AWOL

by Jennifer Barclay

  Katherine Govier’s new novel Creation is set in Labrador. She is the author of six previous novels, as well as three collections of short stories, and will follow the anthology Without a Guide: Contemporary Women’s Travel Adventures, with a new anthology of writers’ pilgrimages. She has won the Marian Engel Award and the City of Toronto Book Award, and is a contributor to the bestselling anthology Dropped Threads.

  033Destination: China

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  Rui Umezawa

  I looked up, squinting in the bright sun, at the immense statue of Chairman Mao. I took a deep drag from my Fenghuang and coughed into my hand. Wretched stuff until you get used to it.

  The crowd of students at Beijing University shimmered in the courtyard over which the Great Helmsman stood guard. Skinny arms hit a volleyball back and forth. A man and a woman in matching blue track suits rubbed against each other. The autumn sun was still warm, and the graffiti on the bench where I was sitting was as sick as anything I’d seen back home.

  The foreign students dormitory was just a minute’s walk farther down campus—a sort of United Nations of geeks. Bookish men and women from all over the globe getting along remarkably well, all things considered—Turks, Greek Cypriots, Czechs and Slovaks when their country was still united. Even the North Koreans ate with us, albeit in their own, self-designated corner of the cafeteria. There were usually Palestinians, too, but this was 1982. They were away at war, because Israel had invaded Lebanon a few months earlier.

  She’d been studying me, apparently, for some time through those cat’s-eye glasses. She said hi, smiling guilelessly in her plaid jacket, wide black slacks and nameless sneakers. “I’m in your History of Modern Literature class,” she said. “You haven’t been around in two weeks. I was worried.”

  A broad smile revealed a row of crooked, spotted teeth. In the periphery of this vision was a girl with pigtails and perfect skin, sitting on the grass at the centre of the courtyard, strumming her guitar and singing in Chinese:

  La-la-la, la-la-la

  Little wind, little wind,

  Slowly, slowly come on over

  “Are you Japanese or American?” Chen Ling asked, like they all did.

  Neither, I told her.

  “Ah, Canadian,” she said, then added, like they all did, “Norman Bethune.”

  When she told me I had missed the lectures on how one literary journal managed to ignite the passion of the masses against their oppressors, I tried my best to look concerned. She said not to worry because the lessons on how some author gathered the hearts and soul of the people and used them to fuel the revolution were yet to come. I could still redeem myself with Old Teacher. A part of me wanted to tell her that Old Teacher would not know what modernism was if Gore Vidal kissed him on the lips. Before I could say anything, though, she asked me to the ballet.

  “I have tickets for tomorrow night,” she said. “Would you like to come?”

  Somewhere in my mind, a yellow flag unfurled. But I also noticed for the first time that her waist was nice and narrow, her hips perfectly round and that maybe her face wouldn’t be so bad without those glasses and if she fixed her teeth. Maybe I needed a change from sitting around all day and drinking a bottle of imported whisky every night. I looked at her and put my cigarette to my lips, then nodded almost imperceptibly.

  “Great,” she said, clapping. She told me to meet her in front of the theatre then ran off with the breeze.

  The theatre was near the zoo, not too far from campus. The first thing Chen Ling did when we met was give me some unopened packs of Fenghuang. She said her father had recently stopped smoking and they were going to waste. When we got inside, she bought me an ice pop and a Coke. I washed down the ice pop with the Coke then lit a cigarette. She scolded me for smoking.

  Then I had to endure two hours of watching Giselle with the Chinese. They said, “Hao!” when things went well, and sucked air through their teeth with a loud hiss when they recognized flaws in the performance. Some guy in tights jumped high and landed solidly. “Hao!” A girl resembling a Meissen figurine wobbled while holding her leg in the air. Hiss. Everything sounded louder in darkness.

  And it was in the same darkness that I felt Chen Ling put her hand on my leg. “You know,” I thought to myself, “this shit could get complicated awfully quick.”

  After the performance, she offered to buy me some sunflower seeds, but I declined, so instead she walked me to the bus stop.

  “Did you like the performance?” she bubbled.

