Beautiful Country (21 page)

I ended up spending Christmas day in the Hyatt with my father. The morning after my father arrived in Beijing, I asked him when we were planning to leave, and he gave me a surprised look and asked, “Leave for what?” I reminded him how he had said I could go home for Christmas and he brushed me off and said that we didn't need to figure that out right away. Several days passed and still there was no mention of when we would return to America, so I asked again.

“I think we're just going to stay here for Christmas.”

“Wait, why?” All of my happiness of the previous days had been borrowed from my return home.

“I've got a number of meetings the week after that I can't miss. I don't think it makes any sense to go back for just a couple days.”

I knew he was right, I knew it made sense to stay here. But at the same time I didn't care. I had been so close to going home.

“Look, you don't have to stay, if you don't want to,” my father said. “You can go home for Christmas if that's more important.”

“I would like to see my friends.”

He seemed disappointed. He told me that he had come to China early so that he could spend Christmas with me. I went
into my room and lay down on the bed for a while thinking about it all. His reaction surprised me. We'd never been the kind of family that placed a lot of importance on formal celebrations. We never celebrated Father's Day, we had eaten most of our Thanksgiving dinners at the Fireside Tavern in town, and I had yet to have an Easter lunch. There was only one day out of the whole year that I can remember us having any sort of family tradition and that was February thirteenth, the day before Valentine's Day, the anniversary of the day my father and my mother met. Every year on February twelfth, Tom and I would accompany my father to the quiet cemetery behind St. Mary's and would wait as he placed a bouquet of poinsettias on that plot of land in the far corner of the cemetery where my mother lay. There was something particularly tragic about that day, especially when my father had to discard the cheesy Hallmark card the florist included complimentarily with all Valentine's Day orders. I've always wondered why my father chose that day out of all the days in the year to remember my mother. He could have chosen any number of other days, their wedding anniversary, or her birthday, or even the day she died. But he didn't. He chose that day.

I thought it over for a while. It began to occur to me that maybe my father just didn't want to spend Christmas by himself. It was our first Christmas without Tom. I began to dread the idea of spending Christmas alone in our big house in Connecticut. I went back into the living room and told my father that he was right and that I should stay.

I woke up early on that Christmas morning in Beijing and went into the living room of our suite and saw that my father had arranged for a small artificial Christmas tree to be brought in. The tree was about four feet tall, and the plastic branches and
needles were all white with pre-attached ornaments and multicolored lights. My father was already awake and showered and sitting at the desk in the corner of the room on the phone with someone. When he saw me come in he waved and indicated that he was wrapping up the call.

I remembered the present Victoria had given me a few weeks before and went into my room to dig up the gray wrapped present. I found it in my backpack with my schoolbooks, untouched since the last day of class. I pulled off the wrapping paper. She had given me a framed picture of the two of us at the tennis center. I remembered the picture. She had asked one of the guards at the tennis center to take it a few weeks before. Clipped to the back of the frame was my yearbook photo from the year before. In the corner of the picture my name and phone number were written in my father's handwriting just like on the one my father had given me of Victoria before I had left for China.

My father hung up the phone and went to his suitcase and took out a bundle of wrapped gifts. I opened them and inside I found the Nike tennis shirts I had asked for. He also gave me his old Yale varsity tennis team jacket. He told me that he hoped I would be wearing my own in a few years. I put on the Yale jacket and then went into my room to get the
Mr. Bean
box set and the ceramic pot I had bought for him at the dirt market. As I was leaving my room I saw the old army medal lying on my beside table. I had originally planned to keep it for myself, but at that moment I changed my mind and decided to give it to my father along with the other two presents. My father thanked me for the gifts but didn't seem too interested in them, so I told him what Driver Wu had said about the medal. He told me that I should keep the medal as a reminder of how quickly fortunes can change.

