The Foremost Good Fortune (7 page)

I only have three minutes to convince them. The school handbook makes it clear: the bus waits the full three and then leaves. The rest of the kids have gotten on and everyone is waiting. I’m not above bribery. There’s a Taiwanese-American boy named Eric who recognizes Thorne from first grade. Just before Eric climbs the last stair onto the bus, he turns and says, “Hey, Thorne, do you want to sit with me?”

What a gesture. What a random act of kindness from one six-year-old to another. I almost cry out of gratitude. Thorne cannot hear Eric because he’s begun to hyperventilate. “Listen.” I turn to Thorne and speak slowly and loudly. “You know there will be treats.”

“Treats?” Aidan perks up. He’s been standing behind Thorne’s right shoulder, watching to see how things will play out.

“Yes, treats.” I brush a tear off Thorne’s cheek. His skin is smooth. He still sounds like he can’t get enough air and I wonder why I’m not figuring out another way to get them to school. Why we’ve brought them to China in the first place. “You both get on this bus, and when you get home, I’ll take you to Jenny Lou’s.”

“Jenny Lou’s!” Aidan smiles and makes for the bus door. “Jenny Lou’s has Starburst.” Tony thinks I’ve already turned Aidan into a sugar addict in China. But when my husband harps, I remind him that now is not the time to get health-conscious on me. We’re living in one of the world’s most polluted cities, so could he please not get holier-than-thou about fruit-flavored candy.

Jenny Lou’s is a store—Chinese-owned—that caters to foreigners. That means it carries a boatload of processed, artificially preserved foods from countries like Russia and Australia and France. There’s pepperoni
and sardines and Pepperidge Farm cookies and Marshmallow Fluff. There are egg bagels made by a Chinese American woman recently returned from Brooklyn. The food is wildly expensive, even though the store appears to be falling down, with mildewed ceilings and piles of dirt in the corners of the produce section.

I read the school guidelines carefully in June before we moved. They explained how convenient the bus service was: picking up and dropping off kids at the front gates of apartment buildings all over Beijing. I knew the city had the newest drivers in the world. So many cars run over pedestrians here that the government doesn’t report the statistics. “I’m driving the boys to school in China,” I told Tony last August in our kitchen after the kids had gone to bed. Right, Tony nodded, and kept making a list of vaccinations we needed for our visas. “No buses,” I repeated. “No buses driven by strangers on Beijing highways.” Tony nodded again. What he didn’t tell me was that I would have no choice.

Thorne doesn’t care as much about sugar as Aidan. In the end, my promise is twofold: Starburst at Jenny Lou’s, and thirty minutes of England’s World Cup qualifier match on Rupert Murdoch’s Star Sports channel. “Deal?” I say.

“Deal,” Thorne mumbles. Then he climbs on and sits in the front seat and bends his head so he can’t see me. The bus leaves and I walk back to the apartment feeling deflated. It’s not the march of triumph I imagined. Instead, it’s another one of those confused mother walks: walk of guilt with a little bit of victory mixed in. The Bad Mother chorus starts up in my head. I read in some parenting book that you’re not supposed to bribe your children—you’re not supposed to cave. I didn’t cave, did I? I got them on the bus.

The sky looks smoggy. But this is an understatement, so let me try again. I can’t write “thick, noxious fog” every time I want to invoke bad air, so I’ll just call it smog, and you can imagine the worst. I walk toward the hutong, past the circular lawns of scrappy grass. It seems to be hard to make things grow in this city. The soil is thick clay. Another elm sapling has died outside our front door. The gardening is done by a full work unit of men in torn black blazers. The black blazer seems to be the uniform of the entire Beijing working class. I do not fully understand this. It’s a polyester blend, and the majority of men do manual labor wearing the blazer and black loafers.

The gardeners work until six at night digging dirt holes and pruning and hauling out dead things. There’s one woman, and she wears black jeans and a polka-dot blouse—no blazer. I’ve been told these gardeners used to have hutong houses where the Park Avenue apartment towers have been built. In China there is a great deal of imbalanced quid pro quo: you let me tear down your house that’s been in your family for five generations, and I’ll give you a job for two dollars a day gardening in the multimillion-dollar apartment compound we build on your land.

