A Writer's Life

by Gay Talese

  “She’s the soccer player I’m interested in,” I explained.

  “Well, in this message she is actually telling you about her mother,” Madam Fu went on. Liu Ying must have been told about my forthcoming meeting with her mother, I thought; then I listened as Madam Fu began to translate aloud:

  “ ‘It was very difficult for my mother to bring up her three children because she had to overcome a lot of difficulties. Even when I was very young I loved sports and I needed to be strong to do the exercises, so my mother often cooked special food just for me. My mother doesn’t understand soccer and she does not go to watch the games. I began to live in the school’s dormitory at the age of twelve, and would only go back home on holidays. But my mother gives me a mother’s love. She has been my spiritual pillar.…’ ”

  Madam Fu’s voice began to weaken, and then she paused.

  “I am sorry,” she said finally, “but I feel like I am about to fall on the floor.”

  “Let me call the hotel doctor,” I quickly said, and she nodded and asked if she could lie down. I showed her into the bedroom and she stretched out on top of the covers and waited until the doctor arrived. He went in to see her, and when he came out, he told me she would be all right, but urged that we put her in a taxi and let her go home, where she could rest.

  Together, we walked Madam Fu down the hall toward the elevator, and she was very apologetic. I arranged for a hotel car, and gave her the fee for her time, although she accepted it with reluctance. After she had gone, I thanked the doctor and returned to the lobby, thinking that I must not let Chris Billing know about this incident, nor should I further depend upon Patrick Wang of Nike. These men had done too much for me already; from now on, I decided, I must be more on my own.

  I noticed a stack of China Daily newspapers on the side of the concierge’s counter and it then occurred to me to contact one of the editors there; surely, since it was an English-language periodical, it was a likely place for me to seek advice and perhaps even be introduced to a candidate. After the concierge had arranged for me to see one of the editors there whom he knew and had accompanied me to the taxi stand and given the directions to the driver, I was on my way to the China Daily building, which I reached in less than twenty minutes. It was an L-shaped white modern structure lined by large rectangular-shaped sealed windows, and behind its wide glass entranceway was a marble-floored lobby. The receptionist was expecting me, and, after a guard had escorted me up the elevator into a conference room, I was greeted by a smiling Asian gentleman in his mid-fifties who wore a bow tie and a dark suit and spoke English in the same exacting manner as Madam Fu.

  “So, I understand you are an authority on the game of soccer as played by youthful Chinese women,” he began.

  “Not exactly,” I said, “but I am interested in one of the players.” I had already described my story idea so often to so many people that I could relate it by rote, and so I barely listened to myself as I now succinctly recounted to the editor the circumstances that had drawn me into the orbit of Liu Ying, my following in the trajectory of an errant kick through a dozen time zones into the Orient in search of what I was yet eager to discover. The editor appeared to be puzzled by what I was saying, and so he abruptly changed the subject and asked, “May I show you our newsroom?”

  As I followed him through the corridor, he explained that the China Daily, which was founded in 1981, had a circulation of about 300,000 and was the only English-language newspaper in the nation. It was read mainly by Chinese natives who were learning English and by Westerners who were touring or residing here. Among the paper’s dozens of staff members were four or five Americans who held annual contracts as grammarians—“polishers” was how he referred to them, and they were expected to review all the words and phrases written in English by the Chinese headline writers and reporters and to make sure that everything was properly parsed and nothing was printed that might represent “Chinglish.” He did not offer examples of “Chinglish,” and I thought it imprudent of me to request any; but I guessed that what he had in mind were such sentences as I had recently seen printed on a sign displayed in a flea market frequented by tourists: TAKE MORE CARE OF YOUR BELON GINGS.

