by Gay Talese
Days passed without my receiving a reply to the fax I had sent to Kissinger, nor did he or his assistants return my follow-up phone calls to his hotel. But I did hear promptly from Patrick Wang’s secretary at Nike, and she told me that Patrick had arranged for my presence the next day at a luncheon to be attended by Liu Ying and four other Beijing-born women who played for the national team; since the following day was a Saturday and Patrick was taking the day off, he himself would accompany me and help with the interpreting.
I met him in the lobby the next day at noon. He was smiling, as usual, and graciously dismissive of my expressed concern that I was burdening him with my problems. “Oh, don’t worry,” he assured me, “I’m happy to help. I only wish it wasn’t so difficult to find good interpreters. This situation will change. But now there are simply not enough good ones to go around.” We walked out toward his car. He was more casually dressed than I had seen him before, now wearing a sports jacket, a polo shirt, and a peaked blue cap, on the front of which was the white swooshed symbol of Nike.
After a twenty-minute drive across town, we turned into a street that led us in the direction of Workers Stadium in central Beijing. It was a hulking oval-shaped structure supported by gray steel rafters and soot-covered concrete walls, and the outer edges of its grandstand roof were lined with red flags. It could seat about sixty thousand spectators, Patrick said, making it the second-largest stadium in China. The largest stadium, he added with as much modesty as his pride would allow, was the eighty-thousand-seat arena in his home city of Shanghai.
Near the north gate of Workers Stadium, which was where he parked the car, was a restaurant called Havana Café. In its front window was a sign in English reading FOODS & MUSIC, FULLY EXPRESS LATIN FLAVOUR! I thought this was where we were having lunch, but Patrick led me across the parking lot and into one of the side doors of the stadium. Only men’s soccer was played here, he said. The women used a smaller stadium on the south side of the city that can accommodate about thirty-five thousand spectators. The success of the 1999 women’s team, however, especially as it contrasted with the poor performance of the men, had led many male followers of the game to lend their support to the women; today’s luncheon—held in a private men’s club within Workers Stadium—was evidence of this.
After passing through the lobby, where the walls were decorated with framed photographs of male soccer players and coaches as well as the administrators and sponsors of professional soccer in Beijing, we entered a large dining hall where about two hundred people, almost all of them men, cheerfully chatted and laughed with one another as they sat drinking wine and beer. All the tables were covered with green-and-white-checkered cloths, and there were bowls filled with flowers in the center. In the front of the room, too far away from me to get her attention, I saw Liu Ying wearing her red warm-up suit and seated on the dais next to four of her teammates and the head coach.
As we found places to sit at a long table in the corner, I noticed that Li Duan, my appointed interpreter, was waving at me from across the room and was headed in my direction. I was momentarily embarrassed. I vaguely recalled his saying something about a luncheon after he had escorted me back to my hotel following soccer practice; I now wondered if I had neglected to call him, as I should have, to confirm my interest in coming here. If I had been neglectful, it was yet another reminder of our difficulties in communicating. Still, he approached me with a smile and a handshake, and after I had introduced him to Patrick Wang, he sat down next to us just as a group of fleet-footed waiters began moving up and down the aisles balancing trays bearing bowls of steaming food and gallon-sized glass pitchers filled with beer, which they plunked down on the tables. Whenever the waiters noticed that a guest’s beer glass was half-empty, they would grab the pitcher and pour forth more beer in a manner of such effusion and unmeasured nonchalance that the rising foam would cascade over the lip of the glass, dousing the tablecloth and sometimes trickling to the floor. This seemed to be a popular way of pouring beer in Beijing. In my short time in the city, I had seen servers doing the same thing at my hotel and other places I had visited; no matter if they were pouring beer from pitchers, bottles, or cans, they would pour so much of it into a glass that it would overflow—a symbolic sign of abundance and generosity, I guessed, although I never inquired further.
The program began after lunch as the master of ceremonies, a television sports commentator, stepped up to the microphone on the speaker’s platform and encouraged the applause of the crowd by gesturing in the direction of the six honored guests seated at the dais. He explained that the coach and five local women would be departing on the following Monday with the rest of the team to travel to distant locations in China and to foreign countries to compete in dozens of exhibition matches as a tune-up for the 2000 Olympics. This luncheon, he said, represented a kind of pep rally for the team, a way of wishing the women well in their forthcoming ventures. Then he called to the microphone four female soccer fans who had been invited to the luncheon to read aloud the statements that each had prepared in homage to the team.
As the women took turns reading, I sat between Patrick Wang and Li Duan, listening as they interpreted for me, although I was not paying much attention to the praise being bestowed upon the players; I was thinking instead about what the master of ceremonies had mentioned earlier to the audience—that the soccer team was leaving town within two days for an extended journey into the interior of China and elsewhere in Asia to practice for the Olympics, and this meant that my self-appointed assignment with Liu Ying would be indefinitely delayed unless I could somehow get permission to leave on Monday with the team, and could get clearance for a worthy interpreter to accompany me.
