We walked down row after row of stalls. Other potential customers stalked the market alongside us. Everyone had their eyes on the ground, scanning blankets filled with trinkets and jewelry. Eyes watching eyes to discern with precision exactly what object was being considered. Victoria stopped in front of a stall that had a set of small dishes of different shapes that fit together to form a circle. They were painted with dark pink peonies and light green leaves and were displayed in a worn velvet box. As Victoria looked over the plates, the vendor handed me a small brass pot engraved with circular markings on the side. It was similar to one that my father used as a pen holder in his office in New York. He could use this one in his study at home. I nodded to Victoria. The vendor understood that I had chosen this piece, and he was a tough negotiator. I ended up paying 200 RMB or about thirty dollars. Victoria thought it was far too much, but I was pleased with my purchase. “Next time walk away,” she said. “He would have dropped the price. You could have gotten it for seventy RMB.”
After looking at several rows of offered goods, the goods began to develop a sense of sameness, and anything unusual stood out. “Don’t act interested,” Victoria said in English. “But did you see the fighter pilot’s helmet?”
Laid out on a blanket to our right with trinkets and chipped pieces of pottery was a green helmet with a red star on the side. There was also a large pair of binoculars.
“Those are some serious binoculars,” I said to Victoria. The man squatting behind the blanket stood up and handed them to me. They had red lenses and were heavy. I wondered what they had been used to sight. It was still too dark to see how well they worked. I handed them back. He watched me look at the helmet and picked it up and thrust it at me. “You like. Good price.” I turned the helmet over in my hands. It was heavy and looked authentic to me. “Kan yi kan (Take a look),” he said and mimed putting it on himself. It had a sun visor. I pushed it up and then lifted the helmet onto my head. It was cool, I thought. It was the kind of thing I would have gotten Tom as a present. It would have pleased him, and he would have found a reason to wear it. I put the helmet down.
Just as I started to walk away, the vendor tugged my shirt and motioned for me to wait. He lifted the top of a large crate and searched vigorously through it until he found what he was looking for. He pulled out a small red cardboard box wrapped closed with string. He took his time untying the knot. Inside the box were four medals. He took one from the box and handed it to me. The red ribbon was dirty and crumpled and stained. The metal’s luster was gone. But for some reason that made me like it more. It felt real. Not like the spotless medals you see pinned onto starched uniforms in films. This medal was scratched and imperfect, heavy in my hand.
I asked him, “Zhe shi ni de ma (Are these yours)?”
“Dui (Yes),” he said. He pointed a stubby finger at the medals. “Wo baba de (My father’s).”
The first price he asked I accepted. It felt immoral to haggle with a man reduced to selling the medals that his father had won during a war. As I walked away, Victoria told me that I had paid three times too much.
I didn’t like bargaining. The people had a lot less than I had and were doing whatever they had just to get by. It felt wrong to haggle and try to save a few dollars at their expense. Victoria treated this bargaining as if it was a game and maybe it was to her, but to the vendors it was survival. Did it matter if I had paid double for something? It mattered to that man, it might have helped him get through a day when no one was buying. Victoria laughed. “Chase, you have a soft heart, it is good, but in China that’s a luxury we cannot afford.”
Once we had completed a circuit of the outer stalls, Victoria led the way inside the covered area. The vendors inside were different from the peasants who squatted behind their blankets on the perimeter of the market. These vendors presided over a chaotic paradise of counterfeit goods. They were pros, and there was a rhythm to the negotiation that everyone understood. They spoke relatively good English, and they told you whatever you wanted to hear. Doubts were answered with confirmations. “Is this real gold?”—“Yes.” “Is this old?”—“Very old.” “Does this work?”—“Work very good.” The conversations took on a kind of gospel-music-verse-and-repeated-chorus rhythm. They waited by their stall and pretended to be a customer examining the goods until you came and looked, and then they would give you advice on what to buy. They set the prices high so that they could give up a lot of value in the negotiation and still get the price they wanted.
I picked up a New England Patriots jersey for one of my friends back home who was a huge fan. When the shopkeeper handed over the jersey I was surprised by the garment’s quality. It felt and looked exactly like an authentic one. I showed it to Victoria.
“It could be a real one,” she said.
“But I only paid eighty-five RMB for it,” I said. “I saw a real one in a store by the Hyatt. It was nine hundred RMB.”
Victoria shrugged. “It could be stolen from the factory where they make the real ones. Sometimes the truck drivers ‘lose’ a delivery.”
I bought a few other small things for friends back home and also bought a counterfeit DVD set of the first season of Mr. Bean. We ended up in front of a stall selling shoes. Victoria had found a pair of Gucci tennis shoes for her husband. Victoria said 100 RMB and when the vendor said no, she motioned for me to walk away with her. He then instantly lowered the price, to 80 RMB. Victoria said 100 for two pair of shoes. He handed her the matching pair of his and her Gucci tennis shoes, and she handed him 100 RMB.
“Don’t you want to look around a little more?” Victoria asked.
