Alison McGhee

Your best friend taught you how to knit, and your mother sort of taught you how to purl – she’s lefthanded, and she kept miming the motions of purling with her hands and then trying to reverse the process in order to explain the whole thing to you, which gives you an idea of why that “sort of” precedes the “how to purl” above – and then they sent you out into the world to make your own knitstuffs.

Leave that word alone. If foodstuffs is  a word,  then knitstuffs should be one too.

So here is your first knitstuff, above. That’s a lie,  actually; your first knitstuff was a green and black scarf, but it was completed BEFORE your mother taught you, in that bewildered manner, sort of how to purl, so it doesn’t count.

Although the strange thing about that first knitstuff – let us call it a scarf, because even though knitstuff should be a word, it shouldn’t be overused, especially on its first voyage into the world – is that when your son glimpsed it, he reminded you that it is the exact colors and width of the knit coaster-placemat thing he made you in kindergarten, when the kindergartners did a small knitstuff unit.

The minute he reminded you of this you could see the tiny coaster-placemat thing in your mind, and you wondered what in the world you had been thinking when you made that first scarf/knitstuff. Were you trying to replicate the days when he was in kindergarten and making tiny gifts for you?

Best not to think about that now. Best to turn to the matter at hand, which is the current knitstuff project, pictured above.

When you began this particular project, you decided to make it according to this pattern: knit two rows, purl two rows. Because that would make it easy, right? Who couldn’t remember such an easy pattern?

You, apparently.

At first,  given the brevity of your knitting and purling tutorials, you couldn’t even remember the difference between the two. You got around that one by sort of (emphasis on sort of) re-teaching yourself how to knit and purl,  and then reciting, over and over “knit from behind,  purl from the front,” which made and makes a kind of sense to you.

Then you couldn’t remember how many rows you had knit – one? two? possibly three? – so you tried to teach yourself how knitting looks different from purling. But that proved impossible for many reasons, the main one being that you seem to be deeply impaired on a level that includes but is not limited to visual discernment between knitting and purling.

At one point, sitting in the church for the non-churchy (you are one of those people who concentrates better if your hands are in motion, and you make no apologies for it) you actually forgot, halfway through, if the row you were working on was a knitting row or a purling row.

Who could possibly forget such a thing halfway through the row? You,  apparently.

So you took a stab in the dark and decided to finish out that row by knitting. Wrong choice! The minute the row was finished it was immediately obvious that it was a half and half row.

“You can always unknit,” your best friend assured you when she taught you how to knit.

Not if you barely know how to knit in the first place, you can’t.

You suppose you could un-do everything. But then, given your huge inadequacies (in many aspects of life, aspects that go far beyond knitstuffs), you’d be left with a pile of twisted, shrivelly wool.

There are people who can sit calmly in an ergonomically correct manner at their desks for hours on end, steadily writing their way through novels that they have methodically outlined beforehand.

There are people who manage to follow a topic through to its end in a conversation, rather than leaping about like a frog, jumping from that topic to another because a certain word, e.g., “the,” reminded them of an entirely new – but, in their minds, somehow related – topic.

There are people who, when faced with their astonishing inability to figure out the difference between knitting and purling, would go to howtoknit.com and figure it out once and for all. Or give up entirely.

No matter how you might wish it, you are not one of those people.

These are the thoughts you ponder as you focus, focus, focus on the row you are knitting – yes, knitting – there in the church of the non-churchy. You are doing so well!

But wait, what is that? That appears to be a 1.5″-long strand of blue wool that is stretching across one row to another. It is not knit, nor is it purled. It is a homeless blue wool child seeking shelter, but no shelter is to be found.

What just happened? Truly, what did you do? You stare at it in puzzlement. Peer at the upper righthand section of the knitstuff pictured above and you too might be able to see it. Whatever it is, it’s there now. It cannot be undone.

You realize that at some point you will have used up, in your haphazard and horribly inadequate way, all three balls of wool. And then it will be time to cast off, a dreadful phrase which implies further wandering alone in the wilderness.

The thought occurs to you that you could just buy more balls of wool and keep going, sort of knitting and sort of purling for the rest of your life. It would be the Eternal Scarf, eventually big enough to rival the world’s largest ball of twine, currently located in Darwin, Minnesota.

That the idea of creating a knitstuff without end strikes you as easier than learning to cast off makes you, for a moment, deeply uneasy.

She had just turned eighteen. It was the fall of her freshman year at that college in the mountains.

