Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization

by Jan Alexander

  “Look there,” said the builder, and pointed to a lush valley just below where the jasmine tea flowers grew. Then he snickered. “They say you can get another kind of flowers from those fields way out there, beneath the forest camouflage.” He gestured toward the west.

  William looked agitated; she could sense it by the way his forehead crackled. When they bid goodbye to the contractor and headed toward the dock where paddleboats ferried visitors back to the other side of the river, he stopped. “We need to see what’s going on with the papaver somniferum flowers.”

  “How?” The impenetrable bamboo forest was visible to the west.

  “I guess you don’t remember the time you flew? Just a little liftoff, but you’d be surprised at the miracles you can make happen if you try, Ms. Zoe Austin from New York. Close your eyes, inhale wisdom. Arms high; slice through the air. Imagine you’re an eagle, and if anyone sees us, we’ll look like eagles to them.”

  She inhaled all the wisdom she could imagine and lifted her arms high. Nothing happened. William hovered and told her to try again. The fourth time, she took a deep breath that seemed to send heavenly breezes fluttering down to her toes, then felt herself gliding over the crests of trees, following a form that felt like William, aglow and familiar and sinewy, as he swooped below the treetops, following a floor of pine needles and weeds and grasses. A dazzling field of poppies—vibrant red with black seeds, hot pink, and fireball orange—materialized below, so bright that they seemed to beckon. Zoe dipped closer. Then a death rattle thundered right in her direction. She saw the earth shake beneath the flowers, and felt an arm grab her waist and swoop her into the forest.

  They were in a thicket of trees, standing in tall grasses. Zoe blinked. William held her by the shoulders. “Don’t go so close. They shot at you!”

  She found herself shaking all over.

  He led her through the trees to a rock along the cliff. There they perched side by side and contemplated the sky and the river and the eastern bank. They were miles downriver from the Buddha and the factory and the village proper, though they could see the airstrip and the pagoda-shaped roof of the terminal on the opposite bank. A small plane was taking off, carrying passengers to the east.

  “I don’t know what to do,” William admitted. “Who are these people who insist on holding the world hostage at gunpoint so they can make money from fools who’ve become prisoners to their false cloud of bliss?”

  “Make another program. Give them chips.”

  He shook his head. “They’re not the leaders. It’s those who lead who are the wind that bends the grasses.”

  Zoe knew he was paraphrasing Confucius not from her memories of Nirvana, but from books. Poor Confucius. She was still shaking from her mortal brush with death, too much to challenge William on whether the world was always going to be too power-mad for purists.

  Yet, with a lot of effort she could fly. As the dry spring grew balmy, Zoe practiced flying in the woods beyond William’s house. She managed to take off alone and leap into an arc before landing.

  In her regular rounds walking about the town, Zoe found the Kwan Market growing. Jing Yin was still there, selling homemade jams, a condiment of hot peppers and peaches, and an assortment of steamed buns with poppy seeds on top. Next to the edibles she’d stacked a dozen paper-wrapped CDs, with a picture of herself and the title “Do You Dare?”

  “I always knew you had talent,” Zoe told the sullen girl as she purchased a CD. Jing Yin lit up, seemingly in spite of herself. Then they talked for a while, woman to woman.

  “You’re a business partner to him. You’re a nice person, but I’m young and fresh.” That was what the girl confessed. She tossed her head as Larissa Lee might, then giggled with a heavy dose of fake modesty. “I bet he tells you we haven’t…you know…done anything. Well I won’t give him what he wants ’til he’s mine.”

  Shrewd girl. When Zoe told William about the conversation he begged her to rise above it. There would be time to get back to work on the face in a few years, maybe, after they launched Phase Two. She pushed him away.

  Lulu Pang, with her bluntness reminiscent of older, crueler times, told Zoe she’d been smart to get that philandering man out of her life. “I always wondered how you could let him do that to you. Sure, sometimes he looks sad, like somebody’s broken his heart but it’s probably for show. That type never changes.”

