Among the White Moon Faces

9. Two Lives

CHAPTER NINE Two Lives No one who has not left everything behind her-every acquaintance, tree, corner lamp post, brother, lover-understands the peculiar remorse of the resident alien. Unlike the happy immigrant who sees the United States as a vast real-estate advertisement selling a neighborly future, the person who enters the country as a registered alien is neither here nor there.Without family, house, or society, she views herself through the eyes of citizens: guest, stranger, outsider, misfit, beggar. Transient like the drunks asleep by the steps down to the subway, her bodily presence is a wraith, less than smoke among the 250 million in the nation. Were she to fall in front of the screeching wheels of the Number Four Lexington line, her death would be noted by no one, mourned by none, except if the news should arrive weeks later, thirty thousand miles away. A resident alien has walked out of a community's living memory, out of social structures in which her identity is folded, like a bud in a tree, to take on the raw stinks of public bathrooms and the shapes of shadows in parks. She holds her breath as she walks through the American city counting the afternoon hours. Memory for her is a great mourning, a death of the living. The alien resident mourns even as she chooses to abandon. Her memory, like her guilt and early love, is involuntary, but her choice of the United States is willful. For what? She asks the question over and over again. At first, she asks it every day. Then as she begins to feel comfortable in the body of a stranger, she asks it occasionally, when the weekend stretches over the Sunday papers and the television news does not seem enough, or when the racks of dresses in the department stores fail to amuse. Finally, she forgets what it feels like not to be a stranger. She has found work that keeps her busy, or better still, tired. She has 160 Two Lives found a lover, a child, a telephone friend, the American equivalents for the opacity of her childhood. The dense solidity of Asian society becomes a thin story. At some point, she no longer considers exchanging the remote relationships that pass as American social life for those crowded rooms in Asia, the unhappy family circles. And were those rooms really that crowded, the family so intensely unhappy? By 1971, it seemed I had learned something-the something Alice enacted for me that summer: women could not live alone in society. Unknown to me, however, hundreds of counter-Alices in Cambridge had tried and were tired of marriage and were beginning to see their salvation outside ofcoupling with men. The consciousness-raising groups that sprang up among academic women in the Boston area may have first organized only blocks away from the apartment where I wrote, as it were, my letter of resignation. For me then, these consciousness-raising groups held no historical significance beyond a metropolitan faddishness. Instead, struggling for a footing in U.S. society, I was bedeviled by the super-fragmentations that attend alien status in the United States. In my second year as a dorm counselor, I moved from the annex of the Castle to the main Castle building. A folly imported stone by stone from some impoverished European countryside, the Castle was a massive walled edifice impossible to keep warm and the curious landmark in a campus fast filling up with sleek contemporary glassed architecture. To live in the Castle gave one some cachet and a great deal of inconvenience. Helen, Roz, Wendy, a half-dozen or more of the undergraduate women who had shared a corridor with me the previous year, had left the Castle.They had left for apartments in Waltham with new boyfriends or, tired of the Castle's deep-freeze and ancient electrical outlets, had moved to cheerful new dormitories across the campus. Alice did not return to the dormitory; she and Joshua were by now a fixed couple. For a twenty-five-year-old alone, the fall days stretched minute by minute into early dusk and lengthy evenings. It was impossible to break out of the solitude, for the undergraduates had their own intertwining mating circles, their extended study groups. Now and again I ate with Julie and Carol, five years younger, and listened absently to their stories of men who let them down and mothers who were never available.They had...