He was a nice guy. You just had to get past the markings of autism across his face, the shocking things he would say, the cowboy hat, and the fact that he looked like a Chinese Tom Hanks. Also, I’d never met a Chinese man who hated rice. But here he was, and here we were, in his car on the way to the Halifax airport. Zheng was drawling in a tampered Texan accent about my roommate, so I kept steering the conversation away from the topic of my short, thin-in-all-the-right-places, thick-in-all-the-right-places roommate, because he would lean into a rant about her and miss the exit off the highway. Twice, we were halfway to Truro before I’d realized we were off course.
Finally, Zheng got into one of his stories. “So there I was, with Spider, pumping gas into, you know, my car. I love this thing, just taking care of it, right? Then this LADY comes up to me asking for directions. I tell her to go left and up a hill and down around something-or-other. But then she stops and stares at me and says…” he paused.
“I-DON’T-SPEAK-SPANISH.” His eyes went round at this point in the story, making the face she must have been making.
Let’s go back in time now. To a 15-year old Zheng, putting his hand into a potted plant in some airport in Texas after a long flight from China. No, let’s go back a little further than that. I want to start with how his parents met. She was a beautiful, well-educated, high ranking official in the height of communist China. At the time, they would pair the ups with the lows to breed something neutral, in the spirit of communism. So she was arranged to be married to an alcoholic, bush-man soldier. One-child later, Zheng was born, and grew up on the military compound where his parents lived. In the middle of the night, he would steal his dad’s car and drive around and around, “just thinking, you know?” and would never be found out.
His mother loved him, and must have sensed that her son was different. So there he was, in the Texan airport, really alone, for the first time. “Touching American soil, for the first time.” My understanding was that his mother would visit often to take him to the ballet, to the symphony, to the theatre. We found that we shared a love for Mendelssohn. His mother had sent him everywhere, and somewhere along the line, she found out that her son could take photos. A Forrest Gump moment for him. Every photo he took looked like the cover of a National Geographic. And we would finally get a glimpse of the bizarre travels they would take together. Twice to Tibet to work on a community project, and once to Mongolia. I think she was hoping that he would find true love in one of those remote, poor places.
Since he never did, she finally found him a wife. We all found out about it years later from his Facebook photo album of 143 professional photos. Cold photos of the couple holding each other under European arcs, a beach, 20 different wedding gowns, and stiff poses with fabric backdrops. There was Chinese Tom Hanks in a bow tie, with a woman that looked like a teenage starlet.
I sent him a message to congratulate him on his beautiful wife, but I never heard back. In the end, we did make it to the airport ok. I had budgeted an extra 4 hours of driving time.
