The Foremost Good Fortune (15 page)

The Three T’s and the One F

Today the Internet says two hundred people are dead in Lhasa and Tibetan monks have taken to the streets. We can’t get any YouTube footage of the riots in Beijing. Each time I click on a photo of the fighting in Lhasa, my computer screen goes blank. It’s an unsettling feeling—as if some government censor has gotten inside the apartment and is standing in my bedroom, leaning over my shoulder. What’s really happened is that by typing in the word
Tibet
, I’ve tripped an alarm on an Internet filter at the government’s mother ship.

The Chinese have kicked foreign journalists out of Tibet and are bringing tanks into Lhasa today. These edicts come down just a mile or so from our apartment, in the government compound that circles Tiananmen, but Tony’s and my lives go eerily unchanged. It’s an odd thing to be so close to the mechanisms of war, but to learn about them only in stolen Internet moments.

We meet Sebastian and Margaret for dinner again—this time at a Yunnan place called South Seas. Their friends Gwynne and Alex join us. Chloé has come to babysit for the second time, and the boys have planned a badminton tournament with her in Aidan’s room. Gwynne is a petite woman with shocking blue eyes and a great, throaty laugh. She says she’s here to research Internet use. When she puts out her hand to greet me she asks, “Has anybody been able to get on the BBC Web site since the protests started in Tibet?” Her husband, Alex, is a journalist for an American magazine.

I sit next to Gwynne at the square wooden table, and during dinner she tells me she’s learned there are four things you can’t talk about in China. “They’re called ‘the Three T’s and the One F,’ ” she says.
“Tibet, Taiwan, Tiananmen, and Falun Gong. Bringing up any of these topics”—she smiles and takes a sip of beer—“will not win you any friends in the Chinese government.”

I keep looking over my shoulder, wondering if any of the waitresses here are spies, but no one seems to be paying us any attention. “Do you ever worry about your husband in China?” I ask Gwynne after we’ve polished off a small plate of garlic and mushrooms.

“I worry about Alex, but never about the things I should be worried about. And right now he can’t get a flight to Lhasa. No one can.”

“I read today that the protests have spread over Yunnan,” Sebastian says. “And that monasteries are organized all across China.”

“Good luck and Godspeed,” Margaret says then. “I feel like this is the Tibetans’ last stand before the Olympics. Their last chance for world attention.”

Gwynne nods. “Did you know that when the government here isn’t busy shutting down Web sites about Tibet, it’s trying to control the speed of our Internet search engines? Take this week, for example; they’ve ratcheted things down so that even if you get on a sanctioned Web site, you won’t want to stay because it’s so slow.”

“So that’s why Yahoo has been creeping along,” Tony says.

“And they don’t do it to punish anyone, just to make sure everyone knows they’re there, watching,” Gwynne adds.

When Tony and I get back to the apartment after dinner, the restaurant outside our bedroom still has the lights on. It’s a long, low family place with big picture windows. If we look closely, we can see the noodles people eat for dinner. We go into the living room and Tony turns on CNN. We get five seconds of Lhasa riot footage before the screen goes dead again. We switch to the BBC. It’s blacked out too. “I can’t believe they do this!” Tony yells. “As if we won’t get our news somewhere else.”

But I’m thinking about what Gwynne said—that this kind of censorship slows down information access to the point where we give up trying. It makes things just difficult enough tonight so we go to bed early. Tony and I lie under the sheets. There is the sound of a small electric drill in the ceiling above us. We’re never sure if our apartment is bugged. Tony and I aren’t important enough for that. Still, earlier today the property management office called and said maintenance men
would be over again to “fix some problems with the air-conditioning.” These “problems” are confusing to us—the AC has worked fine since the first week. Tony and I hold hands and fall asleep listening to the sounds of hammering in the air duct.

On Monday morning Rose and I take our class to the giant IKEA home goods store just off the Fourth Ring Road North. I need to find a mattress pad. The hard Chinese bed we sleep in has begun to bruise my back. Rose would like to buy a coffeepot. She’s never been to IKEA before. She meets me at the front door of Tower Five with a big smile. She says her boyfriend wants to know what she’s buying before she pays for it.

We get in the van with Lao Wu and I ask her, “Do you think the Chinese army is being too forceful in Tibet?” I’ve been waiting to pose this question all weekend.

