Li Song looks at us, and I swear he’s winking at us. But perhaps I’m imagining it. He plays the tune again.
A week later, despite two more practice sessions, Byron and I still cannot credibly sing Aobao Xianghui. On the morning of the big day, during a final practice, Li Song brings out his guitar. He plucks the melody while we gwailo sing it, and for a few moments it sounds slightly better than fingernails on a chalkboard. I try flattering him the way I do when we play together. “You play and sing so beautifully,” I say. “Why don’t you sing with us?”
He laughs a curt laugh. “Seriously?”
“Yes, you’re our teacher. Why can’t you go on stage with us?”
“Because I am Chinese.”
At twilight, the four of us, the wedding singers, don what we individually deem to be appropriate attire, and we ride to the city’s finest hotel, the China Hotel. We sashay through the main lobby, up a grand staircase, and into a cavernous banquet hall where chandeliers hang from forty-foot ceilings and illuminate a stage and two hundred white-clothed tables. Microphone squawks and the tinkle of silverware and porcelain echo off embroidered pink wallpaper. Lauren, who’s wearing a sleek Western-style black dress, stands beside me. “I love the tie,” she whispers, touching the navy and burgundy on my chest. “Such flair for fashion.”
“I never thought I’d actually wear this,” I say.
“At least we’re not as nervous as the bride and groom. For us, this is just another stupid gwailo trick. They’re getting married!”
“It’s going to be me,” I reply. “I’m going to break them up. I can hear the story now. ‘She loved him…until she heard the bearded foreigner sing…she didn’t know a man could sound so bad…’”
“You’re not that bad. Well, yeah, I’ll watch her during your solo.”
“Solo?” I look at her.
Byron steps up beside us. He’s in a white tunic and dark slacks, and he too is wearing the tie we got at the opening ceremony. “We’re ‘representing Peizheng,’ right? The least we can do is pin the blame where it belongs.”
Paige is decked out in a gorgeous, hand-tailored red qípáo. She chats with Principal Wu, then strolls over to us with two pieces of bad news.
First, our piano tape is lost. Wu-cat has dispatched his daughter Xiaofen on her bicycle to their apartment to fetch their own private karaoke tape of Aobao Xianghui. So we’ll be entertaining the crowd with karaoke. Perhaps they lost the tape intentionally.
The other news is more troubling: This is Guangzhou’s biggest wedding of the year. Not just one couple will be married tonight.
“Fifty couples?” cries Lauren.
“It finally makes sense,” Byron sighs. “Li Song wasn’t joking when he said this wedding was going to be on TV.”
“This is ridiculous,” says Lauren.
“Indeed it is,” nods Paige sardonically.
Glasses of wine and beer appear in rows on long tables. Beside them stands an enormous upright greeting card, etched with a single red Chinese character. I don’t recognize the word, so I look for it in my dictionary, but I can’t find it there either. “It’s a special character,” Paige tells me, “made by pushing two of the same characters for ‘happiness’ next to each other. It means ‘double happiness.’ It’s used to describe a happiness that comes from a union of different things, or a connection, or…” she chuckles, “marital bliss. Tonight there’s going to be a lot of that.”
Well-dressed older folks begin to trickle in and mingle by the drinks. I stare at this new character, thinking that we’re that connection, and we’re a part of that bliss: the foreign, the strange, the exotic—joined together with what here is normal and mundane to create union amid contrasts. Why don’t we feel honored? We provide something else here too—the comic and the famous. We are white faces imported to make this event more impressive and prestigious.
“If we’re going to bomb…” Byron steps away from us, towards the drinks. “We might as well get bombed.”
I follow him and take a glass of beer. “We’re singing a cappella in front of an entire nation.” I laugh. “‘Step right up! Enter the big top! Watch the crazy, big-nosed Americans sing our most treasured folk song!’”
“Wu-cat must owe someone a huge favor,” Byron tosses his beer back and goes for a second. “He’s pimping out his gwailo.”
Mrs. Yuan approaches us, giggling. “You are nervous? Maybe you will do very well.”
I look at her coldly. “Maybe you know the song better than we do.”
“I’m too old.” She shakes her head, smoothing her dress.
