“Sasha!” he said finally, as though noticing me for the first time. “Everyone’s going to Blue Frog. I’ll get your tourist. Let’s share a cab.” He turned without waiting for me to answer, put his arm around Liz and ushered her toward the door. I remember clearly the drape of Dorian’s arm around her shoulder. I remember the pounding of my own heart.
“Liz!” I shouted after them, as though I wanted to stop her from getting on a train and leaving me behind. She and Dorian both turned.
“You should move in with me!”
She was quiet. In my memory, everything was. What I must have sounded like.
“I know you need to find your own place,” I continued, trying to slow my breathing. “I know the school isn’t helping. I have an extra room.” I shrugged then, trying to convey the level of disinterest I had been practicing all week.
“Oh,” she finally answered. “I hadn’t thought of getting a roommate.”
“Great,” Dorian cut in before I had a chance to reply. “Can we go home now?”
When the cab that Dorian hailed pulled up in front of my apartment building, he stepped from the car to let Liz and me out and then said goodnight, his hand still clutching the edge of the door. When had he become the chivalrous type? There was a time, not so long ago, when a cab ride home with two women—one of them drunk and the other clueless—would have meant something very different to him. I’d already rebuffed his feeble attempt to ask me out, but the thought of sleeping with Liz must’ve crossed his mind. I doubt the fact that she was staying with me would’ve stopped him. In fact, I’m sure a part of him chuckled at the thought of my face, were I to find him the next morning in my apartment.
But he hadn’t done it. As the cab ferried him across town and let him out in front of his own building, he must’ve felt a fleeting moment of pride in himself. But then what kind of asshole feels proud of himself for helping a friend get home? Because we were friends, Dorian and I.
He paused on the dark landing between the sixth and seventh floors of his building, catching his breath. His whole life seemed paused at that moment. He couldn’t see where he was going but knew there was nothing to be gained returning the way he’d come.
But then he kept walking, because the landing—which smelled faintly of urine—was not a metaphor.
His apartment was un-airconditioned and stifling. Dorian retrieved a bottle of Tsingtao from the mini-fridge and carried it across the studio, perching himself on the open window ledge where he had a clear view of the alley below. He could’ve afforded a much nicer place. He was the only non-Chinese I knew who lived in a building without an elevator. But then, he was the only non-Chinese I knew with a sizable savings account.
His meeting with Yang Xue, his real estate agent, was at nine the next morning. He should have gone straight to bed, should have, in fact, come home immediately after work to review his paperwork and get a good night’s sleep. Too late for that now. He was too excited to sleep, anyway; even after the five beers he’d had so far. He wondered how long the process would take, hoped to be moving into a new condo before the holidays.
It had to be Pudong. Shanghai’s future was on the East bank of the Huangpu River, and Dorian would be part of it. Everyone in his firm—Dorian included—was helping to shape that future; he wanted to live in it, too. He didn’t understand the colleagues who lived in one of the many tiled high-rises dotting the city, or worse the charmless planned neighborhoods on the outskirts, each house a replica of the one next door. Dorian would rather die. He’d be clear with Yang Xue that he needed to live in a building that mattered.
He’d already rehearsed the conversation he’d have with his mother. He’d call to invite her for Christmas, and she’d demure, citing the cost of the flight, the hotel.
“I’ve saved enough money for your flight,” he’d tell her, because it was true. There was down payment money, and flight money, all of it waiting, ready to serve. “And you don’t need a hotel. I have a guest room.”
“What do you mean, Dorian? Did you move?”
“I bought a condo.” He would say it slowly, but without too much excitement, as though talking about a new pair of shoes.
His mother would have enough enthusiasm for both of them. She’d shriek and laugh and ask Dorian to repeat himself, unsure that she’d heard correctly.
“Check your e-mail,” he’d tell her. “I just sent you the pictures.” Because he’d have cued up the message before dialing her number. Subject line: Check it out.
