Em's Awful Good Fortune

  “You should turn on the air purifier,” I suggest. It’s sitting next to her desk like a prop. No hum.

  “Oh, okay,” Dr. Chong says, as if it hasn’t occurred to her and I’m being overly cautious. It’s like she’s in cahoots with my family. Everyone in Shanghai acts like I’m the problem, not the environment. At the end of the session, despite the full hour of therapy, I tell her my shoulder still hurts.

  “Oh, okay, shoulder hurt,” she says. Grabbing my head, she cracks my neck in the crook of her elbow, just like that, standing up and without asking permission. I would complain, but it feels better immediately. So good, I walk home instead of taking the metro, window shopping on Fuxing Lu, feeling euphoric, feeling like the pain is gone and it’s gonna be a great day.

  An hour later, I’m standing in the kitchen, making green tea. I don’t even like tea, but it seems like a small step toward making peace with China. It’s the least I can do. Reaching for a cup, I notice a flash of light in my right eye. It’s either an acid flashback or a stroke. That’s the first thing that crosses my mind when I start seeing light trails. Something strange always seems to be happening to my body in China, and I’m never quite sure what is real, what is in my head, what to ignore, what to be concerned about. My eye is flashing, although now that I’m studying it, it’s less like a flash and more like a jagged speck of light, but I can’t snap a picture of light in my eye, so it could just be my imagination. I try to call the health clinic. That’s when I discover my phone is dead.

  Shit like this happens in China. Sometimes email works; sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you can see out the window; sometimes the smog is so thick, the world disappears. I email Dr. Wu a message about my eye flashing and then do exactly what my mother would have done—take half a Xanax and go to bed. A few hours later, I wake to a flurry of messages, including one from Gee: “You okay, doll? SOS is looking for you and you aren’t answering your phone. Team dinner tonight. I’ll be late. Xoxo G.”

  SOS is the international medical service Gee’s company provides in case one of us has to be medevaced to Hong Kong. So it’s not a good sign that the clinic called them, and now SOS is chasing down my husband. At this point I pretty much rule out an acid flashback, although there was this one time, freshman year of college, when I sat in the dorm hallway for hours, staring at a blank wall like it was a video screen, watching a stream of birthday parties and fancy cakes with dolls plunged waist-deep into the middle of the cakes, as if the icing were a princess party dress, my mom in pedal pushers and coiffed hair, in cocktail dresses and pearls, always smiling. And then I was the one holding the cakes and wearing the pearls. That freaked me out. All freshman year, I was known as that girl from third-floor Cooley who had a bad trip and stared at the wall for hours, whispering, “No, no, no, that can’t be me.”

  It’s weird how prescient that trip was, when you think about it, which for some reason I’m doing right now. Maybe because I’m seeing light trails, or maybe because Gee has taken to calling me “doll.” Or maybe because tagalong life is a bit of a 1950s time warp.

  I taxi back to the international clinic, where the doctor rules out stroke, but says it could be something almost as bad: retinal detachment. No time to be relieved about not dying, because now I might be going blind. I’m probably not, but if I am, I will need surgery within twenty-four hours.

  “We need to rule it out,” the doctor says. The test is simple, but his eye specialist is gone for the day. “It’s just a precaution, but you need to go to the hospital right away.”

  I don’t hear anything after that, not a word. All I can think is, No way. I am not going to the hospital, the Chinese one in Hongjiao, where the bird and flower market is. The taxi ride alone will be hours. It’s out of the question, outside the bubble. I was supposed to preregister at the hospital just in case something like this happened. Or at the very least carry with me at all times a laminated address card that said, “Take me to the hospital” in Chinese characters. Normally, I would pull up an address on my phone and hand it to the driver, but my phone is dead; now, I will have to go home and get the laminated taxi card off the fridge and grab cash from the safe, because Chinese hospitals don’t accept credit cards.

  And I know myself. Once I go home, I’ll want to take the other half of that Xanax and pour myself a glass of wine to wash it down, and if I mix wine and Xanax, I will want to take a nap, and then I might as well get back in bed and pull the covers over my head.

