by Spencer Wise
“The staff,” I explained, “are too nice. It’s fake.”
He snickered, which made me self-conscious, like he was laughing at me and not my observation.
In my periphery, the lizard wobbled toward me. I heard the click of its yellow craggily nails on the wood floor. Same color as my grandfather’s fingernails.
The lizard stopped a few feet away and looked up at me with his bright orange eyes and cocked his head to the side like he was saying, Zhang, bub, what’s with the Jew?
Zhang didn’t even glance over. Seemed to make a point of not looking. He just clapped his hands and, searching our faces, said, “Tea?”
“Please,” Ivy said.
He stepped right over the lizard, and went to the kitchen, returning with a glazed porcelain gaiwan and three small pinming cups.
“From Hangzhou,” he said, and poured the tea into our small drinking cups. The color was light green. A feathery smoke lifted off the surface.
“Drink,” he said.
I held the cup between my palms and the tea was light and clean and warming. A nice floral smell. Chrysanthemum.
Zhang took a sip.
“Too strong?” he asked.
“No, I like strong.”
“Americans do?”
“It depends. Everyone’s a little different.”
He smiled at this. He struck me as very shrewd.
I set my empty cup down on the table and placed two knuckles down on the table.
He laughed, reaching for the gaiwan, and refilled my cup. “An old tradition. How do you know?”
“Like a servant kneeling,” I said, which was how my knuckles looked forked down on the table. “Shows humility. Obedience.”
His eyes widened. “Some traditions wear out,” he said.
Out of the corner of my eye, I kept watch on the lizard. He had his eyes closed, head bobbing like the headphone kids on the subway.
“My grandmother drank her tea through a sugar cube,” I told Zhang. “Held in her front teeth. That’s how the old Russian Jews did it.”
“Russian, Jewish, American. How can you be all? Or do you pick one?”
“I’ve never been to Russia. And the Jewish part is just stories, traditions handed down. For me.”
“That’s a lot,” he said. “You’re loyal to them. Nothing wrong with that.” Zhang dragged out the word loyal. He was playing with me. It felt as though he was implying something about Ruxi and the factory, but there was no conspiratorial grin on his face. Nothing to give him away. But everything about him felt calculated, cautious.
“It is easier for us,” he said. “No choice. We’re one thing. Chinese.”
“I doubt it’s that simple,” I pushed back. “Say someone opposes the Chinese government, can he still call himself Chinese?”
Zhang smiled, and I knew I’d passed whatever test he laid out for me. The first one at least.
The lizard waddled close to me. His orange throat flared. Zhang’s hand shot out flat like he was commanding the lizard to be still.
“Don’t look him in the eye,” he said to me. “He hates strangers.”
“What is it?”
“A Chinese water dragon. His colors change. He came to me in Beihai Park. Out of the lake. I’m born in Water Dragon Year. It was a sign.”
Zhang saw I was pretty squirmy with the lizard and he left and returned with a Tupperware container full of what looked like loose dirt, but when he sat back down I saw movement inside.
“Crickets,” he said.
They were crawling around on an upturned egg carton in the tub. Zhang took off the top. In his right hand he held a pair of plastic chopsticks. Reaching in, slow and deliberate, he snagged a cricket.
I thought crickets were pretty good luck, so I was surprised to see one on the end of Zhang’s chopsticks. Its antennae flickered; little legs struggling.
The water dragon flicked his meaty purple tongue. Jaws snapped.
It was a hard world. Tooth and claw, and someone always got eaten. I guess I’d grown up thinking this way. The way Dad thought. At war with everyone. Someone had to lose and it wasn’t going to be us.
Maybe that was why Dad never reused a towel or refilled a water bottle. If he couldn’t outlive everyone, the least he could do was use up all their shit before he went.
I was arguing this out with myself while Zhang fed a couple more crickets to his lizard, and I got this sudden chill that what I’d said to Ivy back in Tiananmen wasn’t right. Going on wasn’t enough. There had to be something beyond that. Where did you look for it? Was that really why I was here? In Zhang’s flat.
“Full?” Zhang asked the lizard. He closed up the cricket box and the lizard wandered off to the other side of the apartment.
“He is going to nap,” Zhang said.
“That’s good,” I said, like we were talking about putting our child to bed. It seemed important to Zhang that I cared. He rubbed his hands together and leaned forward.
“So. Tell me. What did you think of Tiananmen? After what you heard.” He stressed the last word to make it clear that Ivy had already spoken to him about it.
“When we left,” I said, “a huge crowd was coming in to watch the flag-lowering ceremony. The nationalism is strange. Given what happened.” I paused to take a sip of tea. “Can I ask you a personal question?”
“Of course,” he said, “we are talking.”
“Were you in Tiananmen?”
He was silent for a moment. Exchanged a glance with Ivy and seemed to blink away some private thought.
“I was,” he said, looking at his hands.
“The government didn’t—arrest you?”
“Not all of us. No.”
I’d caught him off guard it seemed, though he must have known I’d ask. Maybe he wasn’t as prepared as he thought.
