by Susan Conley
Then Tony calls to report that the pollution was so bad on Monday in Beijing he couldn’t see the Rem Koolhaas CCTV Tower from our bedroom window. It’s the new landmark skyscraper everyone is buzzing about, and on good air days it seems to be very close to our apartment. On bad air days the smog makes everything shrouded and you wonder what everyone’s doing huddled together in a chemical soup out in the middle of the desert.
Tony explains that the government seeded the clouds for the Olympics. “They what?” I ask.
“They fabricated a rainstorm. Seeded the clouds. Shot chemical pellets up into the sky until it rained and washed the smog away.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. And last night at the opening ceremony in the Bird’s Nest the sky was clear. Clear.” He says there were more people onstage and more energy in that stadium than I could ever imagine watching on TV. Now he’s just gotten back from beach volleyball in the park across from our apartment. “The whole concession stand concept does not seem to translate here,” he says. “I was at the volleyball for five hours and all they had for sale was warm beer.”
“We looked for you on TV,” I tell him. “The boys cannot get over the fact that it’s Beijing on the screen. They keep begging to watch more.”
After we each say good-bye, the boys and I make our way to the beach. In the car, Aidan asks, “Mom, who made the first tree?”
I take a breath. I think I can tell where this conversation is going. “Remember how I told you different people believe different things? Some people think a god made the first tree. Some people believe in the science that made cells that grew into plants like the very first tree.”
“A tree god.” Aidan smiles. He’s already alchemized my words into something he can hold on to. “Maybe there’s a tree god.” What a good idea that would be.
“Yeah,” Thorne adds. “A tree god would be great!”
“But maybe”—Aidan gets serious now again—“we’ll never know for sure. Do you think we’ll ever know, Mom?”
Aidan is asking me about the mystery of the universe on Tuesday at eleven in the morning on the way to Popham Beach, and I want to be honest with him. It’s my new cancer policy. “Probably not, Aidan,” I say. “We will probably never know for absolute sure who made the first tree.”
“But, Mom,” he says, calmly now, “if you’re out somewhere and you learn the answer—like if somebody tells you who made the universe—will you come home and tell me?”
“Tell both of us!” Thorne yells. “Make sure you tell us both!”
“I will,” I say, looking in the rearview mirror. “I will make sure I do that.”
After we’ve come back from the beach and gotten the sand off our feet with the hose and eaten our hot dogs, it’s bedtime. The lights are out in the boys’ room, but the sun has just set and the orange glow comes through the curtains. I tuck Thorne in. “Are you strong?” he asks me from his bed. “Let me see your biceps.” He’s begun to be interested in people’s strength—in how physically big they are. “Let me see,” Thorne demands.
Aidan’s eyes are closed. I’m tired tonight and want to go to sleep right after the boys do. I’m missing Tony. I flex my arms and show Thorne my small muscles. “You’re strong,” he decides and sounds surprised. Then he looks me in the eye and asks me clearly, “Are you strong enough to survive?”
Whoa, I think. I didn’t see that one coming.
“Yes,” I say. I feel like Thorne is willing me to live. Like he knows what the stakes are. Like he’s known all along. I look at him and I don’t flinch. “Yes,” I say again, “I’m strong enough.” Then I kiss him on the cheek and close his door and go lie down on the floor in my bedroom until I feel like I’ve stopped shaking and can stand up.
Spaceship
Last Tuesday, the day it poured rain, I drove to New Hampshire to see a traditional Chinese medicine doctor friends had told me about. Dr. Wang had a poster on the wall of the human body with the meridian points written in Chinese. She told me that after the Cultural Revolution, she was able to get out of China and eventually make it to the States. She asked me a lot of quick questions that implied she already knew the answers: “Do you get stressed often?” “Do you worry?” I’d heard this stuff before—the idea that women like me go too fast. Work too hard. That we cause our own cancers. It’s a dangerous brand of reasoning. “You must have been very run-down in the years both your boys were babies at the same time,” Dr. Wang said next.
“No more than any other woman,” I answered. “And I’m really not that stressed.” I decided I wasn’t going to make the consultation so easy for her. I wanted to tell Dr. Wang that in my house we have family meals. Play board games. I’m a freelance writer and teacher, not a corporate executive. How much stress can there be?