  The newsroom of the China Daily consisted of rows and rows of cubicles, within which men and women sat silently facing computer screens. There are modern newsrooms similar to this one in thousands of cities throughout the world, I thought, from Beijing to Copenhagen to Denver, vast and muted spaces in which people of many colors and languages practice journalism in an ambience so different from what I knew as a young man working on the third floor at the Times, where three hundred reporters could be seen at a single glance, making clattering sounds with their fingertips on the metal keyboards of bell-ringing typewriters, their facial expressions alternating between frustration and satisfaction, all within view of everyone else, and all calling aloud to copyboys whenever they wanted their completed stories to be rushed to an editor. Journalism was then performed with resonance and impartible vivacity, whereas it was now the work of walled-in scriveners delivering stories to their editors with the click of a mouse. It was so quiet within the China Daily’s crowded newsroom that I could distinctly hear, rising from a cubicle, the sound of a soft-spoken man conversing on a telephone in an accented American voice that I took to be Texan.

  “Who’s that talking on the phone?” I asked the editor.

  “His name is Mr. Charles Dukes. He is one of our polishers.”

  “Would you allow me to have a word with him?”

  “No problem,” said the editor, “as soon as he completes his call.”

  Within minutes I was being introduced to Charles J. Dukes, a stocky, square-jawed middle-aged man who had a full head of chestnut brown hair and a carefully clipped goatee that was almost entirely gray.

  “I’d be glad to talk to you,” Charles Dukes said after we had shaken hands, “but I have to get out of here for a while and get something to eat. I’m due back in an hour.”

  “May I join you?” I asked. Dukes looked at the editor, exchanged some words in Chinese, and then said, “Sure.”

  After I had thanked the editor, I followed Dukes out of the building and across the street into one of the typical neighborhood restaurants that the Chinese referred to as a huoguo, and that Americans called a “hot pot,” because in the center of each table was a cauldron filled with bubbling broth surrounded by trays of raw meat, vegetables, and hot peppers. The customers seated at the tables would drop their selected food into the cauldrons with their chopsticks, and seconds later would dip their chopsticks back into the cauldrons and retrieve the now steaming and cooked morsels of food ready to be eaten. Dukes started out with an appetizer of something I did not recognize, while I ordered only a bottle of Tsingtao beer, which the waiter poured so freely that the foam flowed onto the tablecloth.

  Dukes told me that he had come to Beijing during the previous year, having applied to the China Daily after he had seen a help-wanted ad placed by the paper on the Internet during the spring of 1998. At that time he had been editing his hometown weekly in Malakoff, Texas, a position that he liked well enough but did not mind leaving, being a divorcé with grown children and thus at liberty to accept whatever he thought might reawaken what was left of his sense of adventure. Although he had majored in journalism at the University of Texas in Arlington, and had been a staff writer for ten years on the Athens Daily Review in Athens, Texas, he had intermittently left Texas journalism to accept consulting jobs with oil companies and other multinational corporations that sponsored his travels in the Middle East, Europe, Peru, the North Sea, and the Arctic Slope. He had earlier learned Mandarin while earning a master’s degree in Asian studies at the University of Hawaii, and he said that this had probably weighed in his favor when he had submitted his application to the China Daily. But his interest in Asia actually dated back to 1967, he said. He was then twenty years old, embarking on a tour as a U.S. paratrooper in Vietnam.

  He ha
d not only experienced hand-to-hand combat there, he said, but had fatally shot two Vietnamese soldiers, a fact of which he was neither proud nor prone to discuss at length with his Chinese coworkers and acquaintances—and especially not with the father of his Chinese girlfriend in Beijing. During the war, her father had been a bomber pilot serving with the Vietcong. Although Dukes’s girlfriend, Nanfei, was thirty years younger than himself—she had just turned twenty-one—he had proposed marriage to her, and she had accepted after discussing it with her family. Nanfei was a very talented artist, Dukes said, and he was spending all of his nonworking hours helping her to find exhibitors and buyers of her paintings—which was his way of explaining, after I had raised the question, that he lacked the time to assist me as an interpreter.

  “But I might have the perfect person for you,” he said. “She’s a Chinese-American. She works with us as a polisher. She’s young and smart. I think she’s done some reporting on papers back in the States. She’s not dating anybody, as far as I know, so she’s probably free at night. After we get back to the office, I’ll introduce you. Her name is Sharline Chiang.”

