A Visit From Voltaire

by Dinah Lee Küng

‘I think you idealized China a bit.’

  ‘Ah, China, the most beautiful, the most ancient, the most vast, the most populated and the most policé in the world.’

  ‘I’ll agree with you on the ‘most populated and the most policed’.’

  He gives me a piercing glare. ‘Policé means well regulated and civilized, not policed. So civilized that Emperor Ch’ien Long wrote verses. An emperor who writes poetry, a ruler with an artistic soul, can’t possibly be cruel, don’t you agree?’

  ‘You’ve overlooked that famous painter, Hitler, not to mention Nero, master of the lyre . . . So that’s your China? Everybody reciting Confucian sayings and competing to be the most virtuous? Sounds a pretty boring night at the theater to me.’

  He sniffs. ‘Well, maybe my Chinese was a little stilted, but that wasn’t my fault!’

  ‘Oh, no, of course not . . . ’

  ‘Well, if the French hadn’t been so damned French, I could’ve made my Chinese more Chinese and my Genghis a real Tartar! I had to water down my ideas and costumes so as to avoid provoking the laughter of people who mocked anything that didn’t match their fashions and customs.’

  ‘That’s the watered-down costume you’re wearing now?’

  ‘Well, it fitted the actor Lekain, so it’s a bit big for me. Anyway, anything Chinese was all the rage in those days. It was a huge success.’

  ‘Goes without saying.’ China mania sweeping Versailles . . . the Beatles and the Maharishi . . . Richard Gere and the Dalai Lama . . . some things never change.

  ‘Can you drive more slowly? I’m getting carsick.’ Green-tinged, he slumps into a heap of silk.

  Twenty minutes later, I scan the arrivals screen at Geneva’s Cointrin airport. Jane and Natalya finally emerge from customs, Jane in Donna Karan nylon sports clothes, Natalya in lycra separates and mules. I feel very ‘cotton’ all of a sudden and count the months since I shopped for new clothes.

  We stop off at the street market in Divonne—lanes of fresh fruits piled high in baskets and earthenware bowls, ducks and geese hanging from hooks, spices filling the air, and blue and yellow fabrics from Provençe. Can I pretend that I do all my shopping here in this cover photo for Condé Nast Traveler?

  I buy our lunch, romantically wrapped in French newspapers and crisp white paper bags. Jane is tempted by the fabrics and Natalya considers hand-cut blocks of lavender soap. V. trips good-naturedly behind us, sniffing flowers, and pretending he doesn’t mind being ignored.

  ‘This reminds me of Xin Ping Lu,’ sighs Jane, referring to the famous Guangdong market filled with butchered pigs, pressed ducks, skinned dogs, gleaming rows of bright green cabbages and scallions, mountains of pomelos and dusty, bumpy red lychees. At last a friend has arrived who can help me connect the dots! This is going to be a great week.

  Back at home, we unload the food and launch into five days of conversation. The weather cooperates. The sun beats down and for a few days, I can watch the tulips tattoo their yin and yang message through the snow. Only Tibetan prayer wheels, flapping flags, and Buddhist gongs are lacking to make this a sanctuary of reflection.

  If I had hoped that two women could be my Bodhisattvas, I am not too disappointed, but it’s possible they’re also taking this break in search of more than my own personal enlightenment.

  Natalya goes for long walks every morning. Eva-Marie nicknames her, ‘The Lady Who’s Out Walking,’ while Jane seems to be catching up on months of late-night calls to Wu Ming in Beijing, for she becomes ‘The Lady Who’s Sleeping Upstairs. ‘

  When they’re not walking or sleeping, there are the long conversations I long for, the companionship without explanation that anyone in exile misses more than food or weather or streets.

  Natalya recalls many forgotten scenes of our West LA youth! Like the Latin teacher with the biggest dandruff flakes ever recorded who giggled with titillation when we staged the ‘Roman Games.’ Or, the celebrity parents sending their kids to recitals in thousand-dollar costumes borrowed ‘off the lot’ with an indulgent wink from the ‘wardrobe lady.’ Whatever became of our fellow students, the offspring of Jerry Lewis, Burt Lancaster and Jayne Mansfield? We review Natalya’s years studying drama, her divorce, and single-parenthood.

  V. listens wide-eyed. ‘It certainly doesn’t sound like my school days at Louis-Le-Grand. The Jesuits may have been perverts, but they never made us act out orgies in bed sheets. A shame Natalya didn’t continue acting. She would be marvelous as the New World princess in my Alzire.’

