What We Were Promised Read online

  “That little dog-fart kid isn’t nearly as bad as any of the older guards,” Rose said. “I hope they keep sending him.”

  The two of them ducked through the side gate, came out onto Binjiang Road, and turned in the direction of the riverbank. They had an evening ritual of strolling along the boardwalk before heading back to Lanson Suites, retrieving their scooters, and going home. The boardwalk had recently been built and few people knew of its existence, aside from the hotel residents, who never took advantage of it anyway.

  “They think we envy them so much, those taitai,” Rose said. “As if we’d wear their boring jewelry. With all that money, you’d think they could afford better style.”

  “Have you seen this bracelet?” Sunny asked. “What does it look like?”

  “If it’s the one I’m thinking of, it looks cheap. Beaded, not even a solid chunk of ivory. I don’t see how it could be worth much.”

  When she first started working at the hotel, Sunny had shyly admired the women who lived inside it. Up close, they were even more exotic than they seemed from far away. Everything about them was smoother and more flawless, from their ironed blouses to their creamy skin. She’d watched these women sit at their vanity tables and apply layers of ointments with light pats into their cheeks and necks, as if molding their features into place. It was hard not to compare them to the other finery in the household that required polishing and preserving, and enough time had passed for Sunny’s admiration to turn into contempt. These women were less useful than their furniture.

  Zhen Taitai was one of the worst types of resident to work for. She herself was lazy but had ruthless requirements of her staff. There was usually a day’s worth of dishes to be washed when Sunny arrived and Taitai would stand behind her to watch as she did them. She looked almost apologetic then, as if to say she couldn’t help it, it was her job to guard the porcelain just as much as it was Sunny’s to wash it.

  The husband, Boss Zhen, was all right. He kept mainly to his study, a place so crammed with his personal and work items that it seemed against his nature to spread out. Sunny liked that he used cheap notebooks, a brand meant for students. They were filled with large, looping English words and the cross-hatchings of geometric shapes. There was a franticness to his handwriting that wasn’t obvious in his person. His physical demeanor was measured and his speech economical. A few weeks ago, one of the clubhouse café servers claimed that he had seen Boss Zhen on TV and that in those few minutes on-screen, he had said more than the server had ever heard him say in all the years he’d been working at the hotel. But you didn’t need to see him on TV to know he was important. He had a serious manner that even Zhen Taitai went out of her way to accommodate. When her husband was home, Taitai occupied herself by fussing around the kitchen, fixing snacks and dirtying dishes. But during the day, she was left alone to attend to the rest of her self-appointed duties—rearranging furniture according to whim and imagining scenarios in which her belongings were taken by the hotel staff.

  Some girls did take things. They knocked lipsticks from vanity countertops into empty buckets, bundled loose cash up with the dirty bedsheets. But the things they stole were so minor. The worst Sunny had ever heard of was a woman who’d pinned little stud earrings to the band of her bra. The trick, the woman had said, was to take only one earring and then wait a month before taking the other. By then, the owner would have assumed she’d lost the first and not look too hard for the second.

  Sunny had only done it once. A couple of years ago, a Polish woman had almost had Rose fired for scrubbing the toilet with the same brush she used to clean the sink. After Sunny heard, she stole a bag of brass buttons from the back of the woman’s utility closet. That weekend, Sunny and Rose met on the Bund and pitched them into the river, one by one, until they had all found homes in the shit-silt of the Huangpu.

  “So,” Rose said now, turning to Sunny brightly as they walked along the river. “Have you thought anymore about my proposal?”

  “I don’t know,” Sunny said. “Meeting a stranger—”

  “He isn’t a stranger! He’s my husband’s coworker’s son. He’s not from Anhui, but close enough nearby. I forgot where. Your ma will like him.”

  Sunny laughed. “I guess my ma’s opinion is the only one that matters.”

  “Aiya, you know what I mean. You’ll like him too. Hardworking. Over one point eight meters. Both legs the same length, feet in good working condition. What’s not to like?”

