China Mountain Zhang (20 page)

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Authors: Maureen F. McHugh

BOOK: China Mountain Zhang
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I’m so tired of being a colony of one.
Xiao Chen says, “Last night, out late.”
I answer in Mandarin, “I was with my tutor.”
“Studying?” he says, grinning.
I shake my head and smile. “No. I’m not that good a student.”
He does not even begin to suspect, straight-forward Xiao Chen.
A couple of Xiao Chen’s friends come over and we watch a vid. I work on my mathematics homework. I get a letter from Peter which begins, “You’re in love? I’m so jealous I can’t stand it. Tell me all about her, is she beautiful?” You never know when a transmission will be monitored. I write back extolling the charms of Haitao who I rename Hai-ming, Sea-jade.
Empty afternoon, empty evening. I am waiting, suspended, until Saturday evening.
I dress in my new clothes; calf-high boots, black jacket with swallow tails over red, and brushed gray tights like Haitao wore. Am I doing it wrong, I wonder? Have I chosen well? I could disappear on the street in a thousand similar outfits. Will he approve?
When he opens the door he is preoccupied.
“Lai, lai,
” he says absently. Come in, come in. And he is not alone.
I despair at not having him to myself. I wonder if I have not been good enough. I am angry at him for doing this to us. I am curious about this other—one of us? And I am elated at the thought of meeting people.
“Hello,” says the man on the couch, “You are Haitao’s
huaqiao.
”
“Hello, I’m called Zhang,” I say, and we scrutinize each other. Haitao is not particularly handsome, in the face he is rather plain, but he has good hair and a good build and is so polished that the net effect is dazzling. This man is casually, even badly dressed. His hair is cut as if someone dropped a bowl on his head and cut whatever showed and he hasn’t bothered to comb it. But he has a handsome face; something easy to miss. In my experience, no one is truly handsome or beautiful without working at it.
“I’m Liu Wen,” he says, “have a seat. Haitao is suffering and we should not interrupt a master.”
“Irony is the escape of the intellectual,” Haitao murmurs.
“Escape is escape. And if I must be a bad element, I might as well allow myself the luxury of indulging as many categories as possible.”
Bad elements. There used to be five categories of black elements; landlords, criminals, counter-revolutionaries, capitalists, and one other which I don’t remember. We studied it in middle school in Political Theory, that was a long time ago for me. Capitalists have been rehabilitated. I don’t remember where intellectuals originally came in, perhaps counter-revolutionaries, but bent as we are, we are criminals. That has not changed in all the years since the revolution.
“Let’s do something,” Liu Wen says.
“It’s early,” Haitao answers, still preoccupied with the view out the window.
“Then let’s go get something to eat.”
Haitao shrugs. And so we go out into the evening and catch a bus. Liu Wen is in charge and Haitao doesn’t ask where we are going. So I don’t either. I notice at an intersection that we’re on Jiankang Lu but I couldn’t retrace my steps. Liu Wen gets up and we swing off the bus and saunter into a restaurant. It’s beautifully finished. My first restaurant in Nanjing. The floors are inlaid wood
and one entire wall looks like red lacquer, finished in so many coats that it seems as if you could put your hand into it like water.
Liu Wen orders duck and four other dishes and beer. I apologize and explain that I can’t drink beer. They bring tea, and eventually duck with creamy white skin and red tender flesh. “It’s a specialty,” Liu Wen says. It is tasty. I chase it with my chopsticks, and wash down monkeybrain mushrooms with my tea.
Liu Wen turns his attention on me. How do I like China? What is it like in New York? How did I get here? He is fascinated when he learns that I worked north of the Arctic Circle, on Baffin Island. He worked in Australia for awhile, he explains, in Melbourne. “Australia will be the next major economic power,” he says, “now that they have the technology to use the Outback.” He says “Outa-baka.”
It is a strange meal. The food is good, but it is disturbing to watch Liu Wen animated while Haitao sits and broods, playing with his duck. I don’t know the rules here.
