China Mountain Zhang (37 page)

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Authors: Maureen F. McHugh

BOOK: China Mountain Zhang
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“I’ll teach you a pattern,” he promises, and taking me by the wrist, pulls me to the center of the room where we are most noticeable, and teaches me a pattern, a simple one. We dance and I think he’ll get tired of me, but he doesn’t. He changes pattern dancing into something baroque, to go with his Spanish clothes. He invests the steps with a stiffness, machismo. He holds my hand high and when he looks at me, he has veiled his eyes under those lashes. He looks like a willful boy who is sensitive to slights. And the more I laugh, the more he warms under the attention.
So, of course, late in the party I take him home. We slip down the steps to the subway and sit on the train, casually uninterested in each other, my left knee touching his right, while an old man sleeps across from us and a girl in a waitress’ uniform knits next to us.
I take him into my room, out of the dark hall where the lights go off the moment you open your door, and he says, “This is where you live?”
I imagine it’s too bare for him, I don’t even have a comfortable chair. “I haven’t been here long.”
Then he surprises me. “This is really nice,” he says softly, enviously. “Is this the way they do things in China?”
“No,” I say, “in China you’d program lights and wall colors. And there’d be more furniture.”
He nods, touches the walls with the tips of his fingers. “It’s white. Doesn’t white mean death?”
“It also means life. It depends on whether you’re Eastern or Western.”
“What are you?” he asks.
I shrug. “A little of both.”
He stands there, looking at me. Waits for me. I am the older man, I make the first move. That is a shock, too. I’ve always been the pick-up, or we were both young and there was no older/ younger, like with Peter. But now we are in my place and I have Invierno.
So I take him to bed.
 
 
I sleep and wake, turn carefully on the bed not to bother him, sleep again, coming half awake to shift. He shifts against me a couple of times, often only a moment after I do. We didn’t sleep until four or five. The light through the one window is bright by mid-morning. He has a lovely shoulder, hairless, the color of tea. Broad flat shoulder bone like an ax.
Used to be I’d be lying here wishing he would leave. Young men leave, don’t even sleep, they grab their tights, stand in the bedroom like one-legged storks, getting dressed. Once I’d have shifted around until he woke up, then I’d offer him breakfast. I’ll
be thirty-one in four months. I’m tired but I like him here, sleeping on his stomach, his face turned away from me.
He told me the tear tattoo was a prison thing a hundred years ago. Fashion now. After the liberation, gay men doing reform through labor had the tattoo. A totem. A sign. A signal. I don’t touch him, he’d wake up.
Someone knocks on the door and Invierno sits straight up.
“Just a minute!” I call.
“Shit,” Invierno says, rubbing his face. “What time is it?”
“Around ten-thirty.” I drag on the pants to my suit—lying on the floor next to the bed—and push my hair out of my face, open the door just wide enough to see out. It’s Vanni, my next door neighbor. She’s fresh, brown face turned up, big eyes, wild black hair caught back.
“Oh,” she says, “were you asleep?”
I slip out in the airless hall, the heat is hard, makes me feel as if I can’t breathe. “What are you doing up so early on a Saturday morning?” Vanni works late hours, I hear her come in at two, three in the morning.
She’s embarrassed. “I was just up, I was wondering about if you could help me strip my floor this weekend. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“Sure, I’ll help you strip it.” I say, “I’m so bored I don’t know what to do with myself. Look, I’ve got company, are you going to be home later this morning?”
“Oh God,” she says, covers her mouth, “Oh Rafael, I’m really sorry. I’ll be home.”
I smile at her, “Okay, I’ll see you later.” I guess I should be irritated, but I’m pleased. I like the idea of having neighbors.
Invierno is still sitting on the bed, bare feet on the floor. “I didn’t know it was so late,” he says.
“Are you late for work?”
“No, but I’ve got to do some stuff first.” He grabs his matador pants. In the bathroom my reflection is a revelation, haggard face,
hair stringing all over the place. I splash water on my face, drag a brush through my hair and tie it back.
While he’s in the bathroom I make coffee. He downs a cup, refuses my offer of breakfast. I tell him to call me if he’s free, give him my number. He stuffs it in the pocket of his jacket without looking at it or me. The morning after. But he smiles at me in the hallway.
Smiles are like tears. Totems. Signs. Signals.
In the white time, you cling to signals.
 