  “It wasn’t bad.”

  “It wasn’t very good, was it?”

  “Hmmmm?”

  “The performers tonight were mostly trained during the Cultural Revolution. They learned the techniques, but theory back then was considered intellectualism and prohibited. It’s better now, but we’ve a whole generation of dancers who know nothing of the meaning behind their movements.”

  I nodded gravely as if this was obvious from the performance we’d just witnessed.

  I HAD TO ENDURE TWO HOURS OF WATCHING GISELLE WITH THE CHINESE. THEY SAID, “HAO!” WHEN THINGS WENTWELL, AND SUCKED AIR THROUGH THEIRTEETH WITH A LOUD HISS WHEN THEYRECOGNIZED FLAWS IN THE PERFORMANCE.

  “Can I come over to your dorm room tomorrow?” she asked when we reached the terminal.

  I furrowed my brow, letting her know I was pondering her question. I had to think quickly, but thinking quickly didn’t help when you were falling fast down the side of a cliff.

  “Okay,” I said, and this made her laugh and clap her hands again.

  It was late morning by the time something resembling a plan came to me. I straightened my room as best I could. Washed the whisky out of the tin mugs scattered on the floor. Actually made the bed.

  The year before, when I was living at the Beijing Language Institute, I hadn’t worried much about housecleaning. I was in love with a Greek Cypriot student with tanned legs and big brown eyes, and she with me. In addition to being bright enough to win a medical scholarship to China (there were no medical schools in Cyprus) she was also an impeccable cook and housekeeper.

  Our affair was too good to last long. They assigned her to a medical school in Shanghai, while I remained in Beijing. She wrote faithfully, and I thought about her every night—usually in a drunken stupor, while the whitewashed walls spun around the bed.

  But I still had the photographs. I dusted the one I kept framed and stood it at the centre of the bookshelf. I pulled a few more from my desk drawer—a couple of her alone, another of the two of us embracing—and pinned them on the wall. I had trouble meeting her silent gaze.

  Chen Ling was right on time. She walked in like she owned the place and sat on the bed. She was scolding me for cutting class again when she noticed the photographs. Squinting as though they were cubist art, she stood and walked over to the one on the bookshelf.

  “Is this your girlfriend?”

  “No,” I said, clearing my throat. “That’s my fiancée.”

  Her face grew pale. For a second, I regretted my ploy because she looked like she might cause a scene. I didn’t know what she might do, only that I didn’t want to be around when she did it, especially if it was going to involve a lot of noise. But she only shook her head and whispered, “How could I have been so stupid?” She repeated this twice.

  I wanted to laugh and tell her that it was a perfectly understandable misunderstanding, but she started for the door before I had the chance. She told me she had to go. When she closed the door behind her, I wondered for a fleeting moment what she might look like with her clothes off. Then I thought of how it might not be too early to open the bottle of Suntory that I’d recently bought at the Friendship Hotel.

  The sun was still high but the bottle half-empty when she knocked on my door again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, avoiding my stare. “I didn’t realize you were engaged.”

  I waved my hand in front of my face, indicating it was already forgotten.

  “I hope w
e can be friends. I wonder if you wouldn’t come have lunch at my parents’ house on Sunday?”

  I thought about it. Surely we understood each other perfectly now. And I wasn’t about to turn my nose up at a meal away from the dormitory cafeteria. “Hao!” she said, adjusting her glasses on her nose. Her smile was back. “Hen hao!”

  Autumn was the most pleasant season in Beijing. Summers there were blistering, and winters bitter. Sandstorms blew in from the Gobi Desert in spring, covering everything in dust. But the air stayed still in the fall, and there was enough sunshine to add warmth to the perpetually grey architecture.

  I felt good about remembering to buy flowers and cookies at the market before hopping on the bus. The engine was loud and made the floor rattle, but at least it wasn’t crowded and people weren’t fighting for seats. I sat by an open window, humming softly to myself as we passed by countless Mao jackets on bicycles:

  Big ocean, where do you come from?

  And where do you wander to?

  Who knows your sadness?