The college was famous for its language classes, and she was good at languages, so she signed up for Russian. It was the weirdest, for lack of a better word, language offered.

Then she received a letter stating that Chinese would now be offered. Chinese? she thought. Well. That certainly outdid Russian in its unusual-ness.

She signed up.

Chinese I met every morning from 8-9, and again every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon from 2-3:30. This was more than a pre-med science class, but she did not think in those terms back then. She wanted to take Chinese, and take it she would.

That first day,  8 a.m. on a Monday morning, there were 16 in the class, mostly freshmen like her. They sat quietly around a long rectangular table in a first floor classroom. In her memory she is wearing her pink skirt, but in her memory she is always wearing that pink skirt, so she doesn’t trust the pink skirt memory.

Right now,  as she types this, she’s looking at an old red spiral-bound notebook open to the first lined page.

Chinese 101. Sept. 11.

zai = to be located at.

ai = to love.

shan = mountains.

dui bu dui = correct?

dui = correct.

budui = incorrect.

Below,  on the same page, is the first character she ever attempted to write: wo,  which means “I.” Over and over and over, in what now  looks to her like a two-year-old’s attempt at Chinese, the word is printed on the page.

At least she can tell what word it is, though. The next one,  Ni,  meaning “you,” is incomprehensible. It’s obvious, looking at it, that this was her first day of Chinese.

But she gets ahead of herself. Back to the long rectangular table, and the sixteen or so of them sitting quietly around it.

The door opened then, and a tall man with a big nose strode in, barking an incomprehensible stream of Chinese at them. Pointing around the table, frowning, smiling, babbling a wild stream of words that made no sense whatsoever.

The sixteen quiet students sat frozen in their chairs. What had they gotten themselves into?

Next morning, Tuesday, at 8 a.m., there were only eight.

Which is testament to the power of the man they knew as Bai Laoshi. Because his pronunciation was perfect, hers is good. Because his command of characters was marvelous, hers at one time was not too bad. Because he expected her to, she spent her junior year in Taiwan.

He was a Teacher. He taught a language from a country,  a continent, where teaching is the most revered of professions, and he lived up to that standard.

Back to the red spiral-bound notebook. Here, on Tuesday, Nov. 14, the word STUDY appears in capital letters, surrounded with stars.

Directly below it is a word she would’ve sworn she didn’t know and never learned: bingkuai, which means ice cube.

Thursday, Nov. 30, is boxed off with an ink rectangle, followed by the word STUDY! with an ! following it.

Tuesday, Dec. 5. Why, what have we here? Could it be the word STUDY, repeated three times and surrounded with a series of faintly desperate-looking rays? Indeed it could.

Teaching, to her, can be boiled down to this one pivotal moment:

It is November, a bit over two months into her study of Chinese. The remaining students in Chinese 101 are now reading a novel, greatly simplified, but a novel nonetheless. They are going around the table according to the pointed finger of the hooknosed Bai Laoshi. Her turn is coming and she’s scared.

In memory, which she doesn’t trust, given the constancy of the pink skirt – which, she now remembers,  she didn’t even buy until two years later, when she was living in Taipei – she was pretty much always scared in Chinese class. She wanted so badly to do right, to pronounce with the correct tones, to master the characters, to see that smile spread across Bai Laoshi’s face.

“Xiaojie!”

There it was. That was her name in Mandarin – it still is, as a matter of fact, immortalized forever in the necklace her friend Oreo made for her and which never leaves her neck.

“Translate the next paragraph, please!”

She stares down at the black pictographs on the white page. My God, this language is hard. They are talking about a boat on this page. There  is something about air,  something about a boat, something about water. . . and then there’s a rush that makes her lightheaded, her whole self filled with power:

“If that’s the way the wind is blowing, then wouldn’t the boat also be able to go by itself in the water?”

Out it comes. She knows she’s right. She didn’t have to think it through, laboriously translate each and every word, try to remember the unfamiliar  rules of Chinese grammar.

She looks up from the  novel, and there it is.

That spark of connection between teacher and student,  the unmistakable jolt when the teacher has held his arms out and taught with all his power to the very ends of his fingertips, and the student has bent over those books every night and gone to class every morning, cramming whole new worlds into her hurting brain, and there it is, at last: the leap, the electric jolt. She had in that one moment vaulted to a new level of learning, and they both knew it.

She wanted to be a writer, but she studied Chinese, not literature. To this day she doesn’t know exactly why, but she does know that it had something to do with the fact that she knew she was in the presence of a magnificent teacher.

