Beautiful Country (10 page)

About a month after we went to see her husband's art studio, Victoria took me to Beijing People's University so that I could see what a Chinese university looked like. First she showed me the original school building, which had been constructed in 1896 by the Methodist Episcopal Church as a seminary to train missionaries and priests. Back then, the school had been known as Beijing Harmony University. The redbrick building with its white windows and small bell tower resembled a classroom building of an Ivy League university. It was an odd thing to find in the middle of Beijing. Surrounded by buildings of Chinese architecture, it looked entirely out of place. Behind the original building was a larger one that had been built with funding from the Nationalist government after Beijing Harmony University had merged with Peking Imperial University in 1917. The building featured a weird blend of European and Chinese architecture styles, with Roman columns supporting a sloped, green-tiled roof that was adorned with gargoyles in the shape of Chinese dragons. Victoria agreed with me that it looked strange and told me that the old Peking Imperial University had a really beautiful campus featuring classical Chinese architecture. She would take me on another day if I wanted to go. We walked a bit farther, and
Victoria showed me a group of four entirely identical buildings that had been built during the 1950s by the Soviets as a gift from Stalin to Mao. The buildings were monstrous four-storied concrete rectangles that had been painted a dull shade of gray. They were buildings that had been designed purely for function with no concern for beauty. Just looking at them made me depressed.

We continued down a road and passed by an athletic facility on our left. Behind two turf soccer fields was a huge concrete playground planted with dozens of basketball hoops. Both soccer fields had pickup games going on, and there were a number of people playing basketball. We kept walking and came to a building that was still under construction. The parts of the building that were finished looked grand and expensive. Victoria told me that this structure was to be the brand-new China Center for a top American university. She said it had become controversial after someone discovered the center had been funded by several wealthy businessmen who used their connections in the government to make it happen. A large grant had been given by the Chinese Ministry of Education and there were rumors that the Minister of Education's grandson had just been accepted to the American university in question. Victoria waved her hand at all the buildings we had seen. “See? It's like a map of one hundred years,” she said.

She led me through a parking lot past the university's library to a small one-story building that was set off from the rest of the university buildings in the corner of the campus. She stopped outside the building and examined the entrance. The accumulated layer of grime and soot that covered the walls made it difficult to see that the building was painted a light blue. I could tell from the dusty, broken windows and the graffiti on the front door that the building had been abandoned for some time.

“What is this place?” I asked Victoria.

“Remember how I told you about Gao Fei and Da Ning?”

The names sounded familiar but I couldn't remember what Victoria had said about them. “Who are they again?” I asked.

“The writers!” Victoria said. “I'm going to give you one of Da Ning's books, remember?”

“Oh yeah. I remember now.”

“This is where they learned to write,” Victoria said. “And Su Tong too. He is another very famous writer.”

I looked at the small, run-down building with skepticism. “Here?”

“Yes, this was their school. There was a teacher here who taught all three of them. Now they are China's three best writers.”

“What happened to the school?”

Victoria took a few steps in the direction of the front door and stopped and looked around. She motioned for me to follow. Victoria pushed the door open. I heard the sound of glass splintering under her shoes. “Careful,” she said.

I followed her through the door and stepped around the broken glass. I looked up and saw that we were in a room I assumed must have been the building's lobby. The room was dark, and the windows were boarded up, and the only light came from the doorway behind us. The floor was scattered with paper, random debris, and fragments of broken glass. The room had been stripped bare and there was no furniture except for a tall reception desk that was pushed up against a wall. I took a step toward the desk and felt something under my foot. I looked down and saw that I had stepped on a dead mouse.

Victoria crouched down on the floor next to several messy
piles of documents. She picked up a loose stack of pages and pulled out her cell phone, holding down a button so that a dim light came from the screen. By the light of her phone, Victoria methodically flipped through the documents.

“What happened to this place?” I asked.

“The government closed it down after
Liu/Si
(6/4).”

“What's that?”

“June fourth. Have you learned about Tiananmen Square?”

“Yes.”

Victoria paused her search and assumed the role of questioner. “What do you know about it?”

I shrugged. “My father told me what happened. I Googled it too and read about it on the internet.”

“Here you cannot read about it on the internet. The government blocks everything. Nobody really talks about it.”

“But why did this place get shut down?”

“After Liu/Si, the universities were in a lot of trouble because most of the protestors were students. The government saw the universities as the cause of the problem. Many professors were arrested. Writers were considered very bad then too because many of the student leaders were writers who were writing very criticizing things about the government. So the university president here closed down the program and pretended like it never existed.”

