China Mountain Zhang (31 page)

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Authors: Maureen F. McHugh

BOOK: China Mountain Zhang
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Woo Eubong shows me the specs for her projects. A housing complex, an office building. A beach house.
A beach house sounds nice. I ask her about it. It will be on the island of Hainandao. Hainandao was one of the original special economic zones like Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Taiwan. It is still a free-market zone, a place of virulent capitalism, meant to fuel the socialist system. The beach house is for one of the old mercantile families of Hainandao, built by the clan corporation.
She points out the setting. No specs, she says. “The only reason they didn’t give it to an architect is that Comrade Gao, the big man of Wuxi Engineering, is friends with Comrade Wang. Comrade Gao wants a number of designs. Engineer Li Jian-fen is submitting one.”
“And you,” I say.
She looks down.
“Humble administrators build gardens, too,” I say, referring to
the
Zhuozheng,
the Humble Administrator’s garden, one of the famous gardens of Suzhou.
She glances up at me but doesn’t answer and I wonder if I’ve offended her.
“You should try,” she says.
“I can’t compete with organic engineering,” I say.
“Okay, then see what you can do with heating and cooling,” she says. It is an infuriating answer. Why did she suggest that I try? Does she feel that I might be able to create an adequate building? She doesn’t ever much comment on how I fulfill her assignments, I never know if I’ve met with her approval or not.
I fiddle with heating and cooling systems. Convection. Conduction. Old-fashioned systems. Expensive systems. Efficient systems. This is a big area, I suspect I will do heating and cooling systems for awhile.
Hainandao. The name means South Sea Island. The first character, “hai” means “sea.” It is the same as the “hai” in Haitao. Sea-wave. I think about heating and cooling systems. (On Hainandao they would only need a cooling system. There’s a lot of sunlight.) I try to imagine a beach house in Hainandao, lots of wood. Maybe paper screens, like they use in Japan.
I scribble more heating and cooling systems. And eventually I stop thinking about Hainandao. And I do not think about Haitao’s white clothes folded neatly by the shattered starburst of the window.
That evening I spend a long time making dinner, trying to concoct rice and beans from the local ingredients. The result is pretty close, although not what my mother would make. Not even what I would make under normal circumstances. I leave it on cycle; flash, stand, flash, stand. My mother cooks on a stove, but I have only a flash wok and an oven, it is hard to slow cook something.
Then while it is cooking I sit down and tap the system. I am not going to scribble anything, I just want to try to imagine a
beach house. And so I try. I try to imagine something that looks as insubstantial as paper, maybe sliding walls.
Twenty-three seconds.
Disgusted, I get up and go back to the beans and rice. But there’s nothing to do but wait. I try the beach house again.
Twenty-eight seconds.
Back to the rice and beans. And then again, the beach house.
Nineteen seconds.
Woo Eubong taps in for twenty, thirty minutes at a time. She sits at the desk for three hours, working, answering questions, dropping back into her work. I have even tried to mimic her posture. I am so frustrated I could hit something. I force myself into the chair and decide I will keep doing it until I manage. I imagine the beach house.
Contact breaks.
I imagine the beach house.
Contact breaks.
I tap in.
Contact breaks.
The flimsies pile up by the printer and finally I override the system and tell it not to print unless I tell it to.
And finally, I give up, get up, put away my beans and rice uneaten and go to bed. I am not, am not, will never be, a daoist engineer.
 
