Free The Foremost Good Fortune by Susan Conley Page B

wait,” I say. “Real fun.” Aidan nods and wipes his nose with the back of his hand. At least I can still reason with him. I open the door, and we climb out of the passenger seat together.
    It’s probably true that a lot of my worries about the boys in Chinaare the same worries I’d have in the United States. Mothering small children for me is a math lesson in worrying: what part to subtract? What part to pay attention to? It’s a constant tally sheet. Some things just feel exaggerated here. I can’t seem to make everything better in China. We’ve given ourselves up to the Greater Forces. Dropped into the river, and now we each have to swim for ourselves. I am counting on the boys to do that. I am counting on the fact that they can swim.

Chabuduo
    Xiao Wang and I reach a language stalemate. It’s the first day of November, and I try to tell her that two maintenance men will be arriving to install a metal rod in Thorne’s closet, so we can hang clothes in there. I think I explain in Chinese that a closet is a place to put clothes ( yifu ), but I’m not making sense to her. In the end, I motion for her to follow me, and we walk back to Thorne’s room, where I open the door to the closet and say, “Closet. This is a closet.” Then we both laugh.
    When the maintenance men ring the doorbell, I stand in my wool socks in the hall and stare at their lips. Tony has arranged their visit over the telephone. The men speak to me in what I now call machine-gun Chinese, and I nod as if I have some notion of what they’re saying. Then they take off their black loafers and walk into my apartment in their white socks like they own it. It’s noon, and I whisper to myself that if these men are going to rob Xiao Wang and me and tie us up with ropes, they should get it over with. I don’t know the Chinese words for getting help. Besides, I don’t know anyone who would come for us anyway.
    But the men are laughing with each other. They smell like nicotine. I leave them inside Thorne’s closet and go into the kitchen to chop onions with Xiao Wang. She’s teaching me how to use the cleaver after she saw me cut a green pepper with a steak knife yesterday. That was when she told me her mother died of cancer. Last year, when Xiao Wang’s mother got sick, she and her husband took their baby and walked away from their jobs in Beijing to go to take care of the dying woman. This is the Chinese way, Xiao Wang explained. When someone is sick, there’s no question. You leave everything.
    After they buried her mother, Xiao Wang and her husband came back to Beijing with the baby and couldn’t find jobs. Her husband is a driver, but no one has been hiring. She says there are no jobs in her old village and the young people have left. Only old people stay in the small towns. Her whole family—including her husband’s parents, who live with them—survives on wages Xiao Wang makes at our house. They don’t have the proper Beijing ID—the hukou (residency card) that allows them free school and a little health care. The card can cost thousands of U.S. dollars on the black market. Without the hukou, Xiao Wang is like an illegal alien in Beijing. The police can stop her on the street anytime and send her to jail or back to Shanxi Province.
    Xiao Wang makes three hundred U.S. dollars a month and works six hours a day. At the bus stop yesterday Flora scoffed at how much I pay Xiao Wang and said it’s way too much. Flora thinks it’s scandalous. Her ayi works twice as many hours as Xiao Wang and gets paid half as much. I want to tell Flora that this kind of domestic hierarchy is not my way. I’d like to explain that I like Xiao Wang. She washes the floors and vacuums the rugs and folds the clothes and has done more ironing in the last three months than I’ve done in my life. She is the housewife I’ve never been. All of which makes me grateful and uncomfortable and convinced we should be paying her more.
    I make a pile of onions on the