by Susan Conley
· 22 ·
Lukas’s father received a degree in engineering at the University of Copenhagen in 1973, but he didn’t find work in the engineering firms in the capital, so instead he became a sought-after train mechanic. When Lukas was five, his father drove him to a youth soccer academy on the east side of the capital for a tryout, and the directors of the academy told his father that his son was too young to try out, but his father insisted that his son be allowed to participate anyway. He was a loud man when he wanted to be and he achieved, Lukas has told me, a way of communicating through syllabic grunting.
It’s hard to get Lukas to talk about his father, and what I’ve assembled has been extracted over years, but what I know about the academy’s soccer fields is that they’re back behind the train station on the east side, and that this was how Lukas’s father got the idea—by spending each day underneath the bowel of a train, watching the boys in the soccer academy kick balls.
On the drive to the tryout he’d told Lukas that the life he wanted for his son was the life of soccer, not the life of a mechanic on the track in the fucking sun. Lukas told me that he played fine in the soccer tryout, but he was a five-year-old among ten-year-olds and that on the day of the academy tryout he was smaller by two hands than most of the boys, so he couldn’t get to some of the balls passed to the wing where the academy directors put him so he wouldn’t get hurt in the middle. You need to be fast on the wing, Lukas explained to me. And he was fast, but also small back then, and it was inevitable he missed balls.
His father cuffed him on the head when they got in the car after the tryout and then again once they’d started driving and said it was for missing balls passed to the wing. Then his father couldn’t contain himself it seems and pulled over to the side of the road and beat Lukas with his fists. Neither he nor his father spoke of the tryout or the beating to Lukas’s mother when they got home. She was a cello player in the city orchestra and a practicing Christian and was often distracted by her busy schedule and by trying to cook meals for Lukas’s father.
It’s only recently that Lukas explained to me the small room in the back of their house with the black-and-white television and the empty bottles lined up on the floor by his father’s wool chair. And how his father would call him into this room with the cigarettes and vodka to watch a replay of a particular soccer goal and then cuff Lukas on the ear or wherever he could reach from his chair for not being a better soccer player.
His father made Lukas try out for the soccer academy every year, and every year the academy directors had a different reason for why Lukas wasn’t admitted. He was a good soccer player; Lukas has made this clear to me. He thinks his father made the directors uncomfortable with his syllabic way of speaking that was often like grunting and his forcefulness, and that the academy directors wanted to make his father go away.
“You could tell as soon as we got out of the car,” Lukas told me once. “To admit me into the academy was to make a relationship with my father and the directors weren’t willing to do that.” He knew this after the second year, which made the tryouts more painful because he said he could have made it, and I take him at his word. He ended up turning to music and away from soccer and away from his father in a definitive way.
· 23 ·
The whole time we walked down the mountain I was afraid I’d lose Justice and Tree and be left alone with the Chinese bears. We turned the last corner on the path, and I thought I could see the kerosene lamps on the terrace. When we got to the terrace, I stood on the side in the dark and waited for Mei and the others. Justice sat Tree down at the table and got gauze in his room and taped it over the cut she’d gotten on the sole of her foot. Then the two of them went to their rooms.
The kang sleepers laughed and tiptoed into the Lius’ house, and Andre said he was exhausted and waved good night. Mei and Hunter were the last, and Hunter smiled at me distractedly and went to his room, but Mei and I stood for a moment and watched the cats circle the eel cistern on the far side of the terrace. Then a man stepped out of the darkness and called her name. Leng was probably, after Ai Weiwei, the most famous artist in China, and he wore the workers’ blue chamois pants and matching jacket. His head was squarish like the top of a wooden mallet, and he smiled at Mei, but she didn’t acknowledge at first that she knew him.
He stepped closer, and she didn’t move back. He took another step. She closed her eyes. I decided that he’d come to apologize, and this hope made me think of what my own marriage was lacking, and instead of turning away from my marriage like I had since I’d gotten sick, I wanted to drive home and fix it.
