"So what is Einstein's theory of relativity?" asked the middle-aged man with a humble smile on his face, "I mean, can you really slow down time?"
The physicist hesitated to look at him, waited a good second before giving the high school teacher a condescending look. Then he said, putting another book in its place on the shelf for physics study material, "That's very complicated. It's not about slowing down time. It's hard to explain, you understand." He understood that that other middle-aged man, standing in front of him, looking extra ignorant, wanted to tell his son, a fan of physics, what Relativity was; that was what that man said two days ago when he asked him about subatomic particles. The middle-aged high school teacher seemed a little ashamed. He looked away and the light in his eyes, that hope for some easy knowledge, had faded. But that only annoyed the physicist a little.
The truth is he was not a physicist anymore, just as the man in front of him, who was about his age, was not a high school teacher anymore. They were both just employees at a Chinese bookstore in a country they both reluctantly adopted as their new home, having left behind a country where their statuses were different. Back there he was a physicist, though not at a prestigious university and did no special research or published anything worth mentioning, he was, still, a professor at a university. His students were not very inspired and he was, himself, not particularly inspired to inculcate information into those thick skulls. After all, while the country was raising up high rises, spawning new corporations and new money, he in his small city in the Midwest of China, saw no new wealth. And the only glimmer of wealth was through the letters his wife had gotten from relatives in America. And that glimmer, once they had arrived in this country, seemed real but also infinitely elusive. He now lived in one of the biggest cities in the country, and yet he had no friends. The only person he talked to mostly was this slightly shorter man who didn't even go to the universities, let alone teach one. His son was interested in physics, and science, in general, and math, the man said to him. Then why not have him read about it himself, he wondered.
The physicist got over the two-prone attacks of guilt and frustration after not wanting to answer this simple man's simple question that actually had a very complicated answer. Instead, they were quietly putting the books in order on this Tuesday afternoon, where only one customer was browsing through the aisles, probably not going to buy anything. The shame in the contracted smile of his colleague dissipated, and his normal smile returned and they started talking about how the price of lunch was getting higher, and which eateries had cheaper food. Simple things. Then they went separate ways in the relatively large store to attend to their own responsibilities.
His hair was nearly all gray. He now looked more like a professor than ten years ago when he had arrived. His specialty wasn't relativity or quantum physics, but rather, optics. He held a book with a drawing of lens and the tracing of light rays going in, bending inside, and then emerging from the lens. He had seen that kind of cover many times, and every time he got this little feeling in his heart he never really cared or dared to understand. Earlier he went out and bought that lunch that was now twenty cents more expensive than yesterday's. He didn't complain; it was still cheap and his meager salary was still much more than his expenditure, which was exemplified by this two-dollar (and twenty-cent) lunch. His savings ten years ago in China was nowhere close to what he was saving now, and if he had stayed, from what he had been reading, his savings would have actually shrunk.
But something still didn't seem right.
At 7PM they turned off all the lights, locked the doors, locked the gates, and he bid farewell to everyone. He had forgotten about the question about Relativity, and didn't notice the slight change in the facial expression on his colleague's face. He was deep in his own thoughts, more so now than usual. It was a warm, early spring evening in Chinatown. The stench from the seafood stores and restaurants was becoming noticeably intense with the warmer weather and lack of rain to wash away the detritus of this little microcosm of a close-knit immigrant society. The sun had already set but the sky was of a light blue. From the corner of Elizabeth and Canal, where there was always traffic jam this time and most times of the day, he looked up and saw the North Star. He wasn't an astrophysicist, not a quantum physicist, nothing fancy, but a physicist with a dissertation about optics, but he knew enough about physics, not only to make stuff up to patch up little he knew about quantum physics, but also he did know enough to understand the stars, among other things. He could see the drawing on an old blackboard with powdery chalk detailing a problem of light rays between planets and stars that his students had to solve. There were symbols, complex symbols that a minority of the world understood.
He walked over to the fruit and vegetable sellers. Where did they come from? He knew. He had spoken to them. They were mostly peasants from a nearby province from where he had come from. They spoke to one another in a dialect he didn't understand, and their mannerisms were so crude, so low-class, and yet, in this new country, it didn't matter where you came from, what education you got, but as long as you didn't excel in English, you are all the same. The vegetable seller, a woman around his age, with bad teeth and sunburned face, called him "Professor" in Mandarin, in a bad accent, of course. He no longer minded, and he put on a good smile. He had learned to haggle and make jokes with these people who never even finished junior high, he believed. That was the American Dream, he had realized at some point; everyone had the equal opportunity to get ahead of him. He had been here for ten years and he was still a clerk in a bookstore. He would sometimes tell someone in the nearby park where even older people were doing Tai Chi about optics. He remembered sitting next to two boys who were doing their homework outside, and he started bragging about how much harder his problem sets were compared to what these high schoolers were doing.
He got his Chinese vegetables and a bunch of Dragon Eye fruits. Then gave a sigh and continued on. When crossing the street towards the subway entrance, he saw his colleague, who had also bought some groceries to bring back home an hour's train ride away. He called out his name, in the respectable manner, and ran across the street. His colleague was full of surprise and smiles. They decided to take the train together until one of them had to leave. The physicist was also full of smiles now. He wasn't alone with his thoughts; he was ready to tell the tale of what time travel meant in the theory of relativity.
