by Susan Conley
So I sat in the car by the side of the road and said, “Maybe there are other things you’d rather be doing than walking on the beach with me.” Then for good measure I added, “Take me home. I don’t want to go anywhere with you ever.”
It turns out that when you have babies, sleep deprivation can be a dangerous thing. “So this is great,” Tony said while I sulked in the passenger seat. “All this time we’ve been talking about walking on the beach, when we could have been walking on the beach.”
I look at my husband across the dining table and tell myself that marriage is a continuum. We’ve taken ours on the road. I stand up and announce that I’m walking the boys to the playground. I want to give Tony a break. He’s made lunch, after all. When I come back, he’s written a note by the phone: A woman named Anke called. But there’s no phone number. Tony tells me she said she’d call back. I haven’t heard from Anke since.
Piaoliang
The site for the Olympic beach volleyball sits in the park across the street from our apartment, and on a warmish December Sunday we decide to put on our parkas and investigate. Chaoyang Park is huge, with miles of picnic spots and paddleboats and enclosed basketball courts. We walk over to the ticket kiosk and stand in line to board one of a yellow fleet of golf carts.
The tour driver is yet another no-nonsense Chinese mother who half plays nice and tells us about the dilapidated amusement park rides we pass, and half chastises me for not having my children sit properly in their seats. One moment this woman wants to touch Aidan’s hair, and keeps saying how beautiful he is. The next moment she’s trying to scam Tony for another hundred RMB. She and her copilot wear thick blue park-issued polyester parkas, with small wool caps.
When we get to the stadium, our driver says in English that come August this place will seat ten thousand people. I look at the barren park and the piles of dirt and bricks left in the makeshift lot and wonder if the Chinese government will forgive us all if we stay home and watch the games on TV.
Outside the stadium is the biggest digital photograph of a volleyball player I’ve ever seen, and I haven’t seen many. But this one must be ten stories high. The woman is diving for the ball in the sand, and her cleavage has begun to spill over. The golf cart stops here, and we look up at the woman: Aidan and Thorne and Tony and me, plus our pilot and copilot in their parkas.
The volleyball player has her arms outstretched to return serve, and the photo almost makes me blush. Isn’t beach volleyball an American sport? The bikini and the woman wearing it and even the stadium itself hit a Chinese cultural flat note. None of these things seems to me like it belongs in China. Beach volleyball involves lots of bright, clear sunshine, tanning oil, an ocean breeze, and copious amounts of sand. Our driver makes a whistling sound between her teeth and puts the engine in reverse. Then she yells loudly at Aidan and Thorne in Chinese to turn around and sit up. They are officially scared of her now. That’s when she reaches out to touch one of Aidan’s plump cheeks. “Piaoliang,” she says to Tony. He is beautiful.
Thorne has a friend at school named Molly, who is also beautiful. The tide has turned and Thorne now has several friends, Jiho from Korea, Mads from Denmark, Ted from China. This is sweet relief. It turns out that being fast at tag can also be an asset if you’re placed on the right team. Molly is a thoughtful six-year-old Chinese girl with long pigtails and round wire-rimmed glasses. She likes to read and sing, and she and Thorne sit at their homeroom table together every day and talk for hushed minutes with each other about how neat their penmanship is and how many minutes they can hula hoop. Molly holds the playground record.
When you meet Molly you know right away that she’s one of those wise children who understands more than her years. Her brothers, Finn and Jack, are British boys with swatches of blond hair who love soccer and electric guitars. Their mom is the school principal—an incredibly talented blond Brit named Julie.
For months Thorne has talked about Molly at home, just a line or two: “Molly had a fall on the playground today.” Or, “Molly broke her pencil this afternoon.” Then he came home yesterday, found me in the kitchen, and said, “You won’t believe this.”
“Try me.” I put my tea down on the counter.
“Molly’s adopted!!! She told me today she’s adopted.”
“So interesting,” I say, trying not to let my surprise show because I can’t believe it hasn’t occurred to him before. He’s almost beside himself with excitement.
“The real mommy put Molly in a cardboard box and someone found her and took her to an orphanage.”
