Rebellion

by Molly Patterson

“Then we must seize the opportunity. It’s best for Wei Ke to go with you the next time you meet him. The American.” Director Wei stresses this last word as if the descriptor is fantastical.

  Since he will no doubt hear of the rendezvous, anyway, she says, “I’m meeting him today, after the tutoring session. I can ask him then about meeting Wei Ke.”

  “Why not take my son with you? Unless you were planning a date with this man. That would be awkward.” The corners of Director Wei’s mouth turn upward. He reaches into his pocket and takes out a wallet without trying to hide the stack of bills inside. Pinching his finger and thumb over the corner of a bill, he removes a one-hundred-yuan note and holds it out to her. “You’ll need to eat. You should take the American to Dongpo Zhouzi.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of anything so expensive. Just noodles or fast fry.”

  This idea is dismissed with a flick of the hand, the hundred-yuan bill flapping after. He waits for her to take it before returning the wallet to his pocket. “I know the couple who run the place. You won’t need to order, I’ll stop by and arrange it on my way to the office.” He walks past her to the door, where he takes his jacket from a hook on the wall. As he slips his arms through the holes, he adds, “I’m sorry I can’t host you myself, but I’m driving up to Tao Xu today.”

  “It’s no problem,” Juanlan replies automatically. The door closes behind him, and she contemplates the day she has just escaped: a formal meal with Director Wei overseeing everything, talking to Rob with her as translator, alternately praising and scolding his son. She doesn’t like him, simply because she is uncomfortable around him. He makes her feel as if she’s the fish on his cutting board—he’ll do what he wants and use her as he wishes.

  Wei Ke is standing by the desk when she enters his room. “I don’t want to meet the foreigner. That wasn’t part of the deal.”

  “The deal?” she says. “I don’t know of any deal. I come here and tutor you for two hours every morning, and in return—” She stops, raises her shoulders.

  “What I mean is that I can practice English with you. But I’m not ready to speak to a foreigner, Jiejie. I can barely say hello.” He sinks into one of the stiff chairs in front of the desk. “You heard what my father said. I’m not good at English, and I’m never going to be.”

  The moment requires her to be either sympathetic or forceful. She’s not up to either one. Pulling out the other chair, she seats herself heavily next to Wei Ke. “Look,” she says, “I don’t really want to do this, either. The foreigner—I’ve only met him once. We were supposed to go to Plum Blossom Hill today because he needs a guide, but that’s as much as I know.”

  Wei Ke strokes the fingers of one hand with those of the other. He looks at them admiringly, even in the midst of his panic. He is a pianist, after all. “So, go,” he says.

  “You know your father will find out if you don’t come with me.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Well, I do. I don’t want to be blamed. And besides, he gave me money for lunch.”

  Wei Ke yawns, suddenly tired of the exchange. “Oh, that doesn’t matter.” He sits up abruptly and says, “You know what, if we’re going to be speaking English all day, I don’t want to do it now,” and for a moment Juanlan has to think whether that’s the language they’ve been conversing in this whole time. But of course what he means is that he doesn’t want to study. He’s fifteen, and without his parents here, he can pretend that he controls his own destiny.

  “Fine,” she says, and they spend the rest of the morning watching television in the main room.

  “Hello, who’s this?”

  Wei Ke stands dumbly beside Juanlan, and she looks from him to Rob and replies, “This is the son of my brother’s . . . associate.”

  Rob laughs. “Sounds like a mobster’s introduction. He’s not packing heat, is he?” He makes the shape of a gun at his side. “Mobsters? Guns?” He explains the joke to her, but the length of the explanation makes it difficult to laugh. She doesn’t bother translating for Wei Ke.

  They stand beneath the overhang of the Friendship Hotel’s entrance. The rain is still coming down. Inside the lobby, the woman at the desk is watching them with open curiosity, her face turned toward them like a satellite dish. She might be the same woman from yesterday, but Juanlan isn’t sure. They are probably all instructed to report on the comings and goings of the foreign guest.

  “The weather,” Rob says, looking out at the rain, “is not cooperating with us. Do we try the flower hill, what’s it called?”

