by Susan Conley
In the morning, we climb down from the mountains with the horses until we’re flush with the black river. It looks smaller now that we are closer to it, but still dangerous with its silent current. Aki has hired a van to take us to a Tibetan temple in the woods. The heavy rains have washed out the road in places, and we get stuck miles down a neglected stretch along a small lake. We climb out to look at the wheels sunk in brown mud. Aki disappears over the hill and comes back carrying tree branches, which he wedges under the tires. Four old Chinese men sit on their heels, smoking cigarettes up the hill, watching the free entertainment.
The driver guns the engine and tries to make the crest, but misses and slides down sideways, closer to the edge each time. The boys and I have been instructed to lie on top of the backpacks in the rear of the van to try to weigh things down. This feels unsafe. The lake is right below. Just when I’m thinking of climbing out, Aki and Tony push the van over the top of the hill, and we jump down and cheer and clap and high-five. We’re closer to one another now than we were before the van got stuck. We drive without stopping through the mud across a stretch of wet field and up to a slightly higher dirt road until we get to the monastery.
Teenage monks greet us in the driveway in long maroon robes and flip-flops. They lead us to the front stairs, where we bow to a large Buddha statue. Aki explains that Chinese police guarded this monastery for weeks during the Tibetan protests last March. “Every day,” he says, “police made a show of force over Yunnan. This is how the government was able to prevent protests in Yunnan while most other Tibetan towns were under siege.”
Then he points to the young monks who sit along the sides of the courtyard kicking dirt. They look to be Thorne’s age. “These boys,” Aki explains, “are not learning math or science or history here. They are studying Buddhist texts. This is the real Tibetan problem. A problem of education.”
The temple is well maintained, with dark rugs on the floors and bright blue and yellow paintings of bodhisattvas on the walls. I find Thorne and Aidan down on their knees in one of the smaller temples, praying in front of an ornate wooden altar. Aidan stands up first and runs to tell me he’s prayed for the video game Wii and for our family to be healthy. Then Thorne says he prayed for the exact same thing, plus for his grandmothers.
Then it’s my turn. I am not practiced. I thought I needed time for my thoughts to coalesce before I could get down on my knees again. I thought if I could only think on the disease a bit longer—a few more weeks to discern and deduce the cancer—maybe then I’d have the answers. I have probably thought too much. I kneel down and light one of the purple sticks of incense Thorne bought from the teenage monks.
I whisper out loud to the Buddha that I do not want these boys of mine to be motherless. “These boys right here,” I say and point with my hand. “The ones who look so carefree.” It’s easier than I thought to surrender like this. There’s an urgency to my prayer now: the tears run. I ask the Buddha to spare Thorne and Aidan. To somehow spare all four of us.
When I stand up, both boys are trying to balance on one leg by the open door. They are calm, almost reverent—as if they understand that something larger is at work in the temple. “What religion are we?” Thorne asks me eagerly. He’s learned enough about Buddhism today to sign on. I can tell he likes being inside the temple with the monks moving around us. “Because I want to be Buddhist,” he says. “I want to believe in reincarnation.”
Aki finds us standing in the small room and Aidan asks him what his religion is. Aki says, “My tribe believes in family spirits. After I die, I will go meet the souls of my ancestors.”
Aidan takes in Aki’s words and then announces, “That’s what I want to be. That religion. That one.”
All year long the boys have been asking me what I believe in, and I’ve been able to avoid a full answer. I smile at them and reach out my hands to touch their heads. The next time they ask, I’ll be better prepared. I’ll explain to them that I have a new kind of faith now. A trustingness. And maybe it’s passed down from a god, or gleaned from the earth. I’ll say too that I believe in language. Thorne will probably counter that language is not a god—that words can’t be my religion. I’ll say, Why not? Because I’ve come to see that words are what get me up in the morning. What allow me to go down on my knees in this small temple and pray. Maybe in the end, words are something we can carry with us. Because the stories of our lives live on. And I would like my story to be about hope. It will also have the word disease in it, but that won’t be my whole story.