Leng tossed his cigarette on the terrace and put his hands on his hips and looked at his wife for another thirty seconds. Maybe it was a full minute. She still had her eyes closed. They stood less than one foot apart. Then he took her wrist. I’ve become pretty fluent in Mandarin, even though I don’t think I’ll ever understand the slang, but what Leng said to Mei was easy because it was repetitive. He said he wanted her to go home with him.
That phrasing—“Come home with me.” Maybe three times. I watched her face, and it didn’t change. Closed and in pain. Then she moved her head to the side almost imperceptibly. He stepped in a few inches and took both her hands and placed them behind her, and she let him do this. His body blocked my view, so I couldn’t tell what she did with her face, but the position looked uncomfortable, and I worried about her and tried to solve for where we were in the order of the universe. What I mean is I couldn’t understand how I’d come to be with Leng and Mei on the mountain, so I was trying to give it bigger meaning. I do this—give things bigger meaning than they deserve—and it can be a mistake.
I also rooted for Leng and Mei on the terrace the way I root for my own marriage, and I don’t know exactly what I’m rooting for, but it’s a sentiment that feels important. I was now somehow involved in Mei’s life. We hadn’t made claims on each other, but it seemed understood that I’d wait on the terrace. Leng took her right arm in both hands and tried to pull her down toward the parking area, and she cried in a deeper voice than I thought she had, and I looked up at the sky and wanted to be standing anywhere but on that terrace.
He said something sharper and pulled on her arm so her whole body shook, and this didn’t look like affection. She was able to move away from him, and he talked softly to her again and stepped toward her with his arms out to the sides the way I’ve seen people do when they’re trying to corner birds. Mrs. Liu kept chickens, and Toby had tried to catch one on the terrace after dinner, but the chicken got away and I was relieved, because what was he going to do with the bird if he got it?
Leng said something I couldn’t understand, but I could tell he was angry. I heard Hunter’s door open, and he came out of his room, which was next to Mei’s room. He was taller than Leng and overall much bigger, and he asked Mei if she was okay, and she said yes and that he could go back to sleep. He didn’t, though. And this was the right thing to do at the time. To stand there.
It was probably close to eleven o’clock at night, and the village was almost completely quiet. The dogs and donkeys and chickens slept. Things changed after Hunter came outside. Leng didn’t try to touch Mei again. She had her hand on the doorknob of her room. But then she put her arms around Leng, and they stood together for a long while forehead-to-forehead, which was surprising. I could tell she was crying by the way her shoulders shook. Then she stepped back and stared at him and waited.
Before he left, he said loudly that he didn’t like the American sleeping in the room next door to her, and that he would kill the American if he learned this man had touched his wife. Then he turned and walked across the terrace past me, though I don’t think he saw me. I also don’t think Hunter understood anything Leng said, because he waved at Mei and told her to have a good night and went back in his room, and Mei opened her door and stepped inside.
I wouldn’t have guesse
d at the sadness in Mei’s life, but there’s a lot we don’t know. I didn’t know the man named Hunter, for example, but we were both now somehow charged with keeping Mei safe. No one said it, and she didn’t ask, but it felt that way. This happens—that I’m allied with people who are unaware I’m allied with them.
My room had a broken TV on a laminate bureau pushed up against the wall, and I lay down on the bed with the nylon bedspread and thought about the configuration of Myla and Elisabeth’s beds in our apartment. They’ve lived there since they were born. I tried to see their faces, and I could hold them in my mind until they almost looked real, but then their hair and faces were gone and wouldn’t appear fully formed. The girls spent most of their time in the apartment in Elisabeth’s room, because it was bigger and had a rope swing Lukas had hung from the ceiling and a wall covered with paper so the girls could draw, but mostly Elisabeth kicked balls in there.
