The first appointment was meant to test his seriousness: Yang Xue spent 45 minutes explaining to him everything that could go wrong during the process: Chinese apartments were very small; he might not like any of them; the one he liked could be sold to someone else; the newest buildings would take too long to be built; his offer might be rejected because he was a foreigner; the government might confiscate his apartment; he could lose a lot of money. The list went on and on until he wondered how Yang Xue managed to make a living; weren’t real estate agents, after all, in the business of selling hope? When she was finished she asked him cautiously whether he’d like to set up another meeting.
He’d been excited prior to the second one. He’d heard her warnings, had proven that he would not be deterred. Again they’d never left Yang’s office.
“You brought a copy of your bank statement?” she’d asked when he sat down.
Dorian nodded and reached into his bag, pushing the paper toward her proudly. She glanced at it quickly and sighed.
“This does not have an official stamp.”
“What do you mean? I got it from the bank. They printed it for me there.”
“Yes, yes, of course.” Yang bit her lip and looked down. She remained silent longer than Dorian could take.
“There is a problem? Something else I should have done?”
“Yes, a problem.” She sounded relieved that he mentioned it first. “There is an office. The Official Documents office. They need to provide a stamp of authenticity.”
“But how will the office know the statement is authentic?”
Yang didn’t answer, so Dorian asked instead how to get there.
It was not open on the weekends, and so he’d taken off work to stand in line. There were three, actually: one to receive a number, a second to pay for the stamp, and then another to wait for his number to be called (this last being a physical line, even though each person in it was holding a number dictating their turn).
Now, finally, he was back in Yang’s office, officially stamped bank statement in hand. She was surprised that he demanded Pudong. It wasn’t yet a neighborhood many people wanted to live, but Dorian knew—better than even Yang did—how fast that would change. On site visits with his firm to the sprawling new district east of the Huangpu, he saw the city recreating itself again. It wasn’t just the architecture that appealed to him, it was the city’s audacity. Its fearlessness.
Yang added the stamped bank statement to Dorian’s file without even looking at it.
“Now we must talk about your Chinese partner.” She folded her hands on the desk in front of her expectantly. Dorian managed not to scream.
5.
There had to be other English teachers who didn’t really care what they taught, who agreed with Liz that lesson plans were a waste of paper, staff meetings a waste of time. All over Shanghai there were expats who’d been lured by the work visas and the promise that they’d be treated like “pandas”: the best housing, food, classes—everything designed to give a good impression. They didn’t move to China to make a difference in their students’ lives. That was never part of the sales pitch.
Believing she was in the majority made Liz feel better each day, each class period, as she stood outside the various rooms, waiting for the regular first grade teachers to wrap up their lessons and leave, brushing silently past her as they hurried away. On Mondays she had Ms. Rose’s class, Ms. Veronica’s, and Ms. Mona’s all in a row, no free periods in between. She taught more classes than the rest of the first grade teachers, she pointed out often to me, and I was quick to remind her that she taught the same lesson over and over again, whereas the other teachers taught reading, math, history, science. I kept talking and Liz stopped listening, wishing only for some space to complain.
Ms. Rose’s students were happy to see her. They always were. They jumped up in their chairs, some of them running up to hug her legs, or pull on her sleeves. Liz wondered often what Ms. Rose did to those poor children.
“Settle, settle,” Liz said, and after a few moments they did. She continued to the front of the room, wondering even as she picked up the whiteboard marker what she was going to do that day. Ms. Rose’s class was often her first period, her testing ground.
On Mondays things were easier. She wrote MY WEEKEND up on the board and then turned to her students.
“Let’s work in pairs,” she started, but there was a knock at the door, interrupting her.
“I’m sorry I’m late, dear. Please, continue.” Madeline, the head of the English department, entered and waved Liz back up to the front, walking herself toward the far corner of the room. She stood there, holding a clipboard in her hand, squinting at the front of the room, apparently waiting for Liz to continue.
