Chenxi and the Foreigner (4 page)

Chenxi stumbled to the window in his underpants and yanked open the blinds. The tiny, dusty room he shared with his mother was illuminated by the late morning sun. Along one wall lay his bed, along another, his mother's. The third wall was filled by a huge cabinet, which served as bookshelf, clothes cupboard, crockery cabinet and television shelf. Everything Chenxi and his mother owned had its place in this cabinet, and what was left over fitted ingeniously into crevices between and under beds, behind the door and under stools.

The centre of the room was dominated by an ornately carved mah-jong table covered with a thick sheet of glass under which were compressed certificates, birthday cards and photos: an identity photo of Chenxi's mother, a photo of Chenxi as a baby. But the photo of Chenxi's father stayed locked in a drawer.

Chenxi dressed quickly and bounded down the dingy stairwell of Apartment Block Eighteen to the phone booth outside.

‘Hello, Uncle,' Chenxi said with a grin. He bowed to the old man with the megaphone, whose job it was to shout out phone calls for the residents of the building. It was no use getting on this old man's bad side, Chenxi needed to use the phone too often! The old man nodded back and sipped from his jar of tea. Chenxi perched himself on the edge of the desk and dialled the college. ‘Mr Director very sorry,' translated the young secretary for Anna.

The three of them sat in a triangle around the college director's desk: Anna, the director, and his secretary who spoke a little English. The director had Chenxi on the other end of the phone.

‘Mr Director sorry for many inconveniencing you. Chenxi very bad. He will have lots of trouble. You father very angry, eh?' She seemed particularly anxious about this possibility.

‘No, not really,' Anna said. ‘It's not that much trouble. And don't worry, my father doesn't know anything.'

She tried to make them feel better, but the atmosphere in the small office was stifling. The director spoke into the receiver in a low terse voice, looking up every now and then, smiling at her. Anna shifted awkwardly. Her thighs stuck to the plastic chair in the heat.

The secretary repeated to herself, ‘Ah, yes! Chenxi lots of trouble.'

Chewing her lip, Anna thought back to her unceremonious arrival. The taxi driver had insisted on bringing Anna right into the college grounds. No sooner had the gatekeeper spied them than he was on the phone to the director who appeared with his secretary, both horrified to see the foreigner arriving on her own. Anna had been whisked into his office, hundreds of eyes staring down at her from the surrounding windows.

Within minutes, Chenxi arrived at the director's office, breathless and sweating, but with the same cool smile on his face.

‘Sorry,' Anna whispered. What sort of trouble had she caused for him? But Chenxi would not look at her.

The director hissed a few words at Chenxi, then the secretary said, ‘Chenxi look after you now,' and led them out of the office.

They strode down the hall and up two flights of stairs. All along the corridor, boys gawked from the doorways and girls giggled and twisted their hair. Every student watched Chenxi and the foreigner and every one of them had something to say about it.

They entered a large light-filled classroom on the top floor of the college. The cement floor was spattered with paint and the chalky white walls were pockmarked and grubby with fingerprints. Six large wooden desks were stationed around the outskirts of the room and the four boys sitting at them looked up as Anna entered the classroom. She was alarmed to discover that there were no girls in her new class.

Lao Li sniggered at Chenxi and raised his eyebrows at the small procession. The other boys in the room whooped and whistled. The teacher tried to call the class back to attention. For an instant, Anna wished she were floating in the consulate pool.

‘I hope you enjoy your stay,' said the secretary formally, with a hint of a bow to Anna as she left.

The teacher shuffled over to Anna and spoke in a soft voice, holding out his hand to be shaken. He was short and hunched with enormous buck teeth that stuck out so far they prevented his thick lips from closing. His left hand flapped around his sunken chin as if hoping to hide his teeth.

Anna shrugged, and looked to Chenxi for help.

‘This is Teacher Dai. Dai Laoshi,' Chenxi said, then he added something quickly in Chinese and the whole class laughed. Even Dai Laoshi couldn't suppress a toothy smirk. Anna felt a trickle of sweat run all the way down her calf. She shook Dai Laoshi's hand. It was like holding a small damp frog.

