“The paintings are beautiful.” I take in the battle scene on my left. “Are they old?”
“The Summer Palace is hundreds of years old—emperors built it and rebuilt it and visited often.” He has a handsome face and an unusually straight jaw line; his Mandarin is crisp. “But the Long Corridor was whitewashed during the Cultural Revolution, and then the Red Guards destroyed it.” He closes his eyes, as if he watched the destruction himself. “It was repainted just a few years ago. How long have you been in Beijing?” he asks, resuming a tour guide’s tone of voice.
“Five days. I came to see the huíguī.”
“Yes, everyone’s happy,” he nods.
“Are you happy?” I ask.
He pauses. “I don’t really care. What does it do for anyone, for me and my family? Chinese people are poorer now—the government spent so much on huge gifts for the people of Hong Kong.”
“Wow, most people say, ‘It cleanses our dishonor white as snow,’ and things like that.”
“I don’t always read the newspapers. They lie.”
“Are there many people like you?”
“Of course. The newspaper lies, the government lies. There are so many corrupt officials and huàidān (bad eggs). For China to be strong again, we must have an open government and the rule of law.” His name is Pei, and he follows me around the lake, telling me stories about the places we pass. He points out the moored Boat of Purity and Ease, and tells me it’s made of stone but, miraculously, floats like any other boat. The Qing empress decreed its construction in 1888, hosted banquets on it, and went on to redesign all the islands and courtyards to fit her own favorite fantasies. Pei turns back to politics and war, and runs me through the horrors China endured when carved up by the “Eight Colonizing Powers” during the Qing Dynasty. He recounts the misdeeds of the “merciless capitalists,” seeming at times to expect an apology for America’s part. I just listen, watching the hot pink sun die splendidly on the water.
I click my camera, letting it chop up and flatten the world around me. Pei tells me about the China Democratic Party, and I mention the party that the dissidents in Guangzhou told me about—the New Light Party—but he hasn’t heard of it. “China needs more parties, more movements, more ideas,” he nods. “More lawyers.” He looks at me thoughtfully. “Hong Kong now needs more lawyers too.”
We climb through scraggly bushes and trees to the park’s highest point, and from there we take in all of Beijing—its monstrous, living, sprawling, smoking expansiveness; its glassy downtown buildings sprouting construction cranes; its countless, identical apartment buildings standing at attention like pink stone soldiers. The place feels political. Guangzhou can hardly be bothered as it hurtles full-speed-ahead toward economic miracles, but here ideas and ideologies are the coin of the realm, constantly changing hands and being rebranded, reborn, reformulated, reorganized. Communism’s demise is ignored, finessed, or vigorously disproved while the rare, glorious victorious moments at which Pei scoffs dominate the news pages and television screens.
I buy three postcards and bid Pei goodbye.
“Yī lù shūn fēng,” he says. I recognize the phrase as the one Lu Lan taught me when she was in my arms. “May your road be smooth and your journey safe.”
Chapter 16
The Scent of the Winter
Plum Blossom
為學日益為道日損
Learning consists in daily accumulating,
The practice of the Tao consists in daily diminishing.
—Tao Te Ching, 48
I awaken to Morning Exercises. “Yī, èr, sān, sì, wŭ…” (One, two, three, four, five…). The loudspeaker counts off the numbers, and a thousand children on the athletic field shout them out as they do calisthenics. It must be a weekday. Sighing, I part the mosquito netting and place my feet in my flip-flops on the concrete floor. Monday. For breakfast I peel an Asian pear with a vegetable peeler, throwing shards of blotchy brown rind into our blue wastebasket. I devour the fruit’s grainy white flesh. I have a pastry too, or a bite—until my tongue wanders into a dollop of the pungent red bean paste. It tastes like apple butter and refried pinto beans, and I can’t stomach it yet.