Now, when she’s prompted to answer security questions online, and the question is “Who was your most influential teacher?” she types in “Bai Laoshi.”

When her children talk about the one teacher at their high school who is feared and respected and adored simultaneously, the one teacher that the students give their all for, she nods knowingly and thinks, “He is their Bai Laoshi.”

His is the face that comes to mind when she thinks of the word “teacher.” His is the voice that still echoes in her ears – gen wo shuo, say it with me – when she carries on a silent conversation with herself in Chinese.

When she makes dumplings every year on Chinese New Year, she is transported back to the dumpling parties he and Alice gave every year. When she looks at her youngest child, born in China, she knows that their life as mother and daughter really began long ago, on September 11, in Chinese 101.

Jan. 30. Test!!! Study!!!

Mar. 9. Review all grammar and characters  from  semester!!

March 27.  QUESTION: WILL  I MAKE IT  THROUGH THREE YEARS OF CHINESE???

Thirty years later, the answer is yes.  Bai Laoshi, duo xie.

She and Ellen wandered the cobblestone streets of Boston.

They stood in sunshine that fingered its way down through the tile roofs and alleys of the old brick buildings.

They went to Man Ray on the weekends, the club across the river where they were the straight girls amid the gay men.

They danced with abandon and without worry. The music was loud and they absorbed it into their bodies and their bones. It pulsed in their blood. The watched the beautiful men dancing with each other under the flashing indoor lights.

The women’s room was in the basement. They emerged from their stalls to find tall muscled men in drag reapplying mascara.

Back across the river, on the sunlit street by DeLuca’s, they talked with their Man Ray friends, their faces shadowed with the worry that was beginning to creep through the alleys and the streets.

More than twenty years later and she’s remembering those months, those years. She’s picturing again the basement of Man Ray, where next to the women’s room was a narrow window set into a brick wall, a window that gave onto a sealed-off 1950’s living room, a perfect movie set living room, cut off from the world, a lamp burning on the coffee table.

She remembers how she and Ellen used to stand on tiptoe, peering silently into the inaccessible room  of the past. She remembers how the drag queens brushed by them, young and male  and beautiful, tan skin stretched over muscles and that invisible blood.

And life was bleak and sweet and you

conjured yourself up inside me, a
something that began to be
and which I imagine now
still being, a grownup, much
older than I was at the time.
There you are now,
tall one, head full of curls,
turning in the doorway to smile at me.
I imagine you, all these years later,
having grown up without me
in that faraway parallel world.
This would be your birthday, and
I send my love to you
over the bridgeable divide:
You drew yourself together
from a blue wool blanket on a narrow bed,
from Neil Young on a tape player,
from a stack of books on a wooden desk,
from a red maple leaf ironed between wax paper,
from a stuffed dog worn thin with age,
secret zippered pocket in its soft belly.

This is how it was:

You sat on the couch
and I climbed in your lap.
You shook out the paper and
then folded it in half, and
again into quarters, and
then smoothed it straight.
I leaned back against your
giant chest and waited.
You pointed to each panel
and read the black and white
marks above the bright picture.
When you finished one quarter,
you turned the paper over and
read the next, refolding,
smoothing, and turning.
It was Sunday.
We called them the funnies.
Your voice was a bass rumble
reverberating in my ears and chest.
Sometimes, these days,
this is the kind of memory that comes
floating up from the other loud ones.
Your finger pointing at the words
rising above bright pictures,
leading me from page to page.

Last week, in the church for the non-churchy, the minister, after talking about unexpected gifts, asked everyone to turn to a stranger and give that stranger an unexpected gift. The gift could be a handshake, or a wish, or a something. An anything.

She didn’t much want to give an unexpected gift, because she didn’t feel like talking to anyone she didn’t know – she is one of those under-the-radar members of the church for the non-churchy, and all she really wanted to do was sing and recite the ending prayer – whether it can be called a prayer, in this particular church, is debatable, but that’s what she calls it anyway – and leave and walk the two blocks home to make corn pancakes for the still-sleeping occupants of her house.

But the man at the far end of the aisle was smiling nervously, and she realized that maybe he didn’t want to give or receive an unexpected gift either, which somehow made it okay.

She considered making up a free verse poem for him on the spot, perhaps about his salt and pepper beard or green cardigan, and reciting it. No. She considered giving him a simple handshake. No. She considered giving him a kind statement, such as, “I didn’t want to give an unexpected gift, because I didn’t want to talk to anyone, but you have such a nice smile that I changed my mind. My gift to you is this nice smile in return.”

