“Hey! I think I know this one. The character’s name is Gui Fu. That’s the same as the character of Dust.” She kept reading. “It’s just like the beginning of Dust.” I had no idea what she was talking about. She was excited and speaking fast in Chinese. I gave her a bewildered look—she laughed when she realized that she had slipped into Chinese by accident.
“Maybe this is the first part of Dust. The first story he wrote.”
I must not have looked significantly impressed with her discovery because she waved the page at me.
“This is very special! Do you understand? This is like . . . Who is the best American writer?”
I thought for a moment. “Maybe Hemingway?”
“Oh, yes, Hai-Ming-Wei. Yes, this is like if we found a page that he wrote.”
“So it’s worth a lot of money,” I asked. “Do you think you can sell it?”
Victoria looked up at me and frowned. “Sell it? No, why sell it? This is a treasure. This book, Dust, it’s a beautiful book. It helped and inspired so many people,” she said. She held up the page. “This is where the book came from. This is a treasure of a beautiful moment in our history. The moment when we are not afraid to speak anymore. No money can buy that moment.” Victoria put her phone away and got up. She tucked the page into her purse. “I will keep it for my child.”
We left the university and went to a nearby bookstore. Victoria wanted to buy Da Ning’s book for me so that I would appreciate the importance of what we had just found. I resisted initially. I told her I only read books required by school or fun books like Harry Potter, but she insisted.
The bookstore was five stories tall and the entire third floor was devoted to English-language books and translated Western authors. She found a copy of Dust in English and reminded me that I had promised to give her To Kill a Mockingbird. We found out that To Kill a Mockingbird had never been translated into Chinese, but the bookstore did carry an imported copy in English. Victoria was pleased to have it, but she said it might take her a while to read. I looked at the back cover of Dust and saw it was about a family’s sufferings during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. I wasn’t sure it was the kind of book I liked to read. But I thought that maybe my father would be impressed if I told him I was reading it.
十七
Victoria started reading To Kill a Mockingbird the day after our trip to the bookstore. She said it was slow progress because she kept having to stop and look up words using the dictionary on her phone, but she read every day during my tennis practices, and she finished the book within the week. She talked to me about it one day after practice. She told me the story surprised her. “I didn’t know America had so many scars in its past,” she said. “It reminded me of reading about China.”
We arrived early to the language school that morning. I passed the time by reading old copies of the China Daily left in the student lounge. The China Daily had a section called “Around China” that featured two-paragraph news stories from each of China’s provinces. Every issue had at least one or two stories that were either really amusing or incredibly bizarre. I remember story headlines like TWO IN GUANGZHOU ARRESTED FOR PLAYING BASEBALL WITH CHICKENS and MAN PURCHASES 32,000 RMB CAR USING ONLY 1 RMB NOTES and HENAN SCHOOL BANS ROMANCE BETWEEN STUDENTS. Those always made me laugh and made me wish I could tell Tom about them. Not all the stories were funny though. Many of them reminded you how tough life still was for most people in China. I remember one story about this couple from a rural town who sold their blood to illegal blood banks to pay for their son to go to university. They were paid only twenty dollars for each donation, and every time they donated, the blood banks would take out so much blood that they would pass out and collapse, drenched in sweat. The saddest part about the story was that a doctor had just discovered that this husband and wife both had contracted AIDS. It was a tragedy, not just for the man and his wife, not just for their son who would have to spend the rest of his life with the knowledge that his education cost his parents their lives, but also for all the people who received blood donated by the couple, and for those people’s families, too.
During class that day, I told Teacher Lu that we had found a fragment of a manuscript by a Chinese writer over the weekend. She seemed very pleased until I told her that it had been written by Da Ning. She didn’t like Da Ning; she said his books were too negative and that he was disrespectful to the government. I asked her why she thought he was disrespectful. I explained that I thought it was good for people to criticize the government when it was wrong. She said that was because I wasn’t Chinese and that I needed to understand that for more than five thousand years, China had been a country ruled by an emperor who was seen as a divinely anointed representative of heaven.
“You wouldn’t criticize Jesus, would you?” she asked.
“Well, no. That’s different though.”
“Is it? Do you know what they would call the emperor?”
“Huangdi?” I asked.
“That just means emperor. It’s like saying king. His real title was Tianzi. It means ‘Son of Heaven.’ For Jesus you say ‘Son of God,’ dui budui (true or false)?”
“Okay, but there hasn’t been an emperor for almost one hundred years. It’s different now.”
“One hundred years may seem like a long time to you, but we have five thousand years of history. That history is connected to everything. The way people think, the way parents raise their children, everything. One hundred years is nothing to us. It takes much longer than a hundred years to forget five thousand.”
“But—” I protested, still unconvinced.
“Think about it like this,” she said. “If you go to England and say rude things about the Queen, English people will be very upset. It’s been a long time since the king or queen of England had real power. The Queen is just some lady, she doesn’t have power like before. But I think English people would still be very angry at you if you insult her because in their mind—in their culture—you are supposed to be respectful to the Queen. It is the same here, only the title is not Emperor anymore.”