That was when Dr. Wang said, “Something in your life caused your immune system to fail.” Oh, please, I wanted to say with my voice raised. Oh, come on.
All of this suggested that my cancer was my own doing, and that I had not, to quote Dr. Wang, been cultivating enough chi. I was also apparently drinking too many cold beverages. “Too much ice,” she told me. “Did you know ice is bad for chi?” All my life I have searched out ice cubes, even if it meant poking around in other people’s crowded freezers.
“No, I didn’t know that,” I said and closed my eyes, trying to figure out how quickly I could get out of there.
• • •
Today my mother and I finally take the boys to the cancer center in Bath to see the radiation machine. We pass the Community Gun Club—a sagging green wooden shed off Route 209 with a sign out front that reads “Trapping Course. August 13–17. Talk to Dan.”
We pass the old rec center and my junior high school. “Just bring the kids in for a peek,” Dr. Godin had said last week. “That way they won’t think what you’re doing is so scary.” She’s the radiation oncologist in charge of my daily dose. She’s a cool customer and one of the most inspiring doctors on the whole team. The day I met her she looked me in the eye and said, We have one chance to get this radiation thing right and then you go live your life.
So here, at the halfway point in my treatment, my boys run through the front door of the center ahead of my mother and me. I poke my head down the nurses’ hall and see Rachel, one of the fabulous technicians. “The boys are here,” I say. “Is that okay?”
“Of course it’s okay.” She smiles. “I’ll be ready for you in five and we’ll bring them in.”
I will now admit that I find getting daily radiation comforting. It’s inconvenient and dehumanizing and sometimes I cry on the table for no reason. But at least I know I’m being treated. I’ve decided that more than anything cancer is a simple game of biological luck. I want as much luck on my side as I can garner, plus all the radiation the doctors will give me.
Which will turn out to be exactly thirty-one days of it. The boys won’t sit down in the waiting room. My mother stands in the open doorway trying to corral them. They keep hovering close to study the long cotton johnny I’ve thrown on. This one is covered in small blue flowers. “What is that thing you’re wearing, Mommy?” Thorne asks and reaches out to touch my wide sleeve. “It’s weird-looking. It’s for sick people.”
There’s one other man in the room with us. He looks to be in his seventies and has belted a blue cotton bathrobe over his striped johnny. He reads the newspaper, and even though he’s smiled at me many times before, and together we’ve guessed if it will ever rain this August, he never once looks over the top of his paper the whole time the boys are in the room. I decide it just isn’t possible for him today—that we all have days when we feel the cancer is beating us, and maybe this is one of his days.
There are too many things for the boys to finger in the waiting room: stacks of slippery magazines and a small plastic globe, pull cords on the roman shades. The boys are excited—it’s a hot day, and we’re going to the beach after this. They begin a game of tag down the carpeted hall toward the n
urses’ station, until my mother grabs one of their hands and stops them. What are they doing here? I want to ask someone. Because they look so out of place. Maybe this was a bad idea, bringing them.
Then Aidan decides to do yoga in the waiting room. “This is a sun salutation,” he announces and lies down in the middle of the rug. Which is when Rachel pops her head in and asks us if we’re ready. The boys run to her, and she leads us into the radiation room, which is always surprisingly cold (the computers, I’ve been told, like it cold) and loud. We have to scream-talk while we explain the TomoTherapy machine to the boys. They stare at it silently like it’s some kind of spaceship.
Thorne doesn’t say much in the room. I know he’s taking it all in. He looks quickly at me where I stand next to the bed and then at his grandmother expectantly. I decide that when you are five or seven, a visit to your mom’s radiation room is meant to be short. “Wow” is all Aidan says.
My mother takes both boys by the hands and says, “Bye-bye, Mommy. We’ll see you out in the car.” And I smile at them and hold back my tears. I’m thankful for my mother again—for how she knows what needs to happen.
“Wow,” Aidan repeats while they walk toward the door. “That machine is really big.” I’m still not sure if bringing them in was a mistake. I do know that neither of the boys has ever mentioned one thing about the radiation center to me since.
