What We Were Promised Read online

  Wei was skeptical, but he didn’t have any better ideas; he’d allowed it.

  “I watched a clip of the show online,” Patricia said now. “You looked uncomfortable.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m teasing. You were fine. Just not your usual superconfident camera-ready self.”

  “It’s different with interviews and press conferences. I’m not good at reading off a script.”

  At the very start of the show, Wei Zhen himself had been a cast member. He’d hated every part of the experience: waiting around for the filming to start, wearing makeup, having his own face inches away from the flawless skin of the young makeup artist. “Don’t do that weird thing with your lips,” she had whispered to him just before the lights were aimed in his direction, leaving him with no chance to ask, What? What am I doing with my lips?

  He’d been stupid to think that the reality show would resemble anything close to reality. The contestants were not the bright-eyed creative savants he’d imagined. They were more attractive than they were smart, and 40 percent of them came from performing arts schools. As each episode aired, Wei had become increasingly perturbed by the show’s existence. Every time a neighbor stopped him at Lanson Suites to say, I saw you on TV! he’d grow red in the face. It was becoming clear to him, if not to them, if not to Patricia, that he was turning the business into a farce. Wei would have pulled the plug on the show long ago if what they were doing hadn’t been working. But Sandrik was right; the show was attracting ten times the number of job applications, and many of these from real candidates, the sort of people they wanted.

  “Look, I’m going to try to get out of the office before they start setting up to shoot,” said Wei. “Do you have anything else for me?”

  “No,” Patricia said. “Except…Wei, take it easy over there.”

  On the way down, in the glass elevator, Wei caught sight of the TV show’s director; his bleached hair was immediately recognizable in an adjacent car. The man was Chinese, but when they’d met three months ago, he’d introduced himself as Dash and insisted on speaking to Wei in Manchester-accented English. Dash embodied the type of Chinese-born expat Wei hated the most—those who believed they were better than the locals because they had once lived outside the country. Whenever Wei was in conversation with Dash, he had the distinct impression that the man was waiting for Wei to ask him where he was from. He had done everything he could to lessen the number of interactions with Dash. His first move had been to request that he be written off the show.

  “But you’re the general manager,” Dash had said.

  “So?”

  “We need a figurehead character for the show. We need a boss.”

  “What about Sandrik?” he suggested.

  “We can’t just switch figureheads three episodes in.”

  “I don’t care how you do it,” Wei said. “Just leave me out.”

  The following week, Wei had arrived at work to find someone who looked exactly like him crouched on the sidewalk in front of Plaza 66, eating fried chicken out of a Styrofoam carton. It was uncanny. Wei had to look down at his own feet to be sure he was really standing there, that he wasn’t having an out-of-body experience. This person had the same bullish nose, the same long arms. Even the set of his back as he leaned into his food—straight, but with a touch of stiffness in the shoulders—was Wei’s. This was the actor they had hired to replace him on camera.

  Wei’s doppelgänger caused a sensation at the office. No one knew his real name, nor did they care to find out. They all called him Mr. Boss and clapped whenever he walked in, handed him briefs to sign, yelled requests for him to raise their bonuses. They begged for photos of the two of them side by side—Mr. Boss and the real Boss Zhen—striking a variety of poses. He had humored these requests for the first day or two, stood with his arms around his colleagues and the actor. He had also stood back to back with Mr. Boss with his arms crossed or with his hands in his pockets—everything short of the finger-gun James Bond pose that was so popular with the interns.

  No longer. He wouldn’t fuel the distraction anymore.

  The moment he and Dash made eye contact through the glass partition, Wei saw the man begin to raise his arm in a gesture he’d come to know well—Boss Zhen, can I get a word? But then the elevator car rose out of view, and immediately, Wei felt the pressure at his temples begin to lift.

