by Liz Phair
I’m not sure why I kept raking after that, but I did, this time only thinking about the space immediately around me, harboring no big ambition, aiming to cross no finish line. I would draw the rake toward me in smooth, light whisks, without stopping each time to see if I’d gathered every single yellow-and-brown leaf. I just moved my limbs deliberately, letting the motion itself be the goal. Each fluid stroke was an accomplishment. Without realizing it, I’d become proficient in this skill I’d been practicing over the course of five hours, and my mastery gave me joy. The elegance of my gestures was thrilling to me. I know this sounds crazy, but when I did it right, I felt hot and beautiful, like raking was something a guy riding by on a bike would stop to admire me for, like, Oh man, you really know how to work that handle!
It was meditative, and that’s exactly what I see in this elderly gentleman’s movements: an acceptance of a never-ending task that can only be tackled with quietness of heart and attention to the present moment. Breathe, stroke, breathe, stroke, thoughts elsewhere. As I sit back in the rear seat of my town car waiting for the light to turn green, I can’t help but feel like I’ve seen something fundamental to my understanding of Chinese culture, some symbolic embodiment of its ethos.
The hotel is very modern. The toilets—my God, they have toilets in Shanghai that can do absolutely everything. They’re full service: a spray, a wash, a blow-dry. When I get to my room, I spend fifteen minutes pressing all the buttons on the commode, learning what rhythmic patterns and levels of intensity are optimal for me. I go to third base with a machine. It’s so Asian, so hentai. It’s my first experience with robot sex, and it’s amazing. I am living in the future—not just across the international dateline but at the cutting edge of tomorrow’s standards of hygiene.
So much is turning out to be different from what I’d expected. I’ve brought modest clothing, based on the recommendation of the guidebooks, but the women who work in the hotel bar are sleek, fashionable goddesses. The Insta girls of New York and L.A. can’t compare with a Shanghai model’s polish and hauteur. I’m starting to realize that this city is all about opulence and money. Everything is westernized. I meet one of the women in our delegation for a drink, and she tells me that most of the cultural sites I plan to visit are tourist traps designed to bilk foreigners out of their cash by running them through all of the gift shops. Maybe I’m looking for the wrong China, she suggests. Maybe I should embrace the modern side.
When I wake up in the morning, I feel like canceling my appointment with the tour guide. I want to spend the day shopping for new clothes and getting beauty treatments at the spa. I want to exude sophistication, like those young women on the mezzanine level last night. I wish I weighed fifteen pounds less than I do. Maybe I’ll work out at the gym later. I spend half an hour trying to combine the clothes I brought into a passable outfit for this cosmopolitan neighborhood. I decide it would be rude not to show up for the prearranged sightseeing, but I will simply say I’d like to finish early. I’m a performer, and I have to take care of myself. I can breeze through this one activity, then tell my tour guide I’m jet-lagged.
An hour later, I’m inside a Confucian temple, hiding from an angry mob. Everyone is shouting and arguing, but I don’t speak a word of Chinese, so I have no idea what they’re saying about me. All I know is that I started this street fight, and it sounds like they’re going to finish it. Or finish me. I glance nervously at the temple gate, wondering if at any moment a horde of furious people is going to come pouring through those doors and take me hostage, dragging me back out into the road. What happens next is anybody’s guess. A beating? Public humiliation? I don’t know what street justice looks like in Shanghai, but from the readiness of everyone in the neighborhood to join in the melee, I know this theater piece is leading to a climax. My tour guide sees my agitation and touches my forearm lightly.
“Don’t worry. It’s fine.”
How is it fine? She can’t believe that. Doesn’t she hear the bloodthirsty crowd growing louder by the minute? Where are the police? Why hasn’t anybody called the authorities? I can’t believe this is happening on my first day in Shanghai. I was so excited to travel, and now I’m going to die here, ripped apart limb from limb, or carried aloft on the shoulders of outraged citizens to be shamed in a public square as a symbol of Western entitlement and carelessness.