His mother would scroll through the photos, mostly speechless, occasionally exclaiming.
“Well, I was going to spend Christmas in Arizona with Simon and the kids. But now…I mean, I need to come see your new place. I’m so proud of you!”
Fuck Simon. Fuck the kids, Dorian thought. No, not fuck the kids. His niece and nephew were fantastic. Magnificent. It wasn’t their fault that their father was an asshole real estate developer with too much money and terrible taste. But fuck Simon. For sure, fuck Simon. He could bring the kids to Shanghai if he was so desperate for family time over the holidays. Dorian would find him a nice hotel. And Simon would talk endlessly about all the expats getting rich in Shanghai, wondering aloud and often why Dorian wasn’t using his connections to open a bar. Simon had no idea what it meant to build something that left a mark. Meanwhile his wife, who was as plastic-looking and generic as the sub-divisions Simon built, would fret over whether the beef and fried onions served to her might in fact be dog, because “don’t they eat dog here, Dorian?” and why had the chef been looking at her like that anyway? Eventually Dorian would snap and tell Simon that if he wanted to invest in China so badly, maybe he should spend eight years of his life learning the language and the culture instead of being such an asshole American. His mother would ball her napkin, smooth it out, ball it again, shaking her head without saying anything.
Dorian chugged the last half of his beer in two long gulps. When he finished he let the bottle slide through his fingers past the six stories of windows below him. Everyone who moved to Shanghai complained about the noise; to Dorian it seemed impossibly quiet. The sound of shattering glass filled the night.
6.
I didn’t say anything as Liz and I made our way into the building and onto the elevator, her arm around my waist. It took her a couple minutes to open the apartment door—the series of unfamiliar keys and locks confusing—and I slid down the wall and onto the floor while she worked. I wasn’t really so drunk anymore, but I pretended, hoping to avoid calling attention to the way I’d ruined everything. She would leave the next morning and never talk to me again. When she finally got the door open she turned to scoop me up off the linoleum.
“Let’s get you to bed.”
“Don’t leave me,” I pleaded. “Never leave me.” My desperation tasted like vomit. Maybe I wasn’t pretending to be drunk.
She helped me into bed, set a trashcan near my head, and went by herself into the guest room. Stripping down, she got under the blanket and lay there awake for as long as she could, watching neon lights dance outside her window. Her old apartment in Brooklyn was over 7,000 miles away, as the jet flies. It should’ve taken longer to travel so far. Her muscles should’ve hardened like a marathoner’s or atrophied like an astronaut’s. Three months earlier she’d been a waitress in Brooklyn, in love and daydreaming about the apartment she and Bryan would finally share. On that night she was an English teacher in Shanghai, slightly drunk and fantasizing about Dorian—the new friend who’d taken care of her that night. If she thought of me at all it was only to wonder how she would extricate herself from my need. At some point before the neon signs blinked off, she made her decision.
The next morning, I lay awake in bed, keeping my eyes closed—just as I did every morning—for one breath, two breaths, three deep breaths. One breath and I registered the headache, faint but throbbing, a hum in the background. It was nothing new. At two breaths I noted that I was still wearing my clothes and immediately pushed t
he thought out of my mind. Not now. Not yet. Three breaths and I felt my chest rise and fall smoothly, just as it was meant to. I opened my eyes.
Now. Now I could let the world in. I was still in my clothes, but my shoes were off. The drapes were open, and sunlight filtered through the haze which, as always, made it impossible to gauge the time. I heard noises outside my room and remembered Liz, presumably out there pacing, wanting a cab back to her hotel, wondering what the hell was wrong with me.
I consoled myself that the drinking wasn’t my fault. I’d been nervous: to suggest that Liz might want to move in, to remain silent. Loneliness sat perched on the edge of my bed, head cast downward like a sullen teenager. I closed my eyes again. One breath. Two breaths. I got up on three, using the exhalation to propel myself through the door. I turned toward the extra bedroom, its door ajar, through which I saw Liz folding a shirt, placing it into the dresser drawer.