 
I wake up. Some burden has been lifted. I have discovered that I am not capable, and now I no longer have to try. Or even if I am capable, it doesn’t matter. Tonight I will come back, eat rice and beans, and work on my project for the University.
I work well this day. Woo Eubong told me that by the time I left I’d be able to review thirty, forty jobs a day, and she is correct. I have learned a great deal about engineering and however strange
her teaching methods may be, I am grateful. Even for all those days of doing heating and cooling systems.
At the end of the day I am feeling pleased with myself. It doesn’t bother me when Woo Eubong says, “You have homework.”
I wait. I’d prefer to work on my project, but I have three weeks to do that and it is almost finished already.
“I want you to scribble again, the way you did when you first came.”
“How many?” I ask.
“Three,” she says.
Okay. I’ll have time to work on my project. “Good,” I say. If I finish my project I can do some shopping, buy things to send home.
So I go home, take out my beans and rice and sit down to scribble. I’ll do my three, eat, and then work on my project. Above my desk the scroll reads “Inaction.”
I can say for the first time that I really don’t care. I am thinking a little that when I finish I can do some work on my project, but my mind is empty. I am not trying to succeed.
I tap in, remember to tell the system to produce a flimsie. I do not think of anything for a moment, I have to think of something to scribble. The beach house is as good as anything else. All white, but this time it isn’t paper I think of, but ice. I think again of Borden Station. I invision a huge expanse of window. It’s not very Chinese, more like the glass and steel tradition of New York. Something long and low, and I know how it should flow. A great room, a kitchen divided by very little wall, slightly higher than the long great room with its window looking over the ocean—
And I reach. For a moment there is no perspective and I am on the edge of panic, but instead I give in, I let myself be swallowed by the emptiness and instead I expand, the system becomes my own memory. I fall through. I feel my mind’s boundaries, I know how little I can think about at one time, and then those
boundaries become unimaginably huge and I am myself, myself, but able to think and have the thing I think in my mind without holding it, without concentrating, because I am using the system to concentrate for me. The system is there for me, a part of me. To modify the house I only have to think it and it is so, it hangs there. I am outside it, seeing the long portion of the house that is the kitchen and great room, off the kitchen the steps down to the beach (and at the landing, there I use my paper screen, although I have to come up with some substitute for paper that has the lucent qualities but is not so fragile). The bedrooms are beyond the kitchen, higher to take advantage of the uneven terrain (also in memory) and I think that this Western building needs a tile roof. Blue Chinese tile. Soften the variation in the roof height and the roof becomes a wave.
I stop, and look around the room. The printer sighs and there is the flimsie. I pick it up. The things I have designed (little more than a shell, not real finish yet) are all there. Fourteen minutes.
I begin to shake. What if I can’t do it again? I close my eyes, tap in, look for the beach house, expand—
It is there.
I drop out and look at the flimsie I am holding. I feel limited, I miss the system. I close my eyes, expand—
And even sitting there, the shell of my beach house just hanging there, I can feel that I am crying. Because I have done it, I have done it.
I feel whole, and now it is time to go home.
 
 
San-xiang
 
It is a terrible thing to go to work with a new face. I finger my new jawline and chin. Do I wear make-up? Is it right to try to look prettier? But now that I have a nice face, isn’t it right that I try to do something with it? To not wear make-up, isn’t that saying that I think I don’t need it?
Everyone at Cuo knows that I have a new face. All those cards, “San-xiang! A sweet girl! May your new face match your heart!” I mean I should have had my face fixed a long time ago. I would have if my father hadn’t spent my face money trying to make
quanxi,
connections, so that we could get back to China. As if there was any chance when America went crazy during the Great Cleansing Winds campaign. If we had been in China we would have been safe from that, too. China is too old, too well established to have indulged in anything like the Great Cleansing Winds.
When I look in the mirror I think of all those weeks while the virus told my bone cells to divide. I was so frightened. They told me everything that would happen, but I would be awake at night and I would think, what if it doesn’t stop? Long lines of jaw grew
down from my ears like curving ridges, and my teeth ached and shifted like old stones in a mountain. I would imagine my jaw grown long and heavy until my head resembled a long-faced baboon, a praying mantis. And then they injected another virus, carrying its cargo of RNA-string materials, its molecules to tell my bone cells to turn off, and it all stopped.
I think it is a beautiful face. Really, Mama says I am pretty now. I am normal, she says, not a vid star, but when I look in the mirror I can’t believe it is there. My eyes are bigger—not
waiguoren
big, of course, but bigger. I have such a nice oval chin. This won’t be the first time I’ve been out, Mama and I have gone shopping and people are so different. Sometimes they aren’t as nice; it’s wonderful, no pity.
At Cuo, everyone will stare at me. And even though I know I’m not ugly any more I’m afraid to have them all look at me. They’ll be thinking about my old face and comparing it to my new one. I don’t want to be the old San-xiang anymore. Poor, ugly San-xiang who had no jaw and little squinty eyes and who looked like she was congenitally stupid. This is it, my chance. I’m going to change my life. I’m going to look for a new job, have new friends, be a new person.
I’m going to put on make-up. When I get a new job no one will ever know that I was ugly and I’ll wear make-up there, so I might as well start now. Practice, so when I change jobs, I’ll be accustomed to my new face, and no one will ever suspect that I once looked ugly and stupid. I put on new clothes, I have a new haircut to match the shape of my new face. My temples are shaved back and my bangs fall like a horse’s forelock. Very how can, as they say.
The world is new.
 