No. Ugh.

Then she knew what she would give the man. She reached into her bag, into the side compartment, and pulled out a gold coinlike object with the Chinese character for luck stamped into it. She slid down to the far end of the aisle and pressed it into the man’s hand.

“My unexpected gift to you is this 24-carat gold good luck stamp. My friend Kingsley gave it to me years ago. Now it’s yours.”

The man at the end of the aisle smiled that nervous smile and said, “I’m not good at this. I don’t really have anything to give.”

She took his nervous honesty as an unexpected gift in itself and shook his hand.

Kingsley, the friend who had given her the gold good luck stamp, had been another unexpected gift, many years ago. In a time of great frustration because no matter how many times she sent her stories out, no one wanted to publish them, she had taken to copying them herself, at Kinko’s, and folding the pages over and stapling them and leaving them here and there in coffeeshops and laundromats.

One of these stories had made its way to New York City, where an older Chinese-American man found it and read it. She had included her P.O. box on the folded and stapled story, and he wrote to her there.

That first letter, so long ago – seventeen years now? – had been typed on a manual typewriter that could have used a new ribbon. It was a short letter, explaining that he had read her story, and that he himself had once visited an uncle in the country who raised chickens. (The girl in her story had a flock of psychotic chickens.)

He had included his name – Kingsley – and his address in Queens.

She wrote him back, thanking him for his letter. He wrote back right away.

And thus began the friendship between her and Kingsley. For many years it was letters only, a penpal relationship, between her in Minneapolis and Kingsley in Queens, a man old enough to be her father. She had lived in many apartments and houses in her life. He lived in the house he had been born and raised in, and where he had cared for his father and his mother until their deaths.

The letters became expansive and elaborate. They remain that way to this day.

Kingsley makes his own envelopes out of magazine pictures that he thinks might interest or amuse her. He pieces together the correct postage out of stamps from a collection which strikes her as vast, spanning many decades of postage.

Kingsley reads several newspapers a day and an average of two mystery novels a week. As he reads, he keeps a pair of scissors on the table next to him, and clips out articles and cartoons that he thinks she might appreciate and includes them in the large, handmade envelopes.

Something she knows about him that he did not tell her, but someone close to him did: He tape-records, from the radio, winter and summer weather reports. On the hottest summer nights he goes into his backyard (Kingsley does not have air conditioning) and lies on the grass and listens to a winter weather report. And on the coldest winter nights (Kingsley does not like cold), he closes his eyes and listens to a summer weather report.

Twice a week or so Kingsley takes a series of subways from his home in Queens to Chinatown. He always carries a backpack, and in the backpack, always, is a selection of Tupperware containers of various sizes. He eats lunch at one of his favorite Chinatown restaurants and packs the leftovers into his Tupperware to bring home, enough to feed him for the next day or so.

A camera is always in the backpack, too, so that Kingsley can photograph the meals at the banquets he arranges for his cousin and friends in his favorite Chinatown restaurants. Each of the many courses is photographed, labeled in his block printing on neatly scissored rectangles of Post-It notes, and affixed to the photos, which he includes in the large homemade envelopes with their colorful stamps.

For many years he sent her a box of rich red bean cakes every year in the fall, at the time of the Autumn Moon Festival. She and the occupants of her house love red bean cakes and looked forward to them every year. Then, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Chinatown bakery that Kingsley always bought them at folded from lack of business, and the red bean cakes were no more.

So many things he has sent her over these many years:

Ginger honey crystals, to dissolve in warm water, when she catches cold or has a sore throat.

Candied ginger, a treat because he knows how much she loves ginger in all forms.

Thin, extremely gingery cookies, ten in a pack, ten packs in a small box, mailed to her at regular intervals because she told him she has searched her city for them and cannot find them.

Silk Chinese dresses far too small for her, that had belonged to his mother.

Cotton t-shirts for her children.

An antique Chinese lock.

Tapes of radio shows that he has particularly enjoyed.

Books, usually with a Chinese theme.

Recipes for her favorite Chinese foods, often accompanied by the ingredients to make them.

Once, years ago, a telephone calling card fell out of one of the packed envelopes. She didn’t use it because she’s not a phone person and she didn’t have his phone number. One day, on a whim, she looked it up online. There it was, Kingsley, in Queens.

She calls him now if she’s going to be in the city. They meet for lunch or dinner in Chinatown. Once, he was there with his cousin and two of his cousin’s friends. It was a meal of several courses, pre-arranged by Kingsley, and before the end of it she slipped away so as to pay the bill secretly.