We had breakfast in the seventeenth-floor lounge. I still hadn't brought up Bowen. I knew that I needed to ask at the right time if I wanted him to say yes. After breakfast we went back to the room and I asked him if he wanted to start watching
Mr. Bean
. He said that first he had to take a couple calls and then meet Mr. Zhang for lunch.

“On Christmas?” I asked.

“Well, they don't celebrate here,” he said.

The phone rang and he answered it at his desk in the living room. It sounded as though it was going to be a long call. I decided that I might as well watch a few episodes by myself. The only television with a DVD player was in the living room, but it was on the opposite side of the room from his desk so I figured it would be all right to watch it there as long as I kept the volume low. I was about five minutes into an episode when my father put down the phone and walked to the door.

“I'll take it in the lounge,” he said, pointing to the phone. “I'm just having trouble hearing in here.”

“Oh,” I said. “I'm sorry. I'll turn the volume lower.”

“No, no,” he said. “You're fine. Watch your movie, I'll be back in a few hours.”

I heard from someone once that the reason they put laugh tracks in sitcoms is because laughter is contagious. People find things funnier when they have other people to laugh with. I had seen the episode I'd put on before, and this time, sitting alone in that hotel room on Christmas, the jokes felt stale. I turned it off and opened my computer and turned on AOL Instant Messenger to see if any of my friends were online to chat with, but it was nearly 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve in the States, and they were all either asleep or with their families.

About twenty minutes later my father returned.

“You finish up your call?” I asked.

“Nah, I just told my secretary to reschedule everything,” he said.

“What about Mr. Zhang?”

“I told him I had to move lunch to tomorrow,” he said. He saw my surprised expression. “It's Christmas.” He shook his head. “Sorry, Chase. It's like I have blinders on sometimes. What happened to that TV show you wanted to watch?” As I had predicted, my father found the show hilarious. We watched five episodes straight.

Around two we called room service and ordered two cheeseburgers with fries for lunch. I knew that this was as good a chance as I would ever have to ask about Bowen.

“I feel like my tennis has improved a lot over here,” I said. “I'm winning matches against some of the guys on the team who used to beat me easily.”

“That's great.”

“I was thinking that this summer I should play some of those men's open tournaments they have at Yale.”

“Men's opens? Are you old enough for that?”

“They're open to anyone. And I've got nothing to lose, really. I know that some of the Yale guys usually play them to get practice matches during the summer. It would probably go a long way with the coach if I had a good result against one of them.”

“Sure, but you just want to make sure that you're ready for this. It wouldn't be great to get wiped off the court by one of his weaker players. First impressions are important.” He thought for a second. “You know, I might shoot the Yale coach an e-mail just
so that he's aware of you and what you're doing. It can't hurt to get you on his radar.”

“That'd be great. I'll be ready. I've gotten a lot better. Remember how I told you about my friend Bowen? He was number one in China last year. I was hitting with him every day for a while. He really helped me improve.”

“You should keep that up. I've always found that the best way to get better was to play with better players.”

“I wanted to, but he isn't on the team anymore.”

“Oh?”

“The coach kicked him off.”

“She kicked him off? Wasn't he the best player?”

“He lost the deciding match in the finals of nationals, and she said he lost the match on purpose to embarrass her, to make her look bad.”

“Did he?”

“No, he was injured but she made him play anyway. I think he tore something in his shoulder, he could barely serve. She wouldn't even let him see the doctor.”

“What? Why?”

“She just didn't, she thought he was faking,” I said. “Anyway, he won his first four matches, but then in the final he was up a set in the deciding match when his arm totally gave out. He was serving underhand and running around his forehand. He kept fighting though, the third set was six-four. Pretty amazing.”

“He was serving underhand?”

“She made something up to the head of the tennis center about how Bowen is lying about his age, about how he is really sixteen but lies and says he is fourteen.”

“Didn't you say that a lot of that goes on here?”

“I think some of them are a year older than they say. But Bowen's fourteen.”

