by Susan Conley
Next Rose explains that you don’t conjugate verbs for the future or the past. This seems fitting for a country in the middle of reinventing itself. She says English relies on logic and word sequences, but Mandarin is based more on graphics—the characters and nuanced meaning built up over hundreds of years. She teaches me the words for weekend plans and elementary students. She tells me how to ask a small boy his age. She says there are two little words I need to get a quick grasp of. Tiny words, really: le and ge.
Le is the word that turns the present tense into a memory. So if you went out and bought milk and eggs at the store, or if you got sick, you didn’t really buy anything and you didn’t really get sick until you insert le. Then you have gone shopping and you have become sick. And you can’t buy apples at the market until you’ve learned to use ge—a miniature counting word. The Beijingren will look at you like you’re speaking Russian until you insert the ge: san ge ping gou (three apples). A small detail—but I’m learning that the heart of this language, like most, lies here. If you have the patience, then you’re back in the boat-building business.
It’s slow going. There’s the Chinese word ma, which takes a declarative and turns it into a question. Ma seems to carry the Mandarin interrogative on its back. Look at a simple sentence: “Tianqi hen re” (The weather is very hot). To flip a statement into a question, you put little ma on the end: “Tianqi hen re ma?” Then you’re asking an actual question in actual Mandarin.
Rose is the Western name Wei Ling has given herself. So far in China I’ve met an Alice and a Sunlight, a Happy, a Flora, a Julia, a Margie, a Vanessa, and a Joy, and now three women named Rose. Rose is from the city of Guiyang in Guizhou, one of China’s poorest provinces. She’s the only child of lower-middle-class parents who sound like they dote. They were able to pool money and send Rose to college in Beijing, quite a feat in this country, where often only the smartest and richest get to enroll. While she was in college, Rose met a boy who would like to marry her.
With Rose’s help, I can now say “I want” in Chinese, and “I go.” Putting the two verbs together has proved helpful: “Wo xiang qu” (I want to go). I use this combination in as many ways as humanly possible: I want to go to the xue xiao (boys’ school). I want to go to the chao shi (supermarket). I want to go to the yinhang (bank). I want coffee. I want tea. I’m beginning to feel primitive. I tend to walk around Beijing making simple declaratives: “I want water.” Or “I want to go home.” There’s an embarrassingly large amount of want on my end: I want, I want, I want. Saturday comes—we’ve made it through another week and begun the day in prayer. Or at least the Blind Boys of Alabama have. I can’t get enough of their beautiful voices. They’re singing a song on the CD player about feasting on milk and honey: “All God’s children gonna sit together one of these days, hallelujah.” The Beijing sky plays tricks. It’s a two-headed beast. Yesterday it was something to run from—thick and white and feverish. Today it’s blue and warmed with a fat, autumnal sun that transforms the city into something that makes sense. A city at the center of the universe, where anything feels possible.
Thorne and Aidan eat their Honey Nut Cheerios and tap their feet to the music. Thorne is still singing more than usual, but it’s tapering off. He lost one of his front teeth in the cafeteria yesterday, and his teacher threw it away by accident. Last night Thorne and I co-wrote a note to the tooth fairy. It read, “Hello there. How are you? How was your flight? We are using a replacement tooth under the pillow (a tooth I lost back in July) due to extenuating circumstances. We hope you understand.”
After breakfast, Tony and I drive with the boys and Lao Wu to a stretch of new art galleries inside a converted war munitions factory. The place is called Dashanzi. Or 798—the street address. There are hundreds of choices here: high art and low art and black-and-white photographs by teenagers who sell them from kiosks along the wide roads. The place hums with industry and grows so fast that no one can make an accurate map. The boys and Tony and I walk into the lobby of one big gallery, and there’s a black sign announcing an Indian artist named Anish Kapoor. I can’t tell where the exhibit is. Then over by the right side of the wall I see an open door to a tunnel.
Thorne pokes his head inside the tunnel, looks back at me once, then is gone. First I see him, then I don’t. A wave of anxiety washes over me. Where is he? Down some long, winding labyrinth of performance art, and I’m supposed to go fetch him. I can tell there’s a trick, that once I enter the tunnel I’m part of the exhibit. I want to go home. I can’t get my bearings in Beijing.