  “Plum Blossom Hill will not be very comfortable. I think we can go to Jinlong Temple instead.” She hands him one of the two umbrellas, and he takes it easily. He had one before, he tells her, shaking it open, but he accidentally left it in Chengdu.

  She and Wei Ke share an umbrella, and the three of them set out down the street. Wei Ke, silent until now, asks if they’ll take a taxi to the temple. “Of course not,” Juanlan replies. “We’ll take a passenger van.” But as soon as she’s spoken, she realizes that this is not what Rob would choose to do on his own. A taxi will cost seven or eight yuan, while the van will cost only one yuan per person. It’s no matter to him, but Juanlan is at the mercy of her mother, who gives her money every now and then, and not on any regular schedule.

  Then she remembers the hundred yuan Director Wei gave her. They don’t need to eat so grandly, after all. She’ll just tell the waitress at the restaurant to cancel a few dishes, and that will make up for the money they’ll spend on a taxi. She flutters her fingers at an approaching cab.

  She and Wei Ke slide into the back. As they peel onto the road that leads east along the river, Rob turns around and tries to make conversation with Wei Ke. “How old are you?” he asks in the patient tone of someone who has spoken with shy children before. “He does speak English, you said, right?”

  “Yes,” she says. “I’m tutoring him.” To Wei Ke, she says in the bright clear English of study: “How old are you?”

  He blinks at her, and she repeats the question. “I am fifty,” he replies, finally. “Years. Old.” His voice is so quiet it’s nearly swallowed by the sound of the car engine and the air through the windows.

  “Fifteen,” Juanlan corrects. “You are fifteen years old.”

  Wei Ke stares back at her for a moment before turning his face to the window.

  They’re getting out of the main section of town now, and through the windshield the slopes of the mountains are visible behind the square, flat-roofed buildings that line the road. A big blue truck, its rear stacked high with spools of steel cording, belches smoke in the air. Construction is everywhere. There is a sense of the country being laid over with foundations for new roads, new houses, for the new dams that will make valleys into lakes and bring power to every new factory, every high-rise building. A motorbike pulls up beside their taxi, beeping its horn, and then cuts between them and the truck to avoid a passenger van coming from the opposite direction. Driving is a miracle, as unimaginable as flying with one’s own wings.

  They ride the rest of the way in silence. The rain has slowed somewhat, and the driver lets the water gather on the windshield before switching on the wipers. At last they reach the temple, and Juanlan tells him they’ll pay extra if he waits. He nods and reaches for the pack of cigarettes resting by the gearshift.

  The temple is up a hill, its slate roof visible through the green bamboo. The stairs are made of large, irregular slabs of stone, and Wei Ke takes them easily, Juanlan following. “The laowai is really slow, isn’t he?” Wei Ke says as they wait for Rob to join them at the top. “What? He can’t understand.”

  “And you can’t, either, when we speak English. Do you want me to talk about you? Say things about you without your knowing?”

  He shrugs; nothing she says matters very much to him. He is sulky and irritable, and this is her punishment for bringing him along.

  At last Rob reaches the top. “Shall we?” he says between ragged breaths, and inste
ad of responding, Wei Ke starts down the path ahead of them.

  They are not off to a good start. But once inside the first courtyard a kind of interested stillness comes over the three of them. It is the temple, sleepy with its centuries of history. The stone flags on the ground are blackened with lichen. Even the thin reedy strains of pop music coming from a tape player nearby seem a natural part of the atmosphere. They pass into the Hall of the Heavenly Kings and stand in the gloom to contemplate the statues. When Wei Ke leaves, Juanlan sneaks a glance at Rob and sees that he wears the expression of someone who knows his own ignorance and is not bothered by it. “Have you seen a Buddhist temple before?”

  “I’ve been to a few.” Rob lowers his voice to a confidential whisper. “Bigger ones, mostly—in Beijing, when I first got here. And then I went to one in Chengdu.” Looking around the small space with its dusty corners, he adds, “It wasn’t much like this. There were a lot more visitors and there were vendors everywhere, in case you wanted a Coke or something. I don’t get it. Like going into a church and up on the altar there’s someone selling popcorn.” He stops and looks up at the statue of the red-skinned Guangmutian with the snake wrapped around one wrist. “Pretty weird,” he says.