 
I become a teacher.
It’s laughable, in a way. The way I become a teacher is simply to have someone say “You’re a teacher.” A
professor
no less.
Brooklyn College is an old school with a long and illustrious tradition. They say that even before the liberation, anyone who had a college diploma could go to Brooklyn College and that it was free. There’s a statue of Christopher Brin in front of Martyr’s Hall and a plaque explaining that and that Brin was a graduate of Brooklyn College. I don’t exactly understand the logistics of all this. If anyone who wanted to could go to school, how did they keep from having classes of two hundred or two thousand students?
My preparation for teaching my course, a course titled “Engineering-Systems Applications” is an interview with Dean Eng. Dean Eng asks me my teaching experience and the only thing I can think of is tutoring. I tell her I tutored a martian settler and she asks me if I could possibly get him to enroll in my class here. He could audit for free.
I use the terminal in her office to send Alexi Dormov a telex. Her major piece of advice is to wait until class has started and then walk in without looking at the class, walk straight to the blackboard and write my name. Then announce my name, the
class name and call numbers and say that anyone who needs to add the class to their schedule should see me afterwards.
I assume this is some method of intimidating students with professorial manner.
“Not at all,” she explains, smiling in a kind of motherly way, “it’s a method of reducing stage fright. This way, when you turn around and look at all those faces you’ll have something to say.”
She is absolutely correct. There are fifteen people officially registered for my course, but when I turn around after writing “Zhang Zhong Shan” on the board there are easily thirty people in the classroom. I’ve never talked in front of so many people in my life and the minute I start with my lecture they’re going to know that I’m a fraud. I make my announcement about which class this is and nobody moves. Thirty faces, almost half of them ABC, all looking at me, most of them Invierno’s age. My knees are shaking. I stand behind the desk.
I glance back at the board behind me. The class before mine is a required politics class, someone has diagrammed the classic Marxist historical progression on the board: Primitive Society to Feudalism, Feudalism to Industrial Revolution to Capitalism to Proletariat Revolution to Socialism to Communism. All sorts of irrelevant things run through my mind. My first year in China, my roommate, Xiao Chen, was a Scientific History major. I can remember helping him study for exams. I can still remember the three major advancements in pure science in the twentieth century: Relativity, Quantum Physics and Chaos Studies.
“I know you are all going to be disappointed,” I say, “but this is an engineering course, not a politics course.”
Some of them smile politely.
“There is a member of the class who is present but several minutes behind us,” I say. “We will have a martian auditing the class by monitor, so please speak up loudly so Alexi can hear your contributions to class.” My voice sounds very shaky. They cannot possibly believe I am a teacher. But they all sit very expectantly.
When I start to talk, they all start their transcribers, highlighters ready.
When I wrote it, my opening lecture seemed brilliant. I don’t really want to teach anything today, I just wanted to get my feet wet and entertain them a little. Looking at my notes I realize I’m going to bore them all bonkers. I talk about how we think of using systems, and how we assume that we jack into the machine.
“Stimulation of your nervous system from an artificial system is illegal,” I say. “Why?”
There is silence.
Madre de Dios,
what do I do if no one answers the question? Then one young man raises his hand and I call on him gratefully.
“Because it’s addicting,” he says.
“How many of you have ever been to see a kite race?” I ask. It sounds like one of those teacher-questions (I am amazed at how much I sound like a teacher). Most of them raise their hands. “Well, a flier experiences the kite as a kind of second body,” I say. “The fliers feel the kites sail as if they were the flier’s wings, and if the kite develops a structural problem then the flier feels it as an ache. Something has got to be stimulating the flier’s nervous system,” I say. They glaze over. Did you know you can see boredom? I have other examples, the medical stuff in China, for one, but I decide to just finish up on fliers and forget other examples. I tell them about the system at Wuxi, where people didn’t jack in. Some of them look interested but nobody uses their highlighters. “In the future we might all be cyborgs linked into systems. In that future, we would all be organic engineers.” This sounds like a teacher lecture. Amazing how you don’t have to have any training to sound like every dull teacher you ever had in middle school.
