"No, I won't."

"You'd better not, or I'll strangle him." He gave a belly laugh.

Apparently Maiyu was attracted to this man. Her fondness for him often exasperated her husband, especially when she and he worked the same shift. Heng would fume, his eyes smoldering. Through his rage Nan could see the kind of desperation that often marked a man unable to find his way in this place. Nan had met a good number of these men, who, frustrated and disoriented and desperate, would vent their spleen on their wives or girlfriends, though almost without exception they all appeared taciturn in front of others. Deep inside, every one of them was like a keg of gunpowder, ready to explode. Intuitively Nan felt Heng and Maiyu's marriage was floundering.

Soon Kellman stopped showing up, and then Maiyu quit. Rumor had it that she had moved out of her apartment and shacked up with that black man. Nobody dared verify this with Heng, fearing he might go into hysterics, but it was an open secret that his wife had walked out on him. Heng sighed a lot at work and was more reticent than before, though once in a while he'd yell at the other workers without provocation.

Howard, the boss, interviewed several people for the job left by Maiyu. He decided on Yafang Gao, a woman of twenty-four who had arrived in New York a week before. She had graduated from Fudan University and spoke English fluently. She smiled at everyone as if she had worked here for a long time. Her slightly chubby face showed some innate goodness, while her bulbous nose and tiny eye-teeth gave her a youthful look. Her geniality made Nan think she must have had a happy childhood. Howard hired her mainly because she could speak the Shanghai dialect, which none of the staff could understand but which matched the cuisine of the restaurant. Four decades before, Howard had lived in that metropolis too. So at the interview with Yafang he spoke the language, which sounded foreign and slick to Nan. At one point, he overheard Howard saying in English to the applicant, "I'm thrilled to speak our home dialect again!" The boss gave Yafang a copy of Practical English for Restaurant Personnel as well, and from then on called her "my hometown girl."

Because Yafang Gao had to settle in before she could start, Howard let Nan wait tables for a few days. When she began waitress-ing, Nan returned to the kitchen, where from then on he'd cook under Chef Zhang's supervision. He liked the work and enjoyed seeing raw materials change into toothsome dishes. He tried to learn as much as he could, believing Howard might put him in the chef 's position someday.

Yafang turned out to know some of Nan's former schoolmates who had continued to do graduate work at her alma mater in Shanghai. She and Nan often chatted and got along well. Both were amazed that China, though a vast country, was actually a small world. Many people who had come out of their homeland knew of one another. Most of Nan's fellow graduate students had left China. As long as one could speak a foreign language, one would strive to go abroad. Some of them had even landed in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Russia, South Africa. "It took me three years to get the approval from my department for visiting America," Yafang told Nan. She had taught English at a technical college in Shanghai.

"Why so long?" he asked.

" The chairman of my department said I was still young and should let the older comrades have a chance first." "So you feel lucky?"

" Certainly. You should have seen the long line of visa applicants outside the U.S. consulate in Shanghai. Some of them went there the night before their interviews, but the American officials turned most of them down."

"I don't think people always know why they want to come to the United States."

"Sure they know, for a better life." "But life here isn't easy at all." "Still, there's freedom."

"Freedom is meaningless if you don't know how to use it. We've been oppressed and confined so long that it's hard for us to change our mind-set and achieve real freedom. We're used to the existence defined by evasions and negations. Most of our individual tastes and natural appetites have been bridled by caution and fear. It's more difficult to break the self-imposed tyranny than the external constraints. In short, we have lost the child in ourselves."

"Wow, you speak like a philosopher, so eloquently."

Heng Chen broke his habitual silence, saying, " Nan is also a poet."

" Are you really?" Yafang batted her glossy eyes, unconsciously licking her top lip.

"I've been trying to write poetry," admitted Nan.

"That means you still have a young heart."

Heng butted in again, "Heh-heh-heh, Nan 's a young-hearted man indeed, also very romantic. More impressive, he doesn't drink or smoke, absolutely a clean man, a model husband."

Nan wanted to call him "a loser" or "a new bachelor," but feeling reluctant to continue the conversation, he merely said, "I've got to go down and cook some pot-stickers." He hurried away to the kitchen.

NAN went back to see his family at the end of September. Pingping and Taotao were overjoyed to have him home again, though Heidi greeted him lukewarmly. Pingping had explained to Heidi several times that Nan had gone to New York just to take a job; perhaps Heidi was afraid she might have to shelter Pingping and Taotao if Nan abandoned them. Nan had promised Heidi on the phone that he would come back as soon as he went through his training at the restaurant. Now, to convince her that he had been learning to be a chef, he cooked a dinner-wonton soup, lemon chicken, and shrimp dumplings-for the Masefields and his family. His cooking was a complete success. Livia loved the wontons so much that she wanted Nan to teach her how to make and boil them. Nan told Pingping what he had put into the stuffing, and she promised Livia that she'd get the wrappers from the Chinese grocery store in Burlington and show her how to wrap and cook wontons. Both Nan and Pingping knew that the girl would forget her interest in a matter of a day or two. Livia rarely persisted in doing anything.

Nan could stay only the weekend and would have to take Greyhound back on Monday morning. He didn't sleep in the same bed with Pingping, though they made love while Taotao was napping in the other room. She sighed afterward, saying she had missed him terribly and felt handicapped without him around, because there were many things she couldn't handle by herself. "Why can't we stay together?" she asked. "When you're not home, I'm restless and can't sleep well at night."

"I can't sleep well in New York either. Too noisy."

"Heidi asked me if we were separated."

"I'll come back soon. Honestly, I don't care about the editorial work, but the job at the restaurant is an opportunity for me to learn a trade. Just take my absence from home as a stint I'm doing, all right? I'll come back like a real chef in a few months."

"Taotao misses you too."

"I know."

"If you meet another woman you like in New York, you can spend time with her, as long as you don't catch disease and come back to us."

"Drop it! I'm too tired to have another woman. One's enough."

That stopped her. Nan remembered that before he left for America, she had said the same thing. Somehow she always thought he could make women weak in the knees. In reality he believed he wasn't attractive at all and was too quiet and too introverted to be a lady-killer. Worse, he had never been good at flirting or sweet-talking. Before coming to the States, he had heard that American colleges offered all kinds of bizarre courses. When he enrolled at Brandeis and got a copy of its curricula, he had thumbed through it to see whether there was a course in flirtation or seduction. If there had been such a class, he'd definitely have taken it.