China Mountain Zhang (28 page)
Read China Mountain Zhang Online
Authors: Maureen F. McHugh
“That’s better than screaming and raving, isn’t it?” I say. I do sound curiously flat, even to my ears. I don’t feel flat.
“All right, Alexi,” she agrees. Disappointment in her voice, in her body language. We’re still holding hands, but I’m sure she doesn’t realize it.
“I didn’t ask you to marry me,” I say, defending myself.
“Son of a bitch,” she says, not particularly at me, it has the sound of a general expletive. I’m taken aback, Martine doesn’t swear much.
“I should have known. Okay. You want a divorce, we’ll divorce.”
There it is, proof of how badly I’ve failed her, failed this whole thing. “I don’t want a divorce,” I say, “but I’m willing to do whatever you want.” I never saw myself sitting on the counter in the kitchen, our feet disappearing into a sea of goats, holding Martine’s hand while we discussed divorce. Cleo shoves at the barricade. “Damn it,” I leap off the counter and haul the nanny away, shove Theresa-the-goat down. When I turn around, Martine is watching me, and she looks so sad, so, what is the word I am looking for? So devastated. Martine has great huge dark eyes, funny how I never thought of how big her eyes are until this moment, in her pale long face.
“Alexi,” she says, forlornly, and to my great consternation she starts to cry.
You have to understand, Martine doesn’t cry. At least not in my experience. Martine is iron. She’s Army. Discipline. For a moment I don’t have any idea what to do. So I wade back through goats and climb up onto the counter and put my arms around her.
“It’s all right,” I say, and other, soothing things, things you say when someone is crying.
“I know I’m old,” she says, sniffling. “I know it wasn’t fair, using the holding as a bribe. I thought, though, it would work out.” Martine’s strong, rather prominent nose gets red, and she looks older when she cries. Certainly not prettier.
“You’re not old,” I say.
“I’m forty-four,” she says, “I’m ten years older than you—”
“Eight,” I correct.
“Men like younger women.”
“I never felt worthy of you,” I say, deeply, from the bottom of my heart.
That makes her cry harder. “I don’t want you to feel worthy,” she says, “I want you to like me!” She pulls away and gets down among the sea of goats and shoves Lilith out of the way so she can open a drawer and pull out a dish towel.
“I do like you,” I say, perplexed. “I like you, I even love you.”
“But you’re always worrying about pulling your own weight,” she says. “You’re always going to feel like this was my farm first, so you owe me. Everything is debt, debt, debt. You owe Theresa because her mother died. You owe me because of the holding. You owe the Commune because of the new yard so you take this class and try to figure out how to make it useful. Nobody gives a damn if you ever use this class or not, it’s
politics
, Alexi. It looks good on the report to New Arizona!”
politics
, Alexi. It looks good on the report to New Arizona!”
I don’t know what to say. After a minute I say, “You make it sound as if it’s a crime to be grateful.”
“It’s not being grateful,” she says. “The flip side of grateful is resentment. You’re not my slave, I don’t want you to be my slave.”
“Hold it,” I say. Goats bleat. We are getting loud and Theresa is going to hear this. I grab her arm, “Come on,” and haul her out into the garden. “You’ve exaggerated this all out of proportion. I’m not your slave, I don’t feel like your slave, maybe I do
worry about keeping up my end. But I never know what you think! You never tell me if you like the way things are or you don’t like the way things are. I don’t know how you feel about me. I don’t know if you like being my wife. Hell, I don’t even know if you like sex with me!”
worry about keeping up my end. But I never know what you think! You never tell me if you like the way things are or you don’t like the way things are. I don’t know how you feel about me. I don’t know if you like being my wife. Hell, I don’t even know if you like sex with me!”
“You don’t have to talk so loud,” Martine says.
“A minute ago you were complaining I didn’t talk loud enough!”
Martine starts to laugh. It runs through my mind that she’s hysterical, after all it’s between two-thirty and three in the morning.
“What’s wrong?” I say.
“It’s funny,” she says, laughing.
“What?”
“Here we are with a kitchen full of goats, having our first married argument.”
“Is this our first argument?” I ask, trying to remember previous arguments.
“Our first real one,” she says.
“We argue about Theresa, you’re always telling me not to remind her to feed the goats.”
“That’s not an argument. I say it, you say she’s eight years old and then we don’t say any more.” She grins at me, red-nosed from crying.
“If this is our first argument—” I say thoughtfully.
“And we’ve even brought up”—she drops her voice—“the ‘D’ word, so it qualifies.”
“—then we must really be married. Like people who don’t get married so one of them doesn’t have to go to the South Pole.”
“Which would normally mean that right now we should make up,” she says, “except—”
“Yes?” I say.
