“So a bunch of us are going out tomorrow night. You should come,” I mentioned casually as we were finishing up. A bunch.
“I would love that,” she answered quickly, without waiting for any further details. “Oh, but how will I get there? I just get dropped off at that horrible hotel every day. I don’t know if I can get a cab.”
“Just come home with me tomorrow after school,” I offered. “You can crash at my place and go back to the hotel on Saturday.” I was careful about the offer, knowing not to suggest too much, too soon.
“That sounds amazing. Thank you.”
I shrugged. “No big deal.” I stood abruptly, taking my tray in my hands. “Bring something fun to wear.” I hurried away from the table, knowing I probably seemed rude. I was afraid, though, that if I lingered I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from pleading with her: Come and stay and stay and stay.
Liz left the hotel on Friday morning with a small bag of clothes.
“Checking out?” the woman at the desk called as she hurried by to meet her van outside.
She stopped, surprised. The hotel staff had never spoken to her before, and she wasn’t aware that they knew English. “Oh, um, no, not yet.” She thought of the green envelope she’d received earlier in the week; the deadline for providing the school with her new address was today.
“Are you sure?” the woman spoke loudly from behind the desk.
Liz hovered by the door, feeling somehow that as long as she didn’t cross the lobby, the woman had no power. “Yes.” Her voice projected confidence. “Yes, I’m sure.”
The woman furrowed her brow and looked down at a sheet of paper, seeming to calculate something. Liz took the opportunity to flee through the revolving door, out into the heat of the morning to meet her driver.
She should have come to me for help. She hurried to the staff room instead, stashing her small bag under her desk lest anyone else see it and mistake this for moving day. Later that afternoon she saw the principal coming down the hallway and she hid in the women’s bathroom. She didn’t think about it; she simply ducked inside, as though the school couldn’t evict her if they couldn’t find her. In the stall she got angry—that the school expected her to find her own apartment. We would’ve provided one for her, though, if she’d asked.
Meanwhile, the green envelopes were piling up. I’d put another one atop a pile of announcements at her first staff meeting on Wednesday. She’d opened it and read the quote on the front: Great change may not happen right away, but with effort even the difficult may become easy. She’d looked around the room, wondering if everyone received the same messages; they all seemed particularly relevant to her life. She’d been nervous to open the note, wondering what new and impossible task she’d be given, but the card was blank inside. I just wanted to encourage her to keep trying.
On Thursday I’d put another one in her mailbox. To know but not to do is not to know at all. Inside, the note instructed her to turn in all her lesson plans by the end of next week, making two looming deadlines.
I wasn’t making them up. That seems important to get straight. There’s a difference between lying and arranging the truth.
I don’t know what she did with the notes. I was expecting her to mention them when she got to my apartment. I see you have an extra bedroom, she might have said. But something held her back. She watched me puttering around, finishing getting ready, and something must have made her nervous.
I recognized it. I’d been registering the sideways glances since junior high. The eyes, slightly wide, always indicated envy, but the pursed lips spoke of disapproval. There was something about me that other women found threatening, but at the same time wanted to possess. I still don’t understand what it is: round breasts, maybe, but those are common; the thick, dark hair that hung down my back in loose waves, perhaps; my pale skin, or almond-shaped eyes. Or it’s the combination; like a poisonous frog in the jungle, I am somehow marked as dangerous. I’d worked hard to fight against this impression, but finally, in the long years before Liz arrived in China, I’d come to understand the ways in which kindness can be read as desperation.
I was trying a new approach with Liz, walking a new line.
“Do I look okay?” she asked me.
Instead of nodding enthusiastically as would’ve been my nature, I tipped my head to one side, studying her for a moment until I could see she was uncomfortable. “I have a better shirt for you,” I told her. “Hold on.”
She looked relieved, which told me everything.
I dawdled getting ready, offering her a beer, giving her time to ask me about the green envelopes, the missed deadlines that must have been weighing on her. I had my response all prepared: a sympathetic nod, and then the flash of inspiration in my eyes, the surprised realization that Liz could just move in with me. “I have this extra room,” I’d laugh, as though it had just appeared in front of us, the shimmering answer to her problem. She said nothing, though, and I began to wonder if she had more resources than I thought, if she’d solved the problem on her own.
This was all just typical Liz. She was incapable of direct conversation. That night, before I understood this, I felt anxious. When we got in the cab, I already knew how drunk I would get. I could feel it coming, like a storm.
5.
Expats love happy hour. It’s a particularly American concept, but the Chinese understand its value and have packaged it well for the lăowài. The bars tend to offer their deals for foreigners haphazardly—one week Glamour Bar might offer a 10 percent discount on martinis, another night it’s all you can drink at Mural. Expats love a good deal of course, but more than that they love to be in the know, an affliction of those who willingly settle in a place where they will always be viewed as outsiders. Getting invitations to all the right happy hours meant something, then.
