Beautiful Country (13 page)

My father went with me to the tennis center the next day but spent the entire car ride on a conference call. As we drove through the gates of the sports center in the black Audi, I spotted Bowen walking in the shadow of the statue. I almost pointed him out to my father, but I didn't when I saw the condition he was in. He looked thin and pale and he walked with a limp. It was strange. I had never seen him look fragile before. I wondered what punishment Madame Jiang had inflicted on him this time. I hoped he was okay.

We started off with the juggling routine. I glanced over at my father to see his reaction to this absurd warm-up, but his attention was wholly focused on his BlackBerry. Madame Jiang fed us forehands for thirty minutes before telling us to practice serves. She walked around the court with a racket under her arms, an old graphite Prince model from the 1980s. It was one of the few times I ever saw her bring a racket to practice; usually she just borrowed one of the boy's rackets when she needed to feed balls. Bowen noticed the racket too, and as we returned to the shopping cart to gather balls for more practice, he said to no one in particular, “What is she going to do with that racket, swat flies?”

For the first hour Madame Jiang walked around the perimeter of the courts watching us, but she also kept her eyes on my father. I noticed that she walked to where Victoria was and chatted with her for longer than usual. Halfway through practice she called us to the net and told us it was time to play sets. She paired Dali with Bowen. During the past week, Madame Jiang had been going after Dali in the same way she did with Hope. She yelled at him for being lazy. She said he was getting worse. I had even heard her warn him that unless he got his act together his place on the team was in danger. I talked to Bowen about it. It worried me. Dali's temperament was not well suited to deal with Madame Jiang. He was losing confidence in his game and he seemed depressed during practice. He was one of the more cheerful, bubbly personalities on the team, but lately he had been despondent and solitary. I wondered why Madame Jiang picked on the players like that. I noticed that she seemed to go through waves of targeting one player, and then would abruptly switch to another. I think it was her way of maintaining control. Her way of reminding them that she was the boss. Maybe it came from the insecurity of knowing less about the sport than the boys she coached. In any case, I hoped that she would move on from Dali before it was too late. I didn't want him to go the way of Hope.

Madame Jiang finished pairing us up, and we headed out to our courts to begin our matches. I was assigned to play Random. He had beaten me quite easily the last time we had played, but I was hitting well that day. I remember glancing in my father's direction after each winner I hit, checking for any sign of approval, or even an acknowledgment that he had seen the point. However, whenever I looked over he was busy sending e-mails on his BlackBerry. It didn't make any sense to me that he wasn't watch
ing to see if I had improved during my time in Beijing. As he continued to ignore my match, I began to have the disconcerting thought that maybe he wasn't watching because it didn't matter to him. Maybe that was why he had never shown any real interest in sending me to Laver in Florida. But it didn't make sense to me that he wouldn't care.

I ended up winning 6-1, 6-2. I was surprised by how well I played. Usually my father's presence made me nervous. The last time he had seen me play had been six months before at the National Clay Court Championships in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, when I drew the number two player in the country in the third round. I lost that match 6-1, 6-1 in less than an hour. Maybe this time I had played better because I knew he wasn't really watching.

I was surprised to hear that Bowen and Dali had split sets and were about to start the third. Madame Jiang was watching the match so intently that she forgot to give us instructions about what to do next, so we sat on the benches and watched too. Bowen had never lost a set to Dali in his life. The only way he would have lost that second set was if he decided to let Dali win. Judging from the few points I had seen, it looked like they were having a very close match. I figured that must be Bowen consciously playing to Dali's strengths. He understood the game so well that he had this ability to raise his opponent's game if he wanted to. Sometimes it felt like he understood your strengths and weaknesses better than you did yourself. Dali looked a changed player from the one I had seen yesterday. He was fired up and full of confidence. It was a big deal for him to take a set off Bowen. It was exactly what he needed to counter all the negativity Madame Jiang had cast on him during the past week of practices.

At 2-2 in the third set, Bowen changed his service motion. Instead of completing a full circle with his left arm, he truncated the arc and brought his racket straight up. He hit his serve flat, and while he still managed to generate some power, Dali did not have trouble controlling and redirecting Bowen's balls. Bowen knew that all Dali had to do to look like a brilliant returner was to punch these flat serves back as if he were volleying. Had Bowen served with heavy topspin, Dali would have been unable to control his return.

