The Foremost Good Fortune (13 page)

A few sharp-looking speed skaters circle in black one-piece suits. There are also men and women well into their sixties, who skate slowly and purposefully with broad smiles. They look so pleased. How could we not all be? A chocolate cupcake sits in the van for each of the boys. Later we’ll sing “Happy Birthday” in Chinese to Aidan on the benches by the side of the lake. Right now it’s a sunny Saturday in Old Beijing at the start of 2008. This city is seductive and God may or may not be dead, depending on whom you talk to.

On Sunday night, Tony and I go to dinner at a new Chinese fusion place with two couples we don’t know—one of the husbands is a friend of a friend whose name we’d been given before we moved here. Sebastian. We’re trying out a French babysitter named Chloé for the first time tonight. She’s fifteen and lives in Tower Four with her brother, Arthur, a playground friend of Thorne’s. She has her own cell phone and carries her laptop in a leather saddlebag, and the boys got her to play soccer in the hall within minutes of her arrival.

It’s pitch-black inside the restaurant. Electronica plays in the background, and the ceiling lights are so low that I can barely make out my own place setting: white bowl on top of white plate, white chopsticks that sit on a small white ceramic bird. Sebastian is a tall, gray-haired
man in his sixties, head of the Asian office of an international law firm. His wife, Margaret, sits next to Tony. She has striking black hair cut to her chin and says, by way of opening, that she’s a psychiatrist at one of the international hospitals here. A man named Ned sits next to Sebastian. I put him at maybe thirty-five. He’s got a completely bald head and an easy, engaging way. He runs the China office of a large investment bank. His wife, Elizabeth, sits next to me. Her blond hair is in a ponytail. She says she’s just pulled off a birthday party for ten three-year-olds.

Everyone at the table wants Obama to win the U.S. presidential election, which is an icebreaker. But it’s hard to talk because we can’t see one another. A troupe of Chinese waitresses stands at attention along the back wall in black silk Chinese jackets. They serve thin slices of tuna on pink beds of radish and one sautéed shrimp wrapped in arugula. It’s the new gourmet that’s taken the country by storm—portions fit for children that cost more than the waitresses’ combined monthly wages.

There’s a worriedness to the way the waitress with the long ponytail keeps pouring more Shiraz for everyone. There’s no ease to this restaurant, either. The chairs are hard and black. The floor is a dark shade of gray cement. I lean over to ask Margaret about her patients, and when my napkin falls, one of the girls is there at my knees to catch it and refold it for me. It turns out Margaret was one of the first Westerners in Beijing to practice psychiatry.

“My patients,” she says, “are a mix of Chinese and foreigners. They and I do fine. It’s more complicated with the hospitals here.”

I tell her she should write a book. She laughs and says, “Psychiatry is so new here.” And that she wishes she had more hours in the day.

Then Sebastian bangs his hand lightly on the table and says, laughing, “When is the real food going to arrive?”

Tony asks for the menu again. It’s up to him to talk to the waitresses in Chinese and figure out more dishes. “Do you have any noodles?” I hear him ask in Mandarin. “Perhaps in a broth?” But this is a restaurant that has forsaken Chinese cooking and replaced it with a nouveau mélange of French finger food. And that’s fine. I just wish the place didn’t take itself so seriously here at the end of an ancient hutong alley, where people shuffle out in their pajamas to go to the public toilets around the corner.

I rise to find the bathroom, and a waitress hands me a flashlight. “Here,” she says in broken English. “You will need this.” I feel like I’m starting my solo on Outward Bound. I take the flashlight and head behind the tables down a long, black hallway that dead-ends in a wall of mirrors. The tiny flashlight doesn’t give off enough light. Maybe I’ve had too much wine, because I’m unsteady and can’t see more than one foot in front of me. I push on two different doors that don’t open, and now I’m lost and the dining room is so dark no one will see that I’m missing.

I start to sweat, and then a door finally opens and I’m standing in a large, open room with a marble sink and toilet and hundreds of lit votives. The walls in the bathroom are covered from floor to ceiling in black bear fur. At first I can’t believe it. I walk toward the wall with my arm outstretched. Then I turn around in a circle, counting how many bears must have been killed.