Immediately after the luncheon ended, I excused myself from Patrick Wang. Taking Li Duan aside, I asked, “Who has the authority to get me on that plane?”
“No press allowed,” he said. “Only the team is going. They are having closed practice sessions, very private.…”
“Are you going?” I asked Li Duan.
“No, I must stay in the office,” he said.
“Look,” I went on, “I came a long way to meet this girl, and I got only that one interview, and now what?”
“We thought you got what you wanted,” he said, “and that now you return home. Maybe you come back some other time.”
“Listen to me,” I said, holding on to Li Duan’s right arm and raising my voice for the first time, hoping I was not pushing my luck (reminding myself that I was here on a tourist visa), “I came to China with good intentions. I came to do an understanding story about Liu Ying. I came a long way. I’m now sixty-seven years old. How much longer do you think I can wait? If I leave now, I might not live long enough to come back to China. Do you understand?”
Li Duan said nothing for a few seconds, but his expression softened. I sensed that I had touched something within him. Maybe one of his parents or a close relative was dying. Whatever it was, his eyes moistened.
“Yes, I understand,” he said, “but I do not know what I can do. The team is training in private. It is the rule.…”
“Well,” I said, coming up with the idea for the first time, “what about me interviewing her parents? Are they in Beijing?”
“Her father is dead,” he said, “but, yes, her mother lives in Beijing.”
“In America we have what we call ‘soccer moms,’ ” I said. “Maybe I can write about her as a Chinese ‘soccer mom.’ ”
He thought about it and then nodded.
“Yes,” he said, “no problem.”
“You can arrange for me to see her?”
He again nodded, repeating, “No problem.”
During the next two or three days, while I waited to hear from Li Duan, I visited the offices of several Beijing-based Western journalists in the hope that they might know of an excellent interpreter I might hire on a part-time basis. I went first to the New York Times bureau, which was located close to my hotel, in a compound behind Chang’an Bou
levard. The government agency that issues press licenses expected foreign journalists to maintain their offices and residential quarters within one of the bulky brick buildings within the compound, which was surrounded by a wall and had guards posted at the entrance. The guards checked the identities of everyone entering the compound—the correspondents, their families, their household employees, the staff workers, and whoever wanted to visit for social or professional reasons. This meant that if a foreign correspondent conducted an office interview with an outsider, the latter’s identity would be known to the guards. Thus interviews dealing with political or other potentially sensitive subjects were usually conducted by the correspondents well beyond the gates of the compound.
After I had shown my passport to one of the guards, I was met by a Times employee who came down to greet me. As I followed him along a path toward the building in which the Times office was located, I wondered if reporters in China could operate more freely if they were not accredited. Perhaps I enjoyed more liberty as a hotel guest on a tourist visa than if I were working here for the Times. I was not living in the compound and playing cat-and-mouse games with the authorities whenever I wanted to slip away to interview a member of the Falun Gong or some other controversial figure. In my case, however, I was pursuing a relatively inconsequential subject, such as women’s soccer. But even in this area, I reminded myself, the authorities had shown themselves to be controlling. I recalled the military checkpoint at the soccer camp, and my aborted interview with Liu Ying, and the fact that Li Duan had told me I could not follow the team to its next destination. Perhaps Li Duan has been assigned to keep tabs on me, I thought; maybe he is my portable gatekeeper. Still, I now needed him to deliver Liu Ying’s mother. And if he delivered, as promised, I could probably learn more about Liu Ying from her mother than I could from Liu Ying herself. In any case, I needed Li Duan as well as someone who could bridge the linguistic gap between us.
As I arrived in the Times office, I met the bureau chief, Erik Eckholm, who greeted me cordially and introduced me to his wife, Elisabeth Rosenthal, who also covered China for the newspaper. In the office were English-speaking Asians working at their desks, and it was my hope that one of these might be receptive to earning extra money as my interpreter during his off-hours from the Times. I approached the subject obliquely to Eckholm, sensitive to the possibility that he might think that I thought his staff was so poorly paid that it was susceptible to moonlighting. And so I digressed for a while, and we talked at length about our mutual friends in the New York newsroom, and I described in detail my story idea about the soccer player, which he professed to find interesting. When I finally hinted that my efforts would be enhanced by the presence of a good linguist, he nodded in agreement, but without offering a suggestion; however, he did invite me to a dinner party that he and his wife were giving the following evening at their apartment within the compound, and I accepted immediately.
As it turned out, I had a fortuitious meeting with one of the guests, a slender, sandy-haired man in his thirties named Chris Billing, the Beijing bureau chief of NBC News. During and after dinner, he questioned me about my work, and, even before I had sought his help, he seemed to understand what I needed and volunteered to assist me. Unlike most foreign correspondents who were married and had children, Chris Billing was a bachelor and he liked going out at night. He had a car, a driver, and spoke fluent Mandarin. He also played tennis two or three times a week, and, at his suggestion, I met him for mixed doubles the following afternoon at my hotel’s tennis facility, where he introduced me to our partners, two English-speaking Chinese women in their early thirties, who turned out to be excellent players.
