Beautiful Country (8 page)

Victoria laughed. “It's not easy to find authentic Guizhou food here in Beijing.”

Z pointed to the ceiling where there were sets of characters painted in red on the arches. Victoria explained that the writings were old Maoist slogans and asked me if I could read them. Of the three, I could only translate one,
女人擎半天,
as “Women hold up half the sky.” The other two Victoria translated as “We shall heal our wounds and we shall continue fighting until the end,” and “Once all struggle is grasped, miracles are possible.”

“I like those,” I said. “They're nice. What are they from?”

“Mao Zedong,” Victoria said.

“Chairman Mao?”

“From his Red Book,” Victoria said.

“Oh,” I said, somewhat surprised. “Isn't that weird to have his quotes on the wall? I would think that they're not really that relevant anymore.”

“They're Mao's statements.”

“I know, but does everyone believe in them still?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“Even now?”

“Yes,” Z cut in. “He make mistakes, but he is great man. Before him China had many problems. The Nationalist government was very corrupt. Many people were poor. Mao changed that and he rescued China from the Japanese dogs.”

He swore in Chinese and spat on the ground after he said “Japanese dogs.” It confused me to see such vehemence toward
the Japanese paired with such positive feelings toward a man that had always been put in the same category as Hitler and Stalin in my history books. “But what about the Cultural Revolution?” I asked. “The Great Leap Forward? Didn't a lot of people die?”

“It's complicated.” Victoria nodded at her husband. “He was there, you know? For the Cultural Revolution. I am too young, but he is older. He was sent to the work camps.”

I wouldn't have brought it up if I had known. Perhaps sensing my awkwardness, Victoria added, “It's okay. You can ask him about it, he doesn't mind.” I hesitated, but Victoria said, “If you want to know, you should ask him. He doesn't mind talking about it. Most people do though.”

“What was it like?” I asked.

Z took a long breath. “My father was a teacher. That meant that things were very bad for us. He was the first one to commit suicide in our village. After that they sent me to the Dadu River State Farm. I was eleven. Seventeen when I can go home. It was hard, hard work.” Z's face darkened and I saw that under his easygoing exterior a harder side existed. “The comrade in charge, Controller Qiu, he was a bastard.” Z reached over his shoulder and rubbed his back. “I still have scars.” He paused. “But I can't remember his face. I only remember always being hungry. We ate anything we can find. Insects—
zenme shuo—
ah yes, worms, and when we can't find those we ate the dirt, we ate the bark off trees, anything.” He paused. “This why I am so small. My head is too big for my body. I should have been much taller. Never enough food.”

Z paused and encouraged us to sample more dishes that had been placed on the table. It was all really good but there was so much of it that I was already full. Not wanting to be rude I took
another spoonful of the peppers and spicy beef dish. Z picked up a small bowl of rice and ate hastily. He explained that he rose to become the farm's youth deputy party secretary. “When I applied to be the youth party secretary, at the end of the application, I was required to write, ‘I will stay on the Dadu River State Farm for the rest of my life.'”

He bowed his head for a moment before looking up. “I could never bring myself to write that sentence. It seems crazy now—but back then, not knowing what the future would be, to write that would break all the hope I hid in my heart. I was not given the head position. I knew I should have said it. I was hungry, and I would have gotten more food as the head. But I just couldn't.”

He reached across the table, picked up a dish, and offered it to me. “Please,” he said. “Delicious. Very spicy,” he added. “You like spicy?”

All the tables in the small restaurant were now filled. The conversations from other tables seemed to bounce hard against the cement walls and floor. I had to raise my voice to be heard.

“What happened?” I asked. I leaned forward to hear his answer.

“You mean how did I get back home?”

“Yes.”

