Leaving Màidāngláo (McDonald’s) and returning to Zhōngguó (China), I spot a few gètĭhù right here in the heart of the communist shoŭdū (capital city). A barrel-chested man fries sweet-smelling wheat bread on a black griddle; an old woman knits socks behind the counter of a magazine stand. The woman eyes me as I approach and reach for her red telephone. 8:45 a.m. seems sufficiently polite. “Local call?” she demands, in Mandarin. I nod and extract a purple half-yuan note from my belt pouch, and fling it coldly onto the counter, as the Cantonese do. The receiver emits clicks as I press the buttons, and then it rings and rings. No answer. I check the digits, the date, the time, the city. I dial again, but again it only rings and rings without response. Retrieving my money, I walk over to a concrete bench, needles suddenly shooting through me. He forgot? He lied? He changed his plans? He met an untimely death in the Mongolian hinterlands? I stare at my backpack, its soft blue nylon skin shining in the sun. I packed lightly: four T-shirts, four pairs of socks, two pairs of shorts, one pair of pants, and one long-sleeve shirt. I brought a camera, a journal, a pocket dictionary, and the securely rigged belt pouch Lu Lan helped me buy in Guangzhou, which is stuffed now with cash, traveler’s checks, permits, and two forms of ID. The day before I left Guangzhou (the people are Cantonese, but no one calls the city Canton anymore), a package from my father arrived containing Herman Hesse’s Narcissus & Goldmund, and I tossed the novel into my pack. And that’s it, that’s all I have here—that bag and my solitary self. My guitar and all my other worldly possessions will hopefully, peacefully, remain safe and sound in my teacher’s dormitory at Peizheng Middle School until I return.
The crowd thickens before my eyes. Chinese tourists, cameras in hand, arrive in busloads. I am about to call out to Lu Lan, but of course it’s not her. A girl in a group of college students smiles at me, waving those same two miniature huíguī flags. Witnessing the flags in happy hands again and again, I feel as if I’ve crashed an enormous wedding, as if the flags are party favors, symbols of a bride and groom, and the crowd represents a million guests converging on a church. Who will sing the wedding song, the song I sang in Guangzhou, the canticle of the tortured lovers, Aobao Xianghui?
I return to the phone stand and dial the same numbers. Fruitless again. I hoist my backpack onto my shoulder and cross back into the square. Face after face stops to watch the seconds tick away on Britain’s freewheeling colony. They also watch me, even point at me, or ask me to give their photos a cosmopolitan touch. Meanwhile the sun blazes hotter and hotter as I try Colt’s number every half hour. At 11:00, I confront reality: I’m alone, solo, yīgerén.
I continue walking, gazing skyward at the kites brought by wedding guests. Is it too late to go back to the train station, to go back to Guangzhou, to just go home, as everyone else—Byron and Lauren and Paige—did? The kites overhead are eagles and diamonds and rainbows, and they soar to and fro against swaths of ivory cloud in baby blue.
Chapter 2
All the Myths Are True
不入虎穴焉得虎子
One must enter the tiger’s lair to see a tiger cub.
—Chinese proverb
I sit in a small chair, its plastic seat and back the color of sunlight shining through honey. Two thousand teenage boys and girls surround me, seated in the same small chairs, row after row of them on a vast field of sepia gray dirt. The kids are in uniform—bleach white with royal blue trim. Overhead, a loudspeaker crackles to life with brassy orchestral music that must be China’s national anthem. The teenagers rise one row at a time and march in formation across the field, performing drills and turning their young faces towards me and away, in unison. The anthem rises to a crescendo. Then the music goes silent just as the students retake their seats.
A man in a tie strides across a concrete dais to a microphone and clears his throat. With a garble that makes his words nearly unintelligible, at least to me, he begins orating in official Mandarin Chinese. “It is September 2, 1996,” he says, formally opening the school year here at Peizheng High School, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China. The principal’s voice saws on and on. Squeezed into my tiny student’s chair and sweating profusely, I catch only occasional phrases about achievement and the importance of hard work. Far above us, a fat tropical sun arcs through the city haze. I’ve been in this land, this empire, this hulking city, a whole week, but everything still scares me and exhilarates me—just breathing what’s in the dirty air, eating what’s on the bountiful plates, wandering through the crowded, crumbling streets. All the myths are true: the interminable noise, the nondescript clothing, the inscrutable faces. And now these two thousand silent, attentive teenagers.
