“Take a picture?” I whisper. “You’ll take my film?”
He shakes his head, and then walks off.
I gaze at the faces of the soldiers for guidance, but what I see is myself. I’ve already chosen this path. I’ve already given in. By stepping onto that plane to Hong Kong, then that train into China, I let go long ago. And now that I’ve moistened my lips, I sense it is a cup from which I am to drink deeply, whether its taste turns sweet or bitter.
I snap forbidden photos of the stone-cold regiments: the faces, the carefully carved swords, the arrowheads. I frame a close-up of the smirking soldier whose face now looks determined, confident, and loyal. I’ll take him with me.
I can’t ignore how this artificial eyesight, this cutting the world into squares, captures just the outline of the experience. Yet it locks something in and ties something to me, a personal conquest and a personal surrender. I return the camera to its bag and step out of the dark vault, into the unfolding yellow sunlight.
Chapter 20
Yī Lù Shūn Fēng
花有重開日人無再少年
Flowers bloom many times,
Man is young but once.
—Chinese proverb
A narrow flight of stairs takes us up into a cool, dark room. There are rows of sofas instead of the bucket seats I expected. We sit beside each other just as the screen comes to life. I whisper to her that this is my first Chinese movie. She promises that the next one will actually be Chinese, and she smiles at me. Suddenly before us is an exotic world: Los Angeles, highways, explosions, car chases, and white men scowling and shooting up the city while chasing a scantily-clad blonde. Jackie Chan leaps and runs and darts, serendipitously saving her again and again. Behind me, the young Chinese faces are illuminated by screen flicker, and to them this is America: licentious, free-wheeling, violent, sexy, criminal. I feel strange and embarrassed, taking it all in, and I find myself sliding away from Lu Lan. I watch her jaw clench mildly as a car explodes. She glances at me, then back at the screen.
Jackie flashes his grin a final time, roars off in a red convertible, and the credits roll.
Lu Lan and I emerge into sweltering heat and a sea of people on Beijing Street. Beijing Street. After the Communists “liberated” cities around China in the 1940s, many important avenues were renamed. Central streets became People’s Road or Liberation Avenue, while cities’ best boulevards often became Beijing Street. Guangzhou’s most fashionable shopping avenue is indeed called Beijing Street, and this is probably why Lu Lan brought me here. She gazes at the high heels and jade jewelry displayed behind panes of glass. I marvel at the boutiques’ foreign-sounding, yet domestic brand names: Bossini, Harbour Type, Calf Land.
There are no white men shooting the place up. In fact I don’t see any other white men at all, even thought it’s a Saturday and the boulevard is overrun with people and movement is difficult. We spot rural folks here and there, and almost step on a group from an ethnic minority wearing hand-woven robes and ornate silver necklaces who have formed a permanent encampment on a corner; they’re seated on a blanket, and all generations are represented—from an infant girl to a toothless grandma. They are selling jewelry and giant machetes and large desiccated red things.
“Those are dried animal parts,” Lu Lan informs me. “Including the genitalia.”
“Really?” I ask. “You’re so smart,” I smile. “You should be a teacher.”
“My classes are boring these days,” she sighs, as we move on. “Biology is just the same thing over and over.”
“Stop by English class sometime,” I suggest. “We’re doing oral reports. Everyone talks about something different. You know—basketball, ice cream, New York.”
“Mm, I’ll sneak in one day as a student.” She smiles slyly. “Ice cream sounds good.” She stops at a stand and buys two vanilla ice cream sundaes, handing one to me. I thank her and switch to Mandarin to please her, asking what she thinks about Jiang Zemin.
“I’m not really into politics. But Americans are, aren’t they?” she replies in English.
The sundae is full of odd gelatin balls that taste like saccharine and tofu and are hard to swallow. As I contemplate what to do with them, she leads us into a sparkling new building, all black trim and mirrors, a shopping mall nearly as tight, crowded, and chaotic as Electronics City. “Wang Yin and I bought a radio there together,” she points out a store. “Mm, you have to strike deals in Cantonese, like at the Jade Market. You get bad deals if you speak Mandarin.”