  V. manages little better with Jane, with whom he hoped to compare his notes on the Confucian virtues. ‘Ask her about the legacy of Confucius. I always said he was the most perfect practitioner of natural religion—‘

  ‘Which is—?’

  ‘—Ethics founded on reason and independent of metaphysics except for belief in God. Vas-y, go ahead, ask her.’

  Instead Jane and I talk of her hopes to pull together Wu Ming’s expanding career in China with the financial security of her New York salary. Jane says she hoped a solution to this dilemma would present itself while she stays with us, maybe even while she sleeps? Like those Buddhist visions appearing to meditating Tibetan monks: a lake, an unknown house, a rainstorm, a child in the distance . . .What clues would appear in Jane’s dreams?—a shimmering image of an apartment in smoggy Hong Kong or a rhyming allusion to an overseas posting?

  The visions don’t come, but at least Jane’s looking rested.

  One morning, I leave Walking Buddha and Sleeping Buddha chatting in the kitchen while I tow Theo and Eva-Marie to school. Eva-Marie’s teacher collars me with a big smile on her face.

  ‘Bonjour, Madame, you are ready for tomorrow?’ she chirps, her ski-freckled face, bright blue eyes, and shining blonde mane the kind of scrubbed beauty that all first-graders deserve.

  Tomorrow? I’m drawing a blank.

  ‘So many kids signed up for your Chinese class that we’ve limited it to the ten oldest. You’ve been assigned Atelier Onze starting at 8:45. Bonne chance!’ And she takes off on legs so long they seem to have cross-country skis permanently attached.

  My I-almost-understood-your-French smile stays frozen on my face just long enough to propel me home. Sure enough, amidst Eva-Marie’s cereal-box dinosaur trading cards, a wad of hardened chewing gum, her scuffed pantoufles and an ear-warming headband she claimed to have lost—aha!—I fish up a dog-eared circular inviting parents to volunteer to teach foreign language and culture during a ‘Jour multi-culture!’

  Suspiciously, the sign-up coupon at the bottom is missing. MISSING! I count the hours until I can subject that little monkey to the third degree.

  Noon finally rolls around, and my two Bodhisattvas are kitting up for a leisurely lunch at the village’s best restaurant. They bid me farewell after we reach the village junction and sail off wafting an air of international glamor over the lunchtime hustle.

  A village patrouilleuse mans her post nearby. She wields her stop sign like a battle shield. Yellow poncho flapping, this protective harpy brings a careening Peugeot roaring down from the direction of the French border to an infuriated halt. With studied care, she shepherds my children across the road. Eva-Marie’s lingering limp slows her down. The driver, a young Frenchman with a cigarette hanging off his lower lip, impatiently glares at us, then revs off in a wave of slushy snow towards Nyon.

  ‘Drives the French crazy when I stop them,’ the mother grins at me, then she nods in Natalya and Jane, ‘Your friends from New York?’

  ‘Yes. How did you know?’ I am embarrassed to admit I don’t know this woman’s name.

  ‘Madame Delacroz overheard their accents last Monday.’

  Are we talking about Natalya and Jane here or the surveillance of two international cocaine smugglers? This is worse than those biddies the Chinese Communists installed in every commune to spy on their neighbors.

  ‘Um, they arrived on Sunday.’

  She nods, satisfied. ‘Bien! Until tomorrow!’

  ‘We
ll, yes, uh, so long,’ I say, pulling Eva-Marie and Theo safely away from Village Intelligence Services.

  I round on my littlest child with machine-gun intensity, ‘’Eva-Marie, did you promise I would teach Chinese tomorrow morning?’ ‘Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you.’

  She ticks off the names of mothers who will teach Italian, Serbo-Croat, Dutch, Hebrew, Greek, Polish, Spanish, SwissGerman and German, ‘And you!’

  ‘But they’re teaching their native languages! Chinese isn’t my native language. Why didn’t you sign me up for English?’

  Eva-Marie looks confused and distressed at losing face. ‘Luke’s mother is teaching English, because she is English. You’re not English. I promised you’d teach them how to write those funny letters. You know.’ Her little hand swooshes through the air. ‘Don’t worry. You’ll be the best. I promised.’

  This heartbreaking confusion in her mind between competing to win and at last winning herself some friends is in painful evidence.

