by Susan Conley
A young woman pushes a rickshaw filled with green vegetables. She’s come from the outdoor market, I bet. I walk down the alley to the market and fill a plastic bag with long Chinese beans. Then I grin at the teenage boy selling them and hand him a five-RMB note, and he smiles and gives me change.
I walk back to the apartment and sit at my desk and stare out my bedroom window. I’ve got my laptop plugged in and I begin an e-mail to my dear friend Sara, about the amazing number of people who come and go from the public toilets every few minutes. E-mail has become my best friend in China. It’s how I talk to people back home. I’ve always had a love/hate thing with e-mail. I can still feel its tyranny—the way e-mail imposes a false sense of urgency, and how it replaced letter writing almost overnight. But for me the love now outweighs the hate. Because I can miss my mother and write her a note about the color of the China sky, and maybe I’ll hear back from her in two minutes if the timing’s right. I can write to my great friend Winky, who lives two doors down from me in Portland, and tell her how much I’m thinking of her. Then she sends me a photo of my house with the October leaves piling up on the lawn.
When the boys return home on the bus, I stand on the sidewalk and wave them out. “How was it? How was the ride?” I ask, breathless. But I’m more worked up about the bus now than they are.
“So-so,” Aidan says. Thorne dribbles a soccer ball on the concrete without answering. I have already called Lao Wu on his cell phone and he can take us to Jenny Lou’s. We climb into the van. This is the victory drive for Aidan. At the store, he walks around the candy aisle three times before choosing.
After we buy the treats, we climb back in the van, and Thorne says, “There’s a boy on the bus named Andrew from Shanghai who hit me.”
“Hit you?” Oh God. “Hit you where?”
“Eric and I sang a song about Andrew and Molly getting married and so he hit me. On the shoulder.”
“Did it hurt?”
“It’s okay, Mom,” Thorne says calmly. “We’re friends now. After he hit me, Andrew gave me some of his Doritos.”
We drive the rest of the way home in silence while I go over the day’s sequence of events. The ending is still the same—the boys are safe. They eat their candy and stare out the van window. When we get back to the apartment, we turn on Star Sports and watch the soccer on the couch together, both boys’ feet in my lap.
Xiao Wang
October is also the month we hire a woman named Xiao Wang to be an ayi—the Chinese word for magical housekeeper. And how completely typical: the Americans go to China and create a small feudal system. It feels like that sometimes. The whole thing is unsettling and awe-inspiring: Xiao Wang will come to our apartment every day, and just for starters, she will clean the floors and iron shirts.
When I was growing up, it was a big deal when my mother hired Mrs. Endicott to come vacuum every two weeks. But many of the Chinese people I’ve met here seem accustomed to having staff—comfortable with domestic and professional hierarchies that for many Americans are unheard-of. Someone to cook your meals every day? Come on. Someone to iron your shirts? You’ve got to be kidding. Someone to help clean the bathrooms and organize the socks and load the dishwasher? You can’t be serious.
The name Xiao Wang means “little Wang,” and we got word from a friend of a friend at the boys’ school that she was looking for work. I believe the other magical thing Xiao Wang will do is buy food to cook for our dinner. Xiao Wang comes to work on the first day wearing tight, acid-wash jeans and a bright pink, long-sleeved T-shirt with Chinese writing on it. She is a reed-thin thirty-year-old woman with shoulder-length black hair and pretty eyes, who doesn’t speak English except for a few key words I’ll come to rely heavily upon, like yes and no and okay. She has a two-year-old boy, a young husband, and a quick laugh, and will work for us from eleven in the morning until five in the afternoon.
Many Chinese people I meet here have multiple ayis—an ayi for each child, an ayi who cooks, a different ayi who cleans. There’s a whole ayi industry in China. I interviewed four other women for Xiao Wang’s job. The interviews were excruciating gatherings at our dining room table. The candidates were young Chinese women in their twenties who’d come straight from rural villages. I’m not sure they’d been in Beijing for more than an hour before the ayi agencies hired them.
