Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization

by Jan Alexander

  “They don’t look like much fun,” Billie said, “but they’ll make good marriage material someday. Let them be more in love with you than you are with them, otherwise you lose your head.”

  “I should have married that Charles guy,” Billie would say from time to time, mostly around the time the bills were due. His name became a code word that meant “a positive bank balance” and “an apartment that was ours for life.”

  When it came time to apply to colleges, Zoe sent off carefully penned applications to a multitude of schools. A few in New England and Pennsylvania sent acceptance letters. So did Barnard—her top choice as a school and just across the street from Columbia. Small-town campuses, however, also held an appeal for Zoe.

  “Why would you want to go to some cloistered college town and leave me when you can go to Barnard?” Billie pleaded. “Besides, how would we pay your room and board?”

  Zoe dutifully enrolled at Barnard.

  Billie didn’t mention Charles Engelhorn again until two weeks before Zoe’s freshman classes began. She pondered aloud, with no warning, “I wonder if that Charles guy is still there. If you meet him, don’t mention me.”

  His name was listed in the campus directory of course, and as it turned out her Asian political economics 101 class was held in the same building as his office. She went as far as the front door of the East Asian Institute, where his office was, but it was a vast suite of faculty offices and a student at the front desk asked, “Can I help you?” so Zoe pretended she was looking for the Human Rights Institute down the hall. But every day, yellow, blue, and pink flyers announcing seminars decorated bulletin boards beside the building’s elevators, and one day in early October, Zoe spotted a yellow one announcing an upcoming brownbag lunchtime seminar with Charles Engelhorn, professor of Chinese history and government.

  Zoe groaned to her friends that she had to attend some tedious talk for extra credit and slipped off to the building by herself. She arrived ten minutes early, but the room was already half full. Professor Engelhorn was there, sitting at the head of a long table. Zoe made her way through a dozen rows of folding chairs to the back of the room.

  Up close, Professor Engelhorn looked even more important than he had on television, surrounded as he was by men and women who were saying things to him in the low tones of people who knew their words carried weight. Zoe met the great Professor Engelhorn’s eyes for a moment. He’d grown a beard. A wistful smile played across his face, as if he were perpetually searching for something he couldn’t quite define. His legs seemed too long for the chair.

  Then she felt a tap on her shoulder.

  “Excuse me, young lady,” said a man behind her. “We have a crowd today, so this table is just for faculty and graduate students.”

  Her face on fire, Zoe moved to a folding chair. People talked of summers in China. Delicatessen bags rustled, and smells of deli meat and yogurt pervaded the room. She’d forgotten that “brown bag seminar” meant you were supposed to bring your lunch, though her stomach was way too knotted up to eat.

  Professor Engelhorn opened the session talking about his summer in Beijing and news he’d heard of several Chinese businessmen getting held under house arrest after they’d displeased one Party official or another. “And, uhm, some have gone to prison,” he said. “Just over the summer, there was an egregious case of a physicist who’d served the Party for years in a remote place called Sunshine Village.”

  The village had been home to a factory that manufactured goods for the military, the professor explained, one of the many that Mao and Lin Biao had set up as part of the Third Front. The man in question, Mr. Cheng, and his wife, who was also a physicist, had felt honored to serve the revolution in a hardship outpost. Later, the Party had moved them to Beijing to run a quasi-government owned company that manufactured latex. In Beijing, the local Minister of Industry, whose duty it was to oversee the Chengs’ company, had a mistress who needed a job in order to acquire a residence permit in the city. Professor Engelhorn smiled here and made eye contact with the important people around the long table. The minister, he went on, asked the Chengs to hire his mistress; they replied, however, that they didn’t have a budget and the girl had no specific skills. Shortly thereafter, the police arrested Mr. Cheng on charges that were never made clear. His wife sought the advice of lawyers and urged everyone who’d worked with them over the years to write letters attesting to her husband’s sterling character. What ultimately got Mr. Cheng out of prison, however, was that the minister himself fell out of favor.