  And so it is that the next morning, I reluctantly leave my two house guests to face one of the toughest audiences in the world—ten kids whose idea of a good time is running their snow boards over the next guy’s collarbone, Crossing the slushy playground, I give myself a pep talk to pump up my confidence with only partial success,

  I can’t do this, Yes, I can. But what if I’ve forgotten all my Chinese? A wicked thought springs to mind. So what if I can’t speak a word of Chinese anymore, well, then, what the hell? Who’s going to know? There isn’t a genuine Chinese speaker within twenty miles! These brats won’t know the difference,

  On this tide of fragile bravado, I go for the kill. The band of roughnecks tries to storm the classroom, but I’ve brought a hand puppet who starts barking Chinese, not allowing a single kid to pass into the room until he or she has identified himself in Chinese. Saucer-eyed and giggling, they realize this puppet means business. The papier mâché ‘Monsieur Bang’ is a take-no-prisoners kinda guy. There’ll be no Italian pizza, no British game-stall, no kitschy German cartoons, no Serbo-Croat folk dances, and no Dutch butter cookies.

  They wanted Chinese, these little thugs, and they’ll get it. It’ll be over in sixty minutes, and I’ll be the one left standing.

  My fearless little puppet chants at them, Within ten minutes, they’re reciting the numbers from one to ten in sing-song perfection, ‘Yi, er, san, si, wu, liow, chi, ba, jeou, shi,’ faster! Faster!

  What’s happened? I wanted to bring these little souls the serenity of classical Chinese, but the demonic hand puppet has taken over! Yi, er, san, si, his victims shout like a bunch of fanatic Red Guards waving Mao’s little book,

  After half an hour of games with big Chinese numbers hanging on their chests like political prisoners in some kind of mock struggle session, the kids have to beg Monsieur Bang in Chinese for their brushes and ink. I choose the roughest customer, Gerard, to read out all the characters hanging on the walls. He sweats tiny little-kid bullets as he struggles with Mandarin’s third tone. Last September this kid tried to set fire to our back forest and stole my kids’ new sleds one month after our arrival.

  Monsieur Bang takes his revenge.

  The puppet then holds his mammoth brush upright and demonstrates the correct brush stroke order. To my astonishment, ten thick brushes move up and down, press and lift, making bold, black suns, men, sedan chairs, rivers, mountains, sheep. The children check each other’s work with the furrowed concentration of T’ang dynasty scholars.

  ‘Chinese has no plurals, no conjugations of the future, passé composé, or imperfect tense, no he or she, no feminine or masculine nouns,’ I comment.

  The budding mafioso Gerard sighs, ‘I adore Chinese.’ Suddenly, the school bell rings and I am released.

  ‘My, my, how things must’ve changed in six months for the locals to start trusting that strange Américaine with their children,’ says a sarcastic voice from the doorway. V. is wearing a quilted jacket, flowing pants of silk tucked into soft leather riding boots, and a curved saber made of cardboard.

  ‘Ah, Genghis Khan, I presume. How long have you been standing there?’ Voltaire laughs. ‘Long enough to know you’re lucky an eighteenth-century bachelor like me doesn’t know the twenty-first century definition of child abuse.’

  ‘Well, I can’t understand their Vaudois accent. I had no choice but to take the sink-or-swim approach.’

  ‘The Jesuits who whipped me at Louis-le-Grand would have hired you in a minute.’ He saunters around the desks, showing off the swish of his trousers.

  ‘Listen to this. It’s my Epistle to the Emperor of China, published in 1771.’

  He starts to recite from a wad of handwritten verse, while I detach sheets of ideographs from the corkboard. Most of his poem is about rival French poets and literary foes.

  ‘Stop, please. It all rhymes, but I can’t imagine what the Emperor Ch’ien Lung, sitting in Beijing, made of all that.’

  I scan the stanzas. ‘Who is Linguet the lawyer? Who is Ribalier of the College Mazarin? Who is Marmontel of the Académie Française? This hasn’t got anything to do with China.’

  Voltaire sighs and folds up his epistle. ‘That’s often the case with China-watching, isn’t it? Thanks to you, these kids discovered their own ‘China’. For that little rascal Gerard, China’s a world free of irregular verbs, for the little girls, it’s the swoosh of ink on paper. For me, China was Not France—a world without arguments between Jesuits and Dominicans, without petty literary rivalries, Church injustice, judicial persecution, or the censoring of thought and belief.’