“We were out in the fields and this boy, he was two years younger than me but was senior in the camp because his family were peasants, he said that we were going home. Just like that. No warning, no explanation. He said they didn't tell him why or how, but this old flatbed truck arrived, and we climbed on it, and it stopped on the outskirts of Guiyang, and I walked home. After we left those fields, we never came back. I had been away from home for over four years. I remember I went to my house,
and only my mother was there. She had been beaten in prison and could never work again. My sister had been sent out to the country a few months after I had left. She was two years younger than me.” He laid his chopsticks down on the table. “Ruo never came back. My mother never got over that. Even to this day she still likes to think that Ruo will come back. That she is alive and will return. I have to believe that she got sick and died. There was so little food and no medicine.”

Our waitress came with a platter bearing barbecued meat piled high in a mound with diced chilies and peppers. Victoria pointed a chopstick at it. “This one is too spicy for him,” she said to Z.

Z waved his hand in front of him. “Let him try, it's fine.”

“Thank you. I'm okay though,” I said. “I'm quite full.”

“
Chi bao le
,” Victoria said. “That's how you say I'm full.
Chi bao le
.”

I mouthed the words silently, thinking about all that Z had told me. A question struck me. “So when did you learn to paint?”

“After I got home. First I just started to draw. I drew the things I couldn't forget. Controller Qiu beating that old woman. Peng'er falling down in the fields that day, and never getting up. The Red Guard leading my father through the streets with a rope around his neck. Mocking him. Throwing things at him.” He paused for a moment to pull his emotions back around him, and I saw his eyes were misted. “The drawing helped me find happiness again. It was a way to tell the story of things I never thought I could talk about. I think it helped other people, too. So I kept drawing and got better and better, and then I taught myself how to paint. Art felt safe.”

“So what do people think of Mao now?”

Victoria answered for her husband. “We see good and bad. Some bad things happened, but they see that Chairman Mao loved China, he wanted to free China from foreigners. He wanted to help the people.”

“But it seems like nobody wants to talk about the bad things he did. Only the good things,” I said.

“It is not so simple,” Victoria said. “He was a great leader, and he did what was best for China.”

“I just don't get why you defend him like that. Surely your parents must have suffered, too.”

Victoria pursed her lips and said nothing.

“Why won't you talk about it?”

“Chase, you are not so smart.”

“What do you mean?”

“No talking tells you how hard it was. Maybe for some people it is too hard, too difficult to talk about.”

“How so?”

“It's like a scar that is left dry and solid,” Victoria said. “Don't touch. If you touch it, it bleeds. Better to leave it alone so slowly, slowly, slowly the scar heals around the edges and gets smaller and smaller. Takes a lifetime to heal, maybe even three lifetimes.”

I looked at her to see if she believed what she was saying. There was no joy in her eyes. I saw the same sadness I had seen in my father's eyes after Tom had died, and I realized that what she had said was true. My father and I had never talked about what happened to Tom. The three of us sat there in silence for a few moments.

After that afternoon, I learned not to ask direct questions. I learned to let the answers reveal themselves. In the United
States, most people are only too pleased to talk about themselves. But not in China. I did not know whether it was an innate or learned reaction, a national characteristic, or a form of survival. The Chinese that I came across were happy to listen, but most of them did not want to talk.

The year I was in China was the year that the world seemed to wake up to its importance. There were plenty of Westerners running around looking for opportunities that were, almost without exception, vague and ill-defined. They even showed up at the training grounds of the national Beijing teams. Every two or three weeks, a coach from a tennis academy in Spain or Germany or Australia or the United States would appear. The head of the academy would train with us for an afternoon and show us new drills and hand out T-shirts emblazoned with the logo of his academy. And then he would disappear. Once at the beginning of practice when we were sitting together waiting for Madame Jiang to finish speaking with the visiting professional, Random said to me, “Watch, everyone is going to practice very hard. They hope for a scholarship to his academy. But we are too old. They are looking for younger kids.”

I could never figure why these recruiters came. It was not as if the Chinese boys represented any potential business opportunities for these academies. They expected students to pay tuition, and these boys were poor. The boys would try to shine so they might have a shot of getting noticed by one of the coaches and
given a scholarship to their camp. Over time the boys developed the sense that everyone who came through was interested in cashing in on China and that there was no chance they would be rescued by one of the foreign coaches.

