Beautiful Country (11 page)

As September turned into October, the weather changed noticeably. It became very cold and I had to wear a thick jacket whenever I went outside. Everything started dying too. The leaves seemed to fall off the trees quicker than they did back home. I wondered if that was because they didn't get enough sunlight due to the smog. Soon all of the trees at the tennis center were bare of any leaves. The grass died as well, and all that remained was the dry, cracked earth.

On the last Friday in September, Madame Jiang told Victoria that the following week the team wouldn't be practicing due to the weeklong national holiday. Most of the boys would go home. I asked Victoria to ask her if anyone would be around. Madame Jiang shrugged her shoulders. I mentioned Bowen's name, and Madame Jiang repeated her shrug and made a face as if she had tasted something sour. She did little to disguise her dislike of Bowen. I was never given an explicit reason for her aversion to Bowen, but I sensed that it was because she knew how little respect Bowen had for her.

At the end of practice on Friday of that week, I sat with Bowen as we repacked our tennis bags. While I continued to struggle
in my efforts to learn Chinese, Bowen's English had improved. It was in part, I think, due to the fact that I spoke to him almost entirely in English. I knew I should have been practicing my Chinese with him, but it was exhausting living entirely in a language as foreign as Chinese was to me. Not just mentally—physically, too. By the end of the day, my jaw muscles would ache from making sounds I had never before had a reason to make. So when I spoke with Bowen, I would give in and lapse into English.

“So, are you going home tomorrow?” I asked.

“No,” he said. I waited for him to continue, but he kept his eyes fixed on the rackets he was slotting one by one back into his bag.

“But Random said everyone's going home.” I said the words before I thought of the implication behind them. Despite the fact that we had talked about many things over the past few weeks—about music, about girls, about tennis—Bowen had never once brought up the subject of family. And neither had I. “Because of the holiday,” I added.

Bowen shook his head.

“Why?” I asked.

“Too far.”

“Where are you from?”

“Tianjin,” he said.

“You're from Tianjin?” It made sense, I thought. I had wondered why Bowen didn't speak with the harsh Beijing accent of the other boys, and why they sometimes mocked the way he said things.

“My family is,” Bowen said.

“So you're staying here, then?” I asked. “For the whole week?”

Bowen nodded again. “And you?”

“I'm staying too. I guess I could have gone somewhere, but I didn't know this week was a holiday.”

“So you will be here?”

“Yes.”

“We can practice.”

“Sure,” I said.

We finished packing our bags, and Bowen said, “Wait.” He reached behind the tennis bench and picked up my tennis hat. He looked at it before giving it back. “Wimbledon,” he said. But the way he said it, it sounded more like
Wim-Bo-Dun
. “You play there?”

“No, I just watched.”

“What players?”

“Everybody, really: Federer, Agassi, Sampras, Ivanisevic—lots.”

Bowen nodded his head and the corners of his mouth turned down as if he was seriously considering something that required intense concentration.

“We will need to ask for the key.”

“What key?” I asked.

“The key to the courts.”

“The courts are locked?”

“For holidays, yes,” Bowen said. He added, “It is best for you to ask Madame Jiang.”

“Me?”

“She will say yes if you ask.” Bowen nodded his head as if this matter had been decided. He stood up and lifted his tennis bag over his shoulder. “See you on Monday.”

I asked Victoria to speak to Madame Jiang about getting a key to the courts. She was hesitant at first but agreed to do it and walked over to where Madame Jiang was putting away her
shopping cart of tennis balls. I sat and watched as they spoke. The conversation took longer than I had assumed it would, and it looked as though Victoria had to do a fair amount of persuading. Finally, after about ten minutes, Madame Jiang looked at me and pulled a ring of keys from her bag. She flipped through them and then twisted one off and handed it to Victoria.

“You should not have asked me to do that,” Victoria said when she returned with the key.

“Why not?”

“Because you have asked for a special favor. Madame Jiang is not supposed to give the key to anyone. It is her sole responsibility.”

“Then why did she give it to you?”