  “Give it up, Rose. I’m too old.”

  “If you’re old, I’m a mountain.” She yanked on the hem of her shirt in a way that settled the matter. “You know, my cousin had a child at thirty-five. Perfectly healthy. Big, fat boy. Head like a watermelon.”

  Sunny had been married once before. The match had been brief and loveless, arranged because both were past the usual marrying age. She had put marriage off as long as possible, telling her parents that she wasn’t ready, that she hadn’t met anyone she liked enough to spend an entire life with. But the truth was, she had never had any real intention to marry. She kept waiting for the wanting to begin as it had for her sister and her friends. She thought maybe the desire to be married would be released like a hormone within her once she reached a certain age. But it never happened. She still couldn’t understand why anyone should want to move in with a near stranger, call his parents hers, and live so close to home while feeling a world away. All for what? To produce children neither family could afford? It simply didn’t add up.

  When Sunny reached twenty-seven, the people in her village began calling her unnatural, and this was a kind of talk her parents couldn’t bear. They didn’t openly say they would kick her out of the house if she did not marry, but they certainly implied it. Your brother already has one baby, they said. When the next one comes, who knows if there will be room for you?

  By the time Sunny finally gave in, all the most promising men had been paired off with other women and there was little choice in husbands. The one her parents decided on was named Wang Jian. He was twenty years old with a sweet face and one leg half an inch shorter than the other. The limp didn’t affect his capacity for fieldwork, his parents had assured hers—it had only affected his ego a little. Over the six months that Sunny had lived with him as his wife, she discovered other ways in which he was abbreviated. He had a habit of stopping midsentence when he was speaking to her, as if suddenly remembering that he barely knew Sunny at all. She couldn’t get used to this guardedness, though she was guarded herself. In the small, single-room hut off the Wang family’s farm that the two of them shared, he liked to sleep facing the wall, his shorter leg curled beneath him.

  Wang Jian hadn’t seemed any more enthusiastic about the idea of marriage than Sunny had, but he was filial and good-natured. Like Sunny, he had married to make his parents happy. This silent but mutual understanding that their relationship was forced allowed them to become used to each other. She didn’t mind that one of his legs was shorter than the other. She liked his strong torso and the gentle way he responded to her in bed. Sex with him was unlike the two experiences she’d had before him—a whole lot of jostling with men who treated her body as nothing more than warm flesh.

  What everyone was waiting for was a baby, but Sunny didn’t want a baby. Raising one seemed too difficult a project for two people who still sometimes behaved like strangers. Her sister and cousins assured her that a child would give her marriage purpose and raise her position in the Wang household, but Sunny could not justify bringing a human being into the world simply to improve her own life. Before bed every night, she inserted into her body a diaphragm that she had picked up from one of the city hospitals. When, four months into their marriage, Sunny still had not conceived, Wang Jian’s parents became worried that she was barren. They began asking about her menstrual cycle and feeding them both medicinal herbs. Whether Wang Jian could tell the difference between rubber and flesh, Sunny never knew, but if he did know the diaphragm was there, he said nothin
g about it.

  One day, about six months into their marriage, Wang Jian took off from work to go to town in search of bike gears. On his way home, he was walking along an unmarked dirt path when a cargo truck came up behind him. He’d startled when he saw it coming so fast out of nowhere, tried to run, and fell. Onlookers said that the truck hit him with such force that it sent his body tumbling off the path. He continued to roll downhill until he was caught in a stand of trees, like a piece of driftwood. The truck hadn’t stopped.

  After Wang Jian’s death, Sunny couldn’t stop picturing the accident. What a way for a life to end, especially for a person who had seemed only half alive to begin with. Sunny wasn’t an idealist, but she had always thought that each human life was due some measure of fulfillment or understanding before its end. Wang Jian was proof against that. She felt guilty for dreading the marriage as much as she had and guiltier still that the occasion of his death had ended up improving her own life. With Wang Jian gone, his parents had little use for Sunny, whom they had never truly been able to welcome into their family. Preferring to grieve alone, they let her go home.

