Big in China

by Alan Paul

“You sound so good I don’t want to break your groove,” he said. “These guys are wonderful musicians and I am really impressed by the whole thing, in a way I just didn’t get from watching the YouTube videos. I’m sorry that I didn’t take it more seriously. I see now that you have something really great happening here.”

  I insisted that he join us. My father’s blessing meant a lot, and we all had fun faking our way through jazz standards like “All of Me” and “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Afterward, with my family long gone, I sat on the porch with Woodie and Jonathan, eating peanuts and sipping beer and tea. I had planned to tell Woodie that I was probably leaving in six months, but I just couldn’t do it. I wanted to savor this moment, not spoil it.

  The next morning, the sweetness turned sour. Over coffee, I corrected my dad when he said something about “when we returned” to the United States in December.

  “If we return in December,” I said. “It’s not final yet.”

  “Oh, come on. Why are you resisting the obvious? You’ve had your fun. Now it’s time to get back to reality.”

  The comment hung in the air for a moment before I responded.

  “Reality?” The word stung me and stuck in my throat. It just sounded so wrong. “Did you say, ‘Get back to reality’?”

  “Yes, and your brother agrees, by the way.”

  I did not actually care what either of them thought, and I found his comment deeply offensive. I rejected the implication that I was playing around, that this incredible life we had crafted was a mere illusion, a dream we must awaken from. I understood that all the domestic help allowed us to live a fake rich lifestyle, and I had seen people become addicted to its trappings. But the real advantage was simply more time to do interesting, fun, and productive things.

  One of the lessons I had taken from expat life was that no one was destined to live by any single reality. There were a million different possibilities, and no one could convince me our life wasn’t real. I had never done more than I did now or felt more alive. The key for me was figuring out how to maintain this vibrancy in the looming new reality.

  I could accept that it was probably time to leave and understood why. I would never block Becky’s career path nor resent her for the very thing that had made this whole venture possible. But I would not celebrate what was happening, and I would never marginalize my expat life. It was a wonderful reality.

  Chapter 26

  Mountain High, River Deep

  I didn’t tell anyone else about my dispute with my father. A few weeks later I would mention his comment in a column without saying who uttered it. That prompted my father to call to apologize and many readers to e-mail me with their own similar stories; “time to get back to reality” turned out to be a phrase expats heard all the time.

  But I kept all this to myself at first; I was tense enough wrestling with my emotions while leading everyone on a tour of interior China that involved two overnight train rides in three days. This spectacularly poor planning reflected the pitfalls of trying to do too many things at once.

  I wore a lot of hats in China: father, husband, columnist, musician, blogger, Olympics reporter, and employer. But tour guide was probably the most challenging and anxiety provoking. I always wanted visiting family and friends to have not only a great time, but a genuine “China experience.” I wanted to take them off the tourist track and let them experience China as we did.

  The problem was, when people say they want to go off the beaten track, you never know just how deep into the weeds they really want to head. And in China it’s not hard to fall into a rut and end up in a dangerous or difficult situation. A year before, we had taken Becky’s parents, aunt, and sister on a beautiful but harrowing bus trip through Sichuan’s mountainous west, climbing over sixteen-thousand-foot passes on torn-up roads with no guardrails teetering over thousand-foot cliffs. Alone with a guide in a four-by-four it would have been the greatest trip I ever took, but it was sheer insanity in an oversized coach bus with a party of nine ranging in age from four to sixty-nine. I was alternately terrified, furious at the guides who had led us to the precipice, and wallowing in guilt over planning the trip. Only everyone’s good humor and my mother-in-law’s ability to tell hour-long versions of common fairy tales kept us sane.

  This time I tried to play it safer, with a trip to the ancient walled city of Pingyao and Xi’an, home of the famous terracotta warriors, which was close to Huashan, the holy mountain where Yechen now lived and that I planned to visit. I relied on a travel agent I had used many times to plan the trip even though I had long ago learned the pitfalls of trusting the sensibilities of a Chinese guide or agent. They tended to emphasize seeing as much as possible over lingering in any one place. This trip ran away from me and it was too late to change by the time I realized we were booked onto two twelve-hour train rides in three nights.

  I had underestimated the distance between the two cities and overlooked the fact that the wonderful trips we had taken on overnight trains between Beijing and Shanghai had been on China’s newest, fanciest line. There were some significant differences this time—which didn’t bother our kids at all and wouldn’t have bothered us, either, except that I was viewing everything through my guests’ eyes. Times like this made me realize how much my own perspective had changed. Things that seemed normal to us were anything but for our visitors, who had never eaten a donkey burger or covered their mouths with bandannas as they shut their eyes and squatted in a fetid village outhouse.

  There are four classes of Chinese train tickets—hard seat, soft seat, hard sleeper, and soft sleeper. We had always taken the latter, which features cabins with four bunks and privacy, as well as bathrooms used by fewer people. Many stations also have special soft-ticket waiting areas, but not the massive Beijing West Railway Station. We walked into a giant room packed with migrant workers heading home laden down with huge bags. A toddler in split-back pants peed on the floor a few feet away from us. Because the hard-seat cars are unreserved—and many people have to stand for days to get to their destinations—the line for the train formed early, already snaking to the back of the room an hour before departure.