“Because she is afraid not to. She knows your father must have connections in the government. It's not normal for an American to be allowed to play with the team. She doesn't want to risk making your father's friends angry. If she causes them problems they will replace her.”

“But Bowen asked me to get the key so we could play.”

“I know,” Victoria said. “I am sure Bowen knew exactly what he was doing when he put you up to this. You should be careful. Don't do everything Bowen asks you to do. Not everything is as innocent as it seems.” Victoria's comments concerned me. I didn't want my father to hear that I had been asking for special favors.

For the next week, Bowen and I practiced together every morning and afternoon. Each day we took a two-hour lunch break during which Bowen would take me to a different local restaurant in the hutongs around the tennis center. At first I didn't really like the food, but it grew on me. I learned the key was not to ask what we were eating. Usually it all tasted pretty good, but if I asked what it was, I might find out that we were eating duck tongue, or chicken feet, and suddenly lose my appetite. I paid for all of our lunches as I knew Bowen didn't have money to spend on eating out.

I tried to be brave about trying new things, but I did draw the line when Bowen tried to get me to eat fried scorpions. We were walking back to tennis when I stopped and stared at a street vendor who appeared to be selling live scorpions impaled on wooden skewers. Bowen laughed when he saw the expression on my face. He turned to the vendor and ordered two. The vendor took two skewers and dunked them in burning oil, and a minute or two later presented us with two fried scorpion kebabs. It was too much for me, so Bowen ate them both.

At one of our lunches Bowen asked me if I knew the name of my country in Chinese.

I had just learned this with Teacher Lu. “
Mei Guo
.”

“
Dui
(Right),” he said with a nod. “Do you know what it means?”

I shook my head.

“Beautiful country. Mei Guo. That is what we call your country. Mei Guo.”

“It's not all beautiful, I mean some of it is, but not all.”

“I think it is beautiful,” Bowen said.

Bowen asked as much as he could about America. He wanted to know about the movies and the music and what we ate every day. He asked me question after question about the tennis academy in Florida where I had trained. What did it look like? How many courts, did they have indoor and outdoor courts? How many instructors, where did the players come from? Did any professionals train there, too? Did any of the players ever get a chance to play with them? Could you play whenever you wanted? Could you enter any tournament you wanted? Were the rules strict? On and on he went. Bowen would get excited about my answers and switch to Chinese to ask more questions. I did my best to understand his random combination of Chinese and English. Once I asked him to write his question down so I could see if I could understand it. He shook his head and said in Chinese, “No big deal.”

I could never understand why Bowen resisted writing anything down. It was not that he did not know how to write. The boys at the center did schooling in the morning. They even studied the English that Bowen was so eager to improve. It was not until I returned to boarding school that I guessed why he was reluctant to show me his writing. Our Chinese teacher handed back the class's first written vocabulary test. Even though most of us had gotten all the characters of the twenty words correct,
she had dropped our grades by one full letter because of what she termed bad characters. “In China,” she informed us, “how you write your characters, what sort of care you take, shows what kind of person you are. In England, it is your accent that helps to define you, in China it is your writing. It shows the quality of your education.” I guessed that Bowen, who had never received much formal schooling, must have been ashamed of the way he wrote his characters and was too proud to let me see them.

On our last day of practice before the holiday ended, I arrived at the tennis center to learn that the indoor courts had been reserved for an official event and were not available to us that day. Heavy rain was forecasted, and it looked unlikely that we would be able to play outdoors.

“We do fitness, then,” Bowen said.

I considered Bowen's proposition for a moment.

“Do you want to do fitness with me?” he asked against my silence.

I hated running sprints. “Not really,” I said to myself. But aloud I heard my voice say, “
Weishenme bu ne?
”

“Exactly—why not.” Bowen translated my words and patted me on the back.

We stretched and loosened up and then started off with suicide sprints. Bowen slaughtered me. We ran ten sets and he won all ten. I asked him if he wanted to run stadiums on the outside running track as a joke, but then he laughed and said, “Why not.”

I looked up at the graying sky. “Looks like rain, it could get slippery.”

“If the rain becomes too much we stop,” he said.

