by Jack Livings
In the market, strings of lightbulbs hung between vendors’ stands, snaking around skeletal trees and up electric poles. The street was choked with smoke, and she couldn’t hear herself think for the cacophony of transistor radios, searing meat, motor scooters, the frenzy of vendors screaming into the crowd. Teenage lovers took advantage of the tight crowd to press against each other as they moved slowly up and down the road. Claire wondered what it said about the Chinese that at the end of the day they repaired to this clanging cowbell of a settlement to unwind. Scattered along the roadside like weeds, men seated on low stools sipped tea and played chess. A few stared off at nothing, puffed on pipes, and fiddled with their crotches. Beneath a loudspeaker blaring a tinny pop song, a sculptor worked dung into detailed miniature animals.
Claire felt like a snorkeler on the open sea. She couldn’t read a billboard or a street sign and she knew just enough Mandarin to get by. But what she saw felt authentic, not like the pantomime that surrounded her back home. Here, there were dusky men perched atop motor trikes, buildings that fell apart before construction was complete, panes of glass peeling off skyscrapers and spinning down onto pedestrians. Swarms of bicyclists so thick she couldn’t cross the street. Bread-box taxis held together with duct tape and spit. In a letter to a professor back home, she’d called it a human drama played out on a life-size stage. She’d been proud of that line. She’d seen couples in the park humping under blankets, crowds cheering bloody street fights, legless beggars trundling along on wooden pallets. Alicia had told her she had colonial fever.
* * *
She never saw the purse snatcher, though she was as obvious to him as a cinder block dropped into a pond. He was a pro, a shadow of a boy who existed between pauses in conversation, clinging to the underside of memory like a fly. She would have felt a dead weight in her chest if she had seen him. His hair fell in heavy ropes over his face, which was brown as old leaves and crossed with amber scars. Ten years old, he was wastewater wrung from the sponge of the world.
At the age of six he’d been grabbed off the street in Turpan and sold with a band of other children for seventy yuan a head to a dealer who transported them to Shenzhen and doubled his investment selling them to a gang. The men who ran the gang taught fast hands by placing the children in front of a pot of boiling water with a coin at the bottom. Failure to grab the coin got them a beating with a hose. After three years of picking at markets in Shenzhen, he’d managed to escape on a train to Beijing, and he’d avoided being absorbed into Beijing gangs mostly by good luck and a studied eye for kidnappers. He was a good thief. Confident, direct. It couldn’t have been easier if Claire’s pocketbook had jumped out of the bike basket into his hands, and with it hidden under his cotton shirt he slipped into a narrow gap between the foundations of two buildings.
He gouged the purse with a scrap of aluminum, forgoing the zipper for the pleasure of opening a hole of his own in the soft leather. With a satisfying pop it gave way: her wallet, two photos, a tampon, which he quickly unwrapped, tasted, and discarded, her student ID card, for which he had no use, a set of keys, a red pocket dictionary, a small tube of hand lotion that tasted like flowers and fish and which he drained in one gulp, followed by the ball of hash, which he swallowed whole.
In the wallet he found five 100-yuan banknotes, the most money he’d ever pulled at once. He rolled the banknotes into a tight stem and packed them into the channel between his gum and cheek. It was the safest place he knew. He could give a blowjob with the treasure secreted in his mouth, but if forced to present his backside and he’d hidden the money there, it would be lost for sure.
The thief slipped back into the market, passing within feet of Claire, drifting through the crowd like a leaf until fetching up on Sanlihe Street, a wide boulevard he had in the past avoided because the shopkeepers there cracked him on the legs with their brooms. But now it seemed to welcome him. This was as close to happiness as he’d ever been, this feeling of inner radiance spreading from his chest, warming his bones, and he began to imagine a future in which he would wear fine clothes and stride with intent through the crowded market. People would step aside.