“Our foreign teachers,” the principal announces, reading our names out one by one. Byron. Paige. Lauren. My name, Tony Brasunas, is mispronounced last. I follow my compatriots over the dirt and onto the dais. Mrs. Yuan, a woman wearing an absurdly formal, pink, Western-style gown, hands us navy and burgundy neckties embroidered with the school’s official crest. I glance nervously at the assembly, at the two thousand pairs of hands clapping. One boy’s face catches my panning eyes: His smile radiates innocence and curiosity. The principal continues orating, declaring that we Americans have arrived “not only to teach English,” but to inspire the students, to “uplift the nation.”
Uplift the nation. The words ring in my brain. Returning to my chair, I examine the necktie and its golden crest, which features communist-looking stars, sheaves of wheat, and the year 1889. The Qing Dynasty was still teetering along in 1889. I wonder how this school survived the 1911 revolution, the 1949 communist takeover, and all of the other violent upheaval I’ve heard about. I wonder whether I’ll survive a single year.
The students rise and march again. The loudspeaker intones a staccato count, and they drill like soldiers in the morning heat, weaving in circular exercises, intersecting, and nodding as one. American high-schoolers would never march with this kind of discipline, I decide, gazing half-hypnotized at the faces.
When it all ends, each student lifts a golden chair and carries it back across the dirt field, towards the three high-rise buildings that hold their classrooms. Our classrooms. I stand, and a boy darts in, grabs my chair, and hurries off with it. The other three foreign teachers and I follow the students at a distance. Lauren, a blonde from Connecticut, walks alongside me cheerfully. “Time for action,” she says, taking my arm.
“The moment is here,” I nod, hoping to hide my anxiety. I translate the principal’s words for her. “We’re not just here to teach. We’re here to ‘uplift the nation.’”
“Let’s lift it up!” she smiles. “You ready?”
“I guess. I’ve just never done anything like this.”
“You can do it,” she jabs a finger into my arm. “Just go for it. All in, heart and soul.”
Chapter 3
An Old Summer Palace
Eighteenth century China had no Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Relations with non-Chinese peoples were instead conducted by a variety of bureaus and agencies that, in different ways, implied or stated the cultural inferiority of foreigners, while also defending the state against them.
—Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China
Alone, bathed in bright noontime sunshine, I thread through crowds of wedding guests. My feet carry me the length of Tiananmen Square, past two-story-high Chinese characters that scream at passersby the same phrase that decorates the rivers in Guangzhou: “Celebrate the Glorious Victorious Return of Hong Kong!”
Past the tall banners, I reach the north end of the square. Tiananmen Gate itself stands before me with its five vermilion archways, seven bridges, and the perch whence emperors once surveyed the masses. Today, an enormous portrait of the most recent emperor, Mao Tse-tung, hangs above the portal, smiling into an incessant fusillade of adoring camera flashes. I take out my own camera, aim, and fire.
In search of respite from the heat, I eventually wander off the plaza and cross the heavily-trafficked eight-lane
Boulevard of Eternal Peace. I take a seat in the shade on the steps of the Great Hall of the People, China’s national legislature. I pull out Narcissus & Goldmund. The book’s cover features a sensual mélange of faces, young and old, male and female, in a collage that seems to promise a disturbingly fluid universe. Its first page transports me to medieval Germany, to a boys’ school run by monks, where a young boy named Goldmund is enrolled in school and then abandoned there by his father. The boy studies piously, but before long he sneaks out at night, wanders through rolling countryside to a nearby village, and there meets a girl and experiences his first kiss. He lacerates his cheek on a rosebush while racing home in the darkness. Narcissus, a cool, intellectual monk, cares for young Goldmund, nursing the boy’s guilty conscience and fevered body back to health.
I look up from the book, back across the boulevard, and the square is now full, holding thousands upon thousands of Chinese visitors. Plus the occasional big nose. A white guy walking alone wears a burgundy shirt that reminds me of Colt.
