Beautiful Country

by J. R. Thornton

I looked up at the graying sky. “Looks like rain, it could get slippery.”

  “If the rain becomes too much we stop,” he said.

  “Okay, but we probably only have time to do one set before it gets too bad.”

  “Only one?” Bowen asked. “You are slower than I thought!”

  We jogged to the stadium and just as we were about to run up the first set of stairs, it began to drizzle lightly. We were halfway through the first set when the rain began to come down hard. We sprinted back to the tennis courts. I grabbed my racket bag and ran to where Victoria and Driver Wu were waiting with the car. The rain was falling heavier now. Bowen took off toward the dorms. Driver Wu slowed as we passed Bowen. I lowered my window and yelled into the rain. “Want a ride?” He kept running and shook his head. “Okay, we’ll pick you up at twelve for lunch?” He smiled and gave me a thumbs-up.

  There wasn’t enough time to go back to the Zhangs’, so we waited out the rain at a cafe Victoria liked near the tennis center called Sculpting in Time. When we arrived, I quickly grabbed a menu and began to scan it for amusing translations. We had recently added a new event to the Translation Olympics named the CULINARY PENTATHLON. Currently occupying the top spot in that category was a shrimp, noodle, and vegetable dish that had been given the bizarre name “Sludge mixed with family.” Equally strange and no more appetizing was something called “Fish head bubble cake.” “Very beautiful kelp” had been in poll position for the bronze medal until I came across a tofu dish designed to resemble three miniature pandas with the name “The wet panda skin of tofu.” Unfortunately, the Sculpting in Time cafe had no new additions to their menu and the standings of the CULINARY PENTATHLON remained unchanged.

  The cafe’s name itself had briefly been considered for a medal in the VENDOR & RESTAURANT event of the Translation Olympics, but in the end Victoria and I decided that the awkwardly translated name actually suited the cafe quite well. The entire cafe, from the lamps to the furniture to the movie posters and lunch boxes on the walls, was decked out with genuine miscellany from the 1970s and 1980s. Victoria loved going there because it reminded her of her childhood. She always sat at one table in the corner that had four plastic chairs that she said were the same as the chairs she had used in school when she was a young girl.

  When we picked him up a few hours later, I told Bowen I wanted to choose the restaurant. I had spotted a McDonald’s on one of Driver Wu’s drives to the sports center. I figured it was a fifteen-minute walk. He had never been to McDonald’s but, as always, he was thrilled by the prospect of discovering something new. The menu was recognizable to me, but pretty much everything had been adapted to local tastes. Instead of chicken nuggets they served chicken wings. We feasted on chicken wings and “shake-shake fries” and Cokes. Bowen chose seaweed-flavored fries and I stuck with salt. We finished our meal off with bean curd ice cream.

  As we were getting up to leave I asked him about Madame Jiang. “If she had never been a tennis player, how did she become the coach?”

  “Maybe no one knows. She was a volleyball player. But maybe no one knows why she is not coaching volleyball.” Bowen could not be drawn into speculation or gossip. It was not that he was resisting, it was just that he was not the least bit interested in her. Over the weeks of tennis practice, I came to understand that it was his total absence of interest and respect for Madame Jiang that infuriated her. There was nothing she could do about it. It was as if she did not exist. The more she tried to goad him, the less visible she became.

  It had stopped raining some time before, and after we finished lunch we walked back to the courts. We walked unhurried, perhaps because we both knew that the week, and the freedom we had enjoyed, were coming to an end. As we were walking, I realized that Bowen and I had become close friends. It was fun hanging out with him. It had been a long time since I had hung out with someone my own age who didn’t act weird around me because of what happened to my brother. It was also the first time that I wasn’t constantly thinking about the friends I had left behind in America. I realized I would miss Bowen when I went back, and I was struck with the sobering thought that I would probably never see or hear from him again after I left.