“Growing up,” he said, “in my Little Red Book—you know we all had, I remember a famous quote, ‘If we do not speak, who will speak? If we do not act, who will act?’ Something like this.”
I was midsip when he said this, and it was so familiar that it startled me and the tea slid down the wrong tube. I started coughing. Dad was one of the great mealtime coughers himself—in fact I couldn’t remember a single family meal without a dramatic hacking fit and him wheezing, What kind of God puts two tubes so close together? But what set off my coughing jag was this clear memory of my mother spending one deranged year trying to write in perfect Hebrew calligraphy the old lines of Rabbi Hillel, If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?
Now Zhang was telling me Mao said the same thing. Couldn’t be a coincidence. I swore he was fucking with me. No other possible explanation, unless this guy could read my mind.
I turned to the window and for a second the gray crumpled clouds mixed with the wadded-up drafts my mother tossed behind her shoulder, littering the kitchen floor. Over a hundred and fifty laws concerning how to write the Hebrew alphabet and she’d violated a dozen of them. The angles of her letters were wrong, the faces shouldn’t touch, the left leg couldn’t meet the roof, there must be room for a single strand of hair between them. This was the essence of Judea, she’d said.
Ivy was patting me on the back.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Let me get you water,” Zhang said and he jogged into the kitchen.
She wasn’t right—my mother about Judaism—was she? All the rules were just mishegas. It was the same as any religion—a way of explaining the mystery, the fucking blizzard right outside your door. The thing we were all terrified of and turned away from.
Maybe the essence was democracy. Maybe that’s what Hillel meant. You must get involved.
Zhang returned with a glass of cold water, and I drank half of it down and it cooled my throat.
; “Thank you,” I said, wondering if Zhang hadn’t intentionally kicked this all up inside me.
“So,” he said, stretching into a long pause, “your father owns it.”
He left out the noun, factory, like he’d been thinking about it so intently that it was obvious what he meant.
And honestly it sort of pissed me off that he asked a question he no doubt knew the answer to already. Ivy had surely told him.
“Yes,” I said. “A joint venture with a Chinese owner and a local party member. And me. I’m a part owner now.”
Zhang wasn’t really listening to my answer. Something in his soft expression felt patronizing. Then I realized why I was actually pissed off—he was insinuating that I didn’t earn it. Like I was just one of those new China princelings—the bratty kids of party officials who never worked a day in their lives. Though by that logic my father hadn’t earned it and neither had my grandfather. I needed to make something clear to Zhang.
“It goes back generations in our family,” I said. “Back to the old country.”
“Factories?”
“Shoes.”
“Ah,” he said. “Inheritance. Dragons beget dragons. It should be the case. And I work as a waiter because of my father. The son pays for the father. They are one. True? His crimes are mine.”
“The difference,” I said, a bit sharper than intended, “is that my father hasn’t been accused of committing crimes.”
Zhang’s head tilted to the side. For a second I thought he was going to ask why I was here. Which is what I’d feared since the moment I sat down. I didn’t know my answer. My reasons—one big slurry in my head, like the floating bits of fat and fur skating across the surface of the dehairing vats. But Zhang didn’t ask this. He seemed to read something else into my defensiveness.
“He doesn’t know you’re here in Beijing,” said Zhang. “Your father.” Then he grinned, taking obvious pleasure in his discovery.
I didn’t respond. Tried to remain mysterious. But my silence probably told Zhang more than he needed to know.
“It’s okay,” Zhang continued. “There are many things my father doesn’t know about me. Which only cause pain. In China,” he said with a sad smile, “you expect suffering.”
That sort of crawled under my skin, though it probably shouldn’t. I wanted to say, Look, Zhang, you can’t just jump to the head of the pain queue; wait your turn.
“In Vilnius,” I said, “during the roundups, my great-aunt hanged herself by her own hair.”
Before I finished saying it, I could already feel a flush rising up from my neck and under my chin. Was I twelve years old showing off? The persecuted’s version of my dad can beat up your dad. What did saying that prove?
Zhang replied calmly, “In the famine, we ate mud. It was white and sweet.”
“We ate?” I asked.
He lifted an eyebrow, before catching my meaning.
“My family,” he said. “I wasn’t alive.”
I could’ve been less of a dick about it, but his digs about inheritance got to me. He was calling me a fake. Or maybe that was my weakness, maybe Zhang didn’t mean it that way. Trying to ease off, I said, “Sorry, I just wanted to understand.”
“I can speak more plain for you,” he said.
We stared at each other. It was conversations like this where I wished I smoked. Something to do with my hands. He didn’t either. What kind of half-assed revolutionary didn’t smoke?
“Tell me,” Zhang said, “what do you police at the factory?”
An odd choice of words. I explained that I didn’t really police anything. He frowned.
“What is your role then?” Zhang asked.
“Footwear design. In charge of development. Putting the seasonal lines together.”
“You must have contact with the workers, no?” Zhang asked. “Do you supervise?”
“Each plant has its own supervisor and team leaders, and they all answer to different managers.”
“A little city,” he said. “With its own bureaucracy.”
