For a novice, Byron’s vegetable stir-fry turns out better than just edible. The green gourds are as bitter as dandelion stems, and we pick them out, but the mixture of carrots, onions, and peppers doused in the deluxe soy sauce blends delectably. We dig in and celebrate, toasting cups of boiled water. May it not poison us, I pray, as we swallow the fluid of this strange new earth. We fire up our television, and there are four Chinese channels and—lo and behold—an English channel! We watch a young American Superman save a faraway suburban world in an episode of Lois and Clark. Next up on our little screen, as worlds far and near collide, is the evening news, and it’s Chinese Secretary of State Qian Qichen declaring that some islands near Japan are—BEEP! The screen goes white. Byron and I look at each other. Censorship? I return to the wok for seconds, and Byron launches into a political lecture of his own. “This is a Hong Kong station we’re getting,” he decides. “Across the border in Hong Kong they get to hear what the Secretary of State says, but you think there’s any chance they will get to after the handover in June?” He goes on, and he tells me more than I really wanted to know about censorship and propaganda and Marxism, about how philosophy once guided the Chinese Communist Party but now, “in the face of globalized capitalism, Marxism languishes. Now the socialism is just in the propaganda, covering up what’s going on, so that the people don’t realize their government is changing and leaving them behind.”
The screen blinks on again, and it’s a news story about ostriches at the zoo.
A few days later, when we’ve finished our mediocre leftovers, Byron begs our one neighbor to teach him how to cook. The other apartments on our floor all seem empty, but yesterday on the walkway we ran into a visiting English teacher, a Chinese woman from a rural village. With the two of them chopping onions inside, I sit out on the open hallway, playing guitar, singing a Dave Matthews tune from the book. “Could I have been a millionaire in Bel Air?” I sing. “Could I have been anyone other than me?” Across a courtyard from me, barely a stone’s throw away, in the window of a crumbling jam-packed ten-story apartment building, a woman is stir-frying dinner.
A tiny girl in a bright yellow outfit bolts down the hallway towards me. She halts, four feet away, and her mouth falls open. She gazes at my foreign eyes. I blink twice at her to get her to smile. “Nĭ hăo,” I greet her. We met Tingting, our neighbor’s daughter, yesterday too. She spins on a toe and launches into her own Mandarin song, carousing up and down the hallway.
Spicy, mouth-watering fragrances—là jiāo peppers, garlic, fish sauce—waft out from our kitchen, and the smells penetrate deep inside me, triggering a sigh. I’m here. I live here. Relaxation settles across my shoulders, drips through my back and down the bones of my spine, down through my hips to the muscles and tendons of my legs. I witness the world around me, swat away a mosquito, and open my journal.
September 5
The myths and stereotypes I brought with me now seem ridiculous, or descriptive of some other land I haven’t yet visited. The market is chaotic but not in any scary way. People, humans, buy and sell food—to eat and to have enough to eat—and a sense of respect and friendliness permeates the haggling. The streets are packed, but there aren’t any kung fu masters or Buddhist sages wandering about, nor are there regiments of Communist automatons patrolling the streets. What other lies have I been believing? May I find out, may I discover, may I be open to the truth.
Chapter 9
The Atom Bomb
If you want to understand today,
you have to search yesterday.
—Pearl S. Buck
The warm night buzzes with summer insects and celebration. Fireworks explode like red and white pottery against an asphalt black sky, but they’re low, near the horizon, since Tiananmen Square is now a mile away. I leave the crowded sidewalk, dart into the center of the boulevard, and snap a photo of the glowing pyrotechnics. The huíguī is ending, China has prevailed, Hong Kong will belong perhaps to some other country in one hundred fifty-seven years, but for now it’s a part of the Middle Kingdom. A policeman’s hand lands on my shoulder. I turn to him, “May I take one more glorious, victorious photo?” He shakes his head, missing my humor, sending me swiftly to the curb. His job is to ensure a single file of cars trickle down this broad street. Red huíguī flags and lanterns dance overhead, and I think about Tiananmen, about the concerts and the dances and the grand international convention of officials and Communist Party bigwigs. I long with an unfamiliar intensity to be there, to experience it all, to penetrate or to conquer this force opposing me.