The e-mail I got from the agency rep said, “Each candidate is proficient in English and knows how to raise children.” It wasn’t that I didn’t find any of the women promising—they were each kind and hopeful in their own way. It was just too arbitrary to conduct a job fair in my apartment and choose one girl over the others. Each sat at the table and stared quietly at me and I stared back, trying to figure her out. Trying to get a feel.
But that was almost impossible. None of the girls spoke any English. They all looked nervous. Each had memorized a series of rote responses in English. I asked, “Have you ever taken care of children before?” All four of them smiled and said yes at the same time. “Do you like to cook?” Same response.
When I met Xiao Wang, I hired her on the spot. She laughed a lot and said in English that she really wanted the job. She needed the job. Then she made an unsolicited pledge to learn a new English word every day. I said I would do the same with Chinese.
In October, we don’t see Tony much. He’s busy with the new job. He stays up until the middle of the night talking to people in the States about the fact that the Chinese don’t like to pay for projects until they’re completely done. He’s started having nightmares about how to say phrases like “risk management” and “credit allocation” in Mandarin. There are big, dark circles under his eyes. I’ve never seen him this stressed out before, or this exhilarated: he wonders if his employees enjoy his brand of leadership—a style I describe as calm and trusting. He’s trying to build company pride and hosting monthly Friday after-work parties. He’s hoping to get the new hires to bond. But it’s harder than he thought it would be to open a business here. More challenging in every way.
His Chinese is my most valuable commodity here. I still feel as if I’ve been cast illiterate, or perhaps mute, in this country. I call Tony at work because the gas stove won’t start and the water in the shower doesn’t come out. Yesterday, I think I showed restraint by only dialing his office nine times.
“Two years,” I say to the Chinese woman named Flora when she asks me at the playground how long we’ll be here. Her daughter, Samantha, is in Thorne’s class. I watch the three children climb up the metal slide backward and then I quickly look up to the sky. “Two years,” I repeat to myself slowly. “We will be here two years.”
Today is what people in Beijing call a “bad air day.” It’s a mild euphemism for when the sky becomes so foggy I can’t see skyscrapers out my bedroom window. Right now we’re inside a low-pressure system that’s trapped clouds and moisture over the city like a lid. The smog begins to sting my eyes.
We’d heard there were throngs of expats here, but it turns out many of them have fled to the suburbs. Beijing is just too dirty, too loud and polluted, for some. I overheard a Belgian woman at the visa office yesterday say Beijing lacks charm. Lacks history. She’s holed up in a French diplomatic compound outside the city. She’d lived in Shanghai the whole year before, she said. “Shanghai has flavor,” she explained to her friend seriously. “It’s so much better. But Beijing”—she shook her head—“no. I won’t live here.”
There are government initiatives to make the air better before the Olympics—they have a “blue sky” goal of 150 days in 2008. This seems like a high number. Each day you can check pollution levels on a government Web site, but I don’t need to look at the ratings. It might be helpful to understand that the Clean Air Act in the United States limits healthy “fine particle pollution” concentrations to thirty-five micrograms per cubic meter. Levels between fifty-one and one hundred are moderate, and anything over a hundred is harmful to “sensitive groups,” including children and the elderly. It’s we
ird to live like this, but I’ve decided to make friends with the pollution. It’s like a Down East fog rolled in from the outer banks. Soupy. Which is a word we say in Maine when the fog won’t burn off.
Pollution here seems to have a lot to do with wind. The city sits at the northern edge of the North China Plain, bounded on the north and west by mountains. Wind blowing south or east pushes things out of the city. North or west winds leave things over the city, along the mountain front.
Tony likes to check the ratings. He calls me at the playground on my cell phone and asks if I want to know today’s pollution numbers. “No,” I say. “I don’t want to hear it. I’m sure it’s worse than I think.”
He isn’t listening. “One hundred fifty and rising,” he says, as if I’m interested. As if I can’t already tell it’s bad by the headache I feel coming on, and the fact that I can’t see the trees across the street.
“Thank you for that,” I say. “I’m hanging up now. You’ve made my day.”
That night, after the boys go to bed, Tony opens a bottle of wine and we sit on the couch so our legs are touching and look down over the Fourth Ring highway and farther out to the crowded skyline. It’s Friday, and it feels like we haven’t been alone together in weeks, because we haven’t. I’ve missed him. Before we moved here I forgot to plan for his absences and all the work he’d have.
