Beautiful Country (20 page)

“It's not that simple!” Victoria snapped at me. “You see everything as good guys and bad guys. Madame Jiang bad, Bowen good, Chairman Mao bad. Nothing is that simple, Chase.”

Her anger subsided and her voice turned soft and sad. “Bowen is not the only one who has been badly treated,” she said. “Madame Jiang wears those gloves because she is ashamed of her hands. When she was a child, her hands were broken badly by the Red Guard. Now her hands are deformed. She is ashamed of them, so she wears gloves.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, confused. “Her hands are broken?”

“Haven't you noticed that she can't hold a racket properly?” Victoria asked.

I had noticed that, but I had always assumed that it was just because she didn't know anything about tennis. “Random said she used to be a great player on China's Olympic volleyball team. How could she be a volleyball player with bad hands?”

“In volleyball you don't use your fingers so much, you use the butt of your hands and your wrists.” Victoria demonstrated hitting an imaginary ball.

“Do you know what happened?”

“Her father was a senior executive at a company in Shanghai. They lived in a large house across from the factory. During the Cultural Revolution the Red Guard came in and taped up all the rooms in her house. Her family could only live in one room. Madame Jiang loved to play the piano, but the Red Guard put tape across the piano. They were afraid to go into the rooms with the tape because if they were discovered they would be beaten. One day, Madame Jiang took the tape off the piano to play, and one of her neighbors reported her. The Red Guard came and made her sit on the piano stool and tied her hands to the keyboard and slammed the cover down on her hands, many times, breaking many bones. She wears the gloves to hide her deformed hands. The bones were never reset. They look like claws. She told me she still cries when she hears a piano make music that is beautiful.”

I was stunned and struck by this odd sense of pity and guilt. It made me feel conflicted, because I still disliked her, but I also felt horrible for the times that Bowen and I had made fun of the way she held her racket.

“How do you know all of this?” I asked.

“One day when the team was running laps on the track, she was adjusting the tennis net and the crank came loose and pinched her hand and it started bleeding. I was at the courts waiting for you so I helped her. She took her glove off to wrap her hand. That is when I saw her hand, and she explained what had happened. It turns out my grandfather had worked for the same company as her father.”

“Why didn't you tell me?” I asked.

“This is not my story to tell,” she said. “I would never tell anyone this story. I only told you now because you needed to hear it to understand properly.”

I now saw what Victoria had been doing all year. All of her hanging around the courts, texting on her phone, waiting for a moment in which she could assist Madame Jiang, all were just pretexts to get to know Madame Jiang, to understand who she was. It was part of her job as my guide, but it was also part of the Chinese character to understand things in context. A few weeks earlier my father had e-mailed me an article about an experiment a psychologist had conducted at an American university with an equal number of American and Asian students. The students were recruited to look at a succession of images on a computer screen. One by one, at three-second intervals, a series of pictures appeared on the screen. All had a large object set against a complex background such as a tiger in a forest or a horse in a field of flowers. The Americans all had excellent recall of the specific object, while the Chinese honed in on the background. The psychologist's conclusion was that Americans are naturally inclined toward a “me first” view of life, while the Chinese understood things by way of context. Understanding context was ingrained into their daily lives even at the language level. As I had learned, the only way to understand the multiple meanings of certain words, or to decipher the skewed tones of strong regional dialects, was through understanding the context of what was being said.

Victoria did not assess Madame Jiang's behavior against an absolute standard as I had done, but against a standard that took into account the context of her background. She understood that
what could be seen on the surface was only that—the surface—and that to see a full picture one must go beyond. When I had come to China I viewed the world in sharply defined spheres of black and white. Now I was beginning to see that my perspective had been incomplete at best.

It reminded me of a boy I had played against at the national championships in the States. His name was Dennis Tikomirov and he was the son of Russian immigrants. He was top ten in the country and he had a reputation for being a ruthless cheat. When I played against him, any shot that was within four inches of the line he called out. I had never seen such shameless cheating ever before in my life. By the end of the match, I was so frustrated and angry that I gave up trying to win, and just focused on trying to hit the ball as hard as I could at his face anytime he came up to the net. After that match, I hated Dennis Tikomirov with a passion. But my attitude toward him changed after I saw what his father would do when he lost.

At the Winter Nationals, Dennis was upset in the second round by a lower-ranked player. They had barely finished shaking hands when Dennis's father burst onto the court, swearing at his son in Russian. He yanked him off the court by the collar and dragged him out to the parking lot. In full view of everyone at the tournament he shoved Dennis against their car and started yelling at him in Russian at the top of his lungs, pausing occasionally to smack his son in the face. I was shocked by how hard he hit him. Dennis was a small kid, and the last slap knocked him to the ground. His father stared at him in disgust, called him a loser, and got into the car. Dennis got up and tried to get into the car, but the doors were locked. His father rolled down the window and told him to find his own way back to the hotel.
He didn't drive losers. Watching that sobbing kid chase after his father's car as he drove away was probably the saddest, most pathetic thing I had ever seen.

