The Foremost Good Fortune (6 page)

“How great is it that you already have friends here?” I ask him. “How great is China?” He eyes me with a steady, noncommittal gaze, and then takes a sip of tea. I look down at the menu. “When Thorne and Daddy get back,” I say, “we can choose yak or venison or Mongolian beef for dinner.”

“But not fish,” Aidan reminds me. “We won’t have fish, because there aren’t any left.”

In the morning, we take a taxi to the Great Wall, and Thorne hums the melody to the Erie Canal song. The funny thing about his singing is that sometimes when I recognize the tune, I can’t help but join in. So I sing, “Low bridge, everybody down. Low bridge for we’re coming to a town.” Then we wait in line for the cable cars. A crowd of Chinese tourists swells behind us, and when the cable finally starts up, we become part of a small, inexplicable stampede. I try to hold Thorne’s hand but lose him in the rush at the turnstile, and he calls out my name until I squeeze around a dozen bodies and grab him by the arm. A line of empty cable cars sits waiting for us. I want to yell at the crowd, “What is wrong with you people? Can’t you see there are enough for all of us?”

We slide into a car, and three middle-aged Chinese join us: a man and his wife and their female friend. The two women examine our clothes and our shoes and our hair. When they decide they approve, the smiles come. Then they insist on taking our picture and get bossy. “Move,” they urge us in Chinese. One holds the camera close to her eye and shoots. “Move closer together.”

When we get to the wall, we’re quiet at first. I am not sure how to approach the wall. How to
be
on it. Do we walk normally? Slowly? Do we touch the stones? Sit down on the sides? It’s so compelling, this wall and its geometry. And so overwhelming. It may be the scope—it stretches up and over the mountains as far as I can see—but this wall asks you to relinquish your hold on things. To give up the reins. We’re speechless for whole minutes, and then the four of us are running and jumping and taking hundreds of pictures. It’s stunning up here—rural China spreads out below for miles, sun-drenched and russet-toned. We
eat soft baozi rolls and cold eggs from a picnic bag the cook at the ranch packed.

From this vantage everything on the wall feels ancient and sacred—even the old men peddling cheap plastic flags. The boys say they’d like to live up here. In tents. And keep watch for Mongol warriors. Then Tony tells them that an emperor from the Ming dynasty oversaw the building of most of this stretch of wall we’re on. Aidan asks how long ago this Ming emperor died. “Hundreds of years ago.” Tony stops to take a picture.

“So this wall was built before Johnny Cash died?” Aidan wonders.

I look down at my son, and he’s not joking. Should I be worried? Who knew how far “Ring of Fire” was going to take Aidan. “The Great Wall,” I say slowly, “is ancient, Aidey.” Then I smile at him and take his hand.

“So that’s good,” Aidan decides. “That means this is a very old place. That means the Great Wall of China is older than Johnny Cash.”

Building a Chinese Boat

On the Monday after we get back, my new Chinese teacher, Rose, arrives and says I should think of learning Chinese like trying to build a boat—a long and deliberate process. I suppose she means you go slow. You want the thing watertight. She tells me that Mandarin has a simple grammatical structure. “Don’t think too much,” she says, and smiles. “Don’t make it more complicated than it should be: subject, verb, object.” She is a petite twenty-three-year-old, with shoulder-length, straight dark hair.

The gray living room couch arrived the week before, and we sit on it together. She has a quick smile and a great, high-pitched laugh. She wears red-framed eyeglasses and a purple sweatshirt with cartoon writing. I want to tell her that I often make things more complicated—that it’s my nature. But now I’ll try to follow her instructions. I’ll try to build the boat.

It’s important, here at the outset, to be realistic about Mandarin. Because Chinese is an old and vast lexicon, and there are thousands of those hand-drawn characters. And then the tones—four different intonations on rising and falling syllables. Things can get murky with the tones. You can say you’d like to go to the grocery store. Or at least that’s what you think you said, but because you missed the fourth tone, you said something about a boyfriend in high school. This language is slippery.

Next Rose explains that you don’t conjugate verbs for the future or the past. This seems fitting for a country in the middle of reinventing itself. She says English relies on logic and word sequences, but Mandarin is based more on graphics—the characters and nuanced meaning built
up over hundreds of years. She teaches me the words for
weekend plans
and
elementary students
. She tells me how to ask a small boy his age. She says there are two little words I need to get a quick grasp of. Tiny words, really:
le
and
ge
.