A rare crystal-clear sky domes campus. Students smack ping-pong balls on the dozen concrete tables. CLICK-CLOCK! CLICK—they all stop to smile and wave at me. I wave back as I walk by on the concrete paving stones, passing through the palm trees. The five-story classroom towers stare down at me, and I can now read the propaganda emblazoned on Tower A. Turn towards modernization, turn towards the world, turn towards tomorrow. Li Song told me that in 1963 Peizheng assumed the politically correct name High School #57 and switched to training local government and military children. That was during the mania of the Cultural Revolution, and it probably helped the school escape the pillage endured by many “bourgeois” institutions. Today, the school is again called Peizheng, and it’s again one of Guangzhou’s more prestigious. The scattered ping-pong tables, bald basketball courts, unsanitary swimming pool, and hard dusty athletic field wouldn’t amaze anyone in suburban America, but here amidst this cheek-by-jowl closeness and roaring construction, they’re an oasis. In addition to the miracle of their existence is the miracle of their constant use: The school’s 2,200 students continuously rotate in and out for athletics—and for the Morning Exercises that rouse me every day.
I stop for a moment beside the basketball courts, under one of three enormous grandfather banyan trees. Children are playing basketball with exuberance—running, jumping, and diving—and their gleeful cries and the sounds of bouncing balls echo off the high tile walls of the buildings. I close my eyes and just listen, savoring the noise and their energy. The bell rings, and there are shrieks and laughter coming from every direction. The students flee to class, taking their sounds with them. I hear footsteps dashing up the outdoor stairways, followed finally by silence. Monotonous recitation then spills down from above: Mandarin, in cadence, call and response, call and response. Words, silence, words. My mind wanders to somewhere I’ve never been: I’m on a grassy riverbank, and I’m walking and walking, searching for something, climbing a steep hillside behind a building, a sacred building, and I’m scrambling upwards, all for something I yearn to find at the top.
The clap of a tennis shoe on concrete yanks me back to Peizheng. My eyes open as a boy races past me, papers clutched in a fist, his footsteps pounding up the stairs.
I ascend the five flights of Classroom Tower C. Unlocking my room, I find my lectern still covered with the morning’s delivery of dust. Sweeping my hand across it, I spot something I’ve somehow never noticed before: a small Chinese flag mounted above the chalkboard. It hangs there quietly in a glass frame, five yellow stars standing on a red field. Gazing at it, I imagine for a moment that I’m working as a government propagandist. I’d have a plan and a clear notion of what to teach, but probably no idea whether I were actually getting through. It would be about the same! I chuckle. An idea dawns on me, a feeling more than a thought. I don’t have to follow an agenda or push propaganda. I’m actually free.
Awaiting my students’ arrival, I open a letter that Mr. Chen handed to me as I left the dormitory. “Tony: Hello,” it begins. The stationery is lemon yellow with cute pink frogs.
I’m a student of yours in Tenth Grade. You have taught us for five weeks. In these days, I feel your way of teaching is not very outstanding. I’m sorry, just in my opinion. At the beginning of class, you usually poses a topic first. I think the knowledges you gave us were very useful, but most of those, we had learnt it before. And then you let us practise one by one. I think this part has spent too much time. After I had answered your questions, I have to wait and wait until the bell rang. I feel very depressed. So I have a propose. Can you please have a look at our English book we’re learning first? And then combine our lessons to give us knowledges. Then you can take a sample for examination with some of us (not all of us). This way will make all of us become more interested in English. All
above are just my opinion. I think you won’t mind my view. If you don’t approve of me, up to you!
Not very outstanding. I fold up the letter, which is clearly from one of my best students, maybe Iceboy. Suddenly I’m overcome with frustration, dumbfounded as to why Mrs. Yuan hasn’t given us copies of their textbooks. I’m already struggling to maintain discipline and prevent the rowdy kids from running roughshod over my hopes for orderly classes. With order, I could get them all to speak, I could create captivating classes, and then, just maybe, I could stimulate their innate urge to learn. Not very outstanding. I stare out the window, contemplating the dilapidated skyline. The guitar was an idiotic idea. I was trying to shut them up by making them sing.
An idea drops into my brain like a basketball through a hoop. I let my prepared propaganda fall by the wayside, and I step to the board and chalk up a map of a traditional American town—city blocks, stoplights, a bank, a school, a supermarket.
