My father gave a look that bordered on annoyance. “To this? No, definitely not.”
With that dealt with, my father turned back to the papers he had been looking over before Victoria arrived. What made my request so out of the question that it could be dismissed with disgust? For a second I was overcome with a desire to push back, to say that I wasn’t going if Bowen couldn’t come. But I couldn’t bring myself to confront him and I said nothing.
Just before we were about to leave, my father told me that dinner was going to be at the house of Mrs. Zhang’s father, Secretary Su. My father explained to me that Secretary Su was one of the nine members of the Standing Committee. I hadn’t known that before. It answered some of my questions about the pictures in the Zhangs’ living room. I didn’t know a whole lot about the structure of the Chinese government, but I knew that the Standing Committee was the top of the pyramid. The nine men that made up the Standing Committee, which included the president and the premier, were the nine most powerful men in China. As a member of the Standing Committee, I knew that Mrs. Zhang’s father would live in Zhongnanhai, the high-security government compound located next to the Forbidden City. It had served as the Beijing residence for all of China’s top leaders going back to Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai and very few outsiders were ever allowed in. It was a modern-day Forbidden City. I would be one of the only Westerners my age to go inside.
The Hyatt had a car waiting for us downstairs. We drove the short distance down Chang’an Avenue to Tiananmen Square. The wide avenue, which had seen tanks roll down it during the student protests, was familiar to me, having walked down it several times for sightseeing trips to the Forbidden City with Victoria. However, this time before reaching the old imperial palace, we turned down a small side street. We were stopped at a security checkpoint and an armed military policeman came up to the driver’s window. The driver passed the policeman several papers and indicated to him our business in Zhongnanhai. As the military policeman checked over the documents, two other guards ran mirrors under the car to check for explosives attached to the bottom of the vehicle. The military policeman, satisfied with our documents, motioned for us to get out of the car and then ushered us through a metal detector to the side of the checkpoint. As I stood there I noticed a screen behind the gate with the words SERVE THE PEOPLE written on it in calligraphy. I smiled to myself. There was some irony to “the servants of the people” taking up residence in the palace of the last emperor. After the driver cleared the metal detector, the three of us got back into the car and drove through the gate.
The interior of Zhongnanhai was quiet and peaceful. A road ran alongside a dark lake that was bordered by trees and grass far greener than anything else I had seen in Beijing. The tranquility of the place was a welcome change from the chaos that defined the streets just on the other side of the wall.
We pulled up outside a smaller walled enclosure. Two soldiers stood guard by the entrance. Before we got out, my father reminded me to be polite and to behave. I hated when he talked down to me, as if I were still a little boy. The large front door swung open, and Mrs. Zhang stood there with David beside her. She greeted my father with a warm smile.
“Tom,” she said. “Come in. Come in. You know David, yes?”
“I don’t believe we’ve met,” my father said. He extended a hand to David. “How do you do?” he asked in mock seriousness.
David shook his hand. “I’m fine,” he said.
“He’s very cute,” my father said to Mrs. Zhang. She smiled and the two walked down the corridor discussing something, leaving David and me by the door with the two soldiers. David blinked and then pointed at one of the soldiers.
“You see his gun?” David asked. “I’m getting one. For my birthday.”
“No, you’re not,” I said.
“I am.”
“You’re getting an assault rifle for your birthday?”
“It looks the same. It just doesn’t shoot the real bullets,” he said.
“What kind of bullets, then?”
“Come on. I’ll show you.” David ran off down the hallway in the opposite direction of our parents and waved for me to follow. I walked after him, and then broke into a jog in order to keep up. David stopped when he reached the end of the hallway and waited for me.
