Beautiful Country (17 page)

At the beginning of practice the following week, Madame Jiang announced that the team would begin practicing for the National Championships. They would be held in two weeks in Tianjin in the last week of November. She said that she had not decided yet which players would go to Tianjin to represent Beijing and that everyone should practice hard if they wanted to go. Even though my Chinese had gotten quite a bit better, I still had a hard time understanding her thick Beijing accent from time to time. Bowen listened to her intently and then quickly, under his breath, translated for me. When he translated Madame Jiang's words, that she wasn't sure whom she would take, Bowen added, “No way, she has to take everybody.”

Madame Jiang's threats, which were meant to unsettle everyone into not being complacent and working as hard as possible, served to undercut her authority. If she could have denied Bowen a spot, she would have, but the security of her position would have been threatened. As much as she disliked Bowen, she wasn't going to lose her job over him.

Bowen practiced unusually hard that week. He did everything Madame Jiang said and spoke in deferential tones. He asked that
if he was selected for the team, could he go by his home to see a doctor. He wanted to get something for his shoulder. It had been hurting for some time. It would help him play better for the National Championships. Madame Jiang said she would consider his request. Bowen uncharacteristically pleaded with her to let him go. She told him to go to the gym to do exercises to help his shoulder. She didn't even ask him what his problem was or try to examine his shoulder. I wanted to tell Bowen that if he had a shoulder injury, he should be careful about doing exercises. Exercises could make his shoulder worse.

It was then that I understood the depth of her hatred. It went back so many years that she could not see through it to have any sympathy for this young boy who was standing in front of her begging. It had pushed her sense of compassion to some undiscoverable corner of her heart.

The following week passed quickly. All of the boys were energetic and positive. Even Little Mao played as if he were expecting something good to happen. Bowen worked hard and went to the gym every day after practice to do shoulder exercises. I warned him there was nothing to be gained by “playing through injury.” I had cautioned him about worsening his shoulder through exercise, but he smiled and exuded the same confidence in his ability to look after his body that he did in his game. As always, Bowen worked harder than the other boys. If one of them raised his work ethic a notch, Bowen raised his, too. In all of my practices with Bowen, I don't think he ever hit a ball on the second bounce. If a shot hit the net cord, he sprinted to touch it before it bounced a second time. No matter how good the put-away shot, he always tried to put his racket on the ball. Most of the time he succeeded.

It was during that week that Bowen came over to me one day
before practice as I was getting my rackets out of my bag and said, “I thought of a name for you.”

“Okay?”

“Yu,” he said.

“Yu?”

“Yes. Yu, like Yu the Great.”

“Who's that?”

“He lived more than four hundred—” Bowen paused and frowned. “No, four thousand years ago. He is a great man. He is never giving up.”

“Okay. I'll think about it.”

“There is nothing to think about. It is a good name for you,” Bowen said, smiling. “Now you have to give me a name.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let me think.”

Madame Jiang left the courts fifteen minutes before practice ended. She told us to practice our serves for the rest of the practice. Bowen and I shared a basket. As we returned to the basket for more balls, he asked me questions. Ever since I had mentioned that one of my friends had gotten a sponsorship contract with Lacoste after getting to the semifinals of the Orange Bowl, Bowen was always asking me about the tournament. I think he saw it as his way to get out of the Chinese system, to get funding and sponsorships, a pathway to make it to the pros. He asked me how I did when I played it the year before. I told him I won three rounds of qualifying, but to be in the main draw you had to win four rounds.

“Only qualifying?” he asked me.

“It's a really tough tournament,” I said.

“But you are very good.”

“Not good enough.”

He thought about this and didn't say anything for a while. “So you are not able to get in the real draw.”

“No, I missed it by one match. The best kids in the world play the Orange Bowl. The main draw is only one hundred twenty-eight, so it's really tough to get in the main draw.”

As I was packing my bag after practice, I said to Bowen, “I brought you a T-shirt.” I reached into my tennis bag and tossed Bowen a long-sleeved white shirt that had the logo of the Orange Bowl on the front. He caught the T-shirt and studied it.

“I can't take your shirt,” he said, “you earned this. It's yours.”

“No, don't worry, they were giving them out free, everyone got one. I have one from last year. Really, here.” I handed it back to him. “Take it, I have lots of shirts like this.”

“
Xie xie, Yu
(Thank you, Yu).” Bowen bowed his head as if I had given him something precious.

“Hey, how's your shoulder?”

Bowen offered no answer. I took his silence to mean that it was still injured. We picked up our bags and slung them over our shoulders and walked down the avenue of trees to the dormitories. I walked with him to the end of the avenue where he turned right to walk back to his room. I turned back and found Driver Wu and Victoria waiting with the car.