She said Chiang Kai-shek, Chairman Mao, and Deng Xiaoping had all been emperors with a different name. I thought about how religion had been eradicated during the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s “Little Red Book” had been the only book that people were allowed to read. I saw that she had a point. In a way, that book had been like their New Testament. It was, after all, a book of sayings and teachings from one man, on the correct and proper way to live life.
Teacher Lu explained that China was changing, and now it was more accepted to criticize the government, but it had to be done in a respectful way. She thought Da Ning went too far with his criticism. She considered him rude and disrespectful and told me that I should read other writers.
As I was leaving class I ran into Josh, the businessman I had met on my first day at the school. I asked him how things were going with his business. He said he had set up a business with his partner importing cheap wines from France and Italy into China, where they sold them for huge markups to Chinese government officials and businessmen. Josh told me they were having trouble keeping up with demand because government officials were buying their wines by the truckload. Apparently it had become a status symbol to serve foreign wines at business dinners. Oftentimes, he said, after the wine had been poured, the waitresses would circle the table and display the bottle label to each guest at the dinner. Nobody cared about how the wine tasted, only how it looked.
Victoria kept asking me if I had finished Dust. But I hadn’t even started it. Ever since Tom had died I found it really hard to do things that reminded me of him, and nothing reminded me more of Tom than reading. That was his thing. I loved playing tennis. He loved reading stories. When I thought about Tom, I always remembered him reading on the big sofa in his room with his head propped up by a pillow. I had never really been a big reader, but ever since he died, anytime I found myself reading a novel, I had this weird feeling inside as i
f I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing. It’s hard to explain, but I felt his presence and I felt as if I was intruding on something that had been special to him. I felt as if I was disrespecting his memory or trying to replace him somehow. For a long while, I had a very hard time doing anything that I considered part of his domain.
十八
As September turned into October, the weather changed noticeably. It became very cold and I had to wear a thick jacket whenever I went outside. Everything started dying too. The leaves seemed to fall off the trees quicker than they did back home. I wondered if that was because they didn’t get enough sunlight due to the smog. Soon all of the trees at the tennis center were bare of any leaves. The grass died as well, and all that remained was the dry, cracked earth.
On the last Friday in September, Madame Jiang told Victoria that the following week the team wouldn’t be practicing due to the weeklong national holiday. Most of the boys would go home. I asked Victoria to ask her if anyone would be around. Madame Jiang shrugged her shoulders. I mentioned Bowen’s name, and Madame Jiang repeated her shrug and made a face as if she had tasted something sour. She did little to disguise her dislike of Bowen. I was never given an explicit reason for her aversion to Bowen, but I sensed that it was because she knew how little respect Bowen had for her.
At the end of practice on Friday of that week, I sat with Bowen as we repacked our tennis bags. While I continued to struggle in my efforts to learn Chinese, Bowen’s English had improved. It was in part, I think, due to the fact that I spoke to him almost entirely in English. I knew I should have been practicing my Chinese with him, but it was exhausting living entirely in a language as foreign as Chinese was to me. Not just mentally—physically, too. By the end of the day, my jaw muscles would ache from making sounds I had never before had a reason to make. So when I spoke with Bowen, I would give in and lapse into English.
“So, are you going home tomorrow?” I asked.
“No,” he said. I waited for him to continue, but he kept his eyes fixed on the rackets he was slotting one by one back into his bag.
“But Random said everyone’s going home.” I said the words before I thought of the implication behind them. Despite the fact that we had talked about many things over the past few weeks—about music, about girls, about tennis—Bowen had never once brought up the subject of family. And neither had I. “Because of the holiday,” I added.
Bowen shook his head.
“Why?” I asked.
“Too far.”
“Where are you from?”
“Tianjin,” he said.
“You’re from Tianjin?” It made sense, I thought. I had wondered why Bowen didn’t speak with the harsh Beijing accent of the other boys, and why they sometimes mocked the way he said things.
“My family is,” Bowen said.
“So you’re staying here, then?” I asked. “For the whole week?”
Bowen nodded again. “And you?”
“I’m staying too. I guess I could have gone somewhere, but I didn’t know this week was a holiday.”
“So you will be here?”
“Yes.”
“We can practice.”
“Sure,” I said.
We finished packing our bags, and Bowen said, “Wait.” He reached behind the tennis bench and picked up my tennis hat. He looked at it before giving it back. “Wimbledon,” he said. But the way he said it, it sounded more like Wim-Bo-Dun. “You play there?”
“No, I just watched.”
“What players?”
“Everybody, really: Federer, Agassi, Sampras, Ivanisevic—lots.”
Bowen nodded his head and the corners of his mouth turned down as if he was seriously considering something that required intense concentration.
“We will need to ask for the key.”
“What key?” I asked.
“The key to the courts.”
“The courts are locked?”