“Did you go to Canada”—Liu Wen says
Jia-na-da
—“because of political problems?”
“No,” I say. “I went because it paid a lot and I only stayed for six months.” I feel like he is amusing himself with me,
hauqiao
from backward country. “Did you go to Australia for political reasons?”
Haitao laughs. “No,” Liu Wen says, “I went because I had heard Australian men are very big.” He grins. “And all that yellow hair. We didn’t have a Cleansing Winds.”
“Not in this century,” Haitao says, to no one in particular. He is looking away from us, off across the restaurant. Is he defending me?
“The Ten-Years Disaster, the Cultural Revolution, was different. That was because Mao Zedong went senile,” Liu Wen says, equally casual. “Cleansing Winds, that was because the American Socialist States had to make the ideological adjustment to the modern world. China didn’t have to join a technologically advanced
society, computers weren’t invented until the twenty-first century.” He leans towards me. “That is Australia’s problem, they haven’t really made the economic adjustment, their economy is still exploitive. When they do, the cultural adjustment is going to set them back. They’ll have to have an ideological revolution.”
You are full of shit, I think, nodding. Cleansing Winds was a civil war between Carson’s conservatives who felt that the economy had to be controlled the way China’s was the first fifty years, and the Red Party who felt that people had to change ideologically, to think as if they were good socialists. But it wasn’t really an ideological struggle, it was just power. It is always just power. But I’m not going to contradict Liu Wen.
I have the feeling that he would like me to contradict, that he would like to see if he can make me look foolish in argument. When I just nod he seems disappointed. Maybe he is no more pleased to share Haitao with me than I am with him. Maybe I am just paranoid.
Liu Wen pays, they give him the debit statement and he doesn’t even glance at it. Out on the street it is night. “Still too early to do anything,” he says. At home I would suggest we go watch the kite races but here I don’t know what anyone does. Liu Wen is attractive, fascinating, but he seems interested in me only as conversation. That is all right, it is better than being alone. I think. I’m uneasy and uncertain. Wait, let things happen, I tell myself, live in this moment, there is nothing but enjoyment in this moment.
We take a bus across town to Linggu Park and walk. “They used to close the park,” Liu Wen says, “but now everything is monitored.”
It is a tacit way to say “be careful.” Liu Wen seems to catch Haitao’s silence. The evening is cool. We walk up a road until we come to a building surrounded by a moat crossed by three bridges. We stop and I try to figure out the reason we are here. The building is small, square, white, with a graceful blue tile roof with
upcurving ends in the tradition of Chinese architecture. It’s a nice little building, but what is the point?
“The tomb of your honorable namesake,” Liu Wen says to me, grinning.
“Zhong Shan?” I ask, stupidly. He nods. Sun Yat-sen is buried here. Well, imagine.
I glance at Liu Wen, he has a funny smile on his face. Haitao leans on the balustrade at the edge of the moat and looks down at the sluggish orange carp motionless near the light set under the bridge.
I don’t know what to say so I say nothing. I am not even sure if they are making fun of me.
“Well,” Liu Wen says to no one in particular, “let’s go play.”
Haitao straightens up and shoves his hands in his sleeves. We walk back and catch a bus.
We ride all the way back across town, out of the dark park into wide streets, then through the bright heart of Nanjing, back out into the dark edge of the city. The bus is only three segments when we get on, goes down to two, picks up two more in the center of town, loses them (people transfer from segment to segment but we just sit) and finally goes down to one segment before we get off. The air smells different down here. All of China smells different, I noticed a dusty, old-clothes smell when I got here, but I don’t smell that anymore. Here is a damp smell. Liu Wen remarks we are close to the river.
Around us are godowns. We walk past loading docks and parked flat-skids for moving goods off trucks. I can’t imagine why we would be here. Liu Wen stops at a metal door and hisses at me, “Don’t give your real name,” and opens the door on a badly lit stairwell. Up we go as I try to understand what he meant. At the top of the stairs another door, waiting behind Haitao I can’t see what it’s like when Liu Wen opens the door, only hear sudden music, people murmuring. I can’t hear what he’s saying, only that he is talking to someone at the door.
