Beautiful Country (16 page)

Victoria spent the car ride home looking through the brochures, pointing out things that she liked to us. From her purse she took out a pair of small scissors and a glue stick and a book that she said was her journal, and then she cut out things from the brochures and glued them into her journal. She did this for a while, cutting out pictures of refrigerators and bathtubs and televisions. I watched from the backseat, pretending to be asleep. As she went through the journal, I saw that the pages of the book were filled with rooms that Victoria had designed from clippings taken from home furnishing catalogues. There were several pages of kitchens and several pages of bedrooms and a few dedicated to living and dining rooms. Then she flipped to the back of the book and I saw that she had ten or fifteen pages dedicated to bedrooms for children. There was a lot of pink in those pages and most of the rooms looked as though they had been designed for a girl.

When I returned to the Zhangs' apartment, I showed one of the maids my handful of seeds and asked for a plastic cup. She thought I wanted her to cook them. I shook my head and dropped to the ground as if I were planting the seeds in imaginary soil.
She instinctively dropped down to her knees and improved on my gestures. She nodded, straightened up, and disappeared. She returned with a paper cup. “
Keyi yong zhege beizi
(You can plant them in this cup).”

“Thank you,” I said. I put the seeds in the cup and placed it on my windowsill. I wondered what Bowen did with the ones he took.

The next day my father called from New York. I told him about the tour he had missed. I asked him how Mr. Zhang had gotten the rights to own the land next to the Olympic site. “I'm not really sure,” he said. “Either he bought the land a long time ago when no one knew the Olympics were coming to China, and he was unusually lucky—theoretically possible, but very unlikely—or someone told him where the stadiums were going to be built before it was announced. That's more likely. Everything in China works off deep personal relationships of trust. He probably did someone a favor years ago and they repaid him.”

“That seems so capitalist,” I said. “Isn't that a contradiction?”

“Yes, of course in theory, but not in practice. Mr. Zhang is not, however, a member of the Communist Party, but he could be. Only about seventy-five million Chinese are members of the Party. The Communist Party is only for the elite who are chosen by teachers and professors at an early age. They are meant to be the most outstanding members of society. Until recently, essentially all ambitious young people would try and join the Party. But it's changing. Mr. Zhang is a member of one of the eight lesser parties, probably the party for businessmen. I think it is called something like China National Democratic Construction Association.”

“Why would he join that?”

“The lesser parties are small. Most have only about a hundred thousand members, so you have a chance of having an important position. The government usually saves a position for non–Communist Party members in governments. For example, in a city government they usually have one mayor and seven vice-mayors. Usually one of the vice-mayors is a non–Communist Party member. So if you haven't been invited to join the Communist Party, or even if you have, joining another party could provide a path to a position of some influence.”

“Oh, by the way, I brought Bowen with us to the Forbidden City. He had never been before. Isn't that crazy?”

“What?”

“I said that Bowen had never been to the Forbidden City before.”

“You brought him on the tour?” My father's voice was terse. It was more of a statement than a question.

“Well, you couldn't go,” I said. “And, you know . . . he had never been before.”

“Did you ask Mr. Zhang if that was okay?”

“I didn't think it would be a big deal. I mean you couldn't go, and Bowen had never been so I thought it would be nice for him to go.”

“What did Mr. Zhang say when you came with Bowen?”

“He didn't really say anything,” I said. “I think he was more surprised that you weren't with us.”

“What do you mean?”

“It seemed like he really wanted you to go on the tour. And then when he found out that you weren't there he went back to the car and called someone. So he didn't really say anything about Bowen.”

“But he already knew that I wasn't going to be there,” my father said.

“I don't think he did.”

“Goddamn it,” my father said. “Victoria didn't tell him? I reminded her three times. And then she brought along your tennis friend? What the hell is she thinking?”

“It wasn't her fault. She didn't know about Bowen,” I said quietly. “That was me. I told the driver to pick him up on the way.”

There was a long pause. “Chase,” he said. “Can you do me a favor and use your brain just once in a while? You're not a kid anymore. Don't you see how that is just totally unacceptable? You think Mr. Zhang has time to take a morning off work to give your tennis team a tour of the Forbidden City?”

“It wasn't my tennis team,” I said with an edge of resentment. “It was Bowen. He's been the nicest to me of all the boys.”

“Christ,” my father said. “I'm going to have to call him tomorrow. You do now realize he thinks I totally blew this off and sent my son and his tennis team instead? I'm going to have to get off. I've got a GE board call in five minutes.”