I didn’t, but I could tell Victoria did. She pointed to a pair of Chanel sunglasses. “Those are good copies. The Cs are the right size, not like those of Madame Jiang’s. Her Cs are too big. You should give her something when you leave.”
I was surprised. I had absolutely no interest in buying a gift for a woman I considered unreasonable and cruel. “After the way she treated Bowen?” I asked. “No way.”
“Okay,” Victoria said. “You should understand, though, that in a Chinese way, sometimes Bowen acted very disrespectful.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” I said. I could not conceal my antagonism and my voice was heavy with sarcasm. “Maybe if I give her some new Chanel sunglasses or some fancy white gloves she won’t have to steal money from the team to buy them herself.”
“It’s not that simple!” Victoria snapped at me. “You see everything as good guys and bad guys. Madame Jiang bad, Bowen good, Chairman Mao bad. Nothing is that simple, Chase.”
Her anger subsided and her voice turned soft and sad. “Bowen is not the only one who has been badly treated,” she said. “Madame Jiang wears those gloves because she is ashamed of her hands. When she was a child, her hands were broken badly by the Red Guard. Now her hands are deformed. She is ashamed of them, so she wears gloves.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, confused. “Her hands are broken?”
“Haven’t you noticed that she can’t hold a racket properly?” Victoria asked.
I had noticed that, but I had always assumed that it was just because she didn’t know anything about tennis. “Random said she used to be a great player on China’s Olympic volleyball team. How could she be a volleyball player with bad hands?”
“In volleyball you don’t use your fingers so much, you use the butt of your hands and your wrists.” Victoria demonstrated hitting an imaginary ball.
“Do you know what happened?”
“Her father was a senior executive at a company in Shanghai. They lived in a large house across from the factory. During the Cultural Revolution the Red Guard came in and taped up all the rooms in her house. Her family could only live in one room. Madame Jiang loved to play the piano, but the Red Guard put tape across the piano. They were afraid to go into the rooms with the tape because if they were discovered they would be beaten. One day, Madame Jiang took the tape off the piano to play, and one of her neighbors repor
ted her. The Red Guard came and made her sit on the piano stool and tied her hands to the keyboard and slammed the cover down on her hands, many times, breaking many bones. She wears the gloves to hide her deformed hands. The bones were never reset. They look like claws. She told me she still cries when she hears a piano make music that is beautiful.”
I was stunned and struck by this odd sense of pity and guilt. It made me feel conflicted, because I still disliked her, but I also felt horrible for the times that Bowen and I had made fun of the way she held her racket.
“How do you know all of this?” I asked.
“One day when the team was running laps on the track, she was adjusting the tennis net and the crank came loose and pinched her hand and it started bleeding. I was at the courts waiting for you so I helped her. She took her glove off to wrap her hand. That is when I saw her hand, and she explained what had happened. It turns out my grandfather had worked for the same company as her father.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
“This is not my story to tell,” she said. “I would never tell anyone this story. I only told you now because you needed to hear it to understand properly.”
I now saw what Victoria had been doing all year. All of her hanging around the courts, texting on her phone, waiting for a moment in which she could assist Madame Jiang, all were just pretexts to get to know Madame Jiang, to understand who she was. It was part of her job as my guide, but it was also part of the Chinese character to understand things in context. A few weeks earlier my father had e-mailed me an article about an experiment a psychologist had conducted at an American university with an equal number of American and Asian students. The students were recruited to look at a succession of images on a computer screen. One by one, at three-second intervals, a series of pictures appeared on the screen. All had a large object set against a complex background such as a tiger in a forest or a horse in a field of flowers. The Americans all had excellent recall of the specific object, while the Chinese honed in on the background. The psychologist’s conclusion was that Americans are naturally inclined toward a “me first” view of life, while the Chinese understood things by way of context. Understanding context was ingrained into their daily lives even at the language level. As I had learned, the only way to understand the multiple meanings of certain words, or to decipher the skewed tones of strong regional dialects, was through understanding the context of what was being said.
Victoria did not assess Madame Jiang’s behavior against an absolute standard as I had done, but against a standard that took into account the context of her background. She understood that what could be seen on the surface was only that—the surface—and that to see a full picture one must go beyond. When I had come to China I viewed the world in sharply defined spheres of black and white. Now I was beginning to see that my perspective had been incomplete at best.
It reminded me of a boy I had played against at the national championships in the States. His name was Dennis Tikomirov and he was the son of Russian immigrants. He was top ten in the country and he had a reputation for being a ruthless cheat. When I played against him, any shot that was within four inches of the line he called out. I had never seen such shameless cheating ever before in my life. By the end of the match, I was so frustrated and angry that I gave up trying to win, and just focused on trying to hit the ball as hard as I could at his face anytime he came up to the net. After that match, I hated Dennis Tikomirov with a passion. But my attitude toward him changed after I saw what his father would do when he lost.