V
Palace of
Earthly
Tranquility
How to Hire an Ayi
In the middle of August Tony flies back to Maine and packs us up, and then the four of us board the return flight to Beijing. We land a little after three on a Thursday, and all of us seem to have slept during the night; except Tony, who for some reason decided he needed to watch Taxi Driver, one of the darkest movies ever. We deplane and he’s catatonic. We have a lot of bags. Twelve, I think. Each one of us has to push a metal cart stacked with them. We wheel our load to the customs line, where they take each bag and scan it. Tony’s cart is stacked the highest, and every bag of his falls off in a pile on the floor as we reach the head of the line. I try hard not to laugh. It’s hot in the terminal, and once again, I’m not sure where we are.
If I’m not careful, China could become an adversary. Because I’ve arrived looking for evidence that we shouldn’t have returned: the toxic air. The traffic. The spitting. If you want reasons to flee Beijing, they abound. We make it out into the teeming terminal and need to find an elevator up to the floor where Lao Wu waits. But I can’t get my cart to turn around. Its wheels won’t budge. Then the whole thing tips and I almost lose the bags. The boys and Tony are on the elevator calling for me, but I’m still in the main thoroughfare—an American woman with ratty hair trying to dodge people and yank the cart around, but I can’t manage it. Finally a teenage guard pops up from a line of guards sitting in chairs watching. He never laughs at me, which I think is noble, and he turns me around and gets me on my way.
We drive back to the apartment and I dig in my bags for a book of Maine photos I’ve brought for Lao Wu. I smile when I give it to him. We’ve missed him so much. And then we shake hands because I’ve learned it’s too embarrassing for him if we hug. Inside the apartment it looks like we’ve just returned from breakfast. This is a comforting feeling, but also disorienting. How long have we been away? A week? A month? A year? Long enough for me to have cancer? Have I really had two surgeries? Have I been lying under that radiation machine every day for the last six weeks? Where did the time go? And that breast? And that sickening fear?
Xiao Wang is waiting for us at the door. I give her an embrace, awkward because of the hugging question. On the whole, China has not seemed like a hugging nation to me. There’s a great deal more talking here than hugging. But I’m happy to see Xiao Wang, so I can’t stop myself, and I reach for her tiny torso and squeeze it, and she half squeezes me back. I ask her about her son and she says he’s still much better. “No IV,” she tells me in English. “No more crying.” Then she grabs the duffels off the elevator and helps me haul them into the front hall. She’s serious about unpacking. She pulls one of the bigger bags into our bedroom and within minutes she’s cornered Tony in there and is fast talking about how she’s quitting. He translates for me as I pass by on my way to see how many of the plants have survived (just one) and I think he must be kidding. She’s what? She’s kidding. We paid her all summer while we’ve been gone.
At first, Xiao Wang says she’ll only be gone a month or so. Her husband has to go back to their province and pack up his elderly grandfather and grandmother, who’ve lost their house to the earthquake. Now who will watch her son? These are serious times in China after the earthquake. But we’ll wait for her return, I tell her. I also want to say I’m sure we can work out a schedule that suits her, but I can’t manage these subordinate clauses in Mandarin.
My Chinese has vanished. Gone. I think I lost it somewhere around the third week of radiation. I wonder if it will ever return. Xiao Wang says she has a friend who lives in her village, Mao Ayi, who will work for us for the month. It’s all been planned. We’ve been back in China a little more than two hours. I nod while Xiao Wang announces that she’ll bring Mao Ayi with her to the apartment tomorrow so we can meet her. You will like her, she commands us. Tony gets quiet and translates less and less of what Xiao Wang is saying. I can tell it’s gotten serious. My arm and rib cage are tight and stiff from the radiation and the long flight. I need to stretch them out. I wish Xiao Wang would leave the bedroom so I could lie down on the floor. This is when she adds that her husband has decided that the bus commute is too long for her. What’s worse, she gets bus sick. Once she fainted on the bus last spring and had to go straight to the hospital.
She’s refolding my underwear and bras and placing them in small piles on the rug. This is uncomfortable because I could do this part. I can fold underwear. There are other, magical things Xiao Wang does that I can’t do: like speak Chinese to the maintenance men when the water mysteriously goes off, and play badminton in the hall with the boys. Soon it’s clear that Xiao Wang is going away for a lot longer than a month. She plans to receive her month’s salary today and take that bus ride home.
