Jen

JEN

When I was studying pre-med in Harvard, I became addicted to iced mocha lattes and the subway. Unlike most of the people squashed into the stuffy compartments, I did not need the subway for work. I rode it at my own leisure, after classes and all weekend, those first two years in New England.
Though I do not believe in signs, a lot of important things seemed to happen to me on the way to the T. One cold day in November, as I was waiting for the Red Line into Chinatown, I got a call from my mother saying my grandmother Lily had lost her fight against cancer. I sat, stupefied on a bench, half-listening as a homeless man rasped James Taylor. Then there was the time I met Mark.
I didn't know that he went to Harvard, but I could have guessed because about half the people you see around Boston you also pass in the marble halls of that university. He was tall and had a baggy, mountaineering look. He was wearing a rain jacket and a few days beard.
"Hey, Whitecoat! Wait up!"
Boston is so cheap. I didn't turn around, but when he grabbed me I spilled the latte on my white sleeve.
"You dropped this." He handed me my black suede wallet. I took it, opened it, and bluntly counted the bills. None were missing, so I gave him a nod.
"So you're Jen Chou? Drivers license," he said to my blank expression. "And you go to Harvard. So do I. What's your major?"
He was smiling, that big, wide, abandoned grin I'd see so much, almost too much, those next few months. Up close his blue eyes stuck out like gemstones on his shabby face. I took a breath, prepared to deliver my speech.
"I'm in pre-med. I'm also late for my train."
"Hang on just a minute, Jen Whitecoat. Aren't you going to ask what my name is?"
I don't go for guys like Mark. Lumberjack hippies, my mother would call them. His beginning stubble disgusted me, and so would his whole face, if it weren't for those eyes. Later he would joke that his eyes saved him, but in fact it was absolutely true.
I turned around and asked him, I hope crisply, what his name was.
* * * * * * * * * * * * In our first month of dating, Mark would call me his "China doll." He did it to annoy me, which it did, but it never became serious because he knew I was not made of china and I was far from being a doll. My mother named me Jen after the Confucian virtue of oneness. The character for Jen breaks into two parts, the symbol for "human being" and the symbol for "two." My mother says Jen is loving others, and so loving yourself.
What Mark liked best about me was my intelligence. What I liked best about Mark were his backrubs, long, hard but not too rough, the warmth of his fingertips through the thinning fabric of my shirt.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
When I came home at winter break, my mother gave me the talk on love. The consternation following the (accidental) revelation of Mark's picture (He's white? Jen, you didn't tell us he was white!) had been brief. Now my mother was overflowing with happiness for me and my boyfriend. "My only child, soon to be a bride!" she would exclaim, and though I tried to explain things weren't moving that quickly, she would not be dissuaded from the blessing, she said, that would be our marriage.
My mother spent most of her time in the kitchen, and I would join her, a good daughter, perched on a stool at the shiny white counter. She'd be making soups and with the smells of my childhood around me, I would feel myself grow calmer, the spices flowing in my nose and down my whole body. It would be nice if we could carry the warmth we've known with us all the time, but in New England, that would be impossible.
"When I met your father, I was eighteen. I never knew I would leave China. But when he learned he must flee, I too fled," she said, adding dumplings to a simmering pot. "It would not have been right to be without him."
"You didn't know, when you married him, that Baba wasn't part of the Party," I said, stirring my tea. "When they came for him, you didn't have the time to take it all in. You had no choice."
"Jen," my mother's voice was soft, like her hands, softened from years of use and comfort. I had always thought of them as one part of her, hands and voice, together gently reaching out. "In China we say it is yuan fen. The love it is your fate to have."
"Mother," I said, making my voice kind for her benefit, "in America, we don't believe in that kind of love."
* * * * * * * * * * * *
The florescent lights hurt my eyes and the smell of disinfectant made my head swim. I couldn't keep focused on the brain surgery going on in the pit below. I felt cold, and there was a vague feeling of floating in my stomach. I put my mask over my face, turned my head, and vomited.
"Chou! Chou!"
I hastily tore off the mask and tried to sit up. "I'm fine, really..."
Dr. Spaeth, middle-aged, balding, was reaching for my shoulder. "Jen," he said, "let's just step outside."
