The Foremost Good Fortune (12 page)

I can’t help but think of what will happen if there’s a police raid or a fire. I have a feeling the Bag Lady (which one of the saleswomen is she?) would keep us locked up for a long time if it meant outwitting the customs officials. But who am I kidding? If the officials wanted the Bag Lady shut down, they could have done it years ago. She and the police prosper in the spirit of corruption. Because I can tell by the stitching and the uneven brass hardware that the bags are fake. I can tell by the way the leather crinkles and by the smell of synthetic.

Before I got to China, several people told me the shopping in Beijing “would be amazing.” But this has not been my experience. Instead, I’ve seen a lot of pirated merchandise meant to fit petite thirteen-year-old Chinese girls. At five feet nine, I am an Amazon here. Nothing fits. But the words “amazing” and “shopping” are still enough to entice me. They sound transformative. Like something I can’t miss.

Sabrina and I stand in the crowded room and spend an hour picking up purses and hanging them off our shoulders. The saleswomen wait behind a long, low wooden counter for us to bring the bags to them to price. Tense and edgy, these women never smile. There are other expats with us—Italian and British women, and a trio from Australia. They try on bags and bring them to the counter to haggle. The bags are expensive
for the black market. One of the shiny black Pradas will cost you $200 U.S. The silver Tod’s, $175.

I once had a student in Cambridge who wrote that she loved shopping because each time she went into a new store, she got a chance to reinvent herself. I’m not sure who I’ve become at the Bag Lady’s—I appear to be an expat American riffling through the Gucci clutches hoping to find one that looks real enough to carry at my cousin Reagan’s wedding next summer. I appear to care. But I’m posing. Before I moved here I thought only Americans had religious conversions in the church of consumption, but China has the fever too. Maybe more so because of the catching up they have to do.

Fake bags conjure up the bad things I’ve heard about the black market: child labor, sweatshops, slashed wages, illegal border crossings. Millions of people in China are supported by the black market—from fabric middlemen to seamstresses to drivers and retail clerks. What this says about a country’s economic future is unclear. I’ve read reports that corruption is so rampant in China, it alone will bring down the government.

Sabrina and I walk away without a bag. For me there’s relief. Once we get back down to the pavement, I breathe easier. I didn’t like being locked up in a room with hot merchandise. Sabrina is disappointed. She was hoping for a Louis Vuitton in snakeskin, and they didn’t have it. I have yet to see her pay full price for anything. She tries to bargain over the cost of our dumplings later at lunch when the waitress brings the bill. Before we say good-bye outside the restaurant, she tells me that next week she’s going to take me to a better bag place.
An even bigger secret
. But I can’t mention it to anyone. She’s sworn me to secrecy. It’s in a food market behind the new American embassy, and the bags
only come out at night
after the police have gone home for dinner.

During our dinner that night Thorne says Aidan is going to marry a Korean girl in first grade. At Thorne’s seventh birthday party last November, one of Mi-cha’s braids unraveled while she played kick the can. Then she and Molly ran over to me and asked me to fix Mi-cha’s hair. Both little girls stood stock-still with serious faces while I began to rebraid. I was so glad I remembered how.

“You’re going to get sexy with Mi-cha,” Thorne teases Aidan. Tony listens, and I raise my eyes at him and remind Thorne that Aidan isn’t getting sexy with anyone. “I won’t marry Molly,” Thorne adds. “Until I am at least twenty-five. But Aidan’s going to get sexy with Mi-cha.”

How is it Thorne knows the word
sexy
, and how can I make him stop using it? Aidan got off the bus last month and announced he’d learned a new naughty word,
fook
. A fifth grader named Brandon taught it to him. It took me a while to realize what he was trying to say.

But
sexy
is new. “Guys,” Tony says casually while he takes a drink of water, “what’s this new word you’re saying?”

“Rashid taught it to us today,” Thorne chirps. “Ali and Rashid.” Ali is in Thorne’s first-grade class, and Rashid is his older brother. Their whole family went home to Bahrain for the winter holidays. Before they left, their mother came into first grade wearing her head scarf and explained the Muslim fasting tradition of Ramadan. I went in to the class the week after and showed the kids how we decorate Christmas trees in America and put presents underneath. I felt sacrilegious.

“Sexy is not something you get with other people,” Tony explains to the boys. “It’s a way some people like to be. Or dress.” Then Tony is silent.

I’m at a loss. Where does our talk go from here? “It’s a grown-up word,” I add, but I sound too mysterious.

“Like Amos,” Aidan adds.

“Like who?” I ask.

“Amos. You know. Like calling someone an Amos,” Thorne explains. “The place in your bottom where the poop comes out.”

“Rashid said it was where you poop,” Aidan says seriously.

Tony coughs into his water glass and I can tell he’s having a hard time trying to not lose it. “Oh,” I say and swallow a laugh. “Let’s not say that one either. No Amos and no getting sexy.”

How Long Have You
Lived Here?

Two uniformed police officers stopped me outside Tower Five today and asked if I had my registration papers and passport. I’m so used to the faux-military look here that at first I thought the officers were security guards. One of them carried a clipboard. Then I saw the word “Police” stitched in black thread on their white shirts, and my heart began to beat faster. For many reasons, it seems better to avoid the Chinese police while in China. The best one I can think of this week is reports of villagers who come to Beijing to protest the demolition of their family houses. They make it to the police station, where they’re placed in what the foreign press calls “black jails.” “Black” because the detainees have no charges against them and no sense of when they might get released. The whole operation is unofficial but sanctioned, just like the black market.