Late that night, on a deserted street near the zoo, a pack of boys attacked him. He’d vomited out the hash by then, but its lingering effects made him an easy target. The other boys, too, had been in the market, hovering near the American, but this was a much safer play. One pried his jaws apart while another crammed a hand into his mouth. After they had the money, they beat him until he stopped struggling, and there he remained, on the cracked pavement, his lips moving wordlessly.
* * *
For a while, Claire stood at the edge of the market scanning the faces of passersby. A loudspeaker over her head was blasting Chinese opera, the wailing voice crackling and fuzzing against her eardrums.
Fuckers, she said. She didn’t care about the money, but not having an ID was going to cause real problems. Traveling was out until she got a new one, and she had wanted to take a trip to Beidaihe to enjoy the last of the good weather, even allowing herself to imagine she might meet someone there. Behind her anger she slowly became aware of an expanding seam of loneliness, a black mood settling around her like fog.
She told herself to cut it out, that she was being stupid, that it was only a bag, but she took the long route back to the college, pushing her bike out to Sanlihe Street first, riding a mile out of her way, not even daring to look down the alleyway as she passed through the college gates.
The following Monday after classes, she paid a visit to Teacher Wu in his spartan office beneath the dormitory stairs. He was charged with tending the American students, an assignment a rising star in the English Department might have considered a temporary setback, at worst a character-building exercise, but that, in Wu’s case, had precipitated the full collapse of his ambition.
He was young and opinionated, and had a habit of speaking out of turn in departmental meetings. His petitions to be allowed to return to teaching at the beginning of the next semester had been ignored, and though he tried to bear those rejections with the grim fortitude of a condemned man, he’d begun to believe that his reassignment had placed him permanently beyond redemption’s reach. He had no real work to do. For the last two weeks he’d only been able to stare vacantly at the Scenery and Natural Wonders calendar hanging on the wall opposite his metal desk. With his head tipped slightly forward to accommodate the slope of the eave behind him, he chain-smoked and rearranged papers. There was a chair for students, though in the two months he’d been at his post, only Claire had visited.
When she arrived, he lit a new cigarette. He was thin, had a large mole on his cheek and heavy, reptilian eyelids. She’d been to see him three times the previous week, twice the week before that, and though he’d at first thought she was a bellyacher, he’d come to recognize a familiar loneliness in the way she stacked questions atop one another, fending off the moment when she’d have to leave. It was not unusual for students to develop feelings for their teachers, and he could see from the frequency of her visits that she was experiencing emotions for him. He could not offer the kind of help she seemed to be after. He took his responsibility to the American students seriously, and he adhered to proper interaction boundaries. When Claire brought him oranges from the market, he permitted himself to offer her special-issue postage stamps in return, nothing more. Very recently he’d had a dream about her and upon waking he’d soaked in the memory of her big white thighs before coming to his senses. He fought mightily not to think about that dream.
There was, in fact, a single reason Claire had made a habit of visiting Teacher Wu’s office: to pump him for information. It had been killing her that she didn’t know why Alicia had moved out. Telling the administrators that they were incompatible wouldn’t have been enough. Surely Alicia had fabricated untruths about Claire—that she stole or didn’t bathe or had emotional issues—and if the administrators believed the untruths, then her teachers knew about them, too, which meant
that every day Claire sat in class her teachers knew something about her that she didn’t know about herself. Wu must have heard something.
No, nothing, he’d say.
She’d narrow her eyes. Nothing?
I am sorry, nothing. I am always asking.
But on this afternoon, she’d come with a different story. When she told him what had happened in the market, he was outraged. Yet, as she went on about needing her ID card to travel to Beidaihe, he realized that he’d been presented with an opportunity to redeem himself in the eyes of his colleagues. An immense gift, this robbery. He closed his eyes and reminded himself to breathe. His long, aqueous fingers moved loosely on his legs. Though Teacher Wu did not consider himself a brave man, he was sure he could ignite the tight blue flame of anger flickering within him.
“So you’ll get me a new ID,” Claire said.