Colt finds me, and together we peel off the busy avenue and weave our path through the hútòng. Wujia’s television screen is exploding with fireworks, better ones—brilliant greens, purples, and golds—from a scene at Hong Kong’s majestic Victoria Harbor. “I guess we’ll do what everyone else in this country is doing,” shrugs Colt, his face lit up by the flicker of the screen. “Watch it on TV.”
“Maybe we should’ve gone to Hong Kong,” I wonder aloud.
“We were at Tiananmen until the PLA made us leave,” Colt informs Fujin. “There were thousands of people there. Tony helped the PLA.”
“What?” She looks bewildered.
“I walked with them,” I admit. “I helped them. I asked some people to leave.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I wanted to see what would happen.” I look at her. “I wanted to know what it’s like to be in the army. I wanted to understand what in this world… you can trust.”
She chuckles the nervous, arms-length chuckle. “You’re a foreigner.”
“Prince Charles is speaking,” Wujia cuts in. The scene has shifted from the harbor skyline to a cavernous auditorium. Prince Charles is smiling thinly, enunciating carefully, giving away a colony—another one, after so many toys and trinkets, so many wildly different, grafted-on fingers and toes have been stoically surrendered by his British Empire. “China tonight will take responsibility for a place and a people which matter greatly to us all. We shall not forget you.”
The camera cuts to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair. The television commentator declares with impeccable certainty: “Chinese all around the world are celebrating this glorious day.” Of course Colt and I know that Hong Kongers are in fact extremely worried that their new constitution, the “Basic Law,” won’t mean a damn thing and that great green walls of PLA soldiers will start marching through their streets tomorrow. I begin to say this aloud, that this is all untrue, false, another myth, another lie, but I swallow my tongue as I look from Fujin to Wujia. New Chinese President Jiang Zemin rises woodenly on the dais and proclaims triumph. “‘One Country, Two Systems’ is the brilliant conception of Deng Xiaoping,” he declares to the world. “Hong Kong’s glorious return to the Motherland will assist China’s development and be a blessing to all Chinese.”
Wujia gazes at the screen with an intensity that propagandists must covet; Fujin looks at Colt, then down at her lap. Just before midnight, she rises and makes tea, and the four of us happily toast Hong Kong’s final British minutes with tea, that delicacy that has always been Chinese but for a while seemed quintessentially British.
An hour later, bitten anew by curiosity, I convince Colt to take a cab with me back to Tiananmen. We ride down to the Boulevard of Eternal Peace, but again, we can’t get very close. As we turn down a side street, I ask the driver his feelings about the huíguī. He gushes happily. “It makes everyone proud. Everyone. We all now hold our heads high! The British dominated China and made us second-class citizens. But today the world can hear a new voice rising—the Chinese voice.” He looks at me. “You know the—” he uses a word we don’t understand, so I consult my dictionary. Atom bomb. “Mm,” he assents. “You’re American, right? It restored your national honor. For us this is like that time, when you dropped the atom bomb on Japan.”
Chapter 10
Celebrity Gwailo
The most outstanding characteristic of Eastern civilization is to kn
ow contentment, whereas that of Western civilization is not to know contentment.
—Hu Shi, 19th Century Chinese Diplomat
It’s a strange buzzing, an angry bumblebee. My ear perceives it, adjusting to its pitch and timbre, even amid the howls of laughter at Adam, a boy whose white uniform is fraying badly at the neck. The bell is ringing.
I close business at our embattled café on time, and the students spring up and flee through the door. On their way out, three students who didn’t yell at all during class, who paid attention, who ordered sushi at the café, pause at the lectern. It’s Jrace, Winnie, and Iceboy, and they gaze at me as if starstruck. Jrace giggles nervously as she speaks. “Can we take a picture… with you?”
I nod, and Winnie clutches tightly to Jrace’s forearm as the two girls step around the lectern. The two of them wear a less common version of the uniform—round-collared blouses and navy blue skirts—and they stand close to me, grinning, holding out two-fingered peace signs. Iceboy clicks the camera.