  Sunny’s life before getting married had been no different than the lives of a million other girls raised in the countryside, but for her it had been enough. She was depended upon, and that was a powerful feeling. Though she’d been a budding spinster, no one could say that she hadn’t made herself useful. Sunny had been a cook, a vegetable seller, a confidante to her siblings, and an interpreter of Nainai’s demented babble. She’d found a way to get the cousins to school and the chickens fed en route. She’d also been the one to organize the books—to enter the li of grain they harvested into the ledger via shorthand only she could understand. And while she had no official say in family decisions, her parents trusted her opinion enough that it counted for something. More, in any case, than it could ever have counted for at her in-laws’ house.

  For a while, Sunny was welcomed back into their old routines. But one day, her mother pulled her aside. Now that your brother has a little wife, she said, there’s not enough work in the house to go around. I’ve arranged for you to help out at the Shao noodle shop instead. What do you think about that? Sunny hadn’t known what to think, but what she thought didn’t matter. Hao ba, she’d replied, and her mother forced a smile. People go in and out of that restaurant all the time. Maybe you’ll catch someone’s eye.

  It was only a matter of time before Sunny would be expected to remarry. And over the next year, during which she performed odd jobs in the surrounding villages, she became more and more resistant to the idea. She’d never thought of herself as headstrong or disobedient, but there it was: a decision growing in her day by day. She wouldn’t remarry. She’d go away to the city to make money, as young people sometimes did. Without her in the house, her parents could forget about her failure to create her own family, and Sunny could atone for her failures by sending money home. Only then would she be free to remember home as the welcoming place it once was.

  “I think one lap does it for me today,” Sunny said to Rose.

  “We’re not leaving until you agree to meet him. Do it as a favor for my husband.”

  Rose was the closest thing to family that she had found in the city. When Sunny first arrived in Shanghai, her friendship had been a lifeline. In these streets, too many faces passed for anyone to look into anyone else’s. Sunny eventually grew to like the freedom that came from disappearing into a crowd, but before that, Rose was there to confirm her continued existence. Where are you from? What does your family do? How old are you? Where are you living? Although Rose was a born-and-bred local and had never known any life but city life, Sunny felt close to her in a way she’d never felt about anyone outside of her family. Rose had assumed, immediately and wholeheartedly, the role of a guardian in her life; it was almost as difficult for Sunny to say no to her as it was for her to say no to her own mother. But unlike her mother, Rose wasn’t trying to set Sunny up on dates for the sake of furthering a family line or escaping village gossip. Rose just wanted to know that she would be taken care of. She wanted her to be happy.

  “All right,” Sunny said, as Rose had known she would all along. “Set it up.” Rose could be a mountain in more ways than one.

  Sunny didn’t usually go straight home—most nights she drove out to People’s Square. After leaving her scooter parked on a side street, she joined the crowds at the Metro entrance, where an escalator funneled them into the brightly lit concourse below. The underground network of stores branched out in many directions, but her favorite route was south, toward electronics stalls full of things that buzzed and flickered—light-up toys, novelty cigarette cases, and cell phone charms. If she walked even farther in, there were girlie shops with photos of celebrities pinned to their walls. Bright red circles were drawn around items worn in the photos and corresponding arrows pointed to copycat items on racks.

  “Mei nu,” a shopkeeper said as she entered that night. “Welcome. Try on what you like.” Mei nü meant “beautiful woman,” but it was a standard greeting offered by retail personnel before they got a good look at you. Sunny wasn’t much to look at. She was used to eyes landing on her only to flick away within seconds. Her nose was broad and her ears stuck out through her hair on either side of her head. It was a decidedly unbeautiful face. Her friends back home had called her jia xiaozi, because of the way she did nothing to improve her appearance. But it couldn’t be helped; when she tried on makeup, her face looked like a territory under siege. In her thirty-four years, she had come to like this stubbornness, her body’s unwillingness to be adorned. On days when she felt adrift, it had even become a comfort. All she had to do was catch a glimpse of her reflection in a window or in the mirror of a store like this one. We are still here, the face said. Ugly or not.

