by Karoline Kan
Shan, another guy from my high school, also asked me out. He wasn’t quite my type: He was majoring in engineering and wasn’t interested in the arts at all. I told him we could be friends, but then he called one night drunk, begging to be with me.
It happened a few times like that for me. When I said I just wanted to be friends, the guys would either chase me or get angry. I thought there had to be more to romance than a game of cat and mouse—I craved an authentic connection.
I did have a crush on someone: a boy from Lutai named Wei. Tall and with thick eyelashes, he was majoring in German at another university in Beijing. Because of him, I studied German during my free time, to have more to talk about when we met. We had known each other since we were thirteen years old. I spent a lot of weekends hanging out with him, and sometimes we’d take the long bus ride back to Lutai together.
QQ, an instant messaging app, had become popular, and I checked it every evening simply to see if Wei was on it. When I received a message from him, I’d get butterflies in my stomach. A lot of my journal was about him: what he said, what he did, and how I felt about him. I printed a photo he took for me, framed it, and put it on my desk. In a sense, he was my first love—though we were not together. We talked about everything. There was nothing that made me happier than being with him.
The more time we spent together, though, the more I wished he could take it one step further and ask me out, but it never happened.
Na’s boyfriend came by almost every Friday afternoon and sat in the lounge waiting for her. He’d wave hi to me when I passed by. At night after classes and before going to bed, Na always stood in the corridor in her pink pajamas talking to him for hours. I longed to have that with Wei.
I never asked Wei about us. I was afraid our relationship would be ruined if he found out I expected more, if he didn’t. I preferred to keep it as it was rather than risk having no relationship at all.
* * *
Still with no real love life, I could focus on my studies. My parents had been supportive when I was choosing my major; they said I could study whatever I was interested in. Most of my friends were not so lucky. I listed three choices: Chinese literature, French, and Japanese, but my gaokao score was not high enough for me to get into any of them. So I was assigned to a finance major. I hated it, but I could not refuse it. If I had, it would have meant another year in high school so that I could retake the gaokao!
Our teachers said we “must learn to walk with two legs,” for example, to major in finance and be skilled in English. The goal was to make us competitive internationally. If I had wanted to be a CFO of a Chinese company, my teachers would push me to learn English so that I could become a CFO of an international Fortune 500 company.
Although the Chinese ideology of working “to serve our country” was ingrained in us, in reality, that goal meant little. What we wanted more than anything else was individual success, never mind the motherland. I thought working in a top Western company would be good for me.
As a student in Beijing, I had more foreign exposure than others studying elsewhere in the country, not just because of the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the capital and its many tourists, but also because our university had so many American and British lecturers. One of these was Helen Smith, who insisted that we call her Helen, not Teacher Helen. An American from Mississippi, she was the first person I met who had blue eyes and light blonde hair. She was a devout Christian, so we learned a lot about Christianity from her. On Easter, Helen brought in paints and brushes and boiled white eggs for us to decorate. On Christmas Day, she held a party at her apartment. She taught us to sing “Silent Night” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and dressed up as a female version of Santa Claus. Helen had us over for movie nights, and it was there that I first watched Star Wars and Back to the Future. She encouraged me to read foreign newspapers even though I didn’t really understand them, and would leave copies of the New York Times, the Financial Times, or the Wall Street Journal in our reading room. She gave me an English name, Karoline, that I would end up using in my writing career.
“I see great potential in you, Karoline. Don’t be shy when you talk to me in English. You should be proud of yourself. Your English is much better than many Chinese people who have lived in America for years.” I was fascinated by the foreign teachers like Helen and liked that she had given me a pseudonym. I told her I wanted to be a writer, and felt she believed in me. I thought, if there were angels, she was one of them.
Because of her encouragement, I became obsessed with learning English.
Barack Obama was then running for his first term as president of the US, and we would play recordings of his speeches to improve our listening comprehension. I thought he was handsome and intelligent, and I was intrigued by his African American heritage. He was doing so well, and his success gave me confidence: I should never think anything was impossible. If a black man could be president of the United States, I, a girl from a small town, could one day do great things in China.
Slowly, our idols ceased to be South Korean pop stars, and became European and American influencers. Yun greatly admired Steve Jobs and was the first girl in my class to buy an iPhone. Even Tian started to watch The Big Bang Theory and Modern Family instead of Japanese anime.
However, speaking English gave me headaches. I had never talked to any Western foreigners before coming to Beijing, and it was frustrating to communicate so hesitantly in another language, stumbling over grammar and vocabulary and pronunciation. I had a long way to go from knowing how to read the sentences to talking like a native speaker.
The day Barack Obama was elected, Teacher Jack Lee was so excited he gave a long speech. But I could only understand a few words: Obama, president, proud, remarkable, black man, excited. I had to guess at what he was saying, but by the time I figured it out, I had already missed the chance to celebrate with him.
