Ming’s wardrobe didn’t include speaking-at-a-charity-gala attire, but she combed through limp gowns at a thrift shop and found a dress made of ivory lace, with a high neck. Jeff snickered when she modeled it for him. “Makes you look like a poetess who writes things like, ‘My Sunday morning carriage ride, through the Lord’s field of demurest daffodils….’”
“Zoe didn’t give me a lot of time.”
“I know. I’m not supposed to tell you…”
“What?”
“Nothing.” He was obviously bursting to tell her. He mentioned the name of a famous Chinese writer now living in Princeton. “They had her lined up, but she canceled, said she was doing something in London. You’re a substitute.”
On the afternoon before the affair, a Thursday, she tried on the poetess lace dress once again. Jeff was Photoshopping something. “Danny is away on business and might not get home in time tonight,” she said, examining the battered red pumps that were her only option.
“Poor Zoe, just has to marry a power broker,” Jeff said.
Ming nodded. The dress cut into her neck. “It must feel so strange to not even know who your father is.”
“Well, of course….” Jeff seemed to be bursting again.
“Of course what?”
“Nothing for your big ears.”
“Are my ears too big?” she checked in a mirror.
“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, Ming is not the fairest of all because she’s so vain she doesn’t even care about her friend.”
“I’d do anything for Zoe.”
“Well I can’t tell you anything.”
“So don’t.”
“Why do you think she got into this China thing? She thinks Charles Engelhorn might be her father. I’m never supposed to tell anyone. You let it out, you die.”
That night, Ming was to meet Zoe at a coffee shop on Madison Avenue near the Hirsch’s penthouse so that they could arrive together. When Zoe entered the coffee shop, heads turned in her direction. She wore long earrings, probably borrowed from her mom, and lipstick. “You should always dress like that,” Ming said. She wondered if Zoe could see through to her brain and this strange secret that Jeff had etched upon it.
In the Hirschs’ apartment, though, Ming observed that Zoe’s earrings were just servile tinsel amidst all the diamonds and emeralds. Suzanne Hirsch was wearing a ruby necklace. The rich all looked like they’d just swept in from somewhere else—the status was in their voices and the things they said, and the jewels were supposed to look like an afterthought, Ming saw. Suzanne had a wholesome face that looked like it really belonged to the sea breezes off of East Hampton.
“I’m so happy you could come.” With a start, Ming realized Suzanne was talking to her. “And have you met Charles Engelhorn?” A tall man with shaggy gray-flecked hair stood looking at her.
“I had such a fascinating visit to Beijing a few years ago. I almost became a Chinese art scholar, many years ago, but I got married instead,” Suzanne said, with a luxuriant smile of regret. It was hard to tell if she was really regretful or just trying to make her guests feel like their lives were worth an ounce of envy.
“Suzanne!” Someone came in and wrapped her in a hug.
“So you’re a writer, I hear,” said Charles Engelhorn.
He had a tight beard and wore a not-quite-expensive-enough-for-this-crowd suit. She observed his gap-toothed smile and arms that stretched as if they didn’t quite know where they would stop.
She nodded. “I blog erotic stories and poems.”
She watched him squirm, then start stroking his beard as if that was what he’d meant to do. “Do you know, I’ve traveled all over China but never got to Sichuan?”
When they were at the table and it was Professor Engelhorn’s turn to speak, he talked about Ming. “I’ll be brief because we have two real-life stories from China tonight,” he told the fifty or so guests. He said that nearly ten years ago he’d been in Beijing and heard about a local man, a physicist and manager of a state-owned division, who had been arrested on unstated charges but in reality had just fallen afoul of a corrupt local official. “I’ve just now, tonight, found myself sitting next to that man’s daughter,” he said.
