Fujin hasn’t invited me or said anything about staying the night, and I don’t want to overstay my welcome or in any way loose strife in the household. But Colt says there’s a straw mat I could sleep on, and when the offer comes, I’m too ridiculously tired to refuse. In Colt’s room, we toss the mat on the other side of the birdcage, and lie down to sleep, discussing the morning—the dawn of huíguī day.
I suggest we go for it, make an adventure of it, and visit Tiananmen Square.
“Fujin said July 1st is the work holiday,” he says. “Not tomorrow. No one’s supposed to go to Tiananmen. We’re not going to tempt the PLA, remember?”
I see them in my mind’s eye—the army—standing, performing, marching. I see myself there, watching, feeling, listening. Why wouldn’t we go?
“You really want to sneak in?” he asks. “What for? No one’s going to protest. It’s Hong Kong’s glorious victorious return to the Motherland, remember?”
“Don’t you want to know? What this place is really made of? What this world is really made of? A few centuries ago at the Forbidden City the price of admission was death.”
He smiles at me. “True.” He hesitates a moment. “OK, Why not?”
I look at him, surprised I’ve really convinced him. “OK,” I say. “We’re doing it.”
He nods and drifts off to sleep mere moments later, but my long day stretches before me, and I lie there, staring up at the dusty rafters. My mind slips backward to the morning’s vast solitude, and images play over and over before my eyes. I take out Narcissus & Goldmund and place the book in a shaft of moonlight. In the cloister, in medieval Germany, Goldmund chastises himself for his transgressions. He regrets sneaking out to the village, indulging his curiosity, feeling the sensuous longings ignited by the girl’s kiss. The teacher Narcissus hears Goldmund’s confessions, and rather than reproving him, he calmly explains to the boy the duality—the battle of heart and mind—that can torture men. Halfway down the page, exhaustion pulls on my eyelids and softens my focus, and I put down the book. I pull the scratchy wool blanket over my shoulders to protect my skin from mosquitoes. My arm instinctively touches the pouch that is belted around my waist containing my scant links to other worlds: a passport, money, permits, and a health record. My eyes set like suns, and the night’s sweet oblivion overtakes me.
Chapter 6
A Grand Total of Ten English Words
見怪不怪其怪自敗
Face a strange thing without fear,
And its strangeness will disappear.
—Chinese proverb
“Apple pie!” cries Sandoh. I write Apple Pie on the chalkboard, under the heading Desserts. “Let’s have some side dishes,” I say.
“Pizza!” shrieks a boy who’s forgotten his nametag. “Pizza Pizza Pizza!”
“Ice cream!” yells another.
“Side dishes,” I repeat.
“Doughnuts!” “Chocolate cheese!” “Fried chick!”
I add a few sides myself to broaden the menu. Rice, Salad, and French Fries. I slide two desks across the floor and push them together to create a miniature restaurant. I tap Sandoh and Leon as customers, and Jenny as the waitress. “It’s your turn first,” I say to Sandoh, as he sits at the table. “You order what you want to eat.”
“French fries!” he calls out. “And I’ll have a milk shape.”
“And you’re the waitress,” I say to Jenny.
“OK,” Jenny mumbles, standing beside him.
“Sandoh, those are good choices,” I say. “But everyone must choose something from the ‘main dishes.’” I tap the words Main Dishes on the board.
They look confused. “Zhŭyào de cài,” I say, translating, offering my first-ever words of Mandarin to the class.
The room explodes with applause, and a wave of pride washes over me. But it becomes confusion as I observe faces who have looked lost listening to my snail’s pace, parrot’s complexity English. How am I going to communicate with them? What little authority I have will evaporate if I employ my patchy Mandarin. “Main dishes,” I repeat, returning quickly to English.
“What would you like? A man—main dish,” Jenny turns to Sandoh.
“Nooooooodles!” he croons gleefully. “Nooooo—”
Laughter rings from all corners. A handful of boys slap hands and call out jokes in Cantonese. A quieter boy in the back row hops up and prances strangely to the back of the room.
