I always arrived on time and Professor Ning would welcome me with a smile. After that, I was ignored. I didn’t know any Chinese and my real responsibilities were close to nil. Professor Ning would write sentences on the board in English and answer all questions in Mandarin. When the bell rang, I was expected to leave and I did. My presence was simply proof of a business relationship between two educational institutions; but it was of help to me because it got me a dorm room, where I slept peacefully, my white bedcover tinged red by the neon sign outside that said RESEARCH INSTITUTE OF PETROLEUM EXPLORATION AND DEVELOPMENT.
During weekends, I visited monuments and parks, but on weekdays, in the afternoons, after my lunch in the dorm, I would read about Lu Xun and also Manto. In the Lu Xun Museum, I saw pictures of Agnes Smedley. On the cover of the German edition of Daughter of Earth she had written: Presented to Lu Hsün in admiration of his life and work for a new society. She had signed the book on February 2, 1930. She would go on to spend much of the decade in China, often reporting from the warfront for newspapers like The Manchester Guardian. When she applied for membership in the Chinese Communist Party she was rejected for what was seen as her lack of discipline. One account said that her activities in China included racing horses, cross-dressing, and providing instruction to women—on birth control, Western dance, and romantic love.
In contrast to Smedley’s activities in China, my life was dull; I was poor and often cold. I went to the library and read the stories in Edgar Snow’s Living China; then I read Manto’s Kingdom’s End and Other Stories. Sitting in my room, an electric heater in the corner, I sipped pots of Da Hong Pao tea and began writing a comparative study of Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh” and Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary.”*4 This solitude in an alien land, as well as the work I was doing, helped me; it made me think more deeply about what I wanted to say about literature. But it was not what I had wanted to do. My starting point had been different. A man like Har Dayal, who had embraced revolutionary ideals, writing letters to women about desire and loneliness. That was an image in my mind. Or Smedley’s marriage to Chatto, their long embrace and falling-out, the strain of being outsiders engaged in subversive activities. I wanted to write about love and, although I was blind to this at first, I wanted to be in love.
* * *
After I arrived in Beijing, everything reminded me of Cai. I tried to suppress my longing. I knew that she wasn’t wasting time thinking about me; instead, she was filing away reports that would become part of her thesis. She was on her way.
I husbanded my energy. I seldom went out on weekdays. When I ventured out in the city, as I did sometimes in the evenings, to look for a drink called Pingo Sou, I carried a red English-Mandarin phrase book. Using that book in Beijing during those months reminded me of the time I was a fresh immigrant in the United States and everything was new. I drank my tea and was content to eat noodles and tofu, and sometimes, as a treat, shredded pork. Two blocks away was the Garden Restaurant, a shabby place with three tables covered with plastic tablecloths. It served my needs admirably. I ate at the same time every day. The owner expected me and brought my food soon after I sat down. His daughter, a cute toddler named Mei Ling, would come and sit near me. She would babble in Chinese and I understood not a word but I was filled with happiness. Back in my room, I read more stories by Lu Xun and Manto, and I shaped chapters on subjects like truth and self-deception, satires against the powerful, the bodies of women and the body of the nation. The conceit that I had smuggled into the thesis was that it wasn’t me but Agnes Smedley who was reading these writers: her passions, her prejudices, even her biography, shaped my reading of Lu Xun and Manto. The work was speculative, even imaginative, but it was also systematic, and when my time in Beijing came to an end, I had much of my thesis finished.
As Ehsaan had instructed, I made the trip to Shanghai and went to Lu Xun’s home, now preserved as a museum. I had the phone number for Cai’s parents but I didn’t call. Only once, late one night, when I was lost near a library I was visiting, and unable to find anyone who spoke English, the thought came to me that I should perhaps call Cai’s parents. But then a cab appeared in the drizzle and I showed the driver the card from the hotel where I was staying.
I had a good two days there. At the museum, I took photographs of Lu Xun’s statue and of the cover of his book of stories translated into Hindi. At another museum I found wooden crates with PATNA OPIUM painted on them, and the mannequins of Sikh policemen in uniform on the streets. Dioramas of Parsi businessmen and male Chinese customers with their hair braided and hanging at the back. Museums evoke a specific feeling in me, Your Honor. This is the feeling of time being out of joint. And why only time? Bodies out of joint. A displacement in time and place. Not belonging. A few years ago, a white American writer described another writer, one whose ancestors had migrated from India to the Caribbean, as looking less like a Nobel Prize candidate than a shopkeeper. A malicious remark, but capturing a fear I have long held in my heart, about being a prisoner in the museum of someone else’s imagination. The future Nobel laureate was likely to be mistaken for a newsagent hurrying from the bank back to his shop, where he hawked cigarettes, chewing gum, and the daily newspapers, keeping the tit-and-bum magazines on the top shelf. Was there any escape from this museum? I know people who will throw numbers at you to prove we belong here. So many doctors! So many engineers! But where’s the museum to show the aching feet of the shopkeepers? Or, for that matter, the fate of the woman from India who was the first to acquire a doctor’s degree in the United States? Your Honor, in a cemetery in upstate New York lie the ashes of a young Indian woman who was born only a few years after the 1857 rebellion in which my distant ancestor Kunwar Singh cut off his arm. ANANDABAI JOSHEE, M.D., 1865–1887 FIRST BRAHMIN WOMAN TO LEAVE INDIA TO OBTAIN AN EDUCATION, reads the inscription on the tombstone. Joshee was aged nine when she was married to a twenty-nine-year-old postal clerk in Maharashtra, and twenty-one when she received a doctor’s degree in Pennsylvania. A few months later, following her return to India, she died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-two. Her ashes were sent to the woman who had been her benefactor in the United States, and that is how Joshee’s remains are now buried in a plot overlooking the Hudson. All the craters on Venus are named after women and I read in an Indian newspaper that one of the craters now bears Joshee’s name.
