A Yuletide Universe

by Brian M. Thomsen (ed)

  Let me preface my story by stating that in my estimation the People’s Republic of China is not a particularly mystical place. Granted, I came to China because I thought it would change me, would make me into something more than I had been before, but I foresaw this change to be purely an experience of character. I wanted experience to make me wise. Not spiritual wisdom, not the New Age Tao of Kites and union of souls pseudo-wisdom. I wasn’t looking for ancient Eastern secrets; I’m biased against most of that kind of thing anyway. And in my limited experience, mysticism and spiritualism seem more particularly debased in China than they are even in the U.S. When any of my many Chinese friends launched into a description of paranormal experiences, I got the same uncomfortable feeling I do when someone in the U.S. tells me about the time they saw a UFO. I nodded and tried to appear to take them very seriously, because they were usually confiding something they felt slightly embarrassed about, but which was very real to them, namely about miracles of kung fu and the magic psychic healing powers of people that a friend of theirs knew.

  I do try to keep an open mind. For example there’s a lot of herbal medicine in China, and although my preference is for antibiotics I am willing to concede that seven thousand years of pharmaceutical experience has probably discovered things that Eli Lily hasn’t yet had time to research and get past the FDA. So when my translator came down with persistent diarrhea I was interested in his remedy, a kind of tea brewed out of something that the college infirmary gave him that looked more like tree bark and grass clippings than it did my estimation of controlled medication. But Xiao Wong was 5'9" and 120 odd pounds and he didn’t have enough body mass to lose much weight or fluid, so when three days later he was still excusing himself abruptly in the middle of conversations I gave him two days’ worth of little white pills out of my own hoard or prescription medication, and his problem cleared up within six hours and did not manifest itself again.

  So let me begin by way of apology by saying that I do not place much stock in the metaphysical.

  I was the only foreigner on staff at my college. I lived in Shijiazhuang, which is a city about the size of Kansas City, located about five hours south of Beijing, in a place where two railway lines cross.

  Shijiazhuang was a sere place less than four hundred miles from the edge of the Gobi Desert. It was cold in the winter, hot in the summer, dusty and windy and ugly all the time.

  Christmas in China is hard.

  The Chinese don’t celebrate Christmas, although they have heard of it the way we have heard of Chinese New Year, and they know it is a big deal. Christmas fell on a Thursday, which meant I taught British and American Culture and History. I dedicated the class that day to Christmas.

  So much of Christmas is the build-up. I bought gifts in Beijing; a tea set for my mother, cloisonne for friends, a tiny jade horse for my sister; but I had sent the gifts off in October. My family sent chocolate chip cookies, but there wasn’t any reason to wait until the twenty-fifth to open the cookies, they’d just be more stale. My sister sent me a new white sweater; a white sweater in Shijiazhuang was so inappropriate I almost cried. By the end of a day anything I was wearing had a ring of gray dirt at the neck and cuffs. But the college decided to have a Christmas Eve party and to invite all the foreigners—there were twelve Americans and Canadians in a city of over a million—so I went and wore the sweater.

  Chinese parties usually involve speeches, and then everybody has to sing a song or something. The most successful song I have ever done was “Oh Lord, Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz,” sung a la Janis Joplin (the only impression I can do), but that was for students. At the Christmas party there were teachers and administrators, so I sang “Silent Night” badly, but in English. Singing in English is so foreign to most Chinese that it is like watching a dancing bear, it is not that it is done well, but that it is done at all.

  I was tired so I left just after the Mitchells. The Mitchells were retired, and they came to China sponsored by their church. They taught English using Bible stories, but could not openly proselytize because it is against Chinese law. Anyway, they tended to leave early, and I had yet another cold, so I left early, too. There are no streetlights, and very few lights in the windows. China is dark in the winter, and this close to Beijing it’s about ten degrees colder than New York City in the winter.