We drive farther in the van and stop at a roadside canteen for lunch. Garbage is heaped outside the door and flies buzz around a coal-blackened ceiling. The boys and I count tires everywhere in the street—over fifty of them—and more piles of stray car parts. Tony laughs when I make a frown face and orders us boiled noodles with steamed bok choy. He says the towns in Yunnan are often organized like this: one village just for cars, one for woodworking, one for slippers. One for baskets.
We make it to a small town called Shaxi for the night. It is a slipper village. Fifteen sewing shops line the main street selling the same embroidered pink velvet shoes, or silk ones if you want, or traditional black ones for men. Who is going to buy all these? We sleep in a guesthouse called a caravan that is hundreds of years old—a place that used to lie on the Burma tea trail. Horsemen slept in these dark rooms and tied up their animals in the dirt plaza outside. Our room has white clay walls, with a floor made of hard dirt. We wake when the first person in the caravan stirs. I decide that no one in the Chinese countryside really sleeps. There is so much activity before the sun rises—so much clearing of the throat and spitting and checking on the chickens and pigs.
In the morning, Tony and I take the boys behind town to the rice fields. Rural China turns out to be a lesson in animal husbandry. A herd of white goats passes on the narrow footbridge, then six oxen. We watch a local woman from the Naxi tribe in a blue apron shoo one black pig past the paddies toward town. A man follows behind her with a loud flock of turkeys. He tells the boys in Chinese that we can come and talk to the turkeys whenever we want. I count seven horses on our walk back into the village. One mother donkey is tied to a tree while her foal is allowed to roam.
We take another path out of town and climb a hill to where a widower lives. He tells Tony it’s his job to take care of the clear pond that sits next to his house. It is the village’s only water source. The man invites us inside. There is a single wooden bed in the corner and a coal stove closer to the door. The ceiling above the stove is black. The man says he’s been living there as long as he can remember and that his wife is dead now.
I go outside and listen to the sound of water from the mountains feed into the pond. The man tells the boys they can find minnows and freshwater crabs along the banks. I reject the notion of Tony as widower. He’s only spoken of it to me once, when I was upset early on after the diagnosis and unable to sleep. He wanted me to know somehow that he understood my pain. And to see how far his pain had also gone. What he said helped, but it also scared me, and I think we’ve put that conversation away for good.
We walk down to the rice fields and balance on the small ridges above the muck and water. It rains again and our pace slows. Each of us falls into a paddy—Tony up to his thighs, me just to my knees. Once Aidan slips over the side of a steep edge, and we lose him for a second, then Aki laughs and hauls him back up. Tony tries to toss Thorne over a wide stream that splits the path in two, but Thorne lands on his back and yells, then I run over to him and hold him in my lap on the ground.
I can say that cancer has brought me closer to the boys. The disease distracted me from them at first. It called for all my attention, and that was alarming—that something could have a stronger claim on me than my children. Now there’s a balancing out. It might be a purer kind of love I feel for them. This is partly because my love does not have as many requirements. I don’t ask for as much back. Or even wish for it. But I can also be further aw
ay from the boys now too, if this makes sense. More remote when I’m worried about dying before they’re grown, or when I’m watching them—wondering what their lives would be like without me. This is one of the contradictions of illness: intimacy and distance with the people I love. It’s something I do not talk about often, even with Tony. It’s too confusing.
Thorne stands up from the ground and steps on a dead snake. When I was growing up in the woods in Maine, nothing scared me more than snakes. I like to believe nothing will scare me again, and that my boys are steady like their father. I’ve tried to make sure of that. I don’t ever want my undoing to be theirs. I close my eyes and hold Tony’s hand, and he guides me past the dead snake. A man stands in the field shaving a piece of wood with a long knife. He reaches out and touches Thorne’s head and tells Tony he’s never seen a foreign boy before.