Classical Western music swells overhead, and brides and grooms march in, two-by-two, in a parade of black tuxedos and red gowns. Television cameras pan the crowd. Byron and I find our assigned table, Lauren and Paige find theirs, and Mrs. Yuan sits with Wu-cat at a third. In a mixture of English and Mandarin, Byron and I introduce ourselves to the eight Chinese adults at our table. I explain what we’ll be performing, and they look impressed and honored. They ask how old we are, and where we’re from, but I’m soon too anxious to practice Mandarin for long. Byron and I partake liberally of the brandy presented to the table, and soon the polite conversation and clinking glass dissolve into a soft din in my ears. The first delicacy that arrives is chicken feet. I find myself eating boldly, pulling the taut, orange skin off with my teeth, as the Chinese do, and spitting the knuckles onto a white saucer. The dark brown cubes of congealed pig’s blood arrive next, and I delve in, flavoring the slippery and silky texture liberally with hot red pepper paste, pushing morsels with my tongue into the roof of my mouth. Byron follows suit, and we toast and shoot more brandy.
Paige appears at my shoulder. “Xiaofen is back,” she tells us. “She has their tape, a different tape from what we practiced with. But whatever. We come on at 8:30, as dinner is ending. We have to be waiting at 8:15 beside the stage. Lauren and I are over there.” She points to a distant table. She glances at our shot glasses. “Hey, how much are you guys drinking?”
Dancing women in white feathers, then prancing green dragons, then screeching singers in leather frolic and spin on stage. My brain buzzes. 8:15 arrives, and our table sends us off with encouragement. We weave through the tables: brides, grooms, families, friends, and the sounds of celebration. “Time to shatter marriages,” Lauren whispers, grabbing my arm as we climb the staircase to the stage. I stumble, and she looks at me and asks if I’m drunk. She glances over at Byron, who shrugs sheepishly. Actually my mind is focused like a laser, and a nervous pit in my stomach grows beneath the buzz. Now. A few yards in front of us the crescendo explodes: Shirtless men bang on drums, bird-like dancers pirouette to the booming rhythm, and fairies in white dresses twirl flaming batons. They all stop dead. Silence. Deafening applause.
Cameras flash and a million eyes are upon us. “Remember the g after the d at the chorus,” Paige whispers. The music sounds strange. The girls start singing, and they sound great. Then it’s our turn, but I don’t know if I’m really singing, because the karaoke voice is loud. I throw my whole voice into it, just to hear myself. The lover runs away but then pines for his beloved, and Byron and I are alone, serenading the crowd: “Nĭ naìxīn de dĕng dai wŏ!” (Wait for me patiently!) We sing, and a ruddy face at the first table starts laughing, and I smile back for a moment, and it’s just long enough for me to lose the melody, to beach us on some low note, posing as “nĭ xīnshàngde rén,” (the one in your heart), promising to “huílaí” (return). Finally we stumble, stagger, reunite, and Paige and Lauren sing with us, for us, and an ecstasy sweeps through my heart as we hold the long last note.
The room is applauding, and we bow. We stumble down the stairs, laughing and laughing—from the thrill and the panic and the release. “That,” Lauren gasps, “was awesome!”
“We were awful!” I blurt.
“No—we pulled it off!” she cries.
“Very good!” exclaims Mrs. Yuan, approaching the foot of the stairs. “You’re grea
t singers! Hee-hee! I told you so!”
Thousands of eyes follow us back to our seats. This time I am the snake, the turtle soup, the exotic animal on display, the oddity served up for consumption.
Chapter 15
A Journey to Centuries Past
During the first days of his wandering life, in the first greedy whirl of regained freedom, Goldmund had to learn the homeless, timeless life of travelers. Obedient to no man, dependent only on weather and season, without a goal before them or a roof above them, owning nothing, open to every whim of fate, the homeless wanderers lead their childlike, brave, shabby existence. They are the sons of Adam, who was driven out of paradise.
—Herman Hesse, Narcissus & Goldmund
“You saw them!” exclaims Wujia, shirtless, watching us pack. “The horses! My mother won’t let us—ride them—so I watch them run—”
We tell him the story of our visit to the Great Wall, but his eyes glaze over, and the conversation feels like a one-way street. When we’re finished packing, we bid him and Fujin a warm goodbye, grateful for their friendly, if tense, hospitality. I shoulder my backpack, and we step out a final time through the metal door, into the hútòng.
