Beautiful Country (5 page)

On the fourth morning I was awakened by the ringing of my cell phone. It was my father, who said he was calling with good news. I thought for a second that he was going to tell me that he had changed his mind and that he was sending me to Laver. But the good news was that I had passed the trial for the Beijing team. I wouldn't be able to play tournaments, but I could train with them every day. I thought back to the match I had played with Bowen and suddenly I resented him for giving me those games.

“Dad, the facilities and stuff here are really bad. I don't think the coach really knows what she's doing.”

“What are you talking about?”

“All the gym stuff is super old. All the balls we play with are dead. I feel like I'm going to get worse over here. I thought the whole point of this was to get better. And if I can't play tournaments—”

“Look, this is going to be what you make of it. The best way to improve is by playing with better players. The players there are good, yes?”

“Yeah, I mean they're good. But the coaching is terrible.”

“Chase, you've had years with some of the best coaches in the world.”

“There are good players at Laver, too. Lukas told me the U.S. national team just moved there. All the best guys in my age group are training there now.”

“Is that what this is about?”

“What do you mean?”

“For the last time, you're not going to Laver. We're not having this discussion again.”

I felt like punching the wall. I wanted to protest, but I said nothing, and there was a long silence on the line. I didn't understand why he was so against the idea of me going to Laver. I knew it would be so much better for my tennis to spend the year there, and Lukas had said the same thing.

“Has Victoria gotten you set up with Chinese classes yet?”

I didn't answer right away.

“Hello? Can you hear me?”

“We're going there this morning.”

“Okay, that's good.” He paused. “How do you like it so far?”

“Like what?”

“Beijing. Fascinating, right?”

I gazed out my narrow window at the city that grew in a cloud of fog. The specters of buildings and cranes grew fainter and fainter the farther away they were, slowly blending into the white-gray fog until the fog overwhelmed the city entirely and even the faintest traces of the city's skyline disappeared into a cheerless wall of white-gray nothingness. It was a disorienting feeling, not being able to see the horizon. You lost all sense of perspective and location. It made you feel like you were in the basket of a balloon lost in the clouds.

“Yeah, it's good,” I replied, not meaning a word. I wished that I did like it here. It was an interesting place. But it was a difficult place to be alone.

Victoria called me at half past eight to tell me she was downstairs. I told the Zhangs' security guard I was leaving, and he unlocked the door and let me out. As I walked around the car, I noticed that it had a white license plate. I wondered how Mr. Zhang was able to have government license plates on his cars. I didn't understand exactly what he did, but I knew he wasn't a government official.

Soon Victoria and I were off to the language school. I had a bad headache that I chalked up to still being jet-lagged, but Victoria said it was probably the pollution.

“In Beijing we have an expression that we are buried up to our necks in pollution,” she said. “Many foreigners get headaches. After some time the headaches won't be so bad, but you will always notice the color of the sky. Most days the sky is gray, it's not blue, sometimes you don't see the sun for a long time. Even for me the air is bad. I don't think I ever get used to it.”

The car ride was long, and we went slowly until Driver Wu decided to go into the lane of oncoming traffic. Victoria looked at me and smiled triumphantly. It would be impossible otherwise. “Take us two or three hours,” she said. “Don't worry, Driver Wu knows what he's doing.” We wove in and out of the oncoming lane of traffic.

During the car ride Victoria chatted with Driver Wu. I caught snatches of what they were saying but had to rely on Victoria's translations for the most part. Driver Wu explained that he had been in the Special Forces branch of the military but had left about ten years ago to become a bodyguard and driver. He had
worked for the Zhangs for most of those years. He said something about his eight-year-old son and video games. I think he was worried that his son played them too much.

There was so much congestion both ways that even our ability to cross over into the opposing lane of traffic did not help that much. We turned into a maze of
hutongs
to reach the school. Several times we were reduced to going foot-speed down these small alleyways because someone was on a three-wheeled bike in front of us and there was no room to pass. The car stopped outside a dilapidated five-story building with a rusty fire escape running up the side. On the outside of the building was a sign that read: B
EIJING WOMEN'S PUBLISHING HOUSE
.