I count the months we have left in China. By my calculations there are seven. Tony and I have decided this week that we’ll move home next January. By then he’ll have handed off the office baton to someone local, as planned. In a way this Yunnan trip marks the beginning of our China leave-taking. Part of me wants to go home—the part of me that’s tired of bad air and permits and doctors who don’t listen. But there’s also another part—almost equally large—that would like to never go home.
China has proven to be the greatest road trip. And the thing about road trips is that they absolve you. Force you to give up control. They allow you to gaze out the window for hours at a time and fiddle with the radio dial and free you of most responsibilities except procuring decent snack food. I don’t want this one to end.
We walk to another village beyond the rice fields. A slogan written on the wall of a farmhouse reads “Socialism is great.” Aki reads this out loud and says it’s just another Chinese lie. Then we slowly make it back to the caravan. Aidan and Thorne play soccer in the town square. A few local kids join until there’s a full game. Three Chinese women in their fifties stop to play too. They laugh and kick the ball with the children until a man comes out of a store doorway and announces that everyone has to stop. He tells Tony it’s too dangerous for other tourists to have a soccer game like this. I want to point out that we’re the only tourists—Tony and Aidan and Thorne and me. There are no others I can see. Besides, I want to say, the locals like the game, and it doesn’t seem to me like there’s a lot else to do in town. Most of the kids tend to sit on the stoops of the slipper shops and stare out at the street.
But the players scatter, and the man retreats. Then one of the older women who’d been kicking the ball with Thorne approaches Tony and me and says in Chinese, “We are good listeners. But we love to play.” She smiles at me and I grin back, happy that I can understand what she says. I’m more than willing to break the rules with her—we’ll be okay. It’s only soccer, after all. I reach my arms toward her. Then she picks the ball off the ground and throws it to me in the air.
Houmen: The Back Gate
We left China on a gray, windy Wednesday in late December. The United flight to Chicago was scheduled to depart at 4:30 p.m. A team of teenage packers had stormed the apartment in the days before, leaving nothing in their wake; for ten hours they’d boxed and taped and stacked like maniacs. The bulk of our stuff—the boys’ Chinese bikes and the calligraphy scrolls and a small collection of teapots—had been put on a slow boat due to arrive in New York City, we were told, some months down the line.
Things we needed sooner but couldn’t fit in our duffels—down comforters, wool socks and hats, an enormous picture of the student body of the boys’ school—were wrapped and placed in a wooden airfreight container meant to land in Portland the day we did. The movers worked so fast it was hard for Tony and me to keep up. I lost track of what was sea and what was air and if we would ever see any of this stuff again and why we had any of this crap anyway.
Lao Wu rang our doorbell at 10:00 a.m. He took off his loafers outside the elevator and walked into our long hall in his black ankle socks. We’d finally been able to talk him into coming up to our apartment. We’d cajoled him all week until he gave in. Dumplings, we’d said. It’s our last day. He’d never wanted to come up before—always trying unsuccessfully to maintain the boundaries between work and friendship.
The apartment sat empty except for two last houseplants—a miniature fir tree we’d hung Christmas ornaments on, and a scrappy potted bougainvillea, both of which I planned to give to my new British friend, Claire. The turtles were still there, too—swimming in their glass bowl, impervious to our departure, still waiting to make a break. Mao Ayi had promised to adopt them. I’d tried several times that week to figure out how to ask her not to eat the turtles. I knew what a fondness the Chinese have for turtle soup, and it worried me the way she’d sometimes gaze longingly at them and measure their growth to me with her hands. “Hen da!” she’d called out to me the day before. They are so big!
Moving home was no longer a simple thing. Tony would have been happy to stay in Beijing. Sure, part of him was ready to go back to the States—and his contract was officially over. He’d handed off the baton and cleaned out his desk, and said he’d also tired of air thick as leek soup. But his patience for the country still seemed endless. The boys knew in theory we were moving home, and that sounded great to them. But so did going to a sleepover at Mads and Gustav’s house on Saturday. And finishing the investigation of the speed of light at school, and practicing a song from the Chinese opera for the winter musical. The boys were in the thick of it—busy with the work of being first and third graders. What did they care about moving back to a country they had only vague memories of?