  While I am mindful of the fact that sometimes things sound or appear to be too good to be true, after meeting Sharline Chiang and speaking with her briefly, I was convinced, as Dukes had suggested, that she was perfect for my purposes. To begin with, she was immediately available for interpreting during her off-hours from the China Daily, and, as well as being bilingual, she was well mannered and personable. She wore her dark hair back in a braid, and her square-framed modish glasses set off her dark-eyed look of intelligence. She was twenty-nine, had a bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University in New Jersey, and in 1995 had earned her master’s from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York.

  Her workday had finished when I met her, and after I suggested that we continue our conversation over dinner at my hotel, she agreed. In the taxi she explained that she was the only child of Chinese immigrants who had gone to the United States in the late 1960s, adding that many of their kinsmen had lost contact with one another during the turmoil of the Japanese invasion of the 1930s and the Chinese civil war of the midforties. Although Sharline’s paternal grandparents had escaped to Taiwan prior to the Communist takeover in 1949, taking six of their eight children, two others had been unavoidably left behind—a younger brother of her father’s and an older sister. Nearly forty years would elapse before her father, then fifty-nine and residing in New Jersey, would be reunited with them at a family gathering in Taiwan in September 1996. Sharline, who was then employed as a reporter for the Press-Enterprise in Riverside, California, flew to Taiwan to join them, and now, three years later, working in Beijing on a one-year contract as a polisher, she was on a kind of sabbatical, reclaiming a sense of her heritage in mainland China.

  When we arrived in the lobby of my hotel, the concierge waved and called out to me, “You have visitors waiting for you in the café.”

  As we entered it, I saw my intrepid interpreter, Li Duan, heading toward me with his right hand extended and a smile on his face.

  “I am very happy that you are here,” he said. “I have telephoned your room many times, but no answer.” He then went on to say, as he nodded in the direction of a woman seated at one of the tables, “I have brought to you the lady who is the mother of Liu Ying.”

  36

  AFTER I HAD INTRODUCED SHARLINE CHIANG TO LI DUAN, leaving for later whatever difficulty I might have in explaining to him that I had just hired her for additional assistance as an interpreter, he led us through the crowded café toward a table at which sat the mother of Liu Ying, a slender and refined-looking woman of fifty-four who wore a black-and-white houndstooth checked coat and had short, wavy brown hair, a smooth-skinned, angular face, and dark eyes that reflected warmth as she stood to greet us. Her name was Sun Zhixian—or, as I referred to her from then on, Madam Sun.

  As she spoke to my two interpreters, I departed to get an extra chair and summon a waiter to bring menus. When I returned, the three of them were conversing animatedly, and so I joined them as a spectator and took pleasure in the fact that my two interpreters seemed to be getting along, with Sharline Chiang helping herself to the pack of Red Pagoda cigarettes that Li Duan had laid on the table. Madam Sun politely refused Li Duan’s offer of a cigarette, but she did not back away from the table as trails of smoke floated past her, and I guessed that she shared with most of the residents of Beijing—a city polluted by coal burners, construction dust, gas fumes, and gusts of westerly sand blown in from the direction of the Gobi Desert—a tolerance toward the puffers of Red Pagodas and other brands. Smoking was permitted in all the restaurants and other public places I had visited since my arrival in China (including in the elevators of my hotel), and I assumed that whatever health threats arose from the inhalation of cigarettes, those threats were minimized in the murk of 8 million tons of coal burned each year in Beijing alone.

  As we three enjoyed our cocktails and canapés, and Madam Sun sipped from a glass of coconut juice, I asked Li Duan to tell her that I had received a fax from her daughter saying what a wonderful mother she was; I also asked him to get her to explain why her daughter had chosen to become a full-time soccer player. As Li Duan spoke to Madam Sun, I noticed that Sharline Chiang had removed a pen and pad from her handbag and had jotted down what I assumed was my question, and she was now poised with a pen for Madam Sun’s reply. I was concerned, for I thought that perhaps we should have extended to Madam Sun the courtesy of knowing in advance that there would be a written account of our interview; but on the contrary, after she had glanced at Sharline’s notebook and seen that the words were in Chinese characters, she smiled. She could read in her own language what she was telling us. From then on, it seemed to me, she was very cooperative and candid.