It all happened so quickly. We had just pulled up outside the temple entrance. I was listening from the back seat as my tour guide described the significance of the site we were about to visit. I reached over to open the door, an action I’ve undertaken a thousand times before without incident. I didn’t hear any cars so I thought it was safe, but I didn’t take into account the scooter traffic in Asia. My door clipped a woman on a moped, sending her tumbling onto the pavement and breaking her side-view mirror. I jumped out to help her, but she was already on her feet, shouting at me and pointing angrily at her damaged vehicle.
I repeatedly expressed how sorry I was, pressing my palms together in the symbol of prayer. She wasn’t interested in my contrition. Everyone around us stopped what they were doing and rushed over to referee the disagreement. They’d seen what happened. They were there to support her version of events. Hearing the commotion, people in the shops and apartments flooded out into the street to add their voices to the chorus. Everyone pushed in, forming a tight circle around me, their voices raised in indignation.
Soon, I was standing in the middle of a whirlwind of animosity with no way to explain myself, and no idea how to mollify the outraged residents. I folded my hands to my chest, nodding my head, and pointed at the moped. “I’m so sorry,” I said to the crowd around me. “It is my fault. I did this.” I was deeply apologetic, but I knew our priority should be to establish the woman’s physical condition.
Nobody seemed to care about that—least of all her. She let fly a long stream of animated accusations. Did she think I would somehow try to deny what had happened, that I would attempt to pin the blame on her? Her impressive and throaty delivery made the crowd laugh, and I broke out in a cold sweat, realizing that she was well known and popular.
I was bound to lose a case to this well-spoken woman, who seemed to captivate her audience. I wanted to say, I’m one of the good guys! It was an accident! But they couldn’t understand me. They wouldn’t even look me in the eye. I spun to the left and to the right searching for an ally but was met only with indifference. Reparations, their hardened expressions seemed to say, must be made. I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience. I saw my life tanking completely. My name would be splashed across the headlines back home and my mug shot broadcast on TMZ. If convicted, I might not be able to travel internationally anymore.
My chauffeur leapt out of the car to defend me. He was tall and impressive, not someone to be trifled with. The woman pointed back and forth between me and her scooter, yelling something with great pathos and righteous indignation. Whatever she said raised another sympathetic cry from the onlookers. No one was paying attention to me; they were speaking directly to my chauffeur, who fired off several angry sentences and then gestured hastily for my tour guide to take me inside the temple walls. She grabbed my arm and pulled me across the street, and now we are temporarily safe—separated from the crowd by the heavy doors.
I can still hear what’s going on. I’m surprised no one tried to stop us from leaving. No one seems to think that my presence is of any importance in the discussion, and it freaks me out. I can’t understand what they’re negotiating if not my involvement. As long as they have our car surrounded, they might think I can’t get away, but I could run out the back of the temple and climb over the wall and hide out at my hotel, or even fly back to the United States. There seems to be no expectation, though, that I would do anything as cowardly or shameful as that. In China, it goes without saying, you pay for your mistakes.
I’m punishing myself inwardly, morbid thoughts racing through m
y head. Why did I fuck up like this and get everybody in trouble? We had such a good time yesterday. My chauffeur was so nice to me. Now he’s out there haggling for my life. I’m worried about him. I feel responsible. He’s all alone, squaring off against twenty or thirty people. There’s no way I can sit here and listen while he tries to shout down the rabble. If anyone should suffer the consequences, it should be me.
My tour guide has been talking throughout all of this. I interrupt her to let her know I’m going back out to the street, but she shakes her head and politely steers my attention back to the serpentine river rock rising up out of the shallow reflecting pond. Confucius, she says, told people to emulate the natural harmony they found in their environment, the way a river rock bends and twists to accommodate the flow of water, allowing erosion to carve holes in its body so the pounding current can pass through easily. I feel like she’s speaking in metaphors, that she wants me to allow this chaos to flow around me, to accept the anger of the townsfolk and let it pass through me. I try, I really do, but it’s hard to ignore the growing cacophony.