“We have a kitchen full of goats, Mr. Dormov. But I do like,” her voice quavers a bit, “sex with you.”
“And I like sex with you. And I don’t think you’re old,” I say. “Ms. Jansch.” I put my arms around her and give her a hug. “How about if we go back into the kitchen and sit on the counter and smooch.”
“As long as the goats don’t start chewing on the furniture,” she says.
Zhang
The train rests heavily on track three, long, gleaming and white. White is the color of death in the East and dawn is the time of burial. My breath is white. The platform is lined with people waiting to get on the train. I have a soft-seat ticket and stand near the end of the platform in a cluster of people waiting for soft-seat and sleeper berths. By sheer foolish luck I am privileged, Engineer Zhang on his way to the site. I am not yet really an engineer, I have to co-op first, but the co-op company has paid for this.
My fellow passengers are business travelers—men dressed as I am in black suits with red shirts, the uniform of the
bailing
jieceng de
, the white-collar class (so why, if they are called “white collar” do they wear red?), and
qingderen,
“green men,” except that of course the army wears silver-gray trimmed in red. The businessmen hunch their shoulders a bit and read their flimsies, straddling their briefcases. The officers, there are three, stand in a small group, shoulders thrown back, oblivious to the weight of the early hour, talking quietly to one another.
bailing
jieceng de
, the white-collar class (so why, if they are called “white collar” do they wear red?), and
qingderen,
“green men,” except that of course the army wears silver-gray trimmed in red. The businessmen hunch their shoulders a bit and read their flimsies, straddling their briefcases. The officers, there are three, stand in a small group, shoulders thrown back, oblivious to the weight of the early hour, talking quietly to one another.
I find a fax and pick up the day’s news and carry it back so as
to blend in. World news first, in America there is a drought in the corridor, families along the fringes are being evacuated. In related news, the world CO
2
level has fallen for the third straight year and science predicts that if the trend continues in fifty years we’ll see more rain across northern Africa, Australia, the middle of China and western America. In Paris a structural failure caused a wall to collapse in an apartment complex and thirty-two people are missing, believed killed.
to blend in. World news first, in America there is a drought in the corridor, families along the fringes are being evacuated. In related news, the world CO
2
level has fallen for the third straight year and science predicts that if the trend continues in fifty years we’ll see more rain across northern Africa, Australia, the middle of China and western America. In Paris a structural failure caused a wall to collapse in an apartment complex and thirty-two people are missing, believed killed.
I turn the pages until I find an article on a commune in Hubei which is celebrating its one hundred fiftieth year of existence. Imagine that, a hundred and fifty years. Haitao couldn’t even make it to thirty-five.
The doors sigh open. Further down the platform the people press forward trying to push on before all of the hard seats are taken. Above us huge smiling conductors hang in the air saying gently but firmly, “Do Not Push To Get On The Train.” At soft seat, we wait in line, our seat numbers already guaranteed.
The air in the train smells new and unused. The seats are pale gray, the soft music is about the same color. The officers fit the decor. I find my seat which is next to a window, shove my bag in the overhead and hope they start soon. Trains serve coffee as well as tea and I’m looking forward to a cup. Finally I feel the sudden suspense as the mag-lev comes on, and then we begin to slide smoothly out of the station. Pale faces upturned watch us go. A dispenser hung off the ceiling comes down the aisle and I get my cup of coffee, peal off the top and wait for it to heat. I bow my head, wreathed in the aroma and somewhere deep in my head some primitive portion of my brain is momentarily lulled into believing I am home. For a breath I feel ease. Home.
Wuxi. The name means “tinless” and refers to tin mines exhausted over a thousand years ago. We cross the Grand Canal before we get to the train station. I am the only person in my car
who gets off; the next stop is Suzhou and after that, Shanghai, the financial heart of China. The door sighs open and I swing my bag in front of me and step down. The air is full of mist and drizzle, thick with moisture even under the cover that protects the platform.
who gets off; the next stop is Suzhou and after that, Shanghai, the financial heart of China. The door sighs open and I swing my bag in front of me and step down. The air is full of mist and drizzle, thick with moisture even under the cover that protects the platform.
“Engineer Zhang?”
I turn, looking, and find a dark, neat little man. “Not yet,” I answer smiling, “only Student Zhang.”
He laughs politely. “I am Engineer Xi. I will see to it that you are called Engineer Zhang by the time you leave here.”
We make the requisite small talk on the platform, did I have a good journey? Did I eat yet? Chinese do not often talk about the weather. Behind us the mag-lev shifts from inert to alive, although not watching closely I don’t see the train rise bare centimeters above the track. It begins to slip soundlessly forward and I follow Engineer Xi back to and through the station.