I caught up with him and we turned the corner, and suddenly to my right was an opening to an expansive courtyard. David kept running down the hallway, but I stopped and looked. The courtyard was simple. The floor of the courtyard was paved with large, smooth, gray stones and the paving was only interrupted in four small areas where trees had been planted. There were bushes around the exterior and potted plants by the small steps that led down to the courtyard. The trees were mostly bare now, giving the courtyard a cold, deserted feel. I imagined it looked quite beautiful in the spring. David had realized that I was no longer following him and stopped.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”
I waved him off. Something in the far corner of the courtyard had moved and caught my eye. David sighed impatiently and followed as I walked down the wide stone steps and across the flat, gray stone floor toward the far corner of the courtyard. As I got closer I saw that in the corner of the courtyard, between two bushes, was a brown, wooden cage. I peered between the bars of the cage and saw three small, brown furry creatures. They looked like miniature brown monkeys, but without tails. One was hanging down from the top of the cage. The creature was no bigger than a small hamster and looked as though it weighed about a pound at most. It dangled upside down from the bars, hanging on by its two minuscule feet. It stared at me with huge round moon eyes.
“Don’t touch them!” David said.
I turned, surprised. “I wasn’t going to.”
“They’re poisonous.”
“What?”
“You have to go to the hospital if they bite you.” David snapped his teeth and pretended to take a chunk out of his own arm. “I’m just joking. You can touch them if you want. My dad called someone to take out their teeth. They can’t bite people anymore.”
“What are they?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“What type of animal.”
“Oh,” David said. “We call them lan hou, but I forget how to say it in English.”
“Must be some kind of monkey,” I said. “Lan hou, doesn’t that mean lazy monkey?”
“Yeah, but they’re not monkeys. It’s called something else in English. I forget. My mom likes them. She thinks they are cute. You can’t buy them anymore. There’s not many left.”
“You mean they’re endangered?”
“I guess. Okay, let’s go, I have to show you my guns.”
Leaving the three lan hou behind, David showed me to a room that his grandfather had given to him for when he came to stay. He opened a closet in the room and showed off an impressive arsenal of airsoft guns. We spent the remainder of the time until dinner sniping toy figurines with David’s assortment of military-replica airsoft guns.
Around eight o’clock, David’s nanny poked her head around the door to call me for dinner. David, coincidentally, or perhaps not, chose that exact moment to unleash a furious volley of airsoft pellets at a target we had taped to the door. David laughed as the nanny yelped and jumped back behind the door. The two exchanged a few sharp words. David sighed. “Okay! Okay!” he said and dropped his airsoft gun. The nanny poked her head around the door once more and called to me to come with her. I followed her back around the courtyard to the other wing of the house. I asked her why David wasn’t coming with us, and she said that he and Lily had eaten dinner earlier, before my father and I arrived. She led me through an elaborate sitting room into the dining room behind it. I came in to find everyone already seated around a large circular table in the center of the dining room.
At the far side of the table my father was seated in between Mr. Zhang and an elderly, serious-looking man dressed in a dark suit with neatly combed jet-black hair that looke
d as if it had been dyed. I knew that he must be Secretary Su. A young woman who I assumed must be an interpreter sat to Secretary Su’s left, then Mrs. Zhang and then her mother to the left of her. Two younger Chinese men sat around the side of the table closest to me. As they were too young to be Secretary Su’s deputies, I guessed that they were his aides. I saw that there was an open spot between Mr. Zhang and the younger of the two aides.
The seating of the dinner was no accident. I had attended some of my father’s meetings with government officials and seen how seriously seating order was taken in China. Every meeting room was arranged with chairs in a horseshoe shape around the perimeter of the room. The two most important people always occupied the two chairs at the top of the horseshoe, and then people filled out the remaining chairs by order of their seniority. The most junior people would take the chairs at the two ends of the horseshoe. I had once made the mistake of taking the chair directly next to my father—the chair for the third- or fourth-most important person in the meeting. This must have caused quite an awkward situation for the Chinese minister, whose seat I had accidentally taken and who had to sit in a seat that was lower than his position, and yet, at the same time, he would not have wanted to offend my father by appearing to be rude by asking me to move. Just before the meeting began, a staff member came over and told me they had a different seat saved for me.
