Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (47 page)

We paid more than $4,000 each month for an office and a three-bedroom apartment. For that money, we got the same white
washed walls, drafty windows and scary elevators as ordinary Chinese flats. It was possible to have the apartment painted, but there was no guarantee the paint wouldn’t be lead-based, and it meant having to suffer through a dozen workmen lounging around your home for weeks. One of my predecessors, Norman Webster, decided to get his wooden floors refinished. A team arrived, strapped sandpaper to their running shoes and skated around his living room for days.

But at least we had Western-style bathrooms, sort of. The bathroom doors came with picture windows and the toilets sometimes flushed hot water. The shower ran either ice cold or scalding hot, with nothing in between. I remembered Pagoda Garden’s mystery plumbing every time Premier Li Peng assured investors and environmentalists that the gigantic Three Gorges dam China was building on the Yangtze River was completely safe.

What I loved — well, maybe
love
is too strong a word — what I
liked
about Pagoda Garden were the quirky touches so revealing of the national psyche. In a nation that once tried to outlaw private property, every single door in our apartment, including the kitchen pantry, the linen closet and the fuse box, came with a lock and key. The locks were of such poor quality that they regularly seized up, sometimes trapping us inside the room. Whenever I fretted about electronic bugs, the quality of Pagoda Garden’s locks always reassured me.

To me, our smoke detectors epitomized China’s crass new materialism. I was impressed we had them at all, until an inspection team dropped by, armed with a lit cigarette and an eight-foot length of bamboo. Norman and I watched one man blow cigarette smoke up the hollow pole while the other aimed it at our dining-room smoke detector. They prepared to leave.

“But I haven’t heard a thing,” Norman protested.

The smoker looked at him as if he were stupid. “The alarm sounds in
our
office,” he said. No one cared if
we
burned to a crisp. Big Brother just wanted to know if his real estate was okay.

My staff exploded many myths I held about China. I’m sure I did the same for theirs about foreigners. I had to laugh when Westerners asked for etiquette tips on dealing with the inscrutable, polite and highly civilized Chinese.

“What’s that on your nose?” Cook Mu asked one day as he set a dish of steaming dumplings on the table. I just
knew
he would ask. I was having a bout of complexion problems during pregnancy.

With as much dignity as I could muster, I replied, “A pimple.”

“Gee, it looks pretty bad,” he said, standing there with his arms folded over his white apron. I grunted assent, and busied myself with the delicious dumplings, hoping he would take the hint and go back inside the kitchen. But he stood there, scrutinizing my nose.

“Bet it hurts, too,” he said, finally.

I stopped chewing and put down my chopsticks. “Yes,” I said, “it hurts.”

Another time, Yan Yan met me at the airport when I came back from a trip. “Wow,” my news assistant said by way of greeting. “Who cut your hair? Looks like a dog bit it off.” My old teacher, Fu the Enforcer, had made similar remarks. But somehow they bothered me less in the early days when I was enamored of Maoism and willing to put up with a lot.

Cook Mu exploded the myth that Chinese food was healthy. A former peasant who had learned to cook in the army, he didn’t stir-fry meat so much as boil it in oil. His real training was in French cooking — airy spinach soufflés, homemade strawberry ice cream and rosy filets of beef with buttery mashed potatoes. He even made bagels. At Christmas, he roasted a goose in traditional English style, stuffing it with forcemeat and sage. More than once, I ignored broad hints from the other staff that my weekly grocery bill exceeded Deng Xiaoping’s monthly pay. I suspected Cook Mu of inflating receipts, but I kept him on because, really, how many times in life could you find someone who made perfect roast chicken? Besides, I appreciated his comments on my acne.

“My wife is fooling around with Cook Mu,” the caller said. I sat up straight at my desk and, as was my phone habit in China, began to jot down notes. He said he was the husband of my housekeeper, Ma Baoying. “Since she started working at your place, we fight all the time. Several nights last month, she didn’t come home. She is having
relations
with the cook. She’s painting her
nails!”

“What do you want me to do about it?” I said. I had never met Housekeeper Ma’s husband, who installed radiators.

“You are the boss,” said the caller. “Its your job to stop them.”

“How?” I said.

