On the surface, there was nothing new or interesting in what Sam was doing. All over Shanghai in fact, perhaps at this very moment, expats and Chinese are sitting down at their language exchanges. Some of them use textbooks, or the newspaper; some bring timers, forcing themselves to speak only in Mandarin until the sound of the buzzer indicates that it’s time to switch to English. These partners are, quite literally, exchanging language, trading English past tense verbs for the rising and falling tones of Mandarin.
Sam didn’t want any of that, though.
He heard the door to the café open and shut, and looked up eagerly, as he had each of the other five times it had opened in the half hour he’d been waiting. Again, it wasn’t her. She wasn’t really so late, he reminded himself. He’d come early, eager to get out of the apartment and sure the Starbucks would be busy on a Sunday afternoon. He’d been right, but now he felt guilty, holding the table for so long. Three times he’d had to wave away the strangers wanting to occupy the empty seat across from him, hoping, he knew, to drive him out with their loud talk and cigarette smoke. “Zuòyĭ căiqŭ,” he said brusquely each time, pointing at the melting Mocha Frappuccino he’d ordered for Liz. It’s taken.
It should have been more difficult for her to find him—a Chinese man she’d never seen before in a café filled with other Chinese, many of them solitary men. Sam wasn’t capable of blending in, though. He wasn’t busying himself with his phone, a magazine, or his notebook; instead he stared brazenly at the door, the expectation on his face more suitable for a groom standing at the altar than a man about to have coffee with a stranger. His hair was short but not shaved, and unintentionally fashionable; it lay flat, following the curve of his head in the way of a child’s drawing of hair. He combed it carefully each morning and didn’t touch it again for the rest of the day, directing his fidgeting fingers to the cuffs of his button-down instead. It was a work shirt, freshly ironed.
Liz waved to him and pointed at the counter, indicating she would buy her coffee first. She wanted more time to think. Do the Chinese go on blind dates, she wondered as she stood in line, because what else would Sam’s expression have called to mind? It seemed too personal a question to ask, though. As was typical of Liz, the list of questions she didn’t feel comfortable asking was long: How old are you? Where do you live? Have you ever left Shanghai? What do your parents do? What do you do on the weekends? Do you know other Americans? They each spoke to a naïveté she preferred not to reveal.
Before she reached the register she felt a tug on her elbow. Sam was beside her, close at first until they made eye contact and he took a step back.
“I already bought your drink,” he said, turning then to gesture to his table, at which two young women had just sat, pushing Sam’s and Liz’s drinks to the side. He rushed back to eject them, leaving Liz no choice but to step out of line and follow him.
“How did you know what to order?”
The two women sneered and said something that Liz didn’t understand and Sam ignored.
“Mocha Frappuccino is the best. Very sweet.”
She thanked him and didn’t say she would’ve preferred a non-fat latte.
“Have you done a language exchange before?” It was an expected opening question, but Sam looked panicked.
“Many times. With many partners.” He didn’t realize the truth would’ve been more comforting to Liz than this lie.
“You’ll have to be patient with me. This is my first time.” She winced at the sexual innuendo she hadn’t intended.
“Do you speak Chinese?”
“No. None. I don’t know anything.” She laughed at herself. It was a relief to admit it. “I don’t even know what I’m doing here! I just moved from New York a few weeks ago.”
“Why?”
It was another expected question. Before she left, Liz had been asked by the other waiters after she’d given her notice; by her parents—over and over again by her parents—in the weeks that she stayed back in their house in Massachusetts after vacating her room in the apartment she shared in Brooklyn while she waited for her departure date; and by Bryan who found the decision more confusing than anyone.
She’d tried out a few answers so far. I really like dumplings, she’d told her co-workers. They laughed, and none of them pressed for a serious answer; they didn’t really know her, didn’t care where she moved.
She’d told Bryan that she needed a drastic change, which was closer to the truth, but still didn’t really answer the question. Los Angeles would have been equally drastic, but she hadn’t considered that, or any other U.S. city, for even a moment.
It’s a really good job opportunity, she’d told her parents. But that didn’t explain why she’d gone looking for it in the first place.
“Where did you get this idea?” her mother had asked her one night, as though it were a disease she’d picked up somewhere.
Liz had only shrugged. Having moved back into her old room, if only temporarily, she felt obligated to communicate like she were 16, though she knew it wasn’t helping her cause.
But then, she didn’t know what to say to her mother that didn’t sound like an indictment. She wanted bigness for her life, but didn’t that make her mother’s life sound small? She wanted freedom, but didn’t that make her mother sound like a captor? So she shrugged and sat silently through the dinners her mother cooked, and her mother didn’t push because it wasn’t her way. Some nights at the table she looked proud, other times devastated; Liz ignored her.
What would her mother have said if Liz had returned home in a week, two weeks, having lost the great job opportunity? She cringed, and saw Sam squint, as though concerned about her. She remembered where she was and reminded herself it wasn’t time to dwell on what she couldn’t control. The deadline laid out in the green envelopes to hand in her lesson plans had passed. She’d tried to write them several times but didn’t know where to begin. How could she explain that to Principal Wu? Instead she waited, wondering what would happen next.