“Sit down!” I call out, my eyes rising to my friends, the rusty ceiling fans. The boy drops anxiously back into his seat. “The spaghetti?” I ask, pointing to the board again in frustration. The word Noodles does not appear. “Choose something off the menu.”
“Yes,” he nods. “Spa-gah-ETT,” twists uneasily off his tongue.
“Spa-ghet-ti,” I enunciate for him. “It’s a noodle dish from Italy.” I look to Leon, who sits quietly across from Sandoh.
Sandoh whispers to him in Cantonese. Leon orders a cheeseburger.
Jenny pretends to bring out spaghetti and a burger. “Eat that,” she says.
“Good,” I nod. “More often, the waitress will say, ‘Enjoy your meal.’” I write the phrase on the board, and they all repeat the words, blankly, the way they probably do in their other classes. Some copy the words down into their notebooks. “Remember,” I say, as the next three students sit down at our restaurant, “speak only English in this class.”
“We want the Pepsi!” Money informs the new waiter, George.
“Yeah, we want the Pepsi,” Alice repeats.
I suggest the chicken and the rice, and the girls whisper in Cantonese, then Money says, “Pizza.” They leave the restaurant and return to their seats, done. A grand total of ten English words. I sigh at the fans. And only if I count repetition. It doesn’t work, what Paige and I devised—this lesson plan. It doesn’t work. Bù xíng. It doesn’t go.
“Goodbye,” I dismiss the class.
“GOODBYE!” they cry out with undiminished enthusiasm. Sandoh is out the door first, as if his “Spa-gah-ETT” is burning on a stove somewhere.
Paige awaits me on the outdoor walkway. Her classroom is one floor below mine, but she’s up here to confer with me, or perhaps for a better view of the student soccer game on the athletic field. We’re partners in a sense, each taking half of standard sixty-child classes, so it makes sense for us to teach the same lessons. “We got a great menu,” she says, with a wry smile. “But they got really upset when I told them Americans eat vegetables.”
I chuckle. “They’re not interested in a balanced diet. Mine went crazy, yelling out ‘Pepsi,’ ‘hamburger,’ ‘milkshake’ faster than I could write.”
She nods, running fingers through her long hair, holding out tresses of umber for her own contemplation. “I keep saying to myself, it’s Welcome Back Kotter, the Peizheng Years.” She laughs. From Seattle, fluent in Chinese, quite funny and not unattractive, Paige’s penchant is for black clothing and cutting sarcasm. Not my type, I’m thinking, as I try to express to her my doubts about the lesson plan.
“Tony,” she eyes me. “We’re teaching each class one forty-minute lesson per week, and we have twelve classes—you’re not going to ‘captivate’ many kids.”
Her words ring in my mind. I want to engage my students, all of them, in order to help them experience the thrill of learning a language, to teach them English better than I was taught Chinese. It’s what I’m here to do. When Mandarin seemed impossible, I fantasized about this, the other side of the coin, about helping people in China grasp the basics of English.
“Why do you always run late?” she asks. “Don’t you hear the bell?”
“Bell?”
She nods, eyebrows raised. “There’s a bell.”
Paige returns to her classroom downstairs, leaving me to endure the callous heat. My next class arrives and swims around me, royal blue pants and white shirts soaked with sweat from soccer, basketball, jumping rope, table tennis, and track sprints. The noise grows as their invasio
n of my room approaches completion. I enter and immediately begin to yell, sounding feeble even to myself. “Kobe Bryant!” Kobe looks up with a startled grin, letting go of Hitler’s shoelaces. Hitler whacks Kobe on the head, telling him in Cantonese to sit down.
“Quiet! This is your chance to learn English.” I try to be stern. “I am a native speaker, and you can learn things from me that you cannot learn from your other teachers. You could study, you should listen.” I look from face to face. I explain the menu, but my only piece of chalk shatters and rolls all the way to the door. They shout and laugh as I retrieve it, and this time my voice dies in my throat. Why can’t I have quiet, control, discipline? Why can’t I do this—teach them, guide them?