“Fire her. Separate her from the cook. Then she will be assigned another job.”

I demurred, but the caller was adamant. “You are the work unit. You must stop them,” he said. “I’m an ordinary worker. I kneel down before you. I beg you to help me save my marriage.”

“I’ll look into it,” I said uncertainly, and hung up. What business was it of mine if the cook and housekeeper were indulging in hanky panky? I had done enough meddling in my time, and I certainly wasn’t going to do any more.

Cook Mu was a Communist Party member. Despite everything I now knew about China, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that Party members should be more honorable than the average person. Could he really be two-timing his wife, a peasant on the outskirts of Beijing whom he saw only a few times a year? I secretly started observing the two of them. Like many Beijing women in their thirties, Housekeeper Ma frizzed her hair, used lipstick, tattooed her brows and, for a while, even wore a wig. But so what? She often joked with Cook Mu, and he teased her back. While there was camaraderie, there was zero electricity.

One afternoon, the caller telephoned again.

“My wife is sleeping with Cook Mu,” he said. “She was caught in his dormitory room this week. You have to stop them.”

“Thank you for letting me know,” I said, and hung up.

I was beginning to doubt the caller was Housekeeper Ma’s husband. If she really had been caught in Cook Mu’s dormitory, Chinese officials would have dealt with it. Yet nothing happened.

One morning an official from the Diplomatic Services Bureau called. “Housekeeper Ma won’t be going to work today.”

“When will she be coming back?” I asked politely, knowing that, as the person who paid the salary, I had the least say in Housekeeper Ma’s schedule.

“We’ll send over another cleaner,” he said.

I was taken aback. “Why?”

“The police are interrogating Housekeeper Ma. She won’t be working for you any more.”

“Is it because of me?” I blurted. I lived with every journalist’s fear of getting someone into trouble.

“It’s nothing to do with you,” the official said blandly.

Housekeeper Ma phoned me the next morning. “I’m not working for you any more,” she said nervously.

“I know. Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine, but I want to collect a few things I left in the office. And I don’t want to see the others,” she said.

I wondered if she was in trouble because she really was fooling around with Cook Mu. But he seemed perfectly normal; if it were true, he’d be in hot water, too. I met her a few days later in an alley. When she saw me, she started to cry.

“I’ve been fired,” she said. Two days earlier, police had interrogated her. “They told me to confess,” she said, wiping away her tears. “I had no idea what they were talking about. They kept telling me to confess.”

That was standard operating procedure in China. The police already had the goods on you, but they wanted to see what else you coughed up. Housekeeper Ma had racked her brains. After ten hours, a policeman dropped the first hint. It had to do, he said, with pornography. She finally understood. Four years earlier, when she was a cleaner at the Polish Embassy, several drivers and maids got together to watch porno films on a VCR. One of the drivers had recently been arrested on unrelated charges, and when police tried the fishing-expedition tactics on him, he told them about the porno-film club.

“I supplied one of the cassettes,” said Housekeeper Ma, reddening in shame. She began to cry again. I hastily assured her I watched porno movies all the time.

“The police wanted to know where I got the film,” she said, “but I refused to name names. I’m not like that turtle’s egg driver. I would never turn anyone in.”

After fifteen hours of interrogation, the police released her with a warning. Then the Diplomatic Service Bureau fired her.

“What are you going to do?” I said.

“I’m going into business for myself,” she said defiantly.

I felt bad. I knew she would fail. I mean, Housekeeper Ma just wasn’t all that smart. And where would she get the start-up capital?

“If you need seed money, I can help,” I said.

She shook her head, thanked me for everything I had done and asked me to give Ben a hug. Lamely, I thanked her, too. Then she bicycled off.

Seventeen months later, Housekeeper Ma phoned to invite everyone to lunch at Pizza Hut. “Are you sure?” I said. “It’s pretty expensive.”

“No problem,” she said. “Make sure everyone comes: Cook Mu, Nanny Ma, Driver Liu, Ben and Fat Paycheck Shulman.” Pizza Hut was a big hit among Beijing’s up-and-coming middle class. It was clean, served an exotic concoction called cheese and offered a nonsmoking section. The Chinese thought that was cute, since everybody smoked.

