Beautiful Country (7 page)

Bowen was back with the team the following week. After Monday's practice he pulled out a CD from his tennis bag and held it out to me with a wide smile on his face. He asked me if I had brought one of American music for him and I told him that I had forgotten but that I would bring one the next day. I tried listening to his CD that night but I couldn't get it to play on my computer. The following day I gave him a
NOW
pop music compilation that I had brought from America. He studied the glossy album artwork and flipped it over and stumbled over the names of artists as he tried to read them aloud. He ran over to the other boys and showed them what I had given him. None of them seemed that interested, but for the next week Bowen would pull me aside before and after practice and ask me questions about the different artists and how to pronounce their names.

After two weeks of practice, I began to get to know my teammates quite well. I wasn't sure if it was because he spent so much time talking to me, but I began to get the sense that Bowen wasn't quite part of the gang. The other boys would walk to practice together in a group. But Bowen would already be at the courts alone, running sprints or hitting serves. When we would
have water breaks, the other boys would stand in a circle and chat and joke, while Bowen came over and sat by me. I noticed other things about my teammates too. You can learn a lot about a person's nature by the way they play a sport—whether they are conservative, impulsive, imaginative, bold, optimistic, pessimistic, a risk taker, a cheater—it's all coded in the choices a player makes. Lukas always said that a hard-fought game of tennis laid bare one's soul.

The boys on the team had differing levels of commitment to practice. With the exception of Bowen, they played with a sense of obligation and duty as if they were going to work every day. Random treaded water, waiting for the time to come for him to leave. Only Bowen had his heart in it, or at least that is how it seemed to me.

I would later learn that Random was the only boy who didn't come from a desperately poor background. I don't know how she found out, but Victoria informed me that Random's father had recently made money in a shirt business—selling cheap white shirts to the growing Chinese workforce over the internet. So Random had a safety net underneath him. I guess because he knew he had a better future than the other boys, he had developed a protective attitude toward some of them. I once asked one of the boys if I could borrow some tape for blisters on my hand, but Random shook his head and said I shouldn't ask for anything from them because they couldn't afford to give anything.

In the first two weeks I was paired with Little Mao quite a bit. He said he was sixteen, but he looked older. His teeth were so crooked and at such odd angles to one another that I guessed it must have been hard for him to bite food properly. He hit the ball flat and hard and never varied the way he played. He stayed
on the baseline and was uncomfortable at net. I had figured out on the first day that the way to beat him was to frustrate him by mixing up the speed and placement of the ball. A chip, followed by a lob, followed by a heavy forehand would rattle him, and he would miss by overhitting. If you gave him the same ball every time in a rally, he would lock onto the rhythm and send a winner streaking past you. When we did drills such as figure eights or side-to-side movement, Little Mao almost never missed. He was like playing the backboard.

Dali was the opposite of Little Mao. Whereas Little Mao was small and worked hard, Dali was tall, thin, and extremely talented but the laziest player in the group. Little Mao could not hide his irritation at Dali's squandering his talent. He would look over in amazement at Dali doing a tough drill with ease and then later react with disgust as Dali tanked another match because he didn't feel up to it. He always looked for the shortcut in a rally, and he was happier to let a ball go than to lunge after it. But even though Dali was the laziest out of all of us, his raw ability meant that when he actually tried, he was the second-best player in the group. I also liked his name because it reminded me of the artist.

Then there was Lu Xi, whose last name,
è·¯
(
Lu
), meant
path
or
road
, and whose first name,
希
(
Xi
), meant
hope
. We called him Hope for short. Hope was agile and graceful and played a way that was reminiscent of the bygone era of serve and volleyers like Stan Smith and John McEnroe. He wore glasses and old tennis whites. He showed up and went to work like a dutiful accountant and never showed any emotion at practices. The only thing he would do if he missed a volley at net was to push his glasses closer to the bridge of his nose with his index finger.