8.
In the months since she left, I haven’t given much thought to these early days living with Liz. They were never the problem, or at least that’s what I’d always thought. I didn’t talk to her about the green envelopes, the deadlines she was missing, because I felt it important that she come to me first. She sat with those anxieties much longer than I thought she would. It should’ve been a clue.
But back to Sam’s question, the why of her move that it took me weeks and weeks to finally ask. She must have tried to give him a real answer, eager as she was to make a good impression. “I wanted to do something no one would expect,” she said, simply, answering truthfully for the first time.
Sam’s eyes widened. “I’d like to do that, too.” Just like that he was hooked on her, in the same way I was when I’d first read her application and created in Liz the solution to Loneliness.
There was an awkward pause, as Liz wondered perhaps if she had revealed too much. Or not enough. But it was all for today. For the next 20 minutes, she fired off ideas for things they could talk about during their next session, as though it hadn’t occurred to her that they might actually begin today. Just by talking to each other.
“I could probably bring in some newspaper articles that we could read and discuss. Or I could find some grammar lessons, I guess, though that’s not really my strong suit.”
“My grammar is not a problem,” Sam answered, pronouncing his words a bit more slowly.
“Yes, of course,” she said. “So…what do you want us to do?”
He remained silent for a time. The truth was difficult, and if the exchange went well, he hoped he’d never actually have to say it.
“I want to know what it’s like to be American,” he responded finally.
“Okay. I can talk about that.” Her tone suggested that they’d settled something larger than they had. “I need you to start at the beginning with me. The alphabet, or characters, I mean. Or whatever is the beginning. I know not
hing. I don’t even know what I don’t know.”
“Tones,” Sam told her. “We’ll start with tones.”
“Right. Four of them, right? Four ways to say every word?”
“No,” Sam shook his head. “Just the opposite. Only one way to say each word.”
She frowned. “But I thought…”
“There are four tones, plus neutral, but for each word in Chinese, the tone never changes. You don’t have four different ways to say a word. Just one way for each word.”
“But you might have one word, spelled the same, but with four different tones? Four different ways to say it, and that changes the meaning?”
Sam shook his head more quickly and frowned. “There really isn’t spelling in Chinese.”
“Um…okay.”
He leaned over his paper, frowning for a moment, before drawing a quick horizontal line, slightly thicker on one end: 一. This character, yī, it takes the first tone, high. No other tone goes with this character. It is fixed.”
“What does it mean?”
Sam continued drawing, without looking up: 以. “This character, yĭ, takes the third tone, falling rising.”
“But you just said the same word. Yi and yi.”
“Different words. Different characters. Different tones. Different meanings.”
“Okay, but if you were going to write them, like in English?”
“In English? Yī means one. Yĭ means to use.”
“Oh, no, I mean if you wanted to write them in Chinese, in the Roman alphabet, though, no characters.”
“Pinyin.”
“Yes! Pinyin. They are spelled the same, right?”
“Yes.” Sam wrote Y-I down on the paper. Twice. With different accent marks.
“Okay. So they’re the same word, just with different sounds.”
“Okay,” Sam sighed. “Yes.”
Liz smiled.
Sam put away his paper. “More tones next time then?”
“Yes! Tones and conversation.”
They made plans to meet at the same time next week. Sam rose abruptly. “Zàijiàn, Liz. Goodbye.”
“Bye, Sam.”
He must have wondered, as he hurried out of the coffee shop, whether he should have made her repeat the Chinese after him. He hated teaching Chinese. This was, of course, his first attempt, and it had only lasted 10 minutes or so, but already he knew he hated it. It wasn’t entirely his fault, though. Liz was a terrible student.
Sam walked, without thinking, to the park across the street from the shopping mall. He should have brought her there. Teaching would have been different without a table between them. There were no lăowài in the park today, but he’d seen them there before. The expats, in fact, often outnumbered the Shanghainese, who thought of the park as somewhere to walk through, on their way to someplace better. Expats sat, lounging on the grass or tossing a Frisbee back and forth until the men in brown uniforms came with their whistles, hurrying them off the lawns. They were never with Chinese, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t allowed. Sam and Liz could have sat beside each other on a bench, and when she asked why everyone around them was staring, Sam would explain that they were all jídù, jealous, of him. Second tone, rising; fourth tone, falling.
It was not the way to learn Chinese, but it was all that Sam could think to do. Here is a word. I will give it to you. Hold on. Here is another word. Take them from me and you will owe me something in return.
Yī: one.
Lăowài: foreigner.
Yĭ: to use.
Jídù: jealous.
9.
One blossom. Two blossoms. Everywhere there are lonely people drinking tea. Shanghai is no exception. Everywhere there are lonely people holding their breath and listening for the sounds of their own heartbeats, wondering how an organ that is nearly smothered can be so impossibly loud. One blossom. Two. The lonely people brew their tea and then sit and watch the jasmine flowers floating slowly up from the bottom of the cup, blinking their eyes, listening for their smothered hearts.