Aidan says he needs to climb a huge, metal birdcage installed out on the street corner, and I wave Tony toward the door. “I’ll go in,” I say and poke my nose into the tunnel. “It’s no problem.”
I make it ten feet or so before the walls curl in on themselves like a snail shell, and I have to reach out and press my hands along the wooden sides. I can hear Thorne laughing up ahead. His voice echoes back amplified. I walk and walk and don’t catch up to him. Anish Kapoor has shaped the tunnel in a way that forces you to turn in on yourself. You keep making tighter circles, but there’s no sensation of getting closer to any ending, no light coming through from the other side. No sense of when there might be an arrival—seconds or minutes or hours. Inside the tunnel, I can see my fear of living in China up close. Fear of losing control, of being alone in this country, unable to manage for my kids. Fear of not being able to learn the language. Fear of not finding a way to belong.
This tunnel is cruel psychotherapy. I land at a circular patch of grass in the middle of a second white room. That’s where Thorne stands, holding his hands in thick steam that rises from an opening in the ground. His face is rounder than Aidan’s. Thorne is often quick to smile. He does not study life so much as eat it up—always looking for more. I get down on my knees and open my arms so he runs to me and I’m able to hold him like this for maybe five seconds. He seems at peace in the tunnel. At peace already in China. And could this be? Do my children already belong here more than I do?
Then he laughs and runs back through the darkness. Ten minutes later, I make it out alive. Thorne waits for me by the door. We walk toward Tony and Aidan in the birdcage and pass some heavy-metal Chinese teens. The boys wear low-rider jeans with wallets hooked to their back pockets on silver chains. They have long, carefully shaped sideburns and type text messages on their cell phones. A lot of the girls sport wispy bangs and orange-colored permanents. They are so hip they don’t look like they belong in China—or not in the old China, anyway—but at least they have each other. That’s the thing I’m coming to realize. How important it is not to feel alone in the tunnel—to know your people are waiting for you on the other side.
I stand next to Tony and can’t begin to describe my anxiety back in the maze. It’s already become a wordless thing. But what’s left is this residue that somehow I’m the odd one out. Exposed. The one who can’t give up her control. Tony riffs with the teenagers in Chinese, and they laugh and wear eager faces of people making that cultural connection—people crossing the language bridge. For a moment I feel language-less. Invisible. Like someone who isn’t really here at all.
I Don’t Speak Chinese
It’s time to wean the boys off the Lao Wu minivan school service. October is upon us, and Lao Wu was hired to drive Tony to meetings at Chinese banks, not to shuttle small children. The news is that Thorne’s stopped singing—or at least the compulsive part of it has let up. He still breaks into song more than most six-year-olds, but not in that obsessive way that makes me uneasy. Right now he’s doing some preemptive moaning in the hall about riding the bus. I push the down arrow on the elevator and hold the door with my arm. Thorne and Aidan step in, and though I’m only two feet away, Thorne begins to yell at me. “In case you didn’t realize it, I don’t speak Chinese!” This is true. “So how will we get help on the bus if we need it?”
Our move to Beijing has for me become a parenting lesson in how to parcel information: what not to tell, what to tel
l, and when to tell it. I’m trying to slow the information overload. I place my hands on each of their heads and gently push them along. Aidan stares at the sky and says out of nowhere, “China is a dream in my mind.” I look up at the cement skyscrapers in Park Avenue. The sky is filmy white with smog and the buildings are the color of putty.
The boys have been intrepid until now. But the shadow of the school bus has rattled them. “What will happen if we miss the bus?” Thorne asks. I say if we miss the bus, we take a taxi to school. But I’ve decided we can’t miss the bus. Because in a taxi, we’ll be relying on my Chinese, and I won’t be able to say the school address in Mandarin.
There’s a crowd at the bus stop: Chinese moms and housekeepers called ayis and all kinds of kids. I try to act like I know where to stand and which bus to look for. I think the boys can tell I’m faking. It’s not that I’m trying to fool them; I’m just trying to incite confidence. I want my body language to inspire—to say We’re going to be fine in Beijing. We’re going to like taking the bus. We’re going to love living in China.