At the pond, scores of men and women jump up and down in place. Under one tree, a small group of gray-haired men and women practices tai chi. Then, further down the path, other couples—men with women and women with other women—practice ballroom dancing. During the Cultural Revolution dancing was outlawed, along with other things. Birds, for example, were banished. Mao didn’t like them. Now the dancers bow to one another with big smiles on their faces, as if they realize how lucky they are to be here, at the start of the next century, waltzing in Beijing after all China has lived through.

A clutch of older men walk to the field behind the pond carrying pigeon cages covered in blue flannel blankets. They hang the cages on the trees, then open the doors, and the birds fly over the sky in formation.

Last Saturday, my first Chinese friend in Beijing, Sabrina, came over with her kids, who go to school with Thorne and Aidan. Sabrina grew up in Beijing. She stood in my living room and looked at the hutong and said it had been housing for work units during the Cultural Revolution. The buildings are long and narrow and set in rows like army barracks, each made of gray concrete with a flat roof.

Sabrina explained how the revolution took the parents away. She was raised by elderly grandparents and was lucky to see her parents for visits. Then she pointed at two sets of common bathrooms that sit in front of the hutong, where people come and go with buckets of water. Sabrina’s family had a house in the city, a “square lot,” she called it. But no toilet. So all her life she walked the alley to the bathroom. “That is why”—she smiled—“when you go into the hutong, you see people walking in bathrobes and slippers. They have just come from the toilets.”

I’ve heard people say that the entire neighborhood out back will be razed after the Olympics. Right now the government has put a freeze on demolition inside the city. Hundreds of skyscrapers have to be ready
by the opening day of the Olympics, August 8. The race to finish goes on around the clock. Sabrina told me the hutong out back won’t be saved. “It is not pretty,” she said, and so it will go.

Today, thirty blue flatbed trucks are parked in front of a string of one-story cement shops. Each shop is the size of a small woodshed and has a stone roof. A woman sits in a chair guarding one of the shops. People smoke and spit and stop their bikes and rickshaws to talk. Some eye the woman’s concrete powder. Finally, two men in black blazers open a bag and sniff. Another woman in a blue sweat suit sweeps in front of her cement shop. The wind blows the dirt back toward her. Halfway down the block, a man puts out two small plastic tables and stools and cooks what looks like rice soup in a wok he’s lit from a gas burner on the ground. A couple of men sit down to eat.

Someone would have noticed by now if the two new American boys hadn’t gotten to school, right? A lot of this expatriation seems to be about trust in strangers. About faith in some larger, global force of good. Because my children are out on the Beijing highway without me. Maybe I shouldn’t have been such a hard-ass about the bus. They’re small children.

Drivers congregate around the flatbeds and stand in a circle and smoke. When they smoke, they also spit. Smoke and spit. Spit and smoke. This is the sequence. I’d heard about the spitting in China before we arrived. I’d even read about a government campaign to eradicate spitting before the Olympics. Apparently, some of the rich Chinese don’t like the spitting. They write essays in international magazines about how the spitting will embarrass China at the games. One of the problems seems to be that people believe spitting is medicinal, that it clears the lungs. Most of the spitting I’ve seen involves a deep, horking sound that calls up any mucus rattling around. Then silver dollars of phlegm get left along the city sidewalks and streets like calling cards. It’s impossible not to step in them.

The woman at the concrete shop has two real customers. She jumps up. The men reach into one of the bags and finger the concrete powder. Then they pull out cigarettes and light up. Once the smoking is done and the bargaining seems complete, they pile bags in the back of the cart they’ve pedaled to the shop.

A young woman pushes a rickshaw filled with green vegetables. She’s come from the outdoor market, I bet. I walk down the alley to the
market and fill a plastic bag with long Chinese beans. Then I grin at the teenage boy selling them and hand him a five-RMB note, and he smiles and gives me change.