  I thought maybe I’d get a beer, a kind of Christmas present. I liked the local beer, and a bottle would make me sleepy. I walked out the back gate and up Red Flag Road, watching for bicyclists coming out of the dark.

  I usually bought my beer at a place made out of the carcass of a bus. Sheet metal was welded over the wheel wells and there was a narrow counter where the driver’s window would be. They had bootleg electricity from an apartment building and a little refrigerator where they kept pork sausage and a bottle of beer for me. (The Chinese don’t drink cold beverages, they believe it causes stomach cancer.) The electricity meant that it was dimly golden in the bus, almost the same frail light as some of the other stalls lit only by kitchen candles. Most nights the proprietor or his very pregnant wife were there until about eleven—and it wasn’t a holiday for them so I assumed they’d be open—but halfway up the street I could see that the bus was dark.

  I was tempted to just sit down on the road except that it was China, and China was so foreign, and I was so tired of its relentless foreignness. It was Christmas and I wanted to be home, but I was between homes, and when I left China I didn’t precisely know where I was going. A cold winter night in China, standing in the street where I could see the window of my apartment and it was as dark as anything else here and I was lost.

  A Chinese girl stopped and said, “Tongshi.” (Comrade.)

  It was dark and she couldn’t make out my face. She was about to ask me directions, it had happened before. “Wo shi weiguoren” (I’m a foreigner), I said and added that I didn’t speak Mandarin.

  “Miss,” she said in English. “I have come looking for you.”

  A student, or a friend of a student. I was tired from my cold and I didn’t want to be polite to this girl in the middle of Red Flag Road. “Yes,” I said, without enthusiasm.

  “You must come with me,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, it’s very late and I have to teach tomorrow.”

  “No,” she said. “It is Christmas, and I have come for you.”

  A party, I thought, feeling sick. They do that, make plans and don’t tell you until the last minute, and it is rude not to go along.

  “No,” she said. “I am your Christmas spirit.”

  The beer was supposed to be my Christmas spirit. “I don’t understand,” I said. “That isn’t clear in English. Do you mean you are going to wish me good spirits?”

  “No, no. I am your Christmas spirit,” she said. “Like a ghost.” I could not really see her face in the dark, just a pale oval turned toward me. The rest of her was shapeless, buried under the interminable layers of sweaters and coats that we all wore. She was only as tall as my shoulder.

  “Ahh,” I said, as if I had a clue. “I am sorry, but it is very late and I am sure you must be going on your way, and I have a cold, I have to go to bed.”

  “Come with me,” she said firmly and took my hand. I was going to pull away, but something happened. Something . . . happened. I know I said that, I am trying to explain it, but there is a space where the thoughts should be, no exact memory, just the sense that something happened.

  And then.

  We were in a large unheated room full of people in coats. The people were all standing in rows, their backs to me, rows of Chinese overcoats, women with hair permed in the precise curls of those old Toni perms from the fifties and sixties (home perms had just hit China the way they did the U.S. in the fifties) and men with their hair shining a little, because in China in the winter the heat isn’t on very long and no one wants to wash their hair.

  Someone was murmuring.

  I was standing at the back of the room, next to the girl fro
m the road. A blackout. A seizure of some sort. And a deep, cowardly relief, that this was serious, and it meant that I could go home. I was stunned at the enormity of my relief. A blackout, brain tumor, neurological disease—who cared. I wanted to go home, to run from being here. I realized that the tiredness I was carrying was a kind of despair.

  I wondered what time it was, how far we were from my apartment, and how long it would take to get back there.

  The people all murmured together, a long muttered response in unison. “It’s a church,” I whispered. I don’t know why I said it out loud, but a person who has had a blackout has a right to be disoriented.

  The girl from the road nodded. “A Catholic church.”

  Christmas Mass. A sad dispirited Christmas Mass. Being Catholic is a hard thing in China. I had one Catholic girl in my third-year class, and she was almost mute, her voice inaudible when she answered questions, silenced by the pressure of being a Chinese girl and a Catholic.