  “It’s all handled,” the doctor says, turning toward me. I’m holding on to his arm. Not holding, exactly—more like gripping. Please don’t make me go there.

  No, I tell him, I can’t go to the hospital; that’s not an option. It’s like that Etta James song “I’d Rather Go Blind,” only I don’t want to go blind—I just think maybe there’s a little wiggle room. I start to negotiate the time frame. We have a twenty-four-hour window to play with.

  “I’ll just come back in the morning to see the eye specialist,” I promise.

  “They’re expecting you,” he says, trying to pry my fingers off his shirt sleeve. They do not have an ophthalmologist on staff at night, he informs me. “Their eye specialist is on call, and they will call the doctor as soon as you arrive at the hospital.”

  The hospital I am never in a million years going to, especially without a phone.

  I know what this must sound like: a functionally illiterate American woman who is willing to risk going blind, rather than step out of the bubble. But I’m not going to let this doctor hand me off to another clinic. I decide not to let go of his arm until he comes up with a better solution.

  A part of me is thinking, Damn Gee. I’m here as his companion, so he won’t be alone in China, and he’s out drinking with his team while I’m hanging on to the sleeve of some stranger in a white coat like he’s a tree branch and if I let go, I’ll be swallowed up by quicksand. Another part of me is thinking, Damn, girl, you are not going to that hospital alone.

  “If their specialist would have to be called in to see me at night,” I ask the doctor, “why can’t you call yours?” It’s not so much a question as an observation, but it comes out sounding more like a demand. And so he calls Dr. Wang.

  “It’s just a vitreous tear,” Dr. Wang says. “It happens to everyone sooner or later.” He’s trying to make me feel comfortable—no worries, ma’am. And it’s all the sweeter considering he was probably halfway home when the clinic called him, maybe even sitting down to dinner with his family, and he had to come back to the clinic and check out the crazy expat lady who’s having a total “I can’t deal with this” meltdown.

  “A rupture like this,” the doctor notes, “is usually the result of a sports injury. Were you doing sports today?”

  No, but I did go to physical therapy. “If somebody cracked your neck aggressively, could this cause such a tear?” I ask.

  “Yes, I believe so.”

  I leave it at that. There’s no point telling him it was probably one of his colleagues. I’m just relieved not to be dying or going blind. My brother the personal injury lawyer always says, “You sue for damages, Em, not bad mojo. If there are no appreciable damages, consider yourself lucky.” So I put on my face mask and head home from the health clinic for the second time today. It’s beginning to feel like a job, like going to work, only my job in Shanghai is to keep myself healthy. My job is not to slip too far below the baseline at which I arrived here in China. The Chinese government made us jump through hoops to get a residence card: We had to cough, cuff the arm, have X-rays, give blood, cover each eye, and read the chart. Everything but pee in a cup. A month or so later, the results came back healthy; I didn’t even have a fatty liver.

  “Em, where have you been? I was starting to get worried,” Gee asks when I walk in the door.

  “Oh, you know, TIC [this is China], and my phone is dead.”

  He grabs my phone and disappears out the front door.

  I curl up on the couch with a book of Sufi poet
ry that sat on the bookshelf in Los Angeles for years, collecting dust. Poems by Rumi, a present from Jerry when she left Paris. I threw it in a box of books, as part of the whole spark-the-romance idea I had while packing for China, which seems so long ago, so naively quaint now. When I crack the spine, the first thing I see is the inscription: “Don’t be afraid to jump off a cliff. Xo Jerry.” I flip open to this page. “Like This” is the name of the poem.

  Like this.

  When someone asks what it means

  to “die for love,” point

  here.

  Half an hour later, Gee returns and hands me my phone, apologizing for letting it run out of money.

  “Wait, what? It’s a burner phone? Like drug dealers, we pay by the minute? You’ve been taking my phone to the corner market and putting money on it for over a year?”

  “I take good care of you, doll,” he says.

  “Thank you, but I could have done it myself if I’d known that was the setup.”