“Susan, the Chinese army is just doing its job.” I look out the window and wonder how much Rose really knows. Then she says, “Tibet has always been part of China.” She views the protests in terms of how much danger they pose to the Chinese people. “The army has to keep the peace in Tibet, Susan. Tibetans are killing Han.” Then she says she’s more worried about the Olympics. “I saw a fortune-teller last week who told me that during the games there will blood in the Beijing streets.”

Lao Wu lets us off inside the parking garage, and we take the escalator to the third floor, which is stocked with aisles of sleek Swedish furniture: maple platform beds and stainless-steel desks. I’m surprised again at how many people are in China—how many men and women wheel shopping carts in and out of the Marimekko bedroom displays. It’s the same IKEA stuff, but tweaked for the China market: smaller beds, and chopsticks in the kitchenware aisle.

Rose holds up a red French coffee press and calls out, “What is this?”

I leave my cart and circle back to her. “It’s for coffee,” I explain and take it from her. “You put the coffee in and then you press down like this.”

“My boyfriend enjoys coffee now.” Rose smiles. “More Chinese like coffee. But I do not think he would like this item.”

There are maybe fifty different kitchen contraptions displayed on a grid of white shelves along the wall. Next Rose picks up a metal whisk. “And this?”

“For cooking,” I say. “For beating eggs.” Rose looks confused. “It’s called a whisk,” I say. “To stir things quickly.”

She gazes at the gadgetry. “There is so much here,” she says. “So much I don’t see the use of.”

She puts the whisk in her shopping cart and holds up a bright green garlic press. “Garlic press,” I say. “You don’t need it.”

Next is an orange plastic spatula. “Do you like pancakes?” I ask her. She stares at me for a second too long, and I realize she doesn’t know this word
pancakes
. Sometimes I forget that Rose has never left China. Or maybe never seen pancakes. I can’t decide what she makes of this place and the well-heeled Chinese milling in the designer lighting aisle.

“Who are you buying this stuff for?” I ask her. “Yourself or your boyfriend?”

She smiles. “I’m not sure yet.” When we get to the tall pyramid of Chinese woks, Rose is unimpressed. “Those woks are cheaply made,” she says. “The iron is too thin.”

“Shall we go to bedding?” I say quickly. Then I catch myself. “Shall we go find where they keep the mattress pads?” She nods and we wheel our carts away from the buzz of so many people shopping. The hallway is wide and relatively empty. I know Rose isn’t interested in talking any more about Tibet. She wants to find the shower curtains. And I wonder if most people in this store are as apolitical as Rose seems.

We Chinese believe in ourselves. We believe in our things
. Rose’s boyfriend calls her on her cell for the second time since we’ve gotten to IKEA. She talks to him for two minutes, then hangs up. “He is jealous that we are here,” she says. “He does not want me seeing these things for the first time without him.”

I Love You.
End of Discussion.

On Sunday I take a yoga class. It’s part of my self-enhancement plan: more women friends. More stretching my calves and quieting my mind. It’s me and a teacher named Mimi. Her dark hair hangs down to the waist of her wide-legged pink pants. We sit on the floor of a white room in her apartment. It took me forty minutes to walk here, and I already feel better for having come. Mimi thinks we should start slowly. I haven’t done the postures for years and my back feels stiff and unyielding.

She has me stand in front of the wall and press against it with both arms. I hold the pose while she instructs me on how I might begin to breathe differently—slower, filling up my rib cage with air. Then she asks me to bend toward the floor. She has a relaxing voice and an easy, comfortable way. She reminds me how to lower myself gently into a pose called Cobra and then says I’m stronger than I think I am. She tells me she was born in the States but her parents are Chinese. Now almost her whole family is living in China again.

By the end of our hour I can tell that Mimi is one of those gifted teachers you’re lucky to meet in any lifetime. I stand to leave and my body feels looser. My mind has less chatter. I can also touch my toes again. I sign up for a series of Wednesdays and walk home feeling lighter.

The streets around Mimi’s house are a rare grid of roads still drawn to pedestrian scale: food kiosks and fruit carts line the sidewalks. The city feels alive. I can smell the garlic and hear the bike vendor calling out about his meat for sale.

