Beautiful Country (19 page)

The team was given the week after the championships off to rest. When we returned to practice, Bowen wasn't there. At first I assumed that he had been given extra time off to rehabilitate his shoulder, but as the days passed without even a mention of Bowen, I began to worry. When he didn't appear at the start of the second week, I asked Random if he knew where Bowen was. He simply shrugged. I asked Dali and Little Mao the same question. They replied in identical fashion. At the end of Friday's practice I finally summoned up the courage to ask Madame Jiang directly.

“
Ta hui jia le
(He went home),” she said.

“Where?” I said.

“Tianjin.”

“Did he change teams?”

“
Bu zhidao
(I don't know),” she said without looking at me. With that she walked off.

The next day I asked Random if he thought Bowen had rejoined the Tianjin team. The addition of Bowen to the Tianjin team would almost ensure that Tianjin would win the national championships again next year.

Random shook his head and said he didn't know but doubted it.

“Why?”

“He came to Beijing because he was expelled from the Tianjin team.”

“He was? Why?”

“His mother angered the Tianjin head coach because he thought she went around him and tried to get a sponsor for Bowen from an academy in America.”

“What happened?”

“Bowen told me that she did nothing wrong. She was approached by an American coach who was visiting Tianjin. Bowen was very, very good when he was twelve, definitely the best player in China. The coach spoke to Bowen's mother about whether she would consider letting him come to America to train. When the Tianjin head coach heard about it, he blamed Bowen's mother. Bowen told me that she was very ashamed. She did nothing wrong, but she was told that she could not come back to the tennis center. After that, Bowen was so disruptive that he got kicked off the team. I think the team director used Bowen to send a message to the other parents and players. It would make them look very bad if they lost any of their good players to America.”

“So how did he end up in Beijing?”

“The coach before Madame Jiang took him. He had been a badminton player and knew something about tennis. I guess he figured if he could get Bowen, his team could be number one, but he was sent to coach the woman's professional team in Shanghai two months after Bowen arrived.”

“But then why did Bowen go back to Tianjin if he doesn't have a chance of getting on the team?”

Random shook his head. “He never belonged here.”

I sensed there was more to know, but Random wasn't telling.

When I awoke the following morning, Beijing was cloaked in a ghostly light, and the sky was gray. A sandstorm had blown in overnight. I had been told about the dangerous sandstorms that plagued Beijing each year. As the sun rose the sky turned from a gray to a yellow to an orange. When Victoria and Driver Wu arrived, I sprinted from the lobby of the apartment building to the car. The sand stung my face and stuck to my lips.

“This is your first sandstorm. You will be tasting sand for days,” Victoria teased and then went on to remind me how much of China was desert. “Over a quarter,” she said. “The sand comes from the deserts to the north of Beijing and is blown into the city by high winds. The deserts are growing and moving, and the government needs to plant trees and grass, but it will take time and money. The Gobi Desert is now less than one hundred fifty miles from Beijing.”

Driver Wu grumbled the entire car ride to the language school. There was a film of fine orange dust covering everything. Driver Wu was worried the sand would get inside the engine of the car and cause damage. Despite the sandstorm, the traffic was still bad. There were fewer cars, but they moved even more slowly, and a few had broken down and been pushed halfway onto the sidewalks. I wondered, perhaps even hoped, that Teacher Lu might be late, or might not show up at all—sort of like praying for rain on a summer day in Florida when you didn't feel like another five-hour tennis practice. Teacher Lu was there when I arrived with more energy than she normally had.

During a break between classes I ran into Josh in the student lounge. It was the first time I had seen him in over two months,
and I asked him how his wine importation business was going. He shook his head and said that everything had been going great until there had been a cyclical crackdown on corruption in the government. All of a sudden, officials could no longer afford to be seen holding elaborate banquets and drinking expensive European wines and the demand for Josh's business had disappeared completely. He didn't seem too worried about it though. He told me that his business partner had assured him that this was only temporary and that these crackdowns happened every now and then to keep people in line and to give the appearance that something was being done to combat corruption. In the meantime, Josh and his partner were setting up a bottled sparkling water company. Josh said that his business partner's uncle was party secretary of Harbin, a major industrial city in the northeast where they had natural hot springs—a perfect source of free sparkling water. At that moment, Josh was incorporating a bottled water company in Europe for two reasons: one, because it was easier to get the money out of China if it was a foreign company, and two, because they wanted to give the water a fancy-sounding European name to make it seem high-class. He said they had liked the name Mont Blanc but were afraid it would get confused with the pen company, so they were thinking about the name Courcheval. I wanted to ask him more, but at that moment the bell rang, and I returned to class with Teacher Lu.