“Do you have the pictures of your family?” Winnie asks, blinking, still gripping Jrace’s arm like a life preserver. She has trouble with ‘v’ and ‘th’ sounds, as do nearly all of my students, and her question comes out: “Do you how fruh picksha fyo fammee?”
“Yes,” I reply. “One. I can bring it to class.”
“Great!” she cries. “I would like to see it.”
Jrace is staring at me, and she speaks quietly. “Do you love China?”
“China,” I pause, observing the three of them in turn. They actually want to practice English. “China… is good. It’s better than I expected.”
“OK!” they dash back to grab their books. “Bye bye!”
Strolling home, I gaze up into the overcast sky. Good? Better than I expected? Is it true? I didn’t expect all this concrete and construction. I expected pandas, bowls of rice, pretty screens of bamboo, and respectful children studying like machines. The only pandas I’ve seen are on the kids’ pencil boxes; rice is served, but primarily at the ends of banquets; I’ve seen bamboo, but only in the ubiquitous construction scaffolding; and precious few students study like machines in my classes. I brought myths and myths and more myths. I had another expectation too—that I would be told what to teach. I’ve taught two full weeks of these classes now, and neither Mrs. Yuan nor Mr. Guo, the head of the English Department, have given me any instruction whatsoever: no guidelines, no dos and don’ts, no textbooks, no supplies, not even permission to photocopy the few materials I brought. I am blessed with academic freedom or abandoned to the student hordes, depending on my perspective. Perhaps we gwailo teachers are trusted completely here, or perhaps some tacit Chinese communication is lost on us. At banquets we’ve been treated as important, prestigious members of the English Department, but then last Wednesday our classes were inexplicably and secretly canceled, so each of us sat in our classroom waiting as the afternoon drifted by; Donkey and a few other students finally swung by to let us know English class was cancelled because a big biology test was occupying the students.
As for Princeton in Asia, the organization that sent us here, no directions have been forthcoming from them either, perhaps as a liberating and terrifying form of benign neglect.
The gateman spots me coming and opens the gate. I ask him the customary Mandarin greeting: “Nĭ hăo, nĭ chī fàn le meí yŏu?” (Hi, have you eaten?)
“Chī le,” he nods and smiles. No mail for me today, he apologizes when I ask. Mr. Chen lives in the room under the stairs with an adorable toddler, Bo, whom I sometimes see waddling about in open-butt pajamas, mooning me or reaching for my nose. I haven’t yet seen Bo’s mother.
Byron is home, and he’s wedging the tea kettle, still steaming, into the fridge. “We’ll have cold, drinkable water by tomorrow morning,” he says with a smile. He grabs a shirt and we leave together, as planned, on a tourist journey. We cross campus and strike out through Peizheng’s gate, hike down bustling Yandun Street to the plaza, and wait at a bus stop for the #17 bus. Our destination is the tomb of Sun Yatsen, the man called the founder of modern China. His tomb isn’t far from campus.
A bus squeals to a stop in front of us, and with two dozen other desperate souls, we push purple half-yuan notes into a rusty box and squeeze on. There are few seats, I notice, probably because more people fit standing up. The furnace of bodies is so tight I don’t even need to hold on. “Where go?” blurts an old man at my shoulder. I respond first in English, then Mandarin, but his transfixed eyeballs never wander. We careen around a corner, and a man in a beige shirt covered with red insignias smiles at me from eighteen inches away, pronouncing every syllable: “Hello. Where are you come from?”
“I am from the USA,” I reply precisely. “Meĭ Guó.”
“Meĭ Guó,” he repeats and laughs. “Meĭ Guó! You speak Chinese?”
“Wŏ huì shuō yì diăn,” I reply. I can speak a little.
“Hĕn hăo!” he cries. “Nĭ shuō de hĕn biàozhŭn!” He’s either praising me or asking if I’m spreading poisonous American ideas among the people. He introduces himself as Dun, a police officer, and asks our ages. He asks if I like China, twice, and I say yes, twice, trying not to stare at the sweat on his forehead, before realizing I’m confusing the word xĭhuān, which means “like,” with xíguàn, which I don’t recognize. “You teach me English?” Officer Dun asks. “You be lăoshī?”