At home I make a dinner date with a woman named Molly. She and her husband, Dan, and their two-year-old, Ann, moved here from California
six months before we landed. They live one apartment complex down from us, in Palm Springs. Dan is in charge of an online photo Web site. He lived in Hong Kong for five years and speaks mean Chinese. Molly is a fearless traveler and businesswoman—busy now taking care of Ann. She and I met for coffee last week, at which point she was patient enough to draw me a detailed map of our neighborhood, highlighted with the places I might be able to buy an iron.

On Friday our families walk to the Lotus Blossom—a Buddhist restaurant that sits at the end of a garbage-filled alley twenty minutes from our apartment. Buddha statues appear along the alley to mark the way. Some of us are hungry when we make it to the Lotus Blossom. Some of us under the age of seven are cranky. There’s another Buddha statue standing by the restaurant door, this one life-sized. Inside, the waiters are bald monks who wear gray cotton tunics and pantaloons and hover around our table handing out warm washcloths on bamboo trays.

Our place mats are gigantic palm fronds. We’re hoping to order quickly—maybe noodles and dumplings. Molly says, “We need to get these kids fed.” I nod to her as a waiter hands me the menu. It’s a bound book the size of Aidan. I reach out and hold it with two hands and try not to giggle.

I rest the menu partly in my lap and open it to the first page. Every dish has been given a “Buddhist poem name” to help inspire our order. There are no simple noodle dishes. No dumplings. This is going to be a more complicated meal than we planned. We try to study the menu—the kids are hungry and fidgeting and the book is so big. I finally tell Tony, “I’m ordering a dish called ‘I love you. End of discussion.’ ” And then I do giggle. The names are too good.

Dan says, “I’m getting ‘Contemplating the Inner Self Spinach.’ ” His laugh is this great, unexpected, raucous thing.

Then Molly announces, “For me ‘Chinese Kale: A Little More Love, a Little Less Misfortune’ and ‘The Heart Has No Hang-Ups Palmelo Salad.’ ”

Tony and Dan together pick “No Birth No Death Tofu” and “In Praise of Going in Happiness Wild Yams.” They also order Buddhist virility drinks made with smashed yams that are supposed to invigorate their sperm.

The food takes a long time to prepare. Aidan stands up on his chair and asks for more orange juice. At one point Ann is singing. I reach
for Tony’s virility drink. It tastes like sweet potatoes. Thorne keeps shredding his palm frond place mat. I’m able to distract him by taking him to the bathroom, where flute music is piped in on speakers and the sink is filled with stones.

When we get back to the table, Tony takes Aidan outside to stand on the porch the monks have built in the alley. “There are stars out there!” Aidan says when he returns. “Stars and candles!” The food arrives and somehow we’ve managed to order well: tofu and fake duck and fake chicken. We scoop glass noodles from one of the soup broths and sell them to the children. Everything is delicious. We eat quickly, and when the bill comes, we hand over wads of cash from our wallets, then walk back to the alleyway.

“Stars!” everyone says almost in unison. Aidan was right. The sky is clear and the night is dark.

“Mom!” Thorne yells. He is standing next to one of the Buddha statues, and he and the Buddha are the same height. “Mom! We are in outer space!” Then he begins laughing. “Right this very second the Earth is spinning in outer space!” Somehow standing in this dark alley in downtown Beijing on a Sunday night in February has unlocked a secret of the universe for my seven-year-old. Maybe China has allowed him to see the sky more clearly. I think all four of us have better vision here.

“Pretty cool, huh?” I squeeze Thorne’s hand, and we begin to walk toward the end of the alley and the taxicabs. “Outer space. Pretty cool.”

When we get home, Thorne lies down in his bed, and I pull the sheets up around his chin and rest next to him. This is when he asks me if I’m going to die soon. What he says exactly is, “Are you going to die in China?”

“No,” I say, and press my face into his neck. “Not planning on it.” I think the ties that bind us feel tighter here. Or maybe it’s that we need to articulate them more in China. And what a nice surprise—that the world has slowed down enough for us to name our affections. But hard questions come more often from the boys in Beijing. They seem to lie at the surface.

“What if you die in a taxicab?” Thorne asks me next. “What if you
die while I am at school?” I hug him and tell him I won’t die for almost a hundred years. Almost forever. It’s my standard answer. I’ve been told there are kids who don’t explore the depths of their existential dread but my kids always have. I think China has given them a bigger frame for the story. A clarity of vision they didn’t always have in the States.