After class as I ran to the car where Driver Wu and Victoria were waiting, the force of the winds, which had been building all morning, felt out of control. A half-block sprint to the car and already the sand was in my hair, clothes, eyes, and mouth. I felt as if I were being attacked with hundreds of needles on all the
exposed areas of my skin and it was difficult to breathe. As we drove to tennis, I saw many people with makeshift remedies. Some people walked around with plastic bags over their heads. Others wore surgical masks while some covered their whole head with scarves. I saw one man riding a bike with his head covered by a sheer blue scarf. A woman with a similar red scarf half jogged, half ran a few meters behind him.

By the start of tennis practice, the winds had died down, and the air was beginning to clear as the sand settled. Even though we practiced indoors, my throat still felt scratchy, and my eyes burned. On the drive home, people began emerging from apartment buildings and storefronts and alleyways with makeshift brooms and shovels to push and sweep the orange sand into piles.

I skipped dinner that night—my throat was sore and my head hurt and I didn't feel like eating. I lay down on my bed and stared out the window into the dusty orange haze. Wherever he was, I hoped that Bowen would be all right.

A few weeks went by and life went on largely as it had before. Madame Jiang continued to lead practices as before, and a new player, Sun Li, was added to the team. But it wasn't the same without Bowen. A crucial component that had kept us together as a team was now gone. When professionals came through, there was no one to give them a run for their money the way Bowen could. The truth was that no one enjoyed tennis the way Bowen did. He played with such joy and intensity that he always seemed to want the ball to come back to his side of the court. He was disappointed when his opponent didn't return his shot.

We could have all been lost in a desert, but Bowen would have convinced us that he knew exactly where the path to water was and that the condition we found ourselves in was nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing to worry about. No one wanted to talk about Bowen, and as many times as I tried, I never could get any of the boys to give me more than a sliver of information. It was almost as if he had never existed. But without Bowen, the boys were listless, and Madame Jiang had turned even more irascible. Even Victoria, who sat at most practices and played with her phone and sent text messages, did not bother to pull
her phone from her purse. Maybe it was the early dark winter days, the cold, smog-filled air that never seemed to let up, or maybe it was just that we all had relied on Bowen's presence to give us energy, to push us forward, to give us a sense of purpose. I used to look forward to seeing Bowen; now I had begun to dread practices.

Christmas was approaching and, with it, the promise of a trip back home. When we had first discussed my spending a year in China, my father had told me that I could return for a few weeks around Christmas when my friends would be on their winter breaks.

Somewhat surprisingly for an institution in China, the language school had a two-week winter recess on either side of Christmas. In my last week I kept track of the number of steps I would have to take up and down the rickety staircase of the Beijing Women's Publishing House—840, 672, 504, 336, 168, 84. I handed Teacher Lu a special package of fermented tea leaves that Victoria said she would like. I thanked her for all of her perseverance with me. When our lesson ended, Teacher Lu told me she had one more tale for me. She told me a story of a young eagle who was raised among a group of young chickens. The young eagle believed that he was a chicken so he didn't try to fly. “The owner was mad at the eagle's identifying himself as a chick. ‘What was the sense of raising an eagle?' he demanded.” Madame Lu stood up and raised her fist in anger as if acting the part of the owner. “He threw the eagle down a cliff.” She mimicked throwing something down. “The eagle fell down the cliff straightly and at the moment he was nearly to the ground to hit himself, he suddenly can use his wings and fly, thus living as an eagle ever since.” Teacher Lu reached up and patted me on my
shoulder. Once again, I wasn't clear what she was trying to tell me, but I smiled and thanked her.

