Beautiful Country (22 page)

“That's just naive.”

When I didn't respond, he asked, “What's really going on here? What's this all about?”

“You never listen to me. You never ask me what I think, or what I want to do. I never wanted to come here. It's so lonely. I had one friend, and now he's gone. You didn't care about what I wanted, and you didn't care about what Tom wanted either. Maybe if you had, he would still be here.”

Before he could respond I sprinted to my room and locked the door and buried my head in the pillow on my bed, making it damp with my tears.

I must have fallen asleep because it was late in the afternoon when I opened my eyes. I unlocked the door and walked out into the living room, hoping that my father would not be there, but he was sitting on the sofa in the same place he had been earlier.

“Come here,” he said.

I joined him on the sofa.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm sorry, Chase. I can do better. It's not that I don't care about you. Of course I do. You're my son and I love you and I loved your brother, more than anything. Your mother was always much better at this.”

I was quiet for a moment. “Sorry,” I said. “I didn't mean what I said.”

“You were right. I should have thought more about what it's like for you to be over here by yourself. I thought I would be over here more this year. I thought I'd get to spend more time with you. But I haven't made time for you and I'm sorry for that.”

“It's okay.”

“I'm going to try and help your friend.”

His words caught me off guard. I lifted my head so that I could study his face. “You mean it?”

“I'll talk to Mr. Zhang about him. I'm sure his buddy, the sports minister, can sort this out.”

“Really?”

My father smiled. “Sure. It's the least we can do for this kid. You're sure that he's actually fourteen, right? I don't want to ask these guys to stick their necks out unless we're positive that this kid is the age he says he is. You said that you saw his birth certificate?”

I had no choice but to say yes.

“Okay. Write down his name for me and the name of that coach, and I'll make some calls.”

That afternoon, my father called Mr. Zhang and explained Bowen's situation. I was filled with hope when Mr. Zhang said that he would be happy to do my father this favor and ask his friend the sports minister to have Bowen reinstated to the team and to deal with Madame Jiang. I didn't allow myself to think one step further than that.

Several days passed before we heard anything back from Mr. Zhang. On the third day I asked my father to call Mr. Zhang again. Mr. Zhang said that he had spoken with the Minister of Sport who had agreed to look into it for us. Another few days passed, and still there was no word from either Mr. Zhang or the Minister of Sport.

My father's efforts for Bowen more than made up for my not being able to go home for Christmas. I enjoyed time off from my normal Beijing routine, and Victoria and I explored some parts of the city that I had not yet been to. On the day that my father finally heard back from Mr. Zhang, Victoria and I had taken a day trip to a small village about an hour and a half outside of Beijing that had been an important site of resistance against the Japanese occupation of China during World War II. Victoria had visited it once during her first few years in Beijing when she had held a research job for a local news channel, and she had stayed in touch with the woman who had shown her around.

We left the Hyatt at eight in the morning. There had been no wind over the past week and as a result, the pollution had been steadily building up throughout the week. The sky was bleak gray
and the smog hung above the city like a great cloud of volcanic ash, blocking the sun from view. That morning, buildings only a block or two away had disappeared from view. Driver Wu pulled up and I saw that the normally pristine black Audi was caked in a layer of grime. I thought about Victoria's comment that the Chinese were buried up to their neck in pollution.

As we headed off, I felt carsick and opened a window, but Victoria and Driver Wu protested and told me that the air would only make me feel worse. Driver Wu rummaged around his glove compartment and pulled out a stack of paper surgical masks and handed them to Victoria and me. I looked at the mask skeptically, wondering how this flimsy paper mask could possibly help, but, it did, and my headache began to subside.

As we drove farther from the city, the smog began to lift, the air began to clear, and gradually all recognizable signs of Western capitalism disappeared. The expensive new Audis, the signs written in both Chinese and English, the Nike advertisements, and the American fast-food restaurants that had sprouted up in Beijing were nowhere to be seen in the rural countryside.

An hour and a half later we arrived at the village. The people were dressed in homespun garments and lived in small, one- or two-room shacks and cottages. I saw only two automobiles in the village, and both were blue, three-wheeled vehicles composed of a small cab and a pickup truck–type bed. Each must have been at least twenty-five years old and looked as though they had come out of a Soviet factory. As I looked around the village, I was struck by how untouched it was by the forces of modernization. Judging from our surroundings, it could have been 1975. Here we were, just seventy miles from Beijing, but thirty years in the past.