I frowned. I couldn't imagine Harvard or Yale shutting down an entire graduate school because of student protests. “But the protests were over. Why did they have to shut the whole school down?”

“The university president had to. Maybe he would go to prison if he did not close the writing school. I think it is sad though,
because maybe many more great writers could have come from this school. I've always wanted to come here.”

“Prison? For what?”

“It happened to many people. All the writers like Gao Fei and Da Ning and Dan Xiaolu were expelled and removed from the university records. Their teacher and some of the students were taken away.”

“What happened to them after that—after they got out of prison?”

“They didn't get out. I don't know where they are.”

Victoria went back to looking through her stack of papers. I had no idea what she was looking for, but whatever it was she clearly didn't find it. She moved on to a second one. Her words unsettled me. I glanced around the dark room. Now that I knew the history of the building, I couldn't help but feel an eeriness and a strange and cruel irony that I hadn't felt before. An institution devoted to writing—the act of recording the past—had become a reminder of how humans often try to remove the unwanted parts of their history. The building stood on the campus, both a derelict memorial to what had been and a terrifying reminder of what happened to those who fell out of favor with the government. I thought about the students and teachers who had been here and wondered where they were now. The building's ghostly structure was the only remaining evidence of their history, a history that had been almost entirely deleted from the record. But while the government could remove the physical proof of the past, it could not destroy that past entirely. For it lived on in the memories of the mothers and fathers and children of those students and teachers who had disappeared. The building made me nervous and I wanted to leave.

“Victoria, let's go.”

Her head was bent down over a piece of paper, her eyes squinting to see it in the dim light. “Chase! Look!”

I crouched down and looked at the paper. It was a page of messy handwritten Chinese characters. I wasn't sure why Victoria was so excited by it.

“What is it?”

“I think it's from a story by Da Ning,” she said and held it out to me. She pointed to two characters at the top of the page:
大凝
. “Look, that's his name there. See?
Da Ning.
He must have written this when he was a student here.”

I tried to share Victoria's enthusiasm, but the piece of paper meant nothing to me. I was nervous that someone was going to find us. The door creaked open. It was only the wind. “Victoria, can we go?”

“Hey! I think I know this one. The character's name is Gui Fu. That's the same as the character of
Dust
.” She kept reading. “It's just like the beginning of
Dust
.” I had no idea what she was talking about. She was excited and speaking fast in Chinese. I gave her a bewildered look—she laughed when she realized that she had slipped into Chinese by accident.

“Maybe this is the first part of
Dust
. The first story he wrote.”

I must not have looked significantly impressed with her discovery because she waved the page at me.

“This is very special! Do you understand? This is like . . . Who is the best American writer?”

I thought for a moment. “Maybe Hemingway?”

“Oh, yes,
Hai-Ming-Wei
. Yes, this is like if we found a page that he wrote.”

“So it's worth a lot of money,” I asked. “Do you think you can sell it?”

Victoria looked up at me and frowned. “Sell it? No, why sell it? This is a treasure. This book,
Dust
, it's a beautiful book. It helped and inspired so many people,” she said. She held up the page. “This is where the book came from. This is a treasure of a beautiful moment in our history. The moment when we are not afraid to speak anymore. No money can buy that moment.” Victoria put her phone away and got up. She tucked the page into her purse. “I will keep it for my child.”

We left the university and went to a nearby bookstore. Victoria wanted to buy Da Ning's book for me so that I would appreciate the importance of what we had just found. I resisted initially. I told her I only read books required by school or fun books like
Harry Potter
, but she insisted.

The bookstore was five stories tall and the entire third floor was devoted to English-language books and translated Western authors. She found a copy of
Dust
in English and reminded me that I had promised to give her
To Kill a Mockingbird.
We found out that
To Kill a Mockingbird
had never been translated into Chinese, but the bookstore did carry an imported copy in English. Victoria was pleased to have it, but she said it might take her a while to read. I looked at the back cover of
Dust
and saw it was about a family's sufferings during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. I wasn't sure it was the kind of book I liked to read. But I thought that maybe my father would be impressed if I told him I was reading it.

Victoria started reading
To Kill a Mockingbird
the day after our trip to the bookstore. She said it was slow progress because she kept having to stop and look up words using the dictionary on her phone, but she read every day during my tennis practices, and she finished the book within the week. She talked to me about it one day after practice. She told me the story surprised her. “I didn't know America had so many scars in its past,” she said. “It reminded me of reading about China.”