Then she admits that she’s a terrible cook. She hates to cook, she says. Tony translates each sentence, and I have to turn away to stop from smiling. She confesses that she’d never really cooked a meal before she began working for us. Her husband is the cook. Each day last year she phoned him and he dictated recipes. She tells Tony she doesn’t like to handle the meat. This explains why the food she made us was so often a glop that all of us had a hard time eating. And why it was almost always shaved pork in oil or shaved chicken in oil. Lots of oil. We felt bad about the food Xiao Wang cooked. It was a wonderful thing to have someone in my kitchen making dinner. But I felt guilty that we couldn’t eat the meals Xiao Wang made, and I felt guilty about complaining, because how many people are lucky enough to have someone actually cooking for them. What a treat.
It became a routine: the boys would push the chicken in oil or pork in oil around their plate with their wooden chopsticks, and after ten minutes or so, I’d pour out the Honey Nut Cheerios. But I was so grateful for Xiao Wang—she understood how to work the washing machine. She helped me order the drinking water. She sang Chinese songs to help the boys go to sleep on the nights she stayed late. Now Xiao Wang finishes unpacking our bags and goes home. We have been back in the country just over five hours. Tony hustles to the computer and finds three unemployed ayis on a Web site. I’m impressed. He’s showing verve. He’s worried we won’t hit it off with Xiao Wang’s friend. He’s learned she doesn’t speak a single word of English, and I agree this could be a problem.
I stand in the living room, staring at the moving cars on the Fourth Ring Road. I feel deceived by the air pollution. It’s just as bad as the day I left in May. I feel deceived by Xiao Wang, though I know I can’t really blame her. I decide I’ve been deceived firstly and mostly by NBC, because they mad
e it look like so much fun here on TV.
On Friday we sit first with Hui Ayi, a beautiful thirty-one-year-old woman from Hebei province. Her hair is long and silky and she wears it tucked behind her ears. My heart soars when she walks in. She speaks good English and smiles warmly when we sit down in the living room. Hui Ayi has just finished three years working for an Indian family who took her to London. I want to hire Hui Ayi on the spot. Then I learn that she can’t cook any food except Indian—saag paneer, she says, and the yellow curries her Indian family taught her. I decide we’ll eat a lot of Indian food this year. It will be fun, I think—a change.
The key to me seems to be to hire Hui Ayi so I’ll be able to go lie down in the bedroom. It’s three in the afternoon and jet lag has hit full force. I just want to get this over with. But then Hui Ayi explains that she has a boyfriend who lives in Beijing who works in the far west of the city, a two-and-a-half-hour bus ride away. He will be angry, she warns us, if she’s not available to him on Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays. She says she needs to be paid exactly double the amount we paid Xiao Wang. It’s more money than I’ve heard of an ayi receiving. I’ve always been uncomfortable talking about money, so I don’t make any kind of counteroffer. I just hope Hui Ayi will lower her price, but she insists this is the new going rate.
Jennifer Ayi is a tiny sprite of a woman, even thinner than Xiao Wang. She comes an hour after Hui Ayi leaves. My first thought is that Jennifer is so thin she must be sick. But she has perfect fake teeth and a whole lot of energy. She’s been recommended by an American woman who, for three years, let Jennifer run her household: paying bills, raising the children, cleaning house, cooking. This is more or less how the ayi world works in China: the ayi is indispensable. The ayi rules the house.
Jennifer Ayi wears a one-piece shorts jumpsuit and a plaid cotton baseball hat. Tufts of her hair shoot out from the sides of the cap. She seems like an instant, though quirky, fit. She was born in Beijing, is fluent in English, and has a great smile, and I’m tired again so I want this to pass quickly. It would be nice if we could get the interview over with so I could take a nap. Except after the first ten minutes with Jennifer, I notice that she has this funny thing she does with her face: each time she finishes a sentence, she opens her eyes extra wide and parts her lips into a kind of exaggerated O—as if she’s been startled. Then she looks sideways at some invisible point just to the right of my shoulder. At first I think I’m imagining it. But she does it again. And then again. It’s almost as if she’s stoned. Tony notices it too. We both have the same concerned eyebrows. We’re so ready to hire someone, though. Anyone. It’s late in the day and we’re on Eastern Standard Time. We want to go to bed. We ask Jennifer if she can start on Tuesday. “Yes,” she says and stares off into space with her mouth wide open again.