Beautiful Country (4 page)

That moment always comes back to me—Bowen acknowledging to me that he was up to something and that I was somehow part of his plan. I would come to see that it was his supreme confidence in himself and his ability that permitted him to tease fate. I passed the balls to Bowen and he got ready to serve the
4-all game. Madame Jiang came over to our court and watched with her hands folded behind her back. Bowen won the game easily to go up 5-4, and I won the next game by hitting winners that I suspected he had set up for me. Bowen controlled everything that was happening. At 5-all he went into another gear and raised his game and effortlessly pulled ahead and won the set 7-5. When Bowen won the last point, Madame Jiang nodded her head, as if to say,
This is how it should be
.

By fabricating such a close score with the gift of three fictitious games, Bowen had ensured that I would be considered good enough to practice with the boys. At the time, I had no idea why he had done it. Maybe he knew that if he played his best he would keep me off the team and he did not want that responsibility; maybe he wanted someone new to practice with. I wasn't sure, but I was glad he had let me back into the match. It wasn't until months later that I understood what he had been up to.

The next day Madame Jiang began the practice by rolling out a shopping cart of over three hundred tennis balls. The boys left their rackets on the bench and stood in a wide circle. She threw everyone, including me, three balls, then she sliced the air with a sharp command, and all five boys started juggling. At first I thought it was some sort of joke. But they continued juggling, and I saw that they were taking it very seriously. Madame Jiang walked to the cart and started throwing each boy an extra ball. It was something straight out of the circus. I had absolutely no idea how to juggle, but I did my best to copy the other boys. I kept dropping balls and having to run after them. I would take as long as I could to chase the ball to minimize the time I spent humiliating myself. Madame Jiang threw an additional ball to all the boys except me and then threw two more to Bowen and a tall boy who wore thick eyeglasses. At the end of the drill, Bowen was juggling eight balls, and Lu Xi, the boy with the thick glasses, was juggling seven.

After juggling, Madame Jiang paired us up to begin drilling from the baseline. She motioned for me to go on the court with Chang Yang and Mao Xiao. Both boys were only about five foot
six. Chang Yang was wiry and muscular, his physique more like a gymnast than a tennis player. Mao Xiao was broad, with thick wild hair that hung like a mop and bushy eyebrows that almost met in the middle. I would find out later that the other boys on the team had several rather amusing, but somewhat cruel, nicknames for Mao Xiao that were derived from his last name,
毛
(
Mao
)—the same character as the
Mao
in Chairman Mao's last name (
毛
æ³½
东
—
Mao Zedong
)
.
That character, when not used as a last name, means
hair
. His first name,
Xiao
, was written
恔
, which means
cheerful
, but it was pronounced the same as
小
(also
xiao
), which means
small
or
little
. Given his size and appearance, it was an unfortunate name to have and unsurprisingly my teammates gave him several nicknames including
Xiao Maozi
(which translates roughly to
little hairy guy
),
Xiao Zhuxi
(the Little Chairman), and
Xiao Mao
(Little Mao).

We played “two on one” with two on one side of the court hitting only down-the-line shots, and one on the other side returning their shots crosscourt. They hit the ball hard and fast but they lacked consistency, and it was difficult to get a long rally going to establish a rhythm. Several times Madame Jiang came on the court and chided us for our bad footwork. I couldn't understand a word she said. I think she was trying to show us to take fewer but bigger steps and then sidestep back to the center of the court. She demonstrated herself, but her demonstration made no sense. Her footwork was all wrong. She pushed off from the court with the wrong foot and instead of doing a split step she crossed one foot over the other.

Madame Jiang then stood at the net with her large shopping cart and fed the balls side to side. One forehand, one backhand. We each hit six shots and then the next player rotated in. This
drill was elementary, and, for us, it had no purpose except to practice repetition of technique—something I had stopped doing by the age of twelve.

In the year that I spent in China, Madame Jiang never once adjusted or corrected anyone's technique, but would have us do this drill over and over again to no purpose. She offered no comments as to where we hit the ball; it didn't matter if we hit them all crosscourt, down the line, or in the bottom of the net. It was a stark contrast to the methods I was familiar with in America. Since I was nine years old, I had spent every summer and winter vacation at tennis academies in Florida. At those academies, every drill we did during practice was chosen for a reason and was designed to achieve a specific goal or purpose. We would work on specific shots: running forehands, topspin lobs, angled passing shots. We would practice predesigned patterns like a quarterback and his offensive line rehearse their plays. The coaches did video analysis of our technique, designed specific fitness and workout plans that were tailored to each individual player, charted statistics in our matches, and carefully monitored our progress and improvement over time. In China there was none of that. There was just a woman who clearly knew very little, if anything, about tennis and her shopping cart of three hundred tennis balls that were so old some of them barely bounced. When I saw what these players were working with, I was amazed that they were as good as they were.

