“Why don’t you pick a topic for us?”
“I don’t know. Thank you? I want to thank you. For helping me.” My sentences come short as we switch to Mandarin. “Today at the market. Buy that jade—how do you say it?—for my sister.”
“Shŏuzhuó,” she says. “Bracelet. Shŏuzhuó. You’re welcome.”
“You’re very kind. To me. Of the one billion Chinese, you’re my favorite so far.”
“You don’t have to thank me.” Seeming embarrassed, she switches to English. “Would you like some tea?”
“I’m OK.”
She knits her brow. “Does that mean you want some?”
“No.”
“The word ‘OK’ is difficult.”
“It usually means ‘yes.’ But ‘I’m OK’ means ‘I want no changes.’ So it means, ‘no.’”
“OK.” She laughs.
“You don’t want any changes?” I ask in Mandarin. “Everything is perfect?”
“Nothing is ever completely perfect, right?” She looks at me.
What passed for winter vanishes one morning, and spring embraces Guangzhou with fiery zeal. The sun rips through the haze, the half-built concrete buildings feel taller, and the odoriferous bodies in the streets seem to press in closer. I sweat just going a few blocks. Stepping into a shop in a row of bright yellow camera shops, I hold out my broken Chinon, explaining its malfunction in my best Mandarin. A curly-haired man unscrews the back and fiddles with it. “Can’t fix it,” he apologizes.
Deng is dead. China is about to reconquer Hong Kong. It’s no time for a broken camera.
“You should buy a new one," he says. He obviously assumes I can buy whatever my heart desires. He tells me to go to Electronics City. I say I’ve never heard of Electronics City, and he offers to take me, but I know he’s just being polite. He tells me his name, Yang Youwen, and, feeling confident, I introduce myself with my Chinese name, the name my Amherst professor gave me: “Bao Tongning.” It’s a phoneticized version of Tony Brasunas, flip-flopped so my last name is first. He nods appreciatively, and he insists a third time that I let him help me.
A few hours later, at twilight, Yang meets me at the front gate of the school. He’s standing beside a small motorcycle and wearing a red helmet reminiscent of the thin plastic baseball helmets sold in the U.S. as souvenirs. “Just to be safe,” he says, in crystalline Mandarin, opening the side-trunk and extracting a battered white helmet for me. It’s even thinner than his, I notice, pinching the thing between my thumb and forefinger before I strap it on with a flimsy snap.
“Hold me here,” he says, and indicates his waist. I climb on and instantly the bike darts from the curb, whipping my head back, and I lunge for a tight hold of him as we roar down a narrow alley in the warm evening. We barely miss a slowly turning bicycle-wagon carrying bundles of spinach. I’m slammed into his back as we screech to a stop at a red light. Back at full speed a moment later, we cruise beneath an underpass and turn onto a highway, ignoring all painted lines. We zip like a dragonfly in front of an onrushing truck and then back into an open lane, but there’s another motorcycle merging into the lane too. We swerve back out, into the glare of the truck’s headlights, then we swerve back in. My right knee grazes the other motorcyclist’s left knee. My heart skips a beat, but we share the lane until we swerve onto a dark quiet alley and park outside a place called The Source of Three Treasures.
Inside, it’s a restaurant and bar that resembles in an eerie way a spot back home in St. Louis—blond wood paneling, dim lighting, Budweiser ads on the walls. A waitress in a red and white checkered apron seats us, and Yang asks for Budweisers. He compliments me on my Mandarin before offering a few tips. “The word for man is made up of two characters: field and strength,” he shows me, scribbling characters on his napkin. “See? See how you can remember that? Peace is a woman under a roof. See? It’s simple,” he continues, sipping a beer when they arrive. “Good is a woman holding a child.”
“It’s easier than in English,” I nod at Yang’s scrawlings. “But in English we have letters, and it’s easy to know how a word sounds.”
He disagrees and tells me about phonetic radicals, and while I miss bits of his rapid-fire dissertation, following for stretches feels almost as exhilarating as the motorcycle ride.
