Beautiful Country

by J. R. Thornton

  “That’s the fourth one you’ve put vodka in! Come on now! I’ve told you four goddamn times! I’m gonna have to take it away from you, ain’t I? Here, gimme that bottle!”

  I was reminded of the wrestling match I had watched with David in my first week at the Zhangs’. Just as an alarmed concierge rushed over to resolve the situation, my father tapped me on the shoulder. “Ready to go?” We headed toward the restaurant in the back of the lobby.

  “You should look people in the eye when you’re talking to them,” my father said.

  “I do.”

  “And stand up straighter,” he continued. He put his right hand on my left shoulder and pressed his thumb into my shoulder blade, correcting my posture. “Your posture—presence is important. My father used to make me stand in front of the mirror and squeeze my shoulder blades together every night before I went to sleep,” he said. “If you look like this, people are going to walk all over you.” He slouched and curved his shoulders and pulled his elbows into his body so that he looked like a frail, old person. I pulled my shoulder out from under his hand.

  At dinner my father told me that he had just spoken with the Dover headmaster and that he was very impressed with my father’s report and said that they looked forward to my coming next year. He asked if I was excited to be going to Dover, and I said that I was very much looking forward to it. I had initially thought that a year off from school would be heaven: no homework, lots of time to concentrate on tennis, no exams, and a way to get away from all the things that reminded me of Tom. But I had found that even by November, I desperately missed the camaraderie of classrooms and sports teams. I had never spent so much time in solitude.

  “I like it here,” I said. “But I’m looking forward to being around friends again.”

  “What about the boys you play tennis with here?” It was the first time he had ever asked me about them.

  “I’ve become good friends with one of them. This guy named Bowen. He’s the best player on the team. I think he’s number one in China in the fourteen-and-under. Most of them don’t speak much English though.”

  My father frowned. “You should be speaking to them in Chinese.”

  “Well, I try to,” I said. “But my Chinese still isn’t good enough for me to understand everything they say.”

  “I thought you said your Chinese lessons were going well?”

  “They are. It’s just not an easy language. It takes time.”

  “You really should be making an effort to only use Chinese, Chase. A couple years down the road, you’re going to kick yourself if you don’t take advantage of your time here.”

  “I know.” I paused and thought about whether to continue. “It just gets kind of lonely sometimes.”

  “What does?”

  “Just being here, by myself. I just get lonely, that’s all.”

  “That’s part of life. Everyone’s lonely sometimes,” he said. “You just have to learn to deal with it.”

  Our food arrived and we ate in silence. Perhaps trying to compensate for his criticism, my father told me a few stories about pranks he and his friends had pulled back when they were at Dover. I found myself laughing out loud as he told me tales of their bike jousting tournament, which ended with several broken collarbones, and how they had spent two weeks of their senior spring catching squirrels around the campus, collecting them in a pen they built during woodshop, before finally releasing them in different parts of the main school building early one morning. My father wiped away a tear from his eye as he recalled how one of the released squirrels had wreaked havoc on his calculus class when it scurried up his teacher’s back and into her thick hair. The teacher, he said, had reacted by sprinting blindly away from her desk only to run straight into the classroom door. Encouraged by his good mood, I told him about the Texan and his desperate attempts to get an old-fashioned. My father found the episode even funnier than I did.

  I asked my father what people like the men from Morgan Stanley and the Texan were really doing in Beijing. He said it was hard to know. “There are a lot of people over here chasing deals, but they don’t really know what they are chasing. There are a lot of opportunities, but these guys don’t really like it over here, and the Chinese have to trust you before they will deal with you. That’s what it comes down to, trust. It takes years to earn that trust, and you can lose it in a second. But without that trust you won’t get anywhere here. Most Westerners think they can just come over here and beat their chest and say, ‘I’m from Goldman’ or ‘I’m from Citi,’ and the red carpets will get rolled out. Even with the best contacts you never really know who you are dealing with.” My father paused for a moment before adding, “In some ways, that’s the danger, but also the opportunity.” My father said it was all about trust, but so many of the relationships I had witnessed in China seemed to be transactional relationships. I do this for you, and you do this for me. Maybe that was why trust was so important. In a society where trust was the scarcest resource, it was also the most valuable.

  二十一

  My father went with me to the tennis center the next day but spent the entire car ride on a conference call. As we drove through the gates of the sports center in the black Audi, I spotted Bowen walking in the shadow of the statue. I almost pointed him out to my father, but I didn’t when I saw the condition he was in. He looked thin and pale and he walked with a limp. It was strange. I had never seen him look fragile before. I wondered what punishment Madame Jiang had inflicted on him this time. I hoped he was okay.

  We started off with the juggling routine. I glanced over at my father to see his reaction to this absurd warm-up, but his attention was wholly focused on his BlackBerry. Madame Jiang fed us forehands for thirty minutes before telling us to practice serves. She walked around the court with a racket under her arms, an old graphite Prince model from the 1980s. It was one of the few times I ever saw her bring a racket to practice; usually she just borrowed one of the boy’s rackets when she needed to feed balls. Bowen noticed the racket too, and as we returned to the shopping cart to gather balls for more practice, he said to no one in particular, “What is she going to do with that racket, swat flies?”

