Free Anna In-Between by Elizabeth Nunez Page A

rooms to pay the mortgage?
    Does a true West Indian make education his religion but not for his self-enlightenment? Must he be a philistine, his goal monetary profit only?
    “Anna does not speak like a true West Indian,” some of her white colleagues contend.
    “Anna isn’t black,” some of her African American colleagues counter.
    The radio in Anna’s car, the radio in her office, the radio in her apartment are tuned to QXR, the station for classical music in New York. She listens to Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Handel, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius. Opera is her first love. She does not know Italian, but she can sing by heart all the words from Act 1 of Verdi’s La Traviata . She does not listen to reggae, she does not listen to calypso, but steel pan music fills her with nostalgia, brings her close to tears.
    There are African Americans who accuse her of self-hatred, who say she is Eurocentric. Their only evidence is her manner of speaking, her taste in music and literature.
    One and one make two. Two is not the same as one. She has ancestors from Africa, but from other places too.
    … either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation . So says Walcott, the Nobel laureate from the Caribbean.
    Geography, Anna believes, is a big part of destiny. Even if her African ancestors had not mated with other bloodlines, surely the geography of the islands would have changed them. Surely the psyche is affected when one is constantly surrounded by water; surely one’s vision is projected outward. And if one interacts with the aboriginal Amerindians, and later with the Indians and Chinese who came as indentured laborers, one cannot be the same as one’s ancestors from Africa. The European influence cannot be discounted, either.
    She is all of these: African, Amerindian, Asian, European. She is Caribbean and not Caribbean, for she has lived many years in America. She is American and not American, for she has lived many years on her island.
    She is critical of her mother’s strictures, but her response to Singh troubles her. She worries that in spite of the years she has lived in New York, in spite of the years she has not lived on the island, she has not changed as much as she thinks.

C HAPTER 7
    H er father is on the telephone when Anna sees him again. He is speaking to his friend, Dr. Neil Lee Pak, a specialist in internal medicine. Neil Lee Pak is Chinese, or sort of. He is part of the second generation of immigrants who came to the Caribbean fleeing tyranny and hunger in China and trusting in the promise of the British powers that life would be better in the colonies. The plan was that the Chinese would work in the cane fields that the Africans had abandoned after Emancipation, but the Caribbean sun proved an unbeatable foe for the Chinese. Under the broiling sun in the cane fields they died by the dozens. The survivors ran for shelter, built tin sheds, and made a living selling groceries. Most had arrived without female partners, so they took up with the black women. In two generations their children had gone from shopkeepers to professionals on the island: doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, entrepreneurs.
    Neil Lee Pak is one of these children. His father was Chinese; his mother was a dougla—that is, she was part African and part South Asian Indian. Neil Lee Pak’s cheekbones sit high on his face like those of his African ancestors. His eyes are attractively slanted like his Chinese forebears, his skin is a glistening brown with red undertones like his Indian grandmother. He is tall and slim, and his straight black hair is streaked with silver.
    He never married, though he is close in age to Anna’s mother. Beatrice likes him. He flatters her, tells her that she is one of the most beautiful women he has ever seen. She giggles like a schoolgirl when he tells her that.
    Dr. Lee Pak never flatters Anna. When she was in college, he would ask her about her studies. When she began to work in the publishing industry, he would ask her