“Exactly. It’s huge. Outsole plant, sample room, leather finishing plant.”
“Who supervises workers after hours?” Zhang asked.
“No one. There’s a curfew. Gates lock at 10:00 p.m. and there’s an 11:00 p.m. curfew where everyone’s in their dorms. There’s guards on duty too.”
“I see,” he said, drawing his fingertip over the herringbone pattern of the sofa’s arm.
“Do the different plants see each other?” he continued. “Do the workers ever communicate?”
“Mealtimes or in the dorms,” I said.
“Do you eat with them?”
“There’s a separate canteen for management.”
“So you never bring all the employees together for training or to enforce rules?”
“All together? Only a few times.”
“Where?” he asked, leaning forward.
The top floor of Plant C was empty. Not enough orders to make it worth a line. Sure it was big enough to hold everyone, but I wasn’t coughing that up to Zhang. Let me see where he was going first, what his angle was.
“There’s room,” I said.
“Do you allow cell phones inside the plants?”
His mind kept skipping around.
“We have to. No one would work for us.”
“I see,” he said. Quiet for a moment. “Do you know the mayor?”
“Gang. Yes. My father does. I’ve met him a few times.”
“But no one reports to you directly.”
“Everyone reports to my father.”
“It sounds like a difficult job. A lot of responsibility. Answering to your father.”
“I don’t answer to him,” I said, maybe a little too quickly.
Zhang arched an eyebrow. “No?”
“We see things different,” I explained.
“This means?”
“He wants to stay the course. I’m not sure that works anymore. Labor isn’t there. People don’t want the factories. There’s other jobs. Better pay. This is hot, long, dangerous work.”
“I know.”
“Picture doing the same thing over and over again.”
To show him what I meant, I lifted up the teacup and moved it half a foot to my right and set it back down.
“That’s it. One operation. Over and over. Four thousand times a day. You’d go crazy.”
“According to reason,” Zhang said, in what must have been some clunky translation of a Chinese term of agreement.
“It bothers me,” I said. “To see. After a while. At first maybe I didn’t notice too much. But at the end of the day, everyone’s going back to the dorms. Gray faces. Shoes in hand from swollen feet. The stench. Decay. Who can breathe it all day? It’s like the march of the dead and it—”
“Bothers you,” he said, completing my sentence, before I even realized that I’d trailed off.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s the job though. Footwear’s one of those industries where the machines can’t do everything. Think of a tie. Simple. A machine makes a necktie. Snip, fold, stitch, done. Like a bris.”
I paused for a moment.
“That’s a joke—never mind. But you can’t program a machine to make a shoe—even dumb sandals, simple you’d think, easy, but maybe a hundred and fifty different people handle it start to finish.”
“Is it so?”
“Yes,” I said, slapping my hands together. “You need people in my business. They aren’t replaceable. That’s what I’m saying.”
Actually I was saying it for the first time, which occurred to me right as I finished and Zhang nodded his head.
“Machines you can trust,” Zhang said, no sarcasm in his tone. “Not people.”
I was taken aback. This from Zhang. Like he was arguing from
my side of things. Or what my side should be. Like he owned the factory.
“If you can’t get labor,” Zhang asked, “you go where? Vietnam? India?”
“I don’t want to. I want to make it work where we are.”
His eyes widened. It was as much a surprise to me as it was to him. All my life running. Whenever it got tough. That was Dad’s creed too—Yugo, Brazil, Taiwan, China—keep moving. Always. China was the first place he’d really settled down for any length of time.
Out of my periphery, I saw Ivy looking over at me—probably because I’d never said that out loud before—but I didn’t turn to her because I didn’t want Zhang thinking she was controlling me or that I was doing all this just to get laid.
My reasons, the real ones, were surfacing slowly. Fleeing didn’t seem possible anymore. Before Ivy I was what? What was before? It was hard to even remember. Everything before was only preparing me for her. For this. It didn’t seem possible to go on the same way. With Dad. With the factory. With anything. And all this coming from inside me surprised me too.
“There’s money and then there’s people,” I said to Zhang, my voice a little wobbly. “That’s the problem, isn’t it?”
“Not harmonious.”
“Never. Too bad you can’t keep them separate. In my business it should work for all parties.”
“You’re talking about loyalty.”
“Sure.”
“At my last hotel,” Zhang said, “a coworker cut his finger with a knife. Very bad. I take him to the hospital and all night I stay. When I come back to the hotel, my boss said I have no more job. Fired.”
“For loyalty,” I said. “For doing something compassionate. Impossible to know who to trust.”
“This is humanity today. The daughter of our premier drives a Ferrari, bought with my tax money of course. I valet her at the hotel sometimes and she covers—it is true—the seat with napkins. Kleenex. So my poor working ass doesn’t touch her premier leather.”
“Bitch,” I said. “Nice car though?”
“It has wings,” Zhang said, smiling. Then he took a deep breath and rolled his wrists again.
“May I be honest with you?” Zhang asked. “For a moment.”
“Of course.”
“What brings you to me? To us? Why are you here?”