He’s looking around, weaving back into the masses. I’m rushing blindly across the street, calling to him. By pure heavenly providence, not one of the many cars or bicycles run me down.
“Colt!”
He turns, looks around. “Wow!” He flashes his goofy, good-natured grin. “It’s you!”
“What happened?” I blurt out. “How’d you know I’d be here? Why didn’t you pick up the phone?”
“Yeah, sorry! Long story. I finally… came out looking for you.”
“I gave up,” I say, practically tackling him in an embrace. “I figured you’d died in Mongolia or something.”
“The woman I’m staying with locked the phone in her bedroom and went to work. I just sat there listening to the phone ring every—”
“I just came to Tiananmen out of curiosity,” I interrupt him in amazement.
“I was wondering how to find you. I eventually figured this place was worth a try.”
“Incredible, in a city of thirteen million people!” I lead him across the street, through the cars and bikes, to my backpack.
“Fate,” he says, glancing around and running his fingers through his short, curly brown hair. “So, have you checked out the scoreboard?”
“I think I’ve posed there twenty times. I was thinking of setting up a business—a little gètĭhù on the side.”
“Awesome,” he laughs. “Clever.” He wants to check it out, so we walk over and take our own photos as the clock strikes 130,000. “It’s like the Fourth of July, Christmas, and New Year’s all rolled into one around here,” he says. “The official bash, huíguī day, will be here, at Tiananmen, tomorrow, with fireworks, concerts, and confetti. Not that it matters—we won’t get in.”
“Couldn’t we sneak in? It’s such a huge place.”
He smiles. “Let’s not tempt fate, not after this. There will be walls of soldiers. How close do you want to get to the People’s Liberation Army?”
A dusty dragon roars up, gobbles up Colt and me and hundreds of others into its snaky body, and whisks us all west. The Beijing government built what would be nicknamed “the Underground Dragon” for military purposes in the 1960s and opened it as a subway system to the public in 1977. In 1980, permission was extended to dà bízi (big noses).
Colt and I surface in a residential neighborhood, blinded by the summer sun. We turn our noses down a quiet hútòng alley where the air stinks of rice vinegar and motor oil. Conversations in courtyards on the other sides of gray brick walls are easily audible. Three young men pedal by us, ringing their bicycle bells.
We take a left, then a right, and then Colt stops in front of a plate metal door. He has a key, and he lets us into a dingy concrete courtyard. The furnishings include a metal dining table, a two-burner gas stove, three clotheslines, and several large red flowers blooming lustily in ceramic pots. An assortment of wooden tools lies in a corner. “That’s the sister’s bedroom,” Colt points to one of three doors. “The phone’s in there, but she’s always at work and leaves it locked.” He points to another door. “The brother’s always in that room, watching TV.” He opens the final door, and we enter his room, the storage room, where a bed is jammed between two towering bolts of fabric, a giant birdcage, and a stack of dusty chairs. “At least it’s cool in here,” he says, shrugging, squeezing past the birdcage and falling back onto the bed. “You know, it’s a nice traditional Beijing home. Not bad at all.”
While nodding my agreement, I attempt to mentally calculate how much my perspectives on comfort have changed in a year.
Colt says that the brother and sister are planning to renovate this room with money remitted by their parents, who are acupuncturists in California.
Back in the courtyard, he knocks gently on the brother’s door. Already ajar, it creaks open to reveal a small television playing an old Chinese movie: Actors in black scholars’ robes sport two-foot ponytails. Then Zhong Wujia, pudgy, middle-aged, shirtless, fills the doorway. He offers me a hand and smiles vacantly as we shake. “How long are you in Beijing?” he asks in Mandarin.
“A week,” I reply.
“Have you seen the Great Wall?” His eyes cast about.
“Not yet, maybe in a few days, after the huíguī.” Behind him, on a table beside a bed, a kettle exhales puffs of steam. His tea water is ready.
“No, tomorrow. You must see it,” Wujia says. “The Great Wall!”
“Should we go to see the section at Mutianyu or Simatai?” I ask.
