The Foremost Good Fortune (25 page)

We’ve got a long day ahead, and the children are shivering in the wind. “How do carrots grow?” the voice in the megaphone asks the children in Chinese. The teaching assistant takes the megaphone again and translates. We learn that carrots grow in dirt, and that is the sum total of our ecology lesson.

Then we’re left to roam on our own. My little tribe heads over to the birds. Aidan says, “I’ve been waiting all day to see these guys.” The bird pen is a muddy concrete situation that’s more disconcerting than the broccoli field. Water and excrement have pooled in places on the cement floor. A collection of sad-looking geese walks gingerly: we count fourteen of them, plus two turkeys, four peacocks, two enormous ostriches, a handful of ducks, and five chickens. The words
avian flu
keep popping into my head. The birds squawk at us until someone from the farm brings over a basket of wilted lettuce for the children to feed to the animals.

We’ve been told that soon the kids are going to gather chicken eggs inside the filthy pen.
We don’t need eggs from those chickens
, I want to say to someone in charge. What we need to do is wash our hands with soap and hot water and go home. Because this is not the farm for us. There are pretend handbags in China, and pretend milk, and now there’s a pretend farm. And there’s no soap on this pretend farm either. None that I can find. There are two empty swimming pools, though, and a bumper car ride that looks like it’s been kidnapped from an amusement park and then left here to rust.

This is a farm that dreamed big and fell short. The teachers decide to cut our losses and leave. There will be no egg gathering, and the farm is too dirty for us to sit down anywhere for a picnic lunch. We get back on the bus and I’m given hand wipes to pass out to the children.
“Why aren’t we getting to find chicken eggs?” Aidan asks. “I wanted to gather eggs!” He and Julian wait for my answer. Mona isn’t paying any attention. She says she’s pretending to be a water bug. She climbs down on the floor in her pink tights and hides under the seat, which doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.

Aidan and I get back from the farm, and wait to meet Thorne off the school bus. Then we walk home and I heat up leftover pizza while the boys draw with markers at the dining table. Mao Ayi called in the morning and told Tony she had a fever. Without her here, it’s surprisingly quiet in the apartment. It makes me realize how loudly we talk in our new Chinese when she’s around.

Tonight is a normal school night in Beijing. Tony is on his way home from the office, and nobody in the apartment is musing about breast cancer. No one is wondering out loud how you get to heaven. I hear Thorne say to Aidan, “It was awful at school last year. I did not know how to draw a star. I suck at drawing.” I wince. Drawing is not something I’m good at either, and I’m afraid I’ve given Thorne bad drawing genes. His drawings, like mine, are one-dimensional and rudimentary: sticklike humans and narrow houses with thin chimneys.

Aidan calls out, “Mom. How do you spell the word
boat
?”

“B-o-a-t,” I say and bring the pizza to the table. Aidan shows me his pirate ship and says he’s named it
People Who Want to Tear Down the World
. There are small, intricately colored flags on his boat and humans with large-fingered hands. Drawing comes naturally to Aidan.

“Nice work,” I say to him, even though I’ve recently read an online article on parenting that urges parents to be specific in praise of our kids. Apparently, children are getting too used to vague praise, and this is making them complacent.

“So, Aidan.” I look at his drawing again and try to back up. “I like the way you drew that anchor in black marker and made it hang down behind the boat.”

“It’s not an anchor, Mom,” he says. “It’s a rudder.”

Oh, really?
I want to say.
Oh, please
. Thorne is next to me, busy drawing more stars. His confidence seems restored. “Here is a perfect star,” he says and hands me his paper. “And here.”

“What good work,” I say tiredly, giving the most vague kind of praise. “What perfect stars.” In truth, the stars look rushed and messy and are hard to discern.

The boys finish the pizza and run back to Aidan’s room to wrestle. I gather up the drawings on the table. Above his stars Thorne has written, “Thorne does not have a girlfriend.” Down at the bottom of the page it reads, “Does Thorne have a girlfriend?”

Later, Aidan rides into the kitchen on his skateboard and finds me finishing the dishes. “Can water feel itself when it’s cold?” he asks earnestly.

“No,” I say, glad to be able to answer something definitively. “Water does not have feelings.”