Chenxi spoke again and the five classmates moved into action, shoving desks and clearing paper until there was a space for Anna in a corner on her own. Dai Laoshi tapped the desk encouragingly. She walked over and sat on the chair beside it. As the class regained order, she laid out her pristine brushes, her ink stick still wrapped in cellophane, her ink stone and her roll of paper. Once the attention had shifted from her, she looked around the room.

The students were painting on silk, each of them with an open book or a duplicate of a painting beside them, copying every intricate brushstroke onto the delicate fabric. Anna was alarmed at the thought of beginning with such a difficult exercise, but she needn't have worried; apparently the teacher was as doubtful as she of her painting skills, and advised via Chenxi that she watch until the afternoon class, when they would have life drawing. To be dismissed so readily was not what Anna had anticipated either, but she had caused enough disruption for one morning so she sat and watched.

Chenxi was working next to Anna, his face devoid of expression, only glancing up to murmur to a lanky boy with a floppy fringe at the desk beside him. The boy would stifle a giggle or roar with laughter. But every now and then his eyes flitted towards Anna: she was clearly the subject of their conversation.

She looked over at a stocky moon-faced boy with nicotine-brown teeth who had laid his silk to one side and was working on a small piece of cardboard. When he felt her eyes on him, he lifted his head and grinned, holding up his work. On the cardboard was a drawing of a voluptuous woman with enormous breasts, wild curly hair and bright blue eyes. Underneath it was written: I LOVE YOU! The boys roared in appreciation and Anna reddened.

The class settled back to work and Anna began to relax. Now and then a student would glance at her and smile. Anna looked over at Chenxi when she could, studying his forearms and fine profile, but he was the only one ignoring her.

Half an hour later, Anna heard shouting and thumping out in the corridor. The hum of voices became louder. The students in Anna's class rinsed their brushes and pushed back from their desks, calling out to each other and to friends in other rooms.

The thumping became louder. Along with the excited voices, the sound was deafening. A siren shrieked and a roar of bodies surged along the corridor and thumped down the stairwells. Thinking it was a fire alarm, Anna stood up.

‘Eat! Eat!' Chenxi said to Anna, scraping back his chair.

Anna looked at her watch. It was only half past eleven. Lunch? The other boys in the class had already left, leaping and squealing into the corridor. Anna was alone with Chenxi and his tall friend with the floppy fringe. The boy loped over and stuck out a clammy hand to Anna, pushing his hair out of his eyes with his other hand, and grinning.

‘Lao Li,' he said.

Anna turned to Chenxi.

‘His name. Lao Li.'

‘Low-lee,' Anna tried, and the two boys laughed. But not unkindly. Anna scrutinised Chenxi's perfect face. There was never any malice in his eyes, Anna thought, consoled, but there never seemed to be any affection either.

‘You eat with us some lunch?' Chenxi asked. Anna picked up her bag and followed them downstairs.

‘Why are there no girls in your class, Chenxi?' she asked.

‘Chinese girls prefer to do class for sewing or design,' he explained. ‘Traditional Chinese painting usually for men.'

It hadn't occurred to Anna that Chinese painting could be considered a masculine thing to do. At her school, art was considered a feminine occupation, and a slack one at that. Great, thought Anna. I'm not doing well if I'm competing with those prissy Chinese girls for Chenxi's attention. She looked down at her heavy leather sandals and tried to imagine her feet in the dainty plastic heels that the local girls wore. The thought made her giggle.

She wondered if Chenxi found her big western body and boyish clothes unattractive. She had always found it easy to lure boys; in Melbourne they liked her big breasts and round hips and she dressed the way all girls her age did. Perhaps, for Chenxi, she was too different to be attractive? She loved everything unfamiliar about him, but maybe she was too foreign for his taste.

They reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped out into the college grounds. ‘Where you bike?' Chenxi asked.

‘I caught a taxi,' she blushed. She knew he already regarded her as a rich foreigner, and she hated to flaunt her money in front of him. ‘You were supposed to come and pick me up!' she added defensively. She had planned to be cross with him—twice he had let her down—but she hadn't had a chance in the morning's confusion and she felt cheated.

