Rebellion

by Molly Patterson

  Rob shifts the weight on his back and replies, “The people who buy our guides are backpackers. They don’t like to be treated like rich people. Isn’t there another place I could go?”

  “My family owns a small hotel,” she says quickly, before she can think.

  “Oh, yeah? Can you—”

  “But you can’t be a guest there,” she follows up, and explains that the Three Springs is not registered to accept foreigners. The Friendship Hotel is the only one in town with the designation.

  He turns his eyes to the building rising eight stories above them. The windows are tinted dark gray, not at all friendly. “Then I guess this is where I’m staying.”

  Juanlan waits for him while he checks in and stows his bag in his room. Before going in, he asked if she was busy for the rest of the morning, and she decided she wasn’t. It’s not every day a foreigner shows up in Heng’an, after all. “Great!” he said when she said she was free. “Do you mind doing a little shopping with me?”

  He comes back down the stairs wearing a different backpack, a smaller one like a schoolboy might wear. “You’re like a turtle,” she says, gesturing. “You always carry your shell.”

  “Ha! Traveling, you know. You have to be safe.”

  “But Heng’an is not as dangerous as Chengdu. There are less thieves here.”

  “That’s good to hear. I lost my CD player waiting at the Chengdu bus station. Set it down on the seat beside me while I was searching through my bag, and I don’t know what happened—a minute later it was gone.”

  She almost asks how he could be so careless with an expensive item, but this is not her business. Perhaps it is not so expensive to him. In any case, he is in need of a new CD player now, so off they go.

  Most of the electronics shops are across the river, at the bottom of the hill from which Heng’an Middle School looks out across the town. Juanlan hails a pedicab to drive Rob the distance—it is two kilometers, maybe three—and follows behind on her bicycle. Traveling in tandem but not together, she is able to enjoy the whiplash of bicyclists and pedestrians who turn to stare. They see a white man blithely blinking into the wind as he is pedaled over the bridge, but they don’t know that they, too, are being watched.

  When they reach their destination, Juanlan jumps off her bicycle to pay the pedicab driver. Rob has already pulled out a handful of bills, but she has the advantage of language and the driver takes her money without bothering to try to communicate the amount to his passenger. Rob is still trying to pay her back as she leads him into a store. “Never mind,” she says, flipping her hand dismissively at the proffered bills. “You are a guest in our town.”

  They turn to the array of portable electronics. This store is more expensive than some others, Juanlan explains, but it has the brand names and they are authentic. Sony, Panasonic. Some of the cheaper stores sell lesser brands with fake labels slapped on them. Those players will likely not work for long.

  “I guess I might as well make the investment,” Rob says, leaning over the glass counter.

  She struggles to describe the various qualities of the items he examines. How to translate “antishock” or “liquid crystal display”? After trying out a few options, Rob settles on a Discman—the same one he lost. It seems to be an older model, he says with a shrug, but should do just fine.

  Juanlan buys two bottles of sweetened green tea and they walk down to the river, where the cover of newly planted trees can at least partially disguise them from the curious gazes of passersby. Juanlan locks her bicycle on a lamppost and they walk along, sipping their drinks and talking about music, how necessary it is for Rob while he travels. “What kind of music do you prefer?” she asks, and he tells her the names: Led Zeppelin, Cream, the Yardbirds, the Who. “What I grew up with,” he explains. “You know, the stuff that was popular when I was your age. You probably haven’t heard of any of those groups.”

  “I have heard of some of them,” she says, and they walk in silence for a minute, both turning their heads to look out over the river. Even with the changes the town has undergone in the years since Juanlan has been away, the shapes are all too familiar to her: two-story buildings with flat tile fronts, gray river, gray sky, far-off mountains wavering through mist. She glimpses the top of the new bridge with its red-painted arches: even this structure, pride of Heng’an, looks like many other bridges all over the province. At university, when she saw pictures of her friends in their own hometowns, she’d often marveled at how similar the photos looked to her own, how similar the streets were to the streets of Heng’an. She watches Rob now and tries to imagine what it is like to see a thing for the first time. She would like to have the freedom to go around as he does, without a plan and without guidance, with only the trust that you will be welcomed wherever you go.

  “Have you traveled?” Rob asks, as if he can discern the patterns traced in her mind. “Outside of China, I mean?”

  She frowns. “Most Chinese people don’t travel abroad. Only the wealthy are able. Even in China, I have traveled to very little places. Very few,” she corrects herself.

  He seems to take this response in stride. He asks if she’s lived in Heng’an her whole life, and she tells him, no, she lived in Chengdu while she attended university. “I’ve only recently returned,” she adds.

  “Oh, yeah? What’s it like being back?” He glances around, as if what they’re passing now is all there is to know of Heng’an.

  She could tell him about her father, but he doesn’t seem like a person who understands sadness. He is an American, after all, and perhaps has never lost anything that matters to him. Instead she tells him about her brother and Lulu. “This baby will be the first in our family. My brother will be a father. My parents will be grandfather and grandmother. Grandparents,” she remembers.

  “And you’ll be an aunt!” He says the word with a flat a, like the word for the insect. “Congratulations!”