  I wondered if Bowen had ever thought about trying to get a scholarship to an American university. I asked him if he was considering university at all. He shook his head and explained to me that he would never pass the Gao Kao, the university entrance exam. The Gao Kao was made up of four sections that Bowen described as 3 + X. The “3” are Chinese, math, and English. Every single high school student is required to speak English well enough to pass a rigorous English exam. The “X” is an exam that tests a subject that each student feels he or she is the strongest in. Bowen said that every year almost ten million students take the Gao Kao. There was no way he could take it now, having been out of the system for so long. Even the smartest students at the best schools in the country would study from 5 a.m. to midnight every day for an entire year to prepare for the test. Bowen said that the best universities, Tsinghua and Beida, only accepted the top eight students out of every ten thousand who took the exam.

  I was quiet for a moment while I thought about what he had just said. The ten million number was simply staggering. The year before when I had almost flunked out of school, my father, in an attempt to make me pick up my grades, had impressed upon me the fact that Yale only accepted a little more than two thousand of the thirty thousand people who applied every year, giving it an acceptance rate of about 7 percent. According to Bowen, Tsinghua accepted twenty-four out of thirty thousand. That acceptance rate was closer to 0.07 percent. Later on during the year, as the Gao Kao got closer, I would read stories in the China Daily of parents who had their children prepare for the test by studying and living full-time in hospitals, hooked up to IV drips and oxygen to improve their concentration. Victoria told me that during the two weeks before the Gao Kao, cities all across China became deathly quiet at night as bars and clubs were shut down and special noise ordinances passed so that the students could study in peace. I also read of kids who committed suicide, of elaborate cheating scams that used wireless earphones, camera pens, and signal-emitting watches, and of girls who took hormone injections to delay their periods until after the exam. In America I had heard of students going to the bathroom during the SAT and reading cheat sheets they had stashed in their pockets, but I had never heard of anything as drastic as any of this. To many the Gao Kao was a route out of poverty and there was a competitiveness to every facet of life here that simply didn’t exist in America.

  The boys on the tennis team had long dropped off the academic track necessary to be eligible even to take those exams. Their futures had been gambled on a game. I thought about Bowen’s answer, about how he had absolutely no chance of going to university in China. What if he got injured? A thought came to me. What if over the next few years he prepared for the SAT or TOEFL? As long as he got a semi-decent score, I was sure he could get a tennis scholarship to a school in the States.

  “What about an American university? I’m sure you could get into one by using your tennis.”

  Bowen seemed confused by what I had suggested. “So if I lived in America, I could go to a university?” he asked.

  “I’m sure you could get a scholarship for tennis and then play tennis for the university. You wouldn’t have to pay anything then. It would be free.”

  We sat quietly while Bowen considered this revelation.

  “But why play for the university? Why not just play professional?”

  I shrugged. “You can do both. James Blake played at Harvard, McEnroe went to Stanford. It’s good in case you get injured or something. Then you have a backup plan.”

  “So if you can’t play tennis you will go to university?”

  “Yeah, I guess. That’s what my father wants me to do. I still want to go pro, but it’s a good backup option, I guess.”

  “My father wants me to learn zenme shuo (how do you say),” Bowen said. Stuck for a mo
ment, he began imitating the actions of a builder.

  “Building?” I asked and pointed at a construction site across the street. “Like that?”

  “Uh—maybe, but it’s different,” Bowen said and gestured at the walls. “He makes the house walls.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Plastering?”

  “Pla-ster-ing,” Bowen said, mouthing the unfamiliar syllables again silently. “Yes, maybe that.”

  “And not university?”

  “He is worried about tennis,” Bowen said. “He tells me always people are building in China.” He waved a hand toward the window. I looked past the grimy pane of glass and saw construction cranes dotting the distance. “Maybe he is right,” Bowen said with a shrug. “But why would I ever stop playing tennis?”