“I’m sorry,” I say, relieved not to be getting arrested. “I can’t be your lăoshī (teacher).” The older man grabs my wrist, twisting it, waving at the window, at a gigantic blue pagoda tower. “I’m very busy,” I apologize to Dun, extricating my hand and joining Byron as he hastily slips off the bus.
In front of the blue tower is a gate and a ticket booth. Admission prices are painted on the booth’s wall:
LOCAL VISITORS - 2元
FOREIGN FRIENDS - 10元
“Five times the Chinese price?” I ask the ticket lady, twice.
She eyes us both silently, like a frog watching flies.
“Discrimination!” I say to Byron.
“We need a Tourist’s Bill of Rights,” he declares, alluding to that faraway place called America. “It’s only $1.25,” he calculates.
“What’s your salary?” the woman snaps in Mandarin without blinking.
“1,800 each month,” I reply, when I finally understand her.
She grimaces. “American dollars?”
“No!” I say. “Rénmínbì! We’re not that rich.”
“Rénmínbì?” she shakes her head in disgust. “You should get more.”
Still, she won’t give us the locals’ price, so we hand over 10元 worth of Revolutionary People’s Money, also called rénmínbì, and we pass through the gate. A vast compound of gorgeous manicured lawns surrounds the attractive memorial, which is an impressive tower of blue tiered roofs and burgundy colonnades. Flower-lined walkways lead toward the memorial, and elderly couples relax on benches under enormous trees with ancient, unruly roots. The odor of chemical fertilizer hangs in the air, and the hue of the grass lawns is a bright sickly green. The air smells slightly better when we reach the memorial itself, which was erected in 1931 “by Sun’s many overseas friends,” according to a plaque. A statue of Sun gazes past us, frowning, as if in reproof of all this attention. I point out Sun’s expression to Byron, and he tells me that Sun Yatsen is considered China’s first revolutionary because he was the leader of a rebel movement that brought down the Qing Dynasty in 1911, long before the word “communism” was even a whisper in Beijing. Sun was also a Guăngzhōurén (Cantonese), and his organizing cemented this area’s reputation as a hotbed of heresy and rebellion. “His frown might betray his disappointment that his Revolutionary Party never amounted to much,” Byron says with a chuckle. He did end the empire, inspire the masses, and usher in the era of the Republic, but his dreamt-of union never materialized, and it was the Communists who finally united China three decades later, in 1949.
Byron drifts awa
y, perhaps having tired of me or having tired of talking. Hailing from upstate New York, between semesters studying philosophy at Princeton, he spent a year at Oxford, learned to row a warship in Turkey, and had a love affair in Greece. He frankly seems unworried about adjusting to China and its ideologies, chemicals, and extortion. What surprises him is that this is my first time abroad, and that I’ve read so little political science or philosophy. I studied computer science, music, art, and Chinese, and while I’ve long yearned to leave the U.S., to me it didn’t seem strange that my first trip abroad would be to China.
Entering the memorial alone, I find a long hall with glass cases that hold faded photographs and bilingual captions: “Comrade Sun and a revolutionary comrade at the train station of Shanghai.” “Comrade Sun with factory comrades in France.” Between the cases stand stacks of dusty books, and topping one stack is Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Whether or not touching the books is permitted, the coincidence of finding China’s two most famous Suns united under one roof is too much for uneducated me. I flip open the tome and struggle to decipher the poetic lines of military advice. “All warfare is deception,” one phrase surrenders to me. “Water flows according to the nature of the ground.” My mind on its own reels in another of his famous epigrams, and then there it is: “Zhī bĭ zhī jĭ…” “Know the other, know thyself, and you will always succeed.” I repeat the words to myself, smiling as they ring through me, as if they are what I’ve been looking for all along. This is why I’m here, why I’m teaching, why I made this long journey. To know and understand China, to know and understand Chinese students, and to know and understand myself. Teaching is another form of learning. I gaze at the portrait of Sun in France for several minutes, and appreciate that he too was a traveler.
Double Happiness: One Man's Tale of Love, Loss, and Wonder on the Long Roads of China Page 6