That week Zapata’s was offering two-for-one 16-ounce frozen margaritas from six to nine. After that anyone left still ordering them was too drunk to care that they cost an outrageous ¥90. Happy hour was more crowded than usual when we arrived, even though Zapata’s was one of the bigger bars in the rotation. People stood two rows deep along the heavy oak bar that ran the length of the restaurant; on the other side every table was full, and the ones on the patio were as well, though few people were actually sitting, preferring instead to stand and mingle.
We inched our way through the crowd, each of us looking to drown our own butterflies. I ordered our margaritas—in English, from a German bartender—and turned to face the throng of almost entirely white faces. The few Chinese who came to bars like this for happy hours paid more for their drinks than we did, for the privilege of standing amidst the international patrons.
“It’s busier because school just started,” I leaned in close to explain to Liz. The English teachers had returned. They traveled over the summer, or they went home having completed their grand adventures, to be replaced in the fall by a new batch of wide-eyed Americans and Europeans, all waving their TOEFL certifications proudly. They were like an incoming crop of freshmen on a college campus, or, perhaps more accurately, a new bunch of summer camp counselors: entirely replaceable, possessing next to no actual expertise they could apply to their jobs, all of them merely in it for the experience. I often wondered what these people would do if they didn’t move to China: they’d be waiters, perhaps, or work in bookstores, Banana Republic, until they grew up and went to grad school.
Liz was probably the least qualified among them that night. Before I really knew her, I assumed she realized that.
Dorian was there, standing at the other end of the bar, glowering at the crowd in front of him, a half-drunk beer in his hand. He downed the rest of it. I expected to see him turn toward the door, but instead he signaled to the bartender for another. He was the only person there not drinking a margarita. This was typical of him. “I like to keep my wits about me,” he used to say. But that night he wasn’t smiling.
He was handsome. That wasn’t my opinion, but rather
an objective fact. His jaw was square, and his dark hair, cut short on the sides but left long on top, accentuated the angles of his face. His features were in perfect proportion, his mouth a square under the isosceles triangle of his nose. His eyes were always bluer than I expected them to be. He was from Portland, and the first night we really talked, after seeing each other out at the bars for a few months, I asked him something about life on the West Coast. Maybe I’d told him I had ideas about going there “next.” Expats often talk like that, listing cities they plan to move to the way normal people discuss the movies they’d like to see.
I don’t remember the rest of our conversation. I remember the dark corner of Glamour Bar. Dorian stood facing me, leaning forward onto his hand, which rested on the wall behind my head. He is nearly eight inches taller, and I must have been wearing flats that night because I remember craning my neck to look up at him. He is slender, but very muscular, not at all awkward. I remember the tendons in his wrist, the slight bulge of the muscle in his forearm, the triangle of freckles on his wrist, pointing like an arrow to the bottom of a tattoo that peeked out from the cuff of his rolled-up sleeve.
With his other hand he plucked at a few strands of my hair, bringing them close to his face as he spoke, as though examining them for some secret. I don’t think he knew how nervous he made me. I finished my vodka with Red Bull so fast the ice had not begun to melt. My hand grew cold, but I had nowhere to set the glass down.
He didn’t try to kiss me. I’ve wondered many times over the past few months how things might have been different if he’d just done it then. But he was interrupted, and he stood up straight, took his hand off the wall.
That was all. The next time I saw him out, he was standing in the exact same position with a tallish blonde girl I’d never seen before. It seemed after that night that he was always standing in a dark corner with some blonde girl who’d only just arrived in the country. It didn’t take me long to figure out what Dorian was all about. He didn’t date Chinese women, like the other Western men, but he was just the same as them anyway. We became friends, if only because we both stayed put while everyone else around us came and went.
I watched him scanning the room until his eyes settled on me and Liz. He wove his way toward us, his full beer just above his shoulder to keep it safe from the crowds.
“So you’re the new one?”
Liz started at the touch on her elbow, and it took a moment for her to realize that Dorian was talking to her. If nothing else, he was predictable.
“Dorian! Slumming it with the plebes tonight?”
He raised his hands in mock surrender. “I do try to make time for the little people. Who’s your friend?” He turned to Liz before I had a chance to answer. “Let me guess: you got here…last week?”
Who could blame me for assuming he was flirting with her? And who could blame me for panicking? If there was anyone else who’d be able to help solve the problems I was causing Liz at work, it was Dorian.
She introduced herself and offered her hand as she swallowed a sip of her drink. “And yes, it’s been a week. Do I still look jetlagged?”
“No, you’re fine. I just know Sasha always does such a good job taking care of the newcomers.”
“I was about to say the same of you,” I interjected quietly. Liz didn’t hear me, but I’m sure Dorian did.
“She’s been a lifesaver, actually. I’m staying at her place tonight.”
“Liz works at the school with me,” I explained quickly.
“Naturally. What else would she do?” Dorian grinned and took a long sip off his beer, his eyes fixed on Liz.
“Just ignore him. Dorian thinks that foreign architects and lawyers have more of a right to Shanghai than English teachers do.”
“Not true. I hate lawyers, too.”
“Right. How silly of me.” I turned toward Liz and rolled my eyes dramatically.