“What about crabs? Can crabs feel when the water is cold?”

“I think so,” I answer and walk out of the kitchen. “I’m going to take a bath.”

I get in the tub and close my eyes and try to feel the normalcy of the evening rain down. It is the kind of normal I’ve been working toward all fall: a state of mind that does not allow for fear. An apartment where my boys talk about the dimensions of stars and no one asks me if I’m going to die. I hear Thorne greet Tony at the front door with a yell.

That’s when Aidan jogs into the bathroom, sees me in the tub, flexes his tiny arm muscles, and asks me again if he looks any stronger. “Definitely,” I say. “Your biceps are definitely bigger.”

I stand and grab a towel, but I am too late. “When are you going to get another nipple?” he asks me. We’ve gone over this before.

“In June.” I’m intentionally vague about the where and the how, and I don’t explain that the thing will be fake. Or that later on, someone (a tattoo artist who moonlights at the hospital) will tattoo the areola on me. I have a hard time getting my head around this information, which is why I can’t offer it up to Aidan. I almost don’t believe it myself.

Aidan looks at me closely. “In June?” he says. “June is summer.”

“Yep. When we go back to the States for summer.”

“But how,” he asks me slowly as he thinks it through, “can you be sure it is going to grow back by then?” It’s a reasonable question. But this whole discussion is getting too Freudian for me.

Tony comes into the bathroom and saves me. He asks Aidan to finish a chapter of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
with him in bed. Then I’m
alone again with my fake left breast in China. We dry off. I put on my brown sweatpants and a white T-shirt and say good-bye to the implant.

Thorne is lying on his bed holding
Farmer Boy
, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. He reports that Almanzo has spent the entire day in the one-room schoolhouse. I turn out the light and lie down on the bed. Then Thorne says he’s undecided.

“About what?” I ask.

“I can’t decide if I ever want to be ten.”

“And why’s that?”

“Well, if I am ten, it means I am closer to dying. Except I want for there to be a next week because next week we go skiing in Japan.”

“That’s true.” I take a breath. “And you don’t have to worry about dying,” I say slowly. “Dying is a grown-up problem.”

“I wish I could close my eyes and be back in America.”

“Where would you go?”

“To school,” he says. “I would go right to school to see my friends. Don’t you think everyone in America is just waking up?”

Starter Buddha

On Sunday I tell Tony we need more help at the apartment—some kind of Chinese talisman to ward off the leftover cancer juju. Because there’s too much talk between the boys about my disease. “Too much brooding on life and death, don’t you think?” I ask, and he nods. I suspect he would agree with just about anything I said at this point. “I think maybe a Buddha head is what we need.” He nods again, and maybe looks slightly resigned to what the coming day will bring, but he does not complain once. No. He seems entirely game. I think he’s trying to humor me. Trying to see me through to a healthier place, where I don’t have so much anxiety or wake up on Sunday mornings needing to go buy religious artifacts.

It’s a mild morning in October, and our kids are at double playdates. How often does it happen that Tony and I are alone together on a weekend in China? Almost never. And since we’ve made it through the circus that was our summer of cancer treatments, and trips to hospitals to meet different flavors of doctors, it seems natural to me to get ourselves to the biggest flea market in Beijing.

The first one we see is a beautiful Buddha from the shoulders up. He has a large, round head carved from some kind of pale wood, and he’s been covered in white plaster of Paris, which smudges on my fingers when I touch his ear. He’s really only a head—with long, impossibly wide eyes and full, rosebud lips. There’s no body to speak of. I like him. I can tell Tony does too, by the way he’s stopped in the crowded aisle to stare.

“That’s a pretty cool face,” Tony says, and smiles. We’re surrounded by Chinese “antiques,” the detritus of a city embracing free market enterprise. There are rows of 1940s Mao wristwatches, and red and
black feng shui meters. There are brightly embroidered Tibetan booties and slim Communist-era metal cigarette cases. You can buy tea-colored calligraphy scrolls and vintage Cultural Revolution posters of the Long March. You can bargain over wooden moon cake molds and the earliest Chinese radios and glass mirrors with etchings of the imperial family. You can bargain over anything.