My reasons for returning were several. I wanted the boys to be able to walk to friends’ houses again. We hardly ever walked anywhere in Beijing. I hoped their friends would move in and out of our house in a constant coming and going. Seeing friends in Beijing was a logistical quagmire of traffic and confusing Chinese addresses. But when I’m honest, I probably wanted to go back most for me.
I thought I needed to feel what it was like to be home again and healthy. Really home. It may make no sense, but I held on to the idea that by being back in our house I would once and for all be divested of cancer. I had never known cancer in that house, so maybe, just possibly, returning home would be like entering a small portal: we would be transported back to a time when we didn’t know the data involved in cancer staging. When we hadn’t learned the Chinese word for disease.
Lao Wu followed me into the kitchen—his stride was purposeful. He was here to do a job, and making the dumplings, we’d come to learn, is a big deal in China. An important part of almost every ritual. Thorne poked his head out of his bedroom, where I had him sorting the stuffed animals he wanted to bring in his backpack on the plane. He saw Lao Wu and ran down the hall to hug his waist. Then they did a little mock fighting pressed up against the dishwasher, yelling slights in Mandarin.
Mao Ayi put a stop to it. It was her kitchen, after all, and she was in charge. “Lai, lai,” she yelled, and they both turned and walked over to her at the counter, where she put them to work. Aidan was already standing there on a dining room chair he’d dragged over. I leaned in the kitchen doorway watching while they pressed out dumpling dough with four wooden rolling pins. Then each of them began filling small pancakes of dough with Mao Ayi’s mash of ground beef, green onion, cooked egg, and garlic.
Earlier that morning, just before she mixed the dumpling dough, Mao Ayi had called me into the front hall. “SOOZAN!” she yelled at the top of her lungs. “SOOOZAN!” I bolted out of Aidan’s room, and there she was, standing next to a large blue and orange poster of the Buddha. There were three of them, actually—large-scale Buddhas, each one trippier and more psychedelic than the next: the Buddha in long, orange robes holding a lotus blossom while a deep electric yellow orb radiated from his crowned head. The Buddha shirtless in an orange sarong. The Buddha in blue with medallions around his neck. All three Buddhas appeared to be floating in black space.
The poster reminded me of some bad 1970s heavy metal drug album—maybe Blue Oyster Cult or that British band named Yes. “Wo xihuan,” I said, and smiled. I like it. How incredibly generous of her. How kind. And what in God’s name was I going to do with it? The movers had come and gone. We’d been left with our eight overstuffed L.L.Bean duffels. We were almost out of there—almost gone from China, but not quite yet.
Tony got so excited by the dumpling making in the kitchen that he ran and grabbed his video camera. “I’m going to record each step!” he yelled to me from where he stood backed up against the refrigerator. “And then we can play it over and learn the recipe at home.” I nodded and smiled at the scene and thought, We can’t leave China. We can’t leave these kind people. We will never leave China.
Then I went back to Aidan’s room and tried to pack up his collection of rocks—an assortment of black and gray stones he’s gathered all over the country. I put them in a plastic grocery bag. I sat on Aidan’s rug and realized that the problem with leaving China was that Aidan and Thorne were happy here now. They chatted in Mandarin, and how could we leave the language behind? Another problem in leaving China was that in some ways Tony was the purest version of himself there—open and engaged and always curious, always hoping for the next train ride. China had called him out of his comfort zone and plunked him deep in that Daoist river.
I opened Aidan’s sock drawer and found myself asking the same questions I’d voiced leaving Portland two and a half years ago: what would become of us in the move? I knew we’d been changed by China, but how exactly? Leaving meant we were closing a door. Marking time. In that way it was impossible to ignore that the four of us were all growing older.