“I think it’s my duty to remind you, if you take fifty newly-minted PhD’s in the humanities, the likelihood of two of them ending up with tenured jobs at any school, let alone an Ivy League one, is slim. The odds are that you’ll have to ply your trade in a series of contract jobs or adjunct jobs, roaming around as an academic nomad.”
Nomad. When Professor Engelhorn said “two out of fifty,” what Zoe heard was that at least one of those fifty would get tenure at a top school, and didn’t she deserve to be that one? It might be tenure at Harvard or Yale or Princeton, in which case she and her New York-based financier husband—she had started dating Jeff’s friend Danny Hirsch that year—and two precocious children would work out some kind of commuting compromise.
“It’s brave of you,” Professor Engelhorn continued. “I mean, going for something as difficult as China. I fell into this because my grandfather had been posted all over Asia with the State Department, and then my father was a professor of Russian literature at Harvard. I wanted to do something similar but different. I guess if my dad had worked for General Motors, I’d be making cars.”
He made her feel like an imposter.
When she left his office, she considered locking herself in a toilet stall and crying all afternoon.
Yet the day he said, “The TA job is yours in September—if you want it,” he sounded as if he really thought she might have better things to do.
Her second year in the master’s program began like a reward; first, she became Professor Engelhorn’s TA, obligated to attend his classes, grade all of his student papers, and sit in on the discussion every time a student came to complain about a grade. The job paid her tuition and provided a stipend—just enough that when three scholar friends pleaded with Zoe to be the fourth roommate in their student apartment so that they could all afford the rent, she said yes. “It’s time I grew up,” she admonished Billie, who had a boyfriend coming around from time to time that year and called Zoe asking her to come home only when she and the boyfriend fought. By then, it was March and the graduate students had received word that their building was scheduled for demolition at the end of the school year to make way for a luxury condo development. The graduate student residents began taking turns holding what they called Armageddon parties.
As Professor Engelhorn’s teaching assistant, Zoe found that students frequently came into his office after hours, hanging around talking about anything—their dissertations, Chinese scandals, cranky lovers, certifiable parents, inorganic wheat allergies. She observed that while the students were unloading, Professor Engelhorn was just avoiding going home. Sometimes he would suggest going out for a beer.
They would crowd around a table at the Abbey Pub and an eager cluster of students would ask Professor Engelhorn what he thought of this or that news from China or this or that new book, while another core would talk about who they were dating or who they thought was hot. A few teased Zoe about how she was going to be looking at Shanghai someday from the perch of a penthouse built by the famous Hirsch Builders—Danny’s father.
One such night in May, she invited two dozen students and the professor to a party she and her roommates were throwing that Friday night—their turn at hosting the end of the world. Professor Engelhorn said he was going to be addressing a group of Columbia and NYU students from China on Friday night. “They call themselves an assorted crew of malcontents who don’t believe a free market will make everything all right.”
“They can all come. Armageddon should be overpopulated,” Zoe assured him.
It was at that party that a confluence of karmic influences caused Ming and Zoe to meet.
It was a cool night, but open windows were no match for the inferno of body heat. Zoe, standing against the kitchen counter between Danny and Jeff, watched friends of friends of friends jostle for air rights.
“Does a crowd make us feel more or less loved?” Danny wondered. He poured a frosty bottle of South Hampton barley ale for the three of them. Danny had a fresh-scrubbed face that could sometimes deflate with an incongruous inner gloom, and a body that was just a little too thin, as if he were still growing into his adult role. Zoe’s mother had pronounced him “not shallow but callow, not repulsive but not hot.” His shirt smelled as rarified as the men’s department at Barney’s.
Jeff raised his glass and said, “To the evolution of barley malt. Hey, there’ll be strangers fornicating in your bed by the time you try to clean up.”
Jeff wore a T-shirt with a faded picture of McDonald’s arches above the words “Pave the rainforest.” Zoe herself wore an I-have-no-time-for-fashion tank top from her martial arts academy.
“We might love the reinforcement of a crowd but hate the people in it,” Danny went on.