You could also watch the hutong out the enormous window. It had about eighty one-story houses like barracks, and for years the girls and I wondered whether or not the hutong would be torn down and replaced with high-rises. Lukas also worried about this, but it wasn’t one of his chief worries, so he didn’t watch the comings and goings of the people the way the girls and I did. Every month or so we heard something different: The hutong was going. The hutong was staying. We watched for bulldozers out the window and rooted for the hutong as if we understood something essential about China’s past when we knew nothing. For a long time the girls and I wanted Lukas to root for it, too, and we told him he wasn’t paying enough attention to it. He was caught up in his music, and I wonder now if we thought he wasn’t paying enough attention to us, but I think he was. I just wasn’t able to see it.
· 24 ·
On Saturday morning we ate rice porridge on the terrace, and it’s hard to explain how beautiful the valley looked from up there and how loud the absence of construction equipment was. The sun was full and made the clouds seem whiter and closer to the mountain. Sometimes I’m amazed at the scope, and I’ve told my sister Ginny several times that she needs to come to China and understand for herself. I often think if you haven’t been to China, you can’t really talk about the state of the world, but Ginny hasn’t come yet.
We walked down to the yoga house after the porridge, and I didn’t speak with Mei about what I’d seen the night before. There wasn’t time to talk. At breakfast I’d heard that Tamar had left before dawn, and we were quieter while we walked, silent almost, and her absence opened up the real possibility of going home. The village also seemed silent. I understand now that most children had been sent to military boarding schools, and others had left Shashan with their parents to look for work in the cities because there was no work left in the village. In this way the village felt emptied except for the old women in blazers who were like ghosts, and a few families like the Lius testing the tourist business.
I set up my mat in the back of the house and bent at my waist and tried to touch my hands to the ground, and I saw the Hong Kong hospital where I had my small operation. In Beijing if you have money, you can get medical information quickly, and there are no waits or protocols. You receive X-rays and ultrasounds not long after you arrive at the doctor’s office. In the end we were sent to Hong Kong. But we had no parents we could bring with us, so it didn’t seem like a solution at first, because who would watch the children?
My sister Ginny came to Hong Kong, and I’ll never forget that. She had her own family in San Francisco and had become the type of evangelical Christian with no birthdays or singing, and I was certain it was Jehovah’s Witnesses, though I tried not to ask. She met her husband through a financial literacy program for soldiers that she ran at the local bank, and neither of them voted because they said what happened on earth wasn’t what mattered.
Tommy Miller, the neurosurgeon I’d lived with in Dublin, had a medical practice in Hong Kong, and I’d learned this from a painter friend in Ireland who was still in touch with both of us. Tommy didn’t work at the hospital where I was going, but I thought he could help me and I wrote him and asked him for lunch the day before my surgery. We met at the American Club, where he was a member, and the dining room had big potted palm trees and white linen and checkerboard yellow sisal, and it felt calm in there and orderly. He chose the tenderloin for both of us, and I don’t know why I let him order for me, but I felt young again like we were back in Dublin. After I’d left him and moved in with the owners of the Montessori school, he gave me the chance to go back to him and I almost did. I was selling my paintings by then—the earlier, more literal interpretations in the exaggerated David Hockney colors. But in the end I didn’t go back, because he wanted to marry me and said he’d wait as long as it took.
Ginny hadn’t arrived in Hong Kong yet from California, and Lukas had taken the girls on the ferry to Kowloon because they loved boats and he needed something to do with them. Were they okay on the ferry? Had Lukas gotten them enough food? When the waiter came back with the iced teas, I ordered a dirty martini, and Tommy said, “You are so thin. You look wonderful.” I wanted to tell him, “I have always been this thin.”