 
All day long people have been saying to me, “How beautiful.” “Come out for a drink,” Celia says. “Come celebrate, we won’t stay late.”
So after work we all troop to The In-Between, the place where everybody goes after work to get a drink and I order a beer. Celia and Carol get those neon-looking drinks with sprays of those plastic fibers with glowing ends sticking out of them. I only see them in drinks, where do bars get them? Tim and Qing Yang get
baijiu,
man-type drinks, no-nonsense drinks. I only drink beer. I didn’t even used to like beer but I learned to like it.
“Such a good Chinese girl,” Tim says, teasing, “sipping your beer.”
“Baijiu
makes me dizzy,” I say and he and Qing Yang laugh although it’s the truth. They laugh at a lot of things I say and at first it makes me nervous, but then I think that they’re just being nice. They act as if I am clever. They laugh when I say that I have to call my mother and tell her I’ll be late.
“Mama,” I say in Mandarin, “Tonight I will be late. I’m at a bar with some people from work.”
“Hao, hao,
” she says, nodding complacently. Looking at her double chin I think with surprise, I am prettier than my mother.
“Qing ni gaosu baba,
” I say. Please tell papa.
“Meishi,
” she says,
“ni gen nide pengyou, wanba.”
Don’t worry, have a good time with your friends.
It’s a funny thing to say, Chinese words in an English way. She does not seem to care at all that I am sitting in a bar. I go back to my seat. There is the bar, then the space for the bartenders, then a counter with rows of bottles and rising above the bottles is a pretty Chinese woman in a business suit.
She looks a little nervous, but she is still having a good time. You can tell.
 
 
Qing Yang asks me to The In-Between on Thursday. I have my political study meeting but I say yes. Then I call Gu and tell him that I can’t make it, I have to work late.
Qing Yang is an ABC. I would like him to ask me out. He is
not too handsome, he has a round bald spot, like a monk, only small. He is not as handsome as Zhang, another ABC I went out with a couple of times. Zhang is the only other person I have ever dated and he only went out with me because he worked for my father and my father asked him to. I wonder what he would think if he saw me?
Qing Yang is nice. Handsome men are usually not very nice, they usually can’t be bothered. So we go to The In-Between and I have a beer. I don’t know what to say to him. At first we smile a lot and things are very uncomfortable, but then we get talking about his job and he starts telling me about all the people he meets and the people he tries to sell systems to. I never really knew what Qing Yang did. I suppose I thought that people who needed systems came to Cuo, I never realized that some people in Cuo actually sold them. Which is pretty naive of me, I realize.
Qing Yang sounds like he’s a pretty good salesman, all his stories are about how he found some trick that would make the person who bought the system like him, like the woman who didn’t like ABC and didn’t like Qing Yang, of course, until she found out that he grew up in West Virginia, just like she did. “We were neighbors then, you see?” he says. “It’s that personal identification, you have to draw the client in to you.”
I’m sure I could never do it, I mean, what if he hadn’t been from West Virginia? I’ve never even been to West Virginia.
Qing Yang goes to the bathroom and I look at my watch. It’s an hour after work. I don’t know when I should go home, actually I’m getting hungry. He comes back. “Want to get something to eat?”
“Okay,” I say.
We go to an Indian restaurant on Seventh Avenue. The sign says that it’s been there over one hundred years. “Have you ever had Indian food?” Qing Yang asks.
“Is it like Thai?” I ask.
“Sort of.” Inside is old-fashioned brick walls and tables with
silver and white linen tablecloths. It doesn’t seem very Indian. It’s one of those antiquey places that has two glasses and three forks at every place; it doesn’t look like there would be enough space on the table to put our dinner. Qing Yang orders for me, something called tandoori chicken. It’s chicken baked with a yogurt covering, but it doesn’t seem very yogurty. It’s all right. I tell him it’s very good. The bread is called poori, it puffs up like a pillow. We use it to scoop up red and green spicy sauces from a server in the middle of the table. I really like the bread.
I have a beer with my dinner, too. It’s an Indian beer called Golden Eagle, but it just tastes like beer to me. Beer is beer is beer. I can’t tell much difference.
After the restaurant he takes me to this place he knows where we can listen to music, “Just for an hour or so.” At the place they are pattern dancing. Qing Yang tries to get me to dance, but I don’t know any patterns. Finally he shows me a simple one. It’s only twelve steps, well really fourteen if you count the curtsey/ bow at the end and then he kisses my hand. When I curtsey, the tails of my suit brush the ground. If I start to go wrong, Qing Yang kind of pulls my hand to show me the correct way. “I’ll teach you the quad,” he promises. “What those people are doing.”
The man holds the woman’s hand in the air, she is wearing a ring that sparkles blue and white. They take two steps together, and make this kind of slithery glide, then a turn so that somehow she ends up in front of him, then he puts his hands on her hips and they lean sideways, bending away from each other like graceful trees, like tall courting birds. It seems to be very complicated, there’s more after that. I don’t think I could ever learn it. But it’s so pretty. Pattern-dancing music just seems to ripple along, at first I can’t really tell the beat in it, but after a bit I realize it’s very easy.
At nine Qing Yang says he’ll be right back, and then he’ll walk me to the subway station. I wait by the bar.
“Excuse me, what time is it?”
I don’t realize that the man is talking to me until he repeats himself. “Excuse me, miss? Do you have the time?”
“Oh,” I say, flustered. I look at my watch, although I just did. “It’s a little after nine.”
He is a
waiguoren.
He smiles at me and I smile back. He has light brown hair, very thick, that he wears in a queue. He reminds me a little of Zhang, the ABC I dated. He is wearing a burgundy sweater with a little cape, not a suit like he came from work.
“Your boyfriend?” he asks, gesturing towards the bathroom.
“No,” I say, “just a friend.” How casual it sounds. I like the sound of it. Qing Yang could be my boyfriend, but he is not, he is just a friend.
“What’s your name?”
“Qian San-xiang,” I say.
“San-xiang,” he says, “that’s a pretty name. What’s it mean?”
“It means ‘Three Fragrances’.”
“My name’s Bobby.” He shrugs. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean anything.”
I giggle, he’s funny.
“Are you from around here? I’ve never seen you here before.” He has very nice, big eyes. Like a puppy. He isn’t comparing my new face to my old face.
“No,” I say, “I work for Cuo, down on Water Street. I live in Brooklyn.” Just then I see Qing Yang coming back from the bathroom and I wonder if I’m supposed to be talking to Bobby if I’m with Qing Yang. But Bobby just smiles and turns back around, understanding. Just goes to show that all handsome guys aren’t jerks.
I can feel my new life opening, like one of those paper pills you put in water that opens out into flowers.
 