He rose into a stoop, his head canted in such a way that he looked to be bowing solemnly, and motioned Claire out the door, as there was not room for him to move from his post behind the desk unless she first left the office. Once they’d emerged, he said, “Please follow me.”
Claire had to jog to keep up with him. At Central Administration, a dilapidated building that smelled of wet plaster and ashtrays, Teacher Wu dashed from one pea-green office to the next, gesticulating wildly to the accounting staff, ideology monitors, anyone who would listen. Claire hung back in the hall, and a couple of times she thought to leave entirely, but she wanted to get her ID sorted out. Without Wu, it could take months to get a new one.
There was always some story making the rounds about Uyghurs kidnapping Chinese virgins. They were never above suspicion, hailing as they did from a place so far away from Beijing that it was said the clocks hung upside down. They were diseased and they bred like livestock. Their acts of terrorism had been well documented. Now, finally, Wu told his colleagues, these murderers, these pale-skinned dope peddlers, could be made to suffer. Rapists. Cowards, pickpockets. Robbers of defenseless American female students.
“We must extract the rotten tooth,” Teacher Wu exclaimed. He fell easily into the cadences of zealotry, a strange nostalgia fueling his anger. As a child, he’d marched with his schoolmates, emptied his inkpot over his teacher’s head, watched as older middle school students had stuffed their teachers’ mouths with dirt. He still had long passages from the Little Red Book rattling around his brain. His colleagues, patriots all, agreed that the Uyghur problem had to be dealt with once and for all. The foreign students had too long been at risk, and it was only a matter of time before one was kidnapped, raped, hacked into pieces.
By the time Wu was done, he’d cleared the building and a crowd of over a hundred administrators had gathered outside. Claire tried to slip away, but Wu grabbed her arm and ferried her to the front. The crowd swept like a mudslide through the college gates, diverting a stream of cyclists into the street, snarling traffic. As they turned onto the wide sidewalk, a traffic cop, whistle bleating, stepped off his pylon, waving his white-gloved hands, then stepped back up, perplexed. The mob was nothing more than middle-aged academics from the language college. They weren’t shouting or holding signs. He watched the crowd march up Fucheng Road.
But by the time they breached the front door of the Public Security Bureau, they had worked themselves into a frenzy, and the noise went up like a cannon. They poured into a long room resembling a drained swimming pool, the sound of their voices echoing off the bare walls. A squadron of junior officers who had spent the day slogging through paperwork shot to their feet all at once, their metal chairs clattering across the floor. Most of them would have fled if they’d been able to, but there was nowhere to run. Some of the officers had been students at the School of Foreign Languages and recognized the administrators in the front ranks.
A voice commanded them forward, and the officers complied, running headlong into the crowd, arms extended against the wall of humanity bearing down upon them. Teacher Wu stabbed his finger at the nose of a young officer whose peaked hat had gone sideways on his head, its leather chin strap jogging across his eye. The officer, though attempting to adhere to training protocols by displaying the dispassion of an agent of the state, was churning inside, and his cheeks were flushed a deep crimson. To a man, the officers were scared out of their wits. The administrators had waded into a wave of fresh technical school graduates, a skinny bunch whose collective specialties ran to electronic eavesdropping and code-breaking, all awaiting reassignment, in the meantime cleaning up six months of back paperwork at the Ganjiakou station in Beijing.
Lacking any slogans to chant, the academics targeted individual officers and shouted into their faces, creating an unintelligible wash of noise that only served to further frighten the officers. After a while, the protesters began to feel bad for the young officers, and the mass action lost some of its passion. In the middle of the crowd, administrators looked at one another abashedly, as though they’d been caught in a collective act of masturbation. Their voices waned, and those in the front rank stopped pushing against the officers. Teacher Wu tried to rouse them, but no one seemed interested in taking up the charge.