“Good morning,” I said too loudly, surprising us both.
“Oh, hey. Good morning. How are you?”
She cocked her head and I cringed at the fool I’d made of myself. “I’m good. How are you?” My voice trailed off. I wanted to ask her what she was doing.
“Good.” She sounded maniacally upbeat. “I don’t have much with me, but I figured I might as well start unpacking. I was thinking I could pick up the rest of my stuff later today?”
“Right. Of course,” I answered. I didn’t ask her whether she’d changed her mind about a roommate. The answer seemed obvious, and I didn’t want to imply that I wasn’t happy. The truth was, I was thrilled, but also confused. I’d had my plans, but they’d been ruined by an indeterminate amount of tequila. At the time it was impossible for me to grasp that Liz must have had plans of her own.
“It is really so nice of you to let me live here,” she smiled. “I have no idea how I’d find another place, and I think this is really going to work out perfectly.”
“Me too.” It was the truth. I watched her for another moment. She was still putting away the same shirt; she’d folded it three times, tried it out in two different drawers. I frowned for a moment, still confused, but then caught myself, turned, and headed into the kitchen.
“Do you want some tea?” I called behind me.
“Um… no thanks.”
I shrugged, though Liz couldn’t see me. Tea for one was fine. Loneliness hadn’t come out of my room. I turned the kettle on and leaned against the wall in the kitchen, took one breath, two breaths, three breaths.
7.
Like its inhabitants, Shanghai seemed to hope for something better for itself, the gleaming glass and steel towers of Pudong rising up as though in challenge to the 150-year-old French vision of what China was meant to be on the opposite side of the river. Shanghai had found its own identity since then: a glittering capitalist heart, hardened into a diamond and barely hidden beneath its drab, brown communist cloak. The signs of it were everywhere:
At the 11-story Shanghai No. 1 Department Store, just down the road from People’s Square, where young Chinese couples navigated the escalators from the clothing departments up through housewares and electronics, signaling—with each flight ridden and commodity purchased—the strength of their relationships;
On the sidewalks surrounding the luxury apartment buildings on Huaihai Road, where the ayis waited at school bus stops for their charges, each of them responsible, of course, for only one little prince or princess, who, at four or five years old had already learned that they should not have to carry their backpacks any farther than two short steps off the bus;
At Xiangyang Market, where so many expats I knew haggled via calculators (or in Chinese, if they’d gotten around to the money lesson with their tutors) for knock-off Gucci bags and Prada sunglasses, and then later, at Carrefour, spent more on French cheese and real olive oil than we paid our maids in a week, feeling equally good about the discounts won at the former, and the exorbitant price of real luxury afforded at the latter.
Constantly under construction, Shanghai was a place to reinvent yourself. This was true for the expats like me and Liz, who shed old selves like so much dead skin sloughed off by our pedicurists, but also, increasingly, for the Chinese themselves, or the young ones anyway, the ones who hung out in the internet cafés and who understood the ways in which small screens, small connections, could increase exponentially the size of their lives.
Liz had taken Dorian’s advice for shedding her old self and had found a language tutor, refusing my offer to do it and explaining she wanted a native. Could she tell that I felt sorry for myself as I watched her leave for her first session three weeks after she’d moved in? I don’t know how to describe the way the clicking latch of the front door echoed through our apartment after she’d gone. Loneliness exhaled loudly.
Liz had been several times to the Starbucks at Xujiahui; it was one of three that had quickly become part of her regular rotation including the one at Xintiandi and the one at our bus stop, in the ground floor of a luxury hotel, which was, infuriatingly, never open at the posted time of 7:30. Every day of the previous week, she’d stared longingly through the plate glass window into the darkened café, until our bus pulled into the drive and she’d curse the lone employee who clearly had no regard for punctuality and refused to make eye contact through the locked door. I didn’t drink coffee, and we didn’t own a machine. It never occurred to me to buy one. No—that’s not true. It did occur to me, but I assumed if I held out she would break her American habits. She drank tea with me eventually, but she never stopped loving Starbucks.