Jeff had turned away, his gaze fixed upon a Chinese girl whose Rapunzel-of-the-Orient tresses grazed his elbow. “I didn’t know my tasteless friend Zoe was going to use my art this way,” he murmured to the girl, and pointed out the photographs of homeless people tacked on the walls and cabinets.
“Those pictures are, uh, I would say, deeply disturbing,” the girl said, her voice fierce with approval. She wore a tee shirt and mini-skirt as black as her hair, her shirt short enough to reveal a sunburst tattoo easy enough to hide from straight-laced Chinese parents. She spoke English with a versatile vocabulary but with the accent of a recent arrival.
“I’m Ming,” she said. She stopped suddenly and closed her mouth, but Zoe had already observed the gray third-world stumps that passed for teeth.
“Zoe spent a year at Bei Da,” Jeff said. “Can you tell I visited her there? I learned how to say Bei Jing instead of Beizhing—”
“I speak Lhasa-Yipso dialect,” Danny muttered, and squeezed Zoe’s waist as if he were a space alien trying pull her away.
Ming tossed a confused look at him, then turned to Zoe. “I am here to study an MBA at NYU. Surprise to my parents, in my heart I am a writer.”
“Maybe the world isn’t ready for your genius,” Danny persisted. Zoe punched him lightly. That was the code word, between the three of them, for bad art. She saw that Ming got it; the girl lowered her head like a creature in retreat.
“Where are you from?” Zoe asked; dumb small talk to ease hard feelings. Danny turned to talk to a group in the corner.
“Beijing.” Ming tossed her hair. “But I wasted my childhood in Sichuan, you know Sichuan? It was a Lin Biao classified project in an awful,” she gave a shudder, “little village….”
“A Third Front village? Praise…”
Zoe caught the words on the way out. She had almost shouted, “Praise the Lord!”
Around them party guests were expounding on assassinating Republican politicians, the advantages of Zoloft over Paxil, how technology was going to create an empire of its own in the new millennium, and why theatre critics were all bombastic bootlickers. But absolutely no one in that crowd would have known quite how to react if they’d heard some alien in their midst howl the words: “Praise the Lord!” Especially if the words tumbled out in a Mississippi pulpit twang.
“I’ve been talking about the Third Front line of defense in the provinces with my adviser,” she went on, grasping to recover her poise. “He said that the villages might be a good dissertation topic. If the committee decides I’m PhD material, that is.”
Jeff patted her shoulder.
“Do you drive cars?” Ming asked the two of them.
“Sure, I grew up in New Joisey, suburbia, but I try not to go back,” said Jeff.
“I would like to drop out from school and go across America all the way,” said Ming.
“You wanna see billboards and Bible thumpers and amber waves of grain?” Jeff’s pale cheeks lit up with sudden color. “I’ve always wanted to take a foreigner on the road.”
“First, we all go see America, then Zoe comes with me to Sunshine Village,” Ming half-promised.
&nbs
p; When Jeff left the party, Ming left with him. A month later they were married.
Chapter Three
The bus ride to Chengdu took four and a half hours. Ming and Zoe shared a thermos of tea, some bean paste rolls, and one of the two magenta Day-Glo dragonfruits Zoe had bought at the market outside the Chengdu airport. Zoe pulled out her old Swiss army knife with the blade that wouldn’t quite retract and sliced the rubbery rind in perfect strips.
“I remember your mom had a summer dress this color,” Ming mused, holding up a strip of dragonfruit rind, and she felt herself sigh with longing for the place she’d had to leave.
“One hill after another,” Zoe snapped back. “Must have been a rough ride by oxcart.” The way she glared told Ming that this was going to be the rule: no talk about New York.
Ming let her pink strips fall to the floor, along with the banana peels, peanut shells, and cigarette butts that other passengers dropped as the morning wore on.
Just after one o’clock, she sniffed a familiar salty smell, and the old bus wheezed its way through a wall of clouds.
“Next stop, Sunshine Village!” the bus conductor announced.