I had trouble sleeping that night. I couldn't stop thinking about the conversation I had with my father. I didn't understand why what I had done was so bad. Why couldn't I bring a friend with me? Why did I always have to be alone? The worst part was that I had no one to talk to about it. I missed being at home. I missed Tom, and I hated the feeling of being powerless to change my situation. I was on the other side of the world. And besides, I wasn't even able to leave the apartment without my hosts' permission.

After three and a half months of Chinese lessons, I hit a wall. As I learned new characters, I forgot the ones I'd learned previously. I could still recognize them and read them, but if I needed to write something, I could only think of the pinyin, the phonetic spelling of the characters. It was as if my brain had become fully saturated. I brought this up with Teacher Lu, who said that as long as I could recognize the characters it was all right. There were so many that even she needed to look them up in a dictionary from time to time. Besides, she said, so much of writing nowadays was done on the computer where you only needed to know the pinyin, that writing was not as important as it used to be. But Chinese wasn't like learning French or Spanish, where you could guess what words meant because they were spelled similarly to words in English. With Chinese, if you hadn't learned a word you had no way of guessing what it meant other than by the context. Even if I understood 75 percent of a sentence, if I hadn't learned two or three key words in that sentence, I had no idea what the meaning of the sentence was.

My routine at the language institute remained the same every
day. I would arrive shortly before nine and climb the rickety fire escape up to the fifth floor and wait for Teacher Lu to arrive. She had told me that she lived far away and that she had to get up at five o'clock to make it in by nine. The traffic had become so bad in Beijing that the government had started restricting the use of private cars in the city. Unfortunately it didn't seem to make a difference. The only thing that changed about the school was the people who came to take lessons. It had been some time since I had seen Josh at the school but over the course of the fall, the number of Western businessmen showing up for lessons at the Taiwanese Language Institute had increased. And like Josh, they would show up every day for two to three weeks and then disappear. Whether they had picked up enough Chinese for their purposes, or whether they had given up after realizing that no matter how many mornings they showed up at the institute, they would never be good enough at the language—I don't know. I suspect that after two weeks of feeling as if each lesson was a repeat of the prior day's because nothing had been retained, they gave up.

There were a few regular attendees at the school that fall. The one I got to know the best was Tao, the guy who had dropped out of Texas A&M to come to Beijing. We both took classes in the mornings, so I saw quite a lot of him, and we became pretty good friends. Tao was often at the school even when he didn't have classes. He would sit in the student lounge and work through textbooks on his own and try to read Chinese newspapers and would chat in Chinese to whoever came into the lounge. He was much older, so we didn't hang out outside of the school, but I would always chat with him whenever we ran into each other.
He had a girlfriend he mentioned a lot who was still enrolled at Texas A&M who thought he was crazy for dropping out to come to China.

The city's smog had a way of wearing you down. During the winter months, it often built up over the course of seven or even ten days before a wind came and carried it away. Everything was covered in a layer of soot and the bleak, gray sky felt like it stretched on forever. The air was grimy and it made your skin feel all dirty when you went outside. The smog would block out the sun completely, and sometimes it would last for so long that I would forget when the last time I had seen the sun was. It affected your sense of time. Without the sun, there was no changing of light, no passage of shadows on the ground. Time seemed suspended in the absence of shadows to mark and measure the earth's rotation and the passing of the day.

The novelty of learning Chinese had worn off and the lessons became a grind. Most days, my brain was dead by the third hour of one-on-one instruction. I began to slack off. I started coming to class without having done my homework, and I would ask to take frequent breaks. Other days I would pretend to have slept through my alarm so that we were late in leaving the house. We'd get caught in the bad rush hour traffic, and I'd usually miss the first hour of class. This continued for a few weeks. I knew it was juvenile, but I didn't really care.

After an unrewarding morning one day, Teacher Lu decided to give me a thirty-minute break in the hope that I would be focused for the last part of class. When I heard that I had thirty minutes off, I went straight to the student lounge and found a spot on the sofa and flipped through a magazine that was lying on the table. A few minutes later, Tao came into the room. I put
the magazine down and waved to him and asked him how he was doing. He didn't sit down but just stood there looking at me. He seemed pretty upset about something.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Oh, my teacher just gave me a quick break.”

“Dude, I just talked to Ai Lu. She told me she had to give you a break because she didn't know what else to do with you. She said you're screwing around in all your lessons and wasting her time. Dude, if you don't want your lessons then give them to me. I'll take them. I'm scrounging so I can afford to stay here another month. Get it together, man.”

