Heaven Lake: A Novel - Softcover

Dalton, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743246357 ISBN 13: 9780743246354

Publisher: Scribner, 2005

Synopsis

When Vincent Saunders -- fresh out of college in the States -- arrives in Taiwan as a Christian volunteer and English teacher, he meets a wealthy Taiwanese businessman who wishes to marry a young woman living in China near Heaven Lake but is thwarted by political conflict. Mr. Gwa wonders: In exchange for money, will Vincent travel to China, take part in a counterfeit marriage, and bring the woman back to Taiwan for Gwa to marry legitimately? Believing that marriage is a sacrament, Vincent says no.
Soon, though, everything Vincent understands about himself and his vocation in Taiwan changes. A complicated friendship with one of the high-school girls he teaches sends him on a path toward spiritual reckoning. It also causes him to reconsider Gwa's extraordinary proposition. What follows is not just an exhilarating -- sometimes harrowing -- journey to a remote city in China, but an exploration of love, loneliness, and the nature of faith.

About this title

About the Author:

John Dalton is the author of the novel, Heaven Lake, winner of the Barnes and Noble 2004 Discover Award in fiction and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently a member of the English faculty at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he teaches in their MFA Writing Program.  John lives with his wife and two daughters in St. Louis.

 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter Nine

Without chagrin or even a trace of contradiction, Jonathan Hwang informed Vincent that his new class at the Ming-da Academy would be comprised of forty-two teenaged girls. "The contest and the judging were both fair," Hwang said, and then wiggled his bony fingers to suggest the fickle nature of chance. "They're meeting with the principal now. I'll send them over as soon as they finish." He made an aloof, stiff-shouldered bow and left Vincent with a key to the language laboratory.

Once inside, Vincent found the room's consoles and chairs in pristine order. He practiced writing on the glossy board with erasable markers, forming loops and squiggled lines and words, and then wiping away everything but the word welcome, which he underlined in red and blue. Standing at the head of the class, before a waist-high lectern, he imagined himself in a white lab coat shuffling beakers and test tubes, and with a sudden smoky fizzle, distilling verbs, nouns, adjectives.

A sparkling panel of windows ran along the laboratory's south wall, and through them he could see the sweeping Ming-da courtyard. Soon a tidy column of students advanced from the east wing, swung left, and crossed under the spindly shadow of Chiang Kai-shek. They made a procession-like turn into the main building and moments later reappeared in two parallel lines outside the laboratory door. They all wore deep maroon uniforms with gold crests sewn to their lapels, and as they waited to enter, they shifted about, eagerly straightening one another's collars and shirtsleeves.

They carried this same air of regimented discipline into the classroom, where they paired off in four long rows and took their seats while a delegated student, the class secretary, called out attendance. She then held out the attendance booklet for Vincent to sign. The class president and vice president stepped forward and presented a typed letter in English from their school principal. It stated that their class had competed in and won a school-wide English competition. The letter went on to declare them an able and worthy class that had been given the distinct privilege of studying English conversation on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons with a highly honored, foreign-born master of English.

Vincent smiled at the tone of the letter. He already suspected -- from a brief but polite exchange of words with the class president -- that their language ability might outrival the simple lessons he had developed for his Bible study class. He began with his now standard model sentence: Mark went to the park with Mr. Jones on Tuesday. The class repeated this in an eager, melodic singsong, their pronunciation exceptionally clear.

He pointed to a girl in the first seat of the first row. "Where did Mark go?" he asked.

The girl rose to her feet. She stood taller than most of her classmates and wore wire-rimmed glasses. "To the park," she replied.

"Good answer," Vincent said. "But I would like you to answer in a complete sentence. Do you understand what I mean, complete sentence?"

"Yes," she said. She gazed timidly about the room, looking to her classmates for encouragement. "Well," she began. "As you told us, Mark went to the park with Mr. Jones on Tuesday. But I think that maybe he went to one or two other areas. Perhaps he went to the cinema to see a foreign movie or perhaps he went to the zoo to see the lovely panda bears."

Vincent could hardly contain his delight. He made a great show of wadding up his lesson plan and throwing it in the waste bin. "You're too clever for that," he told the class. They applauded the announcement and favored him with bright, self-satisfied smiles. Now lessonless, he resorted to drawing a map of America on the board and then described the state of Illinois and his hometown of Red Bud. He rounded out the hour-long lesson by having each student ask him a question. They began with the standard inquiries, familiar questions that had been put to Vincent both by students in other classes and by complete strangers on trains and buses. How old are you? Are you married? How many people are in your family? Then questions of finance, which the Taiwanese considered perfectly acceptable topics of conversation. How much money do you make each month? How much is a car in America? And last, several odd queries, ones, Vincent suspected, the girls had simply translated into English from their homework assignments. Why is Taiwan the true China? How does the color red affect your mood? A student in the back row asked him to please describe the heroic natures of Chiang Kai-shek and Dr. Sun Yat-sen.