“How are we doing?” Tony asks and takes my hand in his and kisses it. He’s a stealth romantic. We forget our wedding anniversary for years in a row. But, as we both like to say, our love is the key to the whole operation. And right now the operation is stationed in China, where Tony likes to keep a running score of our wins and losses. “Is China beating us this week?” he asks, and smiles.
“On Monday,” I answer. “We won. Clearly we won because we had the good luck to hire Xiao Wang.” I take a sip of wine and try to smile. “But today was different. Today it was too smoggy for the boys to play outside at recess.”
Tony nods. “One for us. One for China.”
Sunday morning comes, and the boys eat French toast at the dining table. Tony walks in from the hall and kisses them good-bye. He’s flying to Shanghai for meetings all week. Right before he leaves he gives Thorne and Aidan a speech: “Be kind to each other and more important, be kind to your mother.” I stand by the table and feel like our family is some throwback to the fifties. I’m the housewife whom the kids are badgered into being nice to? I’m more dependent on my husband than I’ve ever been.
I’ve learned that needing Tony and feeling close to him are not the same—need is about practicalities; intimacy is a mysterious underwater current. I bet Brie, the astrologer back in Maine, would attest to this difference. I wouldn’t be surprised if Saturn wants me to cleave to Tony like some helpless bride and never give Neptune a chance.
Tony kisses me on the lips and he’s gone. By 9:00 a.m. I’ve announced the second round of Monopoly—the special edition Red Sox version. Before the game even starts, Aidan comes out of his room wearing a full Brazilian soccer uniform: blue shorts and yellow shirt and knee socks, plus the shin guards. Aidan is a big costume guy. For one year in Maine he lived in a red and blue Spider-Man suit—wore it to school and the supermarket and the playground. He took the business very seriously. And after a few months, once I understood it, I did too. Because when Aidan was Spider-Man, he was bolder and braver and more himself in many ways than when he took it off. I could give him that. I could let him be Spider-Man as long as he wanted because hey, the world can be a scary place, and we get our strength wherever we can find it.
On Friday Aidan’s teacher, Carmel, e-mailed to say that Aidan walked into the classroom that morning, took off his sweatshirt, and said, “I hate it here.” Carmel is seeing this as a good thing. She’s such a positive woman she’s been able to convince me it’s healthy that Aidan is communicating how he feels. Getting it out.
I think Thorne is who we have to pay attention to. Because he isn’t saying much. Right now our camp leader is lying on the couch staring at the ceiling, when what he needs to be doing is organizing our day—out fixing the flagpole and then planning a scavenger hunt.
“Come roll the dice, Thorne,” I say. “It’s your turn.”
Thorne doesn’t have any real friends yet, and this is a painful thing for a mother. He used to have friends. Friend making was one of those seamless things for him. Now when I drop him off at school, he hangs around the teacher, watching the other boys play soccer. Diba has e-mailed me that Thorne is making strides. She says some of the kids are warming to him. Warming to him? And it’s hard for me sometimes not to storm into the building and make friends for Thorne. Just go meet a few six-year-olds in the hall and say, Hey, this is Thorne. He’s fun. What’s your name?
“I hate school,” Aidan says to me now. “And you know why, Mom?” He flops his whole thin body into my lap. “You really wanna know why?”
“Please tell me.” It’s my turn. I lean and move my man six spaces, to Yawkey Way.
“Because you can’t wear tie-up shoes. You have to wear shoes without laces.”
“You mean with Velcro?” I look down at him and try not to laugh. I’ve already learned about the Velcro problem. Carmel also told me on Friday that Aidan wasn’t fast enough at tying his laces yet. She’d like us to get some sneakers with Velcro but I keep putting it off—hoping that maybe Aidan can increase his tying speed over the weekend. I don’t want to have to go to a Beijing shoe store.
“Yeah, that’s it. Velcro,” he says, and begins to suck his thumb.
The trick with Aidan is to make him think you’re on his side. He needs to know everyone is rooting for him. And we can never openly laugh at him—even if we’re only laughing because what he says is funny. “So you hate the school because you have to wear shoes with Velcro?” I ask. He nods. “Then that’s a problem.” I rub his hair. “I bet that’s really frustrating.”