Despite practicing every day for months with Hope and Dali,
I never really got to know them well. Hope was only seventeen, but there was something broken about him, almost as if all emotion had been drained out of him. The only time he ever really seemed content was when he was on the tennis court. He had a good serve that depended more on placement than power, and he often came to net. All his tennis clothes, I later learned, were hand-me-downs from his uncle who had been the men's number one player for Taiwan. I once tried to speak to him about Taiwan, but he did not want to tell me anything. He kept to himself, even among the other Chinese boys. Hope and Dali were both seventeen and would soon be moving on. Either they would be good enough to make the men's team, or they would be deemed not good enough and dismissed from the program. No second chances, no safety nets, no soft landings. Only Dali didn't seem to care about the outcome.

Over the time that I spent playing with these boys, I came to understand the risk with which they had to live life. They were given one opportunity, just one. It was theirs to manage, and there was no one to help them. I guess things had been decided for me too, but it was different. I was expected to apply myself as my father had done and as his father had done before him, but if I was not doing well at something, there was an alternative plan, and there was always someone watching out for me.

Of all the boys, Bowen was by far the most naturally gifted and the best player. He was never without his yellow bandanna tied around his shaggy head of hair that he held up high in a sort of defiance against the world. As a lefty, he nailed his serve consistently at high speeds, and he could place it almost anywhere. Each shot took him at least three feet closer to the net, so he just attacked and attacked until his opponent returned a weak shot.
Bowen would then send the ball to the open court with so much precision and power that most times his opponent wouldn't even bother to chase it. By the time two weeks had passed, I could tell that Bowen had consciously played me in such a way as to bring out the best in my game. It was as if he had flipped his understanding of how to win into an understanding of how to lose, but in a way that still made it look as though he was trying.

Bowen was always asking questions about America and what it was like. He noticed my clothes—if I wore a T-shirt that I had gotten at a national tournament that had the location of the tournament printed on it, he would ask me about the city—San Antonio, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Springs, Dothan. He was especially curious about the Orange Bowl. At the start of one practice I fished out a bottle of Advil from my tennis bag. My elbow hurt from hitting the hard flat balls. Bowen asked me what Advil was.

“It's medicine for my elbow. To make it stop hurting so I can play.”

“Does it work?”

“It helps.”

Practices in Beijing started differently from how they did at home. In America, we would warm up by first stretching and then jogging twice around the court and then turning sideways and sidestepping around the court. Next came alternating crossover steps that twisted your body from side to side. Sometimes our coaches would ask us to get our rackets out with the covers on and swing them in shadow strokes to warm up our shoulders. The routine had been thoughtfully crafted to minimize injuries and gradually increase the level of exertion.

Without fail the Chinese practices almost always started with juggling. Perhaps Madame Jiang thought it would train us to
keep our eyes on the ball. Occasionally she would interrupt practice and tell us to run laps around the outdoor track that was part of the sports complex. The randomness of her inclusion of this conditioning exercise was disruptive to practice. Only once can I remember her ever instructing us to run laps at the end of practice.

Though I hoped my time in Beijing would greatly improve my tennis, what little instruction was given during the tennis drills was incorrect, and I found myself regressing. None of Madame Jiang's footwork drills made sense. When we were doing an overhead drill, she chided me about my footwork. As I had been taught by Lukas, when jumping back for an overhead I would push off my right foot, scissor kick, and land on my left. But Madame Jiang tried to get me to do the opposite, to jump off with my left foot. It made no sense to me. I knew what she wanted me to do, but the movement was so awkward and made it much harder to generate any height or power. Bowen looked as if he were playing badminton. I resisted what she was instructing, and she got frustrated with me. Bowen said to me quietly, “Do what she asks.” I did as Madame Jiang instructed even though I knew it was wrong. She was pleased and smiled and nodded her head. When the drill was over and we were picking up balls, Bowen moved close to me and repeated what he had said when I had first practiced with the team. “She doesn't know how to play tennis. Only volleyball.” He lifted his chin toward her. “She doesn't know anything about tennis.”

“What do I do at the next practice?”