That evening after dinner I Googled “Yu the Great.” I found a short biography of him on the internet:

During China's Great Flood, Yu's father, Gun, was assigned by the King to tame the raging waters. Gun built earthen dikes all over the land in the hope of containing the waters. But the earthen dikes collapsed everywhere and the project failed miserably. Gun was executed. The king then recruited Yu to
succeed where his father had failed. Instead of building more dikes, Yu began to dredge new river channels, to serve both as outlets for the torrential waters, and as irrigation conduits to distant farmlands. Yu spent a backbreaking fourteen years at this task, with the help of some twenty thousand workers.

“Passing his own door three times” is a tale of Yu's dedication. It is said that when Yu was given the task of fighting the flood, he had been married only five days. He then said good-bye to his wife, saying that he did not know when he would return. His wife then asked him what name to give if a son were born. Yu replied, Qi, a character meaning “five days” in ancient Chinese. Then in his thirteen years of fighting the flood, Yu passed by his own family doorstep three times. The first time he passed by, he heard his wife's cries of pain as she bore their first child. The second time he passed by, his wife was holding their child's hand as he learned his first steps. The third time he passed by, his son greeted him and implored him to come in for rest. Each time, Yu refused to go in the door, saying that the flood was rendering countless people homeless, he could not rest in his own.

I could see why Bowen admired Yu the Great. Like Yu, Bowen knew what he had to do to succeed, and he refused to give up no matter how antagonizing or cruel Madame Jiang was. But I wondered why he picked that name for me. It seemed a name better fit for him. He was the one who had saved me during the trial in the beginning of the year, and he was also the one who had saved me from my loneliness. I didn't know it then, but the moment when Bowen would need my help was fast approaching.

The following week Madame Jiang insisted that we play practice matches. Five days of grueling matches to determine the lineup even though we all knew what the order would be. I think we all felt it was Madame Jiang's desire to make Bowen prove himself yet again. This kind of match play was not in the best interest of the team. Most coaches who knew anything would have their players, in preparation for a tournament, drill, work on technique, practice different patterns, work on their serves and return of serves. Playing a week's worth of matches before the tournament would almost ensure that the Beijing team would not perform at their best. Because there was an odd number of boys, I was slotted in to play whoever wasn't paired against a teammate.

Bowen won all of his matches, but not as easily as usual. He was serving with only 50 percent of his usual pace. Now I began to see things differently. Bowen served at half speed not because he was torturing Madame Jiang but because his shoulder was hurting. The other boys assumed Bowen was doing it to irritate Madame Jiang, and they were not happy about it because they knew that when she got mad at Bowen, she punished them all.
At the end of the week, I spoke to him as he sat next to me on the bench.

“I've got some Advil. It could help your shoulder.” I held up the bottle of Advil I always carried in my tennis bag. Bowen rested his elbows on his knees and looked at the ground. He shook his head. Without bothering to look at me, he added, “No thanks.”

“You should see a doctor.”

“If I can just get home . . . there is a medicine man near my house. He will give me something to fix this.”

“Why not see a doctor here in Beijing?”

Bowen shook his head. “Doctors in Beijing too expensive. Madame Jiang will not pay for medicine.”

“Really? That's ridiculous.”

“She told me to go to the gym. She said that if I was doing the weight training properly it would get better. I did what she said. I went to the gym early in the morning and after dinner and tried to do more weight training so it did not hurt anymore. But yesterday I have to stop because when I wake up, my shoulder is . . . not good. Hurts very bad to move it, even just to move it a small amount.”

“The weights are probably making it worse,” I said. “You need to see a doctor. I can't believe she won't let you see one. You should rest and ice it. No more weight training.”

“She thinks I'm serving this way just to show to her that my shoulder is not good.”

We sat in silence for a bit.

“Are you excited for the championships?” I asked.

“I hope my shoulder is good so that I play well.”

At that moment I was about to say that he needed some sort
of good luck charm and then I thought about those seeds we had taken from the Forbidden City. “You know those seeds? The lucky ones from that old tree in
Gugong
(the Forbidden City). Do you want mine?”

Bowen shook his head and gave a tired smile. “Thank you, but no. You keep them. Your friend, Victoria, she was wrong. You can't sell them for much money. Not enough to buy medicine.”

“Sell them?” I asked, surprised. “Oh, I meant if you plant them then maybe they will bring you good luck for the championships.”

“Maybe,” Bowen said. “But maybe I am not the good luck person.”