  All this time, I just assumed the company paid the bills. My phone was dead, I was totally without connection to the outside world, I almost went blind, and all I had to do was go to the market on the corner where they sell spicy peanuts and put money on my phone card so I could call my husband.

  I don’t know who to be angrier with: him or myself.

  I decide to lay off yoga for a while and focus on the play instead. Andra and I are in regular communication. I send her my pieces; she sends back comments. Meanwhile, she’s meeting with actors and forwarding their headshots.

  “You’ll love Hazel!” she gushes. “She’s going to do ‘Collateral Damage.’ And I found the perfect person for ‘Power Cord,’ the mother-daughter piece. Her name is Nita.” Andra is doing “Old Dogs,” the piece about Chandler, my French bulldog.

  Her efforts to keep me in the loop only make me feel less connected. It all seems otherworldly. In California, there are five actors rehearsing my stories, and here I am in China, wasting time in adult daycare, wrapping yak yarn around empty wine bottles with the tagalongs. A wine-and-whine activity.

  My plan is to go home for a week or two, check in on rehearsals, meet the actors, and get back to Shanghai in time for Chinese New Year in Bangkok. That’s the best thing about China—its proximity to Southeast Asia. Stunning photos of rice paddies and ruins taken on exotic trips that when posted on social media make people back home envy your life. If only they knew that in between photo ops, I’m traipsing back and forth to the health clinic in a constant battle with the environment.

  I switch from yoga to swimming and immediately get a “thing” on my thigh. I photograph it next to a pencil eraser head, just to track its size.

  “Look!” I say to Gee a few days later, pointing to the bump, which now appears to be spreading, developing concentric red circles and pinhole sores.

  “It’s probably nothing,” Gee says.

  “But look how it’s grown,” I insist, handing him my phone with the photo series taken as documentation. Just in case.

  “It’s a pimple,” Gee says, sipping his morning coffee, refusing my phone.

  But what if it’s flesh-eating disease? I wonder, now googling images of MRSA. The next day, my leg starts cramping as if tiny vise grips were pinching my veins. Back I go to the clinic.

  “It could be a boil,” Dr. Wu announces.

  A boil!

  I am not the kind of person who gets boils, I think indignantly. People who eat fast food and don’t exercise get boils, like it’s punishment for bad hygiene or poor diet. That’s when I posit this theory of mine that some infection or virus is moving around my body, popping up here and there, in my lungs and belly, manifesting as an urgent need to pee, a sty in my eye, a cut that won’t heal—or a boil.

  “Viruses don’t work that way,” Dr. Wu explains without explaining. “It does look infected,” he admits. “It could be any number of things, but I’d treat them all the same way: with a topical cream.”

  And the bump goes away, phew, but the clamping in my leg gets worse, and then my digestive system starts to act up again. I get a crushing headache, and I know I should have insisted that the doctor test the damn bump to see what it was.

  Ten years ago, Shanghai was a lovely city on the brink of the future. Today, it’s a cautionary tale. Last month, Ava’s American boyfriend, who is under thirty and scoots around town on a longboard, had an environmentally related heart attack. My physical therapist, the one who didn’t use her air purifier, recently had “chest surgery.” That’s what the receptionist said when she canceled my appointments indefinitely. Chest surgery. In a few weeks, Ian will be in the hospital with pneumonia. A few months from now, I’ll be sitting in a dental chair, listening to Dr. Bob, the dentist from Croatia, explain how my tooth appears to have disintegrated from the inside out, either from a bacterial infection or because of some sort of systemic issue.

  Inhale, hold for two, exhale … That’ll be me, trying to practice yoga breathing so as not to scream.

  “Do you have an autoimmune disease?” he’ll ask, while showing me the X-ray of my tooth, which is now more like an empty peanut shell.

