most of my month there bedridden with fever and diarrhea. I recovered in time to accompany my mother and Richard to church one Sunday and marvel at the size of the building and congregation and the number of worshippers who lined up after the service to shake Richard’s hand or pitch him a business proposition. Then, in the crowded parking lot, he asked if I felt like getting a haircut later. I rebuffed him again, and he erupted, screaming at me for not taking his advice (“I even offered to pay for it!” he said, no small gesture for a man who removed the batteries from his laser pointers when not in use) and for being disobedient, willful, and stupid in general. He turned to my mother, excoriated her for raising such a disobedient, willful, and stupid son, ordered her into the car, and left me to find my own way home. In hindsight, perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the whole episode was how none of the other congregants seemed to notice his tantrum, going about their postchurch business as if this kind of thing happened all the time. After walking in circles for a while in the blazing heat, I eventually found my way back to the living quarters.
Andrew laughed when I reminded him of this episode. “I can’t believe you’re still harping on that haircut incident,” he said.
“So?” I said. “He’s never apologized.”
“He won’t. I’m sure he’s forgotten it even happened.”
My hair had not changed much since then, and I braced myself as we rang the doorbell, which played the opening to Beethoven’s Für Elise. Richard answered, dressed in his after-work outfit of long denim shorts and a white T-shirt. He exhibited the typical Chang phenotype: a large, round head on a thin neck, a slight hunch, and a gangliness in his limbs that made him seem taller than five foot seven. Though he was nearly sixty years old, his face remained cherubic, light pooling on his cheekbones, chin, and nose. His bare feet had the same shape as my mother’s.
We followed him into the house, which he had designed himself and featured the utilitarianism of a scientist, the expediency of a businessman, and the eccentricities of a middle-aged Chinese man. The tiled floors were heated. The ground-floor bathroom had an automatically flushing urinal. The décor was strictly exurban immigrant, and crosses and Christian scriptures hung on the walls. Most of the furniture, and many of the rooms, served mostly to store stuff. In addition to animals, he received trunkfuls of food and drink as tribute and acquired so much wine that he ran out of shelf space on which to store it, so he bought a couple of wine refrigerators, even though much of the wine was barely of drinking quality and he didn’t drink. In his office, bookshelves overflowed with technical manuals and business and management tomes, and there was a tatami room for hosting Japanese businessmen.
Richard said nothing about my hair and betrayed no memory of the incident at all. My grandmother was napping, he said, so I would have to wait to say hello to her. He ushered us in and disappeared into the kitchen. I heard the sound of drawers opening and closing. Then he returned with a tape measure and pencil and ordered me to stand with my back against one of the weight-bearing columns in his dining room.
Just as he used to during the summers of my youth, Richard set a book on my head and drew his pencil along its edge. I stepped away, and he unwound the tape measure. In my stocking feet, I came in right at 180 centimeters, the height at which Chinese considered someone to be tall. He looked satisfied. “I’ve been telling all the single women at the company that my tall, handsome nephew is coming to work there,” he said.
I wasn’t sure if the flutter in my stomach was the nostalgic thrill at his approval, or recognition of the infantilization that would make it difficult to extricate myself from the company to search for my family’s porcelain. When I’d contacted Richard about a job, he rejected every arrangement I proposed that would have allowed me to conduct a proper search: a half-time employee, a contractor, an unpaid “consultant.” He had an answer for everything. I said I had to learn Chinese; he said the company offered free courses. I said I needed to spend more time with my grandmother; he said, “Grandma will be around for a long time. She’ll live to over one hundred. The Lord has blessed her. Don’t worry about her.” I said I wanted to travel; he said that was what weekends and holidays were for. I said I had to find my great-great-grandfather’s house and the porcelain; he said there was nothing to find.
I had figured that my coming to Shanghai—Richard didn’t disguise his disappointment in my chosen profession, or for not having kept the same job for more than a few years—would demonstrate enough commitment to win some slack from him. But as I stood barefoot in his house, I realized that for him, the whole of my existence could be reduced to a short, penciled line 180 centimeters above the floor. The company was the only thing that mattered, and he was expecting the same loyalty to it from me. “The Lord gave us this project,” he said. “We need to make sure it isn’t run by people who are nonmissionaries.” If I left the company, I would lose my visa. And while unlikely, Richard could fire me anytime he wished, which would also cancel my visa. I was stuck.
ON THE WAY BACK to the living quarters one night, as Andrew and I got into a taxi, instead of instructing the driver where to go, as he usually did when we were together, he turned to me and said, “Let’s see if you can get us home.”
I rolled my eyes. “Longdong Avenue and Guanglan Road, please,” I told the driver.
“Guanglan Lu, da guai haishi xiao guai?” the driver asked.
I lost him after Guanglan Lu and waited as long as I could before asking Andrew for help. He somehow managed to smirk and tsk at the same time. After instructing the driver, he told me, “He’s asking if he needs to take a left or a right at Guanglan Lu.”
“I thought ‘turn’ was zhuan wan.” That was one of the few phrases with which I had been equipped when I arrived.
“That’s how they say it in Taiwan,” Andrew said. “Here ‘turn’ is guai. Da guai, ‘big turn,’ means ‘left turn,’ and xiao guai, ‘little turn,’ means ‘right turn.’ Because the radius of a left turn is bigger than that of a right turn.”
“How was I supposed to know something I didn’t know?” I said.
“Keep practicing,” he said.
“Why are you talking to me like I’m an idiot?”
“Because you are an idiot.”
Eager to escape both his condescension and the heat—he refused to use air-conditioning at home—I was all too happy to venture into the city on my own in Shanghai’s temperature-controlled taxis and subway cars. I started at the clothing stores, to update my wardrobe with work attire. But my stature, just slightly above average in the United States, indeed rendered me a veritable giant in China, and the common lament from expat women that they couldn’t find any clothes or shoes remotely their size applied to me, too. The manager of one outlet of a famous German shoe brand assured me that none of its stores in Shanghai carried my size, or the two sizes below mine for that matter. I bought a pair of slacks at a Japanese chain that seemed to have been made for a human spider. The store offered free alterations, but the salesperson refused to shorten them for me. “They’re fine,” he insisted. “Pants are supposed to touch the ground.”
“Not when you’re wearing shoes,” I said. “Look, I’m the one who has to wear them, okay? Just shorten them a little.”
He squatted down and told me to join him. Local Chinese could hold a flat-footed full squat without support for an eternity, and most preferred to relieve themselves that way. The cuffs of my pants rode up flush with my shoe tops. “See?” he said. “They’re perfect. You’re 180 centimeters, and a tall guy like you would look really silly in pants too short.”
We argued back and forth until he finally agreed to take off the length that I requested. “Just promise me that if they end up too short, you won’t come find me,” he said.
The fabric market also failed me. It was a popular destination on the expat circuit, a run-down multistory building filled with a labyrinth of colorful stalls offering tailor-made suits and qipaos, traditional Chinese dresses that most female visitors bought as a matter of course.