Some of the students seem to have forgotten their nametags, perhaps intentionally. But many nametags are here, and some names are already easy to remember, like Raymond and Alex, and the oddballs Zark and Keive. Some names, like Kobe Bryant and David Beckham, have clear inspirations, but others appear misspelled, like Angle and Jrace. Others seem downright strange, like the boy named Iceboy, and the girl named Sucky. I can’t even keep a straight face when I scold the boy named Donkey.
Betty, Ban, and Keive—three of my more attentive students—respond to my summons, and we manage to serve a meal in the embattled café. Keive flawlessly orders a double cheeseburger “with mustard and tomatoes.” The next group, however—Hitler, Alex, and Rina—is a nightmare and class disintegrates into laughter and uproar. No bell whatsoever, and it’s seven minutes late when I remember the existence of my watch.
“Hot dog!” Kobe Bryant yells, as he gives me a high-five and struts out into the day. “Hot hot hot dog!”
Chapter 7
The Glorious Return to
the Motherland
勝人者有力自勝者強
He who conquers men has force,
He who conquers himself is truly strong.
—Tao Te Ching, 33
The sun scorches Tiananmen Square, all thirty-four acres of its paving stones. Festive scarlet lanterns dangle from wires and gyrate in a light breeze. I’m adrift in a sea of happy Chinese faces in the middle of the vast plaza. Prohibited or not, the people have come: thousands crowd around me.
“Soldiers!” someone cries out in English. It’s a young man perched on a concrete lamppost five feet above the masses. He has Asian features and wears a forest green T-shirt.
“What’s going on?” asks a friend on the ground.
“There are soldiers—in rows—forming lines—they’re about to march!”
I ask, “How many?”
“Hundreds,” he says, and looks down at me. “I don’t see any tanks.”
Everyone knows the date. June 30. At midnight tonight the gray fortresses surrounding us will finally take control of a wealthy, world-famous little renegade island a thousand miles from here. Precisely 31,202 seconds remain, according to the red digits on the billboard. I look up again at the man on the lamppost.
“He shouldn’t be up there,” mutters a smallish woman.
“He shouldn’t?” I turn to her, surprising her with my Mandarin.
“It’s not safe.” She eyes me warily. “He could fall.”
“I think he just wants a better view.”
She shakes her head. “Are you American?”
“How did you know?”
“Your Mandarin is very good.”
“You’re flattering me. It’s still really bad.”
“No, it’s standard. Like a politician’s.”
“How do you feel about Hong Kong returning to China?”
“Mm,” she pauses. Her eyes drift past me. “It’s been too long. A hundred fifty-seven years! Hong Kong has always been a part of China.”
“Have you been to Hong Kong?”
“Not yet.”
“It’s very wealthy and developed, fast and modern. No one speaks Mandarin.”
“Cantonese, eh?” she chuckles. “I don’t understand Cantonese at all.”
She’ll never be allowed to visit Hong Kong. I know it, she knows it. But it’s been so long, so eternally long, since China has enjoyed international honor.
“He should get down,” she turns back to the young man on the pole, whose T-shirt reads Dartmouth.
“What’s happening now?” I call up in English.
“They’re going to march,” he reports. “Oh no,” his voice drops. “Two are coming over here—right now! The People’s Liberation Army is coming!”
Two men in the olive drab of the PLA push past me, their eyes on the pole-climber, and I imagine their thoughts. No proper Chinese would single himself out, so this one must have succumbed to the spiritual pollution of the West, he must be a huáqiáo (overseas Chinese). He must be naïve.
My foreign opinion screams silently, How does this harm anyone? It’s blindingly hot, the crowds are mashed together, sweating, laughing, taking photographs, and everyone’s just hoping to take part in history. What’s wrong with securing more air or a better view? But they’re pulling him down. He’s a huáqiáo, and regardless of how many years he’s spent in, say, America, or whether he considers himself, say, American, he is still Chinese to the Chinese, and they still expect Chinese behavior of him. Run-of-the-mill dà bízi (big noses) like me cannot possibly be expected to know right from wrong—it’s astonishing if we can put two words together in Mandarin—but huáqiáo should know better.