  “Christmas is a celebration,” I said.

  The girl from the road shrugged. What was she supposed to say? I supposed she was Catholic, too, and had brought me here thinking that being in a Catholic church would console me.

  I had not been in a church in years, only went for weddings and funerals. When my father died, I went to church for the funeral and my strongest memory was of an altar boy holding a white candle. The candle tilted and wax ran onto his hand. He sucked in his breath but made no noise, because a funeral mass is a solemn thing. No altar boys in white here, plastic flowers on a makeshift altar.

  I wondered how she had gotten me here during the space of my blackout, had I seemed normal? One of those multiple personalities that no one notices?

  “Are you Catholic?” I whispered.

  At that moment people turned and smiled and offered each other their hands to shake. I almost shut my eyes when they turned, somebody would see me, notice the foreigner, and then all of a sudden everyone would fuss.

  No one offered their hand to me, no one noticed me. So strange not to be noticed; everywhere I went I was noticed. I walked down the street and people hissed to each other, weiguoren, “foreigner,” tapping their companions to get their attention, “look, a foreigner.” I caused bicycle accidents. Buses nearly hit people, the whole row at the window turning their heads to watch me, in a flannel shirt and jeans and four months without a haircut, waiting to cross the street. But here in this church, no one looked at me. No one saw.

  I went still, thinking that perhaps they just hadn’t noticed me. I wanted them to have just not noticed me.

  “I’m not Catholic,” said the girl from the road, her voice normal and therefore loud among these whispering people. No one blinked. It was as if I wasn’t there.

  My Christmas Spirit looked at me and I willed her not to say anything.

  Sick with apprehension. I was losing my mind. My Christmas Spirit had a sidelong look, a face with smooth heavy eyelids and long eyes, an ancient face. Not civilized ancient, primitive ancient. Bone-old, faintly green in the shadows under her eyes, like oxidized copper. She was waiting and expectant. Expecting something from me. Willing to wait.

  I had always wanted to be invisible in China. You don’t know the strain of doing everything under the public eye, of having every purchase, even my choice of toothpaste or laundry soap, discussed in front of me.

  I thought I was dead. There was no explanation. And I would spend eternity like this, haunting China.

  Shaken. I did not know if I would ever go home.

  We stood through the Mass. There was a closing hymn, plainsong in Chinese. It took me a moment to hear it through the strangeness, but they were singing “Oh, Come All Ye Faithful.” Was I brought here to reprimand me for having given up on the church? My Christmas Spirit said she wasn’t Catholic, then what was she?

  They filed out, looking through my Christmas Spirit and me as if we were not there. Middle-aged women in cloth coats, middle-aged women with tired eyes. Why is church a woman’s thing? They didn’t look saved, they looked alienated and cold and subdued. It still looked strange to see Catholics in China.

  And then the little room was empty. My Christmas Spirit still looked at me. I didn’t know what to say.

  She shrugged again. “Come,” she said, and something . . . happened.

  * * *

  A Chinese flat, four rooms, concrete floor, walls painted blue to waist height and then white the rest of the way. Comfortably-off people if they had four rooms. A Chinese man with an unruly shock of thick hair came out of the kitchen. He was wearing a white T-shirt despite the chill and smoking a cigarette and I knew him.

  It was Liu Liming, cook for the special dining room and therefore, most of the time, only me. He was an alcoholic and a cynic, and a dealmaker, and I liked him very much. We were the same age. He spoke almost no English, I spoke pidgin Mandarin, and yet we were friends because, somehow, we were. I got his jokes; we shared a sense of irony.

  But I had never been to his apartment. Never expected to. I knew a little about him—China is a place for gossip.

  He stood there for a moment looking at his wife. Their son was asleep on the couch, head thrown back. He was still wearing his glasses. The little boy was four, and he had an eye that crossed inward and it made him shy. His father was hard on him, always a little angry because the boy was not a charmer, not like his father.