The argument goes on and on. They aren’t giving up. I’ve identified the gift shop as the best place to make my last stand. It looks like it’s the most heavily fortified location in the compound. Naturally, because it has all the movable merchandise. If you ran off with a Confucian sculpture or a famous lithograph, you’d have a hard time selling it anywhere but on the black market. On the other hand, you could easily peddle the generic jade jewelry in the display cases and all the jade trinkets lining the shelves to tourists from here to the Great Wall of China. No one would ever suspect their origin. The shop has sliding steel gates and automatic locks, so I’m thinking I go there, roll the barrier down, and scream bloody murder until someone comes to the rescue. It just might work.
My tour guide is showing me around the main reception area. I can’t concentrate on what she’s saying. My eyes keep drifting over to the front entrance, anticipating a breech in the barricade. “It’s fine,” she says, smiling and waving her hand in front of her face. “Don’t worry!”
Easy for her to say. They’re not after her. I never got the chance to find out if the lady I hit was really okay. I size up potential champions among the tourists wandering around the courtyard and don’t see anyone of the requisite size or strength. I’m on my own here. There is no one to protect me from the wrath of the vigilantes.
What’s happening doesn’t make any sense. Maybe my interpreter is indeed waiting for the police. Maybe her complacency stems from her certainty that the authorities will be here at any moment to arrest me, and she wants to keep me calm until they arrive and take me into custody. I did commit the crime, after all, and she is a witness. Maybe she’s smiling because she secretly hates Americans, and she’s happy to see me get what I deserve.
If I go to jail, who do I call? Do I ring up my parents? The American embassy? My hosts for the trip? My entertainment attorney lives in New York, and it’s the middle of the night there. This is going to cost me a fortune to fight in court. Isn’t China supposed to have a notoriously corrupt judicial system? I could wind up doing time in a Chinese prison alongside drug addicts and prostitutes. I might get lice, or get sick. I may not be able to communicate with anyone for months, or even years. I see myself in the witness box, begging an unsympathetic judge for mercy. I wish I’d never come to Shanghai, never been seduced by the first-class ticket and premium accommodations. What seemed like the chance of a lifetime is turning into a nightmare.
“These are the certificates of the scholars who have recently passed their exams,” my tour guide says, showing me a noticeboard plastered in overlapping leaflets. She points to a tree whose lower branches are covered in fluttering papers, hanging from short red ribbons. “These are the prayers of the students who will be taking their tests soon.” I am struck by the innocent optimism of affixing a carefully worded wish to a tree. It reminds me of the magic rituals I used to perform as a child, when I still believed in supernatural things.
When I was young, we lived in an idyllic neighborhood in Cincinnati, Ohio. Our street was one half of a horseshoe cul-de-sac bordered by hills and woods. My backyard descended a seventy-five-foot slope through three terraced gardens—each progressively less well tended. I used to play with my best friend, Scott Carroll, at the bottom of the ravine between our two houses. We liked to pretend we were homesteaders making household items out of the soft gray clay deposits on either side of the streambed. One day, Scott was too sick to come out and see me, so I went down to our building site by myself and worked on a set of drinking cups, using the coil method they taught us in our kindergarten class.
I was so intent on what I was doing that I didn’t notice the approach of a gang of kids from the rougher neighborhood at the foot of Vine Street. They must have seen our handiwork and been curious about who was making these objects. I didn’t know anyone else visited these woods. I thought we were playing on private property, like at my grandparents’ house. The boys and girls ranged in age from six to eleven, all bigger than me. They tramped right through our secret spot, staring down at me with sneering contempt. The boys in the back started stomping on all our creations, breaking and flattening everything we’d worked on.
“What’s that?” One of the older girls pointed at the irregularly shaped vessel in my hand.
“It’s a cup,” I answered, extending my shaking arm so she could see.