  “Once again, we see that your track record in China doesn’t matter as much as whether you please the right people at the right moment,” Professor Engelhorn said. “The more economic growth we get, the more we should keep an eye out for human rights violations related to business dealings.”

  Zoe raced home from her classes that evening and found Billie in her grooming-gig yoga pants—the ones that had dog hairs embedded in the threads—watching television and smoking a cigarette. Billie smoked only when the last day of callbacks for an audition had passed and no one had called.

  “I saw him,” Zoe announced.

  “Who, baby?”

  “Professor Charles. He gave a talk about these physicists who came from a remote Sichuan village….When he talked about the village I could see it. Rice fields, and a deep river gorge. He didn’t describe it in detail, but I could see it—as if I had been there before, as if I knew the place!”

  “Maybe you lived there in a past life.”

  “Dumb joke.” Zoe stared at her mother, with her tousled auburn curls, her smudged eye makeup, and ashtray full of twisted butts. People with a good education didn’t say things about past lives and messages from God, even in jest.

  “Excuse me, Little Miss Seven Sisters.”

  Zoe attended other brownbag seminars with China scholars during her freshman year, and Professor Engelhorn was usually there. She always sat in the middle of the spectator row. Speakers left fifteen minutes at the end of the presentation for questions from the audience. Someday, Zoe decided, she would raise her hand and ask a question.

  In the middle of her sophomore year, she gathered her courage at a seminar and raised her hand. A professor visiting from Stanford and seated to Professor Engelhorn’s right had spoken at length about the Three Gorges Dam. The Stanford professor pointed towards Zoe; his mouth tilted suggestively in a way that indicated an appreciation not for her raised hand so much as for her being young and dewy. His eyes scoped out the little points that were her breasts.

  “I read that…um…a good portion of the workers on the dam are political prisoners?” Oh hell, that was all wrong.

  “Is that a question?” the professor asked with a smug half-smile. “Yes, it’s plausible.”

  That was all he said.

  Zoe sat immobile, on fire with shame, and stayed that way as those around her got up to leave, timing her exit to blend in with the crowd.

  “Miss…?”

  Professor Engelhorn was calling to her. She twirled around, and they were face to face.

  “You might want to come next month,” he said, mentioning that a famous Chinese political prisoner would be speaking.

  Zoe opened her mouth to reply, but all that came out was air. She tried again. “I’m going to Beijing next year,” she blurted out. It was the first that she’d thought of a junior year abroad, which would require yet another credit card, but there were things, she felt, that just should be true. “I plan to get a PhD in modern Chinese economic history. I hope I can study with you.”

  The professor smiled in a way that looked both flattered and put-upon. Up close he had a face that seemed too tight to spring into action, Zoe thought, and when he smiled, sadness cast a gravitational pull. He looked directly in her eyes, and she had a sense that he was trying to atone for the Stanford professor’s impertinence by focusing solely upon her fa
ce. “And what year are you now?” he asked.

  “Sophomore.” She might as well have said kindergarten.

  “Well, come by in your senior year if you’re still interested then.” Then, turning, he directed a question to someone else hovering beside him: “So how was your trip?”

  The only friend Zoe confided in about the possibility of Professor Engelhorn being her father was Jeffrey Kirschenbaum, whom she’d met in freshman poli sci class. Jeff was, by anyone’s standards, a scruffy guy. He cultivated a night-bird complexion, kept a cigarette stub between his lips, and made a show of punctuating his sentences with declarative phrases like, “It all means a great deal of nothing.” He could ramble on about overrated contemporary art and the messy state of the nation all in one sentence, then, a moment later, complain about his own philistine parents.

  “How come we’ve never gotten it on?” Jeff pondered aloud, not for the first time, in the middle of their sophomore year. It was late at night, and the two of them were sprawled on his bed smoking a joint. Zoe didn’t smoke often, but she liked listening to Jeff’s incongruous musings and laughing into the night with him.