“Is this the school?” I asked Victoria.

“Mmm hmm,” she said.

“I don't think it is.”

She pulled a piece of paper from her purse and studied it for a second. “This is it,” she said. “Floor five.”

The Taiwanese Language Institute occupied the top floor of this cheaply constructed office building. It had been founded in New Jersey in 1956 and in that same year had set up a school in Taipei. The school had been unusually successful teaching Chinese to Westerners and had expanded to mainland China during the past decade. A former banker whom my father knew had moved to Beijing to take part in what he thought would be the equivalent of the dot-com revolution. He had spent a year doing a crash course in Mandarin at this school believing he would be perfectly positioned to make a fortune on the economic rise of China if he could speak the language. He claimed to have become nearly fluent and had highly recommended the school.

We arrived at the school an hour late. I had missed my first class. I sprinted up the four flights of stairs and down the hall to the office and burst through the door. Two women looked up at me, surprised. One was the
Xiao Zhang
, the School Head, and the other one was the school secretary.

“Sorry, there was a ton of traffic. We were stuck for over an hour.” I was out of breath and panting for air.

“Oh, it's okay. Today really bad traffic. Your teacher is still not here yet. Anyway, just don't be late again,” the principal said.

“Where should I go now?”

“Room twelve, you have five minutes before the next class starts. So you can just wait in that room.” She handed me a piece of paper and pointed across the hall.

I was glad I had gotten off so easily. Lukas had instilled in me a deep fear of ever being late to anything. He had a strict rule where I had to do ten sprints for every minute that I was late to tennis practice.

The waiting room was eight by ten feet. A bombed-out sofa and four metal chairs lined the wall. A young man who looked like a college student was slouched on the sofa reading the
China Daily.
He had a low buzz cut and was wearing sweatpants. He looked as though he was at least partially of Asian descent. A second man, whom I put in his mid- to late thirties, sat in one of the metal chairs. He was well dressed in expensive-looking jeans and brown leather driving shoes, and he had his hair slicked back with hair gel that was shiny under the room's bright light. He was reading a newspaper that I recognized as the salmon-colored
Financial Times
that my father read.

I nodded hello and sat down. The man with the slicked-back
hair looked up from his paper and asked me what brought me to this place. I explained that I was taking a year off from school and was planning to take Chinese classes.

“How about you?”

“I'm doing an intensive course here,” he said.

“For how long?”

“Six weeks.” He held out his hand and introduced himself as Josh Waring. The younger guy in the sweatpants raised himself off the sofa and shook my hand as well. His name was Tao Campbell and he was from Lubbock, Texas, and he had been in Beijing for one month. He said that he had been a student at Texas A&M but had realized halfway through his junior year that he had no idea what he wanted to do with his life, so he had dropped out and worked at his dad's car dealership for six months to pay for himself to come to Beijing and learn Chinese. Tao said he was planning on staying until his money ran out. Josh whistled and said that what Tao was doing was gutsy. I asked Josh what he was doing in Beijing, and he told me that he had just left a boutique investment bank to come to China to start his own business with a Chinese guy he went to business school with. Josh said he had done some work for his old investment bank in China, and it struck them that there were great inefficiencies in the market. Such an environment allowed for smart investors to mine the inefficiencies. Josh spoke with the confidence that he was one of them.

“Isn't it hard as an American?”

“Of course,” Josh said. He twisted a gold watch around his wrist and added that he would have never considered starting anything in China if he didn't have Chinese partners. He smiled and said, “China is all about connections. And my business part
ner is hooked up over here. His family is close with the Premier. We're gonna make a killing.”

“Who's your teacher?” Tao asked.

I looked at the piece of paper. “Ai Lu. Room twelve.” Tao leaned over and looked too.

“Oh,
Lu Laoshi
. She's great, I—” Tao said. He was cut off by the built-in PA system, which began playing a high-pitched Chinese folk song at a loud volume. “That's the bell,” he said over the music. I walked down the hall in search of room twelve.