“Don’t worry,” Haitao whispers, “he is a member.” Then he follows Liu Wen to the door and this time I hear the doorman say,
“Shi shei?”
Who are you?
“Li,” he says, the most common surname in China.
“Shemma
Li?” Which Li?
“Li Haibao.”
I smile. “Haibao” means “seal.” I have seen seals with their cat’s heads and sad eyes in the waters off Baffin Island, and Haitao, in his sleek way, has picked a name that flatters him.
“Shi shei?”
the doorman asks me, he is wearing a white mask with holes for eyes and a slit for a mouth.
“Ma,” I answer.
“Shemma Ma?”
“Guai-zi,” I answer. Ghost or demon.
Haitao glances over his shoulder at me and smiles. I smile back. We are inside.
The place is big, after all, this is a godown, even if it’s not being used for storage. The light comes from floor level or just above our heads and the ceiling disappears in darkness. Looking up I almost think I see stars, which is of course an illusion. The lighting is all gold, our faces and hands are gold. There is a bar and some small tables, and then there are larger, square tables, with people standing around them. Gold light comes up from the tables.
“Want a drink?” Liu Wen asks.
I shake my head.
“Are you buying?” Haitao asks. “Mao-tai then.”
Liu Wen shakes his head and laughs. I remember my mother buying mao-tai for her future boss when she was giving gifts to change jobs. A bottle cost more than she made in two weeks, and that was twenty years ago.
In China, a secretary makes more in a week than I make in almost a month at home as a construction tech.
I wonder if I am dressed right. Looking around I see a few
people dressed as I am, and a few dressed in long formals, tails almost sweeping the floor at their heels as they stand at the tables. Some are dressed like Liu Wen, with complete disregard for appropriateness. What is this place, a gambling hall?
There are no women. I look around, surprised. There are no women. Haitao is watching me, smiling a little.
“In New York, do you have places like this?”
“I don’t know,” I say, “I don’t know what this place is.”
“Jiaqiu,
” he says.
I don’t understand. In Chinese, one word can have many different meanings, “jia” can mean “family” or “home” or it can mean “beautiful” or “welcome.” “Qiu” can mean “prisoner” or “ball.” I try sorting through meanings and nothing makes sense. Mandarin is a hell of a language in a lot of ways.
“Which ‘jia’?” I ask and he sketches the character on his hand.
“Jiagong de jia,”
he explains, which doesn’t translate into English. “Jiagong” means to be caught in a surprise attack by one’s enemies and closed in, almost squished between.
“The
jia of jiazi?”
I ask. “Jiazi” means clothespin, which in Chinese is called a “press-pin.”
“
Dui
,” he says. Right.
“Lanqiu de qiu?”
I ask. “Qiu” meaning “ball” as in basketball? “press-ball” or “squeeze-ball?” What the hell is “squeeze-ball?”
He nods.
“I don’t think we have that,” I say.
“You’ll like it,” he assures me.
I am not so certain. But Haitao brightens up, he actually looks at Liu Wen when Liu Wen hands him a tiny glass containing mao-tai.
“Let’s play,” Liu Wen says.
We find a table with only three men around it. They don’t glance up. The tabletop is featureless, a golden glow illuminating our faces like heat from a fire. Liu Wen picks up a contact and
grins at me with gold teeth before jacking in. The three men shift slightly as if someone had stepped up beside them. Liu Wen seems engrossed in the glow. Haitao jacks in and the four—Liu Wen included—absently shift again.
I study the glow for clues.
Whatever is happening, it’s not visible. I jack in.
The table is still there, but I have an overlay, I am in a circle with five others. It’s a little like contact when making a call, that instant before sound cuts in; I don’t see them but they are there. I try to see them and I can—five men around a glowing table—but then I almost lose the sense of contact.

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