  “Sex would ruin our beautiful friendship,” Zoe told him, also not for the first time. It was an excuse. They could have slept together and still been friends, she thought. His hair was always rumpled, and his tee shirts littered the floor, but that did not bother her so much as the feeling that sex with Jeff would feel like wandering through dark roads with dead ends. Jeff seemed to have slouched into a spot where he was willing to stay forever; some place that would always look like a college dorm, with books and shirts scattered about; living amidst found scraps of metal and Styrofoam—the corpus of art in progress—and tables covered in debris of old computers that he had pulled apart “to find their soul.” Everything seemed to have a tortured significance to him, whereas Zoe knew that her own life must be compartmentalized and ordered so that she wouldn’t end up in an illegal sublet with a perpetually negative bank balance. She reserved sex and romance for boys whose kisses felt like a trip to an easier world than her own.

  Idling on Jeff’s dorm bed, though, felt like the scene from a childhood she’d never had, conspiring with a brother and imagining kingdoms of their own.

  “I’m going to China. I’m going to get a PhD in modern Chinese economic history.”

  “Can I come to China with you? I’ll look for a beautiful Chinese girl and you’ll find yourself a handsome young capitalist.”

  “Would that be so awful?”

  “What, going out with capitalists?”

  “I can’t live the way my mom does.”

  “Okay, how about we go to China and set ourselves up as gurus?”

  “I like that. Let’s start a cult where wealthy people think they’re coming to empower themselves, to get even richer, but we’ll brainwash them into supporting struggling artists.” They both giggled.

  “You’re not cut out to spend your life going through old Chinese manuscripts in dusty libraries. Even if you don’t have ADD like me.” Jeff always made his attention deficit disorder sound like a badge of superior intelligence. He had changed majors four times, although it appeared that he was starting to settle on art. “My dad almost got a PhD. He loved military history, but he said nobody gets tenure anymore. You get contracts, two years at a time in Podunk, Mississippi, then next year Podunk, Wyoming. I could’ve been born in Podunk, Somewhere, instead of Podunk, New Jersey.”

  “Professor Engelhorn—the guy I want for my adviser—has tenure.”

  “Tenure schmenure. We could take a road trip across the US. I’ll make a movie about it and we’ll get rich.”

  It was a fantasy she let herself entertain through one more drag.

  “You’re really ambitious, aren’t you? I don’t mean in a money-making way. I was thinking I’d call the movie On the Road with Zoe and we’d go looking for your father.”

  “Funny thing…my real father could be right here.”

  That was when Zoe told Jeff how she’d seen Professor Charles Engelhorn on television, and how Billie had said he’d loved her once.

  “Wow. I bet your mom was hot when she was young. I would’ve been in love with her too. Hey, if you are his kid, you can go to Barnard or Columbia completely tuition free.”

  Zoe understood that tenured professors weren’t rich, but Professor Engelhorn was enough of an academic star that they probably paid him well and he probably lived in a faculty apartment. She’d been in a couple of them; they were big, old-fashioned residences, full of polished parquet, and walls hung with art from India and Madagascar and ancient Persia. Faculty children rode tricycles in the hallways. No one ever worried about paying the rent or losing the apartment.

  “Don’t worry,” Jeff said. “It’ll all work out. For both of us.”

  A big toe poked through a hole in his sock. He wasn’t quite clean, yet his sweat had a rather pleasant grassy smell, combined with a whiff of suburban New Jersey, popcorn, and green cannabis.

  “Well, what am I going to do now?” Zoe insisted, poking Jeff’s bare toe with her own foot.

  “If I were a forty-year old professor, I’d like to have you as my star protégée.”

  “You can’t tell anybody that he might be my father. I mean, he might not be, right?” Zoe didn’t want to ponder this possibility because Professor Engelhorn as a father figure had taken root and become entrenched in her psyche, much like the way her muscles obeyed her mind once she’d learned the sideways kick and it had become a reflexive action.

