She wanders off again, and through tears I watch my fishball melt, stretch, yawn in half, and drool onto the hot coals, transmogrifying into a black belch of smoke. I leave it for dead and pierce a pinker ball, probably pork. The people at the next grill effortlessly cook multiple balls at once; they jabber in Cantonese, idly watching me, pointing at me. I feel like I’m deaf and dumb, onstage again, and I accept it this time.
“Put it further in,” Lu Lan says in English, surprising me. “Over the fire.” My eyeballs are raw and my knuckles singed, but I hold the ball lower and further over the grill. Why is this so difficult? Smiling, Lu Lan takes the skewer and shows me how to slip it into a groove on the lip of the grill, and then the weight is much easier to handle. She looks at me, and I meet her eye, and there’s a pretty smoothness and angularity in her cheeks. The cooking pork smells sweet and we try out my halting Mandarin. She asks me whether I’m “xíguàn China,” and this time I know what it means. “Yes,” I reply flatly, “I am accustomed to life in China.” I char several more items before finally sitting down on the concrete stairs beside her. The pork ball is tough and tastes awful. I was scared of undercooking it, so I seared the sauce off and the skin to leather. The yellow corn is only slightly burnt.
“Would you like to teach me English?” she enunciates, as I somehow swallow an entire crunchy fishball. She regards me with a shocked smile as I choke it down. Her slender neck reminds me of a swan. “If you’ll teach me Mandarin,” I finally reply, coughing.
“Ok.” She points at my mouth and I pick a piece of corn from my teeth.
The next day Lu Lan shows me into the Peizheng Biology Department office. “Mrs. Shen, Mrs. Jiang,” she introduces me demurely to her colleagues. She takes me into an empty classroom, seats us at a black laboratory table, and avoids my eyes for several moments.
“Do you know about Moon Festival?” she finally asks in English.
“No, what happens? Does the moon change?”
“Yes, it becomes orange,” she says. She laughs. “No. But watch out. It starts tomorrow night.” And in a mix of Mandarin and English she tells me about the coming festivities. “In the daytime,” she says, with my help, “families offer fruit and chicken and rice wine to the ancestors, and burn the incense. Mm, in the night,” she continues, slightly giggling but apparently frustrated, “children are carrying around red dēnglŏng—” We pause to look it up. “—lanterns—people eat treats and mooncakes. My friends and I are making paper boats and float them on the lake. With candles.” She pauses, and as she shifts our knees collide under the table. Her vocabulary in English is clearly larger than mine in Mandarin, but she speaks even more hesitantly than I do. “We used to write our desires on the little slips of paper and watch them float away.”
“Did they come true—your desires?”
“Mm, I don’t remember.” She starts a lot of phrases with this ‘mm.’ “I don’t think so,” she laughs but continues more seriously. “Everyone likes to watch the moon. I guess that’s the thing. Sometimes sweethearts, mm, exchange flowers.” We move from topic to topic—my family, movies, whether girls should live at home before they’re married, as she does—because every time the pesky language barrier blocks our path. That’s the point, I remind myself, why I’m in this laboratory. The language barrier.
“Xiàge xīngqīsì jiàn” (See you next Thursday), I say at the end of the lesson, watching her smile in approval at one of my few correct phrases. We wish each other happy Moon Festival weekends and fold up our lists of new words, written mostly in her pretty handwriting. “Zàijiàn,” she says goodbye curtly, like a teacher.
The next night it begins, Moon Festival, and I stroll through endless narrow streets. Giant red paper lanterns dangle from overburdened telephone poles, vendors hawk sweet poppy-seed mooncakes, and an aura of enchantment and magic permeates the air. Four of my students rush up to me, and with hands and mouths full of candied taro, juicy pomelo, and sweetened sticky rice, they wish me a happy festival. Down by the river, I discover a small park where families are placing miniature boats in a pond, and I imagine slips of paper inside carrying away their desires.
My three colleagues are in Hong Kong for the holiday weekend, and I am alone.