  On the riverbank she would see young lovers on benches and old lovers strolling, hands clasped. An occasional interesting man passed through town, but Zoe felt like the keeper of so many secrets it was hard to imagine an intimate conversation with someone new. If only Ming were here, she could talk to someone about body doubles and flying. Sometimes in the dappled light of a spring evening she’d think of old friends from home, though. If Jeff were here, he’d at least make her laugh. One night in April, not quite eight a.m. in New York, Zoe pulled out her cell phone and hit his number.

  Three rings and he picked up. “Zoe? At the bottom of the hole I’ve been digging to China? I nearly broke my neck on a pile of shit, getting to the phone, but at least it’s worth it. I’m supposed to be exhibiting at a gallery show, but they didn’t pay the rent and they got evicted yesterday. Can you fucking believe it?”

  How forlorn and strange his problems sounded. And so easy to fix.

  “I miss you. Why don’t you come to China? I mean fly to Chengdu and then to Sunshine Village. Ming isn’t here…”

  “Shit, I can tell by the tone of your voice—trouble with Mr. Sun and Moon and Stars? Tell Uncle Jeffrey all about it. But I don’t have any money to come to China. My estranged wife left me with a big credit card bill, remember?”

  “I think she’s been meaning to pay you back. But I’ll take care of it. And your ticket.”

  “I’m touched. But how could I let you—”

  “Everything is different here. You’ll find the strangest words you can hear are ‘I can’t afford it.’”

  “I miss you too,” Jeff said.

  Five days later—on a day that Tom Wendall’s alternate was flying the Cessna— Zoe met Jeff at the airstrip. He was wearing a torn tee shirt. He’d made friends with the other passengers on the flight—a backpacking couple from Sweden, two businessmen from Seoul, three earnest-looking women from Toronto.

  “Hello, welcome to Sunshine Village.” Lulu shook hands with the passengers as they disembarked.

  “You look like a movie star,” Jeff gawped when he saw Zoe. “Hell, I thought I was gonna land in rice paddies. Holy shit, we got to what’s that first place I landed in China—Gwang Joe?”

  “Guangzhou.”

  “They’ve got a casino in the airport, can you believe it? Where’s your boyfriend? Mister Fun in the Sun.”

  “You are photographer?” Lulu asked in stilted English. “My great uncle was a Civilizer too, a well-known playwright.” Self-aggrandizing had become common practice in New China.

  “A syllablizer?” Jeff asked, perplexed. “I saw your mom, Zoe. She almost lost her funding for her Harlem classes, but that gorgeous actress with the preternatural tits—the one who made the documentary about Sunshine Village, what’s her name?—heard about it and put her own funding in. What luck!”

  “I know.”

  “So when did you turn into a fashion maven? Is the Dragon Lady gone? Promise me she’s gone. It’s a big country but, I swear, if I bump into her, I’m on the next flight out of here. I must be jet lagged—kind of feels like an invader from planet Klingon has scooped out my brain with a spoon. What do they have to eat in this town? Is there a bar where we can get some irony on the rocks? Where’s Mr. Sun anyway? Didn’t I come here to see if he gets my seal of approval?”

  “We sort of broke up.”

  “You don’t sort of break up.”

  At the Nirvana Café Jeff nursed a jasmine beer. “Not a macho brew,” he pronounced. “Produces onl
y a nice Jewish boy kind of belch.” He poked chopsticks into green curried chicken. With a morsel still in mid-air he paused to notice three young Chinese women at the next table and two German-speaking blondes at the bar.

  “That girl’s got an intriguing take-me-as-I-am look. Her friend’s got a sweet face; dare I say nice tits?—yeah, slap my face. How come they all look like they’re dressed for a fashion spread?”

  Zoe looked up to see that Sun Two had come into the café. He was peering sideways at the five women. Then he saw Zoe and strolled over. He kissed the air in proximity to her cheek. “This is the famous William Kingsley Sun,” she felt obligated to say. He shook Jeff’s hand and took it upon himself to sit at their table. He ordered tea and braised tofu with black bean sauce. His dinner break from the bunker; he’d be in no hurry to return to relieve his master.