Perfectly natural that Tony and I chose to come to this crazy place full of Beijing’s castoffs. Because we are in need of some kind of help here. A statue of an animal god or a torn Tibetan prayer flag (we don’t particularly care which) to take back to our apartment and help keep watch over the cancer with us. That’s what we’re doing now—every day without having to say it: keeping watch, making sure it doesn’t come back, making certain it doesn’t destroy the time we have together. We are knocking on wood. We are eating our fruits and vegetables.

It’s a long, mostly invisible vigil—one that I hope lasts until we’re old and gray and have forgotten the cancer. But that’s why I motion impulsively to a man in a black polyester sports coat who looks like he might own this big Buddha head. I ask him in Chinese to bring it down for us from the high table for a better look. The black sports coat says in English that this Buddha is old.
Very old
. Four thousand Chinese RMB old, to be exact.

And also heavy. Getting him off the table is not easy, but the black sports coat and a friend are able to slowly move the Buddha to a small, metal cart with wheels. Then I kneel in the dirt and rub the top of the Buddha’s head with my hand. “Very old,” the black sports coat says again. “Very beautiful.”

It’s important to remember that most things at this market are “very old” at first, and almost double the price they should be. The market’s name is Panjiayuan, but locals call it the Ghost Market. Long before free markets were legal in China, vendors would bike here to Panjiayuan and set up in the dark to sell. Then they’d disappear like ghosts when police came around to shut them down.

The black sports coat keeps motioning for Tony and me to sit on two small collapsible stools he’s brought out for us, but we stay standing. To sit on the stools would mean we are ready to concede that we want the Buddha. It would mean we are prepared to negotiate a price. But we’re not. Because negotiating in China is a hard-learned skill. An art, really.
One that Tony and I sorely lack. He and I both know four thousand RMB is too high a starting point for the games to begin. But we have no idea how low a price to counter with.

Soon there are ten people standing in a circle around Tony and me while we stare at the Buddha. It’s often this way at the market—I show an interest in something, and the Chinese gather round tightly to see how much the foreigner will pay. “I am not prepared for a crowd,” Tony whispers to me, then tries to take a step back. “And we’re not sitting down,” he says. “I repeat. Do not sit down. Nor are we buying a fake Buddha head for seven hundred U.S. dollars.”

“I’m with you.” I nudge my way back through the small gathering. “I’ll admit I know next to nothing about prices of Buddha heads.”

“Big Buddha heads,” Tony says and takes my hand. “Too big. Because this Buddha is large. Very large. We don’t need this Buddha. What we need is a starter Buddha. A Buddha we can afford.”

“Okay,” I say and turn down the aisle toward a cluster of Tibetan teenagers selling wooden altar boxes. Their stalls are right next to those of several Han Chinese women selling identical metal Christmas tree ornaments. Nearby, the Uighurs have cornered the market on fake fur: tiger and leopard and bear. I hope the pelts are fake. They have to be fake; almost everything else in this market is. “Okay,” I repeat. “A starter Buddha.” Then I take one more look at the Buddha on the metal cart.
Our
Buddha—the one with the obelisk eyes.

I must gaze too longingly, because that’s when Tony takes me by the elbow and says, “Number one purchasing rule in China: do not stare at the object you’re hoping to buy. Do not show emotional interest of any kind.” Then he leads me down an aisle of darkly woven Mongolian carpets and calls over his shoulder to the black sports coat that we’re going to look at other Buddhas. Cheaper Buddhas. Tony says in Chinese, “We might be back.”

We see many other Buddhas over the course of the next hour. Some are made of hard stone and stand with their legs under them. Some are wooden and kneel in prayer. Several raise their right arm to offer blessings. All of these Buddhas are painted and sanded and burnished to look like antiques, but when I press the teenage vendors, they tell me the statues were bought at a factory in Pingyao and are selling for about three hundred RMB each. In other words, they are starter Buddhas.

The Buddha head I love (because I do love it now) is still sitting on its metal cart in Aisle Five when we walk past again. The black sports coat comes running from a small card game over in Aisle Six when he sees us. He yells out in broken English: “Think of a price you offer, then make deal. You won’t regret. This Buddha, very old Buddha.” Then he slips his business card into Tony’s hand. We are on our way to the front gates of the market. We seem to have resolve. We appear to be leaving the flea market without buying any kind of religious iconography.