In Manchuria (4 page)

“Welcome to the United States.”

Inside the terminal, a man in his seventies, well dressed and silver-haired, asked if she could spare a minute. He stood on a platform that said something about free speech and the First Amendment. He told Frances she should donate money to the International Association for the Something-or-Other. She didn’t catch the last part. She did as she would when a beggar approached her in Beijing: she pulled out a ten-spot and put it in his hand.

“Ten dollars? That’s very generous. Thank you, miss.”

She froze.
Did I give him too much? Can I ask for it back?

Instead, she asked where she could find a public phone. He pointed to a row of them.

Strange. No hovering aunties to take your money and watch the timer, calculating the fee. No receiver sitting atop a handcart of cigarettes and bottled orange soda. Just a bank of cold, shiny pay phones.

She didn’t have change. The man using the phone beside her noticed her confusion.
How embarrassing—can’t even figure out a telephone!
“Can you help me?” she asked.

“You need to put coins in there, then dial the number.”

She opened her hand, offering a wad of bills.

“I think tens and twenties are too much,” he said. “It should be fifty cents. Here, you can use my phone card. What’s the number you’re calling? I’ll dial it for you.”

My father answered in Minneapolis. He was very excited to meet her at the airport, he said. “We’ll be waiting for you with bells on.”

“No, no bells: I’ll be embarrassed,” Frances pleaded.

He thought she was in on the joke. “And horns, too! Lots of horns! We’ll blow them to welcome you!”

“Please don’t, please.” Her voice turned serious. She listened to the uncertain silence at the other end of the line. “Wait, you were joking, weren’t you?” As she walked away from the phone she had a realization—one that I had said, to her disbelief, that I felt every day in China:
These people think I’m a moron.

She bought cigarettes to calm her nerves, managing a lighter’s flick and one blissful drag before a security officer approached.

“I understand. I’ll go outside. Thank you.” So America wasn’t a free-for-all; freedom meant something else.

Boarding her connecting flight to Minneapolis, she found a man occupying her seat. Frances checked her boarding pass. She had specifically asked for the window so she could watch America from above. Now an Asian man was in her way.

“Excuse me, I think you’re in my place.”

The burly white man beside him, in the middle, turned his sunglasses to her. “I’m sorry, you can’t sit there.”

She didn’t know how to reply. Was this the culture? Did airplane seats in America work like hard seats on a Chinese train: first come, first grab?

“I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t understand.”

“I’m an immigration officer,” the white man said, “and I’m transporting him. You can sit here.” He motioned to the aisle seat. Frances looked at the Asian man. His left hand was cuffed to the officer’s right.

She took her seat, terrified. She’d never been close to a criminal before. What if he planned an escape? With explosives! Her mind replayed the more fiery scenes from the action movie
Air Force One
. The Asian man, however, looked resigned. The officer looked tense. The plane took off. The beverage cart came around. Frances asked for a beer. The stewardess asked her age, then rattled off a list. So many choices. It was a confusing blur. “I’ll have the first one you said.”

After a second Budweiser, her confidence returned. She asked the officer if he liked his job. He said he had been to forty-seven countries. Had he ever been to China?

“Oh, I’ve been to Beijing many times. Is that where you’re from?”

“I work there, but I’m from the Northeast.”        

The officer nodded vacantly.

“Have you heard of Manchuria?”

“I saw
The Manchurian Candidate
.”

Frances had never heard of the movie. She studied the handcuffs. “How do police treat prisoners in America? If they don’t tell you things, do you beat them?”

The officer thought that was hilarious. The prisoner looked out the window.

In Minnesota, we ate at a restaurant with
panda
in its name. “I can’t think of a less appetizing image,” Frances said, “than an animal known for soiling itself and smothering its offspring.” She frowned at the broken English on the chopsticks packet, reading aloud, “Please try your nice Chinese food with chopsticks the traditional and typical of Chinese glorious history and culture.”

She opened the menu and frowned again. “Seven bucks for garlic-fried broccoli? That’s five times what it costs in China. It’s just a vegetable. People pay these prices?” At meal’s end, the waitress presented the check with a mound of plastic-wrapped fortune cookies. Frances had never seen one, as they had been invented by a Japanese man for American diners. The shell tasted like sugared cardboard, but much better than the mysterious orange syrup that coated our sweet-and-sour dish. Yet, to her ear, the messages within sounded overoptimistic and American. We played a game. I read the fortune, and she edited it to sound authentically Chinese.

I read: “You are one of the people who ‘goes places in life.’”

“Chinese would never say that,” she said. “In China, it would be: ‘You’re not so bad. Better than some, worse than others.’”

“Your present plans are going to succeed.”

“No plan is the best plan.”

“The current year will bring you much happiness.”

“This is as good as it gets.”

“You will step on the soil of many countries.”

“The best thing to do is to stay home and serve your parents.”

“You have an ambitious nature and may make a name for yourself.”

“You’re a woman. Be chaste and stop dreaming.”

We had met in Beijing a year earlier, in
1997
, teaching together at an international school located in the capital’s far northern suburbs, surrounded by apple orchards and flanked by the Western Hills. I taught English to the teenagers; Frances taught the kindergarteners Chinese. Meeting her for the first time was confusing. In my two previous years as a Peace Corps volunteer in China’s rural southwest, I had been ordered, in training and regular meetings, not to do three things, in order of severity:

(
1
) engage in politics

(
2
) ride motorcycles

(
3
) date a host country national (as locals were called)

I had arrived in
1995
as part of China’s second-ever batch of volunteers. As a fluent Spanish speaker, I had hoped to be sent to Latin America, but the Peace Corps offered Vladivostok, then Turkmenistan, then Malawi, then Kiribati, then Sri Lanka. The choices kept getting further from a
¡Sí!
After I refused Mongolia, the recruiter snapped, “This isn’t Club Med, it’s the Peace Corps.” His final take-it-or-leave-us offer: China. At the time I couldn’t even use chopsticks, let alone speak a word of Chinese.