Lately, Molly has decided that she feels like sharing her story with her first-grade class. Thorne still can’t get over it. “Her real parents didn’t want her. They put her in the box. But then Richard and Julie found her and they are her parents now.”
We talk about adoption through dinner and how the new mommy and daddy love the babies they adopt just as much as the real mommy and daddy did. Aidan listens silently while he eats his dumplings, and then he tells me he would not like to be adopted. I nod at him. Next he pauses in his chewing, looks me in the eye, and goes one step further by announcing, “I’ve decided not to leave. I’ve decided now to stay in this family.”
“Good,” I say and reach for another dumpling. “Wise decision.”
The Bag Lady
One of the things you do when you’re dating new women in Beijing is you go on a series of follow-up dates. It’s very Jane Austen at first. I try to pay attention to the rules of etiquette: it often starts with an e-mail—maybe from a woman I sat next to at a school luncheon, for example. I’m supposed to reply to the e-mail and suggest a follow-up activity: a trip to the Silk Market to buy fake pashminas, or a hutong walk. Once we’ve begun the courtship, it’s understood that it will play out for weeks, if not months—a carefully calibrated series of overtures. The only thing many of us have in common is that we live in China, and our children may go to the same school. So it’s not unusual during these rituals for me to have pangs of longing for my friends back home and to consider throwing in the towel. I’ve also learned that “dating” takes up an inordinate amount of time.
But I invited Sabrina and her kids over for dinner last Friday, and now she’s called to ask if I want to go handbag shopping with her. I think this qualifies as a follow-up date. Sabrina and I may be courting. I say yes to the handbag shopping for the same reason I said yes to the sweater party. I’m still lonely, and part of me knows that having friends in Beijing is a good thing.
I’ve been told by an Australian woman at the boys’ school that if I ever need handbags, I should go to the Bag Lady. Her operation moves around every few months to outrun officials, so while Lao Wu is driving toward downtown, I hand Sabrina the Bag Lady’s phone number on a piece of paper and ask her to call. Sabrina’s father is one of the coaches of China’s soccer team. She’s spent almost her entire life in this city and knows the back streets. It will be easier if she gets the directions in Chinese. But the Bag Lady answers and wants to know how Sabrina got the number, because she doesn’t like to sell to Chinese women, only to (gullible?) foreigners. She tells Sabrina the address, but warns her not to share it.
We head to an apartment plaza called Soho near the boys’ school and take an elevator to the eleventh floor of Tower Four, then turn right and knock twice on the door at the end of the hall. There’s a small glass window in the door, and after we knock, someone opens a curtain inside and stares at us. Then I hear a dead bolt pulled back, and a stern teenage boy looks us over, then motions us in.
It’s the penny candy store of illegal purses—they’re piled on tables and in boxes and along wooden shelves. The majority of them look the same: shiny and black, with one or two leather shoulder straps, and a brand name stamped in silver or gold lettering. There’s the Prada section and then Louis Vuitton. There’s Chloé and Burberry and Miu Miu, and over there are Givenchy and Ferragamo. While I take in the room, the teenage sentry turns and locks the door so we’re ca
ged in.
I can’t help but think of what will happen if there’s a police raid or a fire. I have a feeling the Bag Lady (which one of the saleswomen is she?) would keep us locked up for a long time if it meant outwitting the customs officials. But who am I kidding? If the officials wanted the Bag Lady shut down, they could have done it years ago. She and the police prosper in the spirit of corruption. Because I can tell by the stitching and the uneven brass hardware that the bags are fake. I can tell by the way the leather crinkles and by the smell of synthetic.
Before I got to China, several people told me the shopping in Beijing “would be amazing.” But this has not been my experience. Instead, I’ve seen a lot of pirated merchandise meant to fit petite thirteen-year-old Chinese girls. At five feet nine, I am an Amazon here. Nothing fits. But the words “amazing” and “shopping” are still enough to entice me. They sound transformative. Like something I can’t miss.
