The Foremost Good Fortune (8 page)

In October, we don’t see Tony much. He’s busy with the new job. He stays up until the middle of the night talking to people in the States about the fact that the Chinese don’t like to pay for projects until they’re completely done. He’s started having nightmares about how to say phrases like “risk management” and “credit allocation” in Mandarin. There are big, dark circles under his eyes. I’ve never seen him this stressed out before, or this exhilarated: he wonders if his employees enjoy his brand of leadership—a style I describe as calm and trusting. He’s trying to build company pride and hosting monthly Friday after-work parties. He’s hoping to get the new hires to bond. But it’s harder than he thought it would be to open a business here. More challenging in every way.

His Chinese is my most valuable commodity here. I still feel as if I’ve been cast illiterate, or perhaps mute, in this country. I call Tony
at work because the gas stove won’t start and the water in the shower doesn’t come out. Yesterday, I think I showed restraint by only dialing his office nine times.

“Two years,” I say to the Chinese woman named Flora when she asks me at the playground how long we’ll be here. Her daughter, Samantha, is in Thorne’s class. I watch the three children climb up the metal slide backward and then I quickly look up to the sky. “Two years,” I repeat to myself slowly. “We will be here two years.”

Today is what people in Beijing call a “bad air day.” It’s a mild euphemism for when the sky becomes so foggy I can’t see skyscrapers out my bedroom window. Right now we’re inside a low-pressure system that’s trapped clouds and moisture over the city like a lid. The smog begins to sting my eyes.

We’d heard there were throngs of expats here, but it turns out many of them have fled to the suburbs. Beijing is just too dirty, too loud and polluted, for some. I overheard a Belgian woman at the visa office yesterday say Beijing lacks charm. Lacks history. She’s holed up in a French diplomatic compound outside the city. She’d lived in Shanghai the whole year before, she said. “Shanghai has flavor,” she explained to her friend seriously. “It’s so much better. But Beijing”—she shook her head—“no. I won’t live here.”

There are government initiatives to make the air better before the Olympics—they have a “blue sky” goal of 150 days in 2008. This seems like a high number. Each day you can check pollution levels on a government Web site, but I don’t need to look at the ratings. It might be helpful to understand that the Clean Air Act in the United States limits healthy “fine particle pollution” concentrations to thirty-five micrograms per cubic meter. Levels between fifty-one and one hundred are moderate, and anything over a hundred is harmful to “sensitive groups,” including children and the elderly. It’s weird to live like this, but I’ve decided to make friends with the pollution. It’s like a Down East fog rolled in from the outer banks. Soupy. Which is a word we say in Maine when the fog won’t burn off.

Pollution here seems to have a lot to do with wind. The city sits at the northern edge of the North China Plain, bounded on the north
and west by mountains. Wind blowing south or east pushes things out of the city. North or west winds leave things over the city, along the mountain front.

Tony likes to check the ratings. He calls me at the playground on my cell phone and asks if I want to know today’s pollution numbers. “No,” I say. “I don’t want to hear it. I’m sure it’s worse than I think.”

He isn’t listening. “One hundred fifty and rising,” he says, as if I’m interested. As if I can’t already tell it’s bad by the headache I feel coming on, and the fact that I can’t see the trees across the street.

“Thank you for that,” I say. “I’m hanging up now. You’ve made my day.”

That night, after the boys go to bed, Tony opens a bottle of wine and we sit on the couch so our legs are touching and look down over the Fourth Ring highway and farther out to the crowded skyline. It’s Friday, and it feels like we haven’t been alone together in weeks, because we haven’t. I’ve missed him. Before we moved here I forgot to plan for his absences and all the work he’d have.

“How are we doing?” Tony asks and takes my hand in his and kisses it. He’s a stealth romantic. We forget our wedding anniversary for years in a row. But, as we both like to say, our love is the key to the whole operation. And right now the operation is stationed in China, where Tony likes to keep a running score of our wins and losses. “Is China beating us this week?” he asks, and smiles.

“On Monday,” I answer. “We won. Clearly we won because we had the good luck to hire Xiao Wang.” I take a sip of wine and try to smile. “But today was different. Today it was too smoggy for the boys to play outside at recess.”

Tony nods. “One for us. One for China.”