  Juanlan drops a donation in the box, kneels, and kowtows three times. “Would you like to do it?” she asks, but Rob just smiles and shakes his head. Back outside, the rain has changed over into mist, and she holds out her palm to determine that umbrellas are unnecessary. “But this is cool,” Rob says. “I like that this temple is smaller and more real than the other ones I’ve visited.” It takes her a moment to realize he’s picked up the conversation from before. “And it’s so old. Several centuries, right?”

  “Yes, many centuries old.” She considers explaining that after the People’s Republic was proclaimed, citizens weren’t allowed to worship in temples anymore, that during the Cultural Revolution parts of the temple were destroyed and the building was used for grain storage by the people nearby. The statues they saw inside are new; the patriots broke the old ones and threw them into the river. A simpler version: “China’s history is very complex. This temple has existed through many wars.”

  “Like the world wars?” Rob asks.

  “Yes, and others. The 1949 revolution, for example.”

  “With Chairman Mao, right? The Long March and all that? I’ve been trying to catch up on my Chinese history.”

  “Yes, the Long March passed very near here.”

  Pointing at the faded red characters crawling along the inside of the east- and west-facing walls, he asks what they are. She explains that they’re old political slogans proclaiming that religion is counterrevolutionary. Rob takes out his camera and asks, “Do you think it’s okay to take a picture?”

  “I think it’s okay, just a few very quickly.”

  He sets down his backpack and holds the camera up to take a picture of one wall from several meters away, then walks closer and focuses on one of the washed-out characters. He leans down to line up the character in his shot. The one he has chosen is a preposition, practically meaningless. Juanlan considers telling him to choose one of the others instead, but just then Wei Ke appears from behind the Hall of the Heavenly Kings and stops short. “What’s he doing?”

  “Taking a picture.”

  “Of that?”

  “Why not? He’s interested in history.”

  Wei Ke looks dubious, then a moment later he walks over and stands beside Rob. “Do you know what you’re photographing?” he asks in Chinese.

  Rob gives him a baffled look. “What’s that?”

  “He wants to know if you understand what it means.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Rob turns to Wei Ke. “Old political slogans. Very cool. Cool—do you know cool?” He says the word again, drawing out the vowel. Cooooooool. He is the friendly foreigner, ambassador of the English language.

  Wei Ke stares back at him, his face clenched.

  “I already explained everything,” Juanlan says.

  But this seems to rile him. He takes a few steps toward her, leaving Rob watching with his usual incomprehension. “What did you explain? Did you tell him about how China was cheated and stomped on by the West? How it took the revolution for us to stand up tall? I’m sure you didn’t explain that it was the people who painted these slogans. Peasants. Workers.” He gives a quick jerk of his head, eyes flashing like a mirror caught by a flashlight beam in the dark.

  “What do you know about being a peasant?”

  “As much as you do,” he shoots back. “I understand our history, and I’m proud of it. What does this laowai know about anything? All he can do is take pictures of old slogans he can’t even read.”

  “You’ve learned history better than you’ve learned English. But this ‘laowai’ knows more of the world than you do. He’s a man and he’s traveled, while you’re a child who has never gone farther from his home than Chengdu.”

  “But I will. Not like you, who’s come home forever just to wash the sheets in her parents’ hotel.”

  Here is the sentence that can’t be unspoken. They both fall silent, and Rob, sensing the end of the back-and-forth, says, “Should we go check out the rest of it?”

  “Yes,” Juanlan says, and leads the way without waiting to see whether either of them follows.

  9

  The next day is Saturday, and she doesn’t have to tutor Wei Ke. After her father’s morning exercises, he comes into the lobby where Juanlan is mopping the floor and tells her to go out and enjoy the beautiful day. “It’s raining,” she says, glancing at the closed glass doors. It’s not raining hard, but it has been recently, and a curtain of mist shrouds the buildings across the street.