They walked towards the bike shed. Chenxi wrenched a bike from the rusty tangle. ‘I have show you the way yesterday,' he said.

‘Not by bike. That was by taxi. How do you expect me to remember that?'

Lao Li circled his bike ahead, waiting. Chenxi shrugged and slung one leg over the seat, then patted the back of his bike. Anna hesitated then clambered awkwardly onto the metal carry rack behind Chenxi. She wasn't sure whether to try and side-saddle like the Chinese girls did, but she thought she'd feel safer with her legs on both sides of the bike, so she opted for a self-conscious straddle.

Chenxi turned to face her. ‘I take you home today after class, then you know which way. Tomorrow you come by yourself, OK?'

Anna looked at him. ‘Aren't you being paid to look after me?'

‘How old you are?' Chenxi asked.

‘Eighteen,' replied Anna, pleased that he was showing an interest in her.

‘Then you old enough to come to school yourself!' He stepped down hard on the pedal and they wobbled off to catch up with Lao Li.

6

The noodle shop was overflowing. People stood in the street hunched over bowls and slurping, or hanging around waiting for a stool.

A young curly-haired Mongol worked the dough on a trestle table at the entrance of the small restaurant. There were smudges of flour on his wind-cracked cheeks. He slapped, folded and pulled the dough in strips the length of his arm, again and again, until the strips were as fine as spaghetti. Then he twisted off a length and dropped it into the boiling soup. He only looked up when everyone else did, to stare at the foreigner on the back of a Chinese man's bike.

Chenxi acted as if he didn't notice. He and Lao Li parked their bikes and strolled into the shop. Anna brushed off her shorts and followed.

The old man serving up the steaming bowls of noodles pushed a boy off his stool and beckoned for Anna to come in and sit down. Anna looked at the walls spattered with grease and insects, at the grimy tables and the sodden wood chopsticks in baskets. To her right a man cleared his throat and spat on the floor. Her father would be horrified. She was annoyed that Chenxi would expect her to eat in a place like this, but she didn't want to hear his snide remark if she asked to be taken to the Hilton.

‘You want that seat?' Chenxi asked, pointing to the vacant stool.

‘Er, no, I'm not hungry actually,' Anna said. ‘I think I'll walk back to class.' Chenxi shrugged and took the seat for himself.

Anna inched out of the shop and set off in the direction they had come from. She had tried to pay attention during the ride, but at times, balancing on the back of Chenxi's bike, her arms around his waist, it had been hard not to shut her eyes and breathe in the pleasure of being close to him. Why couldn't she stay angry with him for any length of time?

As Anna wandered back in what she hoped was the direction of the college she recognised the rancid smell of Suzhou Creek, which ran behind the market street. Chenxi must have skirted it on his way to the noodle shop. She remembered back in Melbourne her father had spoken to her and her sisters about this infamous river long before he'd seen it himself. This river, where people lived on houseboats, fished, and washed their vegetables, was so polluted that it boiled twice a year because of the methane gases trapped beneath its surface.

Her father had launched the Australian engineering company in Shanghai that had made an attempt to clean it, but after a three-year delay caused by complicated and unfamiliar bureaucracy, everyone had given up and gone home. Only Anna's father had stubbornly persisted, on the pretext that he refused to leave a job unfinished.

The first time Anna visited her father in Shanghai, two years ago, he took her and her two younger sisters across the river. As the taxi crawled over the bridge, Mr White lecturing proudly to his uninterested daughters, they had wound up the windows to block out the stink. Anna and her sisters peered down, revolted, at the ooze of rainbow-slicked water where fish floated belly-up and rats scrabbled among the debris on the banks.

Anna's mother always said that the job in Shanghai was a convenient escape from the family; returning home would mean her father would have to deal with all the problems he had left behind. When the job in China came up, Anna's mother willingly took on the role of the martyr, and stayed in Melbourne so that the girls' schooling would not be disrupted. Anna knew that her mother, with her sighs and her long afternoons in bed with the blinds closed, was a difficult person to leave, and that if her father had been a more honest man he wouldn't have used the job as an excuse. Anna had found it hard enough to extricate herself from her mother's cloying neediness even to visit her father in Shanghai for four weeks.