“Hellloooo Toooo-ny!” cries Sandoh, streaking in a second early from the sweet crystalline morning. His classmates clatter into the rest of the seats, and those who have brought their tiny notebooks copy down the words I’ve scrawled on the board: map, street, bank, post office, supermarket, intersection, directions. I explain a new word—skit—and they listen attentively. I divide them into small groups and then point to the board. “OK, this is a map. You are in this town, by the bank, and one of you is lost. So the others help and give directions.” I look quietly from face to face. “This is how you make a skit.”
Pacing the room, eavesdropping to the best of my ability on each group’s whispers, I let them get to it. Ten minutes pass. I call a group of five girls to go first, and they step to the front of the room.
“You are lost?” Jenny turns softly to Sucky.
Sucky stands beside her on the stage, and she nods, reticent.
Jenny continues: “For the supermarket, you go right. Take your left on the Oak Street, and then go on the right.”
Alice adds: “Remember to walk... on the sidewalk.”
“Thank you,” says Sucky. Each girl speaks at least a few words.
Delighted, I motion them back to their seats, and I give them a score on the chalkboard: 9.0.
I point next to Sandoh, and he and four buddies, including the irrepressible David Beckham, rush on stage and act out their own version of a Hollywood action movie. The lost person, Beckham, happens to be packing an Uzi, and he holds up the bank and loudly guns down everyone else onstage. The boys hurl each other into desks for, perhaps, cinematic realism. I jump in to halt the violence, righting the desks, sending them back to their seats, sighing, realizing this was all a stupid idea. I haven’t gotten anywhere.
“OK, yes, pretty similar to an American city,” I finally say, writing 8.2 on the board. The boys protest in noisy unison; they’re shocked. I explain that one boy never spoke. They nod with a silent and piercing recognition. Maybe I have gotten somewhere.
The other groups go, and they get it immediately. Suspense hangs in the air when I go to score each skit. I teach the lesson again in the afternoon and again the following day, and I find myself often just watching. They stand before their classmates and perform, improvise, and aim for a perfect ten. Many clearly adore performing, and competing and winning seem to capture everyone’s attention.
On Wednesday afternoon, a time we don’t have any classes, I describe the skits to Byron. He says I’m not really teaching them anything, but he congratulates me on finding something I like, and we just laugh together about our lives, the pace of this life, the rhythm of working a mere twelve hours a week. He’s using his extra time to hone his skills authoring short stories. I’m playing enough guitar to hopefully be a rock star when I get home. We sit there on our golden plastic stools and sweat comfortably in the afternoon, discussing our dreams and savoring the slowness of the day. Our conversations are punctuated with whole minutes of silence, but we’re soon on one of his favorite topics, philosophy.
“We all want to change the world in some way,” he says. “The ‘will to power’ is strong. This is what Nietzsche talks about—an inherent drive to assert oneself, to resist oblivion, to achieve something, to change the world. This imperative is behind everything, driving everything, even when it’s repressed.”
I’ve begun reading an English translation of the Tao Te Ching, and I’ve been absorbing the way it encourages something else, letting our guidance come from nature’s primal course rather than from our personal desire.
“That would be religion,” says Byron.
“The opiate of the masses?” I smile.
“The opiate of the people,” he corrects me. “The masses—that’s American propaganda dehumanizing communism, dehumanizing Marx.” He pauses. “Think what you think, of course, you need to. We all need to. Go where your brain goes, and watch when you have the appetite for more. Our future is dictated by our past thoughts and experiences, and we have to follow it. What’s truly rare is something new—those moments of clarity—since it’s what we’re most deeply scared of, what we avoid at all costs. As Dostoevsky, such a brilliant writer, said, ‘Taking a new step, using a new word, is what people fear most.’”
“I don’t want to be scared of anything,” I counter slowly. “Not of what I don’t know, not of these new, weird Chinese ideas. But I don’t know if it’s possible. I want to ‘know thyself, know the other,’ as Sun Tzu says. I want to learn about China, this place, without imitating anyone who’s come before. I want to experience everything as directly as I can.” I glance at him again, but he’s looking out the window now, and he seems gone. Silence retakes the concrete room. The conversation is over. We’re both loners, introverts. We’re people who can live together without ever really getting close.
