Typical American Read Online Free

States wouldn't so much as recognize them?
    He refused to be made an American citizen. He thumbed his nose at the relief act meant to help him, as though to claim his home was China was to make China indeed his home. And wasn't it still? Even if his place in it was fading like a picture hung too long in a barbershop — even if he didn't know where his family was anymore? Or was it exactly because he didn't know where his family was? For certainly he felt more attached to them for their having turned abstract — missing them more than he had liked them, the missing being simpler. Though not

    that simple, not when a family disappeared the way his had, vanishing as if into a crowd, or into a clutch of wilderness, or into some kidnapper's hidden cove. Suddenly no more letters. Who knew why, who knew what had happened? Their story was an open manhole he could do nothing to close.
    Yet he dreamed about saving them anyway — of a simple ending, the missing lid found. The filial son, smashing apart the rock mountain prison. The filial son, talking things out with Mao. (Sure, Mao said, he understood, after all he had parents too.) The filial son, offering his wife Cammy in sacrifice, whispering I'm sorry as men drew their muddy fingers down her skirt.
    Cammy, he dreamed. Still, after ail these months, Cammy.
    This, when he could sleep. Other times he thrashed all night, thinking nothing, his body cramping, dry, racked, beside itself. He banged his ankles on the bed frame, his elbows and wrists against the wall; until, at daybreak, battered and exhausted, he could finally reflect on the whole sobering state of things — appreciating as if from a book how colossal his China was, how fragile his family's house, their garden, their little systems for keeping food from spoiling, for presenting his sisters to company in die very best light. Memories filled him — New Years' feasts, fireworks, chestnuts. His two sisters, a pair of not-boys. Know-It-Ail kept an all-white kitten; he itched just to think about it. His too large mother, his even larger father. He remembered second aunt with her cactus collection, fifth uncle with his beard, eighth uncle with that opium addict, socialite wife. His grandfather with all those spots on his face. The cousins with their bugs — those bugs — and that funny wooden bridge over the neck of the pond, collapsing once under their collective weight. A single warning creak; then there they all were, waist deep in mud and carp, laughing, their shoes unglued.
    Of course, there were other sorts of times too. His first day of middle school, in front of everybody, he mixed up the strokes of his own name. Then he was coming home; then he was in

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    the far back courtyard, with the servants, breaking a rooster's neck. He was lopping off its head with a cleaver — ruining the meat! the servants yelled. So much talk! The kitchen help chattering, chattering, chattering...
    But here was a thing to be happy about. Now the servants chattering have become a choir in a silent movie, a line of O mouths — or a school of fish, blub blub. And his father striding up — underwater, he has turned boneless, a ballet dancer. His black gown clings, his shoes have been ruined.
    Ralph, in New York, kicked one of his hard leather wing tips across the room.
    His downstairs neighbor knocked his immediate protest with a broom handle. High-strung, this neighbor was. When Ralph tossed and turned, he did too, he said. He wanted Ralph to buy a rug. A rug! Ralph sent his other wing tip to join the first, and toed one of his slippers besides, imagining his father being tortured. Not that he hoped his parents were tortured. He hoped they weren't so much as touched, he hoped nothing happened, nothing. He saw a hairy Communist swagger into his father's study, belch, spit on the floor, pick up a scroll... and already Ralph was outraged. Fingerprints! The scoundrel's left fingerprints!
    Ralph could also envision a different scene,