Except it wasn’t.
After a couple of months I felt lied to, though the lies had all been my own. I saw in Liz a chance to make things better.
She was looking to make things better, too. Even before I knew her I realized that. People who don’t speak Chinese, who don’t have any teaching experience, don’t suddenly decide to move to Shanghai on a whim. People like that are usually running from something, and though her application revealed no deep sadness, I assumed. I was running from sadness, too.
The beginning was the hardest. I had to let her flounder a bit, but I lived with the anxiety that it would be too much for her to handle, that those first few days of uncertainty would be enough to send her home. But I needed to see what she was made of.
Principal Wu started with his standard speech. “We’re so happy to have another American representative at our school,” he said softly, after Liz had taken a seat in front of his desk, as though she were an American emissary sent to The Singapore School of Shanghai.
“I’m happy to be here,” she answered, because she was here and was indeed happy and eventually would have to stop wondering how it had all happened.
“We will need you to be flexible about your timetable. There have been some changes.”
The contract the school had sent had been vague. She had visions of high schoolers discussing A Separate Peace or Brave New World, answering her provocative questions in eloquent essays. But she would take any assignment. She assured him she could be very flexible.
“Which musical instruments can you play?”
This question confused her. “None.”
“Only the piano?”
“No, not the piano. I can’t play any instruments.” No amount of flexibility would turn her into a music teacher. She wondered then whether there’d been some mistake. Somewhere in New York there was a music teacher with an impressive résumé waiting for her plane ticket. She wondered how long it would be before she was sent back to America. For just a moment she prayed it would happen quickly.
She tried to stay calm, though. She continued to bluff. “I was an English major. I was hired to teach English.”
“Yes,” he agreed, shuffling through a stack of papers, seemingly looking for something. Then he repeated: “But as I said, the school requires some flexibility. There have been changes in your timetable.” He explained that she wouldn’t be teaching a regular English class. The school needed her, instead, to teach four sections of first-grade speech.
“Parents have been unhappy with the class.”
“What’s speech class? And what does that have to do with playing instruments?”
“Speech is talking,” he said, as though that explained anything. At Liz’s furrowed brow he continued. “Modeling a proper accent and grammar. It is usually taught with singing.”
“Do I have to teach it that way?”
“No,” he answered slowly. “But that’s the way it’s usually done.”
There was a long pause, as Liz considered her response. Principal Wu, a nervous man who avoided conflict at all costs, broke the silence first.
“However, I respect the experience you bring to the position. If you have another approach, I’m sure it will be a great success.”
Liz brought no experience at all, which is one of the reasons she was my first choice, but Principal Wu didn’t know that. I was counting on her, though, to realize she wasn’t qualified; the job was a gift I wanted her to be grateful for.
After their brief conversation, Principal Wu took Liz upstairs to the staffroom, handed her a stack of papers—the orientation packet I’d assembled for her—and pointed her toward her desk, set in a cluster with the four other first grade teachers. He hurried away then, waving his hands at the rest of the teachers, or perhaps holding them protectively in front of his face.
The women seated around Liz each had their own classrooms, their own groups of students, to whom they taught reading, math, and history. Liz would appear in each of their rooms for one period a day to talk with the children.
They glared at her. They didn’t speak directly to her, but they talked loudly about a woman named Felisha and the food she used to bring them.
“Remember the almond biscuits?” one of them said while Liz looked through the drawers of her new desk.
“The toffee apples?”
“The durian cakes?”
Over the course of that first day Liz learned that Felisha, the teacher parents had complained about, had been fired two months ago and sent back to Singapore, that she had a troublesome son, that her husband was always away on business. All of these things were somehow Liz’s fault.
At that moment, sitting at her desk, she began to look through the packet of PowerPoint slides titled “The English Teacher,” understanding finally that they constituted the only training she would receive. On the front was an illustration of a young white woman, smiling in front of a room of Asian children. Liz opened the packet, expecting to find helpful information about what she should be teaching, or how, but instead found more illustrations: a picture of the young woman reading a newspaper at her desk, while the children in the class stood around the room, their arms extended in the air. That one had a big X beneath it. On the next page the young woman was standing at the front of the room, pointing at the word HELLO written on the board. The children sat at their desks, their hands folded in front of them. That picture had a large check mark beneath it.
The whole packet was like this: a big X for letting students attempt to climb out the window, approach the blackboard, or punch each other in the face. Check marks for arranging them in groups, for hanging their work on the wall and gesturing toward it, smiling. If it were me I would have laughed—did laugh, in fact, while I was putting the packet together. I don’t know if Liz laughed, though. She didn’t cry. I would’ve heard about that. And she didn’t quit.
Beneath the packet, sandwiched between a form with instructions for picking up her pay and another listing school holidays and closures, she saw a green envelope, the same glossy paper she’d found in her hotel room. She waited until it seemed the other teachers were occupied with their own papers and plans, and then quietly opened it. Inside she found the same folded piece of green paper. This time, the message on the front read: A tiger doesn’t lose sleep over the opinion of sheep.