Some time later he speaks up. “Hey, are you interested in a barbecue?”
I look up from the Tao Te Ching.
“Yeah, a barbecue. Wang Yin invited me. She told me to invite you.”
“Quiet? With glasses?”
“Shy,” he nods. “She starts talking when you get to know her.”
“She’s in my Teacher Training.” I teach a woman named Wang Yin in a weekly session Mrs. Yuan arranged to help the English teachers. Wang Yin is an attractive young teacher who never speaks, whose story is familiar to us both: Princeton-in-Asia sent interns here for the first time last year, and one of them dated her, led her to believe he would marry her, and then at the end of the year left—for good. It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that this year we men live on campus, under lock and key. “So, now you’re getting to know her?” I ask. “Like Zach ‘got to know her’ last year?”
“I know, I know,” Byron chuckles. “We’re not that close. She speaks enough English, I’m just asking her to teach me Mandarin.”
“Right,” I smile. “Not imitating anyone. Taking a new step is what we fear most.”
“I’m—”
Our baby blue phone cries out from its perch on our TV. Most Chinese families didn’t own phones until ten years ago; this is the first ring from ours. I pick up the receiver, and a stream of Cantonese flows into my ear.
“Zhè shì shéi?” I ask (Who is this?).
The voice gets louder. How can you teach my child American songs? America wants to rule the world and turn our children into prostitutes and murderers. Or perhaps he’s saying: This is the police—we heard what you said about forks being better than chopsticks. You will undergo twelve years of re-education in Qinghai province. Or maybe it’s: How can you live in Canton and not understand Cantonese? You should leave our contry!
“Wŏ tīngbudŏng” I say. (I don’t understand).
“Wei?” And then a click.
I teach Byron a few statements to use if it rings again.
“When do I learn how to swear?” he asks.
“Ask Wang Yin to teach you,” I smile.
“Shut up with that!” he laughs.
“Seriously, whenever I do, I guess. ‘Dog farts’ means
bullshit.”
“When do you use that?”
“In the market sometimes.”
I do tag along, and we meet Wang Yin at the school gate. Quiet as ever, she leads us through residential streets and quiet alleys. We walk by four seated women who are laughing and loudly clacking red mahjong tiles on a table. We pass an old man cobbling shoes at a street-side “shop” that consists of him, a table, a chair, tools, leather, and a half dozen rubber soles. Two students bicycle by us, ringing their bells continuously. I realize something: I have yet to find a Guangzhou street that feels unsafe.
We knock on a metal door, and a young woman lets us into a sparsely furnished flat. The air pulses softly with Cantonese pop music, and the aroma is thick with the wafting aroma of green tea. Young adults stare at us, a few of whom I recognize as Peizheng teachers. Wang Yin leads us out back, into a courtyard where guests stand around circular grills, smoking, laughing, and turning iron skewers spiked through gray balls. The scents of charcoal, oyster sauce, and roasting meat lace the air. She introduces me to a Peizheng biology teacher named Lu Lan who is soon leading me off to a buffet table laden with smooth pink and gray golf-ball-sized meatballs, ears of corn, and piles of the alarmingly red sausages from the market. The way her long hair falls loosely past her shoulders makes her stand out in a way very few girls or women at Peizheng do—long hair has been out of fashion since the 1949 revolution. And for decades standing out hasn’t been a good idea. I notice that a few others around us wear clothes in bright hues that are also only now becoming cool. Lu Lan hands me an ear of corn and two pinkish gray meatballs which she names “fish,” showing me how to dip the spongy balls into a sour-smelling black sauce and impale them on a heavy iron skewer. She goes off to get drinks. Doubting I’ll have the guts to eat them, I nevertheless take the skewered balls over to a spot at a grill and hold them over the flames. Thick smoke eagerly stings my eyes, and I’m squinting painfully when she brings back two glasses of steaming tea.
Double Happiness: One Man's Tale of Love, Loss, and Wonder on the Long Roads of China Page 11