She promised she’d never leave him again on the day they found their doppelg?ngers. Back then, six-year-old Deming and his mother were still strangers to each other, but formed a satisfying pair. The same wide noses and curly smiles, big dark pupils underlined with slivers of white, a bit of lazy in their gaze. Her hand was foreign in his; he was used to his grandfather’s warmer grip and more deliberate walk. His mother was too fast, too loud, like the American city he’d been dumped back into, and Deming missed the village, its muted gradients of grass and water, greens and blues, burgundies and grays. New York City was shiny, sharp, with riots of colors, and everywhere the indecipherable clatter of English. His eyes ached. His mouth filled with noise. The air was so cold it hurt to inhale, and the sky was crammed with buildings.
He’d sought comfort in something familiar. He heard melodies in everything, and with them saw colors, his body gravitating to rhythm the way a plant arched up to the light. Crossing Bowery he felt the soothing repetition of his feet hitting the sidewalk, his left hand connected to his mother’s right, his two steps to her every one. She launched into the crosswalk. It was her one day off in two weeks. Deming examined the sidewalk droppings, cigarette butts and smeary napkins and, exposed between chunks of ice, so much gum. Who chewed these gray-pink wads? He had never chewed gum and neither had his mother, to his knowledge, or any of her six roommates in their apartment on Rutgers Street. This was before they moved in with Leon, before the University Avenue apartment in the Bronx.
They stood before the subway map with its long, noodley lines. “So what color should we do today?” she asked. Deming studied the words he couldn’t read, the places he’d yet to go, and pointed to purple.
He’d been born here, in Manhattan Chinatown, but his mother had sent him to live with his grandfather when he was a year old, in the village where she had grown up, and it was Yi Gong who starred in Deming’s earliest memories, who called him Little Fatty and taught him how to paddle a boat, collect a chicken egg, and gut a fish with the tip of a rusty knife. There were other children like him in Minjiang, American-born, cared for by grandparents, with parents they only knew from the telephone. “I’ll send for you,” the voice would say, but why would he want to go live with a voice, leave what he knew for a person he didn’t remember? All he had was a picture, where he was a scowling baby and his mother’s face was obscured by a shadow. Each morning he awoke to cht cht cht, Yi Gong sweeping the front of their house on 3 Alley, Yi Gong’s wheezing, silver smoke rings dissolving skyward, until the morning Yi Gong didn’t wake up and then Deming was on a plane next to an uncle he would never see again, and a woman was hugging him in a cold apartment full of bunk beds, her face only familiar because it resembled his. He wanted to go home and she told him the bunk bed was home. He didn’t want to listen, but she was all he had. That was two weeks ago. Now he sat in a classroom every day at a school on Henry Street, not understanding anything his teachers said, while his mother sewed shirts at a factory.
Two transfers later and the purple line was running above ground, and Deming and his mother looked out the window at signs in languages they didn’t recognize. “This one’s for socks,” he said, pretending to read, “that one’s for dogs.” Near the end of the line the signs switched to Chinese, and his mother read each one out to him in a funny voice, deep and low, like a radio announcer. “Going Out of Business!” “Immigration Troubles?” “We Cure Bunions!” He liked her like this; he could trust that she was his. He kicked his legs in the air as she slapped her thighs in a giddy beat.
They had traveled to Queens, from one Chinese neighborhood to another, and when they emerged from the subway the buildings were lower and the streets wider, but the crowds and the languages were similar, and despite the cold air Deming could smell familiar aromas of vegetables and fish. It was a frigid, hard bite of a winter afternoon. Stopping at a corner, she introduced a new game. “There could be a Mama and Deming who live here, too, another version of us.” Like a best friend but better; like a brother, a cleaved self. They chose the building this Mama and Deming would live in, a short one with a flat front like theirs on Rutgers Street, and watched mothers and children walk along the sidewalk until they found a boy Deming’s age and a woman his mother’s height, her hair also cut so it settled in wisps against her chin. Like his mother, she wore a navy blue coat, and could be mistaken for her son’s older sister.
“Can’t we ask them to come over?”
“We shouldn’t disturb them, they’re busy. But let’s watch them, okay?”
She steered him into a bakery and he begged for an egg tart. In those days you could buy three for a dollar, but she refused, said it was a waste of money, and they sat at a table without buying anything, examining their doppelg?ngers through the window. The boy leaned up to his mother and she bent down to talk to him as they crossed the street. In the boy’s palm was a glazed, puffy object. A flaky yellow pastry.
“Can I have an egg tart? Please?”
“No, Deming.”
He pouted. Sometimes Yi Gong had let him guzzle Cokes for breakfast, but she never bought him anything.
“I want to meet them.” He stomped his boot on the floor. Again she said no. He tore down the sidewalk after them. “Wait!” he yelled.
They turned around; they knew Fuzhounese. The Other Mama was older and skinnier, and the Other Deming was eight or nine and not five or six, square-faced and squinty-eyed like the kind of boy who might light bugs on fire for kicks. A fat crumb of pastry dangled from his bottom lip. In the moment before his mother yanked him away, Deming met the Other Deming’s eyes and the Other Deming said, in English, “Hi?” Then they walked off, fading into a sea of winter coats.
“They’re gone,” Deming said. “They left.” Frightened, he longed for Yi Gong. “Are you going to leave me again?”
“Never.” His mother took his hand and swung it up and down. “I promise I’ll never leave you.”
But one day, she did.