The two travelers stomped over the carpet of detritus to exit the bus. Outside, the white misty air swirled through the black grime of Market Street. A swarm of villagers, gathered to greet the incoming bus, stared the new arrivals up and down. Ming looked very official in black trousers, high heels, and a yellow wool coat; the townspeople doubtless would have suspected her of being the investment firm conscript she really was if not for the fact that she was with an American in hiking boots, dressed as if China was nothing more than a mountain to scale.
No one was expecting them. New Icarus Capital had a practice of sending researchers out to inspect old state-owned companies in surprise attacks. If they had forewarning, the villagers would erect a stage set to make the company look far more valuable than it was. True, there was always the danger of some local authority detaining unexpected visitors just to let them know they weren’t wanted. Han had a plan for that; Zoe was to flash her Columbia University ID card, which would convey vague suggestions of American ex-presidents and network reporters descending in her wake.
Market Street, the center of Sunshine Village, ran for two and a half blocks, and was lined with cement buildings of two and three stories high. At dirt floor storefronts, merchants sold cabbages and oranges and the occasional bar of soap. Sweaty cooks stirred vats of chicken broth, their customers slurping noodles at Formica tables, playing mahjong, minding babies, and watching soap operas on overhead television screens.
At the end of the two and a half blocks, where the storefronts gave way to a meadow, the visitors halted. Two dozen or so men swarmed about, muttering amongst themselves, smoking, spitting, and carrying signs that read Unemployed Machinist Needs Work and Experienced Payroll Manager, Laid Off.
Zoe stared. You don’t have the freedom to stare, Ming thought, but all she said was “C’mon.” She pointed to an unpaved road that wound uphill. “There used to be a guesthouse this way.”
They passed a few sparser storefronts that seemed to sell nothing but oranges. From the crest of the hill, they looked down upon an undulating valley, the grass brown and frosty between clumps of yellow rapeseed. In the distance was the spire of a pagoda. It was there that a big-boned young woman appeared, trudging up the hill and waving at them, with a face so sour she might have been about to handcuff them. But she didn’t look like any kind of police officer, not in her purple parka and two pigtails tied up in a rainbow of plastic baubles
Ming shuddered.
“Xiao Ming Cheng?” the woman’s voice was a melodic alto.
“Lulu Pang?” Lulu had been a year behind Ming in school. Ming recalled a hideous day when she was taking a shower in the community bathhouse and Lulu, then a chubby eleven year old, had flung open the curtain, pointed at Ming’s budding breasts and pubic hair, giggled and sang out, “Ming has hair!” After which, Ming had recurring nightmares about parading through Sunshine Village naked, while the townspeople pointed and laughed.
“We welcome you to Sunshine Village.” Lulu seized their suitcases. “You will come and stay at my mother’s guest house. Why didn’t you telephone? We use e-mail now too. We would have made up special rooms for you.”
“This is my friend Zuo Yi,” Ming said. “She’s a China scholar at Columbia University.”
Lulu cast a disapproving sidelong glance at Zoe. “Welcome,” she said in a rote tone that sounded like she was reading from an unfamiliar script. “We get many foreign guests now, from America, Taiwan, Japan, Switzerland…”
They had no choice but to follow Lulu down the other side of the hill, along a narrower dirt path to a cement courtyard and behind it, a forlorn slab of a building washed in peeling pink paint. An older woman with plump pouches for cheeks—as if she had gobbled up the previous visitors—appeared at the front door. She gave the girls a contorted smile that looked out of practice, but pumped Ming’s hand and gushed, “Xiao Ming Cheng? All grown up. You came without letting me know?” She stared at Ming and her city clothes, then her gaze crossed over to Zoe and her utter American-ness. “You come from America? My cousin went there.”
“Mrs. Pang,” Ming whispered to Zoe as they followed the older woman up a narrow flight of stairs. “Lulu’s mother. She used to work as an office manager for my parents.”
Above, they traversed an unlit hallway, their footsteps echoing on the cement floor. Mrs. Pang reached into her pocket and pulled out a ring with a dozen keys and unlocked a door, which opened into a small suite. There was a front room with four stiff-backed chairs, and a thick brocade curtain that reeked of mildew. Mrs. Pang picked up a corner of the curtain and led them into a room with one double bed and one single bed. She turned on a switch and a blast of crematory heat filled the bedroom.
