Beautiful Country (12 page)

“How did I start playing tennis?” I asked. “I don't know, my brother played. I guess, I always wanted to do whatever he was doing.”

“You have a brother? How old is he?”

“I did.” The words came slowly. “He died last year.”

“Died?” Bowen repeated the word to make sure he understood correctly.

I didn't answer. We sat there for a while and neither of us spoke. I stared at the cracks in the ground. About a month before I left for China I spoke to one of Tom's friends and asked her what had happened that night. I had never heard the full story. My father refused to say anything more than there had been an
accident. I found some local newspaper articles online, but those were short and vague. I felt this need to understand exactly what happened, and I knew that Tom's friends were the only ones who could tell me. So I asked a girl he had been close to.

At first she was hesitant. But I pushed her, and then the story tumbled out, fast and disorganized. She told me that a bunch of them had gotten the idea of trying LSD from some movie they saw. They tried to buy it from a senior who sold weed. He didn't have any, but he told them he could get them Ecstasy, so they bought some Ecstasy off him and went to Andrew Green's house, because his parents were out of town, and they got drunk and took the Ecstasy and when Tom started convulsing and throwing up, they panicked and were too scared of getting in trouble to take him to the hospital, so they drove to Dr. Miller's house, carried him to the doorstep, rang the doorbell, and drove off. They hadn't known that Dr. Miller was away for the weekend. Tom died that night in the snow on Dr. Miller's front doorstep. The guy who delivered our newspapers found Tom's body the next morning.

Sometimes the thought—that if only one thing different had happened he could have lived—would hit me like a 120-mile-an-hour wind, and I could do nothing but brace. I was using every muscle in my body to keep it together. I wanted Bowen to leave, but he wouldn't get up. He just sat there, unmoving, unspeaking, and for the first time in a long time I didn't feel completely alone.

Bowen rested a hand on my shoulder.

“
Bie danxin
(Don't worry),” he said. “
Ni hai you yi wei gege
(You still have a brother).”

My father visited Beijing toward the end of October. I hadn't seen him since I left for China in early August. I had been looking forward to his visit for weeks. He was supposed to come over during the middle of September, but something had come up at work and he had to change his plans. I was worried that the same thing might happen again. But one morning at the end of October, I woke up to find an e-mail from my father saying he was about to board his flight to Beijing and would see me later that day. I asked Victoria if we could surprise him by picking him up at the airport. She said of course and e-mailed his secretary to let her know the change of plans. My father wasn't expecting to see me at the airport, but when he did it seemed to make him really happy. That made me feel good.

He had a week of meetings and was staying at the Grand Hyatt. I stayed with him so that we could have dinner every night. Compared to my white shoe-box bedroom at the Zhangs', the Grand Hyatt was almost too grotesque in its opulence. It had been designed by an architect obsessed with waterfalls. The large sitting area to the left of the massive revolving doors was called the Cascade Lounge. Water ran down round columns
marking its boundaries. To the right were more sitting areas and, beyond those, the hotel's selection of four restaurants and a cafe. To get around the government-imposed height limit that exists for buildings in Beijing and to maximize the number of floors, the architect had designed several floors underground and had made the ceilings of all the rooms very low. The swimming pool was on the lowest of the three underground floors and was twice the size of an Olympic pool. The architect had given the pool a tropical theme. Its irregular borders were lined with artificial palm trees, and the ceiling had been painted to look like the night sky with glittering lights counterfeiting stars. The sound of whales calling one another was piped in through a hidden speaker system.

The marbled and gilded lobby at the Grand Hyatt was like a cocktail party with people always coming and going. My father and I never walked through without someone stopping him and wanting to meet up later for a drink. Whenever this happened, my father never hesitated to introduce me and explain in detail what I was doing in China. It made me feel like Exhibit A. I wondered if he did it because he felt he had to compensate for Tom. People had heard, I guessed, because no one ever asked us about how Tom was doing.

For the first time in what felt like forever I was surrounded by Westerners. While I had lived at the Zhangs', I would go days without seeing another native English speaker. But the Hyatt was a little bubble of Western culture that had been dropped into the heart of Beijing. Every measure had been taken to replicate the style and feel of a hotel in London or New York. The Starbucks in the lobby, the room-service menu with its Caesar salads and cheeseburgers and French fries, the little boutique that sold
the
Wall Street Journal
and the
New York Times
, all comforting reminders of home. While the hotel staff was mostly Chinese, the managers and supervisors had all been imported from the United States or Europe and were tasked with training the Chinese staff in Western manners and customs. At the Hyatt, one could be in Beijing without ever leaving the United States.

I think that was how most Westerners experienced China at that time. Back then Shanghai and Hong Kong were really the only Chinese cities that had truly been internationalized. Once you ventured farther into the mainland, most traces of Western influence disappeared. Even major cities like Tianjin and Xi'an, both roughly the size of New York City, might only have one newly built Sheraton or TGI Fridays. Other than that, everything was alien. The vast majority of Westerners did their best not to venture outside of Shanghai or Hong Kong. Even Beijing was still very much a Chinese city then. There were small pockets of the city where Western influence had been allowed to permeate, and most Westerners I observed back then rarely left that bubble. They stayed in five-star hotels and they dealt only with Chinese or Hong Kong businessmen who spoke excellent English. They saw the country of modernization and “progress,” and they ignored the parts of China that didn't fit into that one-dimensional image. The foreignness of the real China disturbed and disoriented them. There was nothing remotely recognizable in the Chinese language. When Westerners saw other Westerners, they would seek them out with a bold desperation and cling to them as if they were childhood friends. Most Westerners stayed in Beijing for less than a week, and for that week they lived at a hotel. They tolerated China; some came because they felt they had to come, some were there because they understood it was the right
place to be, but almost all were counting down the days to their departure.