I explain about organic engineers. I expected the lecture to take an hour, but I find it’s only taken twenty-five minutes. I tack on a little about the relationship of science to society, about how social thought always lags behind scientific change. Mostly because
of thinking about Xiao Chen. Then I realize I need an example.
What’s an example of how social thought lags behind scientific change? I mean, it’s a cliche, but other than talking even more about how everyone is afraid of feedback but how it is the way things will go in the future, I really can’t think of anything. Religion. But everybody knows about religion, and it’s not relevant to them.
“Take for example the diagram behind me on the board. Does anyone recognize it?”
They all look at me, blank. Of course they all recognize it. But it’s politics. Nobody in their right mind is going to volunteer anything about politics. Keep your head down, don’t get into trouble. Nervousness makes me a tyrant, I point at one young woman. “Tell me what it means.”
She looks around, hoping for escape. Normally I’d feel sympathy for her but now I am only concerned with how to fill another fifteen minutes.
“Ah, it’s Marx’s analysis—”
Her voice is so soft I can barely hear her. “Sweetheart,” I say, trying to put her at ease, “you’ve got to talk loud enough to be heard on Mars.”
Louder she says, “It’s a Marxist diagram of historical progression.”
“Right. Now, what the diagram says is that primitive society eventually organizes into feudal society. Usually as a result of farming. That society eventually allows a few landlords—whether you call them lords or landholders or whatever—to accrue enough capital to invest in something other than farming. That capital forms the base for an industrial revolution, which paves the way for capitalist society. Capitalism exploits workers the way feudalism exploits serfs. But capitalism is an unstable system, with its boom and bust cycles, its violent corrections, and eventually there
is a proletariat revolution and a socialist system is established. So far so good?”
I expect them to be bored out of their minds, they’ve been chanting this relationship since junior middle school, but they are rigid with attention, the glaze of boredom is gone. Apparently there is some novelty in having an engineering teacher lecture them on politics.
“Okay,” I say, “when did China move from primitive to feudal?”
“The Emperor Qin,” someone says dutifully.
“From feudal to capitalist?”
There is a moment of silence. Finally an ABC raises his hand.
“Laoshi,
” he says formally, Teacher, “Mao Zedong changed the diagram. The revolution in China was a peasant revolution, not a proletariat revolution.”
“Wrong,” I say. The young man’s eyes get large.
“Lenin
changed the diagram. Other than that you are perfectly correct.” I sound like Comrade Wei, my calculus teacher in middle school. Marx and Lenin, I hated that man.
There is a nervous laugh. I find it very exciting to have their attention. “Can you name me an example of a country that did have a proletariat revolution?”
A young woman pops out without raising her hand, “We did.”
“Right. In the early twenty-first century the national debt and the trade deficit of the old United States precipitated the second depression. In effect, the country went bankrupt, and as a result, so did the economy of every first-world nation at the time except for Japan, which managed to keep from total bankruptcy but lost most of its markets, and for Canada and Australia, which created the Canadian-Australian alliance, a holding measure to preserve their own systems which survives until this day. The Soviet Union also went into bankruptcy because it was deeply invested in the U.S. bond market, whatever that was”—they all laugh, we’ve all been taught that the U.S.S.R. was deeply hurt in the economic
collapse because of their involvement in the U.S. bond market, but I’ll be damned if I ever met anyone who really knew what that meant. “And what did China do?”

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