“Do it both ways. When she looks at you—left foot, when she is not—right foot. She forget soon. Just wait.”

A few summers before Tom died, my father took us on a trip to visit good friends who spent every summer in a beautiful but crumbling villa in Tuscany just outside the small town of Marlia. My father's friends didn't have children and didn't know what to do with Tom and me so we were free to do whatever we wanted in the day. Tom had gotten a video recorder for his birthday and for those two weeks he filmed our exploration of the run-down villas in the surrounding countryside. We would spend the evenings watching and editing the day's footage. It soon took shape as
And So We Venture Forth
, a film, Tom declared, that would rival any documentary of exploration he had watched on the National Geographic Channel. For the next two weeks Tom and I snuck into falling-down villas, private chapels, stables, and, in one case, a frog-filled tunnel that connected the main house to a kitchen house. We lit our way with flashlights, and every so often in the film, Tom's voice would softly say, “And so we venture forth.” At the bottom of one of the hills we explored, Tom found the plot for his movie in a large fountain that graced the entrance to a sixteenth-century villa. Tom took the opportunity to introduce himself to the camera and said, “In the spirit of other
great explorers, he, Thomas Ott Robertson, being of low birth but high ambition, hoped”—
hoped
: he repeated as if to emphasize the odds against us—“to find the source of the fountain.” He filmed us going through the bamboo gardens and paths that led to a large stone tank that collected rain and spring water that ran off the hill. At the end of the film, Tom balanced the camera on the ledge of the holding tank and walked around to face the camera. He described our affinity to the world's greatest explorers: Captain James Cook, Sir Ernest Shackleton, Hernando de Soto, Sir Walter Raleigh. Tom put his arm around me and concluded, “And so we ventured forth.” He made me promise that every year, with or without him, I would do something worthy of the
And So We Venture Forth
Club.

On the weekends, Victoria and I would take trips around the city, to markets, to museums, to old Buddhist temples, and to monuments from both the Communist and Imperial eras. I looked forward to those trips and I think Victoria did too because she told me once that she planned to do the same thing when she had a daughter. It was a nice break from the everyday routine of Chinese lessons and tennis practice, and we got to visit a lot of really interesting places. It gave us the chance to talk about a lot of things too, and it was nice just to have someone to talk to.

I also felt as though those trips helped me learn about China in a way that books never could. Victoria showed me how the buildings of Beijing held the history of China in their bricks and mortar. She showed me the old city wall that had once been the outermost layer of the city and had protected the citizens against centuries of invaders. But the wall now stood useless, miles from the city's expanded limits. Like most things from the past that no longer had a use in modern-day China, the wall was seen not as
a part of history that should be preserved, but rather as an inconvenience. Large sections of the wall had been torn down to make way for new real estate developments and thousands of bricks had been stripped from the remaining sections of the wall to be auctioned off at exorbitant prices to China's new wealthy elite as symbols of their wealth and prosperity. The Zhangs had several of those gray stone bricks displayed on a bookshelf in their living room, next to the picture of them with the Clintons.

My favorite afternoons were the ones where we just wandered through the hutongs, the fast-disappearing network of winding, narrow alleys that spidered through Beijing. We visited old courtyard houses and tea shops that had been in the same families for hundreds of years. People walked or rode bicycles everywhere. Elsewhere in the city it felt as if the pace of time had been set to fast-forward. Every day more hotels opened, more malls were planned, more factories sprouted up, more jobs were created, more people bought cars and laptops and iPods and designer clothes, and more and more parts of the old city disappeared. But in the hutongs, time crawled reluctantly forward and it was easy to get lost in those narrow alleyways.