All these years, and he had always paid. All these years, and all the many and varied boxes of treasure he had sent her. But when she returned to the table, Kingsley knew what she had done. He could not look at her, so great was his embarrassment. She, wanting to do something nice for him, had ended up hurting him.

When one of the large and beautiful envelopes arrives now, she writes to him within a week or so, instead of the longer lag time that used to be her routine. Life is precious and too short, and she wants Kingsley to know that she loves him, and that she treasures their friendship.

When she writes to him, often with pen on lined notebook paper, she thinks of the forty years she  wrote to her grandmother, hundreds and hundreds of letters, none of which she threw out, one of which she pulls out at random if she is having a day in which she misses her grandmother particularly badly.

Long ago Kingsley sent her a rubber-banded old cardboard box containing jewelry so shiny gold that she, being ignorant, assumed it was the sort that she would buy for her daughters in the toy aisle. Later, when she found out it was not costume jewelry, she wrote to Kingsley, to tell him it was too valuable for her to keep. It was my mother’s, he wrote back, and I want you to have it for yourself and your daughters.

Among the jewelry was a gold coinlike object, stamped with the Chinese character for luck. May it bring the man at the far end of the aisle good luck, she thinks now. Good luck like the kind that came unexpectedly her way so many years ago, when Kingsley entered her life.

There are many men in the world celebrating a birthday today, millions and millions of them. There aren’t that many birthdays to choose from, when you think about it – only 365 possibilities, and we all have to share them.

We focus in on the man in the photo up there, the one wearing the plaid shirt and the white socks, the one holding the fat cross-eyed baby, his firstborn, on his lap.

Happy birthday, man in the plaid shirt. You might be wearing one today, although I don’t know that for sure. When I picture you, I picture you in tan polyester pants with a stain on the front, and a short-sleeved plaid cotton/poly blend shirt. Large brown tie shoes.  Black socks. A zip-up jacket.

Where are you now? In the 35-year-old new room, maybe, perched on a chair ludicrously small for your large frame, playing computer solitaire.

Looking for your wallet, which you will find, after searching the kitchen, the dining room, the new room and the living room, on the mantel above the fireplace.

Putting a hat on and heading out to your car, which will be unlocked, with the keys in the ignition, to drive five miles to the diner, where you will meet your cronies for breakfast, a 30-year and counting ritual.

Stooping down to rough up the fur of your dog, or, more likely, sitting in your recliner and calling her to you so that you can manhandle her large bulk into your lap and rock her.

Making your way down to the  vast woodpile and chopping some more logs into woodstove-size chunks.

You are the man who took his children on a two-week road trip every summer, road trips that, over the years, came to encompass nearly every battlefield and fort in the eastern  states, north to south and back again, who who came out of the gas stations – back when you paid for your gas inside at the counter – with his hands full of candy bars, one for each child.

Who sat for hours with your parents after the massive meal had been eaten, catching up on all the latest news. Who, not young yourself, bent to the floor and picked your mother up in a single motion after she fell leaving that one restaurant.

You are the one who short-sheeted your sergeant’s bed in basic training, and slipped the dead fish between his covers. You are the one who hung the tire from the butternut tree, who stayed up all Christmas Eve putting together the race track, who makes the stuffing at Thanksgiving.

You are the one so tough and uncomplaining that the doctors didn’t believe you were in any real pain even though your appendix had burst 24 hours prior, the one who had to lie down on the floor of the doctor’s office to  make them believe you.

You are the one who drives your fearful rural friends to Yankee Stadium every summer, who books the cheap motel where you all cram into a single room, and you are the one who tells the stories afterward.

You are the one who puts your campaign sign on the front lawn, opposite your wife’s opposing-party campaign sign.

You are the one with the big frame and the big station wagon who wore the flame-orange polyester shirt to Parents’ Weekend at your firstborn’s exclusive upper-class college in the mountains, your giant voice roaring with laughter; the one that all your firstborns’ friends gravitated to.

You are the one who drives the old people and the young unable people and the people without cars or friends to their doctors’ appointments.

You are the one who wept when your father died: the first and only time your children saw you cry.

You are the one who called your firstborn on her 33rd birthday and told her you loved her on the answering machine tape, back when there were still answering machine tapes, and she yanked it out of the machine and put it away in a drawer, where it has accompanied her to every one of the six apartments and houses she has lived in since.

Happy birthday.