“Oh, okay. Hello, welcome,” Liz answered awkwardly. She didn’t understand what Madeline was doing there, but from her demeanor it seemed clear that she expected Liz to know.
Liz tried to fake it as best she could, dividing the students into pairs, giving them instructions to discuss what they did over the weekend. They were all talking—in English—Liz kept telling herself. That had to look good. But Madeline kept looking down at her clipboard, squinting, drawing it closer to her face as though it contained microscopic clues that would unlock the meaning of Liz’s lesson. It’s just speech class! Liz wanted to shout as she watched Madeline once again staring up at the board, though the words hadn’t changed since she’d entered the room.
Liz had her students switch partners and changed the topic to how they’d celebrated Chinese New Year last month.
“Aren’t we going to draw pictures?” one of the boys in the front row asked.
“Not today,” Liz whispered, looking quickly to the back of the room to determine if Madeline had heard.
With 15 minutes left, after she’d circled the room enough times to make herself dizzy, checking in on all the conversations going on, she silenced her students and asked them to return to their desks. Thankfully, they did.
“Let’s write some sentences on the board together. Sentences you remember from your conversation.” This seemed like a good idea, a way to wrap up the lesson in a more formal way. She looked back again, actually expecting a smile. Madeline met her eyes, fierce and confused.
By the time Ms. Rose returned, opening the door unannounced as she always did, Liz was sweating. Ms. Rose began talking to her students while Liz was still mid-sentence. So Liz nodded, hurrying out. Madeline followed her into the hall.
“Thank you. That was—interesting.”
“Oh, thanks. Sure. Anytime.”
“But I am curious,” Madeline continued even as Liz tried to escape down the hallway. “Is this not the lesson you’d submitted for today’s class.” She thrust her clipboard toward Liz, showing her a lesson with today’s date at the top, the lesson I had typed up and submitted for Liz, which I had, as always, offered to Liz for use in the class, which she had, as always, refused.
“I, uh, I decided to switch things around a bit today,” she explained. Her voice must have trembled.
“I see. A bit unorthodox for your class observation day.”
“Yes, I suppose, but, well, I didn’t know you were coming,” Liz shrugged, as though closed the matter.
“But you did receive official notification.” It was not a question.
Liz turned the phrase official notification over and over in her head, grasping for meaning. The green envelopes, it suddenly occurred to her. The green envelopes she hadn’t opened in months. “I did,” she rushed. “I did. I’m sorry. I forgot. I haven’t been feeling well. I’m very sorry.”
Madeline waved her hand back and forth as though it really was just a small thing, and then turned to head back to the office. Liz knew she should tell me what happened, but she didn’t want to walk the rest of the way with Madeline and so ducked instead into the staff bathroom a few doors down from her class, locking herself in the far stall, staring down at the toilet in front of her. She waited until it
felt safe to come out. Even then she didn’t come to my office, though. She didn’t know what to say.
6.
Some expats call it a code, communicated via grim smiles and understanding nods as they pass each other on the street—two white faces in the crowd. Because Shanghai can be a confounding place, even for the most prepared. Those who speak the language and understand the culture can still be overcome by exhaustion, by the smells of sweat and smoke and burning rubber assaulting them as vigorously as the noise of jackhammers and the press of bodies surging toward the subway. Sometimes even the little things—the business of living a life—become too much to bear. There is refuge, then, in the upscale restaurants along the Bund, the steam room at the Ritz, the beers at Malone’s, where the expats are loud and take up more space than they can generally find anywhere else.
When I first arrived in Shanghai I loved loud expats taking up space. We were outsiders—most of us didn’t need Dorian to explain the concept for us to understand—and so we took care of each other. There was safety in numbers.