On our wanderings around Beijing, Victoria and I would play a game to see who could find the sign with the most amusing English translation of the Chinese characters. Our game soon developed into a serious competition. We named it the
Translation Olympics
, and there were multiple different events. There was the VENDOR & RESTAURANT category, the winner of which was a laundry shop with
CLEENING SERVICE FOR CLOVES
written in English below the Chinese sign. The silver medal in that category went to the restaurant whose motto was
SMART NOSHERY MAKES YOU SLOBBER,
and promised that their food was “guaran
teed not to cause pregnancy.” The small
jiaozi
(dumpling) store around the corner from the language school that advertised
FRAGRANT AND HOT
M
ARXISM
lost out because of its lack of subtlety. Then there was the PROHIBITED ACTION category in which
NO STRIDING
narrowly lost out to
DO DRUNKEN DRIVING.
Honorable mentions in that category went to
NO
LOUDING, THE GRASS IS SMILING AT YOU—PLEASE DETOUR,
and
KEEP OFF THE LAKE
.

My favorite was the HEALTH & SAFETY category.
BE CAREFUL OF CAUTION
took the gold over
PLEASE SLIP CAREFULLY
, and a sign that clearly meant to say
CLEANING IN PROCESS
but instead read
EXECUTION IN PROCESS
. In the INDIVIDUAL FREESTYLE—a category for translations that didn't fit into the other categories—a fire extinguisher labeled
HAND GRENADE
stormed away with the gold medal. It strikes me now that many of the Chinese I encountered that year were just like these translations. They forged ahead and didn't let their lack of understanding or grammar worry them. They didn't wait for conditions to be perfect. They just kept pushing forward.

One of the first places in Beijing that Victoria took me was to her husband's art studio. One Saturday morning, a couple weeks after I first arrived in Beijing, Victoria picked me up at the Zhangs' and told me that she was taking me to a place called 798. As Driver Wu sped away from the Zhangs', Victoria told me a little bit about where we were headed. She explained that about ten years ago a group of artists had taken over a number of abandoned military factories on the outskirts of the city and turned the spaces into studios. The area was now called Art Zone 798 or just
Qi Jiu Ba
(798) for short. The name came from Factory No. 798, one of the largest factory buildings in the complex.

Art Zone 798 turned out to be a collection of cinder-block
buildings organized along a grid. We pulled in and parked, and Victoria called to a man smoking a cigarette in front of one of the buildings. I assumed he must be her husband. He was quite small and looked to be in his early forties. He wore paint-spattered gray work pants and a hooded sweatshirt. He waved to Victoria and threw his cigarette on the ground and walked toward us.

The man exchanged a few words with Victoria and then the two of them stopped talking and looked at me. Victoria laughed and slapped the man on the shoulder. She switched to English. “Well . . . say hello to Chase!” He spoke to me in Chinese, but I didn't catch a word of what he said. “Ah!” Victoria said with mock severity. “
Yong Yingwen!
Use English! His Chinese is not that good yet.” She smiled at me. “But he is practicing—right, Chase?”

“Hello. My name is Z,” he said. “Very pleased to meet you.”

I extended my hand and shook his. “Z? Is that your real name?” I asked.

He laughed. “It is not the name my mother gave me, no. But it is the name I used for art.” He shrugged. “So yes, you can call me Z.”

“Your English is very good,” I said. “I'm impressed.”

“I spent ten years studying and living in New York.” He lit another cigarette. “Want to see my studio?”

As we followed Z, Victoria pointed to the cinder-block buildings. “This all used to be factories. To make guns.”

“When?”

“Oh, I don't know,” Victoria said. “Long time ago. Maybe more than forty years. Now it's all artist studios here. And restaurants. All of them but they used to be factories for guns. That's why it's
called Factory 798. All factories that make weapons for the army are given number seven.”

“Why number seven?”

Victoria looked at me quizzically and laughed. “I don't know! That's just the number they choose.”

We followed Victoria's husband to the studio that he shared with three other artists. He walked over to where some futon mattresses surrounded a low table. He unplugged a kettle from the wall, refilled it, and plugged it back into the wall. While the water was getting hot, he walked around his studio with me. It was much larger than I had expected and had high ceilings with large skylights that filled the studio with sunlight. Z stopped in front of a large canvas with eight
Wizard of Oz
–sized munchkins dressed in military outfits standing in a row. Behind them was a large airplane parked on a runway. He stood waiting for my reaction. “Cool,” I said. “I've never seen anything like it.”

