Beautiful Country (24 page)

I have thought about that day for a long time. What I did, and what I didn't do. I've had to live with those decisions since that day, and the guilt often returns when I'm least expecting it. I could be walking to class or sitting in an airport or bending down to tie my shoe. The punch in the gut never offered a warning.

Four years passed. I graduated from Dover and was accepted at Yale where I earned a place on the tennis team. It was the first time since Beijing that I had practiced with a team, but the boys on the team were so different that it was hard to equate the two. The boys in Beijing looked in one direction. The boys on my college team looked everywhere. Tennis had helped them get into college, but now they were thinking about other things—going out drinking, applying to law school, finding a girlfriend. One kid quit on the first day of practice.

I had not returned to China. My school holidays and summer vacations were filled with and exhausted by tennis tournaments. And I suppose, too, I wanted more distance before returning to Beijing. It had been a lonely, hard time and I knew if I went back I would want to find my old teammates, but I was afraid to discover what had become of them. Most of them probably would
have moved on. My guess is that of all the boys remaining on the team when I left—Random, Sun Li, Little Mao, and Dali—none of them would be there anymore. Random didn't have his heart in it. For different reasons, Little Mao and Dali would have been moved to some provincial area to help coach—Little Mao, because he didn't have the talent, and Dali, because he was lazy. I knew I couldn't see the boys and not tell them about Bowen. Still I continued to work on my Chinese.

In the year following my months in Beijing, my father had mended his relationship with Mr. Zhang and had been able to resuscitate the big real estate deal they had been working on. The deal paid huge dividends after one of the large lots of land they had bought had been selected as an ideal site for the Olympic village and a second lot was conveniently located right next to the Olympic basketball arena. My father confided in me that he was fairly confident that the land they had bought in Shanghai would be purchased by the government at twice what they had paid as a location to host the Shanghai World Expo that had been planned for 2010.

In the summer of 2008, the summer after my second year at Yale, Mr. Zhang invited my father, his new fiancée, and me to Beijing for the Olympic Games. It was a historic event and incredibly important to the Chinese. The opening ceremony was planned, just as Victoria had said, for August 8, 2008, at 8:08 in the evening. I hadn't heard from Victoria in over a year, so I e-mailed her that I would be coming. A few weeks later she e-mailed back. Victoria and her husband had moved back to Guizhou where she was teaching at Guizhou's first international school. She told me that they had decided to have a child in the end and that her baby daughter had just been born. I asked her what the girl's English
name was, and Victoria said that her husband had given her the name Chaos—for all the trouble she was sure to cause. I remembered the old page of writing we found that day at the old writing school and it made me happy that Victoria had a daughter to pass it on to. Victoria said that she would try to come to Beijing to see me while I was there, but she was not sure she would be able to because their daughter was too young to travel.

Two days before the opening ceremony we flew into the new airport that had been built for the Olympics. It had been designed by the famous British architect Lord Norman Foster. It was the largest airport in the world. Lord Foster had said that the design of the new Beijing had been inspired by the form of a dragon. Our flight landed in the afternoon, but it was cloudy, and I did not get a view of the airport from the sky. I remembered Mr. Zhang's describing his designs for his building as a dragon, too.

The new airport was elegant and ultramodern. It had been designed to be vast and airy and built of light material. The ceilings were high and swept upward in gentle curves, dotted with triangular skylights. Most of the walls were glass and huge yellow columns rose from the floors, supports for the giant structure. As we passed by, the columns changed from yellow to orange to red. Everywhere you looked there was color and light. My father said the airport had been designed to deal with the fifty million passengers a day expected by 2020. That number was just shy of the population of the United Kingdom.

Over the past few years there had been an incredible amount of construction in Beijing. I remembered my father saying that the Chinese had plans to put up skyscrapers covering ground three times the size of Manhattan in three years. I had ques
tioned him: “A new New York City every year for three years?” My father was confident it would happen.

