slipped the butt in the little drinking hole.
I stopped writing for a sec and thought of my parents’ story. Or at least what Diego told me their story was. The only reason they got married was ’cause my pop got Moms pregnant. They were eighteen and sixteen when they walked down the aisle in Vegas, told each other “I do.” My pop rockin’ hair halfway down his back and a full beard. Premilitary. A hippie Mexican. Mom’s white stomach already ballooning out. They’d only known each other for seven months. My pop once told us at the dinner table it was a case of “slumming gone too far.” Not exactly the true-love story Mei-li was talking about.
“So he writes her these letters,” Mei-li went on, lighting another cigarette. “And the whole time he never so much as looks at another woman. After eighteen months of constantly hearing her mother and father tell her she’s ruined the best chance of her life—not only for her, but for their entire family—the girl finally agrees to respond to one of the young man’s letters. And then she responds to another. And another. And soon they have a friendly correspondence going. They’ve become pen pals who live only three train stops away. Their letters are very simple, explaining what happened that day, complaining about family members or politics or the weather. Normal things. But when the girl turns twenty, she finally gives in to the pressure from her family and decides to become more serious with her life. She now believes she can do both: singing and a family. The first person she thinks about is the young man. The last letter she ever wrote him contained only one simple line: ‘I’m changing my answer to yes.’ They were married ten days later in the small Chinese city of Yixing, in front of over two hundred people. Six months after that she became pregnant with their son.
“At that same time the girl’s singing career was at its highest point, and she was invited to compete in the biggest singing competition in all of China. She breezed through the three qualifying rounds and made it all the way to the national finals with only three other girls. Think of American Idol , Miguel, only with Chinese girls singing traditional Chinese songs. After all the girls performed in front of the big ballroom crowd, the judges approached the girl backstage and told her she was going to be named the winner. But first they had to ask her a couple questions. The winner, they explained, could not be married. Not officially, anyway. However, two of the previous winners had been ‘secretly’ married. She would simply have to sign a release form that allowed them to say she was single while she was out on tour and when they promoted her recordings. The young man, who was backstage at the time too, put his hand on his new wife’s elbow and asked to speak with her in private. As I said, he’d studied law in America, and he advised her not to sign the contract. He was very traditional in this way. He claimed she would be entering into a dishonest agreement.”
I shook my cramping hand and kept writing. I don’t know why, but I was totally into Mei-li’s story about China and wanted to get down every single word she said.
She kept going: “The girl didn’t know what to do, Miguel. She went back and forth between the judges and her husband, asking questions, listening to their advice, and then she slipped off to an empty room to think by herself. See, not only was the girl married, she was also pregnant . And she knew a woman could only be ‘secretly’ pregnant for so long. In order to sign the contract, she would have to defy her new husband and get rid of his baby. It was simply too much to bear. When she returned backstage she walked right up to the judges and told them she would not be able to sign thecontract. They said they were very sorry to hear it and gave first prize to another girl.”
Mei-li pulled another drag off her cigarette. She blew her smoke out the
I stopped writing for a sec and thought of my parents’ story. Or at least what Diego told me their story was. The only reason they got married was ’cause my pop got Moms pregnant. They were eighteen and sixteen when they walked down the aisle in Vegas, told each other “I do.” My pop rockin’ hair halfway down his back and a full beard. Premilitary. A hippie Mexican. Mom’s white stomach already ballooning out. They’d only known each other for seven months. My pop once told us at the dinner table it was a case of “slumming gone too far.” Not exactly the true-love story Mei-li was talking about.
“So he writes her these letters,” Mei-li went on, lighting another cigarette. “And the whole time he never so much as looks at another woman. After eighteen months of constantly hearing her mother and father tell her she’s ruined the best chance of her life—not only for her, but for their entire family—the girl finally agrees to respond to one of the young man’s letters. And then she responds to another. And another. And soon they have a friendly correspondence going. They’ve become pen pals who live only three train stops away. Their letters are very simple, explaining what happened that day, complaining about family members or politics or the weather. Normal things. But when the girl turns twenty, she finally gives in to the pressure from her family and decides to become more serious with her life. She now believes she can do both: singing and a family. The first person she thinks about is the young man. The last letter she ever wrote him contained only one simple line: ‘I’m changing my answer to yes.’ They were married ten days later in the small Chinese city of Yixing, in front of over two hundred people. Six months after that she became pregnant with their son.
“At that same time the girl’s singing career was at its highest point, and she was invited to compete in the biggest singing competition in all of China. She breezed through the three qualifying rounds and made it all the way to the national finals with only three other girls. Think of American Idol , Miguel, only with Chinese girls singing traditional Chinese songs. After all the girls performed in front of the big ballroom crowd, the judges approached the girl backstage and told her she was going to be named the winner. But first they had to ask her a couple questions. The winner, they explained, could not be married. Not officially, anyway. However, two of the previous winners had been ‘secretly’ married. She would simply have to sign a release form that allowed them to say she was single while she was out on tour and when they promoted her recordings. The young man, who was backstage at the time too, put his hand on his new wife’s elbow and asked to speak with her in private. As I said, he’d studied law in America, and he advised her not to sign the contract. He was very traditional in this way. He claimed she would be entering into a dishonest agreement.”
I shook my cramping hand and kept writing. I don’t know why, but I was totally into Mei-li’s story about China and wanted to get down every single word she said.
She kept going: “The girl didn’t know what to do, Miguel. She went back and forth between the judges and her husband, asking questions, listening to their advice, and then she slipped off to an empty room to think by herself. See, not only was the girl married, she was also pregnant . And she knew a woman could only be ‘secretly’ pregnant for so long. In order to sign the contract, she would have to defy her new husband and get rid of his baby. It was simply too much to bear. When she returned backstage she walked right up to the judges and told them she would not be able to sign thecontract. They said they were very sorry to hear it and gave first prize to another girl.”
Mei-li pulled another drag off her cigarette. She blew her smoke out the
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