He turns next to politics, and speaks with passion. “Jiang Zemin can never be an emperor like Mao and Deng were,” he explains. “He has no personality. Only Zhao Ziyang, who will return soon, hopefully, believes in something. He truly believes in democracy. He’s the only honest leader we’ve had since Zhou Enlai. But it’s always so difficult, even though the Communists are now scared and have to—”
“What are the Communists scared of?” I cut in, to slow him down.
“There are already nine political parties in China, not just one, and we are just waiting for free elections. My party, the New Light Party, has thousands of members in every province, but we have to wait a few more years. Then we will win. The people, the lăobáixìng, will support us and elect us.” As the waitress brings another round, Yang neither hesitates nor lowers his voice. “There are so many people in the countryside who have nothing. Communism is nothing anymore. It’s betraying the people it promises to support. No one believes in it.”
“Guangzhou doesn’t seem very communist.”
“The Communists are so fŭbài” he wrinkles his nose in contempt. I reach for my dictionary: corrupt. “There isn’t a single law that the politicians must obey,” he goes on. “They just make laws for us. I had some faith in the government until there was a fire in my neighborhood. Everyone knew the man who started it, but his brother is high up in the Party, so the newspapers said it happened at a different time. They said that someone else—my neighbor’s friend—started it because he wasn’t as wealthy as the rest of us. And now he’s in jail. Everyone knows it’s a lie.”
“Do most people believe the newspapers?”
“No,” he says bitterly.
“In America we have more knowledge about how our government works, and the press is free of government control, so we trust our newspapers more.”
“Yes,” he says. “In the U.S., people have individual power, free opinion. You are young and quick and optimistic. There can be quick change. Here,” he smiles ruefully, “we know change happens not in months but over centuries.”
“We have problems with corruption too,” I say. “People seem to buy power. I think people with wealth and power always want more wealth and power.” I pause as he pops his second can of the expensive import. “What do you—what does the New Light Party say?”
“We need more democracy and less corruption,” he declares, an abolitionist’s conviction returning to his voice. “Real elections. And a free press. But corruption is the biggest problem. Once the people can vote, the corrupt leaders will have to clean up, or leave.”
“So what do you do—protests? Rallies?”
“Yes, that’s where you come in.” He laughs good-naturedly as I watch the waitress watching us. “We have a meeting next Wednesday night, and I want you to come and talk to us about democracy.”
“Me? What could I do?”
“Just tell us what you think. Or what Americans think…of China. Or even just listen. You don’t have to do anything. It’s safe. We meet at my friend’s house and cook Mongolian hot pot.”
“Are you scared that the police will find you?”
“There are good police and bad police,” he says. “But anyone can live in fear. I don’t. We didn’t fight the Japanese and the civil war and the revolution for this!”
I contemplate his request as we chat, but eventually I suppress my curiosity and choose not to help organize an alternative Chinese political party. Getting caught could easily end my time in China—or worse. “I’m with you in spirit,” I say, noticing Yang’s disappointment. “I’ll be educating people in the park.”
We finally zip over to Electronics City. A gargantuan hybrid of glass-walled shopp
ing malls and scruffy factory warehouses is rammed full of TVs, stereos, cellular phones, pagers, ovens, cameras, computers, and much more. Nighttime shoppers throng and haggle over the contraptions—brand-name factory extras, according to Yang—and communism seems like another lie, like a truly ancient myth. I pick out a very basic model, disappointing Yang once again. He recommends a few others, one of which has a nice red strap, a decent zoom lens, and a price tag that says 675元. He exchanges rapid-fire Cantonese with the salesman, bringing the price down, before turning to me with a smile. “You should be doing this.” And with that, he winks at me and leaves, stepping next door to examine computer monitors.
“It’s very nice,” I tell the man in Mandarin. “But… actually it’s too expensive.” Lu Lan pretended she didn’t want that bracelet. I turn to go. He calls after me, touching my shoulder, holding out his calculator. “480,” reads the LED.
I shake my head. “250元,” I offer.
“480元,” he insists.
I shake my head.
The man nods angrily, repeating, “480元.”
I take a deep breath but go no higher.
He looks me in the eye. “We’re a family, we have to buy our rice.”