She picked up my carefully constructed bowl of wet clay and examined it, turning it over before squishing it between her fingers and smacking it onto my forehead, where it stuck for a few seconds before falling off and rolling into the ivy. They all burst out laughing, and I turned and ran up the embankment, feeling them pelt me in the back with my own tea set as I scrambled over rocks and through underbrush to make it to my house at the top of the ridge. I didn’t cry. I wanted to, but I didn’t. I never told anyone what happened down in the ravine, because some measure of their mockery felt deserved. I hadn’t thought that what Scott and I were doing was stupid until I saw it through their eyes.
My tour guide informs me that we have to wait before we go any deeper into the temple grounds. She says my driver will explain what is going to happen next, but I can’t take the suspense. I beg her to give me some idea of what to expect when he returns. She says she doesn’t know, but she thinks I will have to pay a fine of some kind. I steel myself. That is going to be difficult, because I don’t have very much money, but I can ask my parents to loan me at least a thousand dollars. Maybe the record company will chip in a few thousand more and deduct it from my next advance. I’m not earning anything for my performance here—it’s just an all-expenses-paid holiday—so my hosts won’t be able to give me anything.
I can hear the murmur of the crowd rising to a crescendo again. I feel sick to my stomach.
“How much longer will this take?” I ask.
My interpreter shrugs, slightly embarrassed. “Pay no attention.”
She’s completely serious. She really expects me to tune it out. As far as she’s concerned, we’re having a perfectly lovely day of sightseeing. We stand silently in the courtyard for a few minutes, at a stalemate. I’m incapable of pretending any longer that this isn’t stressful. We’ve been in here listening to the ruckus for twenty minutes, but it feels like it’s been ten hours. With each passing second, I worry, the price of my freedom is increasing. I’m also afraid that they think all Americans are rich. If I can’t pay the fine, if the amount is too high, what then? Is that when they call law enforcement? Is this another way to shake down tourists, to take cash in exchange for keeping transgressions out of court? Or is this really how they settle disputes in their communities—maybe because they don’t trust their own legal system? Both possibilities frighten me.
My interpreter sees me struggling. “It’s a beautiful day,” she says hopefully. “I think you will never forget us.” She smiles. It’s her
first joke. Amen, I think ruefully. We stand in the silence a while longer, and I come to some sort of exhausted acceptance of my fate. If this ruins me financially, so be it. She’s right. The sky is clear, the birds are singing. What’s done is done, and I have to make amends. Anyhow, there’s a cap on how much I can pay. You can’t squeeze blood from a stone.
Finally, after nearly half an hour, my chauffeur slides through the temple gate and strides over to us, the expression on his face impossible to interpret. I thought I was cool with everything, but I’m suddenly trembling again. Get a grip, Liz. It’s only money. Hopefully, it’s under ten grand. I can scrape together that much. If it’s twenty thousand or more, maybe I can book some shows while I’m here and pay some of it back that way. That wouldn’t be the end of the world.
He and my tour guide exchange a few words in Chinese. He’s sweating. He looks relieved after his arduous diplomatic mission. He’s a lot younger than I realized, now that I see him out of character; somewhere in his late thirties.
“It will cost fifty-four twenty,” my tour guide informs me.
“Fifty-four dollars?” I’m speechless. You could knock me over with a feather.
“No!” She and my chauffeur laugh like that’s a ludicrous suggestion. “Fifty-four yuan. If you would please give Li Qiang seven dollars and ninety-eight cents”—she gestures for me to hand the money to my driver—“he will pay the woman on the motorbike now.”
Seven dollars and ninety-eight cents! I open up my wallet and pull out twice that amount in order to offer Li Qiang a tip. He seems embarrassed and refuses to take any more than the exact sum he negotiated. I’m still trying to process what all this means. How could they go to that much trouble over the price of a fancy cup of coffee back in the United States? I’m certain that in New York this altercation would have resulted in a lawsuit. I suddenly feel very protective of any foreign visitors to our shores. How can they possibly cope with our litigious capitalist mentality? Clearly, money is not the priority here. No, this was a fight about honor. The victim’s honor, mine, and my driver’s—and more broadly, the community’s sense of right and wrong. This was about restoring balance.