  I asked him how he had started tennis. He said he lived near the tennis courts. “There was some old rackets that we could use. I would go with some other kids, and we would hit for hours against the side of the building in the parking lot. I would always stay longer than the other children. I think the director of the facility got tired of the sound of my practicing against the wall. One day he walked out. I thought I was going to get in trouble, or he was going to shoo me away. He said he wanted to talk to my mother about me. I didn’t tell her because I was afraid he would say something bad and she would punish me. The next time I went to play, he asked where my mother was. I told him she is working. He asked me if I want to join the tennis classes. He said I have to ask my mother to sign a paper.” Bowen bent down to tie his shoe. “How about you?” he asked.

  “How did I start playing tennis?” I asked. “I don’t know, my brother played. I guess, I always wanted to do whatever he was doing.”

  “You have a brother? How old is he?”

  “I did.” The words came slowly. “He died last year.”

  “Died?” Bowen repeated the word to make sure he understood correctly.

  I didn’t answer. We sat there for a while and neither of us spoke. I stared at the cracks in the ground. About a month before I left for China I spoke to one of Tom’s friends and asked her what had happened that night. I had never heard the full story. My father refused to say anything more than there had been an accident. I found some local newspaper articles online, but those were short and vague. I felt this need to understand exactly what happened, and I knew that Tom’s friends were the only ones who could tell me. So I asked a girl he had been close to.

  At first she was hesitant. But I pushed her, and then the story tumbled out, fast and disorganized. She told me that a bunch of them had gotten the idea of trying LSD from some movie they saw. They tried to buy it from a senior who sold weed. He didn’t have any, but he told them he could get them Ecstasy, so they bought some Ecstasy off him and went to Andrew Green’s house, because his parents were out of town, and they got drunk and took the Ecstasy and when Tom started convulsing and throwing up, they panicked and were too scared of getting in trouble to take him to the hospital, so they drove to Dr. Miller’s house, carried him to the doorstep, rang the doorbell, and drove off. They hadn’t known that Dr. Miller was away for the weekend. Tom died that night in the snow on Dr. Miller’s front doorstep. The guy who delivered our newspapers found Tom’s body the next morning.

  Sometimes the thought—that if only one thing different had happened he could have lived—would hit me like a 120-mile-an-hour wind, and I could do nothing but brace. I was using every muscle in my body to keep it together. I wanted Bowen to leave, but he wouldn’t get up. He just sat there, unmoving, unspeaking, and for the first time in a long time I didn’t feel completely alone.

  Bowen rested a hand on my shoulder.

  “Bie danxin (Don’t worry),” he said. “Ni hai you yi wei gege (You still have a brother).”

  二十

  My father visited Beijing toward the end of October. I hadn’t seen him since I left for China in early August. I had been looking forward to his visit for weeks. He was supposed to come over during the middle of September, but something had come up at work and he had to change his plans. I was worried that the same thing might happen again. But one morning at the end of October, I woke up to find an e-mail from my father saying he was about to board his flight to Beijing and would see me later that day. I asked Victoria if we could surprise him by picking him up at the airport. She said of course and e-mailed his secretary to let her know the change of plans. My father wasn’t expecting to see me at the airport, but when he did it seemed to make him really happy. That made me feel good.

  He had a week of meetings and was staying at the Grand Hyatt. I stayed with him so that we could have dinner every night. Compared to my white shoe-box bedroom at the Zhangs’, the Grand Hyatt was almost too grotesque in its opulence. It had been designed by an architect obsessed with waterfalls. The large sitting area to the left of the massive revolving doors was called the Cascade Lounge. Water ran down round columns marking its boundaries. To the right were more sitting areas and, beyond those, the hotel’s selection of four restaurants and a cafe. To get around the government-imposed height limit that exists for buildings in Beijing and to maximize the number of floors, the architect had designed several floors underground and had made the ceilings of all the rooms very low. The swimming pool was on the lowest of the three underground floors and was twice the size of an Olympic pool. The architect had given the pool a tropical theme. Its irregular borders were lined with artificial palm trees, and the ceiling had been painted to look like the night sky with glittering lights counterfeiting stars. The sound of whales calling one another was piped in through a hidden speaker system.