My father was deep in conversation with Mr. Zhang and Secretary Su and did not see me right away. Uniformed waiters and waitresses stood around the perimeter of the room. I saw the ornately decorated porcelain plates, and the golden napkins and ivory chopsticks, and I knew that this all would have been just as foreign to Bowen as it was to me. I stood there for a moment until the interpreter alerted my father of my presence. He smiled and stood up, pointing to me.
“Ah,” my father said. “Secretary Su, this is my son, Chase.”
As I walked toward them I could feel the eyes of all the waiters and waitresses watching me, and I wondered what they thought of a fourteen-year-old foreign boy being invited to this dinner.
Secretary Su smiled and extended a hand. I shook it. His hand was soft. He turned to the rest of the table and said something that I didn’t understand. The rest of the table laughed at his comment. I smiled awkwardly. The interpreter, a frail young woman with frameless eyeglasses and straight dark hair tied back in a ponytail, leaned toward me. “He says you are a very handsome boy,” she said. Secretary Su puffed out his chest and made himself tall. “Hen qianglie, ah? Xiang yundongyuan yiyang,” he said.
The interpreter translated. “He says you are strong like . . . uh . . . a sports player?”
My father put his hand on my shoulder. “Tell Secretary Su that Chase is a very good tennis player,” he said to the interpreter. He waited while she translated his words. “Tell him he practices with the junior national tennis team, every day.”
The interpreter repeated what he said to Secretary Su and waited for his response. “Oh really? he says. Then maybe one day he will be a tennis champion? Like . . .” She turned back to Secretary Su for clarification. “A-jia-xi-a?” She looked uncertain and looked to me for confirmation. “You know him?”
My father looked at me. “Who did she say?” he asked. I sounded out the syllables in my head and realized whom she meant.
“Agassi,” I said. “Like Andre Agassi.”
“Ahh, Agassi.” My father smiled. “Well, maybe. Tell Secretary Su that he’s also learning Chinese.”
She translated and Secretary Su turned to me. “Ni hui shou Zhongwen ma (You can speak Chinese)?”
“Wo hui (I can),” I said.
He clapped his hands together. “Tebie hao (Excellent)!” he said. Then he said something I didn’t understand. I wasn’t even sure if it had been a statement or a question, and so I just stood there looking at him with an uneasy smile on my face. I could feel the eyes of everyone in the room on me. He laughed and said, “Mei guanxi (It doesn’t matter),” and we all sat down for dinner.
An army of waiters and waitresses suddenly came upon us, placing trays of steaming vegetables and fish and meat on the table’s large turntable centerpiece. A waitress placed a bowl of soup in front of me while another filled my glass with red wine. The waitresses disappeared and were almost immediately replaced by a male waiter who carried a small decanter of clear liquid that he poured into miniature ceramic glasses that looked just like the eggcups I had eaten soft-boiled eggs out of at home. One of the first two waitresses returned with a cup of green tea and asked if I would like anything else to drink. “Shui (Water),” I said, hoping to make up for my earlier failure to understand Secretary Su. I had to repeat it twice more before she understood me. A few minutes later she returned with a glass of water. I picked up the glass to take a drink, but put it back down right away. The water was boiling hot.
I turned to my left where Mr. Zhang was slurping down his bowl of soup. He caught my eye and stabbed at the soup with his white spoon. “Very good,” he said. “Try some. Shark fin soup. Very expensive.” I tasted it. It was very salty. Feeling Mr. Zhang’s gaze, I drank a few more spoonfuls and then put down my spoon. On the other side of the table, one of Secretary Su’s assistants spun the glass turntable centerpiece, sending dishes of fish and meat and vegetables slowly around the table.
My father spoke with Mr. Zhang and Secretary Su for most of the dinner. I sat there quietly and tried a few of the less exotic dishes as they moved past. The aide I was sitting next to asked me a few questions about my tennis game and told me that he had a son who loved to play basketball. I asked him if he worked for the Secretary and he smiled and said no. He said he was just Secretary Su’s “pengyou” (friend). I wondered what that really meant. I met a lot of people like that in China that year, people who you could never really figure out who they were or what they did. They always said they were so and so’s “friend.” I guessed that they must work for the government in some capacity, but I could never figure out who they were.