“If we had more time,” I try Mandarin again. “You could teach me. Cantonese.”
She nods and looks away, eying some skirts in a boutique. I stop in a bookstore for a road atlas of China, but they’re out of atlases, or don’t carry them—I can never tell. I can’t decide whether to celebrate the coming Hong Kong handover in Beijing, which will surely be a huge bash, or in Hong Kong itself, where things might be more, well, circumspect. Lu Lan recommends Beijing, since I’ve already been to Hong Kong. She hasn’t been to either place. We pass the first guitar shop I’ve seen in the city, and she points at the shop and asks whether I like guitar music. I strum the air with my fingers. “I like to play.”
“So my students tell me,” she smiles at me.
I nod. “I play in class. I’m no good, but at least they laugh!”
“No,” she looks at me wickedly. “You play at night. The girls on the second floor of your dormitory told me. They can’t sleep.”
I stop. “I’ve kept them awake all year, and they’re too polite to tell me?”
She laughs, swallowing a lump of ice cream, glancing at me with a sort of chastising indulgence, as if to say: What can we expect from you, foreigner? She asks in Mandarin about the mass wedding again, saying that it’s finally, definitely, absolutely time right now to sing the song for her. I’m still embarrassed. “You can hum it,” she suggests.
“What?”
“Hēnghēng.” She pulls her hair into a ponytail and teaches me the word by purring through her lips. I hum a few notes, and she claps her hands and hums along with me. “That’s it!” We stand there in the mall and hum the whole song, all the way to the finale where the lovers reunite.
“Let’s go to the park,” she says. “It’s a better day to be outside.” So we hail a cab and swerve through the downtown streets. Over his shoulder, the cabby asks me questions—where am I from, am I married, why am I in China—and I feel nervous answering in front of Lu Lan, but I perform well enough for her to touch my shoulder and say, “Good.” A swarm of children invade the road, and the driver has to zigzag across two lanes and veer around a parked car. But wheelbarrows of melons are there, and we barely miss hitting an old woman. A policeman atop a red platform shows us a white-gloved palm, and the cabby slams the brakes. It’s a human stoplight. “So, how do you like Jiang Zemin?” I ask.
“What do I care?” the cabby shrugs, as the white glove waves us through. “At least he’s better than Li Peng,” he refers to the aging Premier.
“Do you like Zhao Ziyang?” I ask about Yang Youwen’s favorite.
“You foreigners are funny!” He emits a laugh that indicates we don’t need to talk anymore.
We get out at Culture Park, an expanse of dust and trampled grass that features a skating rink, an amphitheater, and the hulking Guangdong Provincial Aquarium. Lu Lan and I spot two teenagers making out in a knoll between landscaped bushes. “That’s the problem,” I say, pointing to them, “if you live with your parents until you’re married!”
She laughs, but in fact it’s the first kiss I’ve seen anywhere in China. Even husbands and wives rarely seem to touch in public. “Mm, let’s take that ride,” Lu Lan points to a bright red merry-go-round bristling with shrieking children.
I point past it, to an enormous wriggling black box. “What’s that?”
She shrugs and starts walking towards it. “Let’s see.” I follow, and we’re soon poised before a ticket window. “You buy the tickets,” she
says, pushing me forward. “It’s your assignment.”
I step up to the window and ask for liăng zhāng piào (two tickets), but it’s the wrong window—or the wrong ride—and I get flustered and lose my place in line. Lu Lan laughs at me, sweetly and genuinely, and I realize everyone here laughs at me, but with her I feel like I get the joke. I can laugh too. She translates the bigger words and sends me back to the window until I succeed. Gently sweating under the hazy sky, we stand in line, watching the dark box swallow twenty of the bodies ahead of us, close its mouth, and toss to and fro. She falls quiet as I look at her, then past her, past the big black box, and into the sky. I can see a vast green meadow with a river, and I’m talking through a tornado of emotions—love and confusion and joy and a strange, heavy regret.