  For the first hour Madame Jiang walked around the perimeter of the courts watching us, but she also kept her eyes on my father. I noticed that she walked to where Victoria was and chatted with her for longer than usual. Halfway through practice she called us to the net and told us it was time to play sets. She paired Dali with Bowen. During the past week, Madame Jiang had been going after Dali in the same way she did with Hope. She yelled at him for being lazy. She said he was getting worse. I had even heard her warn him that unless he got his act together his place on the team was in danger. I talked to Bowen about it. It worried me. Dali’s temperament was not well suited to deal with Madame Jiang. He was losing confidence in his game and he seemed depressed during practice. He was one of the more cheerful, bubbly personalities on the team, but lately he had been despondent and solitary. I wondered why Madame Jiang picked on the players like that. I noticed that she seemed to go through waves of targeting one player, and then would abruptly switch to another. I think it was her way of maintaining control. Her way of reminding them that she was the boss. Maybe it came from the insecurity of knowing less about the sport than the boys she coached. In any case, I hoped that she would move on from Dali before it was too late. I didn’t want him to go the way of Hope.

  Madame Jiang finished pairing us up, and we headed out to our courts to begin our matches. I was assigned to play Random. He had beaten me quite easily the last time we had played, but I was hitting well that day. I remember glancing in my father’s direction after each winner I hit, checking for any sign of approval, or even an acknowledgment that he had seen the point. However, whenever I looked over he was busy sending e-mails on his BlackBerry. It didn’t make any sense to me that he wasn’t watching to see if I had improved during my time in Beijing. As he continued to ignore my match, I began to have t
he disconcerting thought that maybe he wasn’t watching because it didn’t matter to him. Maybe that was why he had never shown any real interest in sending me to Laver in Florida. But it didn’t make sense to me that he wouldn’t care.

  I ended up winning 6-1, 6-2. I was surprised by how well I played. Usually my father’s presence made me nervous. The last time he had seen me play had been six months before at the National Clay Court Championships in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, when I drew the number two player in the country in the third round. I lost that match 6-1, 6-1 in less than an hour. Maybe this time I had played better because I knew he wasn’t really watching.

  I was surprised to hear that Bowen and Dali had split sets and were about to start the third. Madame Jiang was watching the match so intently that she forgot to give us instructions about what to do next, so we sat on the benches and watched too. Bowen had never lost a set to Dali in his life. The only way he would have lost that second set was if he decided to let Dali win. Judging from the few points I had seen, it looked like they were having a very close match. I figured that must be Bowen consciously playing to Dali’s strengths. He understood the game so well that he had this ability to raise his opponent’s game if he wanted to. Sometimes it felt like he understood your strengths and weaknesses better than you did yourself. Dali looked a changed player from the one I had seen yesterday. He was fired up and full of confidence. It was a big deal for him to take a set off Bowen. It was exactly what he needed to counter all the negativity Madame Jiang had cast on him during the past week of practices.

  At 2-2 in the third set, Bowen changed his service motion. Instead of completing a full circle with his left arm, he truncated the arc and brought his racket straight up. He hit his serve flat, and while he still managed to generate some power, Dali did not have trouble controlling and redirecting Bowen’s balls. Bowen knew that all Dali had to do to look like a brilliant returner was to punch these flat serves back as if he were volleying. Had Bowen served with heavy topspin, Dali would have been unable to control his return.

  Bowen was giving Dali a chance to shine in front of my father. Madame Jiang knew my father had connections in the Chinese system, but she didn’t know with whom or how deep. What she did not want to happen was exactly the outcome Bowen was orchestrating. If Dali almost beat Bowen in front of my father, my father might mention to his contact—whoever it was—that he had seen a fine match between Bowen and Dali, the two best boys on the team. Madame Jiang then would not have the courage to throw him off the team. Her threats would lose their bite.

  They fought the last set to a tiebreaker at 6-6. Random leaned over to me and whispered, “Bowen had better worry about saving his own skin. If he loses she will go after him.” We were all worried for Bowen. Random was right, I knew that much. The system in China was brutal, if you got cut—that was it, there was no one to help you out. I couldn’t fathom how these boys dealt with the pressure of such a reality, but they did. I guess somehow they just got used to it, or perhaps it was all they ever knew.

  No one understood this better than Bowen. Of all the boys, his place on the team was the most tenuous. He knew as well as any of us that if Madame Jiang could find a way to send him back to Tianjin, she would. Random explained this to me one day. He said it was Bowen’s ability that kept him on the team. Madame Jiang’s government bosses cared only that the team won. Their promotions depended on the success of the sporting programs they supervised. As long as Bowen was the number one player, and as long as he kept winning matches for Beijing, he was untouchable. According to Random, Madame Jiang had once reported Bowen to her supervisor for disrespect in an attempt to have him kicked off the team. But she was overruled. The team supervisor refused to kick Bowen off the team because he was too good. He didn’t want to lose Bowen to a rival team.