I pulled out the bottle of Advil from my bag and held it out to him.

He looked at it briefly and shook his head. “If Madame Jiang knows, she will be angry. Not just angry at me. Angry at you, too.”

Bowen straightened his back and went to throw away something in the garbage can by the door. While his back was turned, I dropped my bottle of Advil into his tennis bag. I don't know if the Advil helped his shoulder, or if he even used it. He never acknowledged receiving it, but I never expected him to.

The National Championships in Tianjin were the following week, and the team would be gone for three to five days. I would have no one to practice with, so Victoria suggested we go to Tianjin, too. “You can try out your Chinese and see how you do. It will be good practice. We can take the train and stay with my aunt. It will be good for you to see what an average family is like and how they live. You have seen China from the top, now you should see China here.” Victoria held her hand high and then dropped it to
chest level. “I will show you around Tianjin, and if the team does well, we can go and watch them play.”

Two days later, we took the afternoon train to Tianjin. We arrived at the packed train station at about 1:30 p.m. There must have been several hundred people queued in half a dozen ill-defined lines. Victoria sent me to buy our tickets as a way to test my Chinese. I stood at the back of the first line and waited. As I advanced in line, I heard a series of depressing announcements. The first said that all the trains before 3:45 p.m. were sold out. Then about three minutes later they said the 3:45 train was also sold out. Just as we approached the window to buy our tickets, the announcer added that all the sitting tickets for the 4 p.m. were sold out, but standing tickets were still available. I bought two standing tickets that together cost less than 40 RMB, the equivalent of about five U.S. dollars.

Two hours later it was time to board. We pushed and shoved our way onto the platform and then into the standing-only car. The car was poorly ventilated, but we managed to squeeze into a corner near a window. The train squeaked and groaned its way out of the station. Victoria took the new silver cell phone she had just bought out of her handbag and checked her text messages. A group of five men, wearing cheap, loosely buttoned blue cotton shirts and dirty cotton trousers tied at the waist, pushed their way back-to-back and stationed themselves next to us in our corner. Many of their teeth were missing, and those that weren't missing had turned grimy shades of brown and yellow. All five were smoking and occasionally spitting on the ground. As more and more people crammed into the train car, the men pressed us farther and farther into the corner with absolutely no regard for our space. By the time the train doors closed, I was firmly
pressed between two of the men, their faces only inches from mine. They continued talking past me, blowing smoke in my face, laughing loudly and shouting at times to be heard over the noise of the train. The man on my left had a habit of spraying me with spittle every few minutes. Lukas had taught me not to complain about such things by calling me a princess anytime I objected to poor conditions. Victoria, on the other hand, had other ideas. After ten minutes of intense texting, she looked up from her phone and saw one of the men blowing cigarette smoke in my face. “Hey!” she shouted. “
Ni zai gan shenme? Ni de limao zai nar
(What the hell are you doing? Where are your manners)?” The two men grumbled and shifted in the carriage so that their backs were turned to me.

The city didn't have plush suburbs in the way that American cities did. Instead the thick metropolis gradually fell away and was replaced by sparse countryside. The land was flat and dry, and it reminded me of the China you would see when you watched films set during the Great Leap Forward.

In contrast to the denseness of the city, life in the countryside seemed as if it would be very isolated. We would pass a cinder-block farmhouse or two with a few chickens running around or a cow tied to a post. I would see people out in the fields. Sometimes a small child worked alongside an adult. I didn't see any tractors or modern farm equipment other than an occasional truck. The farmers worked their fields with the help of oxen. Most of the roads were dirt. Even when we were well outside of Beijing, the impenetrable smog still filled the sky. I wondered how crops survived with such an absence of natural sunlight. The whole landscape served as a reminder that for the majority of China, life was still a cruel and hard existence. For all the talk
of modernization and progress, there were still hundreds of millions living on a dollar a day in a world that the West had long since left behind, far in the past.

For the first part of the journey I worked with Victoria on vocabulary words that would help me talk with Bowen when we had lunch together, but soon the strain of balancing body against body against the bumps and changes in acceleration exhausted me. Seeing that I was struggling, Victoria subtly pushed against the people in front of us and edged out enough room for the two of us to sit down on the floor with our backs against the car wall. She rubbed the top of my head. “Almost there,” she said cheerfully. “Only one hour to go.” I leaned my head back and closed my eyes.

An hour later, I was awakened by the stop-start jolting of the train as it stuttered into the station. As soon as the train stopped, everyone pushed their way to the exit. There was no order—none of the Western courtesies of letting old people or women with children go first. Some passengers were actively pushing people out of their way without apology.