I tried to listen to the conversation my father was having with Secretary Su and Mr. Zhang. From what I was able to hear I gathered that Secretary Su was due to make a trip to the United States later that year, and he was full of questions about the Bush administration policy and whom the people he should meet with were. My father offered to help him arrange his trip and said that he would make a point of seeing some of the members of the cabinet ahead of time to brief them on Secretary Su’s visit. Secretary Su thanked him and told him that his efforts were most appreciated. He said that he had spoken with the U.S. ambassador about his trip, but the ambassador had said nothing of substance, and he wished that my father were the ambassador instead. The three of them toasted to this, and the whole table followed suit by raising their wineglasses and saying, “Gan bei (Cheers).” Not wanting to appear rude, but also unsure if I was allowed to drink alcohol, I looked to my father for approval. He lifted his glass at me. Taking this as a sign I should join in, I raised my glass and clinked it with Mr. Zhang and the aide sitting next to me and took a sip of the wine. All of a sudden I felt quite grown up, and the dinner was looking up.
There was a shift in the mood of the room when Mr. Zhang brought up the Dover School to Secretary Su. The side conversations dropped away and everyone became focused on what Mr. Zhang was saying. Although Mr. Zhang was ostensibly speaking to Secretary Su, the interpreter still translated everything for my father’s benefit. Mr. Zhang told Secretary Su that my father had assured him that Dover was a very good school and it was known for sending many students to Harvard, Yale, and Stanford every year. Secretary Su nodded his approval and mentioned that the Premier’s daughter was currently attending Yale. Mr. Zhang pointed to me and said that I would be attending Dover the following year. Secretary Su spoke a few words to the interpreter and motioned to me with his glass.
“He asks, you are going to this school next year?”
“Yes, I’ll be going there next year,” I said. “A lot of my friends are there now.”
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She translated what I had said, and he gave her another question to ask me. “Your friends, what do they think of the school?”
I hadn’t spoken to either of the two boys I knew who had gone to Dover in more than a month. I didn’t know what their opinions of Dover really were, but I knew what my father would want me to say.
“They love it,” I said. “It’s demanding. A lot of work. But they say it is preparing them for university very well.”
Secretary Su mumbled in agreement as the interpreter conveyed what I had said. “He says that to have a good education is very important. The most important thing,” the interpreter said to my father. Mr. Zhang nodded and mumbled his agreement. The interpreter turned back to Secretary Su, who continued speaking.
“He wants to know if you think David will like this school?” the interpreter asked me.
“Well, you know, I think he should visit a few schools and see which one he likes. But yes, I’m sure he will, it’s a very good school.”
Mr. Zhang cut in. “Tom very good friends with the headmaster,” he said to Secretary Su in English.
My father nodded in agreement. “The headmaster is a terrific guy. You’d like him a lot. He was one of my very good friends at Dover and my roommate for one year at Yale—we’ve stayed very, very close. I saw him just last week, and I told him that he needs to get over to China soon.”
Secretary Su waited for the words to be translated. He seemed to approve of what he heard. He looked at my father and began speaking and didn’t stop for some time. The interpreter began to translate what he had said, but Mr. Zhang cut her off. “We would like David to go to a university here in China, maybe Tsinghua or Bei Da, but because we used to live in Hong Kong, David is out of the school system in China for too long. We think the best is for him to go to international school and then when he is old enough, to go to school in the United States. And then apply to Princeton or Yale.”
“I think that’s very smart,” my father said.
The conversation moved on to something else that didn’t involve me, and once again I was ignored. I tried following it for a while but lost interest and turned back to my food. Just then the waiters brought out small dishes covered by porcelain lids. They lifted the lids to reveal a brown gelatinous glob that looked almost like the body of a slug. Mr. Zhang turned to me and pointed to my plate. “This very good. It’s a Chinese delicacy. Very expensive,” he said.
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