Most of my classmates had grown up in Beijing, where English was often heard, or seen in advertising and in shops, so they had a head start because they talked to foreigners in the street and in their schools. No matter how many hours I immersed myself in English-language newspapers and magazines, it didn’t help; I was a mess.
I thought making friends with English speakers would be the best way to improve, but the foreign students were mysterious. They lived together in the only dormitory building with an elevator. I heard two students, rather than six, shared one room! And they didn’t have a curfew. I often heard music and shouting late into the night. They had a lot of parties. In the morning, we’d often see used beer cans crushed all over the ground outside their dorms.
Chinese students also drank, but instead of going to bars or in someone’s room, we went to the private rooms of restaurants, and only with people we knew well. Going to bars and hanging out with strangers, even with acquaintances, was awkward and would warrant gossip.
One day Tian and I sneaked into a bar nearby. I had begged her to go with me because I was too nervous to go alone. Tian had nothing to do that evening and agreed. Although we were both over eighteen, the drinking age in China, she and I had never been to a bar. Only in a few big cities like Beijing and Shanghai were people starting to hang out in such places. Even today in Lutai there aren’t any. Instead people go to teahouses. I confused bars with nightclubs, and didn’t understand the difference. I also believed bars were noisy and dangerous for young women. The TV shows didn’t help my thinking. In American TV shows, there was always a bad guy harassing a woman in a bar.
When Tian and I got inside, we found it full of foreigners. We looked completely out of place. People had dressed up for a birthday party. Three or four people stood or sat together in a group, drinking and laughing loudly. They wore dresses and makeup, and the guys were in leather shoes. It was a nightclub.
Tian and I sat down anyway and a man began staring at us, perhaps because we were dressed in sneakers and loose T-shirts and looked really lost. We didn’t know how to order, because neither o
f us had ever touched any of these drinks. Reading the English menu made me dizzy.
“How can I help you?” the bartender asked. I pretended to be examining the drink names carefully. Beers? Cocktails? Or wine? I had no idea and turned to Tian. She looked around as if she didn’t see me gawking at her. She wasn’t helping. She stood behind me, like I was her protector. “I’ll order the same thing as you,” she finally said.
“A cocktail, maybe two, for both of us,” I said. God knew how a cocktail tasted, but at least it looked pretty, and I had heard they were sweet.
“Which one in particular?” The bartender turned the menu to the pages where at least twenty different kinds of cocktails were listed. Kill me, I thought. What are the differences? The bartender must’ve noticed my confusion. I didn’t want to look up at his grave face. A few foreigners were crowded around me, waiting for me to finish so they could get another drink. “Long Island and Bloody Mary, that’s it,” I said. The bartender gave me a face that said, Are you kidding me? But I didn’t know what the problem was.
“Are you sure? It’s a bit strong,” he said.
“I’m sure,” I said. My face was burning. I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t want to embarrass us. I glared back at Tian, but she seemed pretty relaxed and was scrolling on her phone, pretending to pay no attention to what was happening. I wanted to shout at her to get off the phone, but she wouldn’t understand.
Tian and I took our drinks and retreated to a spot near the window. I was so self-conscious that I had forgotten how to walk. I started wobbling like a duck for some reason. The foreigners began to dance, stretching their arms and legs, like they were drunk. I didn’t want to get any closer to them. Were they laughing at us? I wished there was a hole under the table that I could crawl into. It was a failure. I quickly finished my Long Island and pushed Tian to finish her Bloody Mary. She was coughing by the first sip. “Never mind, let’s go!” I grabbed Tian, and we sneaked out quickly.
I was thankful to be out of there. I had a headache for the rest of the night.
My second attempt at experiencing an English environment was going to “English corners,” where people discuss their opinions in English over a topic or two they select.
My friend Sun Bin introduced me to the English corners. Sun Bin came from a town, Chongyi, and was two years younger than most students in our class. He joked that he still had time to grow. He was small but disciplined like a soldier. He got up at six o’clock every morning and recited English essays from his textbook. He was one of the first to arrive in the classroom every day and always sat in the front row. He was keen to answer questions, and soon became one of the foreign teachers’ favorites. One of them told him about an English corner at Wǔdàokǒu, and Sun Bin took me along.
Wǔdàokǒu was on the other side of the city. We went through twenty stations on three different subway lines, the journey lasting two hours. People called Wǔdàokǒu “the Center of the Universe” because it was one of the most international places in Beijing. There were foreigners everywhere and from all over the world. It was common to see shops and cafés with signs in many different languages—English, Korean, French.
Wǔdàokǒu was also the cradle of tech start-ups and was rich with China’s top IT tycoons.
The English corner Sun Bin and I attended was at a language training center. The owner held networking events that welcomed both foreigners and locals. Native English speakers were rare, so often a group of young Chinese people would surround a white person, saying how much they loved Hollywood movies and the Harry Potter series. They all had English names like Lucy, Nancy, Jack, or Tom, and some strange names like Cheery, Apple, Candy, and Strongman, either selected from television shows or made up because they liked the pronunciation.