Housekeeper Ma was waiting for us outside. She had gained a little weight and was wearing an expensive gray sweater embroidered with silver beads. She gathered Ben into her arms and won his heart when she gave him a toy police car with a siren, flashing lights and doors that opened and shut. Considering her recent trauma, I couldn’t understand why she had picked a toy like that. But the Chinese, who hate living in a police state as much as the next person, loved dressing their toddlers in soldier uniforms. By the time we left China, Ben had amassed the largest collection of toy tanks and machine guns of any four-year-old I knew.

Like a proper Chinese hostess, Housekeeper Ma ordered for her guests. “Three extra-large deep-dish meat pizzas,” she told the waitress.

“Two are enough,” I whispered.

Housekeeper Ma ignored me.

“Six orders of spaghetti,” she continued. “We’re all having the salad bar. Soup. Seven ice creams. And Coke for everyone.”

The bill came to nearly 300 yuan, or more than a month’s pay for state workers like Driver Liu. I felt terrible. I told her it was too expensive and that she should let me treat.

“I expected to pay 400 yuan,” she said airily.

I finally understood. Housekeeper Ma was redeeming her pride after her ignominious departure. As a correct hostess, she had ordered more than we could possibly finish (and by now I knew better than to try to clean my plate). But she also wanted us to know that she was just fine, thank you. She had opened a tiny convenience store selling soy sauce, cigarettes, toilet paper and instant noodles. Each month, she netted ten times what she had earned at the Diplomatic Service Bureau. The state had tossed Housekeeper Ma out like an old shoe. A year and a half later, she was part of China’s up-and-coming middle class.

After that lunch, Driver Liu was openly envious. He had thought many times of ditching his iron rice bowl and striking out on his own. Housekeeper Ma’s success was especially galling, for he had always looked down on her. When she was fired, he told me he suspected all along that she was a lowlife.

“Why do you say that?” I asked, annoyed at the rush to judgment.

“She has
two
VCRS
at home,” he said triumphantly, as if that was proof of a porno ring. And in China, it probably often was.

Liu Xinyong was born in 1953 in Beijing, one of seven children in a poor, working-class family. During the Cultural Revolution, he was sent to a bleak state farm near the Soviet border. In 1974, he won the district’s only scholarship to Beijing University. We would have been schoolmates, but the local Communist Party secretary bumped him in favor of his own son. The next year, Liu managed to win the only slot to a technical school, but the same anti-Deng political campaign that ruined my studies obliterated his.

Driver Liu was a Party member but, like Cook Mu, he never revealed that to me himself. (Disclosing Party membership to foreigners was another no-no, according to the forty-two secret rules of conduct.) His brush cut and square-jawed face matched his plain-spoken personality. Whereas other drivers napped whenever they weren’t driving, he was never idle. Besides polishing our car until it sparkled, he cheerfully took charge of paying bills, banking, developing film, mailing letters and buying supplies, all time-consuming chores in a Third World country.

Driver Liu was also one of the best drivers in Beijing which, I guess, wasn’t saying much. At any rate, he never had an accident. But we did seem to attract more than our share of people hitting us. Once, a cyclist, zipping through lanes of traffic, broadsided
us
. He bounced off, picked himself up with an embarrassed grin and disappeared, leaving us stunned, and with a fresh dent in the driver’s door. Another time, in 1990, we were stopped at a red light on the Second Ring Road when a white minibus crashed into the rear of our brand-new Jeep Cherokee, which I had just bought to replace the stolen Toyota. I turned around in time to see the minibus bounce back, rear up and smash into us again. For a split second, I thought plainclothes police were trying out a new way to kill us.

Driver Liu’s sunglasses flew off. So did Yan Yan’s earrings. I was in my eighth month of pregnancy, but my seatbelt saved me, and Ben. The back seat buckled under the impact, and the force of the crash pushed us several yards forward. Luckily, Driver Liu had the hand brake on, or we would have flattened a few pedestrians. Three peasants emerged from the white van, shaken but unhurt. Their brakes had failed, they explained apologetically. I asked if they had insurance. They didn’t. But they said they were pretty good at repairs and offered to fix our Jeep, free. I declined.