Madame Jiang had given us a rare day off from practice, so I had the afternoon free. As I trotted down the last steps of the fire escape, I was struck with that rare sense of freedom that one always gets on the last day of school. I rehearsed in my mind conversations that I would have with friends when I returned home. “So what was it like?” they would ask. I smiled to myself when I thought about the reactions they would have to my telling them about the draconian Madame Jiang, about eating sea snails and duck heads, about the sandstorms. I knew they would laugh when I showed them the fake DVDs with their brutally spelled titles and blurbs stolen from the covers of totally unrelated films. Or share with them the winners in the different categories of the
Translation Olympics.
The girls would be impressed, I thought, when I told them about how I had practiced with the national team every day, with boys who would be playing professional tennis in the future and how my best friend, Bowen, was the best player in China and probably one of the best players in the world and how he . . . I stopped. How would I tell them about Bowen? How would I explain what had happened to him, when I still did not understand? Even if I did know what had happened to him, how could I make them understand how unfair it all was? How could I make them care? I walked down the last ten steps and doubted that I would ever be able to make any of them understand the complexities.

Victoria and Driver Wu were waiting for me in the car. In the space of those last eighty-four steps my mood had turned, but Victoria was determined to change that. When I got in the car she handed me a wrapped present.

“It's for Christmas,” Victoria said. “Don't open it yet! I was going to wait until Christmas to give it to you but then you told me you might go back to America for two weeks.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It'll be great. Where are we going now?” Driver Wu had turned down a different street than the one we usually took.

“I'm taking you to a market,” Victoria said. “So you can get presents for your friends back home.”

Most markets in Beijing are now housed in large, several-story buildings that resemble malls filled with hundreds of individual stalls. But at the time there were still quite a few traditional open-air markets. Victoria told me she was taking me to the Panjiayuan Flea Market. She referred to it as the dirt market. She told me it was the oldest and the largest of the markets. Located just off the eastern Third Ring Road, it was not too far from the Zhangs' apartment, but it took us some time to get there. The market was vast with rows and rows of covered stalls.

“This way,” she said. She led me around the back of the entrance. There, spread out on dirty, worn, irregular pieces of cloth, was a wide collection of goods—china, pottery, bits of leather, ox bells, flint wallets, even old wooden washboards.

“Lots of fakes, but sometimes you can find good things.”

Most of the vendors were squatting, but if we paused, they stood up and pushed some trinket at us and said, “Very very good price” as if it were one word. Victoria shooed them away. She pointed to one washboard, a rectangular piece of wood with worn ridges carved across the face. “One of Z's partners came here and bought twenty-four washboards and did an installation with them. An American collector bought it for a lot of money.”

I saw three young boys playing together. I gathered that their
parents were selling things in the market. The three boys whom I guessed to be eight or nine years old were playing some version of rock-paper-scissors. They were standing facing each other and stamping their feet and shouting three words and then swinging their fists downward. They danced around in a loose circle. I watched for a few minutes, mesmerized by the intensity with which they were playing this game. I asked Victoria why the kids weren't in school. She said that they were probably the children of the “illegal immigrants” of the city, people from the countryside or other cities who had migrated to Beijing to find work but did not have Beijing residency cards and therefore could not send their children to school. Victoria said that after staying here for a few years, the immigrants would probably take the money that they had saved up and return to their home village. One of the shopkeepers shouted something at the boys, and they laughed and ran off together, pretending they were being chased, and looking as if they were being blown by the wind.

We walked down row after row of stalls. Other potential customers stalked the market alongside us. Everyone had their eyes on the ground, scanning blankets filled with trinkets and jewelry. Eyes watching eyes to discern with precision exactly what object was being considered. Victoria stopped in front of a stall that had a set of small dishes of different shapes that fit together to form a circle. They were painted with dark pink peonies and light green leaves and were displayed in a worn velvet box. As Victoria looked over the plates, the vendor handed me a small brass pot engraved with circular markings on the side. It was similar to one that my father used as a pen holder in his office in New York. He could use this one in his study at home. I nodded to Victoria. The vendor understood that I had chosen this piece,
and he was a tough negotiator. I ended up paying 200 RMB or about thirty dollars. Victoria thought it was far too much, but I was pleased with my purchase. “Next time walk away,” she said. “He would have dropped the price. You could have gotten it for seventy RMB.”

After looking at several rows of offered goods, the goods began to develop a sense of sameness, and anything unusual stood out. “Don't act interested,” Victoria said in English. “But did you see the fighter pilot's helmet?”

Laid out on a blanket to our right with trinkets and chipped pieces of pottery was a green helmet with a red star on the side. There was also a large pair of binoculars.