Without warning, Madame Jiang stopped the drilling and told us to play sets. She paired me with Mao Xiao. I had him figured as the type of player who would get frustrated if I mixed up my play and didn't let him hit the same shot twice. I played better than I had the day before, and won 6-3. Then I played Chang
Yang, who was wilier than Little Mao, and lost 6-4. Bowen had been keeping his eye on my matches. When practice was over, he sat next to me on the bench and began rearranging his bag. He asked me in English, “How old you?” I told him I was fourteen, but he didn't understand my rough Chinese response. I pulled out a piece of paper from my tennis bag and wrote, “
Shi si sui. Ni duo da
(Fourteen, how old are you)?” He examined my Chinese characters. He smiled and looked at me and nodded his head in approval. I asked him how old he was. He pointed to his chest and answered my Chinese in English, “Me too. You make the team. You good for fourteen.” Bowen faltered over the word
fourteen
.

Madame Jiang noticed us talking and slapped her racket hard twice on the net, which was her way of telling us to stop talking and hurry up with the ball collection. Bowen moved on with his ball hopper picking up balls. Looking down at the ground, he mumbled in broken English, “Madame Jiang, no speak.” I assumed he meant that she didn't speak English. He looked up to see if she was watching. She stood on the far side with her arms crossed. He looked back down and said without looking at me, “Madame Jiang—no play tennis.”

After practice, the entire team went to the gym to work out with weights. In America most academies do not allow boys under fifteen to train with weights. The view is that before age fifteen, bones have not developed enough and weights could cause injury. I explained this to Victoria, and she translated for Madame Jiang. Madame Jiang shrugged her shoulders to suggest she didn't care. She told Victoria that I should come back the following day. She gave no indication whether or not I had made the team. She obviously was aware that my introduction to
the team had come down through the Minister of Sport. I sensed Madame Jiang didn't like having someone imposed on her. As tough as Lukas had been, I knew he cared about me and wanted me to do well. It was difficult to work hard for a coach when you knew they didn't care, and there were many days when I wished Lukas was with me in Beijing.

The traffic back to the Zhangs' was even worse than the day before. For over forty minutes we were at a dead stop. Victoria pulled a book from her purse and opened it. I asked her what she was reading. She looked up and turned the cover to me.

“
One Hundred Years of Solitude
,” I read aloud. The title was written in English but the text was in Chinese.

“Did you read this one before?” Victoria asked.

“No, I've never heard of it. Who is it by?”

“By?”

“Who wrote it?”

“Oh,” Victoria said. “
Ma-er-ke-si
. You know him? In China, now he is very popular.” Victoria pulled out her phone and toyed with it for a few seconds and then held it out to me. “You see? Number one in China now.”

I looked at the screen and saw that Victoria had pulled up the best-seller list on a website that looked as if it were the Chinese equivalent of Amazon.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez occupied the top spot. It was followed by
The Catcher in the Rye
, a book by a Chinese writer,
The Great Gatsby
, and
Love in the Time of Cholera.
It surprised me to see old books
like
The Great Gatsby
on a recent best-seller list. I asked Victoria about it, and she told me that many Western classics had only started getting translated into Chinese in the last few years. She pointed to the third-placed book.

“Do you know Gao Fei?” Victoria asked.

I shook my head.

“He is a very popular writer here. He is Chinese though. But many people said that he copied Ma-er-ke-si
.
So I bought this book because I want to see if that's true.”

“Is it?”

“I don't think so. Maybe the way they write is a bit similar. But—” Victoria held up the book. “The feelings in this one are different from Gao Fei's books. In Gao Fei's books, you can feel the spirit of China. In this one, there is a different spirit.”

“Is he the best writer in China?” I asked.

“Gao Fei? He is good. Many people like Da Ning more. I do. But his books are very criticizing the government. So nobody will say he is best. He doesn't win the prizes. Gao Fei wins many prizes.” Victoria paused. “Do you like to read?” she asked.

“I read some,” I said. “Mostly for school though. My brother liked to read a lot.”

“Why not? What is your most favorite book?”

I thought for a moment. “Last year I had to read a book called
To Kill a Mockingbird.
I liked that one.”

Victoria smiled. “You will find that one for me, and I will buy you one book Da Ning wrote that is my most favorite one.”

Several soldiers stood at attention along the street, guns across their bodies in a ready position. I was about to ask Victoria why there were so many armed guards everywhere with such serious-looking machine guns, but before I could, Driver Wu told Vic
toria a motorcade would be coming through. Almost as soon as Victoria translated this for me, a motorcade of black Audi A4s came up beside us in the emergency lane. Driver Wu looked back at us and smiled.