They mention food when they bargain. Lu Lan kept talking about dinner. “We haven’t even eaten yet,” I try. “We’re hungry. I can’t spend all our money.”
He comes down, bit by bit, to 400, I come up to 280, and we settle on 325. His anger evaporates into camaraderie, and he shows me how the camera’s buttons work, how to load film, how to change batteries. He combs his hair with his hand happily. “Your Mandarin is good.”
“No, you’re flattering me!”
He smiles. “Flattering? You know about that? You’re becoming Chinese!”
I laugh with him and then leave to find Yang.
The motorcycle whisks us back home, and I thank Yang warmly. In the fresh, warm night, I stay up late, reading the final chapters of The Search for Modern China, and feeling strange, disconcerted, almost dishonest that I ever tried to understand this country and its people without knowing their history. This society has wrought amazing transformations in barely a century. Yang and millions more like him must feel proud and bold, as if only their imaginations limit what they accomplish.
Chapter 19
The Faces of the Emperor’s Soldier
Interpretations of this vast and elusive country will always change according to the angle of one’s vision and the flash of time of one’s observation.
—Jonathan Spence, author of The Search for Modern China
Rays of sunshine glint on the puddles that pockmark the train station’s enormous plaza. The place is mobbed with the eternally chairless, and innumerable wretched families simply flop beside their suitcases. I navigate between the puddles. Two men approach me. “Bīngmăyŏng?” they ask aggressively. “Bīngmăyŏng?”
Qin Shihuang, China’s first emperor, unified the Chinese states and constructed the nation’s first capital here in 221 BC. The region had already been the cradle of Chinese civilization, but it was then, when the city sprouted glorious palaces, theaters, and parks, that it became the world’s grandest city, with an unrivaled population of two million. Marco Polo had seen nothing like Xi’an in Europe.
Today, I can’t figure out what these pushy and unglamorously-dressed men are saying until I read a cardboard placard that one is holding. There’s a single phrase in a dozen languages: Terracotta Soldiers. I follow one of them into a maze of parked white minibuses, realizing Bīngmăyŏng is the Chinese name for the world-famous earthen warriors that guard Emperor Qin Shihuang’s tomb. “We leave in ten minutes,” the man says, glancing at his watch. He indicates a rusty minibus, and I step over to it, look inside, and ask the driver whether his bus actually arrives at the Bīngmăyŏng. The driver nods and the bus is numbered 39, as the LP suggests it might be. I break my vow, pay him, and climb inside.
I take an empty seat behind a schoolgirl in a pink blouse and an older man, apparently her father, who wears a charcoal blazer. As I wedge my big blue backpack beside me, the girl steals a glance at me. I smile, but she whips her head back around. Her father says something to her, and she turns back to me. “Hello?” she asks.
“Hello,” I reply.
“Where do you come from?” she asks, with the uninflected ring of recitation.
I follow the textbook: “I am from the USA.” I introduce myself with my Chinese name, Bao Tongning, and say in Mandarin that I’m going to the Bīngmăyŏng.
“You speak Chinese!” exclaims the girl. Her name is Wen, and her pleasant and patient father is Mr. Zhu, who tells me they’re from the capital of Shanxi province, Taiyuan, a city that must be huge and that I surely passed through on the train. I feel stupid since I’ve never heard of it.
The bus rumbles out of the lot, down several streets, and onto a rural highway. We wend our way through the Wei River valley, a fertile summer countryside of tall yellow grasses and bushy persimmon trees. Xi’an marked the start of the ancient Silk Road, which went all the way to Constantinople, and while political power has moved eastward over the millennia, this city continues to serve today as China’s gateway to its wild west.
A farmer leads goats along a path between wheat fields; a boy in a straw hat pushes a wooden wheelbarrow alongside the highway. We stop where a woman sells persimmons in piles. Two farmers climb aboard with four cages of chickens, cramming all the clucking poultry into the aisle. One cage rattles against my knee, and I hold my bag beside the wire so the chickens don’t peck my leg.