 
At work I have a letter from Aron Fahey. Aron Fahey is a martian settler, I contacted him because of an interview I saw in
Xin Gongshe,
a political theory magazine I subscribe to. The interview was about commune management and he was talking about political infrastructure in his commune. My political study group hopes eventually to establish an urban commune, and he had some interesting things to say about a community’s politics versus a larger society’s politics, and he also talked about the difference between a small commune’s politics and a larger commune’s politics. His commune has over two hundred families, our commune might have only sixteen or so, so I wrote him a letter.
I get letters through the Cuo System Mailbox, I couldn’t really afford the interplanetary rates on my own. I gave Aron my access, so he can afford to answer me. His letters are really interesting, it seems strange that I’ve never seen his face or heard his voice, but I know all about him. I know about his wife and his daughter, and about his farm. His life seems so straightforward, he knows what he has dedicated his life to. If it wasn’t on Mars, I’d probably ask him if I could join his commune.
I save the letter until my mid-morning break, but I’m just sitting down to enjoy it when Celia overrides my system shunt to tell me I’ve got a personal call. I imagine it’s Mama, calling to ask me to stop and get something in the city on my way home. I’m really surprised to see the guy from the bar, Bobby.
“Ah,” he says, “it
is
you. I thought I remembered you saying you worked for Cuo.”
“Hi,” I say, startled.
“I’m really sorry to bother you,” he says, “is this a bad time?”
“No,” I say, “I’m on break.”
“Oh, good,” he says. He smiles, really nice. “I felt really bad about calling you at work, usually I never call anyone at work, you know? But I didn’t know any other way to get in touch with you. You seemed so nice at the bar last night and I’ve just kept thinking about you. I bet you don’t even remember me? Hell, I’ll bet you get calls all the time.”
I am blushing, I can feel how hot my face is, and I can’t help
laughing although it comes out all high-pitched and silly sounding. “Oh, no, I remember who you are. You were sitting at the bar. You asked me what my name meant.”
“‘Three Fragrances,’ right?”
“Right,” I say.
He says that he’s never seen me there before, although he adds that it isn’t like he goes there all the time. I tell him it was my first time there.
“Hey, maybe I could meet you there? Buy you a drink? I’d really like a chance to get to know you. Although”—he looks downcast—“on a Friday night, you’re probably busy.”

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