  “Are you a Yankees fan?” Sun Two asked Jeff.

  “Is Buddha a Buddhist?”

  “Yes, I can see your true nature,” Sun Two laughed his un-William-like chortle. “I met your mayor several years ago when I was in New York—”

  “You and your master both have attention deficit disorder in common,” Zoe muttered to Sun Two in Mandarin.

  “For a thousand years she’s had a cruel streak,” Sun Two said in English.

  “I don’t do past life regressions,” said Jeff. “That’s not required in this town, is it?”

  After Sun Two finally departed, Jeff leaned back in his chair and looked Zoe in the eye. “I’ve gotta ask you something. Dead serious. How is this guy your type? Sure, nice if you like ’em lean and handsome, but you never went for guys who look like a male model with the depth of a fruit fly.”

  “He…has a bit of a split personality.” Her voice came out weak. “Seriously, he takes medication for it.”

  On Jeff’s second night in town she took him to one of the pavilions for cocktails and dinner. He appeared with a tidy haircut and new loafers as shiny as mirrors. Before an hour had passed, the real William arrived.

  “Jeff,” William said, extending a hand, his fiery eyes gleaming and sparks electrifying the air. “May I steal Zoe away, for just a moment?”

  Steering her by the elbow, William drew her to a quiet table. “I just wanted you to know I almost got his face. He was mute though. Then 2099 went on a blinking rampage. I’ve got Number Two down there and I think he has it under control so you can stay out and entertain your friend. But some others blinked today. We’ve got to spread the program. I can hurry up with Phase Two or work on Sun Two’s face.”

  “Are you asking me to choose?”

  William ran his fingertips along her back; each spot he touched seemed to burst into a freeform dance. “I know what your answer will be. You look scrumptious, by the way.”

  I would have said save the world, wouldn’t I? She told herself that if he’d wanted to test her, she would have passed.

  “Your boyfriend you sort of broke up with was in rare form,” Jeff conceded the next day. “By the way, if you have work to do, don’t worry. Some people I met invited me to a concert tonight.”

  By his fifth day, Jeff had a new laptop with hundreds of photographs. He had magpies pecking at plums and children kicking balls, arms and legs in motion. He’d captured a pensive series of a young peasant man in galoshes taking a tea break on one of the wrought-iron benches that dotted the rice fields as he browsed Plato’s Republic. Jeff’s camera had caught open-mouthed tourists in the casino, stockbrokers in their striped shirts, children bathing at the river, and bevies of pretty young women.

  “This is the one you should do something with though,” he told Zoe, clicking on a picture of the giant Buddha just after sunrise, with the ruff of clouds around its neck—clouds were appearing over the village again. “It’d better sell after you dragged me out of my cozy bed to take the damned thing.”

  Jeff’s visit drifted into weeks. He enrolled in a Mandarin class and learned how to say, “You’re very pretty,” and “Would you like a drink?” On many evenings, Zoe would see him strolling in the village square with Lulu Pang. Zoe showed the Buddha photo to an entrepreneur planning to export the local jasmine tea and beer. With a loan from Sunshine Finance the entrepreneur purchased rights to use Jeff’s photo of the Buddha on the tea boxes and beer labels. Jeff had little interest in traveling beyond Sunshine Village, however. “I know it’s a fucking big country,” he said, “but what if I bump into the Dragon Lady?”

  Zoe threw herself into her work, meeting with people seeking capital, discussing the company and the state of New China with the man who drew her like a magnet.

  “I can fly on my own,” she told William. “But Jeff feels sorry for me because he thinks he saw my ex-boyfriend making out with some ‘cutie tourist’ as he put it. At least Jing Yin is out of town, I hear.”

  William inhaled self-denial and sat rigid. “Do you know where Jing Yin has gone? I get out sometimes and I hear what’s going on. She’s in Chengdu with her father. Some kind of Raindance Party conference. And all we can do is keep showing everyone how much better New China is than they say.”

  But he looked worried.