  Bowen knew all of this. If there was anything consistent about him, it was his subtle defiance of Madame Jiang. Every action was calibrated so as to pull against her. And the calibration had to be careful and exact. One wrong calculation, a piece of bad luck, a bad step, wrong timing, and Bowen could be banished for good. And it scared me for him. He was balancing on a tightrope without anything underneath him.

  Never one to confirm our suspicions that he was rigging the match, Bowen gave Dali three match points before finally finishing the tiebreaker eleven to nine. Dali was unable to win the crucial points and in that brief space, I saw the difference between Dali and Bowen, and it made all the difference. Bowen believed in himself so completely that there could be no other outcome for him. Dali got nervous and played tight. I don’t know if he understood what his friend was doing for him. And perhaps that made it heavier for Dali because Bowen allowed him to believe that it was all his own doing, that the fate of the match was truly in his hands. But Bowen looked ahead with an infinite confidence in the future. And it was that infinite confidence that allowed him to take risks that none of us would have ever conceived of—let alone dared. But it was all too close for me.

  The moment Bowen won, Madame Jiang turned away in disgust and saw us all sitting on the bench. She shooed us back on the court and told us all to do one hundred push-ups, such was her anger at the outcome of Dali and Bowen’s match and our taking a break to watch the last set. She told us we did not have time to waste watching a mediocre match. I knew her scolding would have been much worse had my father not been there.

  Halfway through the practice my father caught my attention and waved good-bye. He had a meeting scheduled for the late afternoon.

  Bowen raised his chin toward my father. “That man, who is he? He is your sponsor?”

  “No, he is my father.” Bowen looked surprised. He asked me why he had come. I told him that my father wanted to watch me play. Bowen didn’t seem to understand this. I asked him if his parents ever came to watch him. “No,” he said.

  “How about the other boys?” He shook his head. “What about tournaments. Do they come and watch the tournaments?”

  “Not really.” Bowen went on to explain that they were all paid a salary by the government to play tennis and had been since they were young children. “If you worked in a bank, would your father come and watch you work? It is the same thing.”

  I suddenly realized in all the time that I practiced with the team, I never once saw a friend or parent come to watch. Bowen was correct: in a way they were already at work. Tennis was their profession, and a certain level of maturity had already developed. Even though the boys’ families lived in the Beijing area, they would not have been well off enough to own a car. Using public transportation would have taken a lot of time, and both parents probably worked long hours during the week. At the training centers in America, parents came and visited or, if they lived nearby, drove down to spend an afternoon watching their children practice. In fact, in America, the reverse was true, the academies had to develop policies and rules of behavior to keep the parents from meddling too much.

  As we were packing up racket bags at the end of the day’s practice, I said to Bowen, “Why do you push her so much?”

  “Push?”

  “You know.” I motioned to Madame Jiang. “Like with Dali. Why’d you give him three match points? You know it drives her insane when she thinks you’re messing with her. I don’t think it’s a good idea to make her mad like that. You’re just making life harder for yourself.”

  Bowen shook his head. “I don’t know what you are talking about. I didn’t give anything to Dali.”

  “Come on, Bowen.”

  He shook his head again, and for a moment I began to wonder. I couldn’t be certain whether Bowen really was playing with Madame Jiang’s expectation and hopes of match results just to annoy her. I sensed he knew that she could get rid of him anytime and that this was his only permissible act of defiance—through sheer physical and mental talent he could manipulate outcomes and no one watching could quite figure out how. Or perhaps he was indeed injured and was telling it straight. And with Bowen I knew both versions could be
true.

  After practice, I got back to the hotel and waited for my father. I turned on CNN to watch the news. I caught the beginning of a story about the 2008 Olympics and Chinese violations of human rights. The screen went blank, and five minutes later CNN returned with a story about a hijacker who had been apprehended in Chicago. Later that evening at dinner my father explained that anytime a story came on that the Chinese didn’t want on the air, they would censor it by blocking reception for the length of the story. He assumed the censored news story was about people protesting China’s having been awarded the 2008 Summer Olympics, given China’s human rights record in Tibet.

  My father asked me some questions about tennis practice, but he never asked me anything about Bowen or any of the other boys. I guess they didn’t interest him. He often asked me about China’s young generation. What the “young generation” thought about the Chinese government, about democracy, about America, about censorship and freedom. But he never asked me about my teammates. He wasn’t interested in the boys I saw every day. They would never grow up to be entrepreneurs, artists, or political leaders. My teammates were a part of China’s young generation, but they were not a part of the young generation who would matter to America.

  二十二

  Victoria came to the Hyatt on Friday afternoon to tell us that the Zhangs had invited us to dinner that night. Dreading the prospect of a long, drawn-out dinner at which I would be largely ignored, I asked if we could bring Bowen. Victoria shook her head behind my father’s back as if to indicate that it was an inappropriate thing to ask.

  “Who?” my father asked.

  “Bowen.”

  “Who is Bowen?”

  “My friend from tennis. You know? The one I was telling you about.”