  Liming’s wife was watching television.

  “Why don’t you put him in bed,” Liming said and I understood. Which was the other thing I always wished for, to understand what was going on around me. Be careful what you wish for. Liming wasn’t aware that I was standing in his apartment and although I understood Liming better than I did most people who spoke Chinese, I had never had this easy, conversational understanding.

  His wife didn’t answer, pretending not to hear. She was the daughter of the president of the college and she was a shrew. He was a clever country boy who had seduced an upper-class girl and expected to live happily ever after.

  He made a little sound of disgust, a very faint aiyah, and I could see in her face that she heard him but she wouldn’t admit it. So he went back into the kitchen and came out with a bottle of the clear sorghum liquor the Chinese drink. It’s about 120 proof and smells like fingernail polish. He poured it into a little Chinese drinking cup and tossed it back, gang bei, bottom’s up. It was for her benefit.

  She refused to look at him.

  Awful little scene, I thought.

  “Are you going to raise the second one like this, too?” he asked.

  They had been granted permission to have a second child, because of the first boy’s inward turning eye.

  “Are you going to see Xiling?” she said.

  His best friend’s wife. There were rumors about them, but most people seemed to think neither of them would really have an affair.

  He looked at her with hatred. “I am going to bed.”

  I shook my head.

  The Christmas Spirit watched me.

  “They don’t have to live this way,” I said.

  She shrugged. “What should they do?”

  “Divorce,” I said. “It’s not against the law. People in China do.”

  “Where will he live?” she asked. “The work unit has a waiting list for housing.”

  “He can rent a room,” I said. “Some people do. That’s not what’s stopping him.”

  “What’s stopping him?” she asked.

  A thousand things. The fact that he would have to either share a single room with another unmarried man, or pay for a room. The fact that she was the reason he had a good job. That in China, divorce was the moral equivalent of bankruptcy.

  “Why did you bring me here?” I asked.

  “To show you his choice,” she said.

  And took my hand and I closed my eyes.

  * * *

  She took me to the girls dormitories where my students lived eight to a room, building curtains around their bunk beds to hid
e themselves and make themselves a little space. I saw Lizhi, a girl from the third-year class who had stopped showing up. She was lying on the bed, unable to sleep. Her grades had plummeted before she left and she told me she had headaches and insomnia and she couldn’t concentrate and she was sad all the time. But China doesn’t treat depression. During the Cultural Revolution it was decided that depression was a sign of an unhealthy society, and mental illness shouldn’t exist in a socialist country. So people like Lizhi were self-indulgent.

  I had come to visit her twice in the dorm, had talked to her and held her hand, but I hadn’t really done anything for her. Hadn’t spent any real time on her. I had almost eighty students, and I convinced myself that she wasn’t my problem, that I wasn’t equipped to help her. But no one was equipped to help her and I was at least aware that talking to her would help her feel less alone.

  What would happen to her? She would kill herself. She had talked about dying the last time. Or like many people who suffered from depression, she would get better, have bouts of it for the rest of her life. And unless China made antidepressant drugs available, she would live a kind of half-life, never knowing when she would be swallowed up. I could see her on her bunk, curled on her side, her eyes open, while the other girls slept. I could see the pearl of the whites of her eyes.

  My Christmas Spirit stood next to me.

  I understood depression, had spent some nights awake and alone. Had walked at two in the morning just to feel the movement, hoping to be tired enough to sleep when I got back, hoping maybe something would happen to me, then it wouldn’t be my problem anymore, something would have happened and everything would be changed.

  And I remembered getting better. I remember the moment, walking to class, when I looked up at a great beech tree whose roots grew through a stone wall and reached down to uproot the sidewalk, and saw pale new green leaves against the white wood and through the tree saw the intense blue of the sky and I realized I had not looked for beauty for over a year.