  Chapter Fourteen

  On the train to Beijing, Ming was an escapee once again. Born to be an outlaw. A love vagabond. What if I just don’t go back? Zoe and William might even understand, she told herself. She sent them innocuous texts about heading north on trains that smelled like new-born technology and the towns where she disembarked.

  “I feel like I’m playing inside a computer,” Ming told the man seated next to her. They laughed together. Ming got off the train with him in Xian and let their conversation draw out. She stayed two nights, a love vagabond gorging on time. Ming filled her laptop with fanciful descriptions of the man from Xian and the people she encountered on the train, embellishing lives with tragedies and meanderings.

  When Ming decided to move on, she told the Xian man, “I’d like to spend a year writing on a train,” and he understood. All over New China, people were starting to appreciate such dreams. Ming traveled to Linfen, Shijiazhuang, and Baoding. Other passengers also tapped away on laptops, and a violinist tried out a new composition two rows to her rear. Trains were, Ming found, a delightful way in which to travel—the seats tilted back into loungers, and the dining car, with its peach-colored tablecloths, served mid-morning lattes and late-afternoon cocktails. At night, passengers scrambled for seats in the dome cars, where they gazed at constellations.

  “I’m on a road trip under the stars,” Ming texted Zoe. Then suddenly, alone beneath the dome, alone in the world’s most populous country, Ming felt adrift with no one to rein in her euphoria or shadowbox this dark mood and stop it from devouring her.

  She disembarked in cities where the tiny buds of spring were beginning to appear, where teenagers raced bicycles down willow-shaded paths, and children’s laughter tumbled out of pools and playgrounds. She lingered at cafés, drinking cool glasses of lemonade and jasmine beer, and listened to poets in outdoor literary performances.

  Everywhere, she tried to lose herself in observations. People seemed to have seized one end of the spectrum or the other; they were either ravenous for this new way of living or staunchly opposed to it. Richly Civilized Dad, Poorly Civilized Dad—a book that expounded on the value of learning—was a bestseller, beckoning from many a bookstore window.

  In Baoding, posters plastered on market walls advertised help for those still struggling to find their way—Let Dr. Wu confiscate your emotional baggage, and Tonight: If Life is Perfect Why am I Still Searching? A trip to Nirvana with Guru Xi. And with China’s first-ever nation-wide elections approaching, political propaganda posters sought to galvanize the discontented—Stop the conspiracy, Equality is for wimps, and Education and health care won’t solve your problems—Tien for Governor will.

  “I don’t think the crazies will get elected,” Ming wrote to William and Zoe. “I h
ave faith in reason.”

  As the silvery sprawl of Beijing came into view, however, Ming felt an iron band start to tighten across her chest. Han and her parents would have their usual onslaught of questions: “Are you going to divorce Jeff and marry Tom? When are you going to have children?”

  In the greeting area of the Beijing station, amid a sea of people sporting high-fashion spring coats of candy-apple red and deep periwinkle, Ming spotted her parents, still wearing their oft-washed taupe-ish parkas. Papa drove home to Badaling, the road fringed by tall willow trees. Beyond the hills, Ming could see clusters of new villas with brightly painted pagoda roofs, outdoor cafés, bicycle lanes, and a hiking trail.

  “Grown-ups playing,” said Papa, and slapped his cheek.

  “Are you still married?” Mama asked.

  Her parents had made a few improvements in the Rising Phoenix compound. The glass shards that used to line the walls were gone, as was the rusted iron gate. Now, the entrance consisted of an ivy-covered wall with a welcoming archway, and paths that directed workers to the tennis court and swimming pool.

  Inside Mama and Papa’s apartment, though, a garden hose still functioned as the shower, and the same frayed towels hung on racks, grayer than ever.

  Han and Bo Fu were there, waiting. At dinner Papa announced that Ming was going to be staying with her brother, since he lived closer to the city, in the Shunyi district. Ming would have preferred to stay northwest of the city, where Civilizers inhabited luxury skyscrapers between Beijing University and the Summer Palace.