October 8
I’ve always longed for more space and time away from people. I’ve always assumed I’d finally figure my life out when I could be alone. But now, today, I felt loneliness, a weird, unusual sadness, an emptiness, a grayness at the edges of things. I don’t miss my gwailo colleagues—I don’t feel that close to them yet for some reason. And I love the expansiveness here, the time and space to just be in the present, to be simply alive. But this Guangzhou solitude, this anonymity in a crowded city, is strange and wildly complete. No one cares for 10,000 miles. This is the fear I felt as I fell ill—not just that I would die, but that no one would give a damn.
Maybe loneliness has been in me all along, and I’ve just never gone deep enough to feel it. I know I’m sensing things deeper here. There’s something terrifying inside me that I don’t yet understand and can’t yet touch.
Lu Lan folds her legs under the chair beside me. Our noses are in an orange Chinese textbook. We’re dissecting a passage on foreign students who complain about their housing, and she asks about my apartment, wondering if I want to move to a different one.
“Bú shì lĭxĭangde,” (It’s not perfect), I reply slowly. “But it’s OK. I guess….” I switch to English. “I don’t really care?”
“Wŏ bú zài hu” (I don’t care), she instructs.
“Wŏ bú zài hu,” I repeat.
“Mm,” she approves. “This phrase is common in Cantonese, too.”
“Wŏ bú zài hu,” I say again.
“Wú suŏ wèi,” she adds, a wisp of hair falling from her ponytail. “Mm, this also means ‘I don’t care.’”
I repeat after her, and I ask in Mandarin whether either of the two is like “méi guānxì,” which I hear all the time. I enjoy forming the question and enunciating the falling and rising tones, and then watching her understand. She smiles and answers, and for the first time the language sounds beautiful, this Mandarin. It’s an exquisite language, with delicate musical melodies in its tones and a strikingly raw simplicity to its grammar.
“‘Méi guānxì,’ means ‘it doesn’t matter,’” she explains. Looking at her, as my ears open to discern her words, I feel my eyes open to discern more too. She tells me why some Chinese call foreigners ‘dà bízi,’ though I already know. “Is mine big?” I ask her, touching my nose, turning, laughing self-consciously. Hers is small, unobtrusive. Sitting there on her hands, quiet, thoughtful, briefly laughing at me, she seems too young to be a teacher.
We finish with the textbook, and she asks again about my complaints, as if there must be something that makes me unhappy. I talk about Mr. Chen, locked gates, concrete floors, and the poisonous, capricious water that shuns our house for days at a time.
“So everything is perfect!” she says.
“Yes,” I smile. “Lĭxĭangde,” I pronounce the word carefully. “Right?”
She nods. “You say it well. You want to get it just right, don’t you?”
“When I hear other foreigners, I don’t like their accent.” I’ve been called a perfectionist, but, honestly, things can be lĭxĭangde. It just takes time.
“Your accent is…” she pauses for effect, “getting better.” She peppers me with questions about her new favorite topic—my singing performance at the wedding—since she didn’t manage to see it on TV. She looks up a word in her dictionary “I was deprived. Can you sing it now?”
“No way!”
“Please?”
“I don’t think I could sing it then. Do you know Aobao Xianghui?”
“Of course. It’s a classic. It’s about a Mongolian warrior waiting for his princess.” She’s disappointed when I still shake my head. She takes out packets of newspaper and unwraps what turn out to be traditional Dumpling Festival treats
called zòngzi. Dank seaweed-smelling green corn leaves envelop a lump of hot sweet sticky rice that contains boiled hunks of pork and dried dates. I watch her eat delicately with her fingers, and I do my best to mimic her. “These were going to be your prize for singing,” she shakes her head at me. “They’re my favorites.” As we eat she asks again about our place and about our air conditioner, which doesn’t work. Does she want to come see the place? Does she want to go somewhere more private? It would be wrong. Romance, attraction—whatever this is—is wrong, illegal, miscegenation, trouble for foreigners, trouble for Princeton in Asia. Or maybe it’s legal, and just improper. I don’t know, but I don’t invite her over. When it’s time to say zàijiàn, I can’t resist asking her something else. Does she like bowling, the hip new rage sweeping Guangzhou? She regards me for a moment, and answers a question I didn’t ask. She’s busy this weekend, she says. I translate this mentally. She just wants a tutor.