I wanted my blossoms to mean something. Maybe they did. Maybe by focusing my attention on them, I gave them power. I’m watching, I whispered against the lip of the cup. I’m waiting to learn. Willingness was enough, I’d decided. Or anyway it was all I had to give.
Noticing things gave them power. Saying them aloud made them true. It became my philosophy during those early weeks with Liz. I started waking up earlier than necessary to give myself time for tea and mantras.
“I’ve always been an early riser,” I told Liz. “I just love the quiet time in the morning. It’s really important to me.”
Saying things aloud made them true.
Liz respected the quiet, treated my morning tea almost as a religious ceremony. After three weeks, though, I grew impatient. I hadn’t learned anything; nothing had changed, except I was more tired, and I suspected that Liz thought me strange.
Four blossoms. They were tiny buds, dried and rolled tight, and then unfurling in the near-boiling water. Growing into themselves.
“Do you want some tea?” It was the first time I’d offered. I was tired of waiting for her to ask. I was tired of waiting for so many things from Liz, but tea was the place I started.
She’d emerged from the bathroom, her hair still damp from the shower and pulled back into a ponytail. I remember thinking that she’d look much better if she blow-dried.
“Do we have time?”
I looked at the clock. Seven-fifteen. The bus picked us up at 7:30, no exceptions, no waiting for anyone. “Probably not.” I sighed. “You should get up earlier. We could have tea together.”
“Yeah,” she answered slowly. “It might be nice not to be so rushed in the morning.”
“Or, whatever.” I knew she had no interest in having tea with me. I felt stupid for having suggested it. “You should get up whenever you want.”
“No. It sounds nice. Thanks.” She slipped past me into the kitchen to grab a bottle of yogurt, then carried it with her back into her bedroom.
Things were strange, but I didn’t know how to fix them. On the surface it was all just as I’d expected: we walked to the bus together in the morning, sat in the same seats—Liz by the window, me the aisle—ate lunch together in the school cafeteria. On Wednesday afternoons, when the weekly staff meeting kept us late, we sat in the back of the auditorium, whispering complaints about the wasted time, though we never had anything else to do. Once home we would go shopping, or watch DVDs; some afternoons, Liz would sit in Starbucks. I chose the dinner spots—mainly the more expensive Western restaurants frequented by all the other expats. We went to the happy hours, too, and out dancing. We were roommates and friends, just as I’d hoped.
Loneliness had vacated the apartment, but she’d been replaced by a jasmine flower called Anxiety. I watched it gently unfurling, beautiful and meaningless. Noticing things gives them power.
I didn’t know yet why Liz had moved to Shanghai. I wasn’t like the rest of them, expecting some kind of logical or concrete reason. But I wanted her to recognize that about me. I was waiting for her to admit things to me, over dinner and a bottle of bad red wine: I don’t know what I’m doing here, or what I’m doing with my life. I’d planned the dinners, and ordered the wine, but Liz had never said anything like this.
I looked at her often in those early weeks, trying to match up the person I knew with the person I thought she was when I’d read her job application. Nothing made sense and I didn’t feel any better. We left for school that morning just as we always did. I left my solitary mug in the sink.
10.
Shanghai practically sizzles in the rain. Large puddles form at intersections and run in rivulets along the curbs; the pedestrians plod through them, undeterred by the rainbow slicks of gasoline floating on their surface, the congealing soot along their edges. It’s the same soot they blow from their noses or hack into their handkerchiefs as they wait for their busses, stepping back at just the right moment to avoid the spray fr
om the taxis that careen past with occupants still patting dry their hair, wiping their necks with their own grey-stained rags.
The fat raindrops pummeled the sidewalk as our school bus crept along the congested roadway, inching toward the highway. Liz sighed and closed her eyes. She’d resolved to talk to the principal. The day before I’d left another green envelope in her mailbox, another deadline for handing in more lesson plans, along with another quote: Deal with issues from a place of inner peace. She took the message personally.
The question of course was how to deal with the issue. She couldn’t admit to the principal that she had no lesson plans at all. Most days she decided on the bus in the morning, or even as she walked toward the classrooms, what she would do with her speech students. Today, for example, she was going to have them list words that rhymed with “cake” to write on the board. Then they’d draw pictures. She’d have to lie to the principal, tell him that she had plans but that they weren’t written down in a form that she’d be able to hand in. It would at least buy her some time.
I heard her sigh, but I didn’t ask her what was wrong. Though I’d gotten what I wanted—Liz had moved in and on the surface we were friends—I still felt uncertain about how she saw me. I couldn’t understand why she hadn’t asked for help with the lessons yet, or at least complained about the enigmatic notes. What else could I conclude except that she didn’t trust me after all?
I wanted to tell her my stories, but I didn’t know how.
“The first time I ever tried to masturbate…” I wanted to say with the hint of a smirk on my face. But I couldn’t.
It was August, hot and muggy, and I’d retreated to the cool air and new carpet smell of the basement rec room. I was 14, bored and entitled. I took off my shorts and lay on the new sofa in my underwear and a tank top, feeling bold, but also nervous, my ears attuned to any noises upstairs. Why I wasn’t locked in my bedroom or the bathroom I can’t really say, except perhaps that I was looking for danger.
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