  He’s very handsome, Dr. Bob. He’s reminiscent of the actor who played a werewolf on my favorite vampire series, and I’ll kinda like him, even though we’ll have only just met and he’ll be delivering bad news. I’ll feel Bangkok slipping away as he explains how a trip to Thailand might be risky in terms of infection, unless I let him pull the tooth first. “The surgery is simple,” he’ll say. He could have me on a plane to Bangkok in a few days, with a hole in my smile. A minor inconvenience. It will take six months for the implant process. And then, that bad-boy smile, those werewolf teeth, he’ll say, “You’ll be good as new.”

  I don’t need to be good as new, I’ll think. I just want to be as good as I was when I arrived in China and the intake exam mandated by the bureaucracy here proclaimed me to be in perfect health.

  I’ll be taking it all in: Dr. Bob, the Croatian dentist in Shanghai, who looks like he’s straight outta Hollywood casting; the tube that rinses your mouth with water attached to the bowl where you spit. I’ll be wondering if that water is filtered. This is something the old me, the LA girl, would never think to question. Until Flint, Michigan, and toxic water was discovered in the Mitten. Now, water quality is always a question. Everywhere.

  Before they bring back coal mining, everyone should be required to visit China for a reality check.

  “Can you send me a digital copy of the X-ray?” I’ll ask. “I’d like to email my dentist back home for a second opinion.”

  “We don’t have digital equipment,” he’ll apologize, “but you can keep this.” And he’ll hand me a slide. A slide! Shanghai has one foot in the skyscraping future and one foot stuck in the backwoods muck of a country peasant’s thatch-roof hut. They can build a 128-floor super-high-rise with the world’s fastest elevators and indoor gardens, and an entirely enclosed, LEED-certified green community with restaurants, shopping malls, hotels, offices, and apartments, but they don’t have proper dental equipment. Or clean air, electric cars, reliable internet access, or drinkable water. Of course, if they had those things, they wouldn’t need to construct an environmentally controlled bubble for rich people.

  I’ll be thinking about that AQI disclaimer: Air quality is acceptable; however, there may be a small number of people who are unusually sensitive to certain pollutants. Gee says living in China for three years won’t kill you. As if three years weren’t a huge chunk of our lives, as if there were some mathematical curve, a point at which one might be overexposed, and three years is on the safe side of that curve. And I’ll be thinking that I was right about accelerated decay, that it’s not just a built-world term.

  I’m right about a lot of things. If only I listened to myself. Yogaman has this rap he gives on “knowing”—or, rather, the many ways in which we avoid the inconvenient truth, the deals we make with ourselves, the rationalizations. Like how Gee says living in China
for three years won’t kill us. Yogaman says it’s simple: “When you know, you know. You know that fire will burn your hand, so you don’t put your hand in the flame.” But let’s say you’ve read the Surgeon General’s warning that cigarettes can kill, and still you sneak an occasional smoke on the balcony, just one after dinner on Sunday nights, or maybe you bum them off a friend, but only when you’re drinking … or living in Paris. In that case, so says my yogi master, “You don’t really know; you just think you know.”

  “How do you know when to call it quits?” I once asked my therapist. When your partner cheats on you? When you cheat on your partner? When the kids are grown—that’s the usual answer. When the kissing is gone—that’s what Andra says. When your Chinese girlfriend bites you? Or maybe you wait till she smashes your laptop. Definitely beating your partner with the shower hose is a love kill. That happens, the cops told a colleague of Gee’s. Don’t mess with Chinese girls. How ’bout when your husband asks you to sacrifice your career for his? Or maybe when he puts you in a situation that risks your health for his job? At some point, you have to stop shopping for answers and start listening to yourself. When the cognitive dissonance gets loud enough, you’ll know.

  THIS IS NOT OKAY

  The boys expect me to shriek, but I don’t say anything when the fat cockroach saunters sluggishly across the table. Gee drains his glass, flips it over, and with one fell swoop traps the bug and leaves it sitting there in the middle of the table. Like a centerpiece. The dystopian future.

  This is not okay, I think but don’t say. The phrase has become worn. It covers a wide range of things that happen in China, like unreliable internet access, unbreathable air, acid rain—things that don’t work or don’t make any sense, like drivers who don’t stop for pedestrians. And cockroaches that act like they own the place.