I couldn't help but feel an element of disdain. I found their attitude so hypocritical. They claimed to be interested in China. But in truth they were only interested in the parts of China that felt familiar. They claimed to understand the real China, but they had no interest in even seeing it. There was an arrogance to their attitude. It was like someone coming to America for the first time, spending a week in a hotel on the Upper East Side, and then claiming they knew what life was like for a farmer in Nebraska. I had seen enough of Beijing to know that I understood absolutely nothing of the real China. It was too complex. To understand it would take a lifetime.

On my first night in the Hyatt, we were walking through the lobby on our way to dinner when my father ran into two bankers from Morgan Stanley. He introduced me and they commented on how smart my father was for sending his son to China at such a young age, and my father told them that I was already conversational in Chinese. That was a stretch, but I didn't correct him. After the two bankers' interest in me waned, they spoke to my father for a while about some conference they were in Beijing for. I stood there and tried to follow the conversation for a little while before losing interest and shifting my focus to people watching in the lobby. Fortunately I found entertainment close by in the form of a hugely overweight, cowboy-hat-wearing Texan who was frantically trying to explain to a Chinese bartender how to correctly mix an old-fashioned. Judging from the Texan's growing frustration and the four untouched drinks on the bar, his efforts appeared to be in vain. I watched as the nervous bartender attempted another effort.

“Dammit!” the Texan exclaimed. “I told ya! There's no goddamn vodka in an old-fashioned!” The bartender looked up in confusion, still clutching the bottle of vodka.

“That's the fourth one you've put vodka in! Come on now! I've told you four goddamn times! I'm gonna have to take it away from you, ain't I? Here, gimme that bottle!”

I was reminded of the wrestling match I had watched with David in my first week at the Zhangs'. Just as an alarmed concierge rushed over to resolve the situation, my father tapped me on the shoulder. “Ready to go?” We headed toward the restaurant in the back of the lobby.

“You should look people in the eye when you're talking to them,” my father said.

“I do.”

“And stand up straighter,” he continued. He put his right hand on my left shoulder and pressed his thumb into my shoulder blade, correcting my posture. “Your posture—presence is important. My father used to make me stand in front of the mirror and squeeze my shoulder blades together every night before I went to sleep,” he said. “If you look like this, people are going to walk all over you.” He slouched and curved his shoulders and pulled his elbows into his body so that he looked like a frail, old person. I pulled my shoulder out from under his hand.

At dinner my father told me that he had just spoken with the Dover headmaster and that he was very impressed with my father's report and said that they looked forward to my coming next year. He asked if I was excited to be going to Dover, and I said that I was very much looking forward to it. I had initially thought that a year off from school would be heaven: no home
work, lots of time to concentrate on tennis, no exams, and a way to get away from all the things that reminded me of Tom. But I had found that even by November, I desperately missed the camaraderie of classrooms and sports teams. I had never spent so much time in solitude.

“I like it here,” I said. “But I'm looking forward to being around friends again.”

“What about the boys you play tennis with here?” It was the first time he had ever asked me about them.

“I've become good friends with one of them. This guy named Bowen. He's the best player on the team. I think he's number one in China in the fourteen-and-under. Most of them don't speak much English though.”

My father frowned. “You should be speaking to them in Chinese.”

“Well, I try to,” I said. “But my Chinese still isn't good enough for me to understand everything they say.”

“I thought you said your Chinese lessons were going well?”

“They are. It's just not an easy language. It takes time.”

“You really should be making an effort to only use Chinese, Chase. A couple years down the road, you're going to kick yourself if you don't take advantage of your time here.”

“I know.” I paused and thought about whether to continue. “It just gets kind of lonely sometimes.”

“What does?”

“Just being here, by myself. I just get lonely, that's all.”

“That's part of life. Everyone's lonely sometimes,” he said. “You just have to learn to deal with it.”

Our food arrived and we ate in silence. Perhaps trying to com
pensate for his criticism, my father told me a few stories about pranks he and his friends had pulled back when they were at Dover. I found myself laughing out loud as he told me tales of their bike jousting tournament, which ended with several broken collarbones, and how they had spent two weeks of their senior spring catching squirrels around the campus, collecting them in a pen they built during woodshop, before finally releasing them in different parts of the main school building early one morning. My father wiped away a tear from his eye as he recalled how one of the released squirrels had wreaked havoc on his calculus class when it scurried up his teacher's back and into her thick hair. The teacher, he said, had reacted by sprinting blindly away from her desk only to run straight into the classroom door. Encouraged by his good mood, I told him about the Texan and his desperate attempts to get an old-fashioned. My father found the episode even funnier than I did.

I asked my father what people like the men from Morgan Stanley and the Texan were really doing in Beijing. He said it was hard to know. “There are a lot of people over here chasing deals, but they don't really know what they are chasing. There are a lot of opportunities, but these guys don't really like it over here, and the Chinese have to trust you before they will deal with you. That's what it comes down to, trust. It takes years to earn that trust, and you can lose it in a second. But without that trust you won't get anywhere here. Most Westerners think they can just come over here and beat their chest and say, ‘I'm from Goldman' or ‘I'm from Citi,' and the red carpets will get rolled out. Even with the best contacts you never really know who you are dealing with.” My father paused for a moment before adding, “In some ways, that's the danger, but also the opportunity.” My father said
it was all about trust, but so many of the relationships I had witnessed in China seemed to be transactional relationships. I do this for you, and you do this for me. Maybe that was why trust was so important. In a society where trust was the scarcest resource, it was also the most valuable.