At the same time, in the rear, some younger administrators, who’d only just arrived after hearing about the protest from colleagues on campus, were trying to make up for lost time, shouting and shoving at those in front of them. Claire, on the front line right next to Teacher Wu, felt the crush of bodies at her back grow more insistent. She braced herself, locked her knees, and tried to set her feet hard against the concrete floor, but she, along with several other administrators, was sliding forward, borne ever closer to the line of officers by the bodies packed tightly around her. Her heart throbbed in her ears, and she tried to lift her arms but they were pinned at her sides. Then her legs became tangled with those of the administrators on either side of her, and she lost her balance, tipping forward into a ruddy-cheeked officer, who backpedaled as if he’d opened a closet door and a rotting corpse had fallen out. Claire hit the floor in a puff of dust.
The fallen administrators quickly picked themselves up, and the crowd backed away, forming a ring around Claire, the human loupe that never failed to materialize at Beijing’s car accidents and public heart attacks. The floor was gritty, and she tasted coal dust on her lips. Teacher Wu crouched next to her.
“Now is a good time for you to speak,” he whispered.
“Now?” she said. “Some help?”
He tentatively reached for her arm, and was relieved when two other administrators stepped in and scooped her up by her armpits.
“Where’s the officer in charge?” said Teacher Wu to one of the recruits.
“Here,” said the precinct captain, standing off to the side, a smoldering cigarette wedged into the corner of his mouth.
Teacher Wu pushed Claire forward, forcing her onstage. “Now is a good time for you to tell your story,” he said.
“Careful with the merchandise,” Claire said.
“Speak now,” Teacher Wu said, nodding in the direction of the precinct captain.
She looked around, then started to speak in elementary Chinese, but Teacher Wu stopped her.
“English. Speak English. You are tired. I translate,” he said. “Tell about the Uyghur who robbed you.”
“I didn’t see anyone. My bag just disappeared,” Claire said. “I told you that.”
Teacher Wu smiled and looked around at the room magnanimously. “Okay, okay,” he said. “You talk, I translate.”
“All I wanted was a new ID card,” Claire said. “What is all this?”
That blue flame again. Wu turned a grim smile on Claire and then began to relate his version of events to the captain.
The room reeked of sweat and tobacco smoke undercut by the tang of pickled cabbage wafting out of someone’s desk drawer. The precinct captain sucked on his cigarette. His face had the heavy quality of wet cloth, and he surveyed the room from behind a monkish brow, his eyes never alighting on any one person for very long, as
if committing a pointillist version of the crowd to memory. He had a gift for faces.
Teacher Wu, intent on proving himself worthy to everyone gathered, spoke with his clearest voice.
“Our motherland has failed to protect its children. This neighborhood has become unsafe! University students and foreign guests have been endangered, and now one of the students entrusted to us by the government of the United States has been robbed! We demand action. Illegal influences from the western provinces have taken over! We can no longer walk the streets without fear. How many of us will be attacked before you will act to protect us?”
Wu paused to gauge the administrators’ reaction, but especially Claire’s.
What beauty, he thought. Even with dirt all over her face and her hair askew, she was a heavenly spirit. She stared back at him impassively, and he understood immediately that of course she couldn’t understand a word he was saying, and that even if she could, she wouldn’t allow her emotions to surface unless she wanted everyone to know that she harbored romantic feelings for him. Her cold eyes excited him. He knew that beneath her mask of disregard, she was urging him to continue. She never took her eyes off him.
All the administrators were watching him, and he felt alive, electrified, as though delivering a lecture to a packed hall. The PSB officer in charge was watching, too, waiting for him to speak. At last, thought Wu, at last.
He brought his voice to its full register, turning this way and that to address both the administrators and the captain. As he spoke, he allowed his emotions to course freely, until he had broken through the wall dividing self-preservation and martyrdom. Perhaps the government, he said, had planted the Uyghurs to facilitate the neighborhood’s downfall so cadres could sweep up land on the cheap. Perhaps local government was profiting from the drug deals. Perhaps PSB officers were on the take—no one in the room, but an investigation surely would expose graft.