“Can you check to see if there’s a happy hour tonight?” Liz asked as our bus pulled out of the school’s driveway one Friday afternoon. She was bored with my hibernating, wanted that other kind of refuge. I hadn’t looked at my texts since before lunch, when I’d messaged Liz. But it was Friday; someone had chosen a bar.
She waited as I checked my phone. She never asked me to add her to the group text. Maybe she thought it was impossible. I showed her the message—Zapatas again. I shrugged. “I thought we were going to watch a movie?”
“It would be nice to be around other people a bit,” she answered with a smile as she rested her hand on my knee. “We could watch a movie tomorrow?”
“I’m just not feeling that great. But maybe if we stay in tonight and make it an early night, you and I could go out somewhere together tomorrow.”
“But happy hour is tonight.” She took her hand off my knee and turned to look out the window of the bus. In the shadows of certain buildings, I could see her reflection in the glass, could tell from her expression that she saw it too.
A few minutes later we passed our favorite sculpture. She is a woman, two stories high and silver-bright, her body swan-diving forward, the metal that would have been her legs fused together and forming a backward S with the curve of her torso, arcing like the blade of a wave toward the ground. We pass her every day. In hands extended over her head she holds the two ends of a ribbon; it sails above her, caught in the wind she pushes against. It’s a parachute she doesn’t need. It wouldn’t hold her if she did.
I really wasn’t going to go to happy hour. It was already after five when we got home, and Liz hurried into the second bedroom where she still kept her clothes to change. I sat down on the couch and pulled out my phone again, as though re-reading the impersonal message would tell me something. I had a new text from Dorian, sent not to the group but just to me.
Where have you been hiding? I hope you’re coming out tonight.
I paused, my fingers hovering over the keyboard. I didn’t have to respond. I could turn off my phone, go in my room, and put on pajamas. Liz would tell Dorian I was sick. Liz would get drunk with him, make the faces that she makes. Or if not with Dorian, someone else.
I’ll be there, I texted him back.
I called into the other room to tell Liz I’d changed my mind. From the safety of the couch I didn’t have to see the disappointment I assume flashed across her face before she came out of her room, still only half clothed.
“Oh good! I’m glad.”
I don’t know why I didn’t believe her, but I assured myself that nothing was falling apart and made myself get dressed.
We drove along Zongshan Road, through the Bund, and Liz admired the architecture, though she didn’t know to call it Romanesque, Renaissance, or Baroque. She looked at the brightly lit buildings—no neon there, but warm yellow spotlights, casting their shadows upward, imposing and elegant—and didn’t understand their history. She thought of Paris (though she’d never been) as our cab sped down the 10-lane road, unaware that the buildings she gaped at had once housed Europe’s banks and trading houses, before the Communist takeover of the country in the 1950s. This city, with its layers and secrets, its histories erased and rewritten, was a perfect place for Liz and me, though she would never understand that in the way I did. A pity. She would have found it interesting that not quite 40 years ago, the Red Guard tried to rewrite the country’s history, destroying the religious and cultural artifacts antithetical to the new Communist regime. She would’ve marveled at the scale of it—millions of people forced to forget!—without stopping to consider each one of those million lives, left in ruin. As it was, she simply stared at the beautiful buildings, noting the way the smog reflected the golden light, seeming to glitter.
I might’ve explained all this to her, but instead I kept silent. There were histories and histories and histories I never explained to Liz.
She ran her fingers absentmindedly up the side of my leg as she looked out the window. I flinched and pretended not to know what she was hoping would happen when we got to the bar. But I could have written the story that was playing out in her head; I’d lived it already. Not here in Shanghai, not in front of Dorian, but he wasn’t really so different from the drunk college boys who watched Alice and me make out at a party, on the crowded dance floor of our favorite bar, in the hallway of our dorm. All those nights were for me a revelation, but for her they were just a game. Everyone has a heart stitched back together, the scars they try to hide.