Students in a university live transient and comparatively marginal existences. That is true the world over. A university is concerned with preparation for the future and there is an underlying philosophy that overcrowded living conditions and a lack of the comforts of the middle class is not only excused but somehow educational. In Brooklyn, students who lived at school were six to a room. At thirty-one I am not particularly interested in a marginal existence, feeling that perhaps I have paid my dues. But student life in Nanjing has not seemed very marginal, at the very least the amount of hot water is astonishing. I shower every day without regard for cost. The rooms are clean and pretty in their way. Comfortable. For a foreigner life in a Chinese university is a pleasure, full of unexpected amenities—for example, when I discovered therm containers. The idea that I pull the therm of coffee out of the cupboard, open it, and in a minute it’s hot just amazes me. Sure I know all about the way the lining reacts with light to excite the water molecules. I’m just astounded that they would go to all that trouble.
It is only now, in Wuxi, that I discover that the definition of marginal is comparative. Which is to say that “marginal” means one thing in New York, and an entirely different thing in the Middle Kingdom. The first lesson is the car waiting for us.
“Engineer Zhang,” Engineer Xi says, “this is Driver Shi.”
Driver Shi nods at me and smiles. The car is a
Renminde-Hou,
a “People’s Tiger.” I’ve heard of Renmin cars. Engineer Xi opens the back door and I get in. The door closes and my ears feel the way they did on the flight over here, as if we have been completely isolated. It smells different than I expected, faintly sweet, lemony. The interior is uniform gray. I’ve been in a car before, three times, in fact. My mother hired a car to take me to the hospital when I broke my arm; my father hired a car to take us from the port to his father’s place in California. (That car was red and had a slogan across the front panel where the instruments are. My father told me what it said: “Revolution is not a dinner party.”) I rode in a car when Janvier got married just out of middle school; I was a member of the wedding. That car was also red. The cab that took us to the hospital was yellow, of course.
Renminde-Hou,
a “People’s Tiger.” I’ve heard of Renmin cars. Engineer Xi opens the back door and I get in. The door closes and my ears feel the way they did on the flight over here, as if we have been completely isolated. It smells different than I expected, faintly sweet, lemony. The interior is uniform gray. I’ve been in a car before, three times, in fact. My mother hired a car to take me to the hospital when I broke my arm; my father hired a car to take us from the port to his father’s place in California. (That car was red and had a slogan across the front panel where the instruments are. My father told me what it said: “Revolution is not a dinner party.”) I rode in a car when Janvier got married just out of middle school; I was a member of the wedding. That car was also red. The cab that took us to the hospital was yellow, of course.
The feeling of movement in a car is stronger than it is on a train, acceleration pushes me firmly back in my seat, and when the car goes around corners the pull right or left is very sharp. The first time we turn I grab the door, and am embarrassed that Engineer Xi doesn’t, but he pretends not to notice.
The next surprise is the office complex of Wuxi Engineering Technologies. Red lacquer roof tiles swoop in graceful waves down the hill. The buildings themselves are black matte. Engineer Xi describes how the building fuses traditional Chinese architectural details—the many connected buildings and the roofs with the upturned eaves—with more modern architectural technology. The black matte walls actually absorb enough light and sound radiation to provide the energy needed to run the complex. Driver Shi glances back. “Do you know why the eaves go up?” he asks. “Demon slides. Demons can only travel in straight lines, so when
a demon came down from the sky it would hit the roof and be shunted along to the eave and whip off the end back into the sky.”
a demon came down from the sky it would hit the roof and be shunted along to the eave and whip off the end back into the sky.”
“So we are well protected at Wuxi Engineering,” Engineer Xi deadpans and we all laugh.
Inside everything is red and black. Black oriental rugs that look like silk with huge red medallions in the centers, red lacquer walls. The young man at reception is dressed in red and black, of course, but here the effect is even more conservative, as if the young man is actually a part of the decor.
The wonders multiply, maddening and exhausting. Here no one jacks in, instead, Engineer Xi explains, the system will be attuned to me and I will be, in a sense, permanently jacked in. I can call on information anytime I want. Included, he says, is a syntax and vocabulary in Mandarin, should I ever need it. Although, he adds politely, I speak very well.
I am shown my cubicle and desk, beautiful shining black lacquer with red lacquer fixtures. I am taken to the systems department where I am attuned to the system. All I do is jack in and a technician instructs the system to attune and it does. I jack out and query the time. 10:52. The information pops up. Always before I could only access information when I was jacked in, it gave me a sense that I knew what I thought and what the system told me, but now, how do I know what is system and what is Zhang?