  ‘No more l’infâme.’

  ‘Precisely. The Chinese Emperor may have expelled the Jesuits, but he certainly didn’t behead them. For me, China was tolerance. Now, tell me, what was it for you?’

  I dry off the clutch of brushes with a paper towel.

  ‘Let me think back that far. I was nineteen years old. My forty-five-year-old father had just died of esophageal cancer. I was temping summers as a secretary at a film studio. I guess for me China was the pure dedication of the Revolution, the secret language of an exclusive world, the Spartan aesthetic of the Un-Hollywood, the news assignment my father’s illness kept him from keeping, the diplomatic career my mother cut off when she returned from the U.S. Embassy in Nicaragua to marry my father . . . ’

  Voltaire springs to his feet. ‘Yes! It represented everywhere you were not, an escape from everything that oppressed or saddened you, a chance at everything your parents couldn’t finish.’

  V. watches me rinse out the ink saucers. We toss Mr Bang in a shopping bag, and head home for lunch. ‘Perhaps, chère Madame, you left your Chinese world because you had exhausted what it meant to you. My own interest in things Chinese faded when I realized that the Middle Kingdom was not quite so perfect as I had pictured it. I wouldn’t worry about the occasional outbreak of nostalgia.’

  ‘Yes, but—’ I laugh at myself a little helplessly, pushing microwave buttons, ‘—but all those years of China studies just so I could teach that brat Gerard how to write ‘sedan chair’?’

  V. distracts me by pouring some reheated coffee into an exquisite cup and saucer.

  ‘Where did you get that cup?’

  ‘A gift to me from the Chinese Emperor in 1768,’ he crows.

  ‘Come on, if the Emperor of China had actually sent you a gift, you would have mentioned it before this. You showed off Frederick the Great’s letter to anybody who even set foot in Cirey.’

  ‘Well, at least it came to me from China. I like to think it was the Emperor’s acknowledgement of my efforts to expand appreciation of China throughout the French kingdom. Here, read the inscription on the saucer,’ he prompts, lifting the delicate cup.

  Next to a swallow painted in blue and white, I read the ideographs:

  ‘Like snow, he scatters a divine, gold embroidery of Sunlight,

  Mixed with scarlet more radiant,

  Alone, atop the great straight branches

  When the luxuri
ant garden is already deserted.’

  ‘Exactly.’ V. takes a big breath larded with self-adoration.

  ‘Monsieur Voltaire, this is a poem about a bird.’

  ‘Sunlight, enlightenment? Alone at the top of a straight tree? Hmm?’

  ‘Yeeesss.’ I’m groping. . .

  ‘C’est moi, of course! The Emperor of China compares me, Voltaire, to the bird unique, solitary at the pinnacle of achievement, surrounded by snow reflecting sunlight. You see, here, divinely embroidered sunlight? Enlightenment?’

  ‘It’s kind of a stretch.’

  ‘Hmmph!’

  The last night of their stay, Peter offers Jane and Natalya some of his grandfather’s homemade 1946 kirsch. We listen to Jane’s nightmare experience in Beijing on June 4th, 1989 as she lay on the stones at the edge of Tiananmen Square, her shoe grazed by a bullet, her clothing soaking up the blood of wounded students. All around her stood armed teenagers wearing the uniform of the People’s Liberation Army, rural youths brought in to quell the ‘turmoil.’

  I think of Voltaire’s romantic illusions about the distant Chinese, ruled by virtue and tolerance. He’s come to realize that his ideal country now executes more people than any country on earth, that they torture suspects and detain political prisoners in psychiatric wards. And yet, as a teenage soldier told Jane that murderous night, staring down her petrified expression, ‘Don’t fear us. We’re good people.’

  By the firelight, the ageing French philosopher and playwright listens, his brow troubled. For all of us who imagined China as an alternative—more moderate, just, equal, exotic, peaceful, refined—the realization always returns; when you dig a hole through the center of the earth, you don’t come upon a land of perfect opposites on the other side. Nor is China the worst of all possible worlds.

  Jane and Natalya must finally pack up, and with them, their stories of two life streams I didn’t navigate. Natalya stayed closer to our roots in the States. Jane married her Chinese. I chose to leave Hollywood, left my Chinese cartoonist in Hong Kong, finally left China and followed Peter.