Liz knew she shouldn’t enjoy her visits as much as she did. She wanted everything about her life in Shanghai to be authentic; wanted to fight against the pull of globalism, choosing to ignore—when she thought about it—that it was that very pull that brought her here in the first place. She wanted to think of herself as above it all. She didn’t move to China for easy money at a bullshit job, or knock-off purses, despite what her life might look like to an outside observer. She certainly didn’t come to drink overpriced American coffee. And yet.
It was an oasis for her, a kind of port she hoped one day not to need. In Starbucks, patrons formed an orderly line in front of the counter, heads craned toward the menu posted in English and Chinese. With a few modifications—the green tea lattes, the lychee Frappuccinos—they offered the same drinks they did back home. The baristas were all either fluent in English, or simply fluent in Starbucks. Tall, grande, soy, skim: they pronounced the words almost without accent. Once clutching her mug—a nice change, the mugs, from the shops back home—she could take a seat in the corner and sit for as long as she wanted. She was not jostled or pressed upon or stared at, as she was on the sidewalks or in the mall. She could take deep breaths and feel herself expanding, settling. I never came with her—one of a handful of mistakes I made in those early days. In addition to not drinking coffee, I was honestly offended by the very idea of Starbucks in Shanghai. I know it made no sense: Element Fresh, on Nanjing Road next to the Ritz-Carlton, where we went for brunch and ordered—from the all-English menu—carrot-apple juice with ginseng, breakfast burritos and French toast, was good, both decadent and somehow necessary. Starbucks was bad. I hung on to the judgment, though, with the vehemence of a 25-year-old.
It didn’t bother Liz. After a few weeks in the apartment together, we’d settled into a routine. Starbucks, where she went on Sundays, and sometimes after school, was the only thing that was Liz’s alone. She went and ignored my eye rolling, my sighs. At the same time, she hoped that her language exchange would introduce her to new places she’d feel comfortable going to on her own. She would make the request later, after she’d gotten to know Sam. For now she recognized a kind of logic to their meeting at a chain with an atmosphere so uniform and distinct from the rest of the city that it seemed almost to be a country in itself, broken into thousand-square-foot units. It was neutral territory: The United States of Au Lait, The People’s Republic of Chai.
Of the Star
bucks in her rotation, the one at Xujiahui was her least favorite, but in their initial exchange of text messages, Sam had suggested it and she didn’t want to appear disagreeable. The inside of the mall, with its domed roof sitting atop an open atrium, ringed by shops and elegantly arcing staircases going up six stories, reminded Liz of a beehive. The stores were high-end. Having inherited her mother’s habit of always checking price tags before size, color, fit, Liz knew she’d never shop at any of them.
While she fought her way through the crowds streaming from the subway entrance in the basement of the mall, and rode the escalators to the third level, wrinkling her nose at the strong smell of ammonia coming from the floors, the windows, the walls, Sam waited at the Starbucks. He tore another tiny shred of paper from the front page of his notebook and rolled it in a ball between his fingers. Returning his hands to his lap beneath the wobbly table, he dropped the ball to the floor, where it landed next to the others. He willed himself to keep his hands on his thighs, succeeded for 30 seconds before returning to the notebook for a fresh shred.
He’d written the date at the top of the page and a title, Language Exchange Session One, as though this were a real class. He didn’t know what to write underneath that, though, and so had stopped, but now the bottom of the page was disappearing quickly, shrinking the space he had to write down what she—his instructor? partner? he didn’t know what to call her—would say. Maybe he should make some notes about what he intended to teach her. He furrowed his brow, blinking quickly and staring down at his pen. It didn’t move, though. I don’t think teaching Chinese ever held any interest for him. It was just what he had to offer, his only way in.
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