All, that is, except Bowen. Without fail, whenever anyone came, Bowen lifted his game to an even higher level and played flawlessly. I remember on one occasion watching Bowen decimate Juan Esparcia, the founder of the top tennis academy in Spain that bore his name. Esparcia had once been a top world-ranked player himself. He moved beautifully despite being at least fifty pounds overweight. He tried to impress on us the need to constantly be moving during the point. “It's a dance,” he said. “Never stop dancing.”

He had asked us to play a game of king of the court with him, and he had planned to whip us all to demonstrate his point about movement. He had no idea that Bowen could hold his own with him. As we watched this Davis Cup veteran under pressure from Bowen, Little Mao repeated what Random had said: “He thinks he is going to get a scholarship, but he won't.” He spat on the ground after he spoke.

Within two games Bowen had control and was beating Esparcia at his own baseline game. I had never seen another player mimic the style of someone else so completely. At 4-2, Bowen switched to his game of attack, and Esparcia was finished off completely. I looked at Random and raised my eyebrows in approval. “Pretty good,” I said in Chinese.

“Won't matter.”

“Why?”

“He is too old.”

“But he is only fourteen.”

He shook his head. “Sixteen, he is sixteen.”

“What? He's fourteen.” I looked at him in confusion. Bowen had told me himself.

“Bowen is sixteen.” Random waved me over and leaned his head in close to mine. “Everyone here,” he said, “is one, maybe two years more than they say. I say sixteen, but I am seventeen.” He pointed to each of our teammates one by one and listed their true ages. I was amazed to discover I was the youngest on the team by nearly two years.

“Does she know?” I asked Random, lifting my chin toward Madame Jiang.

He laughed. “Everyone knows but no one says anything. All the players in China do it. Even if we don't want to, we have to. If we don't lie then we have to play guys two years older than us.”

I was stunned. Of course I had heard stories about this sort of thing. Stories of North Korean gymnasts who somehow had remained fifteen for three consecutive years, or the occasional rumors about Eastern European tennis players who showed up in Florida at age “twelve,” already over six feet with facial hair. But I had never been confronted by it in person. I had never seen it in such a blatant and unapologetic form as this. Random's cool attitude about it threw me off and made me question the truth of what he was saying. Bowen wouldn't have lied to me. I assumed that Random had made this up, perhaps out of envy of Bowen's talent.

“Well he's still very good for sixteen,” I said.

“He's still too old for an academy.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know.”

“Come on, how do you know?”

“I was one of them.”

“Where?”

“Bollettieri.”

“Is that where you learned English?” Random's English was much better than the other boys.

He nodded.

“Why did you leave?”

“I was too young. I got homesick. It was four years ago, and I couldn't speak English very good. My parents, they could not afford to come over. I wish I had stayed though. Much better than this.” He waved his hand around the complex. “I hate this. I don't want to play anymore. Now my parents can afford to send me to America again, but it is too late.”

Random's words stuck with me. I thought about how I had sometimes tanked practices in the States when I was feeling tired or didn't want to play. For Random, each minute on court at a place like Bollettieri represented hours of work and sacrifice made by his parents to give him the same opportunity that I took for granted. I thought about the times I had cracked rackets in anger during matches. Throwing a tantrum like that wasn't an option when you couldn't afford a new racket.

Another time an Australian coach came to practice with us. Madame Jiang, as she almost always did, brought out the basket of balls and had us all begin practice with juggling. I had gotten better at it, but I still didn't see the point. Usually Bowen took six or seven balls, but this time Madame Jiang handed him three and snapped at him when he tried to take more. Not to be deterred, Bowen adjusted his bandanna so it was loose, and while he was juggling he shook his head so his bandanna fell over his eyes. He continued to juggle flawlessly. Madame Jiang became furious at
him for shifting the attention to himself, and she ordered him to do fifty push-ups clapping between each one. Bowen smiled at her as if to say, “Finally you are going to let this coach see how athletic I am.” He sprung into a handstand, walked on his hands to the baseline, flipped backward to his feet, and then did fifty push-ups. Madame Jiang stood over Bowen. I turned to Random and asked, “What's her problem with him?”