“Okay, but we probably only have time to do one set before it gets too bad.”

“Only one?” Bowen asked. “You are slower than I thought!”

We jogged to the stadium and just as we were about to run up the first set of stairs, it began to drizzle lightly. We were halfway through the first set when the rain began to come down hard. We sprinted back to the tennis courts. I grabbed my racket bag and ran to where Victoria and Driver Wu were waiting with the car. The rain was falling heavier now. Bowen took off toward the dorms. Driver Wu slowed as we passed Bowen. I lowered my window and yelled into the rain. “Want a ride?” He kept running and shook his head. “Okay, we'll pick you up at twelve for lunch?” He smiled and gave me a thumbs-up.

There wasn't enough time to go back to the Zhangs', so we waited out the rain at a cafe Victoria liked near the tennis center called Sculpting in Time
.
When we arrived, I quickly grabbed a menu and began to scan it for amusing translations. We had recently added a new event to the
Translation Olympics
named the CULINARY PENTATHLON
.
Currently occupying the top spot in that category was a shrimp, noodle, and vegetable dish that had been given the bizarre name “Sludge mixed with family.” Equally strange and no more appetizing was something called “Fish head bubble cake.” “Very beautiful kelp” had been in poll position for the bronze medal until I came across a tofu dish designed to resemble three miniature pandas with the name “The wet panda skin of tofu.” Unfortunately, the Sculpting in Time cafe had no new additions to their menu and the standings of the CULINARY PENTATHLON remained unchanged.

The cafe's name itself had briefly been considered for a medal in the VENDOR & RESTAURANT event of the
Translation Olympics
, but in the end Victoria and I decided that the awkwardly translated name actually suited the cafe quite well. The entire
cafe, from the lamps to the furniture to the movie posters and lunch boxes on the walls, was decked out with genuine miscellany from the 1970s and 1980s. Victoria loved going there because it reminded her of her childhood. She always sat at one table in the corner that had four plastic chairs that she said were the same as the chairs she had used in school when she was a young girl.

When we picked him up a few hours later, I told Bowen I wanted to choose the restaurant. I had spotted a McDonald's on one of Driver Wu's drives to the sports center. I figured it was a fifteen-minute walk. He had never been to McDonald's but, as always, he was thrilled by the prospect of discovering something new. The menu was recognizable to me, but pretty much everything had been adapted to local tastes. Instead of chicken nuggets they served chicken wings. We feasted on chicken wings and “shake-shake fries” and Cokes. Bowen chose seaweed-flavored fries and I stuck with salt. We finished our meal off with bean curd ice cream.

As we were getting up to leave I asked him about Madame Jiang. “If she had never been a tennis player, how did she become the coach?”

“Maybe no one knows. She was a volleyball player. But maybe no one knows why she is not coaching volleyball.” Bowen could not be drawn into speculation or gossip. It was not that he was resisting, it was just that he was not the least bit interested in her. Over the weeks of tennis practice, I came to understand that it was his total absence of interest and respect for Madame Jiang that infuriated her. There was nothing she could do about it. It was as if she did not exist. The more she tried to goad him, the less visible she became.

It had stopped raining some time before, and after we finished lunch we walked back to the courts. We walked unhurried, perhaps because we both knew that the week, and the freedom we had enjoyed, were coming to an end. As we were walking, I realized that Bowen and I had become close friends. It was fun hanging out with him. It had been a long time since I had hung out with someone my own age who didn't act weird around me because of what happened to my brother. It was also the first time that I wasn't constantly thinking about the friends I had left behind in America. I realized I would miss Bowen when I went back, and I was struck with the sobering thought that I would probably never see or hear from him again after I left.

I wondered if Bowen had ever thought about trying to get a scholarship to an American university. I asked him if he was considering university at all. He shook his head and explained to me that he would never pass the Gao Kao, the university entrance exam. The Gao Kao was made up of four sections that Bowen described as 3 + X. The “3” are Chinese, math, and English. Every single high school student is required to speak English well enough to pass a rigorous English exam. The “X” is an exam that tests a subject that each student feels he or she is the strongest in. Bowen said that every year almost ten million students take the Gao Kao
.
There was no way he could take it now, having been out of the system for so long. Even the smartest students at the best schools in the country would study from 5 a.m. to midnight every day for an entire year to prepare for the test. Bowen said that the best universities, Tsinghua and Beida, only accepted the top eight students out of every ten thousand who took the exam.