Darkness engulfs us. We sit in the front row of what seems to be an extra-wide bus. I’m beside her, and the doors close like jaws, snapping away every tendril of light. A giant screen flashes where the windshield would be, and suddenly we’re on the moon, surrounded by starry outer space. The wheels start to roll, and we bounce along, over moon boulders. There’s a giant hole on the surface of the moon, and we drive up to it and plunge down into it, and our bus transforms into a spaceship and we fly, darting and banking hard to avoid asteroids. We bump into the walls of the moon shaft, and everyone is truly thrown about. There are no seatbelts of any kind, and I hold on to protect myself, but Lu Lan and I are beside each other, our shoulders colliding. A jolt throws us as we enter Earth’s atmosphere, and her left arm smacks into my chest. We’re both giddy from the fitful massage of the bumps and jolts and moments of smooth flight, and then we swoop low and dive into the ocean.
Under the sun again, we’re laughing together, and I tell myself that even make-believe is better in China. My arm is around her shoulder for a moment as we stumble away from the box and find our balance.
May 27
Time is short if I’m going to fall in love! I think it feels the same to her. Beneath all the fun and butterflies and flickering delights, she knows it can’t happen—falling in love across these boundaries of blood and oceans and skin and origins. I can’t let myself feel otherwise anymore, it just seems wrong. I’m drawn to her, but she would get in the way of everything, my journeys, my adventures. I’d have to leave her and hurt her. It’s better for us to control our feelings.
When I’m not with her, I’m strolling through this insanely busy city, through parks and markets and alleys and department stores, and everything is fascinating, bristling with the familiar and the weird, and the more I learn, the less I seem to know—about China, about myself, about anything. I don’t remember how the old me answered any of these questions. I’m lonely, too, but I know some part of me craved from the beginning to experience all of this alone. Solitude itself may be the only immutable, existential, international truth.
Right now I am on my outdoor hallway. The hot morning air seeps into my pores, and life ambles by comfortably. It’s another day without power or water, another now, unchanging, and as I read and write and play guitar, I realize this time could be as good as any I’ll ever have. With a few weeks remaining in this semester, Mrs. Yuan just now asked for my grades for last semester. So maybe my job matters in some small way. Not that I’m here to give out grades. I’m here to teach what I can and learn what I can, to be curious and to be useful.
Lu Lan and I navigate a maze of booths selling video games, toy musical instruments, high-heeled shoes, portable music players, sweaters decorated with fashionable foreign flags. There’s a banner for Tiger Beer, and pretty young women in white gowns are giving away cups of it to help young people acquire the taste. The practice is distasteful, but the flavor of the beer is fine. Lu Lan grimaces and disagrees, so we pour out the yellow frothiness right there on the street and stroll on. We haven’t seen each other in over a week, and now she’s about to leave to visit her grandparents. I’ll be gone when she returns. But this street fair is exciting to her—something new—and she insisted we come. She guides me into shop after tiny shop jammed floor-to-ceiling with outlandish women’s apparel: vinyl vests, purple corduroy, knee-high white boots. She holds up a glossy orange blouse over her T-shirt and spins in place. I nod and ask her to spin again, and she smiles and indulges my desire. The words “Panda brte fiendip” are inexplicably emblazoned on it. In fact, all the merchandise seems to feature Roman script—not advertising, or even coherent phrases, just letters or misspelled words in random strings. Letters are hip here these days, much as Americans seem to get tattoos of Chinese characters they don’t understand.
I can’t find an atlas, but I spot a black belt pouch for securing my valuables while on the road. The words “Dry Ice” are stenciled on it. Lu Lan makes fun of it, trying the zipper and the Velcro pocket, evaluating my fashion acumen. “You’re going to hold your money in this?” She looks incredulous. I tell her I’ll wear it on my belt, and she decides that at least my braided leather belt is cool. A thrill runs through me as she touches my hip.
Outside, a drizzle begins to fall, and we stop into a restaurant called Do Me Fried Chicken, which makes me laugh, and I have to explain to her why. “It’s a way in English to say ‘make love to me.’” She gives me an embarrassed smile as a clerk in a referee-like, green-striped uniform brings our order. I work on a plate of flavorless spaghetti, and she munches on her favorite, fried chicken, which colors her lips bright orange.