  2

  A film van pulled up to Plaza 66 and parked illegally for the third time that month, penning several cars into their spots. From his office on the eighth floor of the plaza, Wei Zhen watched one of the van’s doors slide open and two men climb out, shouldering tripods and trailing wires behind them. They took their time gathering their equipment, then rounded the side of the vehicle and disappeared behind the glare of the sun. Wei could not make out which cars were blocked by the van but suspected that one of them was his own. “Ta ma de,” he cursed under his breath.

  “What was that? I didn’t hear you.”

  With the time difference, it was one in the morning on Wednesday in New York. Wei could hear car horns coming through the speakerphone, which meant that his boss, Patricia, was in a cab on her way home.

  “Nothing, never mind. I forgot about the film crew. They’re here again. They’re always on time. It’s incredible. Nobody here has any concept of time except for the people you least want to see…”

  June first would mark five years of Wei’s tenure as general manager of the Medora Group’s Shanghai office. On some afternoons, he looked up into the silver-green wash of light coming through the double-paned windows and was disoriented by the room’s similarity to his old office back in New York. He felt an eerie certainty that if he were only to swivel his chair around so that his back was to the city, he would find himself on Fifty-Seventh Street again, and no time at all would have passed. A drowsiness came over him in those moments, an existential gloom. But today was not one of those days. Today, the very essence of what it meant to work in China was about to come rolling in through the marketing firm’s doors. The lights, the cameras, the noise—Wei could feel his temples begin to tighten.

  “Ah, the film crew,” Patricia said. “I saw Sandrik’s reports. It looks like the TV show is working. Are you filling the positions you need?”

  “We’re starting to get better candidates,” Wei admitted. “It does seem like it.”

  When Wei got the Shanghai job, it had been the most exciting thing to come his way in a long time. Over the years working in the New York office, he had watched the Medora Group grow bloated and ineffectual. A new office
meant a chance not only to build business in China but also to make the company lean again—to hire a team of young, local people with bilingual language and cultural proficiency, the set of highly educated Chinese who had grown up watching American movies.

  Unfortunately, as Wei had explained in one of his early reports back to Patricia, the perception of the advertising industry in China had changed. The work used to seem more glamorous. On the one hand, drinking and schmoozing; on the other, distilling human insight into sexy, succinct messages. Things used to be simple. You’d create the ad, buy space for it—call up a magazine or a billboard, negotiate a price—and then the ad would run for however long it was supposed to run. But these days, advertising was about measurement, about whether sales upticks were due to banner ads or direct mail, about coming up with the right questions to ask the market rather than simply creating a campaign idea that pleased the CEO. They needed employees who were both analytical and smart, and top graduates didn’t know enough about digital advertising to consider it a viable career option. Despite the company’s efforts to recruit the best in the workforce, his employee base was a mix of unexceptional college graduates who had majored in English and the few bilingual expats who had come over with Wei from abroad.

  Wei and his human resources manager, Sandrik, had puzzled over this hiring problem for the better part of four years before Sandrik had come up with the idea for the show. Pitch 360, it was called—an elimination-style reality-TV micro-series sponsored by Medora. Twenty contestants were put through a succession of tasks that ranged from designing consumer-research plans to developing viral marketing strategies to pitching to clients. Each week, two contestants were eliminated, and at the end, one victor was granted a cash prize and a salaried position at Medora. A TV show would give the company the right kind of visibility, Sandrik had said. It would show young people what it was like to work in digital advertising while also positioning Medora as an industry leader. They could air it online as well as on Shanghai’s bilingual TV channel, thereby attracting their perfect demographic: people who were educated and who consumed media.