Preview: “The Man Upstairs”
I was twelve when Nai Nai started talking about the man upstairs.
What man? my father asked.
He lives in the apartment above mine, Nai Nai said. He was meddling with her plumbing. He kept her awake at night. She felt threatened by this man and my grandmother wasn’t easily scared.
Have you seen him? my father asked. Have you confronted him?
Nai Nai told him, No.
This phantom—a man in the night without a name and without a face—was disturbing to me as a pre-teen girl. He was simultaneously a haunting childhood monster, a boogie man under the bed, and the kind of stalking creep that preyed on women. It became vitally important for me to understand who this man was and for him to leave my grandmother alone.
My father decided to spend the night at her apartment to get some answers.
I’m sitting at my desk, twenty-two years later, perched in a room wrapped with windows, surrounded by rooftops and trees whose leaves are still green but have lost their summer lushness. I'm in a house my grandmother would never know, nestled in the heart of the country she believed in. I’m looking at black and white words on a page, but can see my old bedroom with blue wallpaper printed with white wildflowers. I can see myself as a girl, getting ready for bed, and I can remember how, the night my father stayed at Nai Nai’s apartment, I imagined him getting ready for bed, too.
I remember trying to picture where he would sleep: if he made a bed for himself along the couch with firm cushions, or the love seat that was softer but not as long. I spent almost every Saturday of my childhood in that living room, and I was familiar with the contours of those couches. I knew where each safety pin was clasped to keep the cushion covers perfectly taut. I could balance along the arms and pretend I was a pirate walking the plank. From the couch, I could hear Nai Nai cooking—the slam of her cleaver, the crash of vegetables tossed in her wok. It was where I have a glimpse of a memory of her nimble hands wrapping my fingers around a pair of chopsticks (But I don’t know how to use them, I told Nai Nai. It’s easy, she said. You just eat). It was where I listened as she chatted on the phone in Cantonese, which I would someday tell my white friends alarmed me, when I actually didn’t think much of it, the same way I didn’t think much when my other grandmother chatted on the phone in English.
In overheard conversations and anecdotes, I gathered pieces of the history that came before me: one side of my family tracing their way to America from the opposite side of the globe, while the other was rooted in the same house for nearly one hundred years. Stories from my family were as exciting as any fairytale, filled with dangerous risks and ending with notes of caution.
Nai Nai’s stories were the most inspiring, but she was rarely the one who told them. My father told me, she was brilliant and beautiful and stubborn—the oldest daughter in her family, and her father’s favorite child. When my great-grandfather was hospitalized, he overheard a woman reading to a neighboring patient who was unable to see, and he wanted his daughter to be literate, too. Nai Nai spoke three Chinese dialects and studied English and French. I heard stories, told with pride by my father, about how she was one of the first women in China to attend university.
I also heard the story of how she made herself sick from sampling the wines in her father’s cellar, and how she went on hunger strike until he let her marry the man she loved. I heard stories of how she was a military wife and travelled throughout China, learning to cook the specialties of each region they were stationed in. She stood resolutely with her father when the Japanese army invaded their family home, a grand estate that could sleep five hundred soldiers. I learned that she volunteered in the movement against the Communists. When Mao came into power, Nai Nai took a sewing machine from one of her father’s factories and taught herself to sew as a way to support her family when they left China. Even after migrating to Taiwan, she still wanted to leave further, and build a life in America.
When my father came home, I expected a dramatic story about a confrontation with the man upstairs; an anecdote I could add to this long history of courage, resilience, and triumph. I asked, Who is he?
He told me, No one.
I said, But Nai Nai said there’s a man.
He said, There’s no man.
After listening all night for strange activity, he told Nai Nai, I didn’t hear anything.
She explained, He knew you were here. That’s why he didn’t bother me.
I asked, What does that mean?
My father said, It means something is wrong.
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