Bowen was giving Dali a chance to shine in front of my father. Madame Jiang knew my father had connections in the Chinese system, but she didn't know with whom or how deep. What she did not want to happen was exactly the outcome Bowen was orchestrating. If Dali almost beat Bowen in front of my father, my father might mention to his contact—whoever it was—that he had seen a fine match between Bowen and Dali, the two best boys on the team. Madame Jiang then would not have the courage to throw him off the team. Her threats would lose their bite.

They fought the last set to a tiebreaker at 6-6. Random leaned over to me and whispered, “Bowen had better worry about saving his own skin. If he loses she will go after him.” We were all worried for Bowen. Random was right, I knew that much. The system in China was brutal, if you got cut—that was it, there was no one to help you out. I couldn't fathom how these boys dealt with the pressure of such a reality, but they did. I guess somehow they just got used to it, or perhaps it was all they ever knew.

No one understood this better than Bowen. Of all the boys, his place on the team was the most tenuous. He knew as well as any of us that if Madame Jiang could find a way to send him back to Tianjin, she would. Random explained this to me one day. He
said it was Bowen's ability that kept him on the team. Madame Jiang's government bosses cared only that the team won. Their promotions depended on the success of the sporting programs they supervised. As long as Bowen was the number one player, and as long as he kept winning matches for Beijing, he was untouchable. According to Random, Madame Jiang had once reported Bowen to her supervisor for disrespect in an attempt to have him kicked off the team. But she was overruled. The team supervisor refused to kick Bowen off the team because he was too good. He didn't want to lose Bowen to a rival team.

Bowen knew all of this. If there was anything consistent about him, it was his subtle defiance of Madame Jiang. Every action was calibrated so as to pull against her. And the calibration had to be careful and exact. One wrong calculation, a piece of bad luck, a bad step, wrong timing, and Bowen could be banished for good. And it scared me for him. He was balancing on a tightrope without anything underneath him.

Never one to confirm our suspicions that he was rigging the match, Bowen gave Dali three match points before finally finishing the tiebreaker eleven to nine. Dali was unable to win the crucial points and in that brief space, I saw the difference between Dali and Bowen, and it made all the difference. Bowen believed in himself so completely that there could be no other outcome for him. Dali got nervous and played tight. I don't know if he understood what his friend was doing for him. And perhaps that made it heavier for Dali because Bowen allowed him to believe that it was all his own doing, that the fate of the match was truly in his hands. But Bowen looked ahead with an infinite confidence in the future. And it was that infinite confidence that allowed him
to take risks that none of us would have ever conceived of—let alone dared. But it was all too close for me.

The moment Bowen won, Madame Jiang turned away in disgust and saw us all sitting on the bench. She shooed us back on the court and told us all to do one hundred push-ups, such was her anger at the outcome of Dali and Bowen's match and our taking a break to watch the last set. She told us we did not have time to waste watching a mediocre match. I knew her scolding would have been much worse had my father not been there.

Halfway through the practice my father caught my attention and waved good-bye. He had a meeting scheduled for the late afternoon.

Bowen raised his chin toward my father. “That man, who is he? He is your sponsor?”

“No, he is my father.” Bowen looked surprised. He asked me why he had come. I told him that my father wanted to watch me play. Bowen didn't seem to understand this. I asked him if his parents ever came to watch him. “No,” he said.

“How about the other boys?” He shook his head. “What about tournaments. Do they come and watch the tournaments?”

“Not really.” Bowen went on to explain that they were all paid a salary by the government to play tennis and had been since they were young children. “If you worked in a bank, would your father come and watch you work? It is the same thing.”

I suddenly realized in all the time that I practiced with the team, I never once saw a friend or parent come to watch. Bowen was correct: in a way they were already at work. Tennis was their profession, and a certain level of maturity had already developed. Even though the boys' families lived in the Beijing area, they
would not have been well off enough to own a car. Using public transportation would have taken a lot of time, and both parents probably worked long hours during the week. At the training centers in America, parents came and visited or, if they lived nearby, drove down to spend an afternoon watching their children practice. In fact, in America, the reverse was true, the academies had to develop policies and rules of behavior to keep the parents from meddling too much.

As we were packing up racket bags at the end of the day's practice, I said to Bowen, “Why do you push her so much?”

“Push?”

“You know.” I motioned to Madame Jiang. “Like with Dali. Why'd you give him three match points? You know it drives her insane when she thinks you're messing with her. I don't think it's a good idea to make her mad like that. You're just making life harder for yourself.”

Bowen shook his head. “I don't know what you are talking about. I didn't give anything to Dali.”