I sit to pee, but I feel like bears are watching me. It turns out I’ve had a lot of wine after all. I tell the bears that the New Beijing seems to have killed off the rest of their brethren. I go on to tell the bears how sorry I am. Then I stand and wash my hands and tell the bears I’m leaving. I make it back to the table, where Sebastian and Ned are laughing at a small collection of wasabi peas they’ve been handed on a Chinese saucer. More pretend food in this parallel universe. I hand the waitress my flashlight and she unfolds my napkin again and places it in my lap with a flourish.

Margaret asks Elizabeth what she’s doing in Beijing and Elizabeth explains that she’s writing a novel about the betrayal of her best friend by her husband when they were all expats together in London last year. My eyes widen. Someone else in the city who’s trying to write a novel. “Tell me more,” I say.

Elizabeth laughs. She’s got a grin on her face. “Oh, I could. I could. But that’s what I’m trying to do in the book. Let’s just say there’s a baby. And my friend isn’t the mother.” When I look closely at Elizabeth in the darkness, I can see that her eyes are a beautiful, icy blue. I don’t know her well enough yet, or I would tell her what is going on back in that bathroom. Something about Old China meeting New. Something about bears and nature. It’s definitely about darkness. About the darkness in this place.

Human Migration

There’s a snowstorm in central China this week and millions of migrant workers get stuck in train stations south of Beijing. The storm couldn’t have come at a worse time. Tens of millions of Chinese are trying to get home for Chinese New Year. It’s one of the greatest human migrations in the world, and whenever hundreds of thousands of angry citizens gather in public it’s of concern to the Chinese government. More snow is predicted. The temporary shelters are full, and men have been sleeping out in the cold next to the tracks.

The way CNN International reports on the problem makes me think civil war is imminent. Their stories focus on tension at the train stations and the lack of food and water. My parents call on the phone from Mexico, where they’ve settled for a month. They get the same high-drama news, and they’re certain that Beijing must be caught in the blizzards and that angry migrants are about to start a coup in Tiananmen.

Meanwhile, the sun shines down over Beijing, and we sit glued to our televisions to see what’s going to happen down south. The migrant workers go home once a year to see their families. They don’t seem to be budging until the trains come. But the trains can’t come because the electricity grid is down. Has anyone told the workers that? Or that China has not had this much snow in fifty years?

Rose comes for our Chinese lesson. She’s put her hair up in a bun and wears an orange Donald Duck sweatshirt. What is it about Chinese fashion and American cartoons? Today I learn how to ask someone how their work is in Chinese: “Ni gong zuo hao ma?” The answer can be as simple as “Hao.”
Good
. But there are other things you can say to answer, and here’s where it gets confusing. You could say
hen hao
or
haixing
or
zenmeyang
or
bucuo
just for starters, and none of these words seems to have anything in common with the other.

In Mandarin the idea is often to turn the question around immediately: “Ni ne?”
And you?
Which is not so different from what we would do in English, so I’m happy to land for a moment on this parallel linguistics bar.

Then something exciting happens. Rose teaches me the Chinese verb
xiwang
. It means “to wish” or “to hope for,” and this is the kind of verb that opens the language door wider for me. Because I’ve got all kinds of wishes since I moved to China. Different hopes for our life here. On smoggy days I wish it was sunny, and on sunny days I hope the smog stays away. I’d been beginning to wonder if the Chinese might have a lack of xiwang—an absence of hoping or wishing—because most of the sentences I’d learned were declaratives: “It
is
sunny” or “It
is
smoggy.” I’d been beginning to think hoping and wishing was a Western construct. But now we’ve gotten to xiwang, and the country makes more sense. Because how could any nation live without hope?

The hour winds down, and Rose takes a sip of the warm water I’ve brought her. She says the Chinese never drink cold things and never use ice. The time at the end of our lesson has become my favorite part of the day in Beijing. It’s when Rose describes pieces of her own life and switches, thankfully, into English. She says that for the last two weeks she’s been trying to buy a train ticket to go home for Chinese New Year. But they’re sold out. “These men,” she explains, “these bad men at the stations will sell me a ticket for ten times the real cost, but I don’t have that kind of money.”