“What's going on?” I asked Victoria.

“They're government officials,” Victoria said. She pointed to the back of a passing car. “See, they have white license plates.”

Every car in the convoy had a white license plate with red and black lettering instead of the usual blue plates with white letters. “What does that mean?”

“That's how you know they're officials. They always have the Audis with white license plates. They can use the emergency lane. They don't have to follow the rules.”

I would come to understand that there were a lot of things in China that I could not explain, for example how Driver Wu always knew when a motorcade was coming, or when he could cross into the wrong lane, or when he should obey the traffic cop standing in the middle of a busy intersection, and when he could ignore him.

I yawned and let my eyes close for a second. I was still fighting off jet lag, and the exhaustion and disassociation came in waves. I leaned my head against the window and tried not to think too much about what I had traded for this year. I forced myself to stay awake by trying to translate the road signs we passed.

The traffic had slowly started moving again. When I asked Victoria why there was traffic going into Beijing at this time, she just laughed and said there is always traffic, it doesn't matter which way or what time. Driver Wu decided to try a shortcut, and soon we were going through narrow single lanes and alleyways. It was slow, but at least we were moving. At a crossroad with a light
I saw two boys playing a makeshift game of badminton in the street with the heads of two broken badminton rackets attached with twine to some sticks. I tapped Victoria on the shoulder and said, “Isn't that dangerous?”

Victoria shrugged her shoulders. “They will be okay.” I thought about David and Lily Zhang and tried to imagine them being allowed to play badminton on the streets, but I wasn't able to picture it. These children were part of a different China.

Victoria pulled out her cell phone and scrolled through some of the features. I asked her if it was new. She nodded. “Pink is very hard to get. I had to wait for six hours!” On our long car rides, Victoria often placed her pink cell phone on the seat next to her. Sometimes she would pick it up and play with the features or send text messages to friends. Sometimes she would just hold it and admire it.

My father had told me that the Chinese had the biggest cell phone system in the world. They had leapfrogged technology; many Chinese went from no phones to cell phones. In many places they didn't even bother installing landlines. During my time in China, Victoria upgraded her cell phone twice. She would spend hours learning all the features of each new phone. Cell phones were one of the few Western consumer goods that were affordable but expensive enough to be prestigious. To her, a phone was a fashion accessory in the same way the newest pair of shoes or an expensive bracelet would have been.

After a gruesome two hours we made it back to the Chaoyang District where the Zhangs lived. I had asked Victoria about Beijing's famous fake DVD shops, and on the way back to the Zhangs she told Driver Wu to stop at a dismal-looking store with
DVD VIDEO
in large soot-covered red letters emblazoned on its windows. I had seen at least a dozen of these stores on the way home. When we went in I was surprised to see titles that had not come out yet in America. I looked at the price, 10 RMB, slightly more than one dollar. The store had all of the new movies and most of the popular TV shows. The television show
24
had just finished season two in America and it wouldn't be out on DVD for another six months, but here it was, right in front of me. It cost the equivalent of five U.S. dollars as opposed to the fifty dollars it would cost when it would come out in the States. I couldn't wait to message my friends back home once I had internet hooked up in my room. I ended up getting the season of
24
and three other DVDS for nine U.S. dollars total.

Victoria and I crossed the street to the Zhangs' apartment building compound. With the building in sight, I convinced Victoria—and it did take some convincing—that I'd be able to survive an elevator ride by myself. I rang the doorbell and waited a few minutes. One of the maids opened the door. She said something to me that I didn't understand. I waved and headed to my room. She called after me in a tone that sounded urgent, and I turned to find her pulling on my shirt and pointing at my shoes. I dropped my bag and bent down to unlace my sweat-stained shoes. She didn't wait for me to take them off but pulled them off my feet before I had a chance to. Shoes in hand, she scurried back to the doorway.

I heard the sound of her bolting the three locks as I trudged through the living room toward the kitchen. I was pleased to see the living room was empty. My legs ached, and my back was sore from hitting serves. I walked down the dark hallway and up the
stairs to my annex. My legs burned as I walked up the stairs. Lukas would have made me stretch after practice, but here there was no one checking that I did the things I was supposed to do.

After showering I felt the familiar haze of jet lag return. It became harder and harder to keep my eyes open. I was in the middle of putting on socks when I fell asleep.

I awoke not knowing where I was. I checked my watch—seven fifty. Morning or evening? The haze in my mind cleared as my stomach awoke: “Dinner.” I picked a fallen sock off the ground and slipped it on my right foot. My thighs burned even more than they had before, and pushing myself off the bed was an excruciating task. I descended the stairs step by step, trying to bend my legs as little as possible.