“You know that for sure?”

I had thought this over for a while, and I knew what I needed to say. I didn't know if Bowen was actually fourteen or not. I knew there was a chance that he wasn't fourteen, but I wanted to believe him. I knew he had lied to me before, at the Forbidden City, but I think that's because he had been embarrassed and had not wanted to lose face in front of me. This was different. Even if he wasn't fourteen, who cared? All the boys on the team lied about their age. It wasn't fair for him to be kicked off the team for that. As I had learned during the past few months, the world didn't exist in black and white, but in shades of gray. He had been there for me and helped me when I had needed a friend, and now he had asked the same from me. It was my duty to help him, and I knew what I needed to say. That didn't make it any easier though. I looked away, down at the ground and felt my throat tighten even more, but slowly the words forced themselves out.

“He showed me his birth certificate,” I said.

“Why didn't he show it to the tennis director?”

I shrugged. “Bowen can't do anything. No one is going to listen to him. He's just a fourteen-year-old from Tianjin.”

“This coach sounds like a real piece of work. She hasn't given you any trouble like this, has she?”

I shook my head. “The worst part is that without tennis Bowen has nothing. He's in Tianjin now, doing construction. For fifty cents an hour.”

My father sighed and took off his glasses. I had hoped that the injustice of the situation would infuriate my father, and he
would fix this situation. He polished the lenses on his sweater and placed them back on his nose.

“That's too bad,” he said.

The words stunned me. That was it? That was all he had to say? “Can't we do something to help him?”

“Look, Chase, in all likelihood that was where he was always going to end up.”

“What is?”

“Where he is now.”

“No,” I said. “He would have turned pro.”

“In the best-case scenario. But then what? He plays a couple years on the pro tour, barely breaks even. If he's lucky, maybe he'll get to play in a grand slam once or twice? That road ends with him twenty-five or twenty-six years old, no money, no education. From there it's either teach tennis or do whatever he's doing now.”

“No. With the right coaching he'd be a great player. I think he could be top ten in the world. That's his dream. He wakes up thinking about it and doesn't stop thinking about it until he falls asleep. He told me that.”

“There's a reason they're called dreams, Chase, not plans.”

I was silent and thought for a minute. The frankness of his words stunned me. I had thought that he genuinely believed in my chances of becoming a professional player. Since we were little, my father had encouraged my brother and me in our dreams of becoming world-famous tennis players. He had started us in tennis clinics early, taken us to the U.S. Open every year since I was old enough to remember. He even arranged for us to get passes to the players' lounge and meet our favorite players. He had joked with the players about how Tom and I would
be nipping at their heels soon. For my eleventh birthday he had arranged for his secretary to go to a sports memorabilia auction and buy one of Pete Sampras's actual rackets, signed by Sampras himself. At that age, I idolized Sampras. I had a five-foot poster of him on the wall in my room and insisted on using the same model racket even though he used the heaviest racket on the pro tour. The night of my eleventh birthday, I went to sleep holding that autographed Sampras racket, as if I were terrified that it would slip away during the night, and I dreamed of serves and volleys on the green grass of Centre Court.

I had seen these trips and presents as his way of encouraging our dream of becoming professional tennis stars. But I realized now that my father did not deal in dreams, only plans. He had merely been implementing the first step of his plan for Tom and me to be recruited to Yale for tennis. Now that I was older he was shifting my focus from playing professional tennis to playing for college. I thought about how much of myself I had put into trying to be good enough to play professionally eventually. How many hours on the court I had spent hitting forehand after forehand, serve after serve, how many times I had thrown up after running suicide drills. With an offhand remark, my father had crushed my dream entirely, and I felt a mixture of resentment and denial about what he had said. “Well, Lukas always said that he would take the player who puts everything he has into chasing his dream and fails, than the player who settles for less because he is scared to fail.” The unsubtle dig at my father hung listlessly in the air.