“Come on, Bowen.”

He shook his head again, and for a moment I began to wonder. I couldn't be certain whether Bowen really was playing with Madame Jiang's expectation and hopes of match results just to annoy her. I sensed he knew that she could get rid of him anytime and that this was his only permissible act of defiance—through sheer physical and mental talent he could manipulate outcomes and no one watching could quite figure out how. Or perhaps he was indeed injured and was telling it straight. And with Bowen I knew both versions could be true.

After practice, I got back to the hotel and waited for my father. I turned on CNN to watch the news. I caught the begin
ning of a story about the 2008 Olympics and Chinese violations of human rights. The screen went blank, and five minutes later CNN returned with a story about a hijacker who had been apprehended in Chicago. Later that evening at dinner my father explained that anytime a story came on that the Chinese didn't want on the air, they would censor it by blocking reception for the length of the story. He assumed the censored news story was about people protesting China's having been awarded the 2008 Summer Olympics, given China's human rights record in Tibet.

My father asked me some questions about tennis practice, but he never asked me anything about Bowen or any of the other boys. I guess they didn't interest him. He often asked me about China's young generation. What the “young generation” thought about the Chinese government, about democracy, about America, about censorship and freedom. But he never asked me about my teammates. He wasn't interested in the boys I saw every day. They would never grow up to be entrepreneurs, artists, or political leaders. My teammates were a part of China's young generation, but they were not a part of the young generation who would matter to America.

Victoria came to the Hyatt on Friday afternoon to tell us that the Zhangs had invited us to dinner that night. Dreading the prospect of a long, drawn-out dinner at which I would be largely ignored, I asked if we could bring Bowen. Victoria shook her head behind my father's back as if to indicate that it was an inappropriate thing to ask.

“Who?” my father asked.

“Bowen.”

“Who is Bowen?”

“My friend from tennis. You know? The one I was telling you about.”

My father gave a look that bordered on annoyance. “To this? No, definitely not.”

With that dealt with, my father turned back to the papers he had been looking over before Victoria arrived. What made my request so out of the question that it could be dismissed with disgust? For a second I was overcome with a desire to push back, to say that I wasn't going if Bowen couldn't come. But I couldn't bring myself to confront him and I said nothing.

Just before we were about to leave, my father told me that
dinner was going to be at the house of Mrs. Zhang's father, Secretary Su. My father explained to me that Secretary Su was one of the nine members of the Standing Committee. I hadn't known that before. It answered some of my questions about the pictures in the Zhangs' living room. I didn't know a whole lot about the structure of the Chinese government, but I knew that the Standing Committee was the top of the pyramid. The nine men that made up the Standing Committee, which included the president and the premier, were the nine most powerful men in China. As a member of the Standing Committee, I knew that Mrs. Zhang's father would live in Zhongnanhai, the high-security government compound located next to the Forbidden City. It had served as the Beijing residence for all of China's top leaders going back to Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai and very few outsiders were ever allowed in. It was a modern-day Forbidden City. I would be one of the only Westerners my age to go inside.

The Hyatt had a car waiting for us downstairs. We drove the short distance down Chang'an Avenue to Tiananmen Square. The wide avenue, which had seen tanks roll down it during the student protests, was familiar to me, having walked down it several times for sightseeing trips to the Forbidden City with Victoria. However, this time before reaching the old imperial palace, we turned down a small side street. We were stopped at a security checkpoint and an armed military policeman came up to the driver's window. The driver passed the policeman several papers and indicated to him our business in Zhongnanhai
.
As the military policeman checked over the documents, two other guards ran mirrors under the car to check for explosives attached to the bottom of the vehicle. The military policeman, satisfied with our documents, motioned for us to get out of the car and then
ushered us through a metal detector to the side of the checkpoint. As I stood there I noticed a screen behind the gate with the words
SERVE THE PEOPLE
written on it in calligraphy. I smiled to myself. There was some irony to “the servants of the people” taking up residence in the palace of the last emperor. After the driver cleared the metal detector, the three of us got back into the car and drove through the gate.

The interior of Zhongnanhai was quiet and peaceful. A road ran alongside a dark lake that was bordered by trees and grass far greener than anything else I had seen in Beijing. The tranquility of the place was a welcome change from the chaos that defined the streets just on the other side of the wall.

We pulled up outside a smaller walled enclosure. Two soldiers stood guard by the entrance. Before we got out, my father reminded me to be polite and to behave. I hated when he talked down to me, as if I were still a little boy. The large front door swung open, and Mrs. Zhang stood there with David beside her. She greeted my father with a warm smile.