“The bus will be fun,” I tell the boys while they each hold on to one of my thighs. It must already be ninety degrees on this still, windless Monday. Eight o’clock comes and goes, and then an enormous coach bus covered with red and white Chinese characters pulls in. Thorne squeezes my leg tighter and begins to cry. I keep a hand on his arm while I talk him down. But I’m hot and flustered. For some reason I decide getting the boys on the bus is a referendum on our entire move to China.
I only have three minutes to convince them. The school handbook makes it clear: the bus waits the full three and then leaves. The rest of the kids have gotten on and everyone is waiting. I’m not above bribery. There’s a Taiwanese-American boy named Eric who recognizes Thorne from first grade. Just before Eric climbs the last stair onto the bus, he turns and says, “Hey, Thorne, do you want to sit with me?”
What a gesture. What a random act of kindness from one six-year-old to another. I almost cry out of gratitude. Thorne cannot hear Eric because he’s begun to hyperventilate. “Listen.” I turn to Thorne and speak slowly and loudly. “You know there will be treats.”
“Treats?” Aidan perks up. He’s been standing behind Thorne’s right shoulder, watching to see how things will play out.
“Yes, treats.” I brush a tear off Thorne’s cheek. His skin is smooth. He still sounds like he can’t get enough air and I wonder why I’m not figuring out another way to get them to school. Why we’ve brought them to China in the first place. “You both get on this bus, and when you get home, I’ll take you to Jenny Lou’s.”
“Jenny Lou’s!” Aidan smiles and makes for the bus door. “Jenny Lou’s has Starburst.” Tony thinks I’ve already turned Aidan into a sugar addict in China. But when my husband harps, I remind him that now is not the time to get health-conscious on me. We’re living in one of the world’s most polluted cities, so could he please not get holier-than-thou about fruit-flavored candy.
Jenny Lou’s is a store—Chinese-owned—that caters to foreigners. That means it carries a boatload of processed, artificially preserved foods from countries like Russia and Australia and France. There’s pepperoni and sardines and Pepperidge Farm cookies and Marshmallow Fluff. There are egg bagels made by a Chinese American woman recently returned from Brooklyn. The food is wildly expensive, even though the store appears to be falling down, with mildewed ceilings and piles of dirt in the corners of the produce section.
I read the school guidelines carefully in June before we moved. They explained how convenient the bus service was: picking up and dropping off kids at the front gates of apartment buildings all over Beijing. I knew the city had the newest drivers in the world. So many cars run over pedestrians here that the government doesn’t report the statistics. “I’m driving the boys to school in China,” I told Tony last August in our kitchen after the kids had gone to bed. Right, Tony nodded, and kept making a list of vaccinations we needed for our visas. “No buses,” I repeated. “No buses driven by strangers on Beijing highways.” Tony nodded again. What he didn’t tell me was that I would have no choice.
Thorne doesn’t care as much about sugar as Aidan. In the end, my promise is twofold: Starburst at Jenny Lou’s, and thirty minutes of England’s World Cup qualifier match on Rupert Murdoch’s Star Sports channel. “Deal?” I say.
“Deal,” Thorne mumbles. Then he climbs on and sits in the front seat and bends his head so he can’t see me. The bus leaves and I walk back to the apartment feeling deflated. It’s not the march of triumph I imagined. Instead, it’s another one of those confused mother walks: walk of guilt with a little bit of victory mixed in. The Bad Mother chorus starts up in my head. I read in some parenting book that you’re not supposed to bribe your children—you’re not supposed to cave. I didn’t cave, did I? I got them on the bus.
The sky looks smoggy. But this is an understatement, so let me try again. I can’t write “thick, noxious fog” every time I want to invoke bad air, so I’ll just call it smog, and you can imagine the worst. I walk toward the hutong, past the circular lawns of scrappy grass. It seems to be hard to make things grow in this city. The soil is thick clay. Another elm sapling has died outside our front door. The gardening is done by a full work unit of men in torn black blazers. The black blazer seems to be the uniform of the entire Beijing working class. I do not fully understand this. It’s a polyester blend, and the majority of men do manual labor wearing the blazer and black loafers.