I was a tourist in Shanghai and did the things that tourists do. For instance, I ate spicy chanzui frog at a restaurant where they also had live crocodiles with thick rubber bands on their snouts. Before I left, amidst the lights of the evening, beside a river full of glittering cruise boats, I took a walk on the Bund.
From Shanghai, I went by train to Guangzhou. I saw the factories and then the new construction sites covered in a green mesh and the familiar grid work of bamboo scaffolding. That evening, at a bar on Xiao Bei Road, I met an Indian banker named Zutshi, who told me that no building in China can be more than seventy years old. When it turns that age, it is pulled down. I don’t know why I was taking notes.
—India has great scope, Zutshi said. We are good in IT. And then he added, But we will never overtake China. The Chinese have the habit of work and they are obedient citizens.
On the train back to Beijing I put down my impressions of the journey. Ehsaan had suggested I use my travel in China to write the preface to my critical study of Lu Xun and Saadat Hasan Manto. Was industrial development going to solve our social problems? Would the powerful and the very rich become more charitable if they had made enough profit? What was a writer to do as a witness in a changing world? What was the writer who was a traveler, an outsider as well as a woman, to do as an activist? I took notes in a brown notebook that said TIAN GE BEN, and back in Beijing, while I waited two more days before my flight back to New York, I typed up my preface on the computer. My master’s thesis was done. On the British Airways flight back, after having eaten and drunk the complimentary red wine, I felt relaxed and took out a fresh Tian Ge Ben noteb
ook. I wanted very badly to go back to what I had ignored in my thesis. I wanted to write about love. Not just the story of one love, its beginning or its end, but the story of love and how it is haunted by loss. I thought of the time I had first gone to pick apples. On the sound system on the plane, I listened to Jimmy Cliff singing “You Can Get It If You Really Want.” With my earphones on, I played the song over and over again.
*1 If you were settled in love, you could get your work done. This piece of writing advice had come from Ernest Hemingway.
*2 If you ask me what I want, I’ll tell you. I want everything.—Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates
*3 After we became lovers, one of the things we did was share a notebook where we wrote down the new words we had come across. Both of us were immigrants and wanted to know the names for all kinds of objects and emotions. Cai’s first entry was dormer: a window that projects vertically from a sloping roof. Her second entry was bunion: a painful swelling on the first joint of the big toe. I remember my first entry in that notebook. Pyriform breast: pear-shaped breast. Years after I had made the stupid mistake of sending Cai the wrong letter, I found a word from Congo in an article in Time magazine that I think would have helped me with my appeal: ilunga: a person who will forgive anything the first time, tolerate it the second time, but never a third time.
*4 Pushkin provided me a letter of introduction to a Chinese writer in Beijing, Yu Hua, who had written extensively about Lu Xun. I took a translator with me for our meeting at a cultural center. Yu Hua turned out to be in his late thirties. He had a fine sense of irony, and a casual, relaxed manner that was not diminished but only enhanced by the fact that he continuously chain-smoked while we talked. Pointing to his watch, he sketched a circle and told the translator that Lu Xun’s career had come full circle in China. At first, he was an author and his writings created controversy. Then he became a catchphrase during the Cultural Revolution, more of an empty slogan. When the Cultural Revolution ended, he was again an author and his name was caught up in controversies. But now, with the rise of rampant capitalism in China, Lu Xun was once again a slogan, a name to be included in ads. On a piece of paper, Yu Hua drew Chinese characters, a long list that my translator transcribed for me thus: The characters and places in Lu Xun’s stories have been put to work as names for snack foods and alcoholic beverages and tourist destinations; they serve to designate private rooms in nightclubs and karaoke joints, where officials and businessmen, their arms wrapped around young hostesses, sing and dance to their hearts’ content.
Epilogue
The preceding picture is in my notebook for this novel. I must have torn it from a magazine, maybe Outlook, during a visit home. A reproduction of some of Satyajit Ray’s sketches when he was making his first film, Pather Panchali. This is the storyboard for the scene in which Apu and his sister Durga catch sight of a train for the first time. It is a scene celebrated in the history of cinema. As in all of Ray’s work, simple scenes, elegantly framed, producing a cumulative emotional effect that is shattering. Nothing in my notebook to indicate why I have cut this out from a magazine. It is possible I was thinking of collage. I suspect I was thinking more of ordinary life being transformed into art. Not just in the final film, but in these sketches too. These drawings are like calligraphy, awash with movement, as if a subtle suggestion was blowing through them like an invisible breeze.
