The Foremost Good Fortune (3 page)

“My old school had sturdier stuff.” Aidan sips his water.

“Sturdier?” I look at him closely and wonder about that room in
my mind and how quickly I can get in there. Because the machinery in Aidan’s head is testing me. His eyes are a shade of brown that looks wet sometimes because the brown is so dark. You can’t see the irises. He’s four years old—why does his mind spit out words like
sturdier
?

“Yeah.” Aidan looks back at me again. “The climbing stuff was sturdier.”

Then Thorne chimes in that he doesn’t know anyone at this school. “Where are my friends?” It’s a simple question. And it deserves a good answer. The boys’ urge to belong is palpable. I feel it, too—a primal need to fit in here somehow, to reach some kind of early understanding with China.

By the time we get back to the apartment complex, it’s begun to rain. We climb out of the van and say good-bye to Lao Wu. Then one of our Chinese neighbors approaches on the sidewalk and points up to the sky. He’s an old man with white hair, and he says in English that each time it rains in Beijing, the temperature drops five degrees. That this is how we get ourselves through autumn in China: rainfall by rainfall, five-degree increments by five-degree increments.

The Jingkelong

I wake up in my clothes. It’s Saturday, and I find the boys and Tony sitting on the floor in our living room (the couch the real estate agent ordered at a nearby factory hasn’t come yet). The three of them sweat in the early heat and eat bowls of instant oatmeal I brought from the States. I count over a hundred skyscrapers out the window without turning my head. Tony sees me and jumps up in his blue boxers. “Get your flip-flops on.” He smiles. “I’m taking you all for a walk into Old Beijing for breakfast.”

I stare at my husband and nod my head slowly—why is he so chipper? I still can’t shake the jet lag. Last night I fell asleep in my tank top and sweatpants at six o’clock, facedown on the mattress. It’s 7:00 a.m. now, too early to say much of anything, and I force a smile and head down the long hall to our bedroom to change my clothes. September in Beijing is hot. Even with the AC churning, there’s no way to outrun the heat.

Our apartment is going to be great—a Chinese take on a Soho loft: high concrete ceilings, large open rooms with empty concrete walls, wood laminate flooring. Tony found it on the same trip that he picked out the school. There’s a new kitchen with a dishwasher, an appliance almost unheard-of here two years ago. There’s also a washing machine, and a bar with a sink that sits right between the living room and the dining room. I’d seen photos of the place on my laptop but wasn’t prepared for the scope—nothing like I’d imagined an apartment in crowded Beijing. “A wet bar?” I had to say to Tony when I first spied it. “You mean like for entertaining?” I asked. “Which would mean a social life?”

The one drawback of the apartment is that it sits on top of one of
China’s biggest interstates—an eight-lane, full-press freeway called the Fourth Ring Road. This must be the black snake on the map back in Portland. It’s a bigger reptile than I imagined and makes noise through the day and the night. I decide we’ll buy curtains to cover the windows that face its way, and then we’ll never notice it. Aidan and Thorne haven’t gotten over the thrill that we live in a building with a real live elevator that we ride every day—one that deposits us into our own small lobby. Our front door opens onto a long concrete corridor—the perfect skateboard alley. It’s what sealed the deal for Tony. Because if we have to spend two years hiding out from the Beijing pollution, at least we can play soccer in this hall.

Bedrooms peel off from here—Thorne’s is on the right with a double bed and sky blue curtains. Aidan’s is on the left: metal bunk beds, green curtains, and enough space to hold a basketball tournament. Tony’s and my room sits at the end of the hall. I stand in our walk-in closet and throw on a sleeveless cotton dress, then grab the flip-flops from behind the door. The high ceilings and industrial beige carpet make it almost feel like a conference room in here. From these windows I can look down behind our building: a warren of narrow alleyways and one-room stone buildings. This is an old, tight-knit Beijing neighborhood that Tony calls a hutong. A gaggle of kids kicks a soccer ball in front of a concrete shop that fronts the dirt road.

“Let’s go, Sus.” Tony opens the front door. “You need to eat something soon to fight the jet lag.”

Outside, a small group of men and women is ballroom dancing in black dress shoes next to the stand of poplars in the hutong. Scratchy waltz music plays from a black tape recorder set up under a tree. “Ni hao,” Tony calls out. Two of the women smile at him. They look like they’re having fun. “Zaoshang hao,” he says to two older men pointing bamboo fishing poles into the fetid pond, and they grin. The boys run ahead of us repeating, “Ni hao, ni hao,” and do ski jumps in the air. Three of the people in my family seem happy to be here. I’m still one step removed.