Sunday morning comes, and the boys eat French toast at the dining table. Tony walks in from the hall and kisses them good-bye. He’s flying to Shanghai for meetings all week. Right before he leaves he gives Thorne and Aidan a speech: “Be kind to each other and more important, be kind to your mother.” I stand by the table and feel like our family is
some throwback to the fifties. I’m the housewife whom the kids are badgered into being nice to? I’m more dependent on my husband than I’ve ever been.

I’ve learned that needing Tony and feeling close to him are not the same—need is about practicalities; intimacy is a mysterious underwater current. I bet Brie, the astrologer back in Maine, would attest to this difference. I wouldn’t be surprised if Saturn wants me to cleave to Tony like some helpless bride and never give Neptune a chance.

Tony kisses me on the lips and he’s gone. By 9:00 a.m. I’ve announced the second round of Monopoly—the special edition Red Sox version. Before the game even starts, Aidan comes out of his room wearing a full Brazilian soccer uniform: blue shorts and yellow shirt and knee socks, plus the shin guards. Aidan is a big costume guy. For one year in Maine he lived in a red and blue Spider-Man suit—wore it to school and the supermarket and the playground. He took the business very seriously. And after a few months, once I understood it, I did too. Because when Aidan was Spider-Man, he was bolder and braver and more himself in many ways than when he took it off. I could give him that. I could let him be Spider-Man as long as he wanted because hey, the world can be a scary place, and we get our strength wherever we can find it.

On Friday Aidan’s teacher, Carmel, e-mailed to say that Aidan walked into the classroom that morning, took off his sweatshirt, and said, “I hate it here.” Carmel is seeing this as a good thing. She’s such a positive woman she’s been able to convince me it’s healthy that Aidan is communicating how he feels. Getting it out.

I think Thorne is who we have to pay attention to. Because he isn’t saying much. Right now our camp leader is lying on the couch staring at the ceiling, when what he needs to be doing is organizing our day—out fixing the flagpole and then planning a scavenger hunt.

“Come roll the dice, Thorne,” I say. “It’s your turn.”

Thorne doesn’t have any real friends yet, and this is a painful thing for a mother. He used to have friends. Friend making was one of those seamless things for him. Now when I drop him off at school, he hangs around the teacher, watching the other boys play soccer. Diba has e-mailed me that Thorne is making strides. She says some of the kids are warming to him.
Warming to him?
And it’s hard for me sometimes not to storm into the building and make friends
for
Thorne. Just go
meet a few six-year-olds in the hall and say,
Hey, this is Thorne. He’s fun. What’s your name?

“I hate school,” Aidan says to me now. “And you know why, Mom?” He flops his whole thin body into my lap. “You really wanna know why?”

“Please tell me.” It’s my turn. I lean and move my man six spaces, to Yawkey Way.

“Because you can’t wear tie-up shoes. You have to wear shoes without laces.”

“You mean with Velcro?” I look down at him and try not to laugh. I’ve already learned about the Velcro problem. Carmel also told me on Friday that Aidan wasn’t fast enough at tying his laces yet. She’d like us to get some sneakers with Velcro but I keep putting it off—hoping that maybe Aidan can increase his tying speed over the weekend. I don’t want to have to go to a Beijing shoe store.

“Yeah, that’s it. Velcro,” he says, and begins to suck his thumb.

The trick with Aidan is to make him think you’re on his side. He needs to know everyone is rooting for him. And we can never openly laugh at him—even if we’re only laughing because what he says is funny. “So you hate the school because you have to wear shoes with Velcro?” I ask. He nods. “Then that’s a problem.” I rub his hair. “I bet that’s really frustrating.”

By that afternoon Lao Wu is driving us to the Lufthansa Shopping Mall for sneakers with Velcro. Aidan falls asleep in the minivan and wakes up quietly saying, “I wasn’t planning on this. I wasn’t.”

“Oh, Aidey.” I’m sweating. What I want to say is that I wasn’t planning on this either.

“I knew I wouldn’t like it here.” Aidan is getting louder now. “I knew I wouldn’t like China.” Lao Wu parks the van in a spot outside the mall, and I pull Aidan onto my lap in the front seat. Then Thorne and Lao Wu get out and stand in the parking lot singing a Chinese folk song. But Thorne keeps waving for me to get a move on. I tell Aidan that China will get better. Easier. “Week by week we’ll have more fun. Just you wait,” I say. “Real fun.” Aidan nods and wipes his nose with the back of his hand. At least I can still reason with him. I open the door, and we climb out of the passenger seat together.