We eat in the cadres’ dining room. There is a cafeteria for workers, although I am assured that the food comes from the same kitchen. There are cold plates on our table which no one eats; sliced, spiced tofu, pickles, kimchee and peanuts. We are offered beer, I decline after Engineer Xi does. The chopsticks are cloisonne, the plates china. We have cloth napkins. Lunch is white fish cooked with ginger and scallions and tender vegetables.
I have the feeling that they will discover who I am, that I’m just some
huaqiao
student masquerading in my suit. Everyone else has short hair. I promise myself that I will keep my ponytail.
huaqiao
student masquerading in my suit. Everyone else has short hair. I promise myself that I will keep my ponytail.
I’m jacked into the system. Is it monitoring me? Surely I’m not focusing, it can’t follow the random pattern of normal thought. A system would be overwhelmed trying to process unfocused thought, wouldn’t it?
I don’t even know if it’s a stupid question. I am without perspective. I have always been told that we manipulate the system, but what’s to keep the system from manipulating us? Symbionts. Soon, perhaps it will be impossible to tell where human ends and machines begin.
Engineer Xi has to work, so someone else shows me to my desk, introduces me to the Engineer with whom I will apprentice, a tall woman named Woo Eubong, a Korean. We are about the same age. “Good,” she says, “I’m tired of dealing with adolescents.”
“You train them that young?” I ask.
“Twenty-one. Not really adolescents, but not adults yet either.”
I don’t know how to take her, I suspect I will miss her humor, irony doesn’t translate. She’ll think I’m dreadfully serious. Maybe the system will flag irony for me?
I live in an apartment so beautiful I am certain I will never live in anything like it again. It is three rooms with a tiny courtyard of raked stones and twisted rocks in back. The rooms are a little bigger than the front room of my apartment in Brooklyn, but what is so amazing is the finish. The bed is an alcove hung with white gauze curtains, the alcove and one wall (hiding a closet) is completely faced in wood with lacework carving at the corners. The black and red carpets are in every room except the kitchen, which is red and white tile. The couch has two little footstools of wood, purely decorative. The walls are hung with calligraphy. Over a black lacquer desk (very like the one at work) hangs a scroll with the characters spelling out “Inaction” followed by a verse from the Dao De Ching.
“I’m sorry it’s so corporate,” Woo Eubong said before leaving
the night before. “It’s a bit impersonal, but you’re only here for fifteen weeks. And it’s better than the guesthouse.”
the night before. “It’s a bit impersonal, but you’re only here for fifteen weeks. And it’s better than the guesthouse.”
I’m not sure I ever want to leave.
I go to work in the morning through the clean, twisting maze of the Wuxi complex, walking through passages with carved wooden handrails and climbing immaculate stone steps. People sympathize with me for having to spend so much time here. Woo Eubong tells me I have to come to her place for dinner some Saturday, just to get away from work. Hard to explain that I like it here just fine.
In the morning, from eight to noon, I do donkey work. I check figures, run things through the system, review jobs. Engineers hate that sort of paperwork. Mostly it’s routine, although once in a while there’s something unusual, a novel solution to a problem. It’s a good way to learn a lot about engineering. Building plans in front of me on flimsies, the system presents the entire building to me, supplements my own capacity and allows me to hold the entire building in my head and go over it. Although the work is routine, it takes me a morning to do five jobs, I have to call on the system to explain techniques to me. Woo Eubong tells me not to worry, in twelve weeks I’ll find myself reviewing thirty or forty jobs in a morning, finish two or three complete buildings a day.
“It’s the only way to really learn,” she says. “You just have to get the experience of knowing so many jobs. Now you can run through the construction jobs as fast as anyone, it’s the systems, the electrical, the utilities, the aesthetics that slow you down.”
Particularly the systems and the aesthetics.
In the afternoon, I am Woo’s student.
Woo is an organic engineer. That doesn’t mean she works with growing things, it means that she plans work so that it makes organic sense. It seems to me that she doesn’t plan at all. Daoist engineering. I refer to it that way once, and she says, “Right,” without blinking. Irony doesn’t translate.
Each daoist engineer learns from working one on one with a
teacher, as I will learn from Woo Eubong. There are only a handful of daoist engineers in North America. It’s not a specialty that is in much demand at home, mostly because we do not make the kinds of buildings that call for the subtlety of daoist engineering. They are very subtle buildings. Complex as bodies, with systems for nervous systems and circulation and musculature. For homework she gives me the task of studying the Wuxi Engineering Technologies Complex.
teacher, as I will learn from Woo Eubong. There are only a handful of daoist engineers in North America. It’s not a specialty that is in much demand at home, mostly because we do not make the kinds of buildings that call for the subtlety of daoist engineering. They are very subtle buildings. Complex as bodies, with systems for nervous systems and circulation and musculature. For homework she gives me the task of studying the Wuxi Engineering Technologies Complex.
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