We arrived early to the language school that morning. I passed the time by reading old copies of the
China Daily
left in the student lounge. The
China Daily
had a section called “Around China” that featured two-paragraph news stories from each of China's provinces. Every issue had at least one or two stories that were either really amusing or incredibly bizarre. I remember story headlines like
TWO IN
G
UANGZHOU ARRESTED FOR PLAYING BASEBALL WITH CHICKENS
and
MAN PURCHASES 32,000 RMB
CAR USING ONLY 1 RMB
NOTES
and H
ENAN SCHOOL BANS ROMANCE BETWEEN STUDENTS
. Those always made me laugh and made me wish I could tell Tom about them. Not all the stories were funny though. Many of them reminded you how tough life still was for most people in China.
I remember one story about this couple from a rural town who sold their blood to illegal blood banks to pay for their son to go to university. They were paid only twenty dollars for each donation, and every time they donated, the blood banks would take out so much blood that they would pass out and collapse, drenched in sweat. The saddest part about the story was that a doctor had just discovered that this husband and wife both had contracted AIDS. It was a tragedy, not just for the man and his wife, not just for their son who would have to spend the rest of his life with the knowledge that his education cost his parents their lives, but also for all the people who received blood donated by the couple, and for those people's families, too.

During class that day, I told Teacher Lu that we had found a fragment of a manuscript by a Chinese writer over the weekend. She seemed very pleased until I told her that it had been written by Da Ning. She didn't like Da Ning; she said his books were too negative and that he was disrespectful to the government. I asked her why she thought he was disrespectful. I explained that I thought it was good for people to criticize the government when it was wrong. She said that was because I wasn't Chinese and that I needed to understand that for more than five thousand years, China had been a country ruled by an emperor who was seen as a divinely anointed representative of heaven.

“You wouldn't criticize Jesus, would you?” she asked.

“Well, no. That's different though.”

“Is it? Do you know what they would call the emperor?”

“
Huangdi
?” I asked.

“That just means emperor. It's like saying
king.
His real title was
Tianzi
. It means ‘Son of Heaven.' For Jesus you say ‘Son of God,'
dui budui
(true or false)?”

“Okay, but there hasn't been an emperor for almost one hundred years. It's different now.”

“One hundred years may seem like a long time to you, but we have five thousand years of history. That history is connected to everything. The way people think, the way parents raise their children, everything. One hundred years is nothing to us. It takes much longer than a hundred years to forget five thousand.”

“But—” I protested, still unconvinced.

“Think about it like this,” she said. “If you go to England and say rude things about the Queen, English people will be very upset. It's been a long time since the king or queen of England had real power. The Queen is just some lady, she doesn't have power like before. But I think English people would still be very angry at you if you insult her because in their mind—in their culture—you are supposed to be respectful to the Queen. It is the same here, only the title is not Emperor anymore.”

She said Chiang Kai-shek, Chairman Mao, and Deng Xiaoping had all been emperors with a different name. I thought about how religion had been eradicated during the Cultural Revolution and Mao's “Little Red Book” had been the only book that people were allowed to read. I saw that she had a point. In a way, that book had been like their New Testament. It was, after all, a book of sayings and teachings from one man, on the correct and proper way to live life.

Teacher Lu explained that China was changing, and now it was more accepted to criticize the government, but it had to be done in a respectful way. She thought Da Ning went too far with his criticism. She considered him rude and disrespectful and told me that I should read other writers.

As I was leaving class I ran into Josh, the businessman I
had met on my first day at the school. I asked him how things were going with his business. He said he had set up a business with his partner importing cheap wines from France and Italy into China, where they sold them for huge markups to Chinese government officials and businessmen. Josh told me they were having trouble keeping up with demand because government officials were buying their wines by the truckload. Apparently it had become a status symbol to serve foreign wines at business dinners. Oftentimes, he said, after the wine had been poured, the waitresses would circle the table and display the bottle label to each guest at the dinner. Nobody cared about how the wine tasted, only how it looked.

Victoria kept asking me if I had finished
Dust
. But I hadn't even started it. Ever since Tom had died I found it really hard to do things that reminded me of him, and nothing reminded me more of Tom than reading. That was his thing. I loved playing tennis. He loved reading stories. When I thought about Tom, I always remembered him reading on the big sofa in his room with his head propped up by a pillow. I had never really been a big reader, but ever since he died, anytime I found myself reading a novel, I had this weird feeling inside as if I was doing something I wasn't supposed to be doing. It's hard to explain, but I felt his presence and I felt as if I was intruding on something that had been special to him. I felt as if I was disrespecting his memory or trying to replace him somehow. For a long while, I had a very hard time doing anything that I considered part of his domain.