Beautiful Country (6 page)

One of the tricky things about Chinese is that multiple characters will often share the same phonetic spelling; for example,
妈
(mother) and
马
(horse) are both spelled
ma.
The way one differentiates them when speaking is in the tone in which one pronounces them. There are four different pronunciation tones. The first tone is flat. The second tone goes up with the word as if at the end of a question in English. The third tone goes down and then up. The fourth, the easiest, is down. It sounds similar to a command or an angry remark in English. I found this fourth tone to be somewhat amusing as its harshness can often make it seem to an observer that two people are having a very angry conversation, only for them to burst out laughing seconds later. Each of these four tones gives the character a different meaning.
Ma
pronounced with the first tone,
mā
, means mother, while
ma
pronounced with the third tone,
mǎ
, means horse.

However, it gets even trickier when different characters share both phonetic spelling and tonal pronunciation.
消
(to vanish),
削
(to peel with a knife), and
箫
(a bamboo flute similar to a pan flute), are all spelled
xiao
and all are pronounced with the first tone,
xiāo
. In cases like this, one has to rely on context in which the word is being used to realize its meaning. Tones, however, are very important to the Chinese as a mark of education, and a Westerner who can speak using the proper tones is held in far higher esteem than one who cannot.

I made certain that in the first lesson I learned how to say, “Where is the sugar?” I repeated “
Tang zai nar?
” several times to
get the tones right. I finished my Chinese lesson at twelve, went down the stairs, and saw Driver Wu and Victoria waiting for me in the car. Josh was perched on top of a brand-new Vespa motor scooter that he revved into gear. He sped off and disappeared around the corner. I envied him for his ability to come and go as he chose.

Victoria was in the front seat reading. She marked her place in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
and listed the choices for lunch—there were several local places that served good dumplings or we could go to
Kenduji
. I asked her if Kenduji was Kentucky Fried Chicken, and she said she thought so. She said Kenduji was the most popular fast-food chain in China, more so than even McDonald's, and it was, she said, very good. I could tell she wanted to go so I thought I'd give it a try.

The menu board was all in Chinese, but thankfully it was complete with pictures so I was able to make a selection rather easily. Victoria told me what to say after I told her which item I wanted. After listening to her pronunciation several times I gave it a try. “
Wo yao dian di wu ge
(I would like to order number five).” I mumbled the words, and the woman behind the counter looked at me with a funny expression on her face. Victoria nodded encouragingly. I tried a second time, but this time the woman behind the counter started laughing. She waved over a second employee. I felt the other customers turn to look at me and I froze and stood there feeling horribly self-aware and not knowing what to do. Victoria came to my rescue and rattled off a few
sentences in Chinese. She looked at me, smiled, and said, “You need to work on your pronunciation and tones. But otherwise it was good.”

There were no tables at KFC so we went around the corner to a small park and sat on a bench and ate our lunch. It didn't taste the same as American KFC. The chicken was spicier and had more flavor and I actually liked it better. I asked Victoria where she had learned such good English.

“In school. Everyone in school has to take English. If you want to go to university you have to take an English exam.”

“Really?”

Victoria nodded her head. “English is one of five exams you have to take.”

“Even in small towns?”

“Yes, everyone who was accepted at Guizhou University had to do well on the English exam.”

“Is that where you went?”

“Yes, I studied English and literature. Then I worked for the Xinhua News Agency. I was a journalist. I left to come with my husband to Beijing, but to find a journalist in Beijing is much more hard. So when my friend who works for CCTV asked me if I knew anyone who spoke good English and could act as your guide, I said I would like to apply.”