  In the glow of his grin, Juanlan finds herself smiling, too. “Thank you. I’m happy for the baby.” Saying it, she instantly feels that it’s true. A baby is coming soon. She will be an aunt. But another moment passes, and she remembers how ambivalent Lulu seems to be about the coming event, and then she is unsure if her joy is a stable feeling. “Is an aunt an important family connection in America?”

  “It depends. Me, I wasn’t ever all that close to my aunts and uncles.” He glances over at her, his brows knitting in thought. Then his face brightens, suddenly earnest. “But we have a thing—I don’t know if it’s this way here, but in the States, if someone your parents’ age is good to you, close to you and your family, you might consider them an aunt or an uncle. My mom, she had a good friend who lost her husband all of a sudden and she had two kids my age. We were all friends. Our two families were, you know—we were kind of mixed up together.” He takes a sip of his tea and replaces the lid. “So I’d say she’s kind of like an aunt to me.”

  “She is still living?” Juanlan asks.

  “Oh, yeah.” Rob laughs. “I told her I’d bring her a souvenir from China.”

  They walk on, and before long Juanlan’s stomach is growling. Back home, her mother is probably putting food on the table, wondering where she is. For a moment, she considers inviting Rob to lunch, but it would be too difficult for her, too strange for her parents and also for him. “I should go,” she says, “unless you need to do more shopping?”

  He looks briefly startled, but then his face goes easy again, easy and open. “I might just wander around, see what there is to see.”

  “Heng’an does not have very much. We have very few monuments or scenic places.” And she lists them for him: Jinlong Temple, Kongquan Park, Plum Blossom Hill.

  Rob nods, unconcerned, and then asks which is closest. He can’t read street signs, and half the streets don’t even have signs marking them, anyway. She writes down in his notebook the name of the park and tells him to take a taxi. “That’s all right,” he says. “I’ll walk around and maybe I’ll stumble ac
ross something interesting.”

  So this is what it means to travel with perfect freedom: you don’t care about seeing what everyone else agrees is worth seeing. Such an attitude implies either perfect wisdom or perfect ignorance. Juanlan isn’t sure which, but the confusion interests her, and so when Rob asks if she’s free again later, or even tomorrow, she decides that she can find the time. After her tutoring session the next morning, she says, she will come meet him at his hotel. They’ll go climb the hill together and she will be his guide. “Awesome!” Rob says. “Shee-shee nee!”

  They return to where her bicycle is parked, and she gets on and begins pedaling, leaving him to his own helplessness and likely confusion. But when she glances back at the end of the street, she sees that he is gazing serenely up at the sky. He is someone who does not get too caught up in difficulties. A Taoist monk, almost. Funny.

  Later, Juanlan sits at the desk of the hotel with a Chinese-English dictionary, trying to recall which words she’d reached for in conversation earlier and come up short. She’s very good at listening, taking in unfamiliar words and phrases and filing them away for later, but in the moment she is not always able to speak as precisely as she wants. Paging through the dictionary, she finds the English translation of ganma, what she thought of before when Rob was speaking of his mother’s friend: “godmother.” A beautiful combination of words, she thinks, if a very strange one.

  In the afternoon the rain begins to fall and two men come in through the door, shaking their umbrellas onto the tile floor. Juanlan greets them, takes their ID cards, checks them in. They both work for a construction company based in Chengdu. She takes them upstairs to their room, points out that the small cabinet by each bed holds rubber house sandals and a towel, as well as a woolen blanket, not that they’ll need it at this time of year. Here is the mosquito coil. Here is the light switch. She pulls open the curtains to reveal tree limbs waving in the rain and then mentions, as her mother always insists she does, that usually the hotel would charge more for a room at the front of the building, but in this case they will charge only the regular rate because their company called ahead to reserve the room.

  She leaves the men and returns a few minutes later with a thermos of hot water. The door to the room is open and she hears them complaining about the long bus ride from Chengdu. One of them has kicked off his shoes and is sitting with his back to the wall, his legs stretched out on the bed. She glances away, embarrassed. The other man is busy hanging up clothes in the shared wardrobe. “Xiao mei,” the one on the bed says to her, “is there an ashtray in here?”

  His friend answers: “It’s there on top of the cabinet, you dunce.”

  He glances at the ashtray without reaching for it. Patting his shirt pockets in search of the pack of cigarettes, he says, “I bet you’re looking forward to the expressway being completed. You must want to travel to Chengdu sometimes, spend time in a more exciting place than this.”

  She does not like having her private dreams described by this man. “I guess,” she says.

  The man locates his cigarettes and pulls two from the pack. He hands one to his friend. “When the expressway is open, you’ll be able to go to Chengdu just for the day. You could do some shopping and visit your friends. You have friends there?”

  “Not really.”

  “You can visit us, then.” The man winks and then strikes a flame from his lighter, which flickers blue and orange and makes shadows of his hands on the wall. His friend shakes his head as Juanlan leaves, her face flushed red.

  She is back at the desk when she thinks again about what the men were saying: You could go just for the day. But of course it works the other way, too. If businessmen can come to Heng’an just for the day, then they won’t need to stay at the hotel.