He answered all these questions with great care. He praised Taiwan and its national heroes, stated prudently that the situation in the Mainland was unfortunate. All the personal questions he answered truthfully, with the exception of those concerning his invented sister, Gloria, and his monthly salary. This he reduced to half its amount so the students would not think him too money-minded.

Before they left, he outlined a seating chart and worked his way down the long rows writing their names in the square grids. They all insisted on English names, which ranged from the customary, Sally and Christina, to the unconventional, Cookie and Snoopy. Violet proved to be a highly sought-after name. Three girls claimed it as their own, and when none of the three would accept another name, Vincent dubbed them Violet One, Violet Two, and Violet Three. At the end of the third row, a slim girl with large, sleepy eyes peered into his chart and said, "My Chinese name is Ch'iu Yüeh, which means 'Autumn Moon,' but I choose the English name Trudy because it is a lovely name and because it is a true name." Vincent penciled this in and when he lifted his eyes from the paper, she was tilting her head up toward him with a fondly amused grin.

During the course of succeeding lessons, Vincent learned that the girls were all third-year students, all either sixteen or seventeen years old. Evidently their high school had chosen a British English curriculum. Thus, their vocabulary was sprinkled with phrases such as waiting in the queue, my auntie from Taipei, and my bright red jumper. They used the word lovely to describe everything from fried rice to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. They shared a troublesome habit of lifting large, powerfully charged words from their Chinese-English dictionaries and inserting them clumsily into otherwise plain sentences: My plan to go to the department store was demolished by my father.

As proficient as they were in their English speaking, there remained long, uncomfortable pauses during class conversation. They understood his questions and knew the answers, and yet when asked to stand and speak, many became paralyzed with shyness. Collectively, they put forth a restrained, virginal sense of propriety that caused them to blush over the most minor mistakes and incidents. The word kiss discovered in a long list of English vocabulary made their faces redden and their hands fly up and cover their mouths. Most extraordinary of all was their ability to witness a single event -- a joke, a mispronounced word -- and react in a strikingly similar way, often mirroring one another's exact expressions. Vincent could enter the class and cunningly pretend to trip over the lectern's wooden base and send every girl reeling with laughter. How easily amused they were, and how beautiful, too. Their hair was dark and thick; their school did not allow them to wear it long, but even short it was full and clean and, he imagined, softly textured. Their bodies were slender with delicate, narrow waists, and they were shapely and tender in a way Vincent decided he was best off not thinking about.

On one particular Tuesday afternoon, Vincent turned from writing on the chalkboard and spied a hand in the back row bouncing fervently above his dark-haired audience. He glanced at his seating chart, called out the student's name, Trudy, and she stood.

"Teacher Vincent, do you have a girlfriend?" Trudy asked.

Because many people in Toulio knew he was a single male teacher, and an enigmatic foreigner as well, this had been another common question, one he consistently responded to with a good-natured no.

"No, I don't have a girlfriend." He shrugged amiably.

"Would you say," Trudy continued, "that I have a chance to become your girlfriend?"

The other students gasped in astonishment. A few girls raised tremulous hands to their lips. Trudy's question, it seemed, was not just an off-color remark. It was a stunner, an unexpected showstopper that bore down upon the class -- the girls sank visibly in their seats -- and produced a blunt, unbridgeable silence. Trudy herself was absolutely beaming; she had straightened her pose, widened her already large eyes in anticipation of his reply.

Against her prompting, against the class's stunned reaction, Vincent struggled for an answer. It had to be something witty enough to lighten the oppressive climate, but also uncomplicated enough so that everyone was sure to understand. He could not think of a single response.

Finally, after far too long a pause, he said, "No, Trudy, I'm at least six years older than you and I'm also your teacher. I would say you have no chance."

Trudy, still beaming, remained undaunted by this answer. "Thank you," she said, smiling resolutely, bowing into her seat as if she'd just been granted a compliment.

After the hour had finished, the class president and vice president stayed behind in the room.

"Teacher Vincent, we apologize for our classmate," the president said. "She has a...a..."

"...a broken thing in her mind," the vice president interjected.

"What kind of broken thing?" Vincent asked. He was curious now that the room's tension had dissipated.

The president thought hard, rubbed her index finger and thumb together as if she could produce words with this kind of friction. The vice president flipped through her dictionary. They leaned their heads together and consulted a moment.

"Don't know how to say ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0743246357
• ISBN 13: 9780743246354
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464