The Foremost Good Fortune (24 page)

All summer he’s been suspicious of my cancer. I don’t think he fully believes me when I say the surgery didn’t hurt because I was asleep. Or that I’m fine now. I say, “Yes. To live forever—wouldn’t that be
fantastic.” This is another one of the techniques I learned from the therapist in Boston. She said sometimes it will be easier for the boys to stop wanting things if I agree with how great their fantasies would be: a new skateboard, a whole pound of penny candy, immortality. The idea is that they’ll feel like they almost got their wish—just by my agreeing with it. Thorne listens to me say I think it would be great to live forever. Then he smiles slightly and goes back to staring at the picture of Chang E. In the picture, Chang E is wearing a long red Chinese robe, and she stands alone on the top of the moon.

No Assembling

We drive back to Beijing on Sunday night, and on Monday morning Mao Ayi arrives to take charge of the kitchen. She gets here at eleven and leaves at six and never stops moving. Like most ayis in China, she wants to be called “Ayi.” It’s a job that garners respect. Today she tells me in Chinese that she’s going to make pork dumplings like she used to at the train station restaurant she worked at. She assures me that the boys will love the dumplings. She says she’s heading out to buy new sauces and cooking oils. She doesn’t like any of the ones I have. She’ll ride her bike and be back in an hour.

Mao Ayi looks fantastic for a woman who’s fifty-three. Today she wore a sequined denim bomber jacket and a gray wool beret, then changed into a tunic and leggings after she got here. When she gets back from the store, she shows me the things she’s bought: red chili paste and black bean and garlic sauce. Long green onions. Leeks. Many heads of garlic. She takes a bowl from the cupboard and places a large piece of ginger in it, then slides that into the fridge. She talks loud and has a gravelly laugh from the smoking she does. The boys and I stand at the kitchen door listening to her and we’re all a little transfixed.

She redefines the word
thrifty
for me. She discovers pieces of old apple and peach I threw in the garbage last night because they were browning and rescues them by slicing and boiling them. Then she offers them to the kids with brown sugar for dessert. She sends a maintenance worker away when she realizes he’s going to charge her ten kuai ($1.50) to replace the small lightbulb above the stove. She’ll do it herself in the morning, she says, even though neither Tony nor I can pry the plastic casing off to get the old bulb out.

Just before she leaves, Mao Ayi comes into the bedroom to ask where I keep the towels. She sees the charcoal Buddha sketch on my desk and picks it up to study it. Then she asks in Chinese if I like the Buddha. She puts her hands together for prayer and bows her head. I tell her I do like the Buddha. (
“Wo xihuan.”
) But she wonders why my drawing of the Buddha is so small. (
“Wei shenme?”
) She has a bigger one, she tells me. She draws the outline of a larger frame in the air. Much bigger. She likes to repeat her words and asks me again why my Buddha is so small. Then she says her son likes to pray to the Buddha. (
“Wo de erzi.”
)

After Mao Ayi leaves and the boys go to sleep, Tony and I eat dinner. I tell him I think she’s a Buddhist.

“Along with the rest of the nation?” Tony asks me.

“What do you mean?” I say.

“Buddhism has been here for centuries.”

“Yeah,” I say. “But I thought religion was banned. I didn’t think anyone could even talk about religion.”

“You can talk about it,” Tony explains. “You can go to the temple and light your incense. You just can’t congregate. No assembling.”

“So you can’t belong to a church?”

“Not in the way you and I might belong to a church.” Tony takes a bite of the shaved radishes. They are bright red and remind me of candy, but taste like vinegar.

“I don’t think I’ve ever belonged to a church,” I say. “And what about Mao?”

“Yeah, Mao sort of shut everything down.”

“So it was not okay to have a framed picture of the Buddha in your house during the Cultural Revolution?”

“No,” Tony agrees. “You could get persecuted for something like that.”

The next morning Mao Ayi arrives at the apartment and finds me in the bedroom at my desk before she’s taken off her coat. “Ni hao,” I say.

“Ni hao,” she answers and hands me a gold-colored calendar with a large painting of the Buddha on it. The writing is in Chinese.

“Xie xie, ni,” I say several times.
Thank you
.

“Ni xihuan ma?” she asks me.
Do you like?

“Dui, dui. Wo hen xihuan.”
I like the Buddha very much
. It’s so kind of her to give me the calendar that I’m short of words.