Sabrina and I stand in the crowded room and spend an hour picking up purses and hanging them off our shoulders. The saleswomen wait behind a long, low wooden counter for us to bring the bags to them to price. Tense and edgy, these women never smile. There are other expats with us—Italian and British women, and a trio from Australia. They try on bags and bring them to the counter to haggle. The bags are expensive for the black market. One of the shiny black Pradas will cost you $200 U.S. The silver Tod’s, $175.
I once had a student in Cambridge who wrote that she loved shopping because each time she went into a new store, she got a chance to reinvent herself. I’m not sure who I’ve become at the Bag Lady’s—I appear to be an expat American riffling through the Gucci clutches hoping to find one that looks real enough to carry at my cousin Reagan’s wedding next summer. I appear to care. But I’m posing. Before I moved here I thought only Americans had religious conversions in the church of consumption, but China has the fever too. Maybe more so because of the catching up they have to do.
Fake bags conjure up the bad things I’ve heard about the black market: child labor, sweatshops, slashed wages, illegal border crossings. Millions of people in China are supported by the black market—from fabric middlemen to seamstresses to drivers and retail clerks. What this says about a country’s economic future is unclear. I’ve read reports that corruption is so rampant in China, it alone will bring down the government.
Sabrina and I walk away without a bag. For me there’s relief. Once we get back down to the pavement, I breathe easier. I didn’t like being locked up in a room with hot merchandise. Sabrina is disappointed. She was hoping for a Louis Vuitton in snakeskin, and they didn’t have it. I have yet to see her pay full price for anything. She tries to bargain over the cost of our dumplings later at lunch when the waitress brings the bill. Before we say good-bye outside the restaurant, she tells me that next week she’s going to take me to a better bag place. An even bigger secret. But I can’t mention it to anyone. She’s sworn me to secrecy. It’s in a food market behind the new American embassy, and the bags only come out at night after the police have gone home for dinner.
During our dinner that night Thorne says Aidan is going to marry a Korean girl in first grade. At Thorne’s seventh birthday party last November, one of Mi-cha’s braids unraveled while she played kick the can. Then she and Molly ran over to me and asked me to fix Mi-cha’s hair. Both little girls stood stock-still with serious faces while I began to rebraid. I was so glad I remembered how.
“You’re going to get sexy with Mi-cha,” Thorne teases Aidan. Tony listens, and I raise my eyes at him and remind Thorne that Aidan isn’t getting sexy with anyone. “I won’t marry Molly,” Thorne adds. “Until I am at least twenty-five. But Aidan’s going to get sexy with Mi-cha.”
How is it Thorne knows the word sexy, and how can I make him stop using it? Aidan got off the bus last month and announced he’d learned a new naughty word, fook. A fifth grader named Brandon taught it to him. It took me a while to realize what he was trying to say.
But sexy is new. “Guys,” Tony says casually while he takes a drink of water, “what’s this new word you’re saying?”
“Rashid taught it to us today,” Thorne chirps. “Ali and Rashid.” Ali is in Thorne’s first-grade class, and Rashid is his older brother. Their whole family went home to Bahrain for the winter holidays. Before they left, their mother came into first grade wearing her head scarf and explained the Muslim fasting tradition of Ramadan. I went in to the class the week after and showed the kids how we decorate Christmas trees in America and put presents underneath. I felt sacrilegious.
“Sexy is not something you get with other people,” Tony explains to the boys. “It’s a way some people like to be. Or dress.” Then Tony is silent.
I’m at a loss. Where does our talk go from here? “It’s a grown-up word,” I add, but I sound too mysterious.
“Like Amos,” Aidan adds.
“Like who?” I ask.
“Amos. You know. Like calling someone an Amos,” Thorne explains. “The place in your bottom where the poop comes out.”
“Rashid said it was where you poop,” Aidan says seriously.
Tony coughs into his water glass and I can tell he’s having a hard time trying to not lose it. “Oh,” I say and swallow a laugh. “Let’s not say that one either. No Amos and no getting sexy.”
How Long Have You
Lived Here?