Six weeks later, in a Sichuan Normal University classroom, a Peace Corps trainer warned us newcomers that a volunteer in the first group had married his college-age Chinese student. The story was related rapidly, as if it had happened during one farcical afternoon. I pictured Cary Grant as the nonplussed volunteer, doing a “spit take” and barking, “MARRIED? What, in that office? I thought she was helping me buy a TRAIN ticket!”

But Peace Corps swore it was all true. The university expelled the student, and Peace Corps the volunteer. There was more: gossip about Chinese police dragging unmarried native/foreign couples from hotel beds and tales of wily women trolling for green cards. Those came from my training-period roommate, a gruff Coast Guard veteran with a salt-and-pepper crew cut, a bulbous red nose, and a tattoo above his navel that instructed
ADD
OIL
HERE
.

We were Peace and Corps, together in one room. I was twenty-three, a freshly licensed English teacher eager to bridge cultures and study Chinese. He was in his fifties, toting a Korean War survival manual in which he underlined key passages such as “
Keep a sense of humor. Americans are the most unpredictable people in the world—and methodical types like the Chinese Communists become unstrung when they cannot anticipate what we do next.”

The man—I called him the Captain—watched for signs of any male volunteer “going native.” My playing basketball with a female Chinese student was, for the Captain, exposure that would lead to “yellow fever.” When the Captain was expelled from the Peace Corps later that year, I thought it was because he had begun a class by chalking
KARL MARX
on one side of the board and
ADAM SMITH
on the other. “This one works,” he had announced, pointing at Smith. “And this one”—moving to Marx—“is full of shit.” But no, the Captain had fallen in love with a host country national.
Americans are the most unpredictable people in the world.

So when I moved to Beijing in
1997
after finishing my Peace Corps assignment, dating had been ingrained as Something You Just Didn’t Do. But it was an untested maxim, like my mom’s warning—handed down by her own mother—to never run the vacuum cleaner over its own power cord or use the blow-dryer with wet feet. You probably wouldn’t get shocked, but why risk it? My students in remote Sichuan, like the isolated campus itself, had become family, and I hoped Beijing would bring the same sibling-like relationships.

I had applied to teach at the international school after reading its Help Wanted posting in the Peace Corps newsletter. Since I had no Internet access or even a cell phone, it was the only lead I had on a post-Corps life. It took an entire morning to peck out an error-free résumé on a manual typewriter. After crossing the river in a skiff with a farmer and his ox, I spent the afternoon at the post office affixing stamps brushed with fish glue and slowly writing the Beijing school’s Chinese name with a leaky fountain pen. I pushed the envelope into the mailbox slot next to
LOCAL
, enticingly labeled
OTHER PORTS
.

The starting salary was $
15
,
000
a year, an enormous increase from the $
1
,
200
I had earned annually in the Peace Corps, and even the fact that I would have to teach grades six through eleven each day did not dampen my excitement to be able to remain in China and continue learning Chinese. On the first day of school I saw Frances, tanned from a summer hiking alone, when she arrived late to a staff meeting with a lilting apology and self-effacing laugh.

Her given name was Peony, and she hated it as much as I hated the Chinese name a teacher had assigned to me: Heroic Eastern Plumblossom. “That sounds like a girl’s name,” she said, a common response that always made me feel sorry for that girl, wherever she may be. “I prefer my English name, Frances,” she said. “Or my nickname, Guazi.” Sunflower Seed. That fit her long, slender face.

We began hanging out after school, cautiously, walking our students home, biking to Wudaokao to rifle through boxes of VCDs and remaindered cassette tapes, and playing basketball at the Language and Culture Institute’s outdoor court. The first time, she out-hustled me with such spirit that it broke my heart to tell her she had to dribble. We started eating together—cautiously, again: first a McDonald’s milkshake, then Korean pancakes, and finally sitting outside on one of Beijing’s perfect clear autumn nights around a steaming brazier, using chopsticks to dunk lamb slices, tofu, and mustard greens in boiling water and washing the cooked food down with big bottles of Yanjing beer that chilled in an ice pail beside the table. This was
1997
B.C.
(Before Cars), when Beijing life still thrived in the
hutong
and under tree-canopied sidewalks in comparably fresh air. For the first time in more than two years in China I didn’t feel, no matter what our waitress had just called me, like a
laowai
, a foreigner. I didn’t feel like the Other. Perhaps it was because I didn’t see Frances that way. I saw many things, not least of all her beauty. Everyone saw that; heads turned to follow her curves as she passed. To me, she was quick, smart and funny—and unlike anyone I had met before, in or out of China. At her insistence, we split the dinner check. Then we said good night.

When I got home, my apartment felt unusually empty.

Frances told her roommate she had made a new friend.

Neither of us could sleep.

I was twenty-five, she was twenty. Eventually, I wanted to return to the States for graduate school. She had no interest in leaving China. We knew how it would end. But then it didn’t: we spent winter nights skating at Tsinghua University’s pond and spring weekends hiking the Great Wall. Peace Corps friends sent an invitation to their summer wedding in Wisconsin, and I asked Frances to go.