  Who understands your loneliness?

  Chen Ling and her parents lived in a high-rise without any distinguishable features. The bus dropped me off at the front, and Chen Ling waved at me from the entrance. She said, “You’re late,” but thanked me for the presents. She seemed nervous and as though she was in a hurry. The hallway leading to their apartment on the first floor was bare but clean.

  No one was home. Nothing was on the stove, and the table was not set. She asked to take my coat, but I shook my head. I was suddenly feeling cold.

  One wall of their living room was covered in black and white photographs. Age had stained the borders, like autumn leaves. The people from one picture to the next looked alike, but I couldn’t be sure. There was one of a young couple holding a baby. I asked if they were her parents.

  OUR AFFAIR WAS TOO GOOD TO LAST LONG. THEY ASSIGNED HER TO A MEDICAL SCHOOL IN SHANGHAI, WHILE I REMAINED IN BEIJING. SHE WROTE FAITHFULLY, AND I THOUGHT ABOUT HER EVERY NIGHT—USUALLY IN A DRUNKEN STUPOR, WHILE THE WHITEWASHED WALLS SPUN AROUND THE BED.

  Some moments creep up on you when you’re not looking. Fat tears began rolling down her pocked cheeks. “No,” she murmured. “Those are my adoptive parents. My real parents are Japanese. I’m one of those orphans abandoned by Japanese parents when they left Manchuria. When I first saw you, I thought you were Japanese, so I thought you could help me look for my father and mother in Japan.” She crumpled into a chair and began sobbing in earnest. “I want my mama!!!”

  Foreign students at Beijing University, particularly those from the West, were used to being played. There was always some hustle—for foreign currencies, blue jeans, Beatles cassettes, porno magazines. Chen Ling was being more audacious than most. Even assuming she was just an infant when the Japanese evacuated north-eastern China after the Second World War, she would be close to forty years old. Her horrid glasses notwithstanding, she obviously was not half that.

  Pulling herself together, she smiled and explained that she’d wanted to go to Japan for a while now. “In fact, I have some relatives in Japan who invited me to stay with them. But I just wrote and told them I was going instead to Canada with a boy I met at school.”

  My mind raced, searching for something to say. “What about lunch?” was the best I could do.

  “Do you want to go somewhere?”

  Both of us were adamant in our refusal to acknowledge the absurdity of the situation, so I told her I was going back to campus.

  “Wait! I’ve got something for you!”

  She ran into what looked like a bedroom and reappeared after a brief moment. “I want you to have a picture of me, but I don’t have anything more recent than this.”

  It was another black and white photograph—this one of a beautiful little girl sitting on some rocks by the seashore. Despite her age, her pose was strangely seductive, inviting. Her eyes were wide, yet determined. Her confident smile seemed mismatched with her youth. For some reason, the bottom border of the photo had been trimmed off.

  “I was really cute back then, wasn’t I?” she asked.

  I supposed she wanted me to assure her she was still cute, but she simply wasn’t. And I was getting tired. I needed to be back in my dorm room. I needed a drink.

  Chen Ling frequently came over to my room after that. Once, she wanted help with her English homework. Another time she wanted some foreign currency. One evening, as I helped her through her new vocabulary, I felt her hand on my knee again. I brushed it aside and tried to ignore her sobbing. “I implore you,” she said, “to understand my feelings.”

  But I was not in a space where I could even understand my own feelings. After being in China for over a year, I was drowning in the country, in the brilliance and wonder contained in the tiniest minutiae of everyday living, like shopping for underwear and discovering that under those dreary uniforms, Chinese men wore floral boxer shorts.

  By contrast, everything I’d lived through before coming here—all the things that awaited me back home—seemed tedious and unremarkable. The world as I’d known it no longer existed. Neither did the man I believed myself to be. It was like waking up after a deep sleep and not remembering anything. The only thing I knew was that daylight was painfully bright. So I buried my soul deep in myself and kept dousing it with alcohol. I refused to move from that comfortable place.