When Tony and the boys flew to Beijing, I was teaching an adult poetry course in a tenth-century stone château on the French Riviera. This is the truth. My bedroom overlooked a slice of white beach and
the green Mediterranean. At about the time the boys and Tony were rounding the North Pole in their 747, I was taking a dip in a small cove near Cannes. So the boys came to China without me, and I came to China alone, and so far I can’t decide if this will be the lasting metaphor for how I experience this country.

Not if Tony has anything to say about it. He’s almost giddy with being back. It was no simple thing to orchestrate our move, and he feels the relief of landing us here—work visa and all. He takes my hand and we jog to catch up with the boys, then turn down an alley into a market of food stalls and live animal hutches. There are rabbits for sale and turtles and lots of chickens. A crowd of people moves through the merchandise like a small herd—no lining up. The idea seems to be to shove your way to the front and begin yelling. I hold Aidan’s and Thorne’s hands tighter, and we stop by a table where Tony manages to buy a dozen brown eggs from a man whose chickens peck at his bare feet.

The chickens make me think of the long talk about avian flu I had with paranoid Dr. Moretti at the vaccination clinic in the States. He said scary things while he gave me the shots, like
The Chinese will always be watching you. They’ll always know where you are
. And other slightly more sane things, like
Don’t go to chicken farms in China. Don’t pet the chickens
. But Tony is shining today. It’s as if he’s been waiting for this morning for twenty years. He has Aidan’s brown hair and the same big, almond-shaped eyes, and he can’t stop smiling.

The sky is blue and so clear, I can see the ring of sloped mountains beyond the city. From here they look earth-colored and inviting. Maybe they got the air pollution thing in China all wrong. Great big rafts of cumulus float by, and the sun shines on the tall willows in the park beyond. We pass a stall selling pink carnations and sunflowers and then a shop with a sign in English that reads “Adult Health: Bondage Toys.” The rest of the signage on the street is in Chinese characters, and when I look at these signs I end up feeling like I’ve dropped down into some Asian netherworld. Some essential Beijing at the epicenter of China. Tony raises his eyebrows at the sex shop and we keep walking toward a dumpling place we’ve heard about. We pass five stalls with open woks set up on the sidewalk. The plastic tables are different colors—yellow and green and turquoise—and come up to my shins. The stools are
smaller; adults perch on half their bottoms, slurping noodles from white bowls.

The smell is of garbage and open sewage and garlic. A kind of Chinese Muzak blares from one vendor’s transistor, and all that marching of waitresses and security guards I saw on Monday feels like a memory. Like it masks the real China, which might be here in the two straw baskets of fresh chestnuts a man balances off his shoulders from a wooden yoke. He would like me to buy some. “Bu yao xie xie,” I say to him, relieved that I’ve already memorized the phrase for what I don’t want in this country.

We sit at one of the round tables fit for preschoolers, and Tony calls out for the waiter. Everywhere we go in Beijing there’s an epidemic of soft drink consumption, and now the boys beg for Cokes. We’re breaking the rules from home, and it’s exhilarating. “Fuwuyuan,” Tony yells again. And then louder. I cringe at my husband’s moment of American imperialism—he’s usually so low-key. That’s when Tony tells me that the only way to get a waiter in China is to yell. There are no menus, and what you do is get the attention of someone who looks like they work here, and ask them what’s good to eat. “They won’t come until you scream, Sus. It’s the custom.”

Sure enough a teenage boy jogs over, and he and Tony begin a shouting match about which dumplings are best and if there are some with shrimp, not pork. Aidan hears the word
shui
, which means water. “Sprite, at least,” he begs. “If we can’t have Coke then at least Sprite.” I look at Tony and am perfectly willing to give in to Sprite for breakfast. I’m tired, and everything here is open for bargaining.

It’s a heady feeling to think we’re going to live in this city for at least two years. Where will we buy toothpaste? How will we find a way to feel like we belong? I want to mark this moment somehow—the four of us sitting in the alleyway for the first time, waiting for dumplings. Because time is already moving ahead; I can feel it. Winds of change are sweeping through Beijing while we decide whether to have soda for breakfast. It’s hot in this alleyway and I have a headache coming on. “Give them soda,” I say to Tony. “Soda will be our friend this morning.”

