Double Happiness: One Man's Tale of Love, Loss, and Wonder on the Long Roads of China

by Tony Brasunas

  He closes his eyes remembering the difficult time. “The hospital had gravel floors and only two rooms. The doctor was smoking! X-rays were just two yuan each, but there was no lead padding, nothing. The doctor just puffed on his cigarette and flashed the X-ray on all of us. He told us nothing was broken and recommended that a healer rub some warming herbs on the ankle and ‘pop it back into place.’ This sounded reasonable to me, but Roy was like, ‘Hell no. Get me home!’ So I lent him 1000元 for a plane ticket back to Beijing.”

  “Very nice of you.”

  “Yeah, I barely had enough cash, but I made do. I even managed to travel around further out there and drink a ton of nasty Uyghur yak butter tea.”

  “Did you try Mongolian hot pot—the real stuff?”

  “Definitely, it’s delicious. We had the big platters of raw meat, the mushrooms, and greens, and a large bowl of boiling soup. You cook the raw stuff in the soup before popping it into your mouth. But I was near starving half the time, so anything tasted phenomenal.”

  He hasn’t heard from Roy, so I agree to loan him 830元 ($100) for the remainder of his trip—back to Guangzhou and home to San Francisco. In return, he loans me something I hadn’t thought of—a travel guidebook. “The Lonely Planet,” he says. “It’s a bit out of date and short on detail, but it helps.” Relinquishing the cash feels scary, but something about holding the guidebook in my hands feels assuring. I want to see places I know nothing about, I tell him. “An urge is pulling me west. I’ll stay here in Beijing a few days, then head out west to Xi’an, then take the Silk Road and see where it takes me. Maybe I’ll reach Jiuzhaigou or even Tibet. I want to see the religious and spiritual parts of this country—the Muslim lands, the Tibetans, the Buddhists.”

  He smiles. “You should check out Xiahe, an amazing town nestled up in the foothills of the Himalaya. It’s shared by Hui Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists.” He visibly lights up. “There’s this café in Xiahe beside the Tibetan monastery with a veranda behind it. It’s really something. You can watch the monks chanting from the roof.”

  We stand and stroll alongside the marsh. Two seated men hold fishing rods tirelessly in the brackish water. Beyond them, towering on the far bank, is a replica of Hong Kong’s skyline, a miniature painted steel model of the city. It’s as if the colony in its last days has literally drawn near to Beijing. Huge red characters stand in the water, making grand proclamations. “Hong Kong Returns to the Motherland! One Country, Two Systems! Glorious Victorious Chinese Feelings!” Something will finally be reclaimed from the merciless imperialists. Yet the replica is unreachable: The path doesn’t cross the marsh, and the distance between the Beĭjīngrén fishing and walking here and the splendor of Hong Kong feels immeasurably vast.

  Chapter 4

  Uplift the Nation

  耳聽為虛眼見為實

  Trust what you see, not what you’ve heard.

  —Chinese proverb

  The sun rises higher in its arc through the tropical haze, the morning air is cloyingly humid, and I’m alone. Five flights of concrete stairs take me up to the top floor of Classroom Tower C, and I stop where Mrs. Yuan instructed, at a door labeled—in English and Chinese—“The Reading and Listening Room.” With the back of my hand I catch a bead of sweat rolling from my hair down my forehead. My hair is newly buzzed to a quarter-inch, about right for this sweltering heat. The heat must also be the reason that all the buildings here have outdoor hallways, like American motels.

  The key that Mrs. Yuan gave me fits the lock, and the door swings inward. The dark room exhales dust and still more heat at me. I step in and pull red strings dangling overhead until fluorescent lights blink on and reveal small golden desks and more of the golden chairs, all frosted with white dust. The rusty blades of ceiling fans don’t respond to any of the strings, so I push open metal windows one by one.