Then he went on to talk about the just-released prisoner and how his crime had been to organize a protest against a group of corrupt officials in another town. Ming flashed a Dr. Perlmutter smile at the young hero just out of the lao gai. He nodded with an expression that said smiling was for pampered fools. When the former political prisoner stood, he spoke in Mandarin with Professor Engelhorn translating, telling of a guard who beat him if he didn’t split rocks fast enough. The hero looked too broken. Ming saw Danny slip into the room and to a table where the guests whispered to him instead of listening to the speaker. When it was Ming’s turn to address the crowd, she made a point of slowing down for effect in the places Zoe had told her to.
The next day an e-mail from an unfamiliar address showed up, signed “Charles.” The message was short, just, “It was good to meet you. I’m glad to hear that your parents are doing well now. Maybe someday I’ll get to Sichuan.”
Ming huddled in a corner even though Jeff wasn’t home, waiting for her fingers to play out a response. What came out was, “I rarely wish to go back and explore my birthplace. But if you were to visit there, I think you might find it…” she sat for a while with her hands in limbo. The word she finally wrote was “salty.”
Sunshine Village was, in fact, a salty place. Around 250 BC, a provincial governor had discovered the salt mines, and for many centuries, the economy had revolved around that most valuable of commodities in the days before refrigeration, a commodity that emperors believed would arouse even the most homesick among their underage concubines. Illegitimate princelings throughout China were conceived in a salted frenzy.
“Come by and chat sometime if you’re around the Columbia campus,” the professor wrote back. Two days later she sat across from him in a tiny coffee bar, fifteen blocks from campus. Ming kept glancing around, fearing Zoe or someone who knew her would wander in.
“I never want to go back to China,” Ming told him. “I love New York.”
“So you’re living the life of a young writer in Brooklyn?” he asked. American men, she’d found, seemed to like it when she talked about living beneath skylights and dropping out of business school to write. Maybe someday she’d meet a man who would listen if she told him about Li Nan and the awful things. She toyed with the idea that the professor might be that man. For the moment she told him about her artsy roommates and their day-to-day angst. She told him about her marriage but said she and Jeff were just good friends, doing it for the green card. She told him that Zoe was also her good friend.
“I love Zoe’s mom, too. She’s a beautiful actress.” The background music stopped, the chatter around them grew silent. At least that was the way it seemed. And Charles—he had said to call him Charles—sat upright, suddenly stiff.
“Sounds like your father’s pleasing the Party now,” he said, as if suddenly remembering his authority. He said to watch for something more insidious as China grew richer and more aware that the eyes of the world were upon them. “We might call a lot of what the media and advertising do in this country brainwashing, but if there’s a society that’s going to turn up in the future with the most sophisticated form of brainwashing, I’d put my money on China.”
He seemed to think he knew more about her homeland than she did, but it was nice to listen to a man who actually had something to say. She thought she could see the traces of a shy and pimply youth, like a pentimento beneath his middle-aged faced. Maybe he’d talked about books to the young Billie Austin, and maybe she’d liked it for a little while. But Jeff had told her Billie had been mean to Charles Engelhorn, and Ming had a sudden sense of wanting to protect that young boy and tell him things were going to work out very well fo
r him.
The next day Ming decided to be bold enough to e-mail him. “I enjoyed talking with you.” The next step was up to him.
He e-mailed back, “I enjoyed talking with you too.”
After that, weeks passed without any messages from Charles. Then she got an idea. She wrote to him and said she had a book she thought he’d appreciate—by the eighth-century poet Du Fu, who wrote his most famous poems in Sichuan. She copied a line from the poem “My Thatched Hut.”
“…my window contains peaks with a thousand years of ice
my gate harbors boats from ten thousand miles downriver.”
“I can bring it by sometime,” she wrote.
Two days later he wrote back. “Sure, bring it by when you have a chance.”
But it all came to an end before she even got to his office.
On her way home from a catering job that same night, in mid-December dampness, Ming spotted a figure huddled across the street from her building, a man with bear-like shoulders and a face wrapped in a muffler. Impossible to tell if the man was one of Li Nan’s henchmen or a plainclothes cop. If the law had found Li Nan they’d also come looking for his employees. She sauntered on, sat in a restaurant that was open until two a.m., but eventually she had to go home. The hulk was still waiting in the shadows.