Le
is the word that turns the present tense into a memory. So if you went out and bought milk and eggs at the store, or if you got sick, you didn’t really buy anything and you didn’t really get sick until you insert
le
. Then you
have
gone shopping and you
have
become sick. And you can’t buy apples at the market until you’ve learned to use
ge
—a miniature counting word. The Beijingren will look at you like you’re speaking Russian until you insert the
ge: san ge ping gou
(three apples). A small detail—but I’m learning that the heart of this language, like most, lies here. If you have the patience, then you’re back in the boat-building business.

It’s slow going. There’s the Chinese word
ma
, which takes a declarative and turns it into a question.
Ma
seems to carry the Mandarin interrogative on its back. Look at a simple sentence: “Tianqi hen re” (
The weather is very hot
). To flip a statement into a question, you put little
ma
on the end: “Tianqi hen re ma?” Then you’re asking an actual question in actual Mandarin.

Rose is the Western name Wei Ling has given herself. So far in China I’ve met an Alice and a Sunlight, a Happy, a Flora, a Julia, a Margie, a Vanessa, and a Joy, and now three women named Rose. Rose is from the city of Guiyang in Guizhou, one of China’s poorest provinces. She’s the only child of lower-middle-class parents who sound like they dote. They were able to pool money and send Rose to college in Beijing, quite a feat in this country, where often only the smartest and richest get to enroll. While she was in college, Rose met a boy who would like to marry her.

With Rose’s help, I can now say “I want” in Chinese, and “I go.” Putting the two verbs together has proved helpful: “Wo xiang qu” (
I want to go
). I use this combination in as many ways as humanly possible: I want to go to the
xue xiao
(boys’ school). I want to go to the
chao shi
(supermarket). I want to go to the
yinhang
(bank). I want coffee. I want tea. I’m beginning to feel primitive. I tend to walk around Beijing making simple declaratives: “I want water.” Or “I want to go home.” There’s an embarrassingly large amount of want on my end: I want, I want, I want.
Saturday comes—we’ve made it through another week and begun the day in prayer. Or at least the Blind Boys of Alabama have. I can’t get enough of their beautiful voices. They’re singing a song on the CD player about feasting on milk and honey: “All God’s children gonna sit together one of these days, hallelujah.” The Beijing sky plays tricks. It’s a two-headed beast. Yesterday it was something to run from—thick and white and feverish. Today it’s blue and warmed with a fat, autumnal sun that transforms the city into something that makes sense. A city at the center of the universe, where anything feels possible.

Thorne and Aidan eat their Honey Nut Cheerios and tap their feet to the music. Thorne is still singing more than usual, but it’s tapering off. He lost one of his front teeth in the cafeteria yesterday, and his teacher threw it away by accident. Last night Thorne and I co-wrote a note to the tooth fairy. It read, “Hello there. How are you? How was your flight? We are using a replacement tooth under the pillow (a tooth I lost back in July) due to extenuating circumstances. We hope you understand.”

After breakfast, Tony and I drive with the boys and Lao Wu to a stretch of new art galleries inside a converted war munitions factory. The place is called Dashanzi. Or 798—the street address. There are hundreds of choices here: high art and low art and black-and-white photographs by teenagers who sell them from kiosks along the wide roads. The place hums with industry and grows so fast that no one can make an accurate map. The boys and Tony and I walk into the lobby of one big gallery, and there’s a black sign announcing an Indian artist named Anish Kapoor. I can’t tell where the exhibit is. Then over by the right side of the wall I see an open door to a tunnel.

Thorne pokes his head inside the tunnel, looks back at me once, then is gone. First I see him, then I don’t. A wave of anxiety washes over me. Where is he? Down some long, winding labyrinth of performance art, and I’m supposed to go fetch him. I can tell there’s a trick, that once I enter the tunnel I’m part of the exhibit. I want to go home. I can’t get my bearings in Beijing.

Aidan says he needs to climb a huge, metal birdcage installed out on the street corner, and I wave Tony toward the door. “I’ll go in,” I say and poke my nose into the tunnel. “It’s no problem.”