I move on, cutting through the masses to the front of the square, where PLA soldiers stand in rigid double-file. They wear coats with bright brass buttons and dark green pilot’s hats with red stars; they stare straight ahead with an almost haunting motionlessness. I walk up to the two soldiers at the front, surprised to find that one is a woman wearing a beret instead of a pilot’s hat. Armed with my camera, I capture a hundred dead-still, perfectly aligned shoulders decorated with epaulettes. The faces look young and nervous, reminding me of how my students looked doing oral reports.
“Hey!” calls a voice behind me.
I turn, and Colt shoots. He steps closer, twisting the lens of his camera. “You look like a general inspecting his troops!” he laughs. After arriving with me, he struck off on his own.
“A little eerie here, isn’t it?” I ask. “The army watching dumbly, the people sitting peacefully on blankets.”
“Thinking of 1989?”
“It’s impossible not to,” I say.
“No, the people today are celebrating, not protesting. Look at all the miniature red flags in everyone’s hands. I just talked to a vendor who couldn’t care less about Hong Kong; he just hopes to sell enough huíguī yo-yos to buy his family a refrigerator.”
“Get any glorious victorious shots?”
“Yeah, I got up on those scaffolding towers—the guards saw my white skin and didn’t ask any questions.”
Looking around, taking it all in, we try an estimate: 80,000 people.
Two lines of soldiers goose-step across the street, and continue marching towards us across the square. Double lines that face us soon stretch the entire width of the square. “It’s almost 3:30,” Colt observes. “It’s about to get interesting.” The soldiers link hands, forming a giant phalanx, and Mao’s portrait hanging over the five arches of Tiananmen Gate behind the soldiers seems to survey us confidently.
The soldiers stand stock still for minutes on end. Colt and I weave back into the crowds. On the stroke of four o’clock the soldiers step towards us. Time seems to stop, the moment engulfing us like an ocean. Now. I see it before I feel it: A wave pushes everything south, away from Mao and the gates. The wall with green legs takes another step. Colt and I stand thirty yards from the double chain, feeling the human barrier impel confusion and bodies at us. The people on blankets stop munching. The wall takes two more steps, unleashing another wave, and it seems to sweep my feet an inch off the stones. My breath catches in my throat. Now. Two more steps, pause. Everyone rises, moves, yields. Two steps, pause. Young and old, in jeans and dresses, they all st
ream past me. A small boy, his head craned backwards, walks straight into my leg. Whipping his face around, he gapes up at me before a man and woman grab him by either hand and guide him away.
“Want to go?” Colt asks, but I barely hear him.
This might be the best symbol of China, right here. A great wall. Colt repeats his question. “No,” I shake my head. “Let’s see what happens.” What is this barrier, this authority, this blunt force? Who are these young men? I lose count of how many small backward steps I take, but I begin to see the individual faces. The young soldier coming straight for me has a square face, as if his natural face was pushed flat. Two steps, pause. Two steps, pause. Two steps, and he’s at arm’s length, right in front of me. His expression is impassive and reminds me of my students marching on the athletic field on Peizheng’s opening day: dutiful, focused, innocent. Innocent.
“You’re going very slowly,” I say, in Mandarin, looking at the young face that mystifies me. His eyes widen, but he presses his lips into a straighter line. I hear myself pushing the conversation. “Do you want some help?” He clenches his neighbors’ hands and looks past me. The line comes to a standstill. Twenty yards to my left, some folks hesitate before standing, but there’s no organized resistance. “I speak English,” I continue. “I could help you with the foreigners. I’ll call out: ‘leave the square, big noses, go home!’”
A good-natured smile, there it is. He doesn’t nod, but his eyes betray curiosity. The wall steps again. Two steps, pause. “What do you think?” I ask. “I’ll help you.”
And with that, I turn and stand before them. I become them. I take two steps with the PLA. Two steps, pause. Two steps, pause.
“We don’t need your help,” says the neighbor.
I look over my shoulder at him just as the shy, younger soldier bashfully utters English. “You go home.”
I feel a strange warmth as I reply in Mandarin. “Your English is better than my Chinese!”
“Yes, I study English,” he replies. Two steps, pause. “My high school teacher was American.”
Double Happiness: One Man's Tale of Love, Loss, and Wonder on the Long Roads of China Page 4