The Third Son A Novel by Julie Wu

Author:Julie Wu
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2013-04-04T21:00:00+00:00

18

NI WEN-CHONG’S LABORATORY WAS locked. I stood in the linoleum hallway knocking on the door and trying to peer into the lab between the posters taped to the window. The poster on top had an emblem I would come to see everywhere—a blue gridded globe orbited by a satellite: SYMPOSIUM ON SCIENTIFIC ASPECTS OF THE INTERNATIONAL GEOPHYSICAL YEAR, APRIL 1957 . . .

I stepped onto a low molding and pulled on the locked door handle to boost myself up. And in that moment of pulling my chin up to the top edge of the poster, I was again a schoolchild, standing atop piles of broken desks to watch the Nationalist soldiers scavenge the very outlets off the wall.

But I was no longer that provincial child spying on a force that I was helpless to resist, and the room before me now was empty of people, soldiers or otherwise. It shone, laboratory benches beckoning with piles of shining steel equipment—capacitors, battery testers, and a large machine with round glass screens and a reel-to-reel tape standing at the ready. Above, on the wall, hung a framed picture of three men in a barren, windy landscape, flanking a rocket. The images from my past slipped away, and I saw that my future was here, in this room.

“You see?” Li-wen said behind me. “There’s no one here, I’m telling you. Let’s go have lunch. We have some shio mai from Chicago.”

“They’ll take a long time to defrost,” Sun-kwei said. “What about the leftover pork chops?”

I had been putting up with them all morning. First, they had said Ni Wen-chong did not exist. Then, after I found his name listed in the University of Michigan telephone book and found his building in a brochure about North Campus, they said that the Aeronautical Engineering Department was too far away, that it required a car, that North Campus hadn’t even been built yet . . .

A door opened at the end of the hallway, and a group of young men appeared, carrying clipboards, their shadows flitting across the pool of reflected light on the linoleum. I jumped down from the window when I saw that one of the men was Chinese. How many Chinese guys could there be in this department?

I ran down the hallway, feet clattering. “Ni Wen-chong! Ni Wen-chong!” My voice echoed.

The man stopped, propping the door open with his shoulder. He was slim, compact, holding his clipboard under his arm. He looked at me in annoyance as the rest of the group galloped down the stairs. “Please,” he said. “We’re late for the launch.” He spoke, to my surprise, with a Hong Kong accent.

“The launch?”

He started hurrying down the stairs, the tapping of his shoes against the concrete stairs echoing in the stairwell. I ran down after him.

“I’ll be back in the lab at one thirty,” he called. “You want help with class, Rodney can help you. He’s in the student lounge.”

His head bobbed up and down, disappearing from view.

“I have something for you,” I called out, my voice bouncing from wall to wall.

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