  I step up behind the lectern at the front of the room, preparing to teach the first class of my life. I assume a responsible posture, or what hopefully will pass for one. My empty stomach clenches, remembering the breakfast that I was handed before the opening ceremony but barely touched: a warm, three-month-old carton of milk and a doughy white bun that squirted a salty red bean paste onto my tongue.

  Voices echo on the hallway, a cacophony growing nearer and nearer. Thirty ninth-grade boys and girls arrive, no longer marching, no longer attentive, no longer quiet. They are gaping at me, pointing at me, pushing each other into the room, and arguing over the least dirty chairs. Unsure how to intervene, hoping to look confident, I nod at them. Every student, regardless of gender, has short hair: bowl-cuts for the boys, crop-jobs with bangs for the girls. Each student is wearing a white buttoned shirt embroidered with the school crest and royal blue pants. They finally do sit. Each face gazes at me.

  I inhale. “Hello.”

  “HELLO!” they roar back. The word washes over me like a wave, reverberating off the dry walls, drenching the torrid air, uniting all of us in some unfamiliar satisfaction—as if we’d just passed a test we’d studied for all our lives.

  I inhale again. “How are you?”

  The wave smashes on dark, jagged boulders. Some voices answer while others repeat the question. Desperate, I look upward, appealing to the motionless overhead fans. “My name is Tony,” I say. “T-O-N-Y.” I write the letters on the board. Silence falls as I explain in excruciatingly slow English, underscored with hand gestures, that I don’t know how well they speak or understand English, that I will speak slowly. “You should always tell me if you don’t understand something.” My white shirt bunches at my armpits. I look from face to face, and it feels like a miracle when they nod.

  I tell them to tear squares of paper from their tiny notebooks and write down their English names—the names they selected during their first year at Peizheng, seventh grade. “Write big,” I say, rewriting my name on the board in giant letters to demonstrate. “Fold your nametag like this.” I demonstrate making a little paper tent.

  I survey their tents, and they’re not bad. “Yes! Good!” I say. “Let’s do introductions.”

  The first boy stands up when I call on him. “I am Raymond,” he says, before sitting back down.

  The next boy’s nametag reads “Bwen,” and Bwen stands too, but he only mumbles inaudibly before sullenly dropping back into his chair.

  His neighbor stands quickly. His hair is a mess and his fingers casually clutch his nametag. “Hello! My name is Sandoh. Welcome to China!”

  The class erupts in applause.

  “Thank you, Sandoh,” I say, impressed but suddenly anxious about his confidence. He sits back down, pleased. The rest of the teenagers generally handle the drill competently, and they seem to stare at me curiously, as if expecting… something.

  I write the alphabet on the board, letter by letter. Then I write a list of words below it, point to each word, draw arrows, and rearrange the words. They gaze at me silently, so I assume they get it—alphabetical order—and I launch my master plan: Alphabetically Assigned Seating. I hope to impose some order on my classes by learning their names and where they sit. I explain all this as they whisper to each other, and they seem to miss the concept completely.

  I write a new list of words on the chalkboard, this time using their names. Chalk coats all ten of my fingers by the time I have erased and rewritten a second list of their names. I underline and point, but they don’t follow and begin to chatter quietly in Cantonese.

  I spot a girl surreptitiously change her name from ‘Sally’ to ‘Alice,’ and it dawns on me. She gets it. She wants to avoid sitting with a group of boys. She’s fourteen years old, and she’s afraid of the opposite sex. Shocked, I appeal to the fans again for help, but no help is forthcoming. They’re pretending not to understand me! They’re deceiving me! My wrist aches, and I look down at my watch. I’ve gone five minutes over. “Th-Thank you,” I stutter. “OK. Class over. Goodbye.”

  “GOODBYE!” they roar, jumping up and grabbing their pencils and notebooks.
They wave to me on their way out and dash chaotically back into the day. “Thank you, Teacher Tony!” Sandoh grins.