Victoria saw the troubled look on my face. “Don't be sad,” she said. “There was no way for you to know those things. Come on, let's go.” She smiled, and the cheerful Victoria who always seemed happy returned. That was the surface that Victoria chose to display to the world, and that was all I had seen when I had met her in the airport that day in early August. “I have a surprise for you,” she said.

I followed Victoria down the narrow alleyways that snaked through the mazelike labyrinth of hutongs outside the boundaries of the market. I asked her where we were going but she wouldn't tell me. It was a surprise, she said. We eventually stopped at a small restaurant. I recognized it as a Guizhou restaurant where Victoria said she had eaten every day during her first month in Beijing because she was so homesick. I remembered that we had gone there with Bowen during the week of the national holiday.

The restaurant was no more than a small, dimly lit room with four or five tables and a kitchen in an adjoining room. It had no front door, just a curtain of clear plastic strips that hung from the ceiling. In the corner of the restaurant, sipping tea, sat Bowen. Victoria broke the stunned silence as I stared. “Look, Chase, it's Bowen! I found his phone number from the tennis center in Tianjin and got him to come visit.”

We went over to the table and sat down. Bowen had cut his hair short, but there was something else that was different about him. I couldn't quite place it. I searched for something to say.

When neither of us spoke, Victoria laughed and pointed at me. “You should see him,” she said to Bowen. “He's so mopey at tennis now.”

I tried to make a joke about Madame Jiang. “She's
even crazier
now . . . you're lucky you got out, man.” Bowen did not smile back.

“Lucky?” He shook his head. “No, you're the lucky one.”

“Sorry,” I muttered, “stupid joke.”

“
Mei guanxi
(No matter),” Bowen said.

“So what happened, man?” I asked earnestly. “Where have you been?”

“Tianjin.”

“Are you playing on the team there?”

“I'm working with my father.”

“Why?”

Bowen shrugged. “What else would I do?”

“No, I mean why did you leave? What happened?”

“Madame Jiang expelled me from the team.”

“What?” Victoria asked, surprised. “She told me that your parents wanted you to go home.”

“She can't do that, can she?” I asked. I felt a sense of outrage and frustration. It was all so unfair.

“No,” Bowen said. “She talked to the Beijing team director and the Beijing Minister of Sport, and they make the decision.”

“Because you lost?”

Bowen nodded. “She told me I decide to lose the match because I want her to lose her job. I told her she is wrong, that my shoulder is not good. But she said I am lying.”

“That's so outrageous,” I said. “How is your shoulder now?”

“Okay,” he said. “Sometimes still hurts.”

“But they can't expel you just because you lose a match!” Victoria said.

“No,” Bowen said, shaking his head. “That's not why they say. When Madame Jiang speak with the director she tells him that I say I am fourteen years but I am sixteen years. She says I lie. But it's not true! I no lie! Madame Jiang lie and say she has proof I am sixteen. The director and the minister are worried about . . .
choushi
(scandal) . . . you know, choushi? Before the
Aoyunhui
(Olympics). The Aoyunhui is very important for their job. So they don't want trouble. They know that maybe Madame Jiang will give her proof to a newspaper. And then there is big
choushi
about Chinese sport players' real age.” He shrugged. “They don't want trouble so they expel me from the team.”

I looked him straight in the eyes. “How old are you actually?”

“Fourteen years,” he said.

“But if you're fourteen then Madame Jiang has no proof, so there can be no scandal.”

“It doesn't matter,” Bowen said. “I can't do anything. I am just a tennis player. I have no power.”

I had an idea. “What if my father talks to the Minister of Sport?”

When I said this, Victoria cut in, “Chase . . .”

Bowen lowered his eyes. “I don't know,” he mumbled. “I don't think they will let me join the team again.”

“There must be some way we can help,” I said.

“What about America?”

“America?” The question caught me off guard.

“You will go back there after one year, yes?” Bowen asked. “Maybe your father can help me find a sponsor? You said the academy where you practice is very good, maybe I could practice
there with you. We will play doubles together. Brother-brother team, we win Wimbledon, like the Bryan brothers.”