I wanted her to be in on the joke with me, but she was too nervous to laugh. Men like Dorian made her anxious. She was trying, though. I’ll give her credit. She’d told herself that things were going to be different in China, and so she took a deep breath and tried to be different.
She started with a smile. “Lawyers, yeah, ugh. The worst. But English teachers? My God, they’re the scourges of the city.”
“I’m glad you see my point,” Dorian chuckled, but looked just slightly off balance.
“I mean, it’s like they show up here, completely uninvited, and force all these Chinese people to learn English. It’s disgusting, really. There should be a ban or something.”
I laughed. “Supply and demand. She has a point.”
“I never said it wasn’t a worthy service. It’s just not a real job.”
“Did you actually just say that teaching isn’t a real job?”
He put his hands up, palms facing Liz immediately, the picture of accommodation. “I misspoke. I’m sorry. I meant to say that you’re not a real teacher.”
Dorian wasn’t usually such an asshole. I wondered if sleeping with the new arrivals had gotten too easy for him, if he was trying to give himself a handicap. Or maybe he just wasn’t into Liz.
She seemed like his type, though: pretty enough to get a bit of attention from men, not so pretty that she felt she deserved it. Her hair should’ve been a darker shade of brown, with red highlights maybe. It should’ve been shorter, too, but she wore it past her shoulders, usually pulled back in a ponytail, like a child. But her eyes were a glassy blue, her neck long and slender, sloping gracefully into narrow shoulders.
I thought about jumping in to defend her from Dorian’s barbs, but I didn’t. I suppose I wanted them to argue.
“I am one hundred percent not a real teacher. That’s very true. I honestly have no idea what I’m doing.” She smiled and shrugged, as though her incompetence at her chosen career had nothing to do with her. And then, “Who needs another drink?” Dorian and I both raised our near-empty glasses and Liz set off happily toward the bar.
“I guess she trusts me not to rat her out to the principal.”
“Let’s have a drink sometime,” Dorian answered, ignoring my comment.
“We’re having a drink right now.” I was still staring after her, allowing the fact of her trust to settle into my lungs, to become a thing I breathed through.
“Not like this. A quiet drink. Or dinner. I haven’t seen you in a while. I have some news.”
I didn’t care about Dorian’s news. He’d gotten a new project, or a promotion, or another building he’d worked on was about to open. He’d found a new apartment or was planning to tattoo another ridiculous skyscraper on his arm, this one a still-fictional building that promised to reshape the landscape of global architecture. I’d heard it all and I didn’t care.
I cared that Liz had confided in me.
The Chinese might avoid the impulse to relive the past, but I’m moving to Germany, where learning from history is a matter of national survival. There are stories from my nine months with Liz that I can’t know, because I wasn’t there, or wasn’t paying attention. I’m claiming them anyway. I’m telling all the stories I believe to be true.
The first thing that happened was I got very drunk. I wasn’t quite dancing on the bar, but I was likely just one Madonna song away. Liz had done the whole frat party thing in college, so what she witnessed as I alternated between margaritas and shots of tequila wasn’t new to her. But she didn’t know me well enough to question my decision to order another drink, or to lick the salt that accompanied my shot off an Australian woman’s neck for the entertainment of the men clustered around us.
Liz spent the time talking to Dorian. I’m not saying my decision to ignore her when what I wanted most was for her to rely on me made any sense. I don’t remember it as a decision at all.
“So let’s say I didn’t want to be a total cliché,” she said. “Anything I can do?”
“Move home?” Dorian smirked.
“I’m serious!” Liz protested. “Teachi
ng is a work visa, a way to pay the rent. I admit that. It’s not my lifelong dream career. But I still want to get something out of being here. I’m not intending to be a punchline.”
“Get a tutor then. Learn the language, something about the culture.”
“Is that what you did?”
“I was a Chinese minor in college. I didn’t need a tutor.”
Liz nodded, made a mental note. She was good at taking advice, and Dorian was good at dispensing it.
She and I hadn’t made any kind of pact, and at a certain point, just drunk enough to feel tired, Liz stood by the door, wondering what she should do about me.
“You should just go home. Sasha can take care of herself.” More helpful advice from Dorian. “You know the address?”
“I can’t go home. I’m still living at the hotel outside the city. I’m just staying with Sasha tonight.”
“You’re not living with her?”
“No. We just work together. She invited me to happy hour.”
Dorian sighed loudly, as he tended to when things weren’t as simple as he believed they should be. “Okay, then. We’ll have to bring her too.”
They both must have turned to watch me, as I spun around in a circle, my arms raised overhead in celebration of some imagined victory.
“Any suggestions as to how?”
Dorian smirked. “We’ll trick her.” He walked quickly toward the other end of the bar where a small group of expats hovered around me. Liz hurried behind.
He didn’t come directly over, and instead rested his arms around the shoulders of two men in orbit around me, leaning in to speak quietly to them. He moved from them to another small group by the bar, and then another. As he made his way around the room, the crowd began to disperse. I remember this night only as the feeling that things were being pulled away from me, that things were happening that I could not control.
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