At the Winter Nationals, Dennis was upset in the second round by a lower-ranked player. They had barely finished shaking hands when Dennis’s father burst onto the court, swearing at his son in Russian. He yanked him off the court by the collar and dragged him out to the parking lot. In full view of everyone at the tournament he shoved Dennis against their car and started yelling at him in Russian at the top of his lungs, pausing occasionally to smack his son in the face. I was shocked by how hard he hit him. Dennis was a small kid, and the last slap knocked him to the ground. His father stared at him in disgust, called him a loser, and got into the car. Dennis got up and tried to get into the car, but the doors were locked. His father rolled down the window and told him to find his own way back to the hotel. He didn’t drive losers. Watching that sobbing kid chase after his father’s car as he drove away was probably the saddest, most pathetic thing I had ever seen.
Victoria saw the troubled look on my face. “Don’t be sad,” she said. “There was no way for you to know those things. Come on, let’s go.” She smiled, and the cheerful Victoria who always seemed happy returned. That was the surface that Victoria chose to display to the world, and that was all I had seen when I had met her in the airport that day in early August. “I have a surprise for you,” she said.
三十三
I followed Victoria down the narrow alleyways that snaked through the mazelike labyrinth of hutongs outside the boundaries of the market. I asked her where we were going but she wouldn’t tell me. It was a surprise, she said. We eventually stopped at a small restaurant. I recognized it as a Guizhou restaurant where Victoria said she had eaten every day during her first month in Beijing because she was so homesick. I remembered that we had gone there with Bowen during the week of the national holiday.
The restaurant was no more than a small, dimly lit room with four or five tables and a kitchen in an adjoining room. It had no front door, just a curtain of clear plastic strips that hung from the ceiling. In the corner of the restaurant, sipping tea, sat Bowen. Victoria broke the stunned silence as I stared. “Look, Chase, it’s Bowen! I found his phone number from the tennis center in Tianjin and got him to come visit.”
We went over to the table and sat down. Bowen had cut his hair short, but there was something else that was different about him. I couldn’t quite place it. I searched for something to say.
When neither of us spoke, Victoria laughed and pointed at me. “You should see him,” she said to Bowen. “He’s so mopey at tennis now.”
I tried to make a joke about Madame Jiang. “She’s even crazier now . . . you’re lucky you got out, man.” Bowen did not smile back.
“Lucky?” He shook his head. “No, you’re the lucky one.”
“Sorry,” I muttered, “stupid joke.”
“Mei guanxi (No matter),” Bowen said.
“So what happened, man?” I asked earnestly. “Where have you been?”
“Tianjin.”
“Are you playing on the team there?”
“I’m working with my father.”
“Why?”
Bowen shrugged. “What else would I do?”
“No, I mean why did you leave? What happened?”
“Madame Jiang expelled me from the team.”
“What?” Victoria asked, surprised. “She told me that your parents wanted you to go home.”
“She can’t do that, can she?” I asked. I felt a sense of outrage and frustration. It was all so unfair.
“No,” Bowen said. “She talked to the Beijing team director and the Beijing Minister of Sport, and they make the decision.”
“Because you lost?”
Bowen nodded. “She told me I decide to lose the match because I want her to lose her job. I told her she is wrong, that my shoulder is not good. But she said I am lying.”
“That’s so outrageous,” I said. “How is your shoulder now?”
“Okay,” he said. “Sometimes still hurts.”
“But they can’t expel you just because you lose a match!” Victoria said.
“No,” Bowen said, shaking his head. “That’s not why they say. When Madame Jiang speak with the director she tells him that I say I am fourteen years but I am sixteen years. She says I lie. But it’s not true! I no lie! Madame Jiang lie and say she has proof I am sixteen. The director and the minister are worried about . . . choushi (scandal) . . . you know, choushi? Before the Aoyunhui (Olympics). The Aoyunhui is very important for t
heir job. So they don’t want trouble. They know that maybe Madame Jiang will give her proof to a newspaper. And then there is big choushi about Chinese sport players’ real age.” He shrugged. “They don’t want trouble so they expel me from the team.”
I looked him straight in the eyes. “How old are you actually?”
“Fourteen years,” he said.
“But if you’re fourteen then Madame Jiang has no proof, so there can be no scandal.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Bowen said. “I can’t do anything. I am just a tennis player. I have no power.”
I had an idea. “What if my father talks to the Minister of Sport?”
When I said this, Victoria cut in, “Chase . . .”
Bowen lowered his eyes. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “I don’t think they will let me join the team again.”
“There must be some way we can help,” I said.
“What about America?”
“America?” The question caught me off guard.
“You will go back there after one year, yes?” Bowen asked. “Maybe your father can help me find a sponsor? You said the academy where you practice is very good, maybe I could practice there with you. We will play doubles together. Brother-brother team, we win Wimbledon, like the Bryan brothers.”
He had clearly thought this all out. We would need to get him a visa, talk to the head of the Laver Academy, find him a place to live, and either find a sponsor or sponsor him ourselves. It was all certainly possible, but it would come down to whether or not I could convince my father to do it. In any case, I guessed that at a minimum it would take several months or maybe even a year to arrange everything. The first step should be to try to get Bowen back on the Beijing team.
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