By that afternoon Lao Wu is driving us to the Lufthansa Shopping Mall for sneakers with Velcro. Aidan falls asleep in the minivan and wakes up quietly saying, “I wasn’t planning on this. I wasn’t.”
“Oh, Aidey.” I’m sweating. What I want to say is that I wasn’t planning on this either.
“I knew I wouldn’t like it here.” Aidan is getting louder now. “I knew I wouldn’t like China.” Lao Wu parks the van in a spot outside the mall, and I pull Aidan onto my lap in the front seat. Then Thorne and Lao Wu get out and stand in the parking lot singing a Chinese folk song. But Thorne keeps waving for me to get a move on. I tell Aidan that China will get better. Easier. “Week by week we’ll have more fun. Just you wait,” I say. “Real fun.” Aidan nods and wipes his nose with the back of his hand. At least I can still reason with him. I open the door, and we climb out of the passenger seat together.
It’s probably true that a lot of my worries about the boys in China are the same worries I’d have in the United States. Mothering small children for me is a math lesson in worrying: what part to subtract? What part to pay attention to? It’s a constant tally sheet. Some things just feel exaggerated here. I can’t seem to make everything better in China. We’ve given ourselves up to the Greater Forces. Dropped into the river, and now we each have to swim for ourselves. I am counting on the boys to do that. I am counting on the fact that they can swim.
Chabuduo
Xiao Wang and I reach a language stalemate. It’s the first day of November, and I try to tell her that two maintenance men will be arriving to install a metal rod in Thorne’s closet, so we can hang clothes in there. I think I explain in Chinese that a closet is a place to put clothes (yifu), but I’m not making sense to her. In the end, I motion for her to follow me, and we walk back to Thorne’s room, where I open the door to the closet and say, “Closet. This is a closet.” Then we both laugh.
When the maintenance men ring the doorbell, I stand in my wool socks in the hall and stare at their lips. Tony has arranged their visit over the telephone. The men speak to me in what I now call machine-g
un Chinese, and I nod as if I have some notion of what they’re saying. Then they take off their black loafers and walk into my apartment in their white socks like they own it. It’s noon, and I whisper to myself that if these men are going to rob Xiao Wang and me and tie us up with ropes, they should get it over with. I don’t know the Chinese words for getting help. Besides, I don’t know anyone who would come for us anyway.
But the men are laughing with each other. They smell like nicotine. I leave them inside Thorne’s closet and go into the kitchen to chop onions with Xiao Wang. She’s teaching me how to use the cleaver after she saw me cut a green pepper with a steak knife yesterday. That was when she told me her mother died of cancer. Last year, when Xiao Wang’s mother got sick, she and her husband took their baby and walked away from their jobs in Beijing to go to take care of the dying woman. This is the Chinese way, Xiao Wang explained. When someone is sick, there’s no question. You leave everything.
After they buried her mother, Xiao Wang and her husband came back to Beijing with the baby and couldn’t find jobs. Her husband is a driver, but no one has been hiring. She says there are no jobs in her old village and the young people have left. Only old people stay in the small towns. Her whole family—including her husband’s parents, who live with them—survives on wages Xiao Wang makes at our house. They don’t have the proper Beijing ID—the hukou (residency card) that allows them free school and a little health care. The card can cost thousands of U.S. dollars on the black market. Without the hukou, Xiao Wang is like an illegal alien in Beijing. The police can stop her on the street anytime and send her to jail or back to Shanxi Province.
Xiao Wang makes three hundred U.S. dollars a month and works six hours a day. At the bus stop yesterday Flora scoffed at how much I pay Xiao Wang and said it’s way too much. Flora thinks it’s scandalous. Her ayi works twice as many hours as Xiao Wang and gets paid half as much. I want to tell Flora that this kind of domestic hierarchy is not my way. I’d like to explain that I like Xiao Wang. She washes the floors and vacuums the rugs and folds the clothes and has done more ironing in the last three months than I’ve done in my life. She is the housewife I’ve never been. All of which makes me grateful and uncomfortable and convinced we should be paying her more.