Two uniformed police officers stopped me outside Tower Five today and asked if I had my registration papers and passport. I’m so used to the faux-military look here that at first I thought the officers were security guards. One of them carried a clipboard. Then I saw the word “Police” stitched in black thread on their white shirts, and my heart began to beat faster. For many reasons, it seems better to avoid the Chinese police while in China. The best one I can think of this week is reports of villagers who come to Beijing to protest the demolition of their family houses. They make it to the police station, where they’re placed in what the foreign press calls “black jails.” “Black” because the detainees have no charges against them and no sense of when they might get released. The whole operation is unofficial but sanctioned, just like the black market.
I told the officers my husband had taken the passports to the Chinese visa office to get the new, long-term work permit, and could I possibly call my husband to see where the paperwork was? Both officers listened intently and then followed me inside the lobby. I got nervous then. I had no idea where the passports were. Tony had taken them a week ago. The law in China is that you’re meant to carry your passport with you at all times. The passports are gold. But no one moves around with them in Beijing. The chances of losing the passports on the streets are too high.
“How long have you lived here?” the woman officer asked me while we waited for the elevator. She was not friendly. She was a vehicle of the state with clear operating instructions, and I was sweating. If the officers followed me up to the apartment there would be a problem. A sinking feeling overcame me then. How do I say this? I felt culpable for sins. Guilty of many trespasses against the Chinese state. Hadn’t I written scathing e-mails to friends about the way you aren’t allowed to speak about the Tiananmen Square massacre here? I’m sure the police would read those once we were inside the apartment. And sophomoric rants on the cult of Mao and the collective Chinese amnesia? The officers would read those too, and then what would they do with me? I knew the policing operation was unpredictable. Sometimes foreigners got brought in—mostly Western journalists—for being in the wrong place with the wrong officer in a bad mood.
“I have lived here four months,” I said slowly and tried to make my face look relaxed.
“Four months?” the woman officer repeated and cocked her head at me.
“Four.” I cringed—four is the unluckiest of Chinese numbers.
“And what is the number of your apartment?” the woman asked me next.
“Eight C,” I stated clearly. Glad I had finally memorized this. “Ba C.”
The two officers paused and glanced at each other. The elevator bell rang, and its doors opened to swallow us whole. I felt as if I were in one of those human-interest stories I’d read in the state-run Daily—naïve foreigner who doesn’t keep her visas straight ends up in hot water. I moved to step into the elevator and waited for the officers to follow. Who knew how this would play out upstairs, but it would be complicated. And involve my trying to explain in limited Chinese why I didn’t have my registration papers or my passport or a copy of our resident permit or the original of Tony’s work permit. In every scenario I was at fault.
Then for some reason, the male officer announced, “It’s okay” to his partner and nodded at her. “Ba C,” he said loudly for emphasis. Ba C. And maybe it was because they trusted my face, but probably not. More likely it was because living in an apartment numbered eight, China’s luckiest number, means good luck will find you. This is how it happens every day inside China’s quixotic system of rules. Maybe you’re lucky. Maybe you’re not. And you must learn to live within this arbitrary system and temper your xiwang—your urge to wish it was any different. Because in this story the officers both turned on their heels and walked out of Tower Five and left me standing inside the elevator alone while the automatic doors closed.
I’d like to say a few things now about Chinese permits. Because in China there are many of them: temporary resident permits and temporary work permits, long-term visas and short-term visas, visitor’s permits and dog permits. Car permits and building permits. Even fireworks permits, though who bothers to get those is unclear. Here in China you need your long-term visa to get the temporary resident permit, and you need the lease agreement on your apartment in triplicate for the long-term visa. For the lease agreement you need copies of your passports, and then you take the stamped agreement to the nearest police station (after you find someone to direct you there, which may take days; the police station has moved), along with four wallet-sized photos. These photos must not be printed on white photo stock. They must be on blue stock. Don’t think of going to the station if you’ve printed on white stock. The blue will get you that temporary resident permit you need. Because if you have that, you might be able to apply at the customs office for that stuff you packed up in boxes before you left the States. And by the time that shipment arrives in Beijing, you will have forgotten what you packed and why that stuff ever seemed important to you in the first place.