“Those are some serious binoculars,” I said to Victoria. The man squatting behind the blanket stood up and handed them to me. They had red lenses and were heavy. I wondered what they had been used to sight. It was still too dark to see how well they worked. I handed them back. He watched me look at the helmet and picked it up and thrust it at me. “You like. Good price.” I turned the helmet over in my hands. It was heavy and looked authentic to me. “
Kan yi kan
(Take a look),” he said and mimed putting it on himself. It had a sun visor. I pushed it up and then lifted the helmet onto my head. It was cool, I thought. It was the kind of thing I would have gotten Tom as a present. It would have pleased him, and he would have found a reason to wear it. I put the helmet down.

Just as I started to walk away, the vendor tugged my shirt and motioned for me to wait. He lifted the top of a large crate and searched vigorously through it until he found what he was looking for. He pulled out a small red cardboard box wrapped closed with string. He took his time untying the knot. Inside the box
were four medals. He took one from the box and handed it to me. The red ribbon was dirty and crumpled and stained. The metal's luster was gone. But for some reason that made me like it more. It felt real. Not like the spotless medals you see pinned onto starched uniforms in films. This medal was scratched and imperfect, heavy in my hand.

I asked him, “
Zhe shi ni de ma
(Are these yours)?”

“
Dui
(Yes),” he said. He pointed a stubby finger at the medals. “
Wo baba de
(My father's).”

The first price he asked I accepted. It felt immoral to haggle with a man reduced to selling the medals that his father had won during a war. As I walked away, Victoria told me that I had paid three times too much.

I didn't like bargaining. The people had a lot less than I had and were doing whatever they had just to get by. It felt wrong to haggle and try to save a few dollars at their expense. Victoria treated this bargaining as if it was a game and maybe it was to her, but to the vendors it was survival. Did it matter if I had paid double for something? It mattered to that man, it might have helped him get through a day when no one was buying. Victoria laughed. “Chase, you have a soft heart, it is good, but in China that's a luxury we cannot afford.”

Once we had completed a circuit of the outer stalls, Victoria led the way inside the covered area. The vendors inside were different from the peasants who squatted behind their blankets on the perimeter of the market. These vendors presided over a chaotic paradise of counterfeit goods. They were pros, and there was a rhythm to the negotiation that everyone understood. They spoke relatively good English, and they told you whatever you wanted to hear. Doubts were answered with confirmations. “Is
this real gold?”—“Yes.” “Is this old?”—“Very old.” “Does this work?”—“Work very good.” The conversations took on a kind of gospel-music-verse-and-repeated-chorus rhythm. They waited by their stall and pretended to be a customer examining the goods until you came and looked, and then they would give you advice on what to buy. They set the prices high so that they could give up a lot of value in the negotiation and still get the price they wanted.

I picked up a New England Patriots jersey for one of my friends back home who was a huge fan. When the shopkeeper handed over the jersey I was surprised by the garment's quality. It felt and looked exactly like an authentic one. I showed it to Victoria.

“It could be a real one,” she said.

“But I only paid eighty-five RMB for it,” I said. “I saw a real one in a store by the Hyatt. It was nine hundred RMB.”

Victoria shrugged. “It could be stolen from the factory where they make the real ones. Sometimes the truck drivers ‘lose' a delivery.”

I bought a few other small things for friends back home and also bought a counterfeit DVD set of the first season of
Mr. Bean
. We ended up in front of a stall selling shoes. Victoria had found a pair of Gucci tennis shoes for her husband. Victoria said 100 RMB and when the vendor said no, she motioned for me to walk away with her. He then instantly lowered the price, to 80 RMB. Victoria said 100 for two pair of shoes. He handed her the matching pair of his and her Gucci tennis shoes, and she handed him 100 RMB.

“Don't you want to look around a little more?” Victoria asked.

I didn't, but I could tell Victoria did. She pointed to a pair of
Chanel sunglasses. “Those are good copies. The Cs are the right size, not like those of Madame Jiang's. Her Cs are too big. You should give her something when you leave.”

I was surprised. I had absolutely no interest in buying a gift for a woman I considered unreasonable and cruel. “After the way she treated Bowen?” I asked. “No way.”

“Okay,” Victoria said. “You should understand, though, that in a Chinese way, sometimes Bowen acted very disrespectful.”

“Yeah, you're right,” I said. I could not conceal my antagonism and my voice was heavy with sarcasm. “Maybe if I give her some new Chanel sunglasses or some fancy white gloves she won't have to steal money from the team to buy them herself.”