“I don’t know,” I say.
“I can give you what I’ve translated. I’ve translated all the words but there are parts that don’t make sense,” Steve says.
I pay him the rest and add enough to make a thousand. He’s spent a lot of time on it. Time he could have been working on his dissertation.
“I actually learned a lot,” he says. “It’s like she really speaks Anglo Saxon.”
“Maybe she did,” I say.
SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE IS working on time travel. I mean, someone has to be. People are trying to clone mammoths. People are working on interstellar travel. I have a Google alert for it and mostly what pops up is fiction. Sometimes crazy pseudo science. Real stuff, too. I get alerts for things like photon entanglement. People are trying.
I think I saw Malni on Wilshire Boulevard one time walking with two other people; a man who looked like her and a woman who had black hair. I was driving, late for an appointment. By the time I saw them I was almost past them. I tried to go around the block and catch them but traffic was bad and by the time I got back to Wilshire they were gone. Or maybe it wasn’t Malni.
Maybe in some lab somewhere, people are close to a time travel breakthrough. I walk downtown with Matt and I think, this might be the last moment I walk with Matt. Someone might be sent back in time at any moment and this will all disappear.
Will it all disappear at once? Will I have a moment to feel it fading away? Will I be able to grip Matt’s arm? To know?
There are two guys walking towards us as we head to the Mexican place. I’m going to have a margarita. Maybe two. I’m going to get a little drunk with Matt. I’m going to talk too much if I want to. The guys are not paying attention. I remember Malni. I throw me shoulders back a little. I do not smile. I look in the face of the one in my way. The world is going to end you fucker. I will not give up this sidewalk with my love.
He steps a little to the side. He gives way.
MY ENGLISH NAME
R. S. Benedict
After studying Sumerian linguistics at Yale, R.S. Benedict (rs-benedict.com) moved to China to spend three years teaching English. Now back in upstate New York, she grinds her days away working at a bureaucracy to support her writing habit.
I WANT YOU to know that you are not crazy.
What you saw in the back of the ambulance was real.
What wasn’t real was Thomas Majors.
You have probably figured out by now that I wasn’t born in London like I told you I was, and that I did not graduate from Oxford, and that I wasn’t baptized in the Church of England, as far as I know.
Here is the truth: Thomas Majors was born in room 414 of the Huayuan Binguan, a cheap hotel which in defiance of its name contained neither flowers nor any sort of garden.
If the black domes in the ceiling of the fourth-floor corridor had actually contained working cameras the way they were supposed to, a security guard might have noticed Tingting, a dowdy maid from a coal village in Hunan, enter room 414 without her cleaning cart. The guard would have seen Thomas Majors emerge a few days later dressed in a blue suit and a yellow scarf.
A search of the room would have returned no remnant of Tingting.
HUNAN PROVINCE HAS no springtime, just alternating winter and summer days. When Tingting enters room 414 it’s winter, grey and rainy. The guest room has a heater, at least, unlike the sleeping quarters Tingting shares with three other maids.
Tingting puts a Do Not Disturb sign on the door and locks it. She shuts the curtains. She covers the mirrors. She takes off her maid uniform. Her skin is still new. She was supposed to be invisible: she has small eyes and the sort of dumpy figure you find in a peasant who had too little to eat as a child and too much to eat as an adult. But prying hands found their way to her anyway, simply because she was there. Still, I know it won’t be hard for a girl like her to disappear. No one will look for her.
I pull Tingting off, wriggling out of her like a snake. I consider keeping her in case of emergency, but once she’s empty I feel myself shift and stretch. She won’t fit anymore. She has to go.
I will spare you the details of how that task is accomplished.
IT TAKES A while to make my limbs the right length. I’ve narrowed considerably. I check the proportions with a measuring tape; all the ratios are appropriate.
But Thomas Majors is not ready. The room’s illumination, fluorescent from the lamps, haze-strangled from the sky, isn’t strong enough to tan this new flesh the way it is meant to be.