  There was a huge surge when the train was called, with people pushing and shoving as one great mass. We let it settle down a bit before joining the scrum. Walking onto the platform, I saw that our train was decades older than anything we had ridden before. We trudged along, looking up at people piling into the hard sleepers, which are lined with bunks stacked to the ceiling.

  “This train looks like it dates back to Chiang Kai-shek,” my astounded father said, referring to the defeated Nationalist leader who left for Taiwan in 1950.

  The day before, my travel agent had called with the bad news that our party of ten could only get seven soft-sleeper tickets—split among three cabins—and three hard sleepers. As we boarded and the reality of being scattered across two cars bunking with strangers set in, I began to feel anxious, guilty, and rather incompetent. Everyone else was enjoying the madness, however.

  All ten of us crowded into a cabin, the adults cracking open a bottle of wine while the kids climbed to the top bunks, happily settling into a vivid game of make-believe. Jacob’s arm was in a brace that had replaced his cast. We toasted our trip and laughed at the situation. I was already anticipating the next problem; how was my mother, who struggled with squat toilets, going to relieve herself for the next twelve hours?

  Most Chinese bathrooms have one Western-style toilet, marked “For Deformed Man (or Woman) Only.” I set out to ask the conductor if the train was similarly equipped. She didn’t understand my request, so I searched my Chinese vocabulary and cobbled together a sentence.

  “My mother is very old and her health is very bad. She can’t use the regular toilets and needs a special one.”

  Understanding flashed through the conductor’s eyes and she leaped out of her seat and jogged to the other end of the car, whe
re she unlocked a door, revealing a clean Western-style toilet. I thanked her profusely and escorted my mother to my discovery.

  “Welcome to your private bathroom,” I said.

  Later, my mother went for a walk and the same conductor who unlocked the bathroom ran up to Rebecca. “The old lady is walking alone!” she exclaimed. “Is that OK?”

  In the middle of the night, with the toilet’s door locked, my mother sought help from the conductor with the aid of valiant Uncle Ben, who found the entire train crew eating noodles in the dining car and somehow managed to pantomime “deformed woman restroom.” Worried that the conductor would notice that she was anything but infirm, my very fit, exercise-crazy mother hunched her back and dragged her foot behind her in an approximation of a disabled woman.

  I couldn’t assist her myself because Rebecca, seven-year-old Eli, and I had decamped for a hard sleeper, where my son and I slept soundly next to each other on top bunks, twelve feet off the ground, in an open cabin with almost seventy fellow passengers. Rebecca slept directly below Eli, across from a loudly snoring man. As foreigners, we had caused a small stir when we entered the car.

  While most of the passengers were sleeping, I climbed down from my perch and went for a late-night stroll. I bought a beer and walked to the far end of the dining car, where I stopped in my tracks. I looked through the window of the back door, across the small connector and into the next car, which was full of hard seats—the cheapest class. People were jammed in shoulder-to-shoulder, flank-to-flank. I made eye contact with several young women, who betrayed no emotion but made me embarrassed about fretting over our own conditions.

  I woke up at 5:30 and climbed down to look out the window and sip tea next to an old man doing the same while the rest of the cabin snoozed. Eli and Rebecca were the last people sleeping—I had to rouse both of them as we neared our destination at 7:00 a.m.

  We spent two low-key days in dusty, picturesque Pingyao, which is a world historical site because it is a rare example of a preserved walled Chinese city. Most walls were torn down in the 1950s and 1960s as relics of a feudal past.

  Then Becky returned to Beijing to work, and I was on my own as guide on our second overnight train ride. This time we had two soft-sleeper berths and the car was newer, but it stopped everywhere, making for an interminable trip. Staring out at a tiny station in the middle of Shanxi Province, I realized with a start that I had forgotten to let Yechen know I was heading his way. I sent my old teacher a text.

  I’m very sorry for the late notice but I will be at Huashan in two days and I hope I can see you.

  I was thrilled when my phone beeped with his response shortly after I arrived in Xi’an.

  I am here and happy to see you. Let me know when you are coming.

  In Xi’an, we climbed onto a minibus for a long day touring around the warriors. I returned to the hotel late that afternoon soaked in sweat, exhausted, and a bit beaten down from a long, hot day of touring on the heels of another night on a train. As I walked off the elevator, my phone rang. It was Becky, back in Beijing, and I answered trying to sound more chipper than I felt. Her own enthusiasm was clearly genuine.

  “You won!”

  “I won what?”

  “The columnist contest. A letter came to New York and the secretary sent it here and I just opened it. You are columnist of the year!”

  It took me a few seconds to process this information, which my wife was spilling out in an excited rush. A WSJ editor in New York had submitted my column months ago for an award with the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and we had chosen three entries. I had forgotten all about it until now. This was incredible news, especially at a moment where I had lost sight of the big picture and was feeling a bit sorry for myself.

  “Congratulations,” Becky said. “I am so proud of you and wish I could be with you to celebrate. Go mark this event and we’ll have champagne when you get back.”