We spewed out of the train station into a vast concrete square and dispersed in different directions. I imagined that from above we looked like the particles in the science experiments on osmosis and diffusion I had done in school. The air outside was humid and almost as hot and stale as the air in the packed train car. The boundaries of the square were framed by large low-rise buildings that replicated for miles in all directions. I did not know what I was expecting, but I had not realized how large Tianjin was. Victoria said it was over half the size of Beijing, its population over ten million. It was the fourth-largest city in China, southeast of Beijing along the Hai He River, and had a large port along the
Bohai Sea in the Pacific Ocean. She said its name meant “the place where the Emperor crossed the river.”

At the train station we caught a taxi, and Victoria asked the driver to go through the area of the foreign concessions. Like Shanghai, Tianjin had foreign districts, or concessions, at the turn of the twentieth century and each small neighborhood area revealed the nationality of its former inhabitants by the design of its villas. Victoria asked me to name each concession as we passed through—“English,” “French,” “Russian.” Victoria clapped with delight. “Chase, maybe you will become an architect.” I wasn't certain I was correct, and I knew Victoria did not know either, but I had come to see how she liked to give the appearance of knowing where she was going, both physically and metaphorically. The only concession that I could identify with certainty was the English Concession—all the buildings, especially the row of terraced houses, looked like the Victorian houses I had seen in London when my father had taken Tom and me to Wimbledon that one year. They looked like those houses except that they all had a diluted, impure look about them, as if they had been designed by an architect with a faulty memory. We arrived in the eastern part of the city where massive apartment buildings stood at least twenty-five stories high, many of which were still under construction.

“My aunt lives in one of these,” Victoria said proudly. The buildings were all identical—a platoon of off-white skyscrapers against the gray sky, a city within a city. Between the buildings were concrete paths lined with rather sickly-looking grass. There were a few shops located at the base of the buildings.

Victoria's aunt lived in Building Eleven. We arrived a few minutes before six just as she was returning home from work. Her
name was Zhang Hui, but when she introduced herself to me, she told me her English name was Cinderella. She worked for a multinational company as a bookkeeper. As she fished her key from her bag, Cinderella explained that she owned two apartments in the building. She interrupted herself to unlock the building's door and usher us into the elevator. I noticed that the elevator's number panel was missing the number 4. This was because the Chinese word for 4 and the Chinese word for death are both pronounced with the same sound and tone. Their number 4 was equivalent to our number 13.

Once we were on our way up to floor five, which was really floor four, she continued telling us about her apartments. One was a three-bedroom apartment, the other just a one-bedroom. Cinderella's mother, husband, and son all lived with her in the bigger apartment, and she usually rented out the other one. It was just down the hall. The former tenants had just moved out, and I could stay there. She unlocked the door and showed me around. In addition to a small bedroom, the apartment had a living room, a tiny kitchen, and a bathroom. The apartment was simple with just the bare necessities—one table and sofa in the living room, an air-conditioning unit, one bed, one closet, a stove, and a refrigerator. The walls were white with nothing on them. No pictures, no carpets, no potted plants. In the bathroom was a washing machine, a toilet, a sink, and a showerhead that protruded from the wall. There were two buckets on the ground beneath the showerhead. There was no shower enclosure, just the showerhead. The water went onto the tile floor of the bathroom into a drain next to the washing machine.

Cinderella wanted me to meet her son. She said his English teacher had given him the English name Chris, but recently
he had decided to change it to Dwyane after some basketball player.

“He loves to play basketball,” she said with an eager smile. “Basketball his number one favorite sport. Every day he plays with his friends. He has many basketball shoes. So many! Is basketball your favorite sport?”

“I prefer tennis.”

“Oh, tennis. Yes. Good, maybe you can play basketball, too.”

We walked down the hall to her apartment. Chris or Dwyane, I wasn't sure what to call him, was in his room playing video games. He was tall—about six foot two—and was rather chubby. He spoke very little English. I asked him who his favorite basketball player was. “Allen Iverson,” he said. His answer surprised me. I guess I had expected him to say Dwyane Wade or maybe Yao Ming.

Cinderella invited us to share her dinner—rice with vegetables and a little chicken. As we ate, she complained to Victoria that her husband's sister was after her to give their son, Cinderella's nephew, her small apartment. He was planning to get married, and his parents were worried he would not be able to get married if he didn't have an apartment. “It's difficult,” she explained. “Many more men than women now. Very difficult for man to find wife.” Cinderella added that she could not let her sister-in-law know the apartment had just lost its tenant. She looked at me and said, “In China families are pushy. They think whatever is yours is theirs, too.”