I don't remember the exact words he used, only it was something about how seeing such a dangerous surgery was always hard. I felt like an idiot as blue uniformed nurses gave us strange looks. He said, "Maybe you should take a break. I've seen you, you drive yourself hard. You should slow down, or you won't be able to go on."
"I appreciate you telling it straight, Professor."
"Chou, you're a smart girl. You've got lots of talent, but right now you just to need to step back a little and asses your situation." He looked at me hard. "I can tell; you don't like my advice. Well whatever you do, just remember you are a smart girl."
He left me, shutting the door behind him. I picked up my phone and dialed Mark's number. Soon his voice, loud and boisterous, came booming cheerfully into my ear. "Hey babe, what's up?"
"I don't want to be a doctor anymore."
"No?" He had this way of never seeming surprised, but I could tell he was raising his eyebrows, scratching his chin.
"No," I said, firmly now. "It was my parents plan. A good job for their good daughter. And," I couldn't help adding, "I am pretty damn good at it."
"Well what else are you good at? You can't just have one talent. Really Jen, everyone is a multi-tasker." He was the multi-tasker I thought, simultaneously a sloppy mountain climber, and sage full of wisdom, eager to illuminate the paths of this life.
"I can think and decide." I said finally.
"Hmm...that sounds like journalism to me babe." Of course he would want me to join his major.
It was three months later, in February, that I completed the necessary paperwork and switched my major from pre-med to journalism. Though Mark urged me to, I never picked up the phone and dialed my parents' number.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Journalism is a strange field. Originally, I didn't like the idea of making a living from other people's lives. It seemed too dependant, too similar to the way a farmer lives or dies by the rain. When I told this to Mark, he shook his head.
"True, it can be a dodgy business, but it's really not worse than most. Think of it this way: you're taking people's struggles, and showing them up to the rest of the world. You are being the instrument through which the stories of ordinary people can be told. In a way, the journalist is the greatest civic serviceman."
"But so much bad happens in journalism too. Take tabloids. As an ‘ordinary person,' I think journalism does more harm than good."
"That's because you like secrets," said Mark wisely. After I switched my major, he put it to me this way, "A journalist controls their subjects, not the other way around. And with that power comes responsibility. Responsibility to be truthful, to them, and to yourself."
As the year drew to a close, I had become a good journalist. Interviewing quickly became my favorite activity. I spent hours constructing the questions and lay awake imagining the answers. Mark said I was vicious. "Give them some space and then they'll open up."
"A journalist isn't supposed to leave space. By description, they're supposed to get in your face," I snapped.
"And now you know so much about it?"
I looked at him. I realized with a sudden rush that I loathed his whole brown, disheveled, backwoodsman appearance.
"Oh baby, you aren't going to be mad at me now are you?" He stood up, reached for me, smiling, teasing, so easy and amiable like he always was. When I didn't move, he looked at me, then turned and left the room.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
By the end of May the weather was finally mild. Mark was away, having been prestigiously granted departmental permission to cover a story in Washington. Finding myself alone for the first time in months, I started using the subway again. I got on it each day as soon as I was free, getting off in Chinatown, grabbing something cheap, and disappearing again into the night.
I was waiting at Parker Street to catch the Inbound Red Line. I was watching an accordion player, listening to his thin, fraying tune when my phone rang. I picked it up. It was my father.
My mother had never told me about the cancer because she didn't want to worry me. Now, it was too late. I couldn't hear anything else Baba was telling me, so eventually I just put my hand over the receiver until I heard him hang up.
I sat down on a grimy bench and dialed Mark's number. In as few words, I told him.
"Baby, I'm coming. You need me right now, and I'm coming."
"You shouldn't."
He hung up. I got on the train.
I rode the subway all night. I didn't go back to Harvard that day, or the next three days. I was suddenly homeless, the sky above me suddenly big and hollow, the streets around me gray.
Mark left me a message, saying that his plane had just landed and would I please come meet him. I didn't, so he left another message, and another, and another until I no longer listened because I could guess what they said.
Sitting on the hard chrome seat, staring at the blackness on either side of me, I thought a lot during those subway rides, more than I ever had before or since. I wondered if my mother's spirit would come to me now that I understood what had happened. Or maybe she would still stay away, as a punishment-or maybe, and more likely, I would not let her come to me, no matter how hard she tried.