I have a writer friend in Beijing now who says when we see people, we see with desire. Which means we see what we want to see. I think there’s truth in this. Maybe Tommy saw my thinness as if he’d never seen it before, because he wanted to see it. I think at first he thought I was finally returning to him, because why else had I found him in Hong Kong? He was seeing what he wanted to see. I remembered why I’d left him then, and I wanted to leave him again and stand and walk out of the American Club. But after he said I looked thin, I thanked him and stayed in the awkwardness and didn’t try to get out of it. I still wanted something from him. But I was glad for my own marriage and felt a small joy for Lukas. Joy for the ferry to Kowloon and the girls.
“If you want to smoke pot in Hong Kong, Elsey,” Tommy said, “you must do it in your room and don’t ever leave your rolling papers out or the cleaning staff will report you to the police and you’ll be put in prison.”
Had he always talked to me like a child? My hair was long and curlier in the humidity, and I was wearing a favorite Japanese sundress with a blue tie-dye pattern. Maybe I wore the tie-dye to provoke Tommy, because I wanted him to know I was different than I’d been in Dublin and had turned out better than I would have if I’d married him. More creative. Someone who wore tie-dye. This was the only word I could think of while I sat in the American Club and listened to him. That he wasn’t creative and I was. I was ridiculous. I don’t even know if it’s true that Tommy isn’t creative. He’s a good man.
“Don’t get caught by the police with drugs in Hong Kong,” he said, and I could see he was still mad at me for not choosing him. He wore a pink bow tie and had the bluest eyes and had become sensible in Hong Kong, and he wasn’t this way in Dublin yet. He was still a little reckless, but maybe it was a controlled recklessness. I think I left him because he was in love with me and I didn’t like myself enough. After he’d given me my first cocaine at a U2 concert in Belfast, I remember feeling euphoric, but also clear that I’d leave him. It was much easier to leave. I mean that. To stay with Lukas has been harder than leaving him.
“I have children now,” I told Tommy after the cold soup was placed on the table. “Two girls. I don’t have time or inclination to smoke pot.”
I saw my marriage as separate from Tommy Miller and the American Club. I knew even then that it was my own fault I’d stopped painting. I couldn’t blame my marriage. I’d thought my girls needed me more than they did, and I tried to let this define me—their need. I thought it was my duty until it had begun to feel like a small pathology. But I couldn’t stop, and I had fixed ideas of who my girls were, which weren’t entirely accurate.
I drank my martini and got high on it and was also angry with Tommy Miller for assuming I was doing drugs. What did I want from him? I wanted a better exc
use for leaving him in Dublin. I’ll admit that I also wanted help from his colleagues at the hospital and for him to feel bad for me so that his compassion erased any negative feelings he’d had for me in Ireland, and this was exactly what happened.
· 25 ·
In Ireland, Tommy Miller and I once drove over something high and dramatic and terrifying called the Conor Pass, which was at ten thousand feet and had a one-lane road and a steep green hedge on either side and pastures and stone walls. Tommy drove and I held my breath and watched the mountains and the round-horned sheep, and the past felt very close the way it also does in China. But in Ireland the story seemed clearer: Here were the stone gates. Here was the paddock and the startling hedge. Here was your life.
We came down out of the mountains and stopped at a beach shaped like a long kitchen utensil, and I felt so alive. We got out of the car and looked across the churning sea, and in my mind I could see my parents in their brick house in America. The particularity of my mother’s sadness had been scary after Margaret died, and I couldn’t look at it directly. It had gotten so that her sadness blocked out my sadness until I didn’t know what I felt. I stood on the beach in Ireland and asked my parents how they were coping without her. Without Margaret. “This is how I’m coping,” I said to myself. By not coming home.
Tommy and I slept in a renovated stable a few miles from the beach that had an earth roof with grass growing out of it. There was a yellow crushed-velvet couch and a metal stove and peat moss. The front door was glass and opened to a yard where wrens landed, and I left the door open when we got there, and one of the wrens flew inside. I was afraid it would panic and bang into the walls, and I tried showing it how to go back outside, but the bird stood on the wooden floor near the couch and studied my face.