  On the outdoor hallway, I command a view of the campus below me. There are smallish buildings, made of orange brick, and huge five-story classroom towers encased in baby blue tile. The athletic field, where this morning’s ceremony took place, is an expanse of ashen dirt. In the space between the classroom buildings, the athletic field, and several basketball courts, most of this walled dominion is paved with concrete sidewalk tiles, between which grow large, happy, unruly tufts of grass. Palm trees and banyan trees, all painted waist-high with white insect repellent, cast oases of shade.

  Beyond the walls of campus, interminable ramshackle neighborhoods of the city unfold in a sea of crumbling brick walls and corrugated steel roofs. Jackhammers pounding in the distance give the impression that not just a city but an entire continent is under construction around us. What we hear is that any day now billions of yuan in investment money will transform Guangzhou from a slapdash, crowded backwater into a shiny, modern urban marvel. All I can tell for certain is that thick gray construction dust coats everything, and I’m inhaling it with every breath.

  I step back inside, take my position behind the lectern, and try to ignore my stomach’s intensifying growls of hunger. Uplift the nation.

  Teenagers stampede through my door with energy that astonishes me in the heat, and I watch as they jostle and push and finally settle on seats. For a moment they gaze at me, and I can taste their curiosity and anxiety and delight. Or maybe those thick feelings are all mine. There are ugly faces and pretty faces, well-groomed achievers and ragged troublemakers, confident athletes and nervous nerds. “Hello,” I say.

  “HELLO!” comes the thunderous response.

  I lead them through creating nametags and enunciating introductions, and this group seems smarter than the first class. I expect them to get alphabetical order easily.

  I’m wrong. Everything slows down and traps me again. Did they get a tip-off from the other class? In frustration, I walk around the lectern and stand in the middle of the aisle. I ask them all to stand up in a single line down the aisle. There I have them reorder themselves alphabetically by their English names. This they do loudly but quickly. Apparently, without the danger of sitting beside someone uncool or of the other gender, they really are smart.

  And that’s it, I’m done. I did it. I taught a class. I look at them, and they look at me, and I look down at the lectern, then at my wrist. My watch says fifteen minutes remain. I look at my students again, and for a moment we just stare in curiosity at each other, as if to indulge a craving. Who are you?

  “So—” I begin and stop, racking my brain for something, anything. Why wasn’t I told about this, what to do, how to prepare? I look back at the board, chalk up new words, erase them. Finally, hoping to impress them, I go with a colloquial dialogue. I call on two obedient-looking kids.

  “What’s up, Rina?” reads Keive, glancing at Rina’s nametag and inserting her name smoothly.

  “Hey, no-, not much, Ke-Keive,” Rina stutters. “How’s it go-going?”

  “OK,” Keive replies, “Peizheng is cool! See you.”

  “Take it ee-easy.”

  I nod. “Good,” I say, with a conspiratorial smile. “Don’t use this greeting with your other teachers. They won’t understand.”

  Two girls smile at me before they begin, either enjoying the informal greeting or perhaps amused by the weird pale animal winking and stumbling around before them. They giggle and blush as they struggle through the dialogue and finally collapse back into their chairs.

  The next boy doesn’t stand up at all. “Peizheng is not cool! I hate it,” he says. His shirtsleeves are rolled rakishly past his elbows. Everyone laughs and looks at me. I do a double-take at the tall block letters on his nametag.

  “Hitler,” I read. “Please stand up.”

  Hitler rises to his feet, shrugging, glancing out the window.

  “You don’t have to like Peizheng,” I say slowly. I think what to say next, wondering exactly how they chose their English names, who supervised, what they were thinking.

  “Hitler is a bad boy!” calls out Thomas. Everyone laughs.

  Hitler says nothing, smirking at me as he sits again.

  “Who’s your girlfriend?” calls out a boy named Ban.

  I shake my head, refusing to answer, trying to stay cool. The students laugh and chat amongst themselves in Cantonese, and I notice I’ve gone late again.

  They’ll never listen to me. I was wrong this morning—about them, about the discipline, about the myths. It’s all a lie. I can’t uplift this nation.