The gardeners work until six at night digging dirt holes and pruning and hauling out dead things. There’s one woman, and she wears black jeans and a polka-dot blouse—no blazer. I’ve been told these gardeners used to have hutong houses where the Park Avenue apartment towers have been built. In China there is a great deal of imbalanced quid pro quo: you let me tear down your house that’s been in your family for five generations, and I’ll give you a job for two dollars a day gardening in the multimillion-dollar apartment compound we build on your land.
At the pond, scores of men and women jump up and down in place. Under one tree, a small group of gray-haired men and women practices tai chi. Then, further down the path, other couples—men with women and women with other women—practice ballroom dancing. During the Cultural Revolution dancing was outlawed, along with other things. Birds, for example, were banished. Mao didn’t like them. Now the dancers bow to one another with big smiles on their faces, as if they realize how lucky they are to be here, at the start of the next century, waltzing in Beijing after all China has lived through.
A clutch of older men walk to the field behind the pond carrying pigeon cages covered in blue flannel blankets. They hang the cages on the trees, then open the doors, and the birds fly over the sky in formation.
Last Saturday, my first Chinese friend in Beijing, Sabrina, came over with her kids, who go to school with Thorne and Aidan. Sabrina grew up in Beijing. She stood in my living room and looked at the hutong and said it had been housing for work units during the Cultural Revolution. The buildings are long and narrow and set in rows like army barracks, each made of gray concrete with a flat roof.
Sabrina explained how the revolution took the parents away. She was raised by elderly grandparents and was lucky to see her parents for visits. Then she pointed at two sets of common bathrooms that sit in front of the hutong, where people come and go with buckets of water. Sabrina’s family had a house in the city, a “square lot,” she called it. But no toilet. So all her life she walked the alley to the bathroom. “That is why”—she smiled—“when you go into the hutong, you see people walking in bathrobes and slippers. They have just come from the toilets.”
I’ve heard people say that the entire neighborhood out back will be razed after the Olympics. Right now the government has put a freeze on demolition inside the city. Hundreds of skyscrapers have to be ready by the opening day of the Olympics, August 8. The race to finish goes on around the clock. Sabrina told me the hutong out back won’t be saved. �
�It is not pretty,” she said, and so it will go.
Today, thirty blue flatbed trucks are parked in front of a string of one-story cement shops. Each shop is the size of a small woodshed and has a stone roof. A woman sits in a chair guarding one of the shops. People smoke and spit and stop their bikes and rickshaws to talk. Some eye the woman’s concrete powder. Finally, two men in black blazers open a bag and sniff. Another woman in a blue sweat suit sweeps in front of her cement shop. The wind blows the dirt back toward her. Halfway down the block, a man puts out two small plastic tables and stools and cooks what looks like rice soup in a wok he’s lit from a gas burner on the ground. A couple of men sit down to eat.
Someone would have noticed by now if the two new American boys hadn’t gotten to school, right? A lot of this expatriation seems to be about trust in strangers. About faith in some larger, global force of good. Because my children are out on the Beijing highway without me. Maybe I shouldn’t have been such a hard-ass about the bus. They’re small children.
Drivers congregate around the flatbeds and stand in a circle and smoke. When they smoke, they also spit. Smoke and spit. Spit and smoke. This is the sequence. I’d heard about the spitting in China before we arrived. I’d even read about a government campaign to eradicate spitting before the Olympics. Apparently, some of the rich Chinese don’t like the spitting. They write essays in international magazines about how the spitting will embarrass China at the games. One of the problems seems to be that people believe spitting is medicinal, that it clears the lungs. Most of the spitting I’ve seen involves a deep, horking sound that calls up any mucus rattling around. Then silver dollars of phlegm get left along the city sidewalks and streets like calling cards. It’s impossible not to step in them.
The woman at the concrete shop has two real customers. She jumps up. The men reach into one of the bags and finger the concrete powder. Then they pull out cigarettes and light up. Once the smoking is done and the bargaining seems complete, they pile bags in the back of the cart they’ve pedaled to the shop.