  One night, my friend Mizutani invited me and a few Japanese students over to his room for dinner: curry cooked on a hot plate. Mizutani was from Japan and was an ardent follower of Nichiren Daishonin Buddhism. He kept an altar hidden in his closet, or so I’d been told by his exasperated French girlfriend, whom he’d tried to convert. But he kept his faith a secret from most people, and I didn’t care about anything other than that he was a really good guy.

  Winter was settling in, and we were dressed in layers of cotton and wool. We were drinking warm Five Star beer, smoking Mild Sevens and listening to Japanese pop music. Life didn’t get much better, really.

  Stirring the pot slowly with one hand, Mizutani threw me a small white packet with the other, saying he’d just bought it at the market the day before. Inside were black and white photographs of very good-looking men and women. They were classic Chinese movie stars, he explained. Sort of like bubble-gum cards without bubble-gum. Amused, I leafed through them until I came to one of a beautiful little girl sitting on some rocks by the seashore.

  Someone said something funny, and the swelling laughter made the room seem bigger than it was. I fingered the edge of the photograph. It was the same face, same clothes, same alluring pose, only her name was inscribed on the bottom border and it wasn’t Chen Ling. The curry bubbled noisily. Mizutani seemed pleased that I was so interested in his new buy. The others just seemed puzzled. I couldn’t blame them, and for the first time, I understood that I couldn’t blame Chen Ling either.

  Rui Umezawa is the author of the novel The Truth About Death and Dying. His short stories, essays and commentary have appeared in Descant magazine, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and elsewhere. He was born in Tokyo and has lived in Italy, the American Midwest and Canada as well as China.

  034Departure Point: Bhutan

  COMING HOME

  Jamie Zeppa

  I am leaving Bhutan. Something is wrong with that sentence because no matter how many times I repeat it, it doesn’t quite make sense. But here I am, getting into the car to go to the airport, heavy suitcases in the trunk and one-way tickets in the glove compartment. I turn for a last look at the yellow brick house that has been home. The windows are dark, and the door is wide open because there is nothing inside. Apparently, I no longer live there. And so, as completely nonsensical as it seems, the rest of it must be true as well: I am leaving, and tomorrow, this country that has for the last nine years been home and more than home (it has been a kind of dream) will no longer be mine either.

  I tell myself I can turn around at any point. It’s not too late to cancel the tickets, call the landlord
, unpack the luggage, mend the marriage, stitch up the breach. It is entirely possible to stay, even now. All I have to do is assemble the words into a simple sentence: I’ve changed my mind. Or, I want to stay. But the words come out differently: “Well? What are we waiting for? Let’s go.” Tshewang, my soon-to-be ex-husband, helps our five-year-old son, Pema, into the car and then turns away so that he does not have to watch us drive off; and even as we are driving off, even as our former house disappears from view, even though Tshewang and I have talked this through a thousand times and have come to the same conclusion every time, I keep telling myself it’s not too late. I can still turn the car around. There must be a way out of this departure, even though I can’t see it, some secret passage that will lead me back in to the place I have lost.

  But I drive on. Pema and I spend the night at Gangtey Hotel, a former palace on a hill crest overlooking the airport. At dawn, white clouds creep down from the dark ridges and fill up the valley with rain. If it rains hard enough, the flight will be delayed. But only if it rains forever will I not have to leave. The clouds shift and break and finally lift, and as we pass through customs, I feel I am repeating my departure from Canada nine years ago, step by step, thought by thought. As I hand over our passports: I have no idea why I’m doing this. As I fill out the visa forms: It’s not really leaving home, it’s more like a holiday. As I haul our suitcases onto the scales: That is a hell of a lot of luggage for a holiday.

  I am leaving Bhutan. Something is wrong with that sentence.

  Leaving Canada almost a decade ago, I expected my first experience of culture shock to be a sharply uncomfortable but quickly fading jolt. And the first waves were shocks to the system: there was the “fleas in the floorboards” shock and the “fried rice and chilies for breakfast” shock and the “monsoon has destroyed all the roads and there will be no mail for months” shock. I was in shock over my own stupidity, my head full of the traveller’s lament: What am I doing here? I want to go home.