She slept late the next morning. She turned over many times and felt the sunlight caress her face. Jeff had gone out somewhere.
Her cell phone rang and she saw that it was her parents’ number in China.
Mama still had a voice as strong as a rock. “We went to see the onight…” It was, after all, nearly midnight in China. “They didn’t want us to come in, they want to hide in shame.”
“What?” Ming played innocent.
“Folks here are saying,” Mama spoke slowly, with meaning, “he was running some kind of company that committed fraud and identity theft. The police raided his office a while ago, but, just this week, they found him. Come home for the holidays. We’ll welcome your husband too. You don’t have to go back, either. Han has a job for you.”
Mama, dear Mama, who always figured out everything, even how to save face.
Li Nan and his thugs would serve their sentences, then change their names if they had to, tap into offshore accounts and start over, because this was America. But there was that steel that would inhabit your soul. Could you ever shake it off if you’d been a criminal?
Ming had knelt and asked Buddha for favors before. Her whole family had, even though they knew it was superstitious nonsense that just made you feel better for the moment. She knelt then, for just a few minutes, before she started throwing things into two suitcases. She begged the gods for a dozen favors, including that no one would barge in, no roommates and especially not Jeff. She left her husband-of-convenience a note saying her father was sick and she had to be in China, just for a while. She left fifty dollars with the note. Not enough to cover anything, just a token of false promises. She stole a platinum wig and a pair of sunglasses that Jeff had picked up somewhere, and left through the backdoor in the basement.
Jeff would get by. He—and Zoe and her mom, and the roommates in the loft—could still trust in the gods that ruled their shabby but oh-so-civilized kingdom. Ming had nothing left, except maybe the god of private equity.
Chapter Five
That guy was like an ancient Chinese hermit,” Zoe contemplated the morning after their arrival in Sunshine Village, “with eyes like fire. I dreamt about those eyes.”
The man in the pagoda. I saw a creature with fiery eyes before, Ming thought.
The overheated bedroom seemed to swirl with rainbow lights flashing from the dingy walls. Then, before she had a chance to say something about the man, the phone rang.
“Did you have a good sleep?” asked the ubiquitous Lulu. The directors of Sunshine Industries invited Ming and her American guest to lunch that day, she said.
The grass and the rapeseed and even the clouds looked like a palette of vivid brown, yellow, and silver, Ming thought as she and Zoe made their way to the executive dining room at noon, with Lulu trailing them.
Three young men and one old man sat at a round table. They stood up in unison when Ming, Zoe, and Lulu entered the room. Ming recognized them all, weathered though they were. Guo Tang Fei, now the company director, and his old friends, Yeng and Eng. The three boys who’d bullied Li Nan. Tang still had his wavy hair. Yeng was almost bald. Eng was tall and reedy. The fourth man was Mr. Pang, Lulu’s father, who introduced himself as the director who’d just retired. He was, Ming recalled, about twenty years older than Lulu’s mother. He’d been a large man, but his back was stooped now and his pants draped around a belt.
“Please sit,” said Mr. Pang. They encircled a Sichuan hot pot bubbling with the savory aroma of chicken broth and ginger. A waitress brought in platters of vegetables and raw chicken and beef, and they all picked up one morsel at a time with their chopsticks, steaming the ingredients in the hot pot and slowly filling their own individual bowls. Ming watched their hosts smack and slurp as if small bites would never be enough; it seemed they hadn’t forgotten how it felt to have nothing to eat but thrice-boiled rice.
They stopped slurping only when the waitress brought in a plate piled high with slimy clumps. Everyone gazed at the platter.
“Ah, pig brains,” Tang Fei exclaimed. He was looking at Zoe as if he wanted to smile but wasn’t sure if that would impress her. “Eat plenty of these and you’ll finish your PhD, no problem.” He grabbed one of the slimy brains with his chopsticks; It had the circumference of a dinner plate, and Ming watched him wrestle it, then another and another, into the hot pot. When the brains were cooked he eased them onto a spare platter, cut them into large cubes with chopsticks, and passed the platter around.