It’s probably true that a lot of my worries about the boys in China
are the same worries I’d have in the United States. Mothering small children for me is a math lesson in worrying: what part to subtract? What part to pay attention to? It’s a constant tally sheet. Some things just feel exaggerated here. I can’t seem to make everything better in China. We’ve given ourselves up to the Greater Forces. Dropped into the river, and now we each have to swim for ourselves. I am counting on the boys to do that. I am counting on the fact that they can swim.

Chabuduo

Xiao Wang and I reach a language stalemate. It’s the first day of November, and I try to tell her that two maintenance men will be arriving to install a metal rod in Thorne’s closet, so we can hang clothes in there. I think I explain in Chinese that a closet is a place to put clothes (
yifu
), but I’m not making sense to her. In the end, I motion for her to follow me, and we walk back to Thorne’s room, where I open the door to the closet and say, “Closet. This is a closet.” Then we both laugh.

When the maintenance men ring the doorbell, I stand in my wool socks in the hall and stare at their lips. Tony has arranged their visit over the telephone. The men speak to me in what I now call machine-gun Chinese, and I nod as if I have some notion of what they’re saying. Then they take off their black loafers and walk into my apartment in their white socks like they own it. It’s noon, and I whisper to myself that if these men are going to rob Xiao Wang and me and tie us up with ropes, they should get it over with. I don’t know the Chinese words for getting help. Besides, I don’t know anyone who would come for us anyway.

But the men are laughing with each other. They smell like nicotine. I leave them inside Thorne’s closet and go into the kitchen to chop onions with Xiao Wang. She’s teaching me how to use the cleaver after she saw me cut a green pepper with a steak knife yesterday. That was when she told me her mother died of cancer. Last year, when Xiao Wang’s mother got sick, she and her husband took their baby and walked away from their jobs in Beijing to go to take care of the dying woman. This is the Chinese way, Xiao Wang explained. When someone is sick, there’s no question. You leave everything.

After they buried her mother, Xiao Wang and her husband came back to Beijing with the baby and couldn’t find jobs. Her husband is a driver, but no one has been hiring. She says there are no jobs in her old village and the young people have left. Only old people stay in the small towns. Her whole family—including her husband’s parents, who live with them—survives on wages Xiao Wang makes at our house. They don’t have the proper Beijing ID—the
hukou
(residency card) that allows them free school and a little health care. The card can cost thousands of U.S. dollars on the black market. Without the hukou, Xiao Wang is like an illegal alien in Beijing. The police can stop her on the street anytime and send her to jail or back to Shanxi Province.

Xiao Wang makes three hundred U.S. dollars a month and works six hours a day. At the bus stop yesterday Flora scoffed at how much I pay Xiao Wang and said it’s way too much. Flora thinks it’s scandalous. Her ayi works twice as many hours as Xiao Wang and gets paid half as much. I want to tell Flora that this kind of domestic hierarchy is not my way. I’d like to explain that I
like
Xiao Wang. She washes the floors and vacuums the rugs and folds the clothes and has done more ironing in the last three months than I’ve done in my life. She is the housewife I’ve never been. All of which makes me grateful and uncomfortable and convinced we should be paying her more.

I make a pile of onions on the cutting board. Xiao Wang seems relatively pleased with my work. She nods and reaches for the wok, and then the doorbell rings again. The maintenance men are still chatting in Thorne’s room. I haven’t wanted to interrupt them. Who could this be now? I look through the glass peephole. There’s a man in a green China Mail uniform.

It took a while, but by now we’ve all but forgotten that there was ever a time in our lives when we got regular mail, or that there are countries where people check their mailboxes every day. Because we don’t get mail in China. Haven’t yet. But this man seems to be asking me to open the door so he can give me the big box he’s holding. I say, “Hao de. Hao de” (
Good. Good. Okay
), and reach for the doorknob.

I carry the box inside. My mother has sent a gigantic care package of kitchen sponges (I can’t find any here) and maple syrup (liquid gold at Jenny Lou’s) and two alarm clocks (missing from every department store I’ve cased here). There are also jelly beans and chocolate kisses and
late Halloween cards for both boys saying she misses us so much she can’t stand it:
When should I come?
she writes.
Because I’m coming and I can’t wait much longer!