Chang-Rae Lee - On Such A Full Sea

We know you do, Fan, Mr. Nickelman said. You like our show, don’t you?

Yes.

You want to be in it.

Yes.

You like our family?

She nodded.

And we like you! We do, don’t we?

Yes, yes! their chorus implored.

You see, there’s not much else to say. Not much at all. So why don’t you go in now with the ladies. Hilly and the girls will set you up with bedding. Boys, you know the drill.

The younger boys led Quig and Loreen to the pole, securing their free hands and feet to it with more plastic ties.

Oh god! Loreen cried miserably. We’re going to be their meat!

We don’t eat meat, Loreen, Mrs. Nickelman gently corrected her. We never have and we never will.

But the dogs were silently poised, their maws slick and drooling, the muscles of their shoulders and hindquarters pulsing with anticipation.

I want to say good-bye, Fan said.

That’s so good of you, Mr. Nickelman said. So very good. Please, go right ahead.

Fan, with Hilton still in tow, approached Quig and Loreen, who had slumped down to a half crouch, propped by only the pole and each other. Their eyes were open but not fixing on her, and when she hugged and even kissed each of them, the only thing Loreen could muster was a whisper of little New China bitch . Quig said nothing. Fan and Hilton then stepped aside into the weeds and Mr. Nickelman told her it was time now to go inside. This was something she should not see, at least until the next time. But Fan shook her head, which surprised but deeply delighted them all, the blood rising in their necks. The machete-armed boys trooped forward, their blades gray and iridescent.

But then Hilton screamed, holding the side of her face. When she examined her hand it was smeared with blood from a cut running down her cheek. Fan had slashed her with the point of a fence spike. When the armed boys moved toward her, she garroted the girl with the crook of her arm and pressed the point of the spike against her throat.

My Hilly! What are you doing to my baby? Mrs. Nickelman cried. Let her go! Philip!

But Mr. Nickelman couldn’t do a thing. He didn’t dare try to use his whistle. The boys stood down. Fan ordered that Loreen and Quig be cut from the pole and slowly walked to their car and placed in the backseat. She took Hilton in the front seat and started the car, turning it around and rolling slowly back to the main road. The Nickelmans all ran their hands on the car, bleating crazily. Once the entrance cover was cleared by the old man, Fan let Hilton out and then pressed as far down on the pedal as she could, slinging them north in the dusk.

We have previously indicated that Fan had larger aims in leaving B-Mor, but perhaps this is not necessarily true. It may be more a matter of our own shifting perspective on that brief period, what we have come to overlay upon her journeys as we revisit them over time than anything she herself was conceiving, planning, implementing. It would appear that she was completely rash in her actions, even reckless, as she set out from our gates and went forth in search of Reg, armed with nothing more than the force of her feeling. We won’t say “convictions,” because it is not in the least clear that she was marching for some cause or platform. And though it seems impossible to think this now, she may not have had any of us in mind, at any juncture. Indeed, she may have had a purely singular concern, which she followed one step at a time, via one person at a time, trusting (perhaps blindly, certainly stubbornly) that each succeeding moment would obtain enough security and succor and an incremental measure of knowledge, which can only lead to greater wisdom.

If she possessed a genius — and a growing number of us think she did — it was a capacity for understanding and trusting the improvisational nature of her will. This might seem a contradictory state, and for most of us it would be. We have hopes and make plans, and if they are dashed or waylaid, we naturally rationalize and redraw the map to locate ourselves anew. Or else we brood and too firmly root. Very few can step forward again and again in what amounts to veritable leaps into the void, where there are no ready holds, where little is familiar, where you get constantly stuck in the thickets of your uncertainties and fears. Fan was different. As we have come to realize, she was not one to hold herself back. Or to be fettered. In this way she startles us, inspires us. She was someone who pursued her project as a genuine artist might, following with focus and intensity as well as an enduring innocence a goal she could not quite yet understand or see but wholly believed.

On the other hand, she may have had more particulars in mind than anyone knows. It’s perhaps the only way to explain how she decided to try to make contact with her eldest sibling, Liwei, the one who also left B-Mor, though many years prior and under very different circumstances. Again, we can’t be sure what Fan thought or planned from the beginning or decided along the way, except, of course, for the goal of reuniting with Reg, but she must have known all along that her brother was out there, beyond the walls, and most likely in a Charter village.

Liwei, as we all know, was among the rare few from B-Mor who are promoted each year to join a Charter village, and if they succeed with their foster families and in school and, of course, engage a sustaining career, they can live there as fully fledged citizens. The determination is made solely by the results of the Exams, which the Charters take a grade-specific version of each year but that those B-Mor (and like settlements’) children interested in promotion take only at the age of twelve. It’s primarily a test of mathematical problem solving and logical reasoning, with multiple sections of number and word and spatial puzzles, all of it extremely difficult and not material that is fully covered in our schools. We have made light of Reg’s not even bothering with the test, but the fact is Fan did quite poorly on it, as did most everyone else who takes it. We’re all in a range, as they say. It’s best this way.

For the Charters, it’s much more fraught a process, at least in their last year (when they’re eighteen), with the lowest-scoring decile put on a probationary list and given the chance to take the test once more, when they must score better than half their flagged peers or be slated for service jobs such as retail or teaching or firefighting, unless, of course, they inherit enough money to make a sizable contribution to the directorate as well as permanently sustain a Charter life. There’s always a path. Still, with the stakes so high, Charter parents will spend whatever they must to prepare for this, hiring developmental therapists and tutors when their children are as young as six months of age. For B-Mors, of course, it’s no big deal, for as previously noted, one of ours must score in the top 2 percent of Charter results to be eligible for promotion, this without any enrichment training or tutoring at all.

No surprise that those who do attain that mark number in the handful each year, across all facilities; sometimes there are just two or three; and about a third of the time there is no one at all. This is not to say that there isn’t great excitement when someone does make the grade, as Liwei and a girl from West B-Mor did a few years before Fan was born. Their names along with the others are etched in a stone monument that graces one of our parks, this roster of the exceptional, and departed. Before they leave, their clan will typically host a massive block party that is something like a public festival and an important wedding combined, with long banquet tables of food and drink and loud popular music and booths where they run games of chance, the profits going to defray the costs of traveling to whatever Charter the gifted child has been accepted into, whether here or, very rarely, to a Charter abroad, as there’s a Charter association in pretty much every country, even if there is only one village, as in places such as Iceland and Laos.