She frowns at my chest. “You’re not buttoned.” A middle button in my plaid shirt has come undone. “Do I have to teach you everything?” she gnaws on her chicken. “At least your Chinese is improving.”
“Really?” I ask, fixing the button.
“Slowly.” She smiles.
“Your English is improving rapidly,” I observe. “I must be the better teacher.”
“Or you have the better student.”
She tells me about her family and her grandparents, explaining they would never come to a restaurant like this, and I finally learn that she’s twenty-three, a year older than I am. She has an older sister who works as a nurse, but Lu Lan is the smart one, she explains happily, the one who aced the dàkăo, China’s gigantic test that dwarfs the SAT in both length and life significance. These days many of my students are locked away studying for the feared dàkăo. Lu Lan says she’s proud of being a teacher, and I know it’s half true—she’s already bored of biology—but what I’m thinking is that her Mandarin is the most beautiful I ever hear, that I’ll miss it, and that I’ll miss not only that.
Outside, the rain falls harder, and we hide under an awning. I can’t bring myself to say anything. Do you feel the same thrill I do when we accidentally touch? Do you know this is both perfect and impossible? But I have to hope that she hears what I don’t say, and before I can fail at speaking, she pulls a gift out of her bag. It’s a small blue travel atlas of China. “Mm, time for your final lesson,” she says, meeting my eye, then looking away. She teaches me the words, “Yī lù shūn fēng.” It’s a phrase that literally means “one road favorable winds,” and that is used, she explains, to wish someone happy travels, luck, and safety. She pronounces it for me several times.
“Yī lù shūn fēng,” I say.
She smiles, pleased. “Yī lù shūn fēng.”
“Yī lù shūn fēng,” I whisper, and I lean over, by her ear, and kiss her on the cheek, and her smile bends and freezes. I take her into my arms.
“Yī lù shūn fēng,” she says, hugging me back for an instant.
And then she’s gone.
Chapter 21
A Victory in the
Cradle of Civilization
莊周夢蝶
I dreamt I was a butterfly.
—Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu
Mist sweeps in over the hills of the Wei River valley, devouring the yellow sunlight. A harsh rain begins to pelt the highway. As the bus returns to Xi'an, the rain strengthens and lightens repeatedly, like a whimsical emperor. A downpour punishes the stone f
latness of the train station plaza. I push off the bus and elbow through the crowds, hurrying around the puddles. “Dìtú, dìtú!” An old woman pushes right up to me, waving shiny pink maps of this city. I pull out a 5元 note and trade her for one. Night is coming, and I need to find somewhere to sleep, to eat, to rest. A long queue of red taxicabs flip on headlights. The driving rain forces me beneath an awning where a dozen others stare through the downpour. Construction workers on the far side of the street labor on, digging trenches, throwing shovelfuls of mud onto the sidewalk; past them, beyond their mounds of mud, chic clothing boutiques radiate bright light and glamour through the grayness.
I open the LP to the Xi’an page, and I find the Victory Hotel, which it labels “cheap and basic.” The rain softens, and I pull my tan cap low, hoist my pack, and head into the city, guided by my new map. The fancy boutiques smell sweet but are smaller and less splendid than Beijing’s. Past them, a row of small groceries offer fresh mangos, oranges, pears, and kiwis scrupulously arranged on tables and under protective sheets of plastic. I press on, passing a crowded KFC with its imposing red and white splendor and big-nosed logo. A twilight sun emerges tentatively, chasing the gray into alleys, and I slow down a bit, relaxing, taking in this new city. A group of young women approach, and pass me. “Hello!” one says boldly, turning to face me just after they pass. They all giggle and shove each other forward. “Wait a minute,” I say in Mandarin, and that freezes them in their tracks. I step towards them, and I ask about the Victory Hotel. The girl who said hello, who wears the latest fashions—blue jeans and a pink Bossini T-shirt—tells me which bus to catch and where, and we lock eyes for a second. I only understand part of her words, but her body draws me like a magnet, suddenly, startling me. Something about the smoothness of her skin. She smiles. I thank her. They all wave and dash off.
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