Liz didn’t understand. Was the woman in all the pictures, pushing her students’ desks together and preventing them from falling out of windows, a tiger or a sheep? The other teachers in the staff room, none of whom had greeted her and who all sat now with their heads down at their desks certainly seemed like sheep, but how was Liz supposed to be a tiger and still do what was required of her? She sighed and opened the note, hoping for some kind of explanation.
She read: Please provide the office staff with your new address by the end of the week. She read the note over a second time, then a third, wondering if words like “provide” and “end of the week” might perhaps mean something different in Shanghai. She tucked the envelope inside her desk, trying to ignore her rising panic.
She wasn’t expecting to have to teach on her first day, and yet there she was, later that afternoon, standing outside Ms. Rose’s classroom, waiting to carry on a 45-minute conversation with 22 seven-year-olds, armed with a list of questions that sounded more like openers for a blind date. She’d spent that morning looking through the English textbooks her students were using.
“You can’t teach them that. We are teaching them that,” one of the teachers had snapped at her.
“I just want to see, so I know what to do in speech class.”
“Speech is talking. You talk in speech class.”
You talk in speech class, Liz whispered under her breath as she peered into the classroom. She wanted to run but had nowhere to go. Then the door opened and she went in.
“Hello, class. I’m your new speech teacher,” here she paused; she didn’t know how to refer to herself. “Elizabeth.” It was default
more than decision. She waited a moment and five hands shot up into the air.
“Yes?” She pointed at a little girl in the front row.
“Where is Ms. Felisha?”
Calling on the first student opened the door; once she began answering their questions she didn’t know how to stop. She spent more than half the class explaining that Ms. Felisha had gone back to Singapore, that she herself had moved from New York, was 24 years old, didn’t live with her parents, didn’t have a boyfriend, did like Shanghai, didn’t know how to speak Chinese, had never been to Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Singapore—places she assumed each of the askers had come from—but that she was interested in trying foods from all those places. After a while students stopped raising their hands and began instead to shout out their questions as they thought of them.
She didn’t know how to control them. For a time she thought she owed them these answers; she was, after all, a stranger in their class, not to be trusted, in need of testing. When they asked her why she’d come to China, why she was a teacher, she began to feel exposed. She didn’t have answers that seven-year-olds would understand. So she lied.
“I’ve been a teacher for three years,” she told them. “In America. I’ve always wanted to live in China, though, so I transferred here.” Transfer sounded to her like a more official word than moved. The children nodded their heads, perhaps confused, or finally out of questions. Liz seized the opportunity. “Now I’d like you to tell me about yourselves. We’ll go around the room and you’ll tell me your name and what country you’re from.”
As she pointed to a child sitting in the front row, she saw an unfamiliar teacher standing just inside the door in the back of the room.
“It’s time for art class,” he said when he caught Liz’s eye.
The children cheered and stood up, quickly forming a line at the back of the classroom. Liz forced a smile. How long had he been standing there, she wondered, listening to her talk about herself and teach her students nothing? She felt her face redden as she followed the line of children and their art teacher out of the class, hoping her failure wouldn’t be reported to anyone who mattered.
3.
When Liz left Shanghai I felt robbed. At the same time I hated the fact of that metaphor. I yearned for the tangible and concrete—something I could have shown to the police. My heart, my lungs, the taste I used to awaken with every morning on my tongue. They’ve all been taken, I might have said.
She had accomplices. Dorian, a typical architect, delusional in his belief that he could shape the world to his liking, had imagined a different ending, and I could never explain to him how wrong he was. He thought I was just like him, that I loved Shanghai. But to me it’s always been just a hiding place.
The city looks like the set of a science fiction movie: the concrete and steel towers, all looming too close to the sidewalks, lit from below to make them seem more imposing; the eight-lane highways, congested with cars creeping ever forward, their headlights refracted in the thick smog; the four-story neon Chinese characters marking the restaurants, the supermarkets, the banks. It wasn’t difficult to imagine retinal scanners on the traffic lights, processing the throngs of people—three rows deep in some of the more popular shopping districts—waiting to cross the street. And then there were the soldiers, erect in their brown uniforms, crisp and dry despite the heat of the morning, drilling in the square in front of McDonald’s, preparing for a future no one wanted to think about. They did it silently, which was perhaps the strangest part. No “hup, hup, hup” and even the click of their boots somehow muffled. Dorian and I paid them no mind, though. At least not by that year.
We understood the bureaucracy. We registered with the local police station when we first arrived, as all foreigners were required. We underwent the labyrinthine series of medical examinations necessary to receive our work visas. The policeman Dorian sat across from in the medical offices, after the third test of his liver function was deemed “too high” refused to look him in the eye. He negotiated, instead, with the office manager of Dorian’s firm, a slight Chinese man with a lisp. Eventually, a fee was settled upon, the visa issued. There was no discussion about a follow-up with the doctor, or what, if anything, Dorian needed to do for his liver. It was a shakedown, his colleagues told him later. I agreed. There’s nothing wrong with his liver, and we bought him many 20-ounce bottles of Tsingtao to prove it. Welcome to China.