The next day Mr. Chen hands me another letter from a student. It’s on the same stationery with the pink frogs.
I’m pleased you have received my letter last time. And I feel your way of teaching became better. Really. At least you had made the class lively and interesting. Maybe now also introduce American culture for us. Everything for example. You can broadcast music for us. And if you sing to us I think it’s better. We’ll be very pleased to hear you sing again. Or you may play games with us. And I’m very sorry to say that I feel you often betray signs of impatience when we can’t understand you. I think your explain is clear. And you even use body language. But after all we are Chinese. And not all the Chinese are good at English and comprehend ability is strong. OK! Tell you something you don’t know. Last week there were fewer students to have class with you. They didn’t hate your teaching. They’re just naughty. Some boys shirked school. All of us will stand by you whatever happens. Forever.
Your student, Keroppi (my penname).
An anonymous stamped envelope has been included, so I write back to Keroppi. “I focus on your oral English,” I tell him or her. “That is why I am here. It will be helpful for all of you to practice informal situations. I want to ensure that all of you speak in class.” Folding up the letter quickly as my students rush in, I realize I should take attendance. It’s discouraging that they’re skipping class, but I can’t reformulate my lessons again.
The first skit begins, and they board the airplane: passengers, pilots, flight attendants. The plane takes off. The pilot thanks everyone for flying Peizheng Airlines. Suddenly two passengers, Sandoh and David Beckham, stand up, shout, and hijack the flight—and my lesson plan. I glare at them, wondering what is so irresistible about imitating Hollywood. I force them to redo their skit, but it’s like pulling teeth, and when they finally do it, they take so long it robs other groups of time for theirs. At the bell, I dismiss everyone, and Sandoh darts out first, as always.
Ralph, a thin serious boy with a disheveled mess of black hair, stays behind. His classmates have clearly discovered grooming and the opposite sex, but he’s a late bloomer. He stands rigidly before me, and he formally invites “the four American teachers” to his home for dinner.
Twilight descends, and three of us dà bízi meet Ralph on a street near campus. He still wears his navy blue uniform as he leads us along an avenue shaded by tall, anonymous apartment towers. Each tower holds a vertical grid of metal-cage balconies. Ralph unlocks the metal front door of one of the towers and lets us into a dingy lobby. A shaky elevator yanks us up to the tenth floor. His apartment is a small concrete place, slightly smaller than ours, but with a magnificently decorated living room. Ralph introduces his mother and father, pours tea from an elegant pot into six small glasses, then sits attentively. To our astonishment, his father is Master Liang Feng, a painter of some renown who has displayed work all over China, in the U.S., and elsewhere.
Master Liang has a serene, intelligent face with small eyes and scant rough hair. He leads us on a tour of the paintings on the walls, and Byron admires them while Paige translates for us. His modern Chinese scenes are harsh, remote landscapes in muted colors with rare microscopic human figures lost amid gigantic mountains, towering clouds, and roaring rivers. In one painting, towering ash grey mountains command the entire canvas, and a few trees and a lonesome temple clinging to one ridge look like an imperious God’s afterthought. In another, a minuscule fisherman watches a colossal river gush down through the rock walls of a canyon.
Master Liang seats us on an austere mahogany sofa, and thanks us for coming. We apologize that Lauren had to stay home with a cold. Byron asks whether his artistic freedom is ever affected by politics, and Master Liang shakes his head. “Art is actually flourishing freely today. There are so many excellent painters that many cannot display their work, but today it’s not because of the Communists.” He pauses, then smiles bitterly. “Chairman Mao was no supporter of the arts, but it was he who spoke about conflicting styles of art and said, ‘Let a hundred flowers blossom.’ This is finally happening. We are progressing… in so many ways.” In another of Master Liang’s paintings I see a different declaration. It depicts a distant train zipping over a high bridge in an immense mountain range, and it seems to urge China to hold onto her traditions, her heritage, her natural beauty, but also to strive for strength and modernization.