She explains how much bigger her Buddha painting at home is. She’s still worried about how small the little sketch of Buddha on my desk is. I ask her how her friend’s birthday party was last night. She explains that she drank too much. She tilts her head back and pretends to drink from a bottle. She has a headache today, she says. Morning has come too quickly.

At ten o’clock, Rose rings the doorbell. It’s the first time I’ve seen her since we’ve gotten back from the States. She embraces me in the doorway and then we each laugh. I tell her in English that she looks great. Her hair is longer, and she’s changed her glasses. She now has a smaller, sleeker black pair with “Gucci” on the side. I try to tell her in Chinese that I have not studied my Chinese all summer—that I have been
bing le
(sick), except the translation doesn’t really work. Because I haven’t really been sick. I’ve felt fine, in fact. I’ve just had cancer, but I don’t know how to say this.

“It’s okay,” Rose keeps repeating to me as we walk to the couch. “It’s okay.” Then she asks how I am and tells me she is glad to see me. “Do you have the charm?” she asks me then. “The charm I gave you?”

“I keep it with me always,” I say, and she nods, and this is all we mention about my disease.

We sit down and she asks me to repeat after her: Faguo (France), Deguo (Germany), Hanguo (Korea), Taiguo (Thailand), Meiguo (America). We’ve gone over the country names before, but it’s good of her to remind me. She teaches me again how to say “Ni hao. Wo shi Meiguoren.”
Hello. I am American
. Then she says her boyfriend can be a little bit of a problem. That he
bu xihuan ribenren
. Which I understand to mean that her boyfriend doesn’t like the Japanese.

“Shi ma?” I say. It’s the closest thing I know to saying
really
in Chinese.

“Ta yao ribenren hui jia,” Rose says, which means her boyfriend wishes all the Japanese would go home. He lives with his parents now, but next month he’ll take ownership of a one-room apartment he’s bought. “He wants me to move in with him,” she says in English.

“Ni yao shenme?” I ask her.
And you want what?

“I won’t move in until we’re married. It is the custom here. My parents don’t approve of him. And besides,” she says, “I’m not sure I
ever want to move in. Until we are married, he can leave me and I will have nothing.”

“Do you want a wedding?” I ask her in English now. “Do you want to marry him?”

She laughs her nervous laugh. “I think he is preparing for it. He calls me on the cell phone every hour. He always wants to know where I am. What I do.”

I stare at her. “I think you are too smart just to teach foreigners like me. Too well organized.” I’m convinced Rose could find a diplomatic job if she went back to the States and got a master’s degree. “Would you ever consider going to the United States? Meiguo?” I ask. “There are colleges there. Universities I am sure would take you. Maybe a linguistics program? Maybe a master’s in international politics?”

Rose watches my lips move. “I am not sure what I want to do. Every day I am thinking on it. No one in China ever talks to me like this. About things I care about.” Her eyes well with tears. “Many of my university friends have moved away. And besides,” she goes on, “I care about more than just clothes and cell phones like they do.”

I don’t know why, but I feel an urgency in the room. I want to tell Rose,
This is your moment
. I want to explain that choices will be made for her if she doesn’t choose soon for herself: she’ll marry the boyfriend and have her one child and never leave. But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Maybe Rose doesn’t want to leave China. Maybe there are hundreds of thousands of Roses now in China. Millions of young women with college degrees who don’t know what to do with them. “Have you thought about teaching young children?” I ask her. She’s such a good listener; she’d make a wonderful elementary-school teacher. “In a school?”

“No,” she says. “I have never considered any other career than the one I have. I learned English and then I began teaching foreigners. My other friends have office jobs.”

“What do your parents say?” I ask. “What do they want you to do?”

“They want me to get a real job in an office. They want me to leave my boyfriend. He did not go to college and they don’t think he’s good enough for me.”

“Have you told your parents that your boyfriend has bought an apartment?”

Rose starts crying now. Silent tears. She says, “I cannot tell them.
They don’t want to hear about him. My father has had to move to Shanghai. He was running a rubber factory back home but then was forced out. It was political. He was the boss and then he was left with nothing. So he has gone to Shanghai to manage another rubber factory.”

“And left your mother alone?”

“Yes,” Rose says, and smiles now. She wipes her tears with a small square of tissue from her black purse. “My mother is happy for this. For forty years she has been cooking and cleaning every day for my father—never getting a rest. Now she can take a break.” Rose stands up to leave. I walk her to the front door.