It is June. This is what I’ve decided to do with my life just now. Here I am in middle age, taking a break from the demands of teaching and family life, writing about youth and love and politics. (Mixing the aesthetic and naked desire, this line stolen from the review of a photography book: Nearly every composition rides that fine line between hand-to-hand combat and cunnilingus, as all art must.) I have been looking at old letters and my journals. How important these pages, written long ago, because, after a while, everything fades, and even the body, maybe especially the body, doesn’t remember anything.
* * *
I became a U.S. citizen last year. The ceremony was held at noon on a Saturday in the high school in a town nearby. A table was set with twenty miniature American flags on it. And a stack of certificates. The ceremony got under way with three pudgy Boy Scouts bringing onto the stage a large U.S. flag. They held their fingers up in a salute, hands close to their temples as if they were in pain. We were informed that together we represented citizens of Somalia, Mexico, El Salvador, Jamaica, and India. The Somalis were one large family, dressed in shiny clothes. The judge, a man of Filipino origin, asked us to repeat the oath. Like everyone else, I held my right hand up. Once that was done, the judge said, Congratulations, you are now citizens of the United States. You have forsaken the country of your birth in exchange for the rights and privileges of this country. He repeated the word privilege, saying, You are not entitled to be in the United States. Instead, it is a privilege. There is no better country in the world.
But I only felt like a man without a country and tears came to my eyes. I was crying perhaps only because the judge, in a poor, inaccurate choice of words, had used the word forsaken. The man next to me, a native of Guadalajara, thought these were tears of happiness and began to congratulate me.
The judge said that he was now going to ask a man “who embodied the American experience and was a hero” to speak to us for a few minutes. A large black man with bad knees climbed to the stage: he had played for the Denver Broncos in the 1999 Super Bowl. I don’t remember his name. The speaker said, It’s been a long journey for you, you have endured pain and tribulation…I wondered whether this was true of any one of us. The speaker wiped his brow with a handkerchief, and the cloth, maybe because it was new, stuck to his forehead. He said that he appreciated diversity and was glad to welcome us to this country. Then a young girl named Rachel with drooping eyelids and a melancholic smile walked to the microphone and sang the national anthem rather beautifully. I was surprised that the Mexican gentleman to my right seemed to know the words to the song. When the ceremony was over, people were taking pictures.
In the car, certificate in hand, I wished I had eaten lunch before coming. I hadn’t driven farther than two miles on I-84 when I saw the flashing lights of a police cruiser behind me. The cop was an elderly man with a thin mustache. When he asked for my license and registration, I picked up the U.S. flag and the certificate and showed them to him.
—Officer, I’ve just become a citizen. Only ten minutes ago. I was rushing home to tell my wife.
—Did you also get your license today?
—No sir, I’ve been driving—no, I didn’t get it today.
—Then I won’t be needing these. Your license and registration, please.
The ticket he wrote was for $165. I thought he had behaved fairly and hadn’t questioned the lie about my having a wife—but I was also suspicious that I had been punished for having become a citizen.
As I proceeded to my house, driving under the speed limit now, I thought of Jennifer with gratitude. She had taken me to the DMV in Harlem in her old blue Volvo. I had been living in the United States for maybe two or three months by then. I drove her car for the test. The man who was the examiner turned out to be a Pakistani. I was afraid he was going to fail me. As I followed his instructions (Please change lane, turn left, park on the right, et cetera) the thought came that I should get on friendly terms with him. I tried to make small talk.
—Where are you from in Pakistan, Mr. Alvi?
—Do not talk, he said, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. Please drive.
When the test was over, he said I had made one mistake but I had successfully passed the test. I said adaab to him. We shook hands. Jennifer said that she was quite sure, even when she had picked me up that morning, that I was going to get the license. Then she laughed and said, I became certain when I saw that you were going to be judged by your brother.
That far-off autumn day came back to me in the car when I was given the ticket after the citizenship ceremony. More than two decades ago. Might have be
en a day in early October. To celebrate the fact that I now had a license we had gone for lunch to an Indian restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue. I was talking in Hindi to the Punjabi woman who was the owner, and Jennifer joked that after I had had my fill of white women I would return to India to live there and enter an arranged marriage. She imitated a head wobble and began to laugh loudly. She shut her eyes and her mouth formed a rictus. Her face had turned red. I had no idea where this sudden bitterness was coming from—her behavior was unusual but it probably made me think that this was the real Jennifer. It is possible that that was the moment when I began to move away.
So, Jennifer, I don’t have an Indian wife. And actually I’m a citizen now. This is not to say that you were wrong and I was right but simply that nothing turns out the way we imagine. (It certainly hasn’t for me.) But thank you for taking me to the DMV.
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