Repeat After Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

working as a busboy.
    “I miss the river,” was all Nai Nai would allow when I asked that first night if she felt homesick. “We swam in the river, naked to our feet.”
    “What river?” I asked Xiao Wang, who was translating.
    “The Mekong,” Xiao Wang said. “Maybe she miss the nature life. Maybe for her, New York too commercial. In New York River, no children can swim.” She turned to Nai Nai and repeated this in Chinese. Nai Nai nodded vigorously.
    I thought the Mekong must be pure, unlike the Hudson, and didn’t want to tell Xiao Wang and Nai Nai that the Columbia rowing team had recently spotted a floating corpse in the Hudson. I said nothing.
    The China they described sounded inviting, perhaps complicated with the problems and secret histories of other people, but free of mine. I wanted to go. I could leave New York forever, I thought, and swim in the Mekong, naked to my feet, whatever that meant. Now of course I realize that there’s nothing pure about the Mekong; kids just swim in the pollution there.
    “You are from New York?” Nai Nai asked me, via Xiao Wang. “It’s your home?”
    “I am from here, yes.” My mother lived in a penthouse apartment on 93rd and Riverside, a place my grandparents had bought her and my father in 1966. She had jade plants on the roof deck and a blue velvet couch in the living room, where I used to sit reading for so many hours straight they’d come to check if I was breathing. I remembered the energyof the house before my father left. How it went from chaos to silence. My mom, brittle on the blue couch.
    “Nai Nai want to know do you live—how do you say—with your family at home?” Xiao Wang asked. I wondered if I emitted a kind of unhappiness siren.
    “I have my own apartment now,” I said, “but I go to my mom’s a lot.”
    “Isn’t that lonely? Don’t you wish you live at home with your mother?” Nai Nai asked. Xiao Wang translated and then waited for my response.
    “It’s not so much wanting to go home,” I said, “but wanting to go back in time.” Then, embarrassed at having said so much and concerned that they hadn’t understood, I chattered on, “Back in time, you know, back to an earlier time, backwards.”
    Xiao Wang nodded. “Your family is okay?” she asked.
    I told her no, not really, and when she waited, I said my father had left my mother. She stopped translating, and Nai Nai watched us, rocking slower and slower. I couldn’t tell if she was increasingly attentive or drowsy.
    “When?”
    “When I was seventeen,” I said.
    “Oh! It’s quite recent.”
    “Well, five years ago.”
    “What is problem?” Xiao Wang asked.
    I shrugged and blushed. Xiao Wang turned to Nai Nai to fill her in.
    “Nai Nai say maybe Americans feel—how do you say—casual—about end of the marriage,” Xiao Wang said.
    “Divorce,” I said. “But I’m not sure about that. I think maybe one of them was having an affair.”
    I stopped short of the truth, which is that my father fell in love with a colleague when I was sixteen. I actually saw them together on 111th and Amsterdam, as if in a tackymovie. I was on my way to meet Julia at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. When I had walked half a block past 110th, I spotted my father across the street in front of the cathedral where three peacocks live. My hand moved to wave, but I stopped it and my voice. My father? He had his hands on the hips of a woman in a straight skirt and brown leather boots. I stared, thought those high boots do not belong to my mother, moved my eyes to the woman’s neck and face, which was turned up laughing toward my dad. And I ran. It took me a year to get the words out of my throat to tell my mother. And as soon as I did, my dad left us and married the laughing woman instead.
    “What means
affair
?” Xiao Wang asked. She was translating for Nai Nai, who I feared would be horrified by the tale of my father’s infidelity. But when I looked over again, she was asleep. Apparently for