I told the officers my husband had taken the passports to the Chinese visa office to get the new, long-term work permit, and could I possibly call my husband to see where the paperwork was? Both officers listened intently and then followed me inside the lobby. I got nervous then. I had no idea where the passports were. Tony had taken them a week ago. The law in China is that you’re meant to carry your passport with you at all times. The passports are gold. But no one moves around with them in Beijing. The chances of losing the passports on the streets are too high.

“How long have you lived here?” the woman officer asked me while we waited for the elevator. She was not friendly. She was a vehicle of the state with clear operating instructions, and I was sweating. If the officers followed me up to the apartment there would be a problem.
A sinking feeling overcame me then. How do I say this? I felt culpable for sins. Guilty of many trespasses against the Chinese state. Hadn’t I written scathing e-mails to friends about the way you aren’t allowed to speak about the Tiananmen Square massacre here? I’m sure the police would read those once we were inside the apartment. And sophomoric rants on the cult of Mao and the collective Chinese amnesia? The officers would read those too, and then what would they do with me? I knew the policing operation was unpredictable. Sometimes foreigners got brought in—mostly Western journalists—for being in the wrong place with the wrong officer in a bad mood.

“I have lived here four months,” I said slowly and tried to make my face look relaxed.

“Four months?” the woman officer repeated and cocked her head at me.

“Four.” I cringed—four is the unluckiest of Chinese numbers.

“And what is the number of your apartment?” the woman asked me next.

“Eight C,” I stated clearly. Glad I had finally memorized this. “Ba C.”

The two officers paused and glanced at each other. The elevator bell rang, and its doors opened to swallow us whole. I felt as if I were in one of those human-interest stories I’d read in the state-run
Daily
—naïve foreigner who doesn’t keep her visas straight ends up in hot water. I moved to step into the elevator and waited for the officers to follow. Who knew how this would play out upstairs, but it would be complicated. And involve my trying to explain in limited Chinese why I didn’t have my registration papers or my passport or a copy of our resident permit or the original of Tony’s work permit. In every scenario I was at fault.

Then for some reason, the male officer announced, “It’s okay” to his partner and nodded at her. “Ba C,” he said loudly for emphasis.
Ba C
. And maybe it was because they trusted my face, but probably not. More likely it was because living in an apartment numbered eight, China’s luckiest number, means good luck will find you. This is how it happens every day inside China’s quixotic system of rules. Maybe you’re lucky. Maybe you’re not. And you must learn to live within this arbitrary system and temper your
xiwang
—your urge to wish it was any
different. Because in this story the officers both turned on their heels and walked out of Tower Five and left me standing inside the elevator alone while the automatic doors closed.

I’d like to say a few things now about Chinese permits. Because in China there are many of them: temporary resident permits and temporary work permits, long-term visas and short-term visas, visitor’s permits and dog permits. Car permits and building permits. Even fireworks permits, though who bothers to get those is unclear. Here in China you need your long-term visa to get the temporary resident permit, and you need the lease agreement on your apartment in triplicate for the long-term visa. For the lease agreement you need copies of your passports, and then you take the stamped agreement to the nearest police station (after you find someone to direct you there, which may take days; the police station has moved), along with four wallet-sized photos. These photos must not be printed on white photo stock. They must be on blue stock. Don’t think of going to the station if you’ve printed on white stock. The blue will get you that temporary resident permit you need. Because if you have that, you might be able to apply at the customs office for that stuff you packed up in boxes before you left the States. And by the time that shipment arrives in Beijing, you will have forgotten what you packed and why that stuff ever seemed important to you in the first place.

II
Hall of
Mental
Cultivation

Houhai Lake

January 4, 2008. Aidan is five years old today. And how could that be? Almost five months have passed since we got to China. Tony and I take the boys to Houhai Lake to go skating. Lao Wu drives the van, and on the way Aidan says, “God is dead.” Then he asks if he can have a lollipop. I remain silent on both fronts.

He repeats, “Did you know God was dead, Mom?”

“No, I didn’t,” I say in my most sunny voice. I’m looking out the window for something I can distract Aidan with—a big truck or a horse pulling a cart of watermelons. I’m not up for a talk about God. I want to discuss what being five years old means, and how proud Aidan must be that he can read picture books. “Who told you the news?” I finally ask him.

“A guy in my class read it in a book. A guy in my class read that God is dead,” he adds for clarity. We’re almost at the lake. “He died,” Aidan explains one more time and then wraps up the conversation by asking Lao Wu directly for a candy. Which leaves me in the front seat pondering the state of the universe. I look back at Tony quickly to see how he’s handling this information, but he’s closed his eyes.

It’s my suspicion that the boys have become more fascinated with death since we moved to China. Maybe it’s just their age, or maybe China has clarified things for them—the grinding poverty, the chaos. Because the white-haired men who play cards across the street from our apartment near the cement shops lie down on the sidewalk for naps after lunch, and each time Thorne sees them, he asks me if the men have gone to heaven.

Here in China, God seems to have been dead for many years, and
then recently brought back to life by the Chinese government. But if God is really dead, it doesn’t seem to be bothering either of my children that much. We pull over in a crowded lane near the lake and get our skates out of the back of the van. I say nothing more about God and his demise. The lake is in the middle of Old Beijing, circled by teahouses and brick temples and stone courtyards. I stand on the street and look at the brick lanes leading out from the lake and feel the history. I could walk down one of those lanes and get lost for hours.

To skate on the lake, we pay fifteen RMB each to a short man in a stall over by a cluster of skinny benches. We get Thorne and Aidan laced up first, and when Tony is ready the three of them head out on the ice. I teeter down the ramp to the lake trailing after them, but I’ve forgotten to remove the plastic skate guards on my blades and fall flat on the ice. I’m not the only one trying to stand up. It looks like many first-timers. Lots of teenage girls hold hands and squeal. Aidan and Thorne link arms and begin skating faster and faster around the lake.