I was quiet for a moment while I thought about what he had just said. The ten million number was simply staggering. The
year before when I had almost flunked out of school, my father, in an attempt to make me pick up my grades, had impressed upon me the fact that Yale only accepted a little more than two thousand of the thirty thousand people who applied every year, giving it an acceptance rate of about 7 percent. According to Bowen, Tsinghua accepted twenty-four out of thirty thousand. That acceptance rate was closer to 0.07 percent. Later on during the year, as the Gao Kao got closer, I would read stories in the
China Daily
of parents who had their children prepare for the test by studying and living full-time in hospitals, hooked up to IV drips and oxygen to improve their concentration. Victoria told me that during the two weeks before the Gao Kao, cities all across China became deathly quiet at night as bars and clubs were shut down and special noise ordinances passed so that the students could study in peace. I also read of kids who committed suicide, of elaborate cheating scams that used wireless earphones, camera pens, and signal-emitting watches, and of girls who took hormone injections to delay their periods until after the exam. In America I had heard of students going to the bathroom during the SAT and reading cheat sheets they had stashed in their pockets, but I had never heard of anything as drastic as any of this. To many the Gao Kao was a route out of poverty and there was a competitiveness to every facet of life here that simply didn't exist in America.

The boys on the tennis team had long dropped off the academic track necessary to be eligible even to take those exams. Their futures had been gambled on a game. I thought about Bowen's answer, about how he had absolutely no chance of going to university in China. What if he got injured? A thought came to me. What if over the next few years he prepared for the SAT
or TOEFL? As long as he got a semi-decent score, I was sure he could get a tennis scholarship to a school in the States.

“What about an American university? I'm sure you could get into one by using your tennis.”

Bowen seemed confused by what I had suggested. “So if I lived in America, I could go to a university?” he asked.

“I'm sure you could get a scholarship for tennis and then play tennis for the university. You wouldn't have to pay anything then. It would be free.”

We sat quietly while Bowen considered this revelation.

“But why play for the university? Why not just play professional?”

I shrugged. “You can do both. James Blake played at Harvard, McEnroe went to Stanford. It's good in case you get injured or something. Then you have a backup plan.”

“So if you can't play tennis you will go to university?”

“Yeah, I guess. That's what my father wants me to do. I still want to go pro, but it's a good backup option, I guess.”

“My father wants me to learn
zenme shuo
(how do you say),” Bowen said. Stuck for a moment, he began imitating the actions of a builder.

“Building?” I asked and pointed at a construction site across the street. “Like that?”

“Uh—maybe, but it's different,” Bowen said and gestured at the walls. “He makes the house walls.”

“Oh,” I said. “Plastering?”

“
Pla-ster-ing
,” Bowen said, mouthing the unfamiliar syllables again silently. “Yes, maybe that.”

“And not university?”

“He is worried about tennis,” Bowen said. “He tells me always
people are building in China.” He waved a hand toward the window. I looked past the grimy pane of glass and saw construction cranes dotting the distance. “Maybe he is right,” Bowen said with a shrug. “But why would I ever stop playing tennis?”

I asked him how he had started tennis. He said he lived near the tennis courts. “There was some old rackets that we could use. I would go with some other kids, and we would hit for hours against the side of the building in the parking lot. I would always stay longer than the other children. I think the director of the facility got tired of the sound of my practicing against the wall. One day he walked out. I thought I was going to get in trouble, or he was going to shoo me away. He said he wanted to talk to my mother about me. I didn't tell her because I was afraid he would say something bad and she would punish me. The next time I went to play, he asked where my mother was. I told him she is working. He asked me if I want to join the tennis classes. He said I have to ask my mother to sign a paper.” Bowen bent down to tie his shoe. “How about you?” he asked.