I shifted in my seat in the back of the cab, making a show of getting comfortable as I pulled my leg out of Liz’s reach. Making a show. I couldn’t tell yet what I was for Liz: an experiment, a prop, or a person. I was too afraid of what she’d say to ask, too afraid she’d ask me in return what I wanted her to be. Our cab pulled up in front of Zapatas and I emptied my head of the past and the future.
We were late, had missed the crowd that came straight from work for a couple drinks before going home. Dorian was still there, though, seated at a table in the back with a colleague I recognized but whose name I couldn’t recall. They were surrounded by empty beer, margaritas, and shot glasses, the detritus of what I hoped was an office gathering that had since dispersed. He stood as we approached and I thought it was for us. But he was craning his neck around the bar, seeming not to notice us at all.
“Where the fuck is our waitress?” he shouted and then he looked at me expectantly, as though he hadn’t registered who I was and was instead waiting for me to hand him the drink he’d ordered. The drink he clearly didn’t need.
“Sasha!” I’d pulled out a chair before he recognized me. “Have a seat!” He gestured grandly. “I’m happy to see you.”
He didn’t greet Liz, and though it made me feel petty, I was glad.
I introduced myself to Dorian’s friend, though I’d likely met him before. Expats in bars meet each other over and over and over again.
“We were about to do shots,” Frank said, after shaking my hand. I let Liz introduce herself so that I didn’t have to determine whether to call her my roommate or my girlfriend. She was just Liz; I wanted to drink enough that the naming of things didn’t make me anxious. I nodded enthusiastically at Frank’s offer and the four of us worked together to flag down the waitress.
“You’re just in time for the latest update on my fucking apartment saga. I need a fucking Chinese partner, apparently. Can you believe that shit?” Dorian was at the five-beer level of cursing, at least one per sentence.
Liz slid her chair slightly closer to mine, though it might’ve appeared she was just aiming for a better angle on the table. Dorian and Frank might not have noticed her finger connecting the dots of the freckles on my forearm before I pulled away to run a hand through my hair. I pursed my lips at her, then looked away.
“So, what? You’re just supposed to put an ad in the paper: ‘Chinese partner wanted to share condo.’ How the f
uck do you have a partner in a condo?” Frank asked.
“I have no idea. I tried explaining that to her. It’s going to be my fucking house. I’m just supposed to have some Chinese dude living in the spare room? I was nicer than that, I mean, but really, that’s the gist.”
“Oooh.” Frank sat up a little straighter, looking suddenly excited. “What if you marry a Chinese girl? Can she be your partner?”
I snorted. “You two are being idiots. The partner doesn’t live with you.”
“You know about this?”
“Our school is all expat families. We help some of them buy. Not many—most of them are set up by their companies—but a few. I’ve seen the process: it’s slow, and—”
“I’m not an idiot,” Frank interrupted. “Obviously whoever they assigned wouldn’t live there, but if he had a Chinese wife, he wouldn’t need the partner. Seriously. This is genius. Whoever you find to marry will be psyched because she gets to live in this sweet condo, right? And brag to her friends about her American husband and his big American dick. She does your laundry and cooks dinners, so you don’t have to hire an ayi. Problem solved.”
“I’m sorry, you’re right. You’re not an idiot. You’re a complete pig.”
I wasn’t really kidding, but Frank laughed and took the shot of tequila the waitress had delivered while he’d been laying out his brilliant plan. Meanwhile Dorian turned a deep shade of pink, whether at the mention of big American dicks or at the possibility Frank and I might get into an argument, I couldn’t be sure.
“Think about it is all I’m saying.” Frank was oblivious to Dorian’s embarrassment. “There are no Chinese chicks here, but we can start going to other bars.”
“I’ll take it under advisement. Meanwhile, my agent said there’s an office I can go to, of course. The Office of Foreign Investment. I fill out a bunch of paperwork, and they match me with a Chinese ‘investor.’ The guy puts his name on the documents with me, and in return I pay him a ‘small’ monthly fee, whatever that means.”
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