You thought I was handsome when you met me. I wish you could have seen what I was supposed to be. In my plans, Thomas was perfect. He had golden hair and a complexion like toast. But the light is too weak, and instead I end up with flesh that’s not quite finished.
I can’t wait anymore. I only have room 414 for one week. It’s all Tingting can afford.
So I put on Thomas as carefully as I can, and only when I’m certain that not a single centimeter of what lies beneath him can be seen, I uncover the mirrors.
He’s tight. Unfinished skin usually is. I smooth him down and let him soften. I’m impatient, nervous, so I turn around to check for lumps on Thomas’s back. When I do, the flesh at his neck rips. I practice a look of pain in the mirror.
Then I stitch the gash together as well as I can. It fuses but leaves an ugly ridge across Thomas’s throat. I cover it with a scarf Tingting bought from a street vendor. It’s yellow, imitation silk with a recurring pattern that reads Liu Viuttor.
The next week I spend in study and practice: how to speak proper English, how to stand and sit like a man, how to drink without slurping, how to hold a fork, how to bring my brows together in an expression of concern, how to laugh, how to blink at semi-regular intervals.
It’s extraordinary how much one can learn when one doesn’t have to eat or sleep.
I check out on time carrying all of Thomas Majors’s possessions in a small bag: a fake passport, a hairbrush, a hand mirror, a wallet, a cell phone, and a single change of clothes.
It takes me under twenty-four hours to find a job. A woman approaches me on the sidewalk. She just opened an English school, she says. Would I like to teach there?
The school consists of an unmarked apartment in a grey complex. The students are between ten and twelve years of age, small and rowdy. I’m paid in cash. They don’t notice that my vowels are a bit off; Thomas’s new tongue can’t quite wrap itself around English diphthongs just yet.
On weekday mornings I take more rent-a-whitey gigs. A shipping company pays me to wear a suit, sit at board meetings, nod authoritatively, and pretend to be an executive. A restaurant pays me to don a chef’s hat and toss pizza dough in the air on its opening day. Another English training center, unable to legally hire foreigners in its first year of operation, pays me 6000 RMB per month to wander through the halls and pretend to work there.
I model, too: for a travel brochure, for a boutique, for a university’s foreign language department. The photographer tells his clients that I was a finalist on America’s Next Top Model. They don’t question it.
China is a perfect place for an imitation human like myself. Everything is fake here. The clothes are designer knock-offs. The DVDs are bootlegs. The temples are replicas of sites destroyed during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The markets sell rice made from plastic bags, milk made from melamine, and lamb skewers made from rat meat. Even the Internet is fake, a slow, stuttering, pornless thing whose search engines are programed not to look in politically sensitive directions.
It was harder in the West. Westerners demand authenticity even though they don’t really want it. They cry out for meat without cruelty, war without casualties, thinness without hunger. But the Chinese don’t mind artifice.
I MAKE FRIENDS in China quickly and easily. Many are thrilled to have a tall, blond Westerner to wave around as a status symbol.
I wait a few weeks before I associate with other waiguoren, terrified they’ll pick up on my fake
accent or ask me a question about London that I can’t answer.
But none of that turns out to be a problem. Very few expats in China ask questions about what one did back home, likely because so few of them want to answer that question themselves. Generally, they are not successful, well-adjusted members of their native countries. But if they have fair skin and a marginal grasp of English, they can find an ESL job to pay for beer and a lost girl to tell them how clever and handsome they are.
I learn quickly that my Englishman costume is not lifelike. Most of the Brits I meet in China are fat and bald, with the same scraggly stubble growing on their faces, their necks, and the sides of their heads. They wear hoodies and jeans and ratty trainers. Thomas wears a suit every day. He’s thin, too thin for a Westerner. His accent is too aristocratic, nothing at all like the working-class mumbles coming from the real Brits’ mouths. And the scarf only highlights his strangeness.