The Underground Dragon ferries us east, and we emerge under an ominous, gray sky that hangs over the train station like a hood. Colt has a train to catch, a journey to begin, and he’s in a hurry. We embrace. We bless each other’s next adventures. And then he’s gone. Back to Guangzhou, back to California, back to a different kaleidoscope of skies, streets, and hurries. He’s gone, and I feel the way I felt when I first arrived in Tiananmen Square, a wild delight and terror mingling in the bottom of my belly.
My feet carry me slowly away from the station, through the descending mist, on a path back to Tiananmen, past Mao and the five arches, up to Tiananmen Gate itself. At the walls of the Forbidden City, China’s largest complex of classical palaces, I stop. Many nations have had royal palaces; China had a royal city, of which only emperors and their councilors and concubines were allowed to become citizens, and they formed a ruling class that lived for centuries and died in a perfect, proprietary world. Before me is the closed inner gate, where only once, in 1901, after mercilessly smashing the Boxer Rebellion, did dà bízi enter freely. I mercilessly ask first for a locals’ ticket, but the rumpled old female half-hidden behind a dusty pane of glass and a collage of brochures shakes her head. When I call more Mandarin into the grate she straightens up a bit in her brown coat and orders me into the foreigners’ line.
“No,” I tell her. “I live in China. I teach English in Guangzhou.”
“Sorry. You must purchase a lăowài ticket,” she uses the Mandarin version of gwailo. “It’s 90元.”
She plows on through my hesitation, shooting rapid-fire sentences I cannot follow. She finally glares at me. “The other line.”
I see Colt climbing the scaffolding to take his glorious victorious photos; I see Lauren and Paige singing at the wedding; I see myself playing guitar at Peizheng. The trick was to be foreign. But now perhaps I can personify the other half of my current, hybrid existence, and be Chinese. “Look,” I explain to her, enunciating the Mandarin slowly, correctly. “I have a work license. I am a teacher. I live in Guangzhou.” I hand her my flimsy, rubber-backed, yes-you’re-right-it-looks-fake work license, with its stapled-on passport photo.
She examines it. “A Foreign Friend. You purchase a lăowài ticket.”
“How can you charge me the Foreign Friends’ price?” I ask. “I’m a poor teacher.” I wouldn’t fit any international definition of poor, but for my small stockpile of yuan savings to take me to Tiger Leaping Gorge or any distance into the hinterlands, I’ll have to avoid the costly plight of Foreign Friends. “I’m very poor. I teach English at a high school. I am helping China to become great and proud. I’m uplifting the nation.”
“I’m sorry. You must have a residence permit,” she utters the magic words.
“Yes, of course. I do. Yes, here,” I hand her the slip of paper.
“No,” she shakes her head. “Sorry.”
“But I work in China! Don’t you wonder why I speak Mandarin so well? Here’s a letter from my school. I must be charged normal Chinese prices.”
She eyes a note I asked Mrs. Yuan to write for me. She flips it over, examines the immense red seal, and glares my way. In that moment I realize something about China: The more documents one has, the more insignias, stamps, seals, and official government imprimaturs, the more powerful you are. “Mm. OK,” she eyes me coldly. “30元. Do you want the tape tour?”
I push the money to her, accept the ticket, and turn down the tape tour. With an outrageously sweet sense of triumph, I step across the threshold.
The forbidden world is colorless. Low, damp, pale heavens sag over courtyards of naked granite. I cross a broad courtyard, and the pallor is broken by the first of a dozen widely-spaced, red-walled palaces. The roofs are angled tiers of gold. Black metal lions glare at me as I pass into Longevity and Happiness Hall, where I examine museum-style display cases of ancient leather shoes, delicately-etched porcelain bowls, and jade statuettes of horses. My eyes linger on the curved handle of an ebony comb, and as I gaze at it, my mind wanders backward, into centuries past, to the luxurious estates of Cao Xueqin’s classic of Chinese literature, The Story of the Stone, where courtesans and courtiers flirted at lavish feasts, hatched petty conspiracies, and led romantic lives without leaving their palaces. The year is 1420, and as I wander through a lush garden, Emperor Yongle stands before me; I watch the intelligent brutal emperor command a few of his million slaves to build, to his precise design, this endless complex of pleasure domes. A century later, when the slaves finish, Yongle’s descendants in the Ming dynasty rule from here. Then it’s 1664, and I watch Manchu marauders ride in and burn the palaces to the ground. The Manchus start the Qing dynasty and rebuild the royal city, and history cycles on. In 1911, Sun Yatsen brings down the Qing Dynasty, and then comes Mao Tse-tung, then Deng Xiaoping.