I make it ten feet or so before the walls curl in on themselves like a snail shell, and I have to reach out and press my hands along the wooden sides. I can hear Thorne laughing up ahead. His voice echoes back amplified. I walk and walk and don’t catch up to him. Anish Kapoor has shaped the tunnel in a way that forces you to turn in on yourself. You keep making tighter circles, but there’s no sensation of getting closer to any ending, no light coming through from the other side. No sense of when there might be an arrival—seconds or minutes or hours. Inside the tunnel, I can see my fear of living in China up close. Fear of losing control, of being alone in this country, unable to manage for my kids. Fear of not being able to learn the language. Fear of not finding a way to belong.

This tunnel is cruel psychotherapy. I land at a circular patch of grass in the middle of a second white room. That’s where Thorne stands, holding his hands in thick steam that rises from an opening in the ground. His face is rounder than Aidan’s. Thorne is often quick to smile. He does not study life so much as eat it up—always looking for more. I get down on my knees and open my arms so he runs to me and I’m able to hold him like this for maybe five seconds. He seems at peace in the tunnel. At peace already in China. And could this be? Do my children already belong here more than I do?

Then he laughs and runs back through the darkness. Ten minutes later, I make it out alive. Thorne waits for me by the door. We walk toward Tony and Aidan in the birdcage and pass some heavy-metal Chinese teens. The boys wear low-rider jeans with wallets hooked to their back pockets on silver chains. They have long, carefully shaped sideburns and type text messages on their cell phones. A lot of the girls sport wispy bangs and orange-colored permanents. They are so hip they don’t look like they belong in China—or not in the old China, anyway—but at least they have each other. That’s the thing I’m coming to realize. How important it is not to feel alone in the tunnel—to know your people are waiting for you on the other side.

I stand next to Tony and can’t begin to describe my anxiety back in the maze. It’s already become a wordless thing. But what’s left is this residue that somehow I’m the odd one out. Exposed. The one who can’t give up her control. Tony riffs with the teenagers in Chinese, and they laugh and wear eager faces of people making that cultural connection—people crossing the language bridge. For a moment I feel language-less. Invisible. Like someone who isn’t really here at all.

I Don’t Speak Chinese

It’s time to wean the boys off the Lao Wu minivan school service. October is upon us, and Lao Wu was hired to drive Tony to meetings at Chinese banks, not to shuttle small children. The news is that Thorne’s stopped singing—or at least the compulsive part of it has let up. He still breaks into song more than most six-year-olds, but not in that obsessive way that makes me uneasy. Right now he’s doing some preemptive moaning in the hall about riding the bus. I push the down arrow on the elevator and hold the door with my arm. Thorne and Aidan step in, and though I’m only two feet away, Thorne begins to yell at me. “In case you didn’t realize it, I don’t speak Chinese!” This is true. “So how will we get help on the bus if we need it?”

Our move to Beijing has for me become a parenting lesson in how to parcel information: what not to tell, what to tell, and when to tell it. I’m trying to slow the information overload. I place my hands on each of their heads and gently push them along. Aidan stares at the sky and says out of nowhere, “China is a dream in my mind.” I look up at the cement skyscrapers in Park Avenue. The sky is filmy white with smog and the buildings are the color of putty.

The boys have been intrepid until now. But the shadow of the school bus has rattled them. “What will happen if we miss the bus?” Thorne asks. I say if we miss the bus, we take a taxi to school. But I’ve decided we can’t miss the bus. Because in a taxi, we’ll be relying on my Chinese, and I won’t be able to say the school address in Mandarin.

There’s a crowd at the bus stop: Chinese moms and housekeepers called
ayis
and all kinds of kids. I try to act like I know where to stand and which bus to look for. I think the boys can tell I’m faking. It’s not
that I’m trying to
fool
them; I’m just trying to incite confidence. I want my body language to inspire—to say
We’re going to be fine in Beijing. We’re going to like taking the bus. We’re going to love living in China
.

“The bus will be fun,” I tell the boys while they each hold on to one of my thighs. It must already be ninety degrees on this still, windless Monday. Eight o’clock comes and goes, and then an enormous coach bus covered with red and white Chinese characters pulls in. Thorne squeezes my leg tighter and begins to cry. I keep a hand on his arm while I talk him down. But I’m hot and flustered. For some reason I decide getting the boys on the bus is a referendum on our entire move to China.