I walk back to the apartment and sit at my desk and stare out my bedroom window. I’ve got my laptop plugged in and I begin an e-mail to my dear friend Sara, about the amazing number of people who come and go from the public toilets every few minutes. E-mail has become my best friend in China. It’s how I talk to people back home. I’ve always had a love/hate thing with e-mail. I can still feel its tyranny—the way e-mail imposes a false sense of urgency, and how it replaced letter writing almost overnight. But for me the love now outweighs the hate. Because I can miss my mother and write her a note about the color of the China sky, and maybe I’ll hear back from her in two minutes if the timing’s right. I can write to my great friend Winky, who lives two doors down from me in Portland, and tell her how much I’m thinking of her. Then she sends me a photo of my house with the October leaves piling up on the lawn.

When the boys return home on the bus, I stand on the sidewalk and wave them out. “How was it? How was the ride?” I ask, breathless. But I’m more worked up about the bus now than they are.

“So-so,” Aidan says. Thorne dribbles a soccer ball on the concrete without answering. I have already called Lao Wu on his cell phone and he can take us to Jenny Lou’s. We climb into the van. This is the victory drive for Aidan. At the store, he walks around the candy aisle three times before choosing.

After we buy the treats, we climb back in the van, and Thorne says, “There’s a boy on the bus named Andrew from Shanghai who hit me.”

“Hit you?”
Oh God
. “Hit you where?”

“Eric and I sang a song about Andrew and Molly getting married and so he hit me. On the shoulder.”

“Did it hurt?”

“It’s okay, Mom,” Thorne says calmly. “We’re friends now. After he hit me, Andrew gave me some of his Doritos.”

We drive the rest of the way home in silence while I go over the day’s sequence of events. The ending is still the same—the boys are safe. They eat their candy and stare out the van window. When we get back to the apartment, we turn on Star Sports and watch the soccer on the couch together, both boys’ feet in my lap.

Xiao Wang

October is also the month we hire a woman named Xiao Wang to be an ayi—the Chinese word for magical housekeeper. And how completely typical: the Americans go to China and create a small feudal system. It feels like that sometimes. The whole thing is unsettling and awe-inspiring: Xiao Wang will come to our apartment every day, and just for starters, she will clean the floors and iron shirts.

When I was growing up, it was a big deal when my mother hired Mrs. Endicott to come vacuum every two weeks. But many of the Chinese people I’ve met here seem accustomed to having staff—comfortable with domestic and professional hierarchies that for many Americans are unheard-of. Someone to cook your meals every day? Come on. Someone to iron your shirts? You’ve got to be kidding. Someone to help clean the bathrooms and organize the socks and load the dishwasher? You can’t be serious.

The name Xiao Wang means “little Wang,” and we got word from a friend of a friend at the boys’ school that she was looking for work. I believe the other magical thing Xiao Wang will do is buy food to cook for our dinner. Xiao Wang comes to work on the first day wearing tight, acid-wash jeans and a bright pink, long-sleeved T-shirt with Chinese writing on it. She is a reed-thin thirty-year-old woman with shoulder-length black hair and pretty eyes, who doesn’t speak English except for a few key words I’ll come to rely heavily upon, like
yes
and
no
and
okay
. She has a two-year-old boy, a young husband, and a quick laugh, and will work for us from eleven in the morning until five in the afternoon.

Many Chinese people I meet here have multiple ayis—an ayi for each child, an ayi who cooks, a different ayi who cleans. There’s a whole
ayi industry in China. I interviewed four other women for Xiao Wang’s job. The interviews were excruciating gatherings at our dining room table. The candidates were young Chinese women in their twenties who’d come straight from rural villages. I’m not sure they’d been in Beijing for more than an hour before the ayi agencies hired them.

The e-mail I got from the agency rep said, “Each candidate is proficient in English and knows how to raise children.” It wasn’t that I didn’t find any of the women promising—they were each kind and hopeful in their own way. It was just too arbitrary to conduct a job fair in my apartment and choose one girl over the others. Each sat at the table and stared quietly at me and I stared back, trying to figure her out. Trying to get a feel.

But that was almost impossible. None of the girls spoke any English. They all looked nervous. Each had memorized a series of rote responses in English. I asked, “Have you ever taken care of children before?” All four of them smiled and said yes at the same time. “Do you like to cook?” Same response.

When I met Xiao Wang, I hired her on the spot. She laughed a lot and said in English that she really wanted the job. She needed the job. Then she made an unsolicited pledge to learn a new English word every day. I said I would do the same with Chinese.