinese.

Mostly, though, she tutored the boys, who tutored her in return. Reedie taught her about baseball-RBIs, MVPs, the seventh-inning stretch. This involved watching TV, and eating cotton candy. Anderson did famous presidents: George Was.h.i.+ngton. Abraham Lincoln. FDR.

Carter's program, meanwhile, began as a great-experiments course but turned into a kind of experiment of its own, in which he would look at her and tell her what she made him think. For example, when he found Hattie in the library one day, examining some hornhandled knives, he asked her why she was frowning. And when she asked if the knives were a wedding present, then observed that giving knives was bad luck, he laughed.

”B. F. Skinner,” he began, and went on to describe an experiment Skinner had performed with pigeons. ”He gave the birds treats every now and then,” he said. ”A click and a food pellet, on a completely random program. There was absolutely no rhyme or reason to it. But here's the interesting thing: The birds developed funny little bobs and dances, as if they were trying to repeat whatever it was that brought the food-as if they were trying to figure it out. Was it looking up? Looking down? Clawing the ground?”

”The birds danced?”

”Yes!” Carter gestured as if amazed himself. ”Can you believe it? Even pigeons try to connect what they do with what happens to them. Really, they have no control. But they're wired to try anyway. They have a connection bias, just like people-a tendency to look for cause and effect, whether it's there or not.”

”Really.” Hattie eyed some of the other objects on the library table-a geode, a geodesic dome, a wooden pyramid puzzle.

”It's called the superst.i.tion effect,” he went on. ”Jerry told me about it.”

Jerry was one of Dr. Hatch's grad students.

”Am I superst.i.tious, do you think?” Hattie picked up the puzzle, which immediately broke apart. ”Is that what you mean? Like a pigeon?”

”Do you really think giving knives is bad luck?”

”Yes.”

”QED,” he said.

She thought about that.

”Aren't you going to ask what that means?”

”No,” she said.

”Because you know I'll tell you.”

”Yes.”

They were quiet.

”You think I'm like a pigeon? As ignorant as that?”

”No!” he said. ”Very definitely not.” But after a moment he added, ”I can see that you're from a long way away, that's all.”

”An ignorant place. A backward, superst.i.tious place.”

”I didn't say that.”

”An unscientific place.”

”Oh, Hattie.” He flushed in a way people in China mostly didn't, though she did a little, like her mother. His eyes shone blue and clear. ”Are you going to go hole up in your room now?”

How much Carter taught her! That ”The Star-Spangled Banner” was based on an English drinking song. That moss has leaves you can't see. That Houdini had a tool pocket in the lining of his mouth.

”Do you know how you can tell a coyote's tracks from a dog's?” he asked her once. Hattie had been living in America for six years by then and had finally not so much started to get used to it, as started to accept that she had ended up in a place she would never get used to-that she was like Lin Daiyu in Dream of the Red Chamber, trying to make herself at home in a home not hers. But there she was, in the meanwhile, with Carter, at his parents' summer house in Riverlake, looking at some tracks in the snow. They were on winter break from their respective colleges.

”No,” she said.

”Look.”

And though they were mostly similar, Hattie immediately saw how directed the coyote's tracks were, compared to the dog's-how the dog's went every which way.

”A dog plays,” he said. ”A coyote is always looking for dinner.”

”They have to,” she said, after a moment. ”Coyotes are on their own.”

”Jerry says we've neotenized dogs. Domesticated them so that they never learn to stare down a rival the way a wolf does-any of that. They're playful, but they remain children all their lives. They never grow up.”

”Well, maybe coyotes wouldn't mind not having to grow up,” she said.

It was cold out-windy. The snow was blowing across the lake in diagonals, like a series of sailboat-less sails. Carter cleared his throat.