  Shanghai humidity was unforgiving. It seeped into your lungs in early June and sometimes stayed until September, when fall winds pushed out the lingering heat. In the short walk from the plaza’s steps to where the car had pulled up at the curb, Wei felt his neck begin to prickle with sweat. He got into the backseat, stripped off his tie, and inhaled a blast of air from the cooling system.

  Little Cao turned around and grinned. “They’re filming again, ah? I saw the van.” He waved to the film crew’s driver, who had moved his vehicle farther down the lot. Here was something Wei had learned since transferring to China: The value of a driver wasn’t so much in his punctuality, or even in his sense of direction. What was important was that a driver had the ability to make friends with policemen, valet attendants, and other drivers. Little Cao had been able to get the film crew’s driver to move the van out of his way before they had finished unloading, and that was the skill that kept him on the payroll.

  “Next season you should put me on your show.” Little Cao wiggled his eyebrows at Wei in the rearview mirror. “I’m full of advertising ideas, Boss. I’ll split the prize money with you.”

  “If there ends up being a next season,” Wei said darkly, “you can have my job.”

  The district of Jing’an was busy at any hour of the day, but the stretch of Nanjing West Road along which they traveled was particularly tricky around lunchtime. Office workers exited the Plaza 66 office tower and mixed with the retail shoppers heading to and from the mall next door. It was easy to distinguish the workforce from the fu er dai—the rich second generation, young men and women whose parents’ money afforded them the leisure to stroll around during the day in designer couture. The workers carried tension in their shoulders and were prone to looking myopically up at the buildings around them—all of them sparkling, all erected within the last ten years. The trees lining either side of Nanjing West Road were too strong, too green for their natural environment, lush in a way that seemed purchased. Money; the whole avenue reeked of it.

  It had been a sudden business decision, Medora’s lunge for China. The fastest thing the slug of a company had accomplished in the ten years Wei had worked for it, and that was a kind of accomplishment in itself—although it meant that Wei, who was supposed to be in charge of it all, often didn’t get clued in to his own operations until the last minute. The first time Medora sent him to Shanghai, he’d made the trip with three others: his chief of staff, Chris, a twenty-eight-year-old bilingual kid who had spent a couple years at Yelp; Sandrik, with whom he’d worked back in New York; and Katrina, a recent Yale graduate whose title wasn’t quite clear to Wei, even now.

  “We just got approved for the final head count,” Sandrik said as he’d settled in next to Wei on that first plane ride over from New York. He’d lowered the back of his leather seat until it was practically horizontal within its pod. “Guess how many.”

  “Ten,” Wei said. “First quarter.”

  “Think big,” Sandrik said. “Think the whole year.”

  “Twenty-five?”

  “A hundred and fifty.”

  “A hundred—” Wei blinked at Sandrik, who smiled and lowered his eye mask, as though the number indicated a grand coup instead of an irresponsible risk. Wei pulled the eye mask back up Sandrik’s face.

  “A hundred and fifty? We can’t train people that fast. We’re going to have new hires sitting around doing nothing for all of March.”

  “Well, we have to start off strong.”

  Even as he resented Sandrik’s ignorance at what these numbers meant—how near impossible it would be to run an organization o
f that size right off the bat—Wei knew, deep down, that he was right. The bigger the employee base they started off with, the more money they could ask for to run the branch next year. He realized later that if anyone had been naive, it was him. What kind of midsize corporation like Medora approached softly? It had to come in strong, elbow its way in. Had to be American.

  So instead of doing what he had wanted to do that initial year—fly through China to visit the different agencies, study the habits of the Chinese and how they engaged with media—Wei had spent it in the office processing paperwork. He had approved applications, interviewed candidates, and set up an organizational structure that he was not convinced would work. He’d been expected to blindly follow the orders of the executives above him, executives to whom he was indebted because they had promoted him so quickly. And suddenly, China didn’t seem so different from New York.