The language school was only about fifteen minutes from the tennis center. When we arrived at tennis, Madame Jiang and Victoria spoke while I unpacked my bag. Victoria made an effort almost every practice to chat with Madame Jiang. I assumed it was just her outgoing newscaster personality. I would later understand her friendliness to be something much more subtle and complex. Victoria turned to me and translated. Madame
Jiang had given her the schedule—tennis practice from one to five every afternoon Monday through Friday. Saturday morning nine to eleven. They would begin to start practicing for the National Championships at the end of the year. I would not be able to play any of the official or arranged matches, but I could practice with the team. Madame Jiang did not bother to say welcome or introduce me to the other two boys I had not played with. I could tell she felt I had been forced onto her program. Victoria later told me that my presence made Madame Jiang nervous, that she was probably apprehensive that I would be a spy of sorts, that I might report things that were not correct or different from the Western way of doing things. Just as practice was about to begin, Madame Jiang was called into the pavilion for a phone call.

As I waited for Madame Jiang to return, I looked over at my new teammates. I was disappointed to see that Bowen, the boy I played with on the first day, wasn't there. The other four Chinese boys had dropped their bags about ten yards away from me and were standing in a close circle, talking and laughing. I stood there twirling my racket in my hand over and over. They continued talking, ignoring me.

These boys were the best junior players in the region surrounding Beijing. In China, four cities—Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Chongqing—held the same status as provinces. By population, each of these cities was the size of a midlevel country. Tianjin was the smallest at around ten million people, roughly the size of New York City or Israel, while Chongqing was the largest at over thirty million, a population larger than that of countries such as Australia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Canada, and was a city that most Westerners had never heard of. These numbers were understated as they only reflected the offi
cial number of residents in each city and did not include the millions of nonregistered workers who illegally immigrated every year and lived in China's major cities.

The cities competed against one another every four years in national games that encompassed all major sports—a sort of internal Olympic Games. Within each city existed an infrastructure that was charged with finding and developing the city's best talent in each of these sports. Just as the USSR had handpicked talented, athletic children and earmarked them as future Olympic athletes, such as gymnasts or divers, the cities did the same to recruit for their sports teams. The Beijing Tennis Commissioner had selected my teammates along with over fifty other boys when they were seven or eight years old and put them in a training camp. Each year some of them would get cut either because they lacked the raw talent, or the commitment, or the competitive instinct to win. The state had decided these boys were going to be tennis players, and that is what they became. The boys took classes in the morning and practiced from one to five in the afternoons. Although they were technically enrolled in school, the classes were little more than a formality, and the boys I knew had very little education. Those who were cut from the team were left with nothing except the skills they had developed on the tennis court. The lucky ones were the players who were cut when they were still young enough to learn to do something else. That was the paradox of the system. It doomed those who succeeded within it. The training methods and level of instruction were so poor that it would be almost impossible for any of these boys to reach the level they needed to become professional, and the system took away any opportunity for success in another field. It was tragic, but for many of these boys I knew that the
highlight of their life might be winning a medal at the National Games.

There was a cynical side to these National Games. The mayors and the government officials who oversaw sports took these National Games very seriously, as success reflected their leadership ability and competence. The more events and medals a city won, the better it was for the careers of all the government officials involved. In most cases, these government officials had no background or interest in sports, but were occupying a position, such as Beijing Tennis Commissioner, that they would hold for two years before being promoted to an entirely different government department. My guess is that most of these officials did not care about the welfare of the athletes they were charged with developing. They cared about medals, not about the athletes. It was as if these boys had been reduced to pawns within the game of Chinese politics.

Victoria came up behind me. “Go talk to them.”

“I can't. What would I say?”

“Just go, it will be fine.” She stressed the word
fine
as if I were making a big deal out of nothing. I noticed that the sounds of conversation and laughter had quieted. Without needing to turn and look, I knew that there were four pairs of eyes staring at the two of us. I didn't know these boys at all, but I understood how Victoria, my minder, would be viewed in the eyes of someone who had been left to fend for himself since he was nine or ten years old. Her presence instantly set me apart from them and marked me as someone who came from a world of privilege that they had never known.

“Okay, okay,” I said to Victoria. “It's time for practice. You should go now.” I walked reluctantly toward the group of boys,
feeling their gaze with every step. “
Ni hao
(Hi),” I said. They were silent. One of the boys I hadn't met yet spoke. “Heyy-lll-ooo,” he said in an exaggerated imitation. The other boys burst out in laughter and turned back to their conversation.