I pushed through the door into the kitchen, expecting it to be swarming with maids cooking and cleaning, but it was empty. There was no one at the dinner table either. It was then that I heard an exclamation from across the room. David was sitting in front of the television, eating his dinner on a table in front of the sofa. I walked over and sat next to him. He was watching some sort of wrestling event. He glanced at me before turning his attention back to the television.

“What is this?” I asked.

“
WrestleMania
,” he said, without breaking eye contact with the television.

I focused on the program. At that moment, a scary-looking bearded guy with a long blond ponytail and a swollen torso accented by a sleeveless biker jacket climbed into the ring. Two men who appeared to be identical twins waited on the other side of the ring wearing matching all-black outfits. They also both had long ponytails and appeared to be wearing eyeliner. I won
dered how this, of all things, had made it to Chinese television. “Who's playing?” I asked.

“You mean fighting? This guy is the best. His name is Triple H. He's fighting the Hardy Boyz.”

There was silence and I tried to think of something else to say. “You think he's gonna win?”

“Of course, he's the best.”

“You speak English really well,” I said.

“Yeah, I know. We speak English in schoo—Woah! Did you see that?” David jumped up from the sofa and gestured at the television. Triple H had just landed a massive hit on one of his opponents. David punched his fists in the air and brought them down on an imaginary Canadian foe. “That was awesome!” he shouted.

“So, where is everyone?”

“Dunno. Lily is doing homework.”

Perhaps alerted by David's shouts, a maid appeared in the living room. Upon seeing me, she disappeared to the kitchen and returned a moment later and placed a tray of food in front of me. There was a cup of soup and a bowl filled with some sort of brown gelatinous material next to it. A bowl of white rice and a small plate of meat that looked vaguely like pork made up the rest of the tray's offerings. In the coming months, whenever I could convince Victoria, I tried to eat at the few Western restaurants I discovered around the city. It wasn't that I was opposed to eating the local food, some of which I found delicious; it was more that it was just so foreign that it became exhausting after a while. The Hard Rock Cafe proved to be an unlikely savior during my year in China. Its mozzarella sticks and chicken fingers neither looked nor tasted like they did in America, but they were close
enough. And they proved to me that the world I left behind still existed.

I asked David how they could get
WrestleMania
on television, and he said they could get a lot of other channels too, and he showed me where CNN, BBC, and HBO were. We watched Triple H a little longer. David jumped up and down on the sofa throwing punches and kicks as if they would somehow help his hero, Triple H, but David's efforts were in vain as the Hardy Boyz proved too much, and Triple H limped out of the ring with a promise to return. I remembered the new DVDs I had just bought. I patted David on the back and told him I was going to my room.

The quality of the first DVD was shockingly bad, very grainy, and there seemed to be a black furry patch in the bottom left corner. About four minutes into the film, the furry patch moved, and I realized it was the head of a person. Someone had brought a camera to the movie theater and recorded the film. I ejected that film and tried another. That was how I learned it was a mistake to buy movies that had just come to the theaters. The slightly older ones already on DVD were much better quality. This rule generally applied unless it was award season. During this time the movie companies sent out DVDs of all the new and still-in-theater films to film critics. Somehow these discs made their way to pirates. Once in a while I'd get a DVD that had “This movie is strictly for Academy Awards judging purposes only” scrolling across the bottom.

This became my routine. Most days I would get home from tennis and go straight to my room until it was time for dinner. Sometimes David was waiting for me. I could tell he wanted me to hang out with him, but I didn't want to be anyone's older
brother. But sometimes the emptiness of my room would get to me. Sometimes those four walls reminded me of a story Tom used to tell me about a World War II tail gunner who was a grandfather of one of the kids in his class. The tail of his plane was shot off by a German fighter pilot, and while the others in the plane went crashing down to the ground, the tail of the plane spiraled slowly down to earth, and so he stayed in the tail until he got close enough to jump out with his parachute. I don't remember all of the details of the story except that Tom liked to retell it—he liked to imagine what it must have felt like to be eighteen years old and have time to think about how to save your life. Sometimes I couldn't get that story out of my head, and the more I tried to think of something else, the more difficult it became until finally I would have to leave my room and join David, who was usually playing video games or watching TV. I watched a lot of films with David that year. We became experts in all the James Bond films. Sometimes when David and I shared a TV dinner together, he would pick a Bond film and challenge me to recite entire scenes from it. I attempted an English accent—one that I imagine was quite terrible, but to David it sounded like the real thing. Back home my friends and I used to watch a lot of funny shows like
The Simpsons
and
Saturday Night Live
. But I didn't watch many of those in China because David didn't get the humor, and I don't know why, but I never enjoyed watching those shows by myself. I think it's because I had no one to laugh with.