His words stung because I knew he was right. I put my book away and got up and walked back to my classroom. I knocked on the door and apologized to Teacher Lu and asked if we could begin again. She nodded and said that she wanted to tell me a folktale. She told me a story about a man and his three sons. The man, a great fisherman, was known as the “Fisher of the World.” His sons, however, were poor fishermen, and their father was frustrated. One day he met a philosopher who asked him three questions:

“When did your sons start to learn fishing?”

The father replied, “As early as in their childhood. They have grown up in my fishing boat.”

The philosopher asked a second question: “Who taught your sons fishing?”

The father answered, “I did. I taught them every experience and every skill, even the top secret of the fishing profession.”

The philosopher asked his third and final question: “Where did they practice your teaching?”

And the father replied that his sons had learned everything in his boat, that he had watched over every detail to make sure that they would not do anything wrong.

The philosopher had his answer. “The tragedy of your sons is that you have arranged everything in your sons' lives. What your sons got in their life are all your experience, but what they lacked in life are the lessons of fishing from difficulty and failure. They never left you to try on their own. You taught them everything, but all your valuable experiences are only indirect experience to them.”

I wasn't really sure what the relevance of Teacher Lu's folktale was, but I used it as an opportunity to ask her if we could veer off from following the table of contents of my Chinese lesson book, which was much more geared for businessmen. I didn't need to know words for conducting negotiations or ordering at restaurants. I really needed to focus on words and phrases that would help me with the boys at tennis—words and phrases I could use each afternoon because without some reinforcement, there was almost no hope of my remembering anything from one day to the next. My progress was jump-started with this new tactic, and from that point on Teacher Lu would tell me a fable whenever I seemed to be lagging. Over the course of my time with Teacher Lu I heard stories about eagles and donkeys and oxen and goats and fishermen and farmers. I never knew whether these stories were Teacher Lu's attempt to impart advice and wisdom to me or whether they were a creative strategy to tailor the teaching material to a fourteen-year-old.

Sometimes Teacher Lu was late, but I never complained or asked for a cut in fees as Victoria urged. I was more than happy
to have five or ten minutes subtracted from a three-hour, mind-punishing marathon of Chinese. When I would arrive, I would go to my classroom and sit by the window and look out at the street. People—walking or riding bikes or walking bikes laden with cargo—moved with a sense of purpose. There was no doubt in my mind that they all had a specific destination.

One morning I heard what sounded like an old dump truck without any suspension system banging slowly down the street, and then I saw a rusted old truck that bumped up onto the sidewalk and parked. Piled high on the flatbed were five thick tree trunks. They were about two and a half feet in diameter and stretched the length of the bed of the truck. At first I couldn't tell why this truck was stopping. Almost before it pulled up, two men and one woman jumped out of the cab of the truck and started unfastening the chains that held the trunks down. They were dressed in dark, worn clothes, and I guessed they were peasants from the countryside. They pulled two sturdily built sawhorses from the truck and hoisted one of the trunks across the sawhorses. Cars were slipping around them, and horns were going off, and drivers were shaking their fists at them, but they were oblivious to it all.

When class was over, I looked out the window and saw that this truck and the three people were still there. Their work had progressed. They were removing the bark on one of the trunks with what looked like an antique saw. The two men moved it back and forth in an even and measured rhythm almost as if they were two mechanical figures.

The next morning when I arrived they were still there. The woman and one of the men were working on the fourth trunk. The other man was asleep in the cab of the truck. I assumed
they had worked all night and had taken turns sleeping. After my lesson, I looked out of the window again. The sleeping man had now taken the woman's position. She was squatting down and seemed to be cooking something over a portable gas stove.

On the third day they had started sawing the trunks into planks. On the way to tennis practice I described this scene to Victoria and asked her what she thought these three people were doing with the newly sawn timber.

“They are most likely for one of the courtyard houses. The planks are made in the traditional way.”

I could not understand why they were sawn on the street—why they weren't sawn before they were brought into the city.

Victoria didn't know either. “Perhaps they wanted to make certain the measurements were exact, perhaps it had to do with bad luck,” she said. “Chinese can be extremely superstitious. After your lesson tomorrow, we can go ask them.”

Tom would not have needed to ask. Like all those times in the car rides when he entertained me with stories and intrigues of all the people in the cars, he would have enjoyed coming up with multiple stories of what these workers were doing, and each story would be more fantastic than the next.

But the next morning the workers were gone. Tom would have had a story for that, too.