The Chinese students’ introduction was always in the same broken Chinese: “Hi, I’m here to make friends with foreigners. I like both Chinese and English culture.” Then the same robotic questions came pouring out from the rest of us: “Why did you come to China?” “How long have you been in Beijing?” “Do you plan to stay long?” Their eyes would light up when the foreigner said something in Chinese like xièxiè or búkèqi, which meant “thank you” and “you are welcome.”
“Your Chinese is great,” the students would always say.
English corner helped, but it took too long to get there. Instead, Sun Bin and I formed a group during lunchtime that included English-speaking staff.
The teacher I chatted with most during these discussions was Mike. He and his wife had retired from their jobs in the US and were traveling the world. He was a young-looking sixtysomething, his hair and beard half-gray; he played tennis and was a runner. He was a fan of history like me. One day over lunch, he said: “I doubt anyone in your class knows about June Fourth.”
“I know!” I shouted with passion.
Mike and the other foreign teachers seemed both open-minded and critical of China, and enabled us to have the type of conversations we could not have elsewhere.
But to my surprise, Mike clammed up, simply returning to his noodle soup and avoiding looking my way. I kept probing him; he just kept sipping his soup.
Later I learned that every single foreign teacher had been warned against talking about it.
Since junxun, I had spent more time researching the events of June Fourth. On the Chinese websites, almost everything about the event was deleted or blocked. On Baidu—China’s version of Google—when you typed in “June Fourth,” the only results were the Chinese government reports that I had read a million times. The government blocked almost all major foreign news sites, so I had no way of finding more information.
Finally, Mike suggested that I use a VPN—a virtual private network—to log on to the blocked sites. Few people in my circle knew about or wanted anything to do with VPNs, and I remembered that I still had a VPN given to me by Falun Gong members in high school during their anti-party movement.
That afternoon, I raced back to my room and had a friend help me install it. Instantly, I did a Google search and discovered photos and videos of students protesting in front of Tiananmen Square, holding banners that read “Liberty or Death” and “Democracy Saves China.” A sculpture of the goddess of democracy had been erected, and students on the hunger strike sat under it. Military tanks and bloody people lay on the roadsides, fire and guns in the air. I learned that many protestors were still in jail or in exile, or had died. I cried as I watched my country’s soldiers kill their own people, on the orders of our government. I thought about the photo I took in front of Tiananmen Square during my family’s trip to Beijing. I was smiling. I was excited because there were a few soldiers standing behind me. I was so proud of the national emblems everywhere and of the characters posted above the gate: “Long Live the People’s Republic of China.” I had showed the photograph to all my friends. But now, thinking about the photo, I felt betrayed, my respect for the army seriously dented. China collapsed for me suddenly. I no longer understood what was in front of me. I had no faith in what I had been brought up to believe.
Chapter Twelve
A Train of Dreams
When I returned home for Spring Festival, I was sullen and depressed, and impatient with my family. They seemed like such conformists, and I hated their naive questions about school and Beijing. They just wanted me to whet their palates with false hope so that they could continue to believe how beautiful and serene the capital was. They seemed like children to me. I told them it was not a magical place, it was just a place! I had experienced more darkness in the past six months in Beijing than in my previous nineteen years. I questioned everything my family did and said when I returned home, as if there were a gigantic question mark looming over my head. I had questions about government, systems, law and order; I was no longer a kid. I did not have blinders on, and I wanted theirs off too. I knew exactly who we were as villagers and as Chinese people under an oppressive government.
“She just has the freshman blues,” my mom console
d Baba, who shook his head.
Then, two weeks before the new semester, Laoye passed away suddenly after a heart attack. My last grandparent was gone. The day we buried his ashes, we also burned the Falun Gong books he had kept hidden and his party membership card and placed these in the same urn.
After returning from the family gravesite, I locked myself in my room. When I was younger, like everyone else, I had been critical of him for his change of heart about the party. Now I understood that he had released himself from disillusion as I also had. He had been secretly practicing Falun Gong until the last stage of his life. I cried for him; he would have understood what I was going through. The rest of my family chose not to, but that was the Chinese way. Caiyuan’s sky, a thick shield of gray, made me long for my grandfather’s light.
When the festival was over, I again boarded the bus to Beijing, but this time on my own. I didn’t need Yunxiang to take me. I was no longer the same scared girl I had been only a few months before.
Days passed in a blur during my second semester. I ran from one building to the next for classes, student union meetings, meals, lectures, and tests, and then I’d do it all again the next day. The repetition seemed monotonous, without excitement or rest. On the weekends, there was more work. My life’s path had been overrated—as a student in the city, I had no more joy or fortune than a farmer in the village. My path grew more confusing to me with every test and every paper to manage. The days turned in and out of each other, over and over, like a dance I struggled to keep up with.
As June approached, one day my former fǔdǎoyuán, Guan Xin, emailed the board of student leaders I was on, calling for an urgent meeting. Apparently, all universities in Beijing had come under intense pressure to make sure that nothing happened to mark the twentieth anniversary of June Fourth.