I bent down and untied and retied my shoes, taking as long as I could. The boys resumed talking. This was just the beginning. Why did I have to come here? I felt this surge of frustration and anger toward my father for leaving me here.

Madame Jiang's cold voice snapped through the dry air, bouncing off the corrugated steel walls and echoing around the cavernous structure. Before the echo was finished, I heard the squeals of rubber on acrylic and looked up to see my teammates racing around the corner of the court. I put my thoughts aside and chased after them.

The rhythm of China was different from the West. There was no formal religion and therefore no day set aside for worship. The sameness of my everyday routine meant that the weeks had a way of running into each other. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao had abolished religion after deciding he no longer wanted to compete for his people's affection with deities and other such inconveniences. Some Chinese had recently begun experimenting with different religions, curiously trying one, and then another, knowing that they were searching for something but not exactly sure what they were searching for.

At home I had been known as a chronic oversleeper, but in Beijing I began waking every day at 6 a.m. Not because I had to wake up that early—Victoria didn't pick me up until 8 a.m., but because I realized that between 6 and 8 a.m. I could catch many of my friends back home during their boarding schools' mandatory study hall periods. At the end of the first week, Mrs. Zhang arranged for someone to set up an internet connection in my room, and I was able to break my isolation by chatting with friends who were happy for a reason to procrastinate. During their nervous early days of boarding school, my friends were just
as lonely and eager for an old friend to talk to as I was. Some of them would ask me about Beijing, but none of them really seemed to understand or care about what I told them. They didn't even know the questions to ask. As the year went on and they developed new friendships, their time and enthusiasm for our conversations lessened, and I could tell that my absence had relegated me to a nuisance from the past. I sent messages to a few of them offering to bring back pirated DVDs and asking what they wanted but only one of them replied. That was one of the toughest parts about my time in China, feeling my friendships slip away and not being able to do anything about it.

Every morning I would descend the stairs, retrieve a bottle of water and bowl of cereal from the kitchen, and retreat back to my annex. I never saw any point in sitting alone at the oversized dining room table. Mr. and Mrs. Zhang traveled a lot and were not around very often, and David and Lily would spend a maximum of five minutes eating before an anxious nanny ushered them out the door to school. Besides, it made me uncomfortable the way the maids hovered, watching me, attempting to anticipate anything I might need. At 8 a.m. one of the maids would open the front door and escort me down in the elevator to the building's lobby where Victoria was waiting to take me to Chinese class. After three hours of class I had an hour-and-a-half break before tennis during which I would eat lunch with Victoria and go over what I had learned in class.

It was a strange feeling living in a place and not understanding the language; it was as if I had become both mute and deaf overnight. I was so unconnected to anything around me that at times it almost felt as if I didn't exist. But with each lesson the sounds and characters began to seem less alien, and I could feel
that I was beginning to make progress in turning the silence of my deafness into sound. While my Chinese was improving, I still lacked the vocabulary to have real substantive conversations. One of the difficulties with Chinese is that if you haven't learned a word, really the only way to guess the meaning is from the context in which it is used. It's not like Spanish or French where you can infer what something means from Latin roots or similarity to an English word, which makes immersion learning much more challenging. Rapid-fire interactions between native speakers were still as unintelligible to me as they would have been to any of my friends back home. Because of that, I had yet to make much of a connection with my new tennis teammates. It wasn't for a lack of trying, but there is only so much interaction you can have with another person when you don't speak a common language. Besides Bowen, only Chang Yang spoke any English. One day after practice Chang Yang told me he had an English name, “Random.”

“You have a random name?” I asked.

“No, my name is Random.”

“Random?”

“Yes, my name is Random,” he repeated. “My teacher give to me. You have Chinese name?”

“No,” I said. “Only an English name. Chase.”