After our tour, we walked to the corner of the studio and sat on the mattresses and drank green tea. Victoria asked me what I thought of her husband's paintings. Did I think Americans would like them? I could tell that Victoria was hoping I would buy one. I told her that I liked them, and the next time my father was in Beijing we should show them to him because he knew a lot more about art than I did. Victoria seemed satisfied with my response. She asked Z to show me other artists' studios.

We walked to a second studio in a nearby building. The walls were covered with large canvases bearing images and slogans taken from old Communist propaganda but painted in a style that was more reminiscent of Andy Warhol's. I assumed the artist was mocking the embrace of the Communist Party in China, but when I asked Z and Victoria if the artist really be
lieved the slogans, they nodded and both said yes. Victoria said they would take me to the studio of the most successful artist in China, Zhang Xiao. She explained that one of his paintings had just sold for over $500,000 in an auction in Hong Kong. Zhang Xiao's studio was at the end of a long row. As we were coming to the door, I suddenly heard the surreal sound of American accents echoing inside the gallery. I was hit by that sense of surprise you feel when you run into a close friend in a place you're not expecting them to be and you have to double-check it's them. It had been four or five days since I had seen another American and a week since I last spoke to my father and had heard American-accented English. Just as we walked in, I saw an American couple, accompanied by a scruffy-looking woman with peroxided blond hair, heading for the exit. The blond woman was an art guide of some sort. She spoke in loud nasal tones and punctuated her speech with wild arm movements. When she saw me, she stopped talking abruptly and all three of them gave me puzzled looks. I realized they were obviously very confused by what an American boy was doing wandering around the outskirts of Beijing with a Chinese couple. It struck me as a funny situation and I decided to mess with them. I nodded at them and with a straight face said, “
Nimen hao
,” in my best Beijing accent. They looked about as bewildered as I've ever seen anybody in my life and it took every ounce of effort to contain my laughter until they had made it through the door.

Zhang Xiao's studio was twice as large as Z's. On every wall were these massive portraits of ordinary Chinese people all painted in shades of pale grays and greens. The way they had been painted made them look almost like cartoon characters. Their heads bulged at the top and then narrowed to a point at the
chin. They had huge, balloon eyes with enormous dark pupils and tiny mouths with thin, pursed lips. The faces were stoic, their lips closed and silent. But underneath that stoicism I could sense a terrible sadness that came through in their eyes. It made me feel as if all these people held stories that had never been told to anyone. Stories that were begging to be told, but would always remain suppressed. Many of the paintings were of incomplete families. A mother and a daughter, a solitary man, a father and a baby. I felt as if their sad, haunted gazes followed us around the darkened studio.

Z suggested that we all have lunch at the restaurant he had just opened. Victoria explained that Z and two other artists from his home province, Guizhou, had started it together. She explained that opening restaurants had become a popular thing for artists to do in China. The restaurant provided them with food to eat, money to pay some bills, and a gallery space to exhibit their work.

The restaurant
,
which had the less-than-creative name The Three Guizhou Men, was about a two-minute walk from Z's studio. The entrance was marked by a bright red sculpture that Z had made especially for the opening. It resembled a sort of totem pole composed of three comically squat men stacked vertically, their arms raised overhead, supporting the figure of a man above. A hostess wearing an elaborate headdress and costume that I suspected was traditional Guizhou formal dress greeted us outside and brought us to a table in the back. Almost immediately after we had been seated, dishes of steaming vegetables, rice, and meats started appearing. Z did what I had noticed a number of Chinese do: he took his napkin and tucked a corner of it under his plate and then used the end of it to wipe his mouth or his hands.

Z explained with great care that these dishes were the dishes his mother used to make. When our waitress brought us a plate of sliced peppers and beef, Z got very excited. He stabbed his chopsticks at the bowl. “This is my favorite. Try, try.”