Random pulled the corners of his mouth down. “She thinks she is too good to be coaching us. She still hasn't given up the past. My father told me she was a famous national volleyball player. She was meant to win the gold medal in 1980, but China didn't participate in Olympics because of politics. So she missed the chance to be the first Chinese to win the gold medal.” Madame Jiang saw Random talking to me and shot him a harsh look. He resumed juggling and whispered, “She is still angry about it.”

Bowen completed his fifty push-ups, and on his last one, he clapped his hands twice. The Australian coach stood up and applauded. He was obviously charmed and amused and impressed. Bowen would have to deal with Madame Jiang's anger later.

After the professionals left, Madame Jiang would follow a sort of watered-down version of their drills. Because there was no methodology or theory underpinning her training routine—as she did not completely understand the purpose of the drill—she would have us do some version of it, but it was always a little off. After about two or three weeks, she would stop asking us to do the drills and would return to the practice she had devised.

Among the senior leadership, tennis is a popular sport in China. As Victoria and I had inadvertently learned, every Thursday the indoor courts were reserved for senior government offi
cials. Often several members of the men's team would be required to play with these officials. On a few occasions the top women players were brought in to play. China had no men ranked in the top 500 of men's world tennis, but they did have several women who were breaking into the top 100 in the world. The highest-ranked player was a girl named Peng Ai. She was originally from Tianjin and had trained at the same facility as Bowen. Bowen had heard that she was coming, and he was determined to watch her play. She had gotten to the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open and was Beijing's only hope for the 2008 Olympics.

How Bowen learned that she was coming I do not know, but somehow he found out. “Watch for Thursday,” he had said to me, and sure enough on Thursday, Peng showed up and practiced with us for two hours. Madame Jiang assigned Hope and Bowen to hit with her. We watched as the two of them drilled Peng. She was big and strong and hit flat and hard with two hands on each side—two hands for her forehand, two hands for her backhand. Several times in the rallies when Peng hit a ball out, Bowen caught it on his racket strings before it hit the court without ever letting it leave the strings. It was almost as if he made the ball disappear, and then, with the deft grace of a gifted magician, he made it reappear. This display of hand-eye coordination and racket control delighted Peng, and she asked Madame Jiang if she could play a set with Bowen. Madame Jiang didn't like the idea, and Bowen tried to act neutral about her request, but he was, I could tell, thrilled. Madame Jiang said Bowen had to go to the gym. He contradicted her and said he could go after he played a set. Madame Jiang had been boxed in, and there was nothing she could do. She made the rest of us run sprints on the court, but we did our best to watch Bowen handle Peng's power. Peng
liked to take control of the points, and once she had control, it was almost impossible to win the point. Bowen started taking the ball early and hitting it on the rise. Bowen knew that he was throwing her off her rhythm. Peng started to lose confidence and make unforced errors. She was a baseliner and was uncomfortable at net, so Bowen created situations that forced her to come to net and hit volleys.

Bowen finished the set 7-5. Peng stayed on court with him and chatted for a while after the match while Madame Jiang clenched her jaw. We had been given instructions by Madame Jiang not to chat with Peng. She told us that Peng didn't want to be bothered with conversation. Peng spoke to Madame Jiang before she left. We finished practice, and I asked Bowen what Peng had said. We spoke quietly and quickly while we were getting a drink at the water fountain to avoid Madame Jiang's irritation. He told me that Peng was playing an exhibition match against a teammate from Beijing that evening for the officials. She had invited him to come watch and told Madame Jiang the same thing. As he wiped his arm against his mouth at the fountain he said, “Madame Jiang didn't say yes.”

“Did she say no?” I asked.

“No, but she didn't say yes, which is the same thing.”