  “Do you have a gun, Teacher Tony?” calls out Thomas.

  Chapter 5

  One Chinese Home

  是謂微明柔弱勝剛強

  The subtle wisdom of life reveals this:

  The slow and soft overcome the fast and hard.

  —Tao Te Ching, 36

  The sky blushes periwinkle, and the air finally cools. Colt and I leave the ancient grounds of the Old Summer Palace and return to the Zhongs’ courtyard home. At the plate metal door, we’re greeted by Fujin, the sister, who is more slender than her brother and sharper in the eyes. She is charming and gracious but curt as she introduces herself. She’s an official at the Beijing Commission on Elementary Education, she says.

  Colt casually mentions my phone calls this morning, and Fujin’s glance shoots past him. “Wujia never answers the phone.”

  As if on cue, Wujia emerges from his room, and she says something harsh to him. He nods and mutters as he takes a seat at the courtyard table. She tells him we went to the Old Summer Palace.

  “The Old Summer Palace?” He looks from Colt to me. “Did you go to the Great Wall?”

  Silence hangs in the evening air. Fujin sighs and rolls her eyes before turning to me. She invites me to stay for dinner, but having learned the decorum, I refuse. She insists, but I refuse again. She asks the crucial third time, and I assent. Her face lights up like a lantern; she ducks under a clothesline to fetch another chair.

  Colt and I sit at the courtyard table next to Wujia, who is obviously confused. He asks us again about “the beautiful horses.” This time for some reason Colt plays along, telling him we did go to the Wall and did see horses.

  Fujin returns from a kitchen nook that I hadn’t noticed before, carrying a large steaming bowl of ginger soup. Barely a minute later, she brings out more: sour, fish-sauced, hot-peppered pork; steamed sides of red snapper with mushrooms and garlic; and bittermelon with bony hunks of beef. She rejects our effusive gratitude with a small laugh and finally sits to dine alongside us. After a few bites, she asks us about the American educational system, and Colt explains preschools and kindergartens to her, the age ranges, the curriculum.

  “Children should remain at home,” she interrupts, “with their parents, until they’re at least six.”

  Colt chopsticks a bit of beef into his mouth. He replies that women often work in the U.S., and that grandparents live separately, and so there’s generally no one to stay at home with the children. “Sometimes children start preschool at age three.”

  Fujin shakes her head. “That’s wrong. That’s definitely too early.”

  Wujia is staring blankly at pork bones that he has sucked clean. Fujin looks at him reprovingly, as a mother might, then rises and returns to the kitchen nook. She fetches a Beijing summer delicacy: sliced watermelon.

  My belly is sweetly stuffed so I just watch as Wujia bites into a juicy slice, swallows, and awakens for a moment. “America has very bad racial problems and discrimination,” he says. “But in China we don’t have these problems.”

  It turns out that neither of our hosts has actually seen, in the flesh, anyone with skin significantly darker than their own. I speak up, pointing out that ninety percent of China is Han Chinese, and that the other ten percent live in small, distant pockets. “So you don’t have any problems. But if a hundr
ed thousand Americans arrived in Tianjin or Dalian and started taking all the jobs...”

  Fujin nods without showing interest. She begins carrying dishes to the sink, refusing our help. Wujia retreats to his room.

  Colt looks at me, and speaks in English. “You have a different personality in Chinese.”

  “With the race thing?” I ask. “Was it too much?”

  “No, well I don’t know if what you were talking about is racism, but I think you’re more cautious in Chinese, more pensive. You have poise.”

  “Poise? It’s just my lack of confidence with Chinese, and my small vocabulary.” I pause. “Or maybe the language is a reflection of the culture, and this culture is just that way—more considerate, more reserved.”

  “Right,” Colt chuckles. “Reserved. I’ve been harassed, yelled at, ridiculed, chewed out, and insulted in Mandarin more times than I have been in English—and I’ve only been in this country a year and a half.”

  “Maybe I’m concentrating on the tones, trying to say things just right.”