“Thank you, Susan,” she says then. “Thank you for listening to me. I have many thoughts going around in my mind now. Many ideas. No one else asks me about these ideas. No one here wonders what I am thinking.”

Ecological Farm

Yesterday Thorne asked me, “Which side is your bad side, Mommy?” and then pointed. So I did jumping jacks in front of him, and then we went outside and had sprinting races on the playground. I’m trying to show them that I’m healed. That I’m no different than I was before my surgery. So that’s why today I am headed on a school bus with Aidan’s entire kindergarten class to what Aidan’s teacher is calling an ecological farm.

I’m dreading the day. It’s possible that the ecological farm is a sham. Maybe I’ve already lived in China too long, but just take the term
ecological farm
for a moment. It sounds important, but if you pull it apart, there’s nothing left. What farm isn’t ecological?

I’m crowded into the last row of the bus with Aidan. His friends sit near us, punching each other in the arms. Other mothers ride the bus and we smile and nod and realize the limitations of our different languages: Cesare’s mother from Italy is here; and Villiya’s mother from Norway; plus Alexander’s mother from Russia; and Josh’s mother, Karen, from Taiwan, who reaches across the aisle and offers me a salty dried prune.

The bus stops on a stretch of road inside the farm near a crop of green leafy vegetables. I’m assigned three children for the day: Julian, a five-year-old from Austria; Mona, a six-year-old from Germany and Korea; and Aidan. I know Mona. Last year Mona and Aidan sat together in preschool and drew pictures of people with long, pink triangular bodies. At our apartment we say Mona is Aidan’s friend that is a girl. We can’t say
girlfriend
. That word is already taboo. Mona’s favorite color is pink. Today at the farm she wears a pink dress with pink polka-dot tights and black Mary Janes. Overnight the temperature in Beijing dropped from
sixty-five to forty-five degrees. There’s a hard wind at the farm and the children are underdressed, Mona most of all, so Aidan and Julian and I hold hands and huddle around her next to the bus.

Our first stop is the bathroom. It’s the dirtiest one I’ve seen in China. I take it as a bad sign. We’ve been attending Chinese public toilets now for over a year. The boys and I have perfected the squat. At first it was a tricky thing—reteaching a four-year-old and a six-year-old how to go to the bathroom. I remember how I held Aidan by his armpits over the hole in the stinky stall inside the Forbidden City and tried not to fall in. At this farm the toilets are all squatters—brown and crusty with things growing on the sides of the small drain. A row of windows sits above the scummy sinks, and the glass is covered in blackflies. It’s as if a few centuries ago, the farm manager decided to walk away from this bathroom and conduct an experiment on what happens to the ecology of toilets and sinks when they’re used by troops of schoolchildren, but never cleaned.

Our farm leader is a young Chinese woman who makes me nervous. She herds us toward the fields in one direction and then abruptly turns and herds us back. She carries a small battery-operated megaphone, and each time she changes her mind she yells at us in broken English to turn around. Finally she leads us into a long, narrow greenhouse covered in clear plastic. We walk the edge of a broccoli field and stare at the bushy leaves. The woman yells something at us in Chinese through her megaphone, and a teaching assistant from Aidan’s school tries to translate: “She says that this broccoli is organic. No chemicals have been used to grow it.”

I look at the garbage on the sides of the fields, and I think of the bathroom we’ve just visited, and I make a plan not to eat organic broccoli anymore in Beijing. I’m in the middle of a crisis of confidence about China’s food chain anyway. The first year I was here, I was able to turn a blind eye. But not now. This month they’ve discovered melamine in the milk—a synthetic that dairy farmers add to make the milk appear to contain more protein. Six children have died after melamine calcified their kidneys. Hundreds of thousands have been hospitalized.

Yesterday a rumor spread through Beijing that maggots were in the oranges. So the oranges were all thrown out. I’ve already stopped buying eggs. Melamine showed up there too. Farmers fed it to the chickens as
well as the cows. The foreign press thinks the Chinese health officials should check the goats and pigs. The possibilities are endless. The Mayo Clinic says breast cancer survivors should eat pounds of green, leafy vegetables like the broccoli in this field I’m standing in. I try to tell Julian and Aidan and Mona what
organic
means. I say, “Organic vegetables are fed by the sun and the rain and the soil and have no chemicals.” But I think my lesson is lost on them. The woman with the megaphone screams at us to head over to carrots in a field nearby. It’s ten o’clock in the morning.