  They turned off Nanjing West and headed toward the elevated thruway on Yan’an Road. Seeing pedestrians sweat as they walked along the streets made Wei thirsty. He had a sudden craving for calamansi juice but didn’t ask Little Cao to stop—didn’t want to test the traffic. Instead, he grabbed a bottle of water from the pocket of the front seat, wrested it open, and drank half its contents at once. The greedy act of gulping, mixed with the afternoon sunshine, was delicious. It reminded him of how it felt to be young. What a treat, to be going home at this hour. He’d almost forgotten the pleasure of truancy.

  The traffic let up as soon as they hit the bridge, and within minutes they were descending into Pudong New District. He could see Lanson Suites already, the serviced apartment in which he and his wife lived. They’d chosen it out of a catalog the company had sent to him when he’d taken the job in Shanghai. That night, Lina had sat on his lap and they’d flipped through the pages together. Each apartment’s price was listed in the lower-right-hand corner—sums that made them gape at each other in surprise. This is the monthly cost? Lina had asked. And the company will cover it? He’d felt both happy and ashamed then. Happy that he could give her something nicer than she had expected, ashamed that he hadn’t been doing so for years. His success at Medora had come upon him so quickly that they hadn’t had the time for their lifestyle to catch up with his paycheck. He wasn’t even sure if Lina knew how much money he’d made in the past year, with bonuses and stock options. Unlike his colleagues, he hadn’t yet put his daughter in private school or bought a nicer car or moved the whole family to New York City. But this was his chance. That’s right, he said. Whichever one we pick. It’s time to think big.

  And so they had settled on Lanson Suites. Lina liked it for its dark wood floors and the building’s countless amenities: three pools, two gyms, four “relaxation rooms,” two business lounges, a billiards room, a child-care center, a full-time staff including twenty-four-hour kitchen service, and more. These were nice to have, but Wei had rightly predicted that he would be too busy to take advantage of any of it. The only room that truly mattered to him was the office space, and of all the apartment photos they’d flipped through, this one had been just perfect: floor-to-ceiling windows, a good view of the river. It was just large enough for pacing. And sure enough, he’d done some of his best work walking from one end of the room to the other, looking down at the waterfront restaurants and, if there wasn’t too much smog, at the buildings beyond. The visual distance gave way to mental distance, space for patterns to emerge and ideas to present themselves in ways that they couldn’t when he was just staring at numbers and graphs at a desk.

  When Wei walked into the apartment that afternoon, Lina was lying on the couch with a magazine covering her face. Hearing him come in, she sat up, alarmed. Her hair was mussed and mascara dust clung to the skin below her left eye.

  “What happened?” she asked, her voice foggy.

  “Nothing happened. I’m home early.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I was just having a nap.”

  Wei often feared that life in Shanghai bored Lina, who had gone from working full-time teaching Chinese to grade-schoolers in America to not working at all. He had once suggested that she take up teaching again, but Lina pointed out that there was little need for Chinese-language teachers in China. Not true, Wei told her. The influx of expats meant that there were more international schools these days, and they were all looking for bilingual teachers to teach Western kids how to speak Chinese. Lina scoffed at the idea. Our friends’ kids go to Shanghai American. You want me to start working for our friends? Privately, Wei believed that the real reason she didn’t want to go back to work was that she had become too used to the lifestyle of a taitai. That’s how they referred to them now, as taitai—ladies of luxury who could not be called housewives because, aside from cooking the occasional meal, they did no housework at all. Wei thought, watching her now, that it hardly seemed possible he’d once known her as a schoolgirl in Suzhou, her hair in braids.

  “Do you want something to eat?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “Where’s Karen?”

  “Swimming, I think.” The balcony’s sliding doors stood open and a warm wind beckoned him through. Outside, he rested his palms on the hot stone balustrade. As he leaned over it, a line of palm trees came into view, then water, and, at last, his twelve-year-old daughter. Wei rarely knew what to say to Karen, but her presence—her dark head bobbing on the pool’s surface—was a stabilizing force. One of his favorite things to do when she was home for the summer was to open the door to her room and just look in on her.