Yeng gobbled down one clump of pig brain after another, then looked at Zoe as if he, too, wanted her to notice him. “Ming was the smartest kid in school,” he pronounced. “There was a kid named Li Nan who was the dumbest. He went to New York too, and he got very rich.”
“Until he got caught, that is,” Lulu snickered.
Ming felt her little-girl falsetto take over, against her will. “I talked to him once or twice in New York. He said he makes dreams come true.”
She reached for the pig brain platter, intending to stuff her mouth and say no more, but only a single clump was left, and it wasn’t polite to take the last one. Odd, how fast the delicacy had disappeared.
Zoe had turned to examining her teacup. “Ming and I have been talking about how someone ought to start a business exporting this jasmine tea,” she told their hosts.
Thank you for changing the subject, Ming uttered silently.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of private businesses operating in Sunshine Village,” Lulu said.
“We don’t need private businesses. We’re the only state-owned company in Sichuan that’s doing very well,” Tang Fei said. “We expect to see a profit of forty percent this year.” Ming interpreted the giggle in his voice as a blip from some spot in the stratosphere where numbers were free for the offing. “We found that we could cut our workforce by sixty percent and still get more accomplished by requiring that everyone work six days a week. We were spending so much money sending people off on vacations every summer, you see. We are much more like America now; two week vacations and workers pay for their own vacations and housing.”
“I’m writing about the history of Sunshine Village for my dissertation,” said Zoe. “Did you all grow up here?”
Mr. Pang spoke up, his voice thin and gravelly. “I came here as part of a military unit when there was nothing here but a few peasants working the land,” he said. He cleared his throat and spat on the floor. Old revolutionaries in China were always spitting, just to flaunt how lower-class they could be.
“We were going to build something big and beautiful,” Mr. Pang w
ent on. “China didn’t need to grow rice everywhere, we needed a powerful country with a strong economy. So we built a factory with our own hands, then brought more people here and built a town.”
“Did people think it was going to become a workers’ paradise?” Zoe asked.
Mr. Pang laughed. “Yeah, the village cadres reminded us China was going to be a workers’ paradise every time we went to get our food rations. The peasants petitioned us because we were taking land, land that belonged to the state of course. We built a good school, a good hospital, for everyone. Some of the peasants even got new jobs in the factory.” He stopped and coughed a wet, hacking cough before he resumed talking. “Some people think paradise is being part of a strong country. Somebody else won’t agree.” Then he lit a cigarette.
Old Mr. Pang was killing himself with cigarettes, Ming surmised. And, in fact, when everyone got up to leave, Lulu pulled Ming aside and said, “I have to take my father to the doctor this afternoon.” They would be gone a couple of days, she said. Her father needed radiation and for that they had to go to the town of Fushun. “My mother will look after you and the American, though,” Lulu promised.
Ming wondered if Mrs. Pang was going to follow them or just hear reports from the villagers about every move they made. “Also,” Lulu lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “Tang Fei invites you to visit the factory tomorrow morning. We’re sorry, though, we can’t get clearance for foreigners to visit, so you must go alone.”
Ming interpreted that to mean that they were embarrassed to have foreigners see their sorry little factory. Zoe was going to be very disappointed.
She told Zoe they were on their own, but she left out the part about Tang Fei’s invitation. The two of them tromped over the grasses outside, headed in the direction of the guest house, and Zoe was silent, gazing at the gray sky as if she were contemplating a storm. A sparrow circled around them. Zoe glared at the bird, then spoke. “This place is full of ghosts and spirits. And no one’s telling me the truth about anything. Forty percent profit? Pu-leaze.” Her tone accused Ming of lying too. “Everyone except old Mr. Pang, and I’m guessing he’s eaten up with lung cancer and who knows how long he has. I want to talk to the peasants. I don’t expect them to be noble, pure, pastoral folks or anything, but what do you think they might have to say about the invasion of the military factory people? And the hermit in the pagoda?”
Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization Page 8