  “I am not exactly sure why my daughter became a soccer player,” she said, “but I think she inherited her interest in the game from her father, my late husband, who played soccer in school and was very athletic all his life. He was a physical education teacher at our neighborhood school. Unfortunately, he did not live past the age of thirty-three. He was knocked off his bicycle by a truck one night in 1978, and died instantly. Liu Ying was only four. She hardly knew him. But I still think she connects with him through the game. She grew up watching soccer matches on television, and watching the boys playing soccer in school, and she would often stand on the sidelines criticizing them—“You are not doing this right; you are not doing that right”—and a teacher said to her one day, ‘Well, if you can do better, why don’t you play?’ Girls did not play soccer in school, but the principal allowed her to play with the boys, and she did very well. When she was eight or nine, and did not have a soccer ball to kick, she was out in the streets kicking pebbles and small rocks. The other little girls had nice shoes, but my daughter’s shoes were always scratched and tattered from kicking stones. When she was fifteen, in 1989, she was transferred from the middle school to a special school that emphasized soccer. When she was eighteen, she was promoted to the national women’s team as a substitute player. She accompanied them to the Olympics in Atlanta in 1996, and, when one of the starters was injured, she was sent in for twenty minutes. The team did not win, but she passed accurately and played aggressively. Soon she became a starter, and since then has traveled all over the world. And so I now have a daughter who makes her name with her feet.”

  As we progressed through dinner, with Li Duan continuing to do the interpreting while Sharline Chiang kept jotting down the questions and answers, Madam Sun wanted us not to ignore the fact that she was the mother of two other children—a thirty-year-old son, Liu Tong, currently employed as a sales representative in Beijing for a door-manufacturing company, and a twenty-five-year-old daughter, Liu Yun, who was a cashier and bookkeeper at a leading department store on the western end of Chang’an Boulevard, not far from their home. Liu Yun was actually the fraternal twin of Liu Ying, Madam Sun explained. Neither of Liu Ying
’s siblings were athletically inclined, and they watched soccer matches only when Liu Ying was participating. Madam Sun also mentioned that her seventy-eight-year-old mother was an active part of her household, and that the latter helped to raise the children when she, Madam Sun, had been sent to work on a dairy farm during the decade-long Cultural Revolution, which continued through 1977.

  “I cried when I had to leave home,” she recalled, “but it was a time of a national crisis. There had been a great famine a few years before, and millions of people were moved from the cities to the countryside to work and live with the farmers. I spent more than eight years on a farm. I actually first went in 1967, a year before I got married and began to have children. I had been living with my parents and other relatives in the old-style courtyard house that we still live in today, on a narrow lane a few blocks west of the Forbidden City. My grandfather, an attorney, bought the place in 1911 after the fall of the last emperor. The house was later inherited by my father, a chemical engineer who attended a Jesuit-tutored college in Beijing before the Party takeover. The farm where I worked was many miles from the city, a five-hour bus ride one way, and my visits home were infrequent. On the farm I stacked hay, fed the animals, and worked in the fields. At night I slept in communal quarters with other young women.”

  During one of her visits home, she was introduced to the man who would become her husband. She met him through her mother, a teacher in the elementary school where he was the physical education instructor. The wedding was an unceremonious and unphotographed occasion, at which the marital couple both wore blue Mao suits. Following the birth of their son in 1969, her husband began earning extra money as a construction worker after school, while she remained employed on the farm, returning home two or three times a month. This routine continued until 1974, when, following the birth of the twin daughters, she managed a transfer from her farming job to a lamp-making factory in the outskirts of the city, making it possible for her to live at home but nevertheless requiring a two-hour bus ride to and from work.