We parked behind the schoolhouse. Victoria had arranged to meet the woman who had given her the tour back when she was a newscaster.

“She said she would be waiting here,” Victoria said.

“Can you call her?” I asked.

“She doesn't have a phone,” Victoria said.

I took another glance at the surrounding village and felt stupid for asking the question. “Let's go, we will find her,” Victoria said. “The village is not big.”

As we walked down the village's dusty main road, almost every villager we passed stopped and stared at us. I asked Victoria why everyone was staring at us.

“Most of them have probably never seen a white person before,” she said. “Not in real life anyway.”

A voice called out to Victoria, who turned and waved at an elderly woman standing in the open doorway of a house to our left. “That's her,” Victoria said. “Let's go, she will show you the tunnels the Red Army soldiers used to hide from the Japanese.”

Just then Victoria's phone rang. “
Wei
(Hello)? Oh—Mr. Robertson. Hi. Yes, he is here with me. We are at that village I told you abo—” She abruptly stopped speaking and listened. Her face showed confusion. “Right now? Okay. We will go back now.” She hung up the phone.

“What was that about?”

“Your father says we have to go back to Beijing, right now.”

“Why?”

“He just said we need to go back right now. He needs to speak with you.”

“Did he sound angry?” I asked Victoria, but Victoria was busy apologizing and explaining to the old woman that we were very
sorry but there was an emergency, and we had to return to Beijing immediately.

On the car ride back to the Hyatt, I couldn't help but worry that this had something to do with Bowen. Victoria came up to the room with me and we found my father sitting at his desk in the living room sending an e-mail on his BlackBerry. He looked up from his phone when we walked in, but then immediately turned his attention back to the e-mail he was composing. Victoria said that she would be leaving, but my father held up his hand. “One second,” he said without looking up from the keyboard. He finished and put the BlackBerry down on the desk and turned his attention to us.

“You're going to move out of the Zhangs' today,” he said to me.

“Move out? Why?”

“I made a mistake sending you here. You're too young. I thought you'd be able to handle it.”

I had assumed that my father had called me back to talk about Bowen. But the Zhangs? Had I said something to them or done something wrong?

“That kid Bowen has caused a real shit storm, let me tell you,” my father said.

“What are you talking about?”

“The coach was right. He's been lying about his age this whole time.”

“No, he hasn't. Madame Jiang is just saying that because she hates him.”

“The sports minister called the team director at the training center and put pressure on him to dismiss your coach, which he did. The coach appealed her dismissal, but the sports minister said no go. They were going to call Bowen back to the team, but
your coach then leaked all of this to some reporter. Told him the whole story, gave him your friend's real birth certificate, told him about you, about me, told him that she was getting fired because some corrupt official had taken a bribe from an American businessman to do it.”

“But that's not true!”

“So then last night the reporter publishes this all on his blog, and it starts to spread around the internet. Luckily Zhang and his friends noticed it and jumped on it quickly and had it all shut down by this morning. But the damage is done, Zhang said that rumors have been flying around. You can't practice with the Beijing team anymore and Zhang can't risk getting dragged into this by having you live with them.”

“I don't understand. Why?”

“Chase, this kid played you. I should have warned you, but you've got to watch out for people like this. The world is full of people who will try to take advantage of you. I'm not mad at you, it's my fault. I should have seen this.”

“No, Bowen wouldn't do that.”

“You have to face the facts.”

I was silent for a moment. “So what happens now?”

“Now? Victoria will take you to the Zhangs' so you can pack up your stuff, and I'll get my office to work on getting you a flight home.”

“No,” I said. “I mean what happens to Bowen?”

“I have no idea, and frankly I really don't care what happens to him. You know that deal I've been working on with Zhang? That's finished. You think anybody wants to risk associating themselves with someone accused of corrupting officials? No chance. This is over, Chase. You're going home.”

My father turned back to his BlackBerry and began firing off more e-mails. I had known there was the possibility that Bowen might have been lying about his age, but I had never imagined that the consequences of helping him could be anything this drastic. I looked at Victoria, who offered nothing. She was calculating the consequences for herself. I thought about all the hours and energy that my father had put into the deal he had been working on with Mr. Zhang.

“I'm sorry about your business deal. I'm really sorry. I just—I didn't realize . . .”

My father sighed. “I'm not mad at you, Chase.” He paused. “The thing I don't get though, is how we didn't realize that this kid was lying. I thought he showed you his birth certificate. Did you read it wrong or something? Victoria, do you know this kid?”