Though the airport had opened, it wasn't quite finished. There were no signs telling arriving passengers which way to go. Young men and women, dressed in matching navy blue uniforms, had been positioned every ten yards to direct travelers and answer questions in crude English. I had read somewhere that fewer than three thousand high school students in the States take the Chinese AP exam. That one day, I guessed there were more English-speaking young Chinese in the airport than there were Chinese-speaking young Americans spread out across all fifty states.

We went through passport control with passengers from other arriving flights. There were separate lines for all of the Olympic athletes. We saw members of the Israeli swim team and the Brazilian men's volleyball team. One of the Brazilian players was over seven feet tall. Even though many of these athletes were well traveled, the Olympics was, for many of them, their first time in China. This time when I handed the immigration officer my passport, there was no trouble with my visa. The woman spoke good English and briskly stamped my passport and smiled and waved me on.

Our luggage came swiftly. My father's office had arranged for a driver to meet us at baggage claim, and once our bags had arrived, the driver led us to a private elevator that took us down to a VIP exit where his car was waiting. As the black Audi pulled out of the airport and onto the highway that led to the city center, I gazed out of the window at a landscape that was familiar but different.

The sides of the highway had been planted with grass and
flowers and shrubbery. The landscaping reminded me of the entrance to exclusive gated communities in Florida. The landscaping wasn't just at the entrance of the airport. It continued on both sides of the road all the way to the city. I could only imagine the number of people required to plant these miles and miles of flowers and shrubs. I also noticed newly planted bands of trees. I asked our driver if the trees were for the Olympics. He shook his head and said, “To stop the sand from coming.” I had remembered Victoria pointing to a large swath of land that had been cleared near the airport. She had explained that the government was planting a ring of trees around the city to trap the sand and prevent it from entering the city.

The traffic wasn't nearly as bad as I had remembered. There were two highway lanes dedicated solely to Olympics-related travel, and we flew toward the city center without the usual stop-start rhythm of Beijing traffic. My father explained that the government had put into effect an alternating system of odd and even license plate numbers, so, in theory, the amount of traffic should have been cut in half. It was still heavy but not as bad as when I had lived there. The pollution had improved as well. My father said that the government had shut down a number of factories six months earlier to improve the quality of the air. Some of the Olympic competitors in track and field had dropped out because of the pollution in Beijing. One marathoner was interviewed and said he was fearful that he could suffer permanent lung damage. He was not willing to take the risk. It had taken me over a year to get over the cough I had developed in Beijing. My father looked up at the gray sky and said that they were seeding clouds in an attempt to create more rainfall that would also help purify the air.

In the five years that I had been away, the city had changed dramatically. An entire district had been redevelo
ped to serve as an area expressly for Western tourists. It was filled with familiar restaurants and shops and new nightclubs and bars. I asked our driver if he could take us to the old tennis center where I had practiced every day. He was confused by my question. He assured me that the Beijing tennis center was on the outskirts of the city. I realized they must have built a new center and asked him if he could take us to where the old one had been. I was amazed to see that the old tennis center had been totally transformed into the site of several new clubs and bars. I got out of the car and walked toward the old stadium. The main gate was gone, and with it, any sign of the machine-gun-toting guards that I had passed by every day. A huge neon club sign sat atop the building that had housed the gym and thin women in glinting cocktail dresses tiptoed past in their stiletto heels. I heard laughter and voices speaking in English behind me, and I turned to see a group of American teenagers stumbling in my direction. The tall five-sided statue was still there, but it looked wildly out of place now—a relic from the past that someone had forgotten to remove, or maybe it was too heavy. The indoor tennis stadium, where we had run and sweated and bled until we were on the verge of unconsciousness, was now a nightclub called Club Latte. I went back to the car and motioned to the driver that we could leave.

When we arrived at the hotel there was a message from Victoria. She would not be able to come to Beijing. Her baby was sick, and it was difficult to get train tickets. She sent me an e-mail with a picture that she had found and had been saving for me. It was an image of an airplane that had been mislabeled
BUS
. Underneath was the nonsensical slogan “Wherever we go
the passages are always our God.” Victoria said in her e-mail that she had never stopped looking for the absurd signs to enter into our
Translation Olympics
. I replied that I could hear her laughing.

