These are the opening pages of my historical fiction novel, which centers around a young woman who has a job offer in China on the eve of the pandemic, and is writing about her grandfather's life in the Underground to understand her own decision to move abroad. It introduces one of the main characters and the primary conflict, as well as one of the primary settings (Philadelphia).
CHAPTER ONE
January 2020
In a city of 25 million people, I was alone. The Pearl Tower pierced the foggy skyline in a monochromatic crimson that hypnotized me into walking away from the piano bar where I’d been headed. I braced myself against the unobstructed wind and crossed the deserted street. On the night of January 16th, 2020, this famous patch of skyline felt like it was mine alone to behold. I wandered up and down the Bund, a riverside promenade along the bank of the Huangpu River across from the former financial hub of Shanghai.
It was close to midnight on my last night of a whirlwind trip to China for a job interview, and not a soul was outside. The local bars were eerily quiet, and the traffic had all but stopped. My stomach swayed with the weight of a tea-stained egg, fried rice cakes, Shepherd’s Purse dumplings, crab wonton, and the decision that if offered the job, I’d take it.
I looked back at the river, its dark waters reflecting a kaleidoscope of neon. The Pearl Tower reminded me of something sinister, but I couldn’t think of what. The emptiness of the Bund reminded me of a headline I’d seen earlier that day. I texted my best friend, Phee.
There are rumors of a new virus here. Have you heard anything?
No.
Ok, never mind. Maybe it’s only a big deal here in China.
I dropped my phone back in my purse, but then pulled it back out again to take one last photo of the clouded skyscrapers, their true heights shrouded. It was cold, but in the exhilaration of the decision I’d come to, I didn’t mind.
I turned my back to the river, content with my secret plan to finally get out of Philadelphia, a place I loved but that had made me feel stuck. I had given up so many dreams—an abandoned Peace Corps application and a halted decision to live on a farm in Costa Rica among them—all in the name of love. This time, I was choosing myself.
I was going to China, a decision that seemed random and illogical to those who didn’t know me, and inevitable to those who did. I boarded the plane the next morning with the knowledge that I’d been preparing for this sort of departure before I’d been born. If restlessness was a gene, I had inherited its most complicated and complete translations.
My return flight arrived in Philadelphia on the evening of January 18th, 2020. As I exited the airport, headlines on a nearby TV flashed with news of the same virus I’d only heard rumors of 36 hours before.
Looks like a lot happened while I was in the air, I texted Phee.
Good thing you made it out of there when you did, she replied.
She didn’t know that I was even considering going back. I began to think of ways to rationalize my decision to re-enter whatever it was I’d just left. In the end, I landed on one reason: I felt displaced, and I needed to know why.
In the coming weeks, I realized what the neon-red Pearl Tower had reminded me of: a syringe ready to pierce the blackness. Even then, I couldn’t allow myself to see it as a harbinger of what was to come.
#
I had begun telling people about my plan in secret: that yes, I really was considering taking a job in China despite the situation that was currently spiraling across the globe. The more I said it, the more I began to accept it as an irrevocable decision. I clung to my dream of living abroad, pandemic be damned, with a stubbornness that I couldn’t explain.
A month before Philadelphia issued its stay-at-home order, my mother came to visit me. We wandered vintage stores and ate eggy brunch and raced through the streets of historic Old City in a torrential downpour. My mother had a knack for bringing the rain with her wherever she went, like her stress gathered strength just to follow her.
“If I get the offer, I’m going to take the job,” I told her over a shared beer. My mother never ordered her own beer, insisting that more than half a pint would send her into full-blown intoxication. I humored this belief by drinking two thirds of the IPA by myself.
She didn’t say anything.
“I’m sorry,” I added. “I know you might not understand.”
“I just worry about you over there.”
“Because of—?” I couldn’t finish the sentence. I looked up at the glowing pinball machine instead. We were at a garage turned barcade, a place that I enjoyed taking my mother just because it was precisely the sort of place one wouldn’t bring a mother. It was where locals went on cheap Tinder dates and friends gathered to people-watch the chaos of tourists ordering overpriced cheesesteaks at the neon rivals, Pat’s and Gino’s, across the street. Such blatant Americana often amused me. My mother and I observed a man in an out-of-town sports jersey order his cheesesteak with actual cheese instead of Whiz, and I lamented that I wasn’t certain which of these was the graver faux pas. As a vegetarian, I’d never eaten a cheesesteak, but I knew the etiquette as well as any local.
“You know,” I began, averting my eyes from so much familiarity. “I often wonder what grandpa would think of me moving to a place like China. It kind of goes against everything our family fought to escape, doesn’t it?”
“Your grandfather was a complicated man,” my mother said, her eyes glossy. “But he would have supported whatever you do.”
She paused, perhaps desperate to change the subject.
“How is your novel?”
I slid the beer towards her, sensing she needed it in that moment more than I did.
“Dead in the water.” I sighed, not wanting to explain further.
My mother considered my unspoken misgivings while dragging the pint glass along the table in a wet line.
“Have you considered writing a story about your grandfather’s life?” She brought the beer to her lips and grimaced. It was, as I had feared, too bitter for her palate.
“Of course,” I said. “But I don’t know the full story.”
“I’ll help you,” she said.
“But what if I get something wrong?” I skated my fork across my empty plate. I was terrified that I would misrepresent a man whose history was so fragmented, parts of it in the archives of Drew University, others buried in notarized letters from witnesses in a national archive of Polish eyewitness accounts. It didn’t help that my grandfather’s name was exceedingly common, making his identity immune to search engine sweeps.
“I’ll make sure you understand who he really was,” she said.
But I wasn’t so convinced. By the time the pandemic was in full swing, I knew that the only way I was going to really understand him was to understand myself during the time I knew him: mostly as a child, worshiping the stories that he told me.
“Do you think I’m at all like grandpa?” I asked.
“Well, you are both very stubborn,” my mother remarked. Now I wasn’t sure if the grimace was from the beer or not. “And intensely curious.”
“I think grandpa also didn’t ever feel very American,” I added. “And neither do I.”
“Your grandfather thought everything was going to be easier here. I think he believed that the Universe owed him for what he’d been through.”
“I don’t think the Universe owes me anything,” I countered. “But I’ve always felt like I was born in the wrong place.”
My mother frowned. I knew she took comments like this personally, assuming that she had failed me somehow, and this was the source of my displacement.
“You’re very American,” my mother assured me. “And you should be thankful for that.”
“I am.” I swallowed the cloudy dregs of the beer. “But it doesn’t change how I feel.”
When had I truly felt thankful to be American in my life? I searched wildly for some reasons that wouldn’t make me seem ungrateful. I had fond memories of eating push popsicles and ice cream tacos down the shore, attending sleep-away camp in the woods, and accompanying my father to canned goods sales at the local supermarket, our donuts in hand as we matched each coupon to its corresponding brand.
“You were too young to hear grandpa’s stories from the war,” my mother lamented. “I should’ve tried harder to shield you from all of that.”
“Well,” I said with a shrug, “now you can at least help me to get the story right.”
What I didn’t tell her was that I couldn’t remember ever not feeling this displacement. Perhaps my understanding of Americanness had been too malleable from the start, and so it was there that I began deconstructing where my grandfather’s Americanness ended and mine began.
My mother held up her hand and in an uncharacteristic gesture, ordered another beer.
“Some people have a hard life before they’re even born,” she said. “Your grandfather was one of them.”
