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a seventy-eight-year-old woman, there was nothing new about this story. Who could blame her for sleeping through it? Xiao Wang stopped translating and covered Nai Nai with a blanket.
    “You know,” I said, “having an affair—being unfaithful, having another lover—someone other than your wife or husband.”
    Xiao Wang nodded, as if she knew a lot about such matters. “I’m married,” she said, perhaps sensing my doubt that she could understand.
    I looked around the room, and she laughed.
    “My husband is in China. He start a tourism business in Jinhong. Now he is travel often in Beijing. Anyway, maybe we do not consider marriage how you do in America.”
    “How do you consider it in China?”
    “It’s not simple like here,” she said, marking the beginning of more than a decade of responding to every question I ever asked with some variation on “It’s not simple like you think.”
    “Maybe we have to get married for various reasons of the family or the society,” she said. “But those are also involving love, I think. Not the television love of America, but a kind of marriage love.”
    “People in the West get married for all sorts of complicated reasons, too,” I suggested. “Not just TV love.” I smiled, thinking of the kind of love Xiao Wang might mean.
Roseanne
was America’s most popular TV show, along with
The Cosby Show
and
Cheers
. I can see why, if Xiao Wang got her information from American TV (which even now she admits she did), she would find our ideas of romance simple. Of course, as I often tell Xiao Wang, if I defined Chinese love by Chinese television, it would be a drab, state-run affair.
    “And maybe it is,” she says, laughing.
    Back then, I just said that people left each other for complicated reasons, that nothing like that was ever simple.
    She said, “Why do your father leave?”
    I told her the story. It was the first time I had ever told anyone other than Julia. I didn’t know why I felt safe with Xiao Wang. Maybe it was Nai Nai’s soft snoring in the corner. Or the comfortable, if incorrect, notion that someone who didn’t speak fluent English wasn’t a real listener in the same way as someone who did. Or wasn’t a critic, anyway.
    I said my father’s name, John Mitchell, disliking the taste of it in my mouth. Then I said he had grown up on a farm in Iowa, the fourth son in a family of Roberts, Jameses, Williams, and Johns, that two of his brothers had died in a car accident as teenagers, and the other took over the farm. My father, in a surprise move unlike any other the family had ever imagined, broke away to go to college and then graduate school, where he wrote a dissertation on Gatsby that was apparently shimmering with brilliance and promise. So he and one of his best chapters got to flyto a conference in New York, where he yapped away without irony or experience about Daisy and the predicament of the modern American marriage. And met my mother, Naomi Silvermintz. It was his first trip to the East Coast, and she was in a dance recital some professor took my father to see. I imagine my mother was all of New York to him, sharp-tongued and mysteriously sleek. Even her name sounded like jewelry: shining and minty music to a farm boy. My father, to hear the pre-divorce version, loved my mother the instant he saw her barefoot in that black leotard. “It wasn’t ballet bullshit where the women are weightless and floating,” he used to tell my older brother Benj and me before he abandoned my mother and me. “It was the stomping, barefoot, modern dance that suited your mother.” He relished this story, loved casting himself as the lover of a strong girl more than he actually loved her, I think.
    Xiao Wang said, “He must love her sometime though.”
    “Of course,” I said. “I think he even loved her later, after—I mean, I don’t think it was so much about her. He was just disappointed in his life.”
    “Why? It must be he has an okay life, right?”
    I had