“Tom,” she said. “Come in. Come in. You know David, yes?”

“I don't believe we've met,” my father said. He extended a hand to David. “How do you do?” he asked in mock seriousness.

David shook his hand. “I'm fine,” he said.

“He's very cute,” my father said to Mrs. Zhang. She smiled and the two walked down the corridor discussing something, leaving David and me by the door with the two soldiers. David blinked and then pointed at one of the soldiers.

“You see his gun?” David asked. “I'm getting one. For my birthday.”

“No, you're not,” I said.

“I am.”

“You're getting an assault rifle for your birthday?”

“It looks the same. It just doesn't shoot the real bullets,” he said.

“What kind of bullets, then?”

“Come on. I'll show you.” David ran off down the hallway in the opposite direction of our parents and waved for me to follow. I walked after him, and then broke into a jog in order to keep up. David stopped when he reached the end of the hallway and waited for me.

I caught up with him and we turned the corner, and suddenly to my right was an opening to an expansive courtyard. David kept running down the hallway, but I stopped and looked. The courtyard was simple. The floor of the courtyard was paved with large, smooth, gray stones and the paving was only interrupted in four small areas where trees had been planted. There were bushes around the exterior and potted plants by the small steps that led down to the courtyard. The trees were mostly bare now, giving the courtyard a cold, deserted feel. I imagined it looked quite beautiful in the spring. David had realized that I was no longer following him and stopped.

“Come on,” he said. “Let's go.”

I waved him off. Something in the far corner of the courtyard had moved and caught my eye. David sighed impatiently and followed as I walked down the wide stone steps and across the flat, gray stone floor toward the far corner of the courtyard. As I got closer I saw that in the corner of the courtyard, between two bushes, was a brown, wooden cage. I peered between the bars of the cage and saw three small, brown furry creatures. They looked like miniature brown monkeys, but without tails. One was hanging down from the top of the cage. The creature was
no bigger than a small hamster and looked as though it weighed about a pound at most. It dangled upside down from the bars, hanging on by its two minuscule feet. It stared at me with huge round moon eyes.

“Don't touch them!” David said.

I turned, surprised. “I wasn't going to.”

“They're poisonous.”

“What?”

“You have to go to the hospital if they bite you.” David snapped his teeth and pretended to take a chunk out of his own arm. “I'm just joking. You can touch them if you want. My dad called someone to take out their teeth. They can't bite people anymore.”

“What are they?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“What type of animal.”

“Oh,” David said. “We call them
lan hou
, but I forget how to say it in English.”

“Must be some kind of monkey,” I said. “Lan hou, doesn't that mean lazy monkey?”

“Yeah, but they're not monkeys. It's called something else in English. I forget. My mom likes them. She thinks they are cute. You can't buy them anymore. There's not many left.”

“You mean they're endangered?”

“I guess. Okay, let's go, I have to show you my guns.”

Leaving the three lan hou behind, David showed me to a room that his grandfather had given to him for when he came to stay. He opened a closet in the room and showed off an impressive arsenal of airsoft guns. We spent the remainder of the time until dinner sniping toy figurines with David's assortment of military-replica airsoft guns.

Around eight o'clock, David's nanny poked her head around the door to call me for dinner. David, coincidentally, or perhaps not, chose that exact moment to unleash a furious volley of airsoft pellets at a target we had taped to the door. David laughed as the nanny yelped and jumped back behind the door. The two exchanged a few sharp words. David sighed. “Okay! Okay!” he said and dropped his airsoft gun. The nanny poked her head around the door once more and called to me to come with her. I followed her back around the courtyard to the other wing of the house. I asked her why David wasn't coming with us, and she said that he and Lily had eaten dinner earlier, before my father and I arrived. She led me through an elaborate sitting room into the dining room behind it. I came in to find everyone already seated around a large circular table in the center of the dining room.

At the far side of the table my father was seated in between Mr. Zhang and an elderly, serious-looking man dressed in a dark suit with neatly combed jet-black hair that looked as if it had been dyed. I knew that he must be Secretary Su. A young woman who I assumed must be an interpreter sat to Secretary Su's left, then Mrs. Zhang and then her mother to the left of her. Two younger Chinese men sat around the side of the table closest to me. As they were too young to be Secretary Su's deputies, I guessed that they were his aides. I saw that there was an open spot between Mr. Zhang and the younger of the two aides.