He had clearly thought this all out. We would need to get him a visa, talk to the head of the Laver Academy, find him a place to live, and either find a sponsor or sponsor him ourselves. It was all certainly possible, but it would come down to whether or not I could convince my father to do it. In any case, I guessed that at a minimum it would take several months or maybe even a year to arrange everything. The first step should be to try to get Bowen back on the Beijing team.

“You will help me, yes?”

My father was scheduled to arrive in Beijing that night. Driver Wu took me back to the Zhangs' to pack up some things to take to the Hyatt while Victoria dropped Bowen off at the train station. Victoria had seemed upset when we had left the restaurant. I could not tell if learning what actually happened to Bowen had made her upset, or whether she was uneasy about what I had suggested. In any event her buoyant mood disappeared and she did not speak to me after lunch. Not even to wave good-bye. I showed Driver Wu the medal. He nodded his head in approval. He explained that it was an award for courage in the old Chinese nationalist army, the army that had fought Mao and his Red Army. He held the medal and gently turned it over. He lifted his hand several times. He then said something in Chinese that I could not quite make out. I asked him to repeat it.

“Take good care of this,” he said. “It is covered in courage.”

Traffic was light that night and Driver Wu dropped me off at the Hyatt an hour before my father's flight got in. As usual there was a room key waiting for me in an envelope at the concierge desk. I went up to the room on the seventeenth floor. The door lock flashed green and I entered. I was surprised to see Victoria
perched on the sofa in the living room. I dropped my bag by the door.

“Victoria?” I said.

“We need to talk about Bowen,” she said.

“What about him?”

“I made a mistake arranging his visit. You need to understand what he's asking you to do.”

“He's not asking me anything,” I said. “I offered.”

“He's lying, Chase. He's not fourteen. You know that too. He is asking you something. He's asking you to lie to your father for him.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do.”

“He told me he's fourteen. I believe him,” I said.

“None of those boys are fourteen. They're all fifteen or sixteen. That's how it is here.”

“Well then why does it matter how old he is?” I asked.

“Of course it matters,” Victoria said. “The boys get away with it here because nobody asks questions. The team officials just pretend they don't know. But if Madame Jiang officially reported Bowen for lying about his age, they can't ignore it. It could be a huge scandal. Ten years ago some Chinese athletes were caught using drugs to make them run faster. It was very embarrassing for China. The coach who was giving them the drugs was fired and sent away. It is the same with lying about the ages.”

“Bowen wouldn't lie to me,” I said.

“If you don't help him, his dream is finished. Don't you see that? Completely finished. He will say anything to make you help him. He lies, Chase. You can't trust someone like that.”

Her words touched on a truth that I didn't want to hear. “It
doesn't matter if he's fourteen or fifty-five. If he's lying about his age, it's because he doesn't have any other choice.”

Victoria was silent.

“Look,” I said. “He's had to fight every possible obstacle to get to where he is. I haven't. I've been given everything. It's not the worst thing in the world if I take one risk to help him. You were the one who lectured me about Madame Jiang, about having to understand her whole story. Not just what you see. How is Bowen any different?”

“How old he is does matter,” she said. “It's not you taking the risk. It's your father. You will have to ask your father to risk his name, his friendships, his reputation, everything he has here to help a boy he doesn't know.”

“I'll explain that to my father,” I said. “He'll understand. He'll listen to me.”

“Will you?”

“Yes, I'll explain it to him.”

She was silent for a moment. “Good,” she said. “That is who matters most. Friends like Bowen will come and go, but no one in the world cares for you like your father does.”

She got up and left.

A few hours later my father arrived. He was in a good mood. Things had progressed well with the deal that he had been working on and he expected it to be wrapped up soon. It was still early so he suggested we walk down to Tiananmen Square.

It was a clear night in Beijing, one of the rare times that you could see stars over the city, and the night air felt cool and fresh. My father told me that he had been getting good reports about me from Victoria and the Zhangs and that he was very proud of me for what I was doing. I told him that my Chinese was now
good enough for me to understand even Madame Jiang's rapid-fire Beijing dialect. He seemed happy to hear that. We reached Tiananmen Square, the red walls of the Forbidden City on our right. I had never seen it at night before. Uncluttered by people, we could hear our feet strike the pavement. I thought about bringing up Bowen to my father, but I decided against it. He was in such a good mood, and I was afraid I would ruin it.

The portrait of Chairman Mao that hung above the Meridian Gate of the Forbidden City was illuminated and Mao's bright eyes stared out into the dark night. We turned around and headed back in the direction from which we came. I looked at the Hyatt and the tall modern office buildings that surrounded it. We passed a Nike billboard that had been put up on one of the outer walls of the Forbidden City and it reminded me of the Starbucks within the gates of the ancient palace. I wondered what Mao would have thought of all of this.