I think for sure I will be exposed, until one day at a bar a real Englishman jabs a sausage-like finger into my chest and says, “You’re gay, aren’t you, mate?”
When I only stutter in reply, he says, “Ah, it’s all right. Don’t worry about it. You might want to tone it down, though. The scarf’s a bit much.”
And so Thomas Majors’s sexuality is decided. It proves useful. It hides me from the expats the way Thomas’s whiteness hides me from the Chinese.
IT’S IN A waiguoren bar that New Teach English finds me. A tiny woman not even five feet tall swims through a sea of beery pink bodies to find me sitting quietly in a corner, pretending to sip a gin and tonic. She offers me a job.
“I don’t have a TOEFL certification,” I tell her.
“We’ll get you one. No problem,” she says. And it’s true; a friend of hers owns a printshop that can produce such a document with ease.
“I’m not sure I’ll pass the medical exam required for a foreign expert certificate,” I tell her.
“My brother-in-law works at the hospital,” she says. “If you give him a bottle of cognac, you’ll pass the health exam.”
And that’s how I get my residence permit.
YOU ARRIVE IN my second year at New Teach in Changsha with your eyes downcast and your mouth shut. I recognize you. You’re a fellow impostor, but a more mundane sort than myself. Though hired as an ESL teacher, you can hardly say, “Hello, how are you?”
We introduce ourselves by our English names. I am Thomas Majors and you are Daniel Liu. “Liu. Like my scarf,” I joke. I give you a smile copied from Pierce Brosnan.
I lie to you and tell you that I’m from London and my name is Thomas. Your lies are those of omission: you do not mention that you are the son of New Teach’s owner, and that you had the opportunity to study in the United States but flunked out immediately.
Somehow being the only child of rich parents hasn’t made you too spoiled. In your first year at New Teach you sit close to me, studying my counterfeit English as I talk to my students. Meanwhile, I sit close to Sarah, a heavyset Canadian girl, trying to glean real English from her as best I can.
Somehow, my waiguoren status doesn’t spoil me, either. Unlike most Western men in China, I bathe regularly and dress well and arrive to work on time without a hangover every morning, and I don’t try to sleep with my students. My humanity requires work to maintain. I don’t take it for granted.
For these reasons, I am declared the star foreign instructor at New Teach English. I stand out like a gleaming cubic zirconium in a rubbish heap. The students adore me. Parents request me for private lessons with their children. They dub me Da Huang (Big Yellow).
Every six to twelve months, the other foreign teachers leave and a new set takes their place. Only I remain with you. You stay close to me, seeking me out for grammar help and conversation practice. There’s more you want, I know, but you are too timid to ask for it outright, and I am unable to offer it.
We slowly create each other like a pair of half-rate Pygmalions. I fix the holes in your English, teach you how to look others in the eye, how to shake hands authoritatively, how to approach Western women, how to pose in photographs, how to project confidence (“fake it till you make it”), how to be the sort of man you see in movies.
Your questions prod me to quilt Thomas Majors together from little scraps stolen from overheard conversations in expat bars. Thomas Majors traveled a lot as a child, which is why his accent is a bit odd. (That came from an American girl who wore red-framed glasses.) Thomas Majors has an annoying younger brother and an eccentric older sister. (This I took from old television sitcoms.) His father owned a stationery shop (based on an ESL listening test), but his sister is set to inherit the business (from a BBC period piece), so Thomas moved to China to learn about calligraphy (that came from you, when I saw you carrying your ink brush).
Your questions and comments nudge me into playing the ideal Englishman: polite, a little silly at times, but sophisticated and cool. Somehow I become the sort of man that other men look up to. They ask Thomas for advice on dating and fashion and fitness and education. They tell him he’s tall and handsome and clever. I say “thank you” and smile, just as I practiced in the mirror.
I LIKED THOMAS. I wish I could have kept on being him a little longer.