“Cha-se,” he repeated. The way he pronounced it made it sound more like
Chay-Suh
. I hadn't seen Bowen since the second day. His absence at practice was yet to be mentioned or explained to me by anyone. I asked Random about Bowen but he didn't answer.

The second Monday I arrived at practice fifteen minutes early and found that Bowen was still missing. The same four boys I
had practiced with the week before were on the first court, positioned around the net, playing a game of mini-tennis in the service boxes. At the academy where I trained in Florida, my friends and I often played the same game before and after practice. The smaller area of mini-tennis favored skillful hands, trick shots, and misdirection. The game was a favorite of mine. Excited to have found a common ground, I snatched a racket from my bag and ran to the net so I could sub in for the player who made the next mistake. None of the four boys registered my presence. I was beginning to get the sense that they were suspicious and perhaps resentful of my being able to walk into their training program. They had worked hard to be where they were. They had been playing in the same program for as long as they could remember and most likely were fearful of losing their place.

I asked Random if I could play. “Next game,” he said. I waited. The four boys kept playing, and despite one of the boys losing two games in a row, the “next game” never arrived.

I stopped about halfway through practice that day because of pain in my elbow and wrist. I had been experimenting with changing my technique to suit the courts better, but slapping the ball low and flat had put strain on my arm. I explained it to Madame Jiang through Victoria. Madame Jiang nodded, uninterested, and said I could rest if I wanted to. I asked Victoria to ask her where the medical trainer was. Madame Jiang simply said, “
Mei you
(don't have),” and turned her focus back to practice.

I sat on the ground to the side of the first court, my back against the corrugated steel wall and watched the other boys practice. The whole group, Madame Jiang included, was on the second court. Madame Jiang stood at the service line on one side with a shopping cart of balls, racket in hand, the four boys in a single-
file line behind the opposite baseline. I watched as the boys rotated in one at a time and slapped forehands and backhands as hard as they could, not seeming to care where the ball ended up. Rather than improving, the boys were reinforcing terrible habits. Had Lukas been on the court, the sight would have made him apoplectic. Madame Jiang was making these boys worse.

Bowen appeared dressed in jeans and a loose-fitting gray T-shirt. He saw me and walked over and sat down beside me.

“Why you don't play?” he asked.

“I injured my arm.” His eyes moved upward to the ceiling and he mouthed the words slowly. “My arm, it hurts,” I said to clarify. I tried to think of the word I had learned that morning for hurt. “
Tou teng
,” I said, pointing to my arm.

Bowen laughed and pointed to his head. “This is
tou
.” I realized I had used the compound word for headache (literally
head-hurt
). I hid my embarrassment behind a smile, pointed at my elbow, and said, “
Dui, Dui. Zhe teng
(Right, right. This hurts).”

Madame Jiang spotted Bowen sitting next to me and shouted something at him. He sighed and stood up and started to walk toward the exit.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I have to go,” Bowen said.

I scanned the courts. Victoria was nowhere in sight, and Madame Jiang's attention was back on the boys on court two. Having no desire to sit by myself and watch more mindless drilling, and sensing Bowen was my best chance to make a friend, I jumped up and followed him. “Wait, wait,” I said. “I'll walk with you.”

Bowen stopped in the doorway. He glanced at Madame Jiang. “Okay.” He seemed hesitant. It had been dark every day by the
time I had finished practice, and it felt odd to step out of the complex into the brightness of the day. Bowen was several yards ahead of me, so I jogged to catch up. “Where are we going?” I asked.

“I go to . . . uh . . .
zenme shuo
(how do you say) . . .
sushe
(dormitory)?” He looked at me questioningly, but I was unfamiliar with the word. “Where I live,” Bowen said.

“Oh, okay. Your dorm.”

“Yes, dorm.”

“How come you haven't been at practice? Are you injured?
Teng ma
(hurt)?” I asked, making sure I got it correct this time.

“No.” He paused as if he was searching for the words to explain. “
Mei guanxi
(never mind).”