“Wow.” I stare at her. Communist scalpers. “I had no idea it was that hard to go home.”

“It happens every year.” She smiles. “You can only get home on the trains if you know someone. Or if you’re willing to bribe.” I’m thinking about my new verb
xiwang
, and wishing things with the ticketing might be changed. But Rose is a twenty-three-year-old in New China, with a cell phone and a bedroom in a group apartment in the capital. She has a college degree, speaks excellent English, and has prospered by problem solving within the system. “I have secured a ticket home from a friend of a friend of a friend,” she explains. “He works on one of the trains leaving Beijing tomorrow. It’s not really a ticket. It’s a secret space on the train.”

“But how will you get on?” I ask. “Won’t the conductor see you?”

“The boy who works the train will smuggle me into the compartment early in the morning—when it’s dark, before the others have begun to gather. I will bring American cigarettes to pay him off. All he wants is Marlboros.”

“It sounds dangerous. And there’s so much snow now. I don’t think you’ll get far. What will happen if the authorities find you?”

“They’ll kick me off the train,” she says. “But my parents are waiting for me. I am their only child. I see them once a year. I have to get back by the sixth.”

This year on the sixth day of the month Chinese families will gather for dumplings and stay up until midnight to see in the new year. The night marks the end of the twelve-month lunar cycle and the beginning of the next. “The factories close,” Rose explains, and takes another drink of water. “The shops shut down and everyone spends the day setting off fireworks.”

“Why fireworks?”

“The Chinese love fireworks.” She stands up from the couch. She has to go to her next lesson now. “Fireworks scare evil spirits away.”

Later that night, I watch Prime Minister Wen on TV. He stands at a crowded train station to apologize to hundreds of thousands of workers camped out along the tracks. He says he’s sorry for the weather—as if he’s somehow responsible for the precipitation, and maybe he is. Or should be. Because I’ve begun to think that in this totalitarian by proxy government, the leaders can control the snow. One migrant worker interviewed blows his cool while people jostle him. “This government is terrible!” he yells. “The members of the party can go home for the holiday. But not the people. This government should be banned!” I wonder how long it took the secret police to find that man in the crowd.

Rose left on the train today, and I worry for her. It’s snowed more in the south since I saw her, and crowds are trampling people at the train stations. Footage shows hundreds of thousands rushing at metal barricades at the train station in Guangzhou. It seems like maybe CNN was right—there really will be riots. The news reports that twenty-five people have died in a bus crash on a snowy highway.

Then the snow stops. Five days pass. The headline in the
China
Daily
today reads, “Human strength prevails in the face of storms.” Extra trains are brought in to take the workers home. Civil war gets averted. The
Daily
article profiles one older army official and the days of shoveling he did to rid a stretch of highway of freezing ice. The
Daily
is big on personal triumph stories. They also go in for accounts of sacrifice (death, maiming, disfigurement, or emotional toll) for the greater good of society. I keep wondering if Rose made it.

I finally call her on her cell phone and she answers right away. “It took me fifty hours on the train. I snuck inside the staff sleeping room and the boy gave me an engineer’s uniform to wear.”

“A uniform?” I ask. I can’t believe what lengths she went to.

“Then I was told to lie still in the empty bed and pretend to sleep. I couldn’t speak to anyone, and if someone asked me for a ticket, I was not supposed to open my eyes.”

“I’m so glad you made it.”

“I kept waiting for the train conductor to find me and kick me out into the snow. My parents were worried. But I’m here now. Eating like a pig and sleeping late. Tomorrow we go visit our cousins and eat at each house. It is the custom. We start with the oldest people and work our way down.”

I ask if she thinks the government handled the storms well. “At first I thought no,” she says into the phone. “I did a lot of reading on the Internet, and there everyone is angry at the government. But then I began talking to friends, and they persuaded me that the government couldn’t control the weather.”

I tell her I think the government could have warned the workers about the biggest snowstorm in fifty years. “They have computers that track storms, you know,” I say. “They have Doppler radar.”