“Eh? Take a bus, maybe an hour. You take a bus. And up there above the restaurant are the large horses. The green ones—”
“He has a problem,” Colt murmurs in English. “It’s not you. He’s already told me about the Wall three times.”
“—from the top,” Wujia goes on, “look, West, you can see all the beautiful horses—”
“We’re going out to lunch,” Colt interrupts. “Do you want to come?”
“Eh? I already ate. You can eat in here, watch TV.”
We thank him and decline. Back out in the hútòng, Colt steers us to a neighborhood diner. He orders for us, and his Mandarin is smooth, far more fluent than mine, but I think—and hope—that my pronunciation is better; he seems able to understand everyone perfectly, but his tones sound awkward and American. I’m utterly unable to understand the waitress, and for a moment my body freezes in some kind of anxiety. What am I planning to do exactly? Wander across this empire alone?
She brings our food as expected. Even our drinks are right—a lemon-honey Jianlibao soda for him and a cold local Yanjing beer for me. Colt recounts Wujia’s story. The young man was happy and happily engaged to a woman back in February, but then a bus careened into an icy intersection and ended her life. And his too, it seems. He had a good government job, like his sister, but he fell quickly into some sort of catatonic depression. “The sister works seven days a week now,” Colt adds. “She seems resentful and angry. He muddles around, watches lots of TV. They receive money from their parents every month. Hopefully he’ll snap out of it one of these days,” he shrugs. “Hopefully.”
After eating, to cheer ourselves up, we leave the quiet web of hútòng capillaries for an arterial boulevard and its deafening clamor. Eggshell-hued wisps of exhaust hang in the air as buses queue up like beads on an abacus. We shove our way into one headed for the Old Summer Palace, a park built around the ruins of Emperor Qianlong’s 17th century palace. Our bumpy and crowded journey ends right at the park’s gate, which is decorated for the huíguī: Red flags snap imperiously in the breeze; longer green, pink, and yellow banners flutter around the flags like an endless cascade of confetti; and gargantuan, Hong Kong-style dragons coil around the gate. We slip through the gate and thread our way past a colonnade of crumbling stone pillars. Even amid swarms of picnickers, the ruins have a stoic, pensive beauty. A large placard greets us: “The merciless imperialists of France and England slaughtered countless innocent people here and burned down our beloved palace.”
We continue on to a secluded marsh to evade the heat, crowds, and placards. The grass on the marsh’s bank looks inviting, but no one sits on the grass in Chinese parks. We find a rare vacant park bench under a willow, and I confess my admiration for his language skills at lunch. He chuckles. “You’ll pick this up—all of it—it just takes a little time.” He says ordering our meal was nothing compared with what he accomplished in Inner Mongolia. He delves into a story about living in a dirt-floored yurt with a family of Kazaks, a people ethnically distant from the nation’s dominant Han. After several weeks there in the yurt, he hiked further, out to a barren part of the grasslands where the horizon is an endlessly long, endlessly straight line, and the fertile grass is swallowed up by sandy yellow nothingness.
“It was amazing, the desert appears suddenly, from nowhere,” he recalls. “On the bus out there I had met two guys: a bearded cross-country runner from Oregon and a weird Canadian who sat there memorizing Karaoke songs to sing to Chinese girls in bars. The three of us traveled together through Xinjiang and out to the Lake of Heaven. The Canadian dude took off, probably because there were no bars out there, but Roy from Oregon and I trekked on. One day we ran into a creek that was swollen with snowmelt and had risen above the bridge. I got drenched crossing it, so Roy tried to jump. He took a running leap but slipped where he landed on the bank and went down howling in pain. I pulled him up onto the bank so that just his foot was in the water, to reduce swelling and everything, and I ran to the nearest village of yurts. But they spoke only Kazak and couldn’t understand ‘doctor.’ So I said, ‘money for horse,’ and they ran off into the fields to get one. Roy was lying there in shock, shivering and muttering, but I put him on the horse, and we rode that way. It was a long road, many miles. We had to rent a boat to cross a lake, and then get on a truck, and finally we arrived at a hospital.”
Double Happiness: One Man's Tale of Love, Loss, and Wonder on the Long Roads of China Page 2