We walked along the cracked, gray pavement and followed the curve of the athletic stadium. We passed the five-sided statue that guarded the entrance. One guard and then a second emerged from the stadium's periphery. They marched side by side, chins held high, red-starred caps pulled down low, black automatic rifles pressed tight across their chests into their starched and pressed green uniforms. Neither acknowledged us. I wondered if their guns were loaded.

Bowen interrupted my thoughts. “Why do you come to China?”

“I want to turn pro when I'm older. So I'm not going to school this year. Just playing tennis,” I said. Knowing it was something I was going to be asked a lot that year, I had practiced my answer a thousand times in my head. But when I heard it, it sounded false. It was the truth, it just wasn't the whole truth.

“Me, too.” Bowen's sudden intensity surprised me. “I want to be professional player, too. Wimbledon.” He struggled with the word and tried again. “Wimbledon. I am going to win Wimbledon.”

“My club at home has grass courts,” I said. “But I'm terrible on grass.”

He frowned. “But why do you come to China? I think maybe it is better in America, no?”

“Well, my dad is here a lot for work,” I said. Both of us knew that this was an incomplete answer. I wasn't sure I knew the true answer myself. Bowen didn't press me on it. We had now left the stadium and were following a brick path that bordered an artificial soccer field. Trees covered with a thin layer of dust lined the brick path. But they were barren and seemed pathetic compared to the maples and oaks that colored Greenwich every fall with impossible shades of red and yellow.

“So in America you are number one?”

“Me?” I asked, surprised. “No, no. In the twelve-and-under I was number fifteen. Now in the fourteen-and-under I am lower.”

“Oh,” Bowen said, clearly disappointed. “I am number two in China for under fourteen. Dali? You know him?” I shook my head. Bowen stopped and pointed back in the direction from which we had come. “He plays here. He is tall, hits ball like this.” Bowen screwed up his face, grasped an imaginary racket in his two hands, ducked low into an exaggerated athletic stance, and sidestepped to the left, pulling the pretend racket back as he did. He stopped and shadowed a double-handed backhand, slow and awkward, grunting loudly as he did it. I laughed out loud, recognizing it as the backhand of the tallest of our teammates.

“Okay, yeah, I know him,” I said.

“He is number six,” Bowen said. “The others are not so good, maybe numbers twenty, twenty-five. So you practice here now? How long?”

“For one year, I think,” I said.

“Good. I can practice my English.” He patted his chest and opened his hand to me as if he was offering something. “Maybe we can play doubles.” I knew we couldn't because foreigners were not allowed to compete in the national tournament, but I sensed this was his way of making up for the other boys.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and saw that Bowen had stopped walking. To our left were several rows of identical one-story bungalows that extended far down the brick path. Most wore their years poorly, their green doors pockmarked with brown patches where the paint had flaked off, and their whitewashed walls chipped and divoted. Bowen pointed down one of the tiled avenues that ran perpendicular to the bungalows, cutting the rows into columns. “Okay,” he said. “I go here. You should go back. Maybe Madame Jiang will look for you now. She can be angry.” The thought made him frown, but only for a second. He began to walk away but stopped and turned back to me. “Hey, what kind of music do you think is beautiful?”

“Coldplay, Outkast.” I could see the names meant nothing to him. He listed some names that he said were famous, but I didn't know them and have still never heard of them again.

“Okay, I will give you, uh—” He searched for the word.

“CD?”

“Yes.” He beamed. “I will give you CD.”

I walked back to the courts quickly with my head low. Bowen's warning had made me anxious about Madame Jiang's reaction to my leaving practice. I passed several uniformed guards. In all my time at the center, I never got used to their presence. I broke into a jog and rushed past the five-sided statue and up to the indoor complex. As I approached the main doors of the indoor center, I imagined an irate Madame Jiang waiting for me, and I
imagined the conversation I would have to have with my father about my skipping practice. I felt an anxiety I had last felt while waiting outside my principal's office after I had gotten into that fight with Jake Green.

But when I walked in, Madame Jiang didn't even register my presence. She must not have realized I had been gone. Or maybe she just didn't care.