That was all a few years before Liz had arrived. By the time she showed up, Dorian had changed. Shanghai was a city always looking toward the future, and three years after Dorian showed up, so was he. The few friends he’d told thought he was crazy for wanting to buy in China. They weren’t bad friends, but they were expats. Expats don’t own furniture, never mind the apartments or houses in which to put it. They arrive with dingy frame backpacks, or heavy suitcases on wheels, which they learn to pack and unpack quickly. They crash on each other’s couches, or each other’s floors, and even when they do find their own apartments, they live as though still crashing. They buy one mug, one bowl, one set of chopsticks. They debate the need for a shower curtain.
Expats are temporary people, seeking temporary lives. But Dorian wanted permanence. In a different life, he and I might have made a good match, his constancy a good counter-balance to my self-destructive impulsivity.
He walked to work, cutting through Xintiandi. The renovation of the old French Quarter, its name meaning “New Heaven and Earth,” was completed the previous year. The American architect scrapped plans to tear down the nineteenth century Shikumen-style buildings in favor of skyscrapers. He kept the old instead, preserving façades and repurposing the buildings to house high-end restaurants and boutiques. There’s also a mall.
Dorian would’ve preferred the skyscrapers. The past, he believed, wasn’t necessarily worth preserving just because it was old. The city’s developers seemed to agree, more often employing bulldozers than chisels in their quest to re-globalize the city, turning it back into the cultural and financial hub that it was in the 1930s. The architecture of the city then—in the French Concession, along the Bund—was distinct. There was nothing distinctive, in Dorian’s opinion, in the restoration of old façades; they looked more to him like Walt Disney’s idea of China. While many of his expat friends treated Shanghai like their own personal Neverland, Dorian saw more in the city’s future than that.
He liked the metaphor and thought of the laughs it would get at happy hour. It was Zapata’s that night. It was hard to know how things like that were decided, who made the call. It wasn’t as though there was some kind of Expat Happy Hour committee choosing the bar. But he got the group text each week, just like I did. Just like anyone who’d moved here and met another expat. Of course, not all of them showed up. It’s hard to say how many expatriates live here. Does a migrant worker from the Philippines count? Or just the well-educated Europeans, Americans, Australians—the ones who stand in line at the consulates, apply for their visas, get jobs at English schools and foreign companies? Two hundred thousand, then, or maybe four. The community seemed much smaller than that though. If we counted only the ones we saw regularly—the ones who got the group texts and came to happy hours after work, went to the clubs on weekends—it was maybe just 40 or 50 people.
Dorian always wondered where the rest of them went, how the community the size of a modest city could end up feeling as small as a college fraternity. The rest of them, he assumed, were real people, out living real lives: jobs and families and houses and grocery shopping, all of it just happening to take place in China. Not like the expats he knew, mostly working for beer and travel money. It didn’t stop Dorian from going to the happy hours, getting drunk with some of them, sleeping with others. He was done with that, though. It was time to grow up.
4.
Liz and I made it to that happy hour, but the first week of school leading up to it was a trial. My certainty that Liz’s insecurities at work would drive her to confide in me wavered. It woul
d take time and time and time, I told myself. Everything takes time, but there were afternoons that week, long afternoons when the sunlight slanted through the glass-paned front doors of the school, when I would hold my breath and pretend that it was all done already: Loneliness driven out, the empty caverns within me no longer gaping, gasping. But nothing was done. Nothing had changed. The silence still cut into me, leaving tracks.
Just ask her, I would growl inside my own head, or occasionally out loud, when the office was filled with the cacophony of teachers and all their silly problems and I felt sure that my own complaints, offered to myself and the universe, would be lost. Just ask her to move in. But I couldn’t. It’s hard for me to understand now what scared me so much. My memories are crowded by my knowledge of how things turned out, the way you can never quite remember the feeling of being lost after you have come to know a place.
Whatever the cause of my fear, I didn’t push past it. Instead, I watched Liz shuffle the hallways and made sure to seem in a terrible rush whenever we passed. I knew when she ate lunch—knew her whole timetable by heart, in fact—and on Thursday of the first week of school, I finally sat down at one of the empty stools at her usual table.
“I’m sorry I haven’t had time to come and eat with you sooner,” I hurried, hoping with speed to project importance. “It’s just, you know the beginning of the school year is so busy for me.”
Liz nodded, gulping down the bite of eggplant she’d been chewing. “That’s okay. I mean, it’s not your job—”
“Oh, of course it’s not my job,” I cut her off. “But still, I know how lonely this place can be.”
She didn’t respond, and I understood, knowing that to acknowledge Loneliness was to invite her to stay. I didn’t push, and instead made small talk while we ate our steamed pork buns and eggplant over rice. I pointed subtly to the other teachers around the cafeteria, telling Liz which one had almost been fired over the summer, which one spent weekends with the principal and his family, which one had once slapped a student.
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