“You must be very tired,” Mrs. Pang pronounced. Her cheeks grew fatter. “Two beds, see? And you have a private bath, with hot water.”
“How much?” asked Zoe.
“Don’t worry, you are our guests, we settle when you go.”
Price improvisation, Ming thought.
Another young woman entered, head bowed, carrying a tray laden with a tea thermos, four oranges, and two paper-thin towels.
“Let’s go back out,” Zoe said as soon as the two visitors were alone. It was ice-cold in the front room. Zoe tried to yank the curtain aside. “Shit. If this would move, we could distribute the heat….”
Ming turned the knob on the front door. It didn’t budge. “We have a smiling jailor.”
“Shit! Try again.”
“I think they’ll come let us out when the town is cleaned up.”
“Cleaned up?”
“The men,” Ming reminded her. “Those protesters will rot in prison so that we can see the town all spiffed up and presentable.”
“When you take over the company, you can let the men out. Shit, shit, shit. I should get word about a human rights violation to Professor Engel….” Zoe stopped herself and turned her back to Ming.
“How is he?” Ming felt her voice coming out in little-girl falsetto. An involuntary reflex that happened when she had cause to be contrite. Nothing happened with him, she had to remind herself.
Instead of answering, Zoe picked up the teapot. “Think there’s a microphone hidden somewhere in the room?” She poured the tea, and the small room was filled with the fragrance of a summer garden.
“Sichuan jasmine. Grows all around here,” said Ming. “When I was little they used to ration two shreds of leaf to a cup for the grownups and one shred to the children. We might as well take showers. You want to go first? Not very nice towels. Maybe you like this one?”
Ming handed Zoe a faded blue and green striped towel.
Zoe pulled out a bar of wrapped soap. “My mom put more money on her credit card to send me off
with some nice peach-mango soap.”
When Zoe came out of the shower, Ming was sprawled out on the small bed, tapping at her laptop. Zoe claimed a few square inches of floor to do modified qi gong stretches and kicks. Then she settled into a chair. Ming looked up from her writing occasionally, and saw Zoe trying to bury herself in a scholarly book except that she kept glancing up at the cracks in the ceiling as if the squiggles contained a message. The oxygen grew thin.
At last, somewhere in eternity, they heard the sound of metal scraping metal. Then a knock on the door.
Lulu stepped inside. “Did you have a nice rest? Are you hungry?” she asked. “I will show you the town now.”
They were outdoors, finally, ambling down the hill and onto Market Street. The protesters were gone—nothing but a puddle of water on the ground where they’d been. Ming could almost smell blood spilt then hosed away.
“We have many restaurants now,” said Lulu, their designated minder.
They wandered into a market stall where Ming and Zoe ordered bowls of steaming noodles. A critical customer from New York would have pronounced the broth lukewarm and the clots of fatty gray meat beyond disgusting, but New York was far away. Zoe poured jasmine tea into three cups.
“You have great hair,” Zoe told Lulu. Lulu’s hair was indeed glossy, the color of black jade and so thick that her pigtails nuzzled her shoulders like twin panther cubs. “You could be a hair model.”
Basking in Zoe’s effervescence, Lulu looked more wistful than sour. “I would like,” she said, “to study the hospitality industry.”
When they left the restaurant the clouds were the color of smoke. On the eastern side of town they could see the tiny figures of peasants trekking home from the fields. Ming turned up the hill toward the pagoda that loomed against the northern sky.
“It is not so nice there,” Lulu protested. Ming ignored her and steered Zoe toward the poplar trees that formed a circle around the ancient tower. While Lulu planted herself behind a tree, Ming showed Zoe the friezes carved in crumbling stone. Each wall depicted a scene from the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove. The sages lifted wine cups at a long table in one, stood debating the universe in another, wrote poetry in a third—their robes flowed gracefully, their long fingers, tapered and elegant, but there were only gouged holes where their heads had once been. Red Guards came with stonecutters and broke their heads off before you were born, Papa had told her.
Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization Page 5