IN SHENZHEN, I nearly tell you the truth about myself. New Teach has just opened a center there and sends you out to manage it. You want to bring me to work there and help keep the foreign teachers in line.
“I don’t know if I can pass the medical examination,” I tell you.
“You look healthy,” you reply.
I choose my words carefully. “I have a medical condition. I manage it just fine, but I’m afraid the doctors will think I am too sick.”
“What condition? Is it di...” You struggle with the pronunciation.
“It’s not diabetes. The truth is”—and what follows is at least partially true—“I don’t know what it is, exactly.”
“You should see a doctor,” you tell me.
“I have,” I say. “They did a lot of tests on me for a long time but they still couldn’t figure it out. I got sick of it. Lots of needles in my arms and painful surgeries.” I mime nurses and doctors jabbing and cutting me. “So now I don’t go to doctors anymore.”
“You should still have an examination,” you tell me.
“No,” I say.
Physicians are not difficult to fool, especially in China, overworked and sleep-deprived as they are. But their machines, their scanners, and their blood tests are things I cannot deceive. I do not want to know what they might find beneath Thomas Majors’s skin.
I tell you I won’t go with you if I have to submit to a medical exam, knowing full well how badly you want me to come. And so phone calls are made, red envelopes are stuffed, favors are cashed in, and banquets are arranged.
We feast with Shenzhen hospital administrators. They stare at me as I eat with chopsticks. “You’re very good with... ah...” The Hospital Director points at the utensils in my hand, unable to dig up the English word.
“Kuaizi,” I say. They applaud.
We go out to KTV afterward. The KTV bar has one David Bowie song and two dozen from the Backstreet Boys. The men like the way I sing. They order further snacks, more beer, and a pretty girl to sit on our laps and flirt with us. “So handsome,” she says, stroking my chin. By now I have mastered the art of blushing.
You present a bottle of liquor: “It’s very good baijiu,” you say, and everyone nods in agreement. We toast. They fill my glass with liquor over and over again. Each time they clink it and say, “Gan bei!” And to me they add, “For England!” Now I have no choice but to drain my glass to make my fake mother country proud.
For most foreigners, baijiu is a form of torture. I’ve heard them say it’s foul-tasting, that it gives monstrous hangovers, that you’ll find yourself burping it up two days later. But for me, it’s no more noxious than any other fluid. So I throw down enough liquor to show our guests that I am healthy and strong. We finish t
he bottle, then a second, and when I realize that the other men are putting themselves in agony to keep up with me I cover my mouth, run to the nearby lavatory, and loudly empty my stomach. Our guests love it. They cheer.
The winner of the drinking contest is a short, fat, toad-like man with a wide mouth. He’s the director of the hospital, which is easy to guess by his appearance; powerful men in Guangdong often look a bit like toads. You tell me later that I made him very happy by drinking with him, and that he was extremely pleased to have defeated a Westerner.
And that is how I pass my health examination in Shenzhen.
YOUR GRANDMOTHER RECOGNIZES me during the following Spring Festival.
Going home with you is a bad idea. I should spend those two weeks enjoying the relative quiet of the empty city, drinking myself into oblivion with the leftover handful of expats.
The idea starts as a lark, a jocular suggestion on your part, but once it seizes me it will not let me go. I can’t remember the last time I was in a home, with a family. I want to know what it’s like.
You are too embarrassed to try to talk me out of it, so home we go.
Your mother is surprised to see me. She takes you aside and scolds you. Tingting’s Changshahua has faded. Now my new English brain is still struggling to learn proper Mandarin, so I only get the gist of the conversation. I know meiyou (without) and nü pengyou (girlfriend), and my understanding of the culture fills in the rest. You’re supposed to have brought home a woman. You’re not getting any younger; you’re just a few years shy of turning thirty unmarried, a bare-branch man. Your parents can’t bear it. They don’t understand. You’re tall, rich, and handsome. Why don’t you have a girlfriend?
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12 Page 24