Gazing at the rolling hills, my mind journeys away, backward, replowing and reharvesting my entire year in Guangzhou: the skits, the mass wedding, the hospital. Lu Lan’s clever smile warms my heart, and I remember for a moment so much more: the snake restaurant, the market, the duties of the “gwailo available,” and then the quickness of the others’ departure. Paige took off the day after school ended without intention for further time in China; Lauren departed a few days later to spend her summer at home before returning to Asia to work in Vietnam with Save the Children; Byron is probably still trying to line up another year in China, but he too went home for the summer. It’s just me here now, sliding alone into the belly, insatiably curious or incurably foolish or chosen by fate perhaps never to leave.
A pink concrete promenade of hotels, restaurants, and gift shops—the customary welcome mat to China’s biggest tourist draws—rolls into view. Hordes of Chinese tourists wear the same gray pants, white shirts, and plastic yellow tourist visors, and they photograph everything; behind them, tour buses armed with loudspeakers blare different identifying songs so the masses can find the right bus home. When we park, Little Wen approaches, and she personally requests my company. I remember that I was worried about being bored amid mass tourism at the Great Wall, and that that place far exceeded my expectations. I nod to her, and we stroll through the crowds, under the sun. The Zhus ask me whether American students respect their teachers as much as Chinese students do. I regale them with tales of my rambunctious teenagers—the misbehavior of the bad ones, the diligent attention of the few good ones, the joyful way so many sang folk songs. Wen laughs at my story about skits as her father buys us piping-hot baked yams from a metal cart.
I manage to be Chinese enough for a Chinese ticket, and the three of us pass through a fortress of turnstiles and enter an enormous building. Grand twin doors usher us into a small lobby where a television proclaims the Bīngmăyŏng the eighth wonder of the world. We push through another pair of double doors and finally enter the cavernous vault itself. Cool, musty-tasting air floods our faces. The tomb could hold a 747. Instead, thousands of pottery warriors stand in rigid regiments, separated by low walls of packed earth. In the silent rows of muscular infantry, stern cavalry, ready crossbowmen, and stately charioteers, each face is unique; all are poised to attack and await only the eternal emperor’s word. This amazing necropolis was discovered just twenty-five years ago, when two peasant
s digging a well struck the archaeological find of the century. Today, it remains an ongoing excavation: The soil has not been completely removed from the statues, and we have to walk on bridges suspended ten feet above the helmeted heads. Mr. Zhu and Wen walk ahead of me, and I let myself fall back. I am standing before the massive imperial army, fighting for my life, conquering my fear, going on adrenaline, stabbing, being stabbed, slaying, being slain. Death by the sword.
Or would I again side with the imperial army?
Placards report that the generals’ bronze swords, which have been treated against rust, remain sharp after two thousand years. A lead alloy in the archers’ arrowheads remains lethal today. Nonetheless these heroes haven’t been able to fend off the relentless looting by archeologists or thieves, and unfortunately the hangar is so gigantic that from up here on the walkways everything seems miniature: the drawn swords, the linked limestone armor, the loose-hanging bootstraps, the fierce eyebrows. Warlike tension creases every face, but their supposedly unique expressions are inscrutable, and it’s frustrating—to be so close and yet so far.
“Bāo Lăoshī,” I hear Wen’s soft voice calling me. It’s the first time I’ve ever been honorably addressed, and it melts me. “We’re going to another tomb now. Do you want to come?” she asks.
“I think I’ll stay in this tomb a little longer,” I finally say. She nods, and we wave goodbye.
Suddenly I sense my aloneness acutely. Lu Lan’s face appears before me again and cuts a hollowness somewhere in the middle of my chest. I tour the tomb, stopping, leaning over the rail at one spot and locking eyes with a terracotta swashbuckler in the front row of infantry. He smirks at me, or it’s my imagination. Not far from the soldier’s drawn sword, a live security guard, who actually is smiling at me, mimics a camera with his fingers. Photography is prohibited—the LP even reports film confiscation and fines—so he may be bored and trying to tempt me into a confrontation. He’ll have to do better, I decide. As a representative of the modern repressive regime, with thousands of his ancestors arrayed behind him, he’s not going to goad me easily. The gawky young man persists, following me, nodding at me. “Lăowài,” he whispers. I take out my camera and point to it. He nods.
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