My father and I unpacked our suitcases and decided to walk down to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. Both were packed with people. At the entrance of the Forbidden City, gone were all the beggars. I suggested to my father that we go to Starbucks. He told me that the Starbucks had closed. About a year ago, an anchor at CCTV had started a blog against Starbucks being in the Forbidden City. His blog had received over half a million hits. Many Chinese felt, as he did, that there was something disrespectful about having a Starbucks inside the Forbidden City.

On the eve of the opening ceremony, Mr. Zhang invited us to a party at a penthouse apartment in one of the buildings he had built on the land next to the Olympics. I don't know if I was more amazed by the Olympic buildings or Pangu Plaza. There, on what four years ago had been a vast field of rubble, was a five-building complex that was in the shape of a dragon. Of the five buildings, the middle three were thirty-nine stories tall and identically shaped. They formed the body of the dragon. On top of each were penthouses that were modern interpretations of courtyard houses. The three buildings were flanked by an office tower, twice as tall as the other buildings with a top in the shape of a dragon's head, and a fifth building the same height as the three identical buildings but which looked half the width of the apartment complexes and represented the tail of the dragon. Unlike Lord Norman Foster, Mr. Zhang's interpretation of a dragon was as literal as possible. Pangu Plaza had been named after Pangu,
the mythic Chinese god who is said to have created the world by separating heaven and earth.

We arrived at Pangu Plaza behind a gold Rolls Royce from which two Chinese men emerged. My father recognized both men, K. L. Tang, a wealthy Hong Kong businessman who had made a fortune in real estate, and Timothy Chan, also from Hong Kong, who owned a private bank. My father greeted both of them as we waited for the elevator. K. L. Tang was finishing off what looked like a hamburger wrapped in McDonald's paper, and he was looking for a place to throw away his wrapper. “I had to stop by McDonald's for my Big Mac,” he said, laughing. “I can't survive these parties without my Big Mac, but I can't arrive with this.” He laughed, waving the crumpled wrapper. His British–Hong Kong accent produced sharp, exact words. He stuffed the wrapper in the pocket of his bespoke suit as he entered the elevator. Just as the elevator door pinged open, he invited my father to a private dinner he was hosting several days later in the Forbidden City at a royal garden he had restored.

Mr. Zhang was waiting for us. It wasn't the first time I had seen him since leaving Beijing. After my father had salvaged the deal they had been working on, they had gone on to partner on several other projects and he had come to stay with us once or twice. He greeted us warmly and insisted on giving us a tour. He ushered us into the center of his apartment. It had indeed been designed around a central courtyard. A large flat piece of glass covered the ceiling. People were scattered throughout the apartment. In addition to the Chinese, judging by the accents I heard, the other guests were a collection of Americans, Russians, and Brits. Mr. Zhang took us over to a dining table where some guests were finishing dinner. He introduced my father and me to
Lord Foster, who had been describing to everyone how the Chinese had built an entire airport in three years while the English, after a decade, were still working to finish Heathrow's Terminal Five. Mr. Zhang patted him on the shoulder and said that they both had been inspired by dragons.

Mr. Zhang escorted us to the balcony, which overlooked the swimming complex referred to as the Water Cube and the Bird's Nest Stadium that would host the opening ceremony the following evening. Mr. Zhang remembered the tour he had given me and Victoria four years earlier. “You remember,” he said, enthusiastically waving his hand out in front of him, “none of this existed.”

“Watch,” he said as he pointed to the Water Cube. First it turned blue, then silver, then white. Lights forming the five differently colored Olympic rings traveled swiftly around the middle. Mr. Zhang clapped his hands like a delighted child. We turned to reenter the penthouse apartment. I looked down again across the city. From such a height, cars looked like squares of a broken mosaic that disappeared behind bands of buildings.