“For holidays, yes,” Bowen said. He added, “It is best for you to ask Madame Jiang.”
“Me?”
“She will say yes if you ask.” Bowen nodded his head as if this matter had been decided. He stood up and lifted his tennis bag over his shoulder. “See you on Monday.”
I asked Victoria to speak to Madame Jiang about getting a key to the courts. She was hesitant at first but agreed to do it and walked over to where Madame Jiang was putting away her shopping cart of tennis balls. I sat and watched as they spoke. The conversation took longer than I had assumed it would, and it looked as though Victoria had to do a fair amount of persuading. Finally, after about ten minutes, Madame Jiang looked at me and pulled a ring of keys from her bag. She flipped through them and then twisted one off and handed it to Victoria.
“You should not have asked me to do that,” Victoria said when she returned with the key.
“Why not?”
“Because you have asked for a special favor. Madame Jiang is not supposed to give the key to anyone. It is her sole responsibility.”
“Then why did she give it to you?”
“Because she is afraid not to. She knows your father must have connections in the government. It’s not normal for an American to be allowed to play with the team. She doesn’t want to risk making your father’s friends angry. If she causes them problems they will replace her.”
“But Bowen asked me to get the key so we could play.”
“I know,” Victoria said. “I am sure Bowen knew exactly what he was doing when he put you up to this. You should be careful. Don’t do everything Bowen asks you to do. Not everything is as innocent as it seems.” Victoria’s comments concerned me. I didn’t want my father to hear that I had been asking for special favors.
十九
For the next week, Bowen and I practiced together every morning and afternoon. Each day we took a two-hour lunch break during which Bowen would take me to a different local restaurant in the hutongs around the tennis center. At first I didn’t really like the food, but it grew on me. I learned the key was not to ask what we were eating. Usually it all tasted pretty good, but if I asked what it was, I might find out that we were eating duck tongue, or chicken feet, and suddenly lose my appetite. I paid for all of our lunches as I knew Bowen didn’t have money to spend on eating out.
I tried to be brave about trying new things, but I did draw the line when Bowen tried to get me to eat fried scorpions. We were walking back to tennis when I stopped and stared at a street vendor who appeared to be selling live scorpions impaled on wooden skewers. Bowen laughed when he saw the expression on my face. He turned to the vendor and ordered two. The vendor took two skewers and dunked them in burning oil, and a minute or two later presented us with two fried scorpion kebabs. It was too much for me, so Bowen ate them both.
At one of our lunches Bowen asked me if I knew the name of my country in Chinese.
I had just learned this with Teacher Lu. “Mei Guo.”
“Dui (Right),” he said with a nod. “Do you know what it means?”
I shook my head.
“Beautiful country. Mei Guo. That is what we call your country. Mei Guo.”
“It’s not all beautiful, I mean some of it is, but not all.”
“I think it is beautiful,” Bowen said.
Bowen asked as much as he could about America. He wanted to know about the movies and the music and what we ate every day. He asked me question after question about the tennis academy in Florida where I had trained. What did it look like? How many courts, did they have indoor and outdoor courts? How many instructors, where did the players come from? Did any professionals train there, too? Did any of the players ever get a chance to play with them? Could you play whenever you wanted? Could you enter any tournament you wanted? Were the rules strict? On and on he went. Bowen would get excited about my answers and switch to Chinese to ask more questions. I did my best to understand his random combination of Chinese and English. Once I asked him to write his question down so I could see if I
could understand it. He shook his head and said in Chinese, “No big deal.”
I could never understand why Bowen resisted writing anything down. It was not that he did not know how to write. The boys at the center did schooling in the morning. They even studied the English that Bowen was so eager to improve. It was not until I returned to boarding school that I guessed why he was reluctant to show me his writing. Our Chinese teacher handed back the class’s first written vocabulary test. Even though most of us had gotten all the characters of the twenty words correct, she had dropped our grades by one full letter because of what she termed bad characters. “In China,” she informed us, “how you write your characters, what sort of care you take, shows what kind of person you are. In England, it is your accent that helps to define you, in China it is your writing. It shows the quality of your education.” I guessed that Bowen, who had never received much formal schooling, must have been ashamed of the way he wrote his characters and was too proud to let me see them.
On our last day of practice before the holiday ended, I arrived at the tennis center to learn that the indoor courts had been reserved for an official event and were not available to us that day. Heavy rain was forecasted, and it looked unlikely that we would be able to play outdoors.
“We do fitness, then,” Bowen said.
I considered Bowen’s proposition for a moment.
“Do you want to do fitness with me?” he asked against my silence.
I hated running sprints. “Not really,” I said to myself. But aloud I heard my voice say, “Weishenme bu ne?”
“Exactly—why not.” Bowen translated my words and patted me on the back.
We stretched and loosened up and then started off with suicide sprints. Bowen slaughtered me. We ran ten sets and he won all ten. I asked him if he wanted to run stadiums on the outside running track as a joke, but then he laughed and said, “Why not.”
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