  He returned to the living room with an inspiration. “Let’s go out for dinner tonight.”

  As his eyes were adjusting back to the low light, he almost tripped over a wine-colored urn that he could not remember having been there a moment before. “Is this new?”

  “I got it yesterday,” Lina said. “At a crafts show in Hongqiao.”

  It had to have been the third or fourth urn purchased this year. There was no telling where the others had gone.

  “Did you put anything out to defrost?”

  “Not yet,” Lina said, rising and running her fingers over her blouse to catch stray wrinkles. “There’s that new restaurant along the water we could try. Near the sushi place?”

  “Perfect,” Wei said.

  “I’m going down for coffee. Do you want anything?”

  “No, thanks. I still have some work to finish.” He watched Lina slip her feet into sandals and clatter out into the hall.

  Wei had just settled into his chair when the phone rang. Usually, he let the house line go to voice mail, but on impulse—chalk it up to a good mood—he answered.

  “Hello?”

  There was a crackling on the other end. And then: “Wei?”

  “Yes. Who’s calling?”

  “It’s me. Qiang.”

  “Who?” he said, even though he’d heard it clearly the first time, had felt his heart rise in his chest like a creature coming up for air.

  “Qiang. Your little brother.” The sound of something brushing across the speaker, and then the voice came back, clearer. “You don’t remember me anymore?”

  He said it loud enough that Wei could hear the old humor in his voice. Qiang had always had the most expressive of voices—somehow, even if he was in the other room, you could tell after just a word if he was smiling or scowling or about to tell a lie.

  “No, of course—I—where are you?”

  “I’m in Kunming. I saw you on TV last week, on some kind of reality show. What’s your company called? Mei duo la? I didn’t know you were even in China until I saw you on TV. And then I called up Auntie Pei from the old village. She tracked down your number for me…”

  Wei began to sweat.

  “Are you there?” Qiang asked. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes! Yes, I hear you. Can I come see you? Can we meet?”

  “I thought I’d come up and visit you, if it’s convenient. I haven’t been to Shanghai in a very long time. Plus there’s all the talk about the World Expo happening over there right
now. I kind of want to see it.”

  Wei shifted forward in his seat. “Yes, of course, come. I’m looking forward to it. When can you be here?”

  “Well, this weekend is probably too soon. Next Friday? Is that all right with you? I was thinking I could come for about a week or so.”

  Wei nodded fiercely into the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Yes, yes. That’s great.”

  “And Lina won’t mind?”

  “No, of course not,” Wei said. “She’ll be glad to see you. We’ll be here. We’ll both be here.”

  “Great. Take my number. Let’s not lose touch again.”

  Later, Wei would think about those last few words—Let’s not lose touch again—and wonder whether there was something accusatory in them. But in the moment, he had simply said good-bye and hung up. Before he could register any follow-up emotions, he heard his wife’s voice behind him.

  “Who was that?” Lina stood in the doorway of his study holding a paper cup of coffee.

  “Ah,” he said, coming back to himself. Already he could anticipate the dozen more questions this one answer would prompt. “That—that was Qiang.”

  3

  When she had first moved into Lanson Suites, Lina found a stack of name cards in her mailbox. LINA ZHEN, they read. And underneath, in English: LANSON SUITES, 6221 MID YINCHENG ROAD, TOWER 8, APARTMENT 8202, LUJIAZUI, PUDONG NEW DISTRICT, 207290. Her name looked so small sandwiched there between the embossed logo of the hotel and her complicated new address. She put the cards back in their box and took them downstairs.

  The first floor of Tower Eight resembled a spa more than it did the lobby of a hotel. When the elevator doors opened, soft music wafted through them. Three young women sitting behind the front desk spoke to one another in equally musical tones, pausing when they saw Lina approach.