The 70 Percent Rule

The inside of the refrigerator has a stain with a funny curve. The gas stove works sometimes. The walls almost paper thin, the water stinks about 90 percent of the time. For the other 10 there is no water, and that’s only 5 percent of the list. I won’t bore you with the rest. Mom would. Dear husband, 65 percent of the time Mom says before sprinkling in the other 35 percent while beating down a garlic flower until the petals become a grain of a cutting board. By the time she gets to the pork, you can’t hear a sliver.

But I was served up early enough to be bruised by a few pieces of brick during the Tángshān Earthquake but late enough to watch the bricks from the several flat houses become a part of the leather factory run by some Koreans who serve spicy shish kebab that’s only 30 percent tasty. The rest burns off my tongue. I don’t complain. I don’t need to, having a flower that needs crushing along with garlic, green onions, and of course sesame. Throw the bunch in flour. Stretch until the flour becomes a thin yellowing skin: easy, fifteen minutes and am ready for the gang. That’s what they call themselves, no joke, a bunch of composition guerrillas. Really and hand the dish to my shũ daī zi, and tell my shũ daī zi what the gang is, a bunch of shũ daī zi. My husband looks at me like I’m the shufi daī zi, so I serve up this time my dish in a few words even a book idiot can understand while throwing down the chipped handle of the rubber mallet in one lengthy circle. My shũ daī zi sees that circle and decides with his last degree of book sense to leave our very small kitchen area for an L-shaped couch that we two have managed to rope onto a Toyota Corolla (a very dependable vehicle) after talking down a peddler at the Hadley Flea Market. Then wait. At seven, the gang shows. Two sit cross-legged on the hard wood floor. Three occupy the L-shaped sofa, one stretches out like a beached whale. That guy wears the yellow face of the old Chairman stamped across one flabby chest. Asks how I feel about the old Chair. Now, it’s my turn to stop: is this some foreign game in which a few of my words are let blossom on top of the stone mahjong table a catty corner near family’s apartment, then smashed like garlic, green onion, and sesame on a Friday or Wednesday, sometimes Monday evening. So I repeat what my Auntie Wěn taught me. She’s the No. 3 on the Neighborhood Watch, a real Red: “The Chair was 70 percent right,” she said, placing her fatty palm against a thin scholar tree. “The rest we forget.”

“How’s that possible?” the shũ daī zi says, chewing a hole through his pancake. The sesames on his pancake look like cute little stars, the black t-shirt with a shiny yellow with very thick eyebrows and one cute smile, so I try to remember whether the Chairman was in possession of such heavy eyebrows. Then carry an empty dish across the open living room into the open kitchen of the subsidized housing unit. Flatten more sesame plus a few unlucky cloves of garlic, putting 10 percent in a saucer while throwing the rest into some floured circle—which I stretch until the pancake has a thin enough skin that I can see the cheap metal counter, so I know I’m at home and show the shũ daī zi a chipped saucer and ask the shũ daī zi if the shũ daī zi wants some shreds. The shũ daī zi does, so I dump enough garlic to bury the sucker.

The shũ daī zi compliments me on the growth of my English. I want to ask what’s behind that conclusion. All I’ve done is bury the sesame of a sh...