  “Puleeeze. You think Uncle Jeffrey would spill your secret?”

  

  With the help of her mother’s credit cards, Zoe spent the spring semester of her junior year at Bei Da, and two years later she embarked upon the master’s program in Chinese history. While she had not obtained a full fellowship—the one that took care of all tuition and living expenses—Zoe managed to get a small grant for the first year. The grant required work-study hours, so she worked part-time in the office of the department, answering the phone, Xeroxing papers, and writing up expense reports.

  For the first few weeks, Professor Engelhorn kept calling her “Melanie,” the name of the girl who’d had the job the year before.

  “Actually, my name,”—it seemed a bold move to correct him—“is Zoe. Zoe Austin.” Charles Engelhorn’s face reddened for a moment, she was sure.

  Zoe took Professor Engelhorn’s seminar, Origins of the Chinese Revolutionary Movement, in the second semester. She studied every night for a month before the first test and made an A. After that, she felt bold enough to say a few things when he passed her desk, like “How are you today, Professor Engelhorn?”

  Department gossip had already been a significant source of information. Professor Engelhorn was married with two young sons, but Sara—a friend working her dissertation—told Zoe that the Professor and his wife led separate lives. On his desk, Professor Engelhorn kept a small family photo of his wife, an elegant Chinese woman with a meticulous hairdo and fabulous cheekbones, and his two dark-haired sons. Despite Mrs. Engelhorn’s apparent composure, her face looked anxious, as if the photographer had set her in the pose and then told her the studio was on fire. The boys had somber Eurasian eyes. Sara said Professor Engelhorn’s wife was “a piece of work.”

  “She’s an investment banker and she travels a lot,” Sara told Zoe. “And, apparently, she had an affair. They stay together because of the kids. Sad, I’d say he deserves better. He likes to intimidate his new students, but if you make it through, he’s your friend for life.”

  In April, Zoe, her mouth so dry she wasn’t sure if words would come out, approached Professor Engelhorn to ask if he would agree to be her primary thesis adviser the following year. “Um, well, I’d like to do something, you know…”

  “Take a deep breath.”

  “I’ve read about villages that be
came industry towns under Mao for state-owned enterprises. So when those enterprises fizzled out what happened to the people there?”

  Momentum gathered in her mind. “Anyway, I was thinking of examining the towns that had no real reason to exist in the modern system, the towns that Lin Biao set up as his line of military contractors…”

  “Do you mean the Third Front?” He was plunked in a chair in his big office, like some kind of wiseman with a novice standing at his feet. “Mao and the whole Party apparatus set up the villages. It was just later, after Lin Biao betrayed Mao, that they spread a story that Lin had sent all those scientists and workers to the boondocks as a ploy to run a secret network of military manufacturing facilities as one of his last gasps at power.”

  Zoe felt like an eight-year-old who’d failed to do her homework.

  “Be careful about assumptions. What do you hope to contribute to the history of the Third Front?” He stretched upward, until he was standing over her, as if he were about to drill her head open and pour knowledge in.

  “Um, I’d really like to find a specific village and, you know, study its last fifty years, one where there was plenty of drama….”

  “Well, you can start your research with these.” He pulled three books down from his shelves.

  In May of that year, Zoe got up the nerve to tell him that, since his teaching assistant was going to spend the following year conducting research in China, she was interested in the job. “Assuming I survive, of course.”

  There were fifteen master’s candidates in her class and Professor Engelhorn had said, on the first night of his seminar, “If three of you make it to the PhD program, and then through orals, and then finish your dissertation that will be about the normal odds.”

  That afternoon he reacted with his familiar flattered-though-put-upon gaze. “Sit down.”

  “Are you absolutely sure you want to be a scholar?” he asked when she was seated.

  “Of course. If I wanted an MBA, I’d be there.”