Victoria nodded, her lips pursed tight. My shock was replaced by the horrible realization that Victoria was going to tell my father that Bowen had never shown us any birth certificate, and that she had warned me that Bowen was lying.

“And?” my father asked.

“Yes, I know him,” she said. “I told Chase that many sports players in China are lying about their age, many of the tennis players on Chase's team too, they are lying about how old they are. Chase knows this. With Bowen, it could be the same thing. But I always think that Bowen was fourteen, like Chase thinks. Not sixteen.”

I could barely believe what I was hearing.

“And the birth certificate? Did he show that to you too?”

“Yes,” she said. “It looked just like my one. It says he is fourteen. Maybe it is fake, but very good quality fake, or maybe he buy
a new one from a hospital. I don't know. Sometimes people do this in China, for work permits too. It is difficult to tell.”

My father turned back to his BlackBerry. “There's nothing we can do about it now.” In that moment he looked old and defeated, and his voice sounded tired. “Victoria, can you take Chase to get his things at the Zhangs'?”

“I have to go to my husband's gallery and help prepare for an exhibit. Driver Wu can take him.” Victoria had lied for me, but she blamed me for it, and right now she didn't want to have anything more to do with me.

Driver Wu took me to the Zhangs' apartment and waited for me to get my things. I looked out my little window down at the street below and wondered how many more Bowens were out there. It was strange, but I didn't feel any bitterness toward Bowen. Maybe part of me had always suspected, maybe even known, that he was lying. I just never wanted to accept it. It hurt that he had lied to me, but I couldn't hold it against him. He did what he had to do. I'm sure the lie ate away at him the same way the lies I told my father about Bowen continue to eat away at me. Secrets are heavy things to carry.

I picked up the small cup of seeds on my windowsill and briefly thought about asking Driver Wu to stop by the training center on the way home so that I could give them to my teammates. But I realized I probably would not be allowed back at the center, and I doubted if I would ever see any of them again. Dali, Sun Li, and Little Mao would remain where they were—playing tennis. When they didn't make it in the pros, they would be placed by the state system to run a tennis training center and slowly, over time, the tennis level in China would improve. Only Random had a chance to do something else. For them, my leav
ing was as if I were walking out into the sea. I could go anywhere. They could never even comprehend the wide array of choices that awaited me back home. I decided to take the seeds home with me. I considered giving them to my father for a brief second, but I knew he would dismiss them as silly and superstitious and probably leave them in the ashtray of a room at the Hyatt.

By the time I returned to the hotel, my father had already left for the airport to fly to Shanghai for a meeting with his business partner to try to salvage the Zhang deal. He left me a note on my bed that said a car would pick me up in the morning to take me to the airport. I was on the 11 a.m. flight to Newark.

Victoria was waiting for me by the car the next morning. I started to thank her for lying to cover for me, but before I could get the words out she held up a hand and shook her head. “We all make mistakes,” she said. She gave me a hug and said that she was sad that I was leaving and that I must send her e-mails from America. I said I would as long as she promised to send me funny pictures of any mistranslated signs or notices she came across. It hit me then that I was leaving for good. I realized that I would probably never again see Victoria or Bowen or Teacher Lu or any of the other people I had become close to during my time in Beijing. There were so many times that I had longed to leave, yearned to return home. I had never thought that when I actually did leave, I would be sad—but there I was, about to get in a car for the airport, and part of me didn't want to leave any of this behind.

Victoria took a white package out of her bag and handed it to me. “You can open it,” she said.

I opened it and saw that it was the page she had found lying in the dust at the abandoned writing school. “For me?” I asked.

Victoria nodded. “I want you to have it to remember your time here.”

I shook my head and pressed it back into her hands. “No, Victoria. You should keep this. Give it to your kids, like you said.”

“I don't think we're going to have children,” Victoria said.

“What? Why not?” I looked at her, surprised.

“It's too much money. We have to look after our parents.”

“But—”

“We're their only children. If we don't do it then who will? We can't afford to do both.”

I tried to think of something to say, a solution to offer, but I came up with nothing.

“Here, it's for you,” she said. She held out the page. I couldn't take it. I shook my head again. “Keep it,” I said. “You'll find a way to make it work. I know you will.”

I said good-bye and got in the car before she had a chance to change her mind. The driver took me to the airport, and I got on the flight to Newark.