  The wave we had been riding since day one just kept getting higher, and I looked forward to marking the moment with Becky. She had always been somewhat uncomfortable with my writing about our personal lives, so I felt like I owed her an extra thank-you for letting down her guard and giving me her blessing to document our lives. Most of all I owed her thanks for getting us over here in the first place.

  The rest of us celebrated over dinner at a remarkable restaurant, which served endless rounds of different dumplings, stuffed with everything from pumpkin to fried rice. It felt right to mark another China-based success with a delicious version of the country’s traditional good luck comfort food. I only wished Becky was there to share the meal.

  I was still buzzing the next day as we climbed back onto the minibus for the hour-long drive to Huashan. We rode to a gondola station, where I was to meet Yechen. My mother took the kids for a walk, buying them fake Pringles, while I sat on a hard bench in the hot sun, looking up at the spectacular peaks looming above us and waiting for my friend.

  Fifteen minutes later, two monks walked slowly up the hill. I rose to greet my old teacher, who did not look well, with pale skin and sunken eyes. He had lost weight and seemed to have aged ten years in the few months since I saw him when he visited Beijing.

  A smile briefly lit up his face when he saw me. I wanted to hug him, but he only offered a limp handshake. I introduced him to my crew, and we all walked over to the cable car together. As we waited in line, I told him of the near certainty that I would be returning to the United States in less than six months. He showed little emotion but said he hoped I could return to Huashan alone for a longer visit before leaving China.

  Huashan is an imposing mountain. The hike is famous for its difficulty and danger; every year people die on the treacherous walkways, which in many places host two-way traffic on wooden beams suspended from sheer cliffs by hanging chains. Yechen, though not physically strong, had made the hike many times. As we soared up in a cable car, he pointed down to show me the trail and tell me how much he would like me to hike it with him.

  The gondola ride was nerve-racking. The cable rose straight up a large peak, before dropping down the other side, descending in hair-raising fashion before turning back up and depositing us at the 5,290-foot North Peak. The mountain has four other peaks, soaring up to seven thousand feet, and a series of trails. Yechen wanted me to accompany him up to some high-altitude temples, far beyond what my parents or kids would or should attempt.

  I explained this to him and said that although my time was limited, I would like to venture out a bit. Jacob accompanied us as we left the others behind.

  “This is my best friend,” Yechen said as we ascended, pointing to his fellow monk. “He has really helped me. He’s very nice, but there are a lot of fake monks, even here.”

  Yechen was a purist and an idealist and had really thought that he would find a like-minded community at Huashan, only to be disappointed once again. Few could meet his exacting standards; he found even the monks at one of Taoism’s most sacred places lacking.

  At the temple, another monk offered us seats on tiny stools as well as sweet white peaches and tasty green tea. Yechen taught Jacob how to bow and pray properly, and we both got to our knees and prostrated ourselves before a graven image. It was a nice moment even if, as Jacob later noted, we were breaking one of the Ten Commandments. Although I could feel Yechen’s excitement in showing all this to me, I knew that he was not doing well. I was trying to decide how hard to dig, but he made the decision easy by opening up as we descended a set of steep steps.

  “I often go days without leaving my room,” he whispered. “I just read, write, and sleep.”

  Textbook depression symptoms, I thought.

  He continued. “I lost myself, you know. I have no more self-confidence.”

  He not only looked to me like he was fading away; he felt that way about himself, too. I asked him what his mother thought, and he said that she still did not
know where he was—this was why he had kept the same cell-phone number, which had allowed me to find him. She had been growing increasingly worried, knowing that something was not right.

  “She called me crying the other day,” he said. “The night before she had a dream that I had vanished.”

  “In a way she’s right.”

  I was not going to hold back what I thought. No one had ever said anything this direct to me about the precariousness of his or her mental state and I had to respond in a similarly forthright manner. I had been haunted by my failure to offer smarter, more concrete advice when he sought my counsel a year ago, and I would not make the same mistake again. I knew this was probably the last time I would see him for a very long time.

  Yechen had been such an important early guide to China. Now I was riding high while he seemed to be sinking fast. The dichotomy was jarring, hard to accept and impossible to understand. How had I found myself in China while this native son was losing himself? How could I pull him out of his hole?

  I looked back and saw Jacob a few steps behind, holding hands with Yechen’s friend, who was helping him down the steep stone steps.

  “You need to think about things. If this is not the right place for you, then you need to move on. That does not make you a failure. It just means you tried something and it didn’t work out. It means this is another part of your journey, not your final place. That’s fine. You will be a better, smarter, richer person for having had this experience.”

  Yechen nodded in agreement, but I wasn’t sure he was truly listening. We had stopped climbing and were standing atop a giant rock. Jacob and his friend were behind us looking out over the spectacular landscape.

  “You have to understand that sometimes the journey is more important than the destination,” I said.

  It felt strange to be offering him the same kind of aphorism-laden advice he used to give me, but I was trying to be honest and caring. I told him that he was always welcome to stay with us in Beijing, and that if he wanted to look for jobs abroad again, I would help him do so. “You can always e-mail or call me,” I said. “I’ll help you any way I can.”