Our games were often disturbed, however, by the ringing sounds coming from the cell phones that the women had left in their handbags near the net posts. Putting aside their rackets, they would hasten toward their phones, apologizing to Chris and me for interrupting our game, but it was clear they believed their calls were important, too important to ignore. I think both women held executive positions within private firms; both were married to successful husbands (too busy to play tennis), and one of the women (or maybe both) had a youngster at home being cared for by a nanny or a grandmother. In any case, Chris and I played singles while our doubles partners stood on the sidelines holding tiny gleaming phones to their ears and jabbering in Mandarin perhaps to a colleague in the office or, indeed, to a “little emperor” at home. But despite these interruptions, I enjoyed being back on a tennis court and was pleased to have in Chris Billing a new American friend who knew his way around Beijing and was including me in his social plans.
The two of us dined that night in a back-street restaurant in a congested residential area with cobblestoned alleyways lined with single-level courtyard houses. During the evening, I alluded to my recent visit to Tiananmen Square, which led Billing to invite me to the NBC office the following day to view several hours of tape taken during the six-week confrontation of 1989. It was an offer I accepted. I was also grateful to him a week later: He was expected briefly in New York, and while there he saw my wife, Nan, and volunteered to carry back to China a suitcase containing some of my suits and other clothing made of a heavier fabric than what I had brought with me to Beijing a month earlier following our fortieth-anniversary cruise in the Mediterranean. But before he left Beijing, he gave me the phone number of a woman whom he hoped was what I was seeking in an interpreter. She was a refined and highly educated woman, he said, who both spoke and wrote English, and, since she had recently retired from a full-time position, she had flexible hours and was looking forward to hearing from me. Her name was Fu Cuihua.
I promptly telephoned Madam Fu, and she said she would come to my hotel as soon as she could, maybe within the hour. This pleased me because I had just received a fax written in Chinese—sent by Chen Jun of the soccer association’s advertising department—and I was eager to have it translated. In less than an hour, the concierge notified me that Madam Fu had arrived in the lobby and was on her way up. I left my suite on the fourteenth floor and walked down the hall to meet her at the elevator. When the door opened, I saw a tiny woman coming out unsteadily but with determined resolve. She seemed not to notice me as she hurried past, taking several mincing steps in the wrong direction while holding on to the wall with one hand for support.
“Madam Fu?” I called out, pursuing her from behind. “Madam Fu?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, stopping and turning around. She regarded me with a tentative smile. Refocusing her eyes from behind her steel-framed spectacles, she said, “I’m afraid I am a little dizzy. These elevators go so fast, they make me dizzy.”
“Would you like to hold on to my arm?” I asked as she removed her hand from the wall.
“Oh, no,” she said, “I will be fine once I sit down. It just takes a while for me to get used to how fast the elevators are in these tall buildings.” I guessed that Madam Fu was in her sixties, if not older. She was not much taller than five feet and weighed maybe one hundred pounds. She was demurely dressed, wearing what might have been in vogue during the days when Chinese women first ceased to emulate the fashion of Chairman Mao.
She followed me through the corridor, then into my suite. Seeing a cushioned chair, she headed toward it and sank into it. “Water,” she said, “I could use a bit of water.” I removed a bottle from the refrigerator and poured the contents into a wineglass and handed it to her. As she slowly sipped from the glass, she glanced around the room at the polished paneling, the mirrored backbar, the pale blue damask pillows on the sofa, and the coffee table, on which was a vase containing the fresh flowers that were brought in daily by the chambermaid. In the far corner of the room was a banquet table that served as my desk, and, in its center, surrounded by stacks of folders and yellow lined pads, was an electric typewriter I had borrowed from the concierge. He had retrieved it from the storage room, where it had been discarded by the secretary of the banquet manager after she had switched to a computer. “Nobody
uses typewriters in China anymore,” the concierge explained after dispatching a porter to bring it to me. It was an IBM Wheelwriter 3 model, exactly like the ones I had purchased twenty-five years ago and continued to use in New York and New Jersey.
After Madam Fu had drunk less than half of the water, and had politely waved off my attempt to refill her glass, she asked: “You are a writer?”
“I try to be,” I said.
“Well, then, “she said with a snap in her voice, “how is it that I can be of service to you?”
I was pleased that she spoke English in such a clear and formal manner, preferring to associate it with my younger years, when people seemed to communicate with more care and when an IBM electric typewriter was less anachronistic.
“I just received this fax written in Chinese,” I said. “It comes from a woman named Chen Jun, who is employed by the soccer assocation. Are you well enough now to translate it for me?”
“I shall try,” she said, taking the page in her tiny hands, which were as small as a child’s. She studied the writing for several seconds, her eyebrows arched over the rim of her glasses, her facial expression absorbed with intensity. “This message was not written by Chen Jun,” she said. “It was forwarded to you from the office of Chen Jun, but it is composed by someone named Liu Ying.”