  She has been longing for change, but not of this kind, not if it means her family’s source of income will dry up. She pictures a road unfurling like a roll of paper. Sees herself holding one end, watching it go.

  In the evening, the television blares news about the floods along the Chang Jiang. The rain now is in Hunan, Jiangxi, Hubei. On the screen, the brown water roils and people cry to the camera, their faces stricken with grief. Juanlan and her parents eat dinner and watch the devastation. “Look at all that water,” her mother says, shaking her head. On screen is an image of PLA soldiers in a squarish boat, tearing white ruffles in the water as they peel away from the camera. The voice of a newswoman explains that our people’s army is fighting bravely against the ravages of nature.

  Juanlan’s father maneuvers his chopsticks with difficulty. “Ba, let me get you a spoon,” she says, but he makes a swatting motion.

  She wonders whether they have considered what the future will bring. It’s not her place to ask, and that is a relief. She thinks instead of Rob, of their plans for the next day. She has not told her parents about meeting him, sure, somehow, that they would disapprove. “Tomorrow,” she says, “I won’t come back until after lunch.”

  “Why?” her mother demands.

  A lie comes quickly: “Teacher Cao asked me to stay. She wants to thank me for helping Wei Ke. I think we’re going out to eat.” She is ready to say where, but then stops herself from speaking. A good lie is a stone that does not need engraving.

  “We can manage without you until afternoon. But they should do more than feed you, Lan’er. With all you’re doing for that boy.”

  “It’s good practice for me, too,” Juanlan replies vaguely. It is enough; her parents are once again engrossed by the television. The news is done, and a comedy program about a set of neighbors in a hutong of Beijing comes on. The old people are always saying funny things. “Here, Ma, let me get those.” Juanlan takes the plates from her mother and carries them to the kitchen, where she washes them alone.

  The next morning she rides her bike to Director Wei’s flat. It is still raining steadily. She wears a biking rain poncho and brings along two umbrellas. The weather is not good for visiting Plum Blossom Hill, but something tells her Rob will be easygoing. Mud splashes up onto her legs so that by the time she arrives at the flat she is almost unfit for the indoors. Director Wei opens the door. His eyes run from her head to her toes, and then he ushers her into the bathroom to clean off.

  When she comes out again, he’s standing by the table, sorting through a pile of papers. “I’d like to ask you how my son is doing in his study.” He holds a paper in his hands, and Juanlan is reminded of times in school when she would be criticized for bad performance on a test.

  “He’s doing very well,” she says, an approximation of the truth. In the weeks they’ve been working together, the boy has shown some minor improvement in his reading and comprehension. Since the day she helped him take down the wet laundry, they’ve developed a routine of working for an hour and then taking a break to play music before returning to study. “Where is he now?”

  “In his room.” Director Wei nods at the hallway. Surely Wei Ke can hear them, so close by, but his father seems unconcerned as he goes on, “I doubt he will be a very strong English student. He doesn’t have the talent for it.”

  “He’s trying.”

  “Trying isn’t enough if you don’t have the ability.”

  “Wei Ke is a very smart boy. There’s no reason to think he won’t keep getting stronger.” She is aware of overstepping, of sounding like a teacher or a school administrator, rather than a tutor whose qualifications are only that she herself is good at the language she’s teaching. But she feels the novelty of talking like this with Director Wei, the fun of playing at being an authority.

  He’s shuffling papers into a folder now. She’s ready for him to go. Taking a briefcase from the floor, he opens it up so that its insides are splayed like a patient on the operating table. Juanlan thinks of her father, paralyzed at the hands of a doctor, even though his stay at the hospital didn’t involve surgery at all. Director Wei and her father are examples of the two kinds of men that exist in the world: one exercises power, and the othe
r obeys it. Reflexively, she thinks of her brother and then revises this conception—Zhuo Ge is a third kind: the facilitator, the actor.

  “You made a friend yesterday,” Director Wei says lightly. He smiles at her confusion. “I hear you helped a foreign guest who’s come to our town.”

  Juanlan shakes her head. “I didn’t—”

  “You didn’t meet a foreigner?”

  “No, I did.” She straightens her shoulders. “But I don’t know that I helped him very much. All I did was show him to his hotel.”

  Director Wei nods. “And you spent time together after.”

  “We went for a walk.”

  Narrowing his eyes, he says, “You’re suspicious of me. All right, I confess: I’m having you followed.” He gives her a serious look, then abruptly breaks into a grin. “I’m joking with you. The truth is that I know the Friendship Hotel’s owner, and he mentioned that a foreign guest checked in yesterday. It’s my business to know about such things.”

  She waits for more, to hear how he learned that there was a young woman with the foreigner, to hear how he learned that the young woman was her. But he seems uninterested in further explanations. He says suddenly, “I assume you’ve made plans to see him again?”

  Surprised, she can only nod.

  “It would be useful for my son to have the opportunity to make conversation with a foreigner.”

  From the bedroom down the hall comes the scraping of a chair over the floor. They both glance in that direction, but Wei Ke doesn’t appear to speak up in his defense, either for or against this plan. “I’m not sure how long the American is planning to stay in Heng’an.”