Snapping out of my reverie, I find myself perched on a large stone next to a pool, staring at a glistening leaf on a sapling tree. Two young women are giggling on the other side of the pool. “You said you liked lemon, so I did too—I was nervous!” One laughs and looks at me as I eavesdrop. Our eyes connect. She glances away, but then a minute later, she glances my way again. They soon leave. I’m not a courtier right now. I think back to my Peizheng companions and try to remember why I pushed them away, why I wondered around alone, why I ended up so solitary. The thought of Lu Lan brings a sweet tingle and a sudden knife of sadness.
I pull out the book, Narcissus & Goldmund, and fly away to young Goldmund’s side in the cloister. He recovers physically, but the stirrings in his heart only deepen. Confused and disappointed with himself, longing to remain on the monastic path to holy perfection, he gives himself completely to Latin and Greek. Nevertheless, the artist’s streak in his soul drives him elsewhere. In the older, colder Narcissus he finds an intellectual, a friend, a teacher, and a man who speaks of destiny and the difference between love of the good and real love of all that comprises God—good and bad, sin and perfection. Goldmund is captivated.
The ashen sky falls in fat drops, and I leave the forbidden world. Tiananmen Square is vast beneath the rain, crawling with pedal-powered tricycle taxis. I wave them off and continue on foot, threading through streams of people, relishing the scents: roasting plum sauce from a row of restaurants, floral perfumes cold from the air conditioning of fancy boutiques, aromas of pan-fried wheat and oil from street vendors operating big black ovens.
In the afternoon, the sun finally blasts through the rain clouds vengefully, and I return to the train station, ready to leave. A different surly woman behind a different pane of glass says a variety of incomprehensible things before accepting my rainbow of rénmínbì and handing me a “hard sleeper” ticket to Xi’an. Minuscule printed characters confirm that I leave tomorrow, at 10 am.
A bus slaloms through seemingl
y every nook of the city, carelessly banging around sharp turns, and delivers me with a newly bruised elbow at another palace for emperors. The Summer Palace. It’s a leafy paradise where, for centuries, royalty fled the city’s estival heat. I’m just in time to see the brass poles of its gate swing shut. A woman locks it up. “Closed,” she says, in English. I mumble protestations: that I rode all this way to see this place, that I leave tomorrow, that my guidebook obviously listed incorrect hours. To my utter surprise, she furtively waves me closer. “You can discover Small Gate.” She points down the street.
I nod, partly understanding, partly trusting her gesture, and partly just following the silent intuition of my feet. The street plunges into a labyrinth of hútòng. After winding left and right, at a dead-end, through the branches of a prodigious willow tree, I spy the charcoal gray walls—and a small stone gate standing ajar! A man in a stationery shop spies on me. I smile at him, turn, and push through the branches.
Like Alice in Wonderland, I emerge into a vast dreamscape of hills, trees, brick paths, stone bridges, and a gorgeous lake. The sun, now slung low in the sky, blazes a brilliant trail of orange gold across the water. A giddy gratitude lifts me as I alight onto a path and follow it to a bridge that arches as steep as a semicircle over a finger of the lake. Gazing across the lake, I count seventeen silhouetted arches on a longer, classical bridge. The path takes me into a covered sidewalk whose wooden walls are emblazoned with paintings of battles and banquets. At the end of the walk, I come upon a tall man in a burgundy shirt who’s selling postcards.
“No thanks,” I shake my head.
“You speak Mandarin!” comes his response.
“A little. How’s business?”
“Not too good,” he says, glancing about. His postcards depict the lake and the graceful seventeen-arched bridge. He laughs at himself. “The place is closed. How do you like the Long Corridor?”
Double Happiness: One Man's Tale of Love, Loss, and Wonder on the Long Roads of China Page 10