  “Even so.” Her father gives his lopsided shrug. “I told your ma I want you to have some fun. Every day, you’re doing bitter work for free.” He pauses, and Juanlan has enough time to wonder if he’s referring to the tutoring or to the hotel. Then she feels guilty for having the thought.

  “After I finish mopping, I’ll go.”

  “I can do it.” He takes the mop from her, and she watches him push it over the floor, dirty water streaking the red linoleum. His body tilts slightly to one side, but he is not falling down, he is not incapable. “I’m fine, Lan’er. Go.”

  She finds her mother in the flat across the alley, cleaning up the kitchen from breakfast. “Ba is over there,” Juanlan says. “He insisted on cleaning.”

  Her mother nods without turning from the sink.

  “He seems okay. Don’t you think he’s doing better?”

  Reaching for a towel to dry her hands, her mother glances up with eyes as darkly bright as a bird’s. “You think he’ll be able to do the mopping on his own?” She shakes her head. “Hand me that food cover.”

  Juanlan takes the netted plastic dome from its place on the shelf and passes it to her mother. The table has been wiped clean and the leftovers pushed to the middle: a plate of pickles, a single mantou, half a salted duck egg. Her mother places the dome over the food and says, “I’ll go find him in a little while.”

  “Ma, I’ll stay.”

  “He wants you to go out. You should go out.” She glances around the kitchen to make sure she hasn’t forgotten anything, and her eyes pass over Juanlan as if she isn’t there.

  “Do you want me to clean the bathrooms before I go? So Ba doesn’t have to?”

  “How do you think he’s going to get upstairs? Of course he won’t do the bathrooms. He won’t mop the floors upstairs, either. He’ll come back here and lie down or he’ll sit at the desk and read one of his astronaut books. I’ll do the bathrooms and the floors, and the sheets and towels, and I’ll get the rooms ready after the guests check out. I’m used to doing this. You go out and enjoy yourself, like your Ba wants.”

  Juanlan bites her lip. “I’ll go out and come back again in a little while.”

  “And make him unhappy?” She shakes her head angrily. “He wants you to go have fun—I don’t know why, since you had s
o much time yesterday to play around. I know lunch with Teacher Cao didn’t last three hours, and then you came back and didn’t say where you had been. I didn’t ask—I figured you would tell your parents, and so if you don’t, maybe it’s a secret you have. Okay, you have your secret. I don’t say anything about it. And I don’t say anything when your Ba tells you to take the day and play around. You should respect his wishes, too. Go shopping, buy a new music tape or a necklace. You need a little money?” She pats at her pocketless trousers, her anger gone, expelled in one breath.

  “I still have some,” Juanlan says. “I’ll go see Zhuo Ge and Lulu. Maybe they’ll want to go walking downtown.”

  “Your brother is working today. Maybe Xiao Lu will go, but don’t wear her out. You know she shouldn’t be moving so much.”

  “Okay, Ma.”

  “I don’t know if you’re doing her any good.” She squints, as if trying to see her daughter better. “You girls. You don’t know anything about how the world works.”

  Juanlan doesn’t ask what she means. But her mother tells her anyway: “You think things should just keep getting better and better.”

  As she leaves the kitchen, her mother adds, “Tell them to come to dinner tomorrow. I’ll get a chicken at the market, and we’ll have lotus seed soup. It’s good for Xiao Lu’s health.”

  When Juanlan presses the buzzer at the bottom of the building, her sister-in-law calls down from above, “Where is your foreigner?”

  Juanlan’s neck cranes upward: there is Lulu’s face six stories above, shadowed against the white sky. The tops of the buildings around the courtyard all seem to be bent inward like bamboo. “I told you, he’s out of town until the day after tomorrow.” On the phone last night, she told Lulu all about the trip to the temple and the lunch after, where Rob mentioned that he was going to Kangding for a few days. Somehow her sister-in-law already knew about the foreigner’s presence in town, as well as Juanlan’s status as unofficial guide.

  “I don’t believe you,” Lulu yells down. “Anyway, wait a minute and I’ll come down.”