  The marbled and gilded lobby at the Grand Hyatt was like a cocktail party with people always coming and going. My father and I never walked through without someone stopping him and wanting to meet up later for a drink. Whenever this happened, my father never hesitated to introduce me and explain in detail what I was doing in China. It made me feel like Exhibit A. I wondered if he did it because he felt he had to compensate for Tom. People had heard, I guessed, because no one ever asked us about how Tom was doing.

  For the first time in what felt like forever I was surrounded by Westerners. While I had lived at the Zhangs’, I would go days without seeing another native English speaker. But the Hyatt was a little bubble of Western culture that had been dropped into the heart of Beijing. Every measure had been taken to replicate the style and feel of a hotel in London or New York. The Starbucks in the lobby, the room-service menu with its Caesar salads and cheeseburgers and French fries, the little boutique that sold the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, all comforting reminders of home. While the hotel staff was mostly Chinese, the managers and supervisors had all been imported from the United States or Europe and were tasked with training the Chinese staff in Western manners and customs. At the Hyatt, one could be in Beijing without ever leaving the United States.

  I think that was how most Westerners experienced China at that time. Back then Shanghai and Hong Kong were really the only Chinese cities that had truly been internationalized. Once you ventured farther into the mainland, most traces of Western influence disappeared. Even major cities like Tianjin and Xi’an, both roughly the size of New York City, might only have one newly built Sheraton or TGI Fridays. Other than that, everything was alien. The vast majority of Westerners did their best not to venture outside of Shanghai or Hong Kong. Even Beijing was still very much a Chinese city then. There were small pockets of the city where Western influence had been allowed to permeate, and most Westerners I observed back then rarely left that bubble. They stayed in five-star hotels and they dealt only with Chinese or Hong Kong businessmen who spoke excellent English. They saw the country of modernization and “progress,” and they ignored the parts of China that didn’t fit into that one-dimensional image. The foreignness of the real China disturbed and disoriented them. There was nothing remotely recognizable in the Chinese language. When Westerners saw other Westerners, they would seek them out with a bold despera
tion and cling to them as if they were childhood friends. Most Westerners stayed in Beijing for less than a week, and for that week they lived at a hotel. They tolerated China; some came because they felt they had to come, some were there because they understood it was the right place to be, but almost all were counting down the days to their departure.

  I couldn’t help but feel an element of disdain. I found their attitude so hypocritical. They claimed to be interested in China. But in truth they were only interested in the parts of China that felt familiar. They claimed to understand the real China, but they had no interest in even seeing it. There was an arrogance to their attitude. It was like someone coming to America for the first time, spending a week in a hotel on the Upper East Side, and then claiming they knew what life was like for a farmer in Nebraska. I had seen enough of Beijing to know that I understood absolutely nothing of the real China. It was too complex. To understand it would take a lifetime.

  On my first night in the Hyatt, we were walking through the lobby on our way to dinner when my father ran into two bankers from Morgan Stanley. He introduced me and they commented on how smart my father was for sending his son to China at such a young age, and my father told them that I was already conversational in Chinese. That was a stretch, but I didn’t correct him. After the two bankers’ interest in me waned, they spoke to my father for a while about some conference they were in Beijing for. I stood there and tried to follow the conversation for a little while before losing interest and shifting my focus to people watching in the lobby. Fortunately I found entertainment close by in the form of a hugely overweight, cowboy-hat-wearing Texan who was frantically trying to explain to a Chinese bartender how to correctly mix an old-fashioned. Judging from the Texan’s growing frustration and the four untouched drinks on the bar, his efforts appeared to be in vain. I watched as the nervous bartender attempted another effort.

  “Dammit!” the Texan exclaimed. “I told ya! There’s no goddamn vodka in an old-fashioned!” The bartender looked up in confusion, still clutching the bottle of vodka.