We kneel around a low black table for a Cantonese feast. Ralph’s mother, who has been smiling in obvious pleasure during her husband’s remarks, brings in steaming platters of seafood and fresh stir-fried greens. Her hair is cropped closely at her ears in a politically correct bob, and there is a slight stoop to her shoulders. Her days are spent at a restaurant on Shamian Island, we learn. She sits to eat last.
“How is Ralph doing in school?” Master Liang asks, turning to me. I glance over at Ralph, who sits with an impassive face beside his mother. He’s an only child, I realize. The Liangs are a good, modern family.
“Hĕn hăo,” I reply directly to Master Liang, who smiles in surprise and appreciation, and glances at his wife. I go on in Mandarin. “Really well. Ralph is smart and he gets English quickly.” This is gentle flattery: Ralph is well-behaved but often appears confused, as he did during today’s airplane skits.
Master Liang speaks directly to me. “He has a marvelous opportunity with you here. Thank you.” He says something else about kindness and travel, and I finally have to turn to Paige. Byron has been awaiting her translations all night, but I’ve been trying to understand on my own and cultivate a notion that my Mandarin is beyond flailing and perhaps nearly mediocre. In the market I construct simple questions, but I rarely understand the answers, and no one seems to grasp the notion of speaking slowly—it’s either on or off, rapid-fire or stony silence. Saleswomen and taxi drivers hear my inquiries and unleash torrents of incomprehensible syllables. I understand Lu Lan’s delightful, lucid enunciations, and to me she is unique.
Brushstroke. Original. Characteristic. I memorize the new words flying through the air. Calligraphy hangs on my tongue, and I repeat the word quietly to myself as Master Liang shows us some of his. Calligraphy is at least as revered an art form as painting, and his is stunning. His characters flow in a wild, cursive freehand known as the grass style, and as with his paintings, there’s a vital boldness, a seemingly unassailable freedom in his hand. He insists on giving us gifts from his portfolio of poetry, and he offers me a poem on the wondrous winter plum blossom. Carefree yet sharp, the untamed, black tails of his strokes fly through the ancient, stoic lines.
Without enduring bone-chilling cold,
Could its delicate sweetness so assail the nose?
I accept the gift gratefully, reading the words over and over. Only dedication brings sweet success. Only solitude brings strength. Only true suffering brings true happiness. In a flash, I see a world far away, a blur, hurtling down a mountainside, something gargantuan and out of control, rain and suffering and death. Fear and yet peace. I’m there, terrified, yet safe. I’m there, and I’m here, repeating the w
ords of the poem, looking around the neat room, mystified and grateful. Master Liang is shaking our hands warmly, giving gifts to Byron and Paige, and bidding us goodbye.
His eyes meet mine and hold me there a moment as I thank him.
Chapter 17
Into the Belly
The free man is he who does not fear
to go to the end of his thought.
—Léon Blum
The train stretches along the platform like a twenty-jointed finger. Car 14 has a narrow aisle, windows on one side, and bunks full of people on the other. I sidle down the aisle to Berth 8. I shrug off my pack, stow it on the rack overhead, kick my shoes under the bottom bunk, and without setting foot on the sticky floor, climb the ladder into the cozy top bunk. I rotate in place, so that the overhead rack is a foot from my nose, and I watch passengers board and pile luggage onto the rack. My right shoulder is touching a wall, and on my left is nothing: I could easily fall through the two-foot gap between the three bunks of Berth 8 and the three bunks of Berth 7, and plummet eight feet to the floor. Above me, a speaker crackles to life and drones news and weather in Mandarin. The glorious huíguī remains the lead story.
One by one, five passengers—all men—stow their duffel bags and sit below me on the bottom bunks. Together, the six bunks of Berths 7 and 8 become a small home, and I watch the men get to know each other by complaining about the heat, describing their destinations, and sharing cigarettes. They puff enough smoke to utterly engulf my two-foot space below the ceiling. Just as I start to cough, an air conditioner breathes its first. I paid extra for air conditioning because there were no bunks left in regular “hard sleeper.” That’s what this is: hard sleeper. Colt could only afford the rows of crowded benches in “hard seat” for what must have been 34 grueling hours of hell to Guangzhou. Soft seat is assigned seating, like on an airplane. Soft sleeper offers private rooms for the ruling class.
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