A circle of men in their twenties huddle around the table next to us, and when they finish their dumplings, they all light up cigarettes. I look around and most everyone else out here is smoking if they’re not eating.
Some are doing both. This is when Thorne begins to worry. “The smoking,” he says. “It’s making me sick.” I try to brush it off. I say they do smoke a lot of cigarettes in China. “But they’re killing themselves,” Thorne explains. Which is the mantra we’ve always told the boys, who think of cigarettes as something close to heroin.

Maybe this kind of schooling is a mistake, because now Thorne gets up from the table and storms away. Tony runs after him. Thorne must be trying to piece it together—how it is we came to be here, and what we’re going to do with our days. But I’m projecting. I’m often guilty of that. Maybe it’s me who’s trying to figure out where we’ve landed.

Aidan puts his head in my lap and begins to count in Chinese. If you can get from one to ten in Mandarin, then you’re on your way to one hundred. The numbers seem to make Aidan’s brain feel good. Aidan already has the purest Mandarin tones of any of us. Tony says it’s because he’s the youngest. I can’t make the sounds Aidan makes in Chinese. He’s laughing and gets to fifty-five (
wu shi wu
).
Wu
is pronounced almost like
wooooooo
. Aidan says it perfectly, cutting it off the way you’d stop a horse:
whoa
.

“You’re the new smoking police,” I tell Thorne when he sits back down. “From now on you can give out citations.”

“What is a citation?” he asks, and takes a drink of Sprite.

“A ticket,” Tony says. “You can write up smoking tickets and hand them out on the street to anyone you see smoking.” Thorne laughs, and then the dumplings come and they’re boiled, not steamed or fried, and a little doughy on the outside and delicious. We dip them in a round dish of soy sauce and vinegar that sits on the table, and our little ship is righted again.

After the dumplings, I feel emboldened. I leave the boys with Tony at a small bike shop and head over to the Jingkelong that sits at the end of the main street. It’s time to do a little retail work. For starters, I need apples. There were no apples in the hutong market. I also need a hair dryer. My requirements for this are simple: the dryer needs to be able to dry my hair. Until now I’ve air-dried and then tied it up in a black elastic and forgotten about it.

The Jingkelong is big (think Costco or Walmart) and intimidating.
It’s filled with lots of people speaking fast Chinese, plus four whole floors of live carp and bulk rice and woks. There are so many people in here I could get lost in the appliance aisle, and Tony would never find me. I stand on the third floor and shyly motion to one of the uniformed clerks, who reaches for the hair dryer I point to. But she doesn’t give it to me. She writes out a receipt and waves me to a cashier, who takes the slip and makes copies of it in triplicate.

I think capitalism smells different here. It’s old-school. They hardly ever use credit cards. Instead we walk around with big wads of cash. Still, it looks as if everyone’s buying things like mad at the Jingkelong. It just takes longer. Money is a bigger deal. That’s what happens, I think, when you still have nine hundred million peasants living on the equivalent of less than five U.S. dollars a day. The transaction gets scrutinized.

After the cashier hands me one of the receipts, I’m led to another cashier (they’re all wearing matching blue polyester pantsuits) at another counter, where I’m supposed to come up with eighty-five yuan (about twelve U.S. dollars). I hand over the money, and she gives me a different receipt—something to document the sale, maybe. Then I pass both receipts to a runner, who heads to a stockroom, then reappears carrying my hair dryer. This has all taken almost three-quarters of an hour.

On my way to the produce section, I see turtles swimming in cloudy tanks, shells big as Frisbees. Dark eels float nearby. In the cleaning products aisle, different salesgirls are dressed up in costumes: short red skirts and matching jackets and high, shiny red boots. One girl tries to sell me a new kind of synthetic floor mop. She wears her microphone on a headset and calls to me in Chinese to come watch the demonstration where she takes off the mop head and washes it.

Who knew supermarkets could become impromptu talent shows? There’s the man who wants me to watch him fry an egg in a Teflon wok, and then the teenage girl further down who’s calling to me to watch her use a bagless vacuum cleaner. I make it to apples. I would like to buy a dozen to keep in a bowl on my new kitchen counter. The boys have been asking for apples all week. There’s an old man looking at the oranges who has a small bird in his jacket pocket. I can hear it chirping. I grab a plastic bag and fill it with apples. I fill another bag with pears because they look so ripe. Then I head to the row of cash registers. I
have my hair dryer in one hand and the fruit in the other. Things have taken so long I’ve given up on the salt I need. But the teenage cashier wants nothing to do with my fruit. She keeps pointing to the back of the store—way, way back to some hinterland where they must have a scale that I won’t know how to use because the directions are in Chinese.