The seating of the dinner was no accident. I had attended some of my father's meetings with government officials and seen how seriously seating order was taken in China. Every meeting room was arranged with chairs in a horseshoe shape around the perimeter of the room. The two most important people always occupied the two chairs at the top of the horse
shoe, and then people filled out the remaining chairs by order of their seniority. The most junior people would take the chairs at the two ends of the horseshoe. I had once made the mistake of taking the chair directly next to my father—the chair for the third- or fourth-most important person in the meeting. This must have caused quite an awkward situation for the Chinese minister, whose seat I had accidentally taken and who had to sit in a seat that was lower than his position, and yet, at the same time, he would not have wanted to offend my father by appearing to be rude by asking me to move. Just before the meeting began, a staff member came over and told me they had a different seat saved for me.

My father was deep in conversation with Mr. Zhang and Secretary Su and did not see me right away. Uniformed waiters and waitresses stood around the perimeter of the room. I saw the ornately decorated porcelain plates, and the golden napkins and ivory chopsticks, and I knew that this all would have been just as foreign to Bowen as it was to me. I stood there for a moment until the interpreter alerted my father of my presence. He smiled and stood up, pointing to me.

“Ah,” my father said. “Secretary Su, this is my son, Chase.”

As I walked toward them I could feel the eyes of all the waiters and waitresses watching me, and I wondered what they thought of a fourteen-year-old foreign boy being invited to this dinner.

Secretary Su smiled and extended a hand. I shook it. His hand was soft. He turned to the rest of the table and said something that I didn't understand. The rest of the table laughed at his comment. I smiled awkwardly. The interpreter, a frail young woman with frameless eyeglasses and straight dark hair tied back in a ponytail, leaned toward me. “He says you are a very handsome
boy,” she said. Secretary Su puffed out his chest and made himself tall. “
Hen qianglie, ah? Xiang yundongyuan yiyang
,” he said.

The interpreter translated. “He says you are strong like . . . uh . . . a sports player?”

My father put his hand on my shoulder. “Tell Secretary Su that Chase is a very good tennis player,” he said to the interpreter. He waited while she translated his words. “Tell him he practices with the junior national tennis team, every day.”

The interpreter repeated what he said to Secretary Su and waited for his response. “Oh really? he says. Then maybe one day he will be a tennis champion? Like . . .” She turned back to Secretary Su for clarification. “
A-jia-xi-a
?” She looked uncertain and looked to me for confirmation. “You know him?”

My father looked at me. “Who did she say?” he asked. I sounded out the syllables in my head and realized whom she meant.

“Agassi,” I said. “Like Andre Agassi.”

“Ahh, Agassi.” My father smiled. “Well, maybe. Tell Secretary Su that he's also learning Chinese.”

She translated and Secretary Su turned to me. “
Ni hui shou Zhongwen ma
(You can speak Chinese)?”

“
Wo hui
(I can),” I said.

He clapped his hands together.
“Tebie hao
(Excellent)!” he said. Then he said something I didn't understand. I wasn't even sure if it had been a statement or a question, and so I just stood there looking at him with an uneasy smile on my face. I could feel the eyes of everyone in the room on me. He laughed and said, “
Mei guanxi
(It doesn't matter),” and we all sat down for dinner.

An army of waiters and waitresses suddenly came upon us, placing trays of steaming vegetables and fish and meat on the table's large turntable centerpiece. A waitress placed a bowl
of soup in front of me while another filled my glass with red wine. The waitresses disappeared and were almost immediately replaced by a male waiter who carried a small decanter of clear liquid that he poured into miniature ceramic glasses that looked just like the eggcups I had eaten soft-boiled eggs out of at home. One of the first two waitresses returned with a cup of green tea and asked if I would like anything else to drink. “
Shui
(Water),” I said, hoping to make up for my earlier failure to understand Secretary Su. I had to repeat it twice more before she understood me. A few minutes later she returned with a glass of water. I picked up the glass to take a drink, but put it back down right away. The water was boiling hot.

I turned to my left where Mr. Zhang was slurping down his bowl of soup. He caught my eye and stabbed at the soup with his white spoon. “Very good,” he said. “Try some. Shark fin soup. Very expensive.” I tasted it. It was very salty. Feeling Mr. Zhang's gaze, I drank a few more spoonfuls and then put down my spoon. On the other side of the table, one of Secretary Su's assistants spun the glass turntable centerpiece, sending dishes of fish and meat and vegetables slowly around the table.