Ai Lu was a small, wiry woman, probably in her fifties. She wore a dress with a pattern of green and red owls and held a clear glass thermos of tea with all sorts of flowers and herbs floating in it. She told me to call her Lu Laoshi (Teacher Lu) and then she asked me to introduce myself. I began in English but she immediately stopped me, and, with a kind smile, told me to speak Chinese. I told her that I wasn't very good yet, but she said it didn't matter and that making mistakes was the only way to learn. I told her my name and age, and I tried to talk about my hometown and my hobbies. It was frustrating. There were so many simple words that I had no idea how to say. She asked me about my family. I told her that I was an only child and that my father was a banker and my mother was a teacher because I hated the way people looked at me when I told them my mother had died. But it was a mistake to say teacher. She got excited by that and asked me a bunch of questions about what kind of teacher my mother was and I had to lie on the spot.

Like many people I met in China that year, Teacher Lu had a background of incredible hardship. I would later learn that she was from Beijing and had lived in the city until she was fifteen when, during the Cultural Revolution, she was sent to a labor
camp twenty kilometers outside of Beijing. She said that she had to spend six years there, but that it wasn't so bad, because she had been able to bicycle home to her parents' house in Beijing on the weekends. Her brother had had it much worse. He had been sent to a labor camp in Inner Mongolia and only came home once during those six years. She told me that when he came home he was thin as a starving dog, and his hair and clothes were covered in lice.

The thing she disliked the most about the labor camp was that it meant she couldn't attend school. For six years the only book she was allowed to read was Chairman Mao's “Little Red Book” of quotations. After the Cultural Revolution finished, she went back home and applied to take the
Gao Kao
, the national university entrance exam. She told me that the Gao Kao was incredibly competitive that year because it was the first time since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution that anyone was allowed to take it. Less than 1 percent of people who took the exam were accepted to a university that year. Because her schooling was interrupted when she was sent to the labor camp, she had to teach herself three or four years' worth of material for this exam in a matter of months. She taught herself calculus and physics and learned English by listening to illegal foreign radio broadcasts at night. Even still, it wasn't enough and when she took the exam she didn't earn a high enough score to get into a university. But her cousin did, and when Teacher Lu heard that her cousin had been accepted into the foreign language instructor program at Beijing Teaching University, she decided that she would retake the exam the next year and then apply to the same program that her cousin got into. She did just that and, the next year, ended up getting into the program. After she graduated she did a PhD in
English and then applied to study abroad in America where she did two years at Middlebury College. She had thought about staying in the States, but ultimately decided that it was better to come back to China where her family was. She also said that she wasn't sure if she would have gotten a green card because during those two years at Middlebury, the FBI visited her four times because they had gotten reports that she was a Chinese spy.

While she might have fallen into education by accident, Teacher Lu was one of the best teachers I have ever had. She never stayed seated for more than a minute or two. She hopped around in our small classroom and sometimes leaned so close to me and pinched the air with staccato hand gestures that I felt as if she were trying to pick sounds from my mouth. When I would not know the answer or make a mistake, her eyelids would flutter and the rest of her body would freeze, but when I responded correctly she would jump up and clap her hands and say some phrase of praise so rapidly that I never could decipher the words.

My first text was an introductory book on pinyin. Pinyin is the system of writing that uses the English alphabet to spell phonetically the sounds of the Chinese characters. Some of the sounds that are used in Chinese, however, are not even sounds in the English language. The
u
is pronounced like the German
ü
,
zh
is pronounced sort of like
j
, and the
c
is pronounced
ts.
It is difficult because all of a sudden you have to make sounds that you have never made before. For example, to pronounce the word
cai
meaning dish (as in dish of food), you need to press your tongue against your teeth and make an almost hissing sound. It is like combining a
t
with an
s
into a
c
. I spent most of that lesson
reading column after column of three-letter words to improve my pronunciation. By the end of two hours, my jaw was sore from forming so many new words.