Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization

by Jan Alexander

  “The New China might have changed our houses, but it can’t change the laws of nature. Someone is happy, someone else is going without rice,” another spat out.

  On that particular visit, Ming also bumped into Jing Yin. The peasant girl was Zoe’s project, and Ming had avoided getting involved with the whole nasty Kwan family. But when she saw Jing Yin kicking the soil forlornly as a crowd of village teenagers skipped past her, chattering and laughing, presumably on their way to play basketball or watch one of the foreign films at the Cinema Club behind the new stadium, Ming stopped her and told her that she’d looked so pretty in Larissa Lee’s documentary.

  The girl snickered, then spat. But she didn’t move on. Instead she looked Ming in the eye and said, “I wrote a song. Would you like to hear it? I’m not quite finished but maybe you can tell me what you think of it so far.”

  “Love be like the earth exploding. You be shreds of fresh-killed prey,” Jing Yin began, a rap tune with a raw, searing rhythm. She sang of falling in love; of his eyes that transformed you into a bird with rainbow feathers. “Then he turn away,” Jing Lin breathed, kind of heaving her small breasts for emphasis. “You felt the bomb. It tear you apart.” When she finished, Ming had a sense of having entered an open wound that would never heal.

  “Why use second person if it’s about your own feelings?” asked Ming, finally.

  “Because I’m just a dumb peasant,” she said, her lips quivering, before running off.

  In the office that afternoon, Ming told Zoe her protégée was incredibly talented. “Except I thought referring to her character in the second person was a cop-out.”

  “Did you have to say that? She’s vulnerable. She needs someone to encourage her.”

  “Jing Yin ought to get away from this town and her father,” Ming grumbled.

  Zoe agreed with that, at least. “And from him.” It was always clear who Zoe meant when she uttered the word him.

  By September, the ground had become cracked clay, with sparse tufts of brownish grass. The drought had hit much of southern China, and provincial coffers paid extra for rice from Vietnam, and wheat and sorghum from the north. The Tuo River shrunk to a tenth of its usual size, so that people were able to wade over pink pebbles to the center.

  Jing Yin, still manning the market stall, told Zoe it was stupid to bother with school anyway. She was writing a kind of music that was showing up all over China—peasant rap, it was called. “She said I wouldn’t like it,” Zoe told Ming. “But her father hasn’t tried to stop her—it’s like he’s okay with it if it distracts her from going to school.”

  Bradley Kwan, in fact, was calling his fellow peasants to meetings in the dining pavilion. Ming watched from the back as one attendee said life was about the land and procreating, always had been. “Yeah, what do we need with fil-os-o-phee?” Bradley replied, and pounded on the table with such rhythm Ming caught herself tapping her foot.

  “Don’t worry, it will all wash out in the end,” William consoled the co-conspirators later. “Bradley Kwan won’t last forever. Jing Lin will grow up and have kids of her own and they’ll go to school, and the next generation will have different ideas.”

  Ming was already tired of waiting, though.

  One day in October she saw Tang Fei go into William’s office and close the door. Afterward Tang came and told Ming he was leaving. He was moving to Beijing, going to work for an American named Jack Duffy who was the new head of China Operations for the big American pharmaceutical company Plenette-Leuter.

  “Do you ever get bored with this place?” Tang Fei asked her. “I used to think, ‘I was born here, I’ll die here.’ But this isn’t my home anymore. So when Jack Duffy called me one day to ask about the price of nanochips, I wasn’t shy about letting him know I was looking for a new job. They’ve got big things going on. One of the company’s scientists in Beijing had suggested using nanochips in the brain to rewire a depressed person’s brain to be happy. But Duffy decided they should work on a drug in the end. He said you can rewire the brain but it won’t change body chemistry. So now he has some kind of information that suggests things are going to come crashing down, and that when people realize all this equality isn’t working, there’s going to be a big market for anti-depressants in China.”

  “I like equality,” Ming said, her voice rising into the soprano little-girl tone that felt too much like weakness.

  “You wanna know something I know, that you can’t get from books? People aren’t all equal in their heads. Some of us work hard, and then we just want to go home and have a beer, and turn on the TV and watch a bunch of good guys shoot up a bunch of bad guys, or my team grab the ball and beat the hell outa’ your team.”

  “I looked up Jack Duffy,” Zoe reported later, when the three of them convened in the bunker. “He was in Jordan for five years, and now he’s in China? Could be CIA, you know. Undercover. He doesn’t have a chip, does he?”

  William checked the database. “No. He’s new in town.”

  “Well, go get him.”

  “We’ve got our test subjects going, and their influence should be sufficient for the foreign regional managers who find themselves in China,” William insisted. “Next phase, we go to the power brokers in America.”

  “Soon, I hope,” said Zoe. Ming watched the two of them graze each other’s knees, still silly in love when they weren’t fighting.

  Above ground, December provided the longest sequence of dry days on record. At the dining pavilion, Ming mingled with the peasants at yet another meeting. They smelled like spa soap now, but they seemed almost rapturous in their righteous indignation.

  “They won’t send us rain!” one woman lamented. While none identified who “they” were, the peasants all murmured and nodded agreement.

  “It’s just nature,” Ming ventured.

  “The government gave us this fancy New China, they can just as easily take it away. They’ve got some kind of machines to control the weather, too—that’s what I heard.”

  “Yeah, big government will kill all of us in the end.”

  Ming briefed William and Zoe on the new conspiracy theory, but William wouldn’t waver. In January, the official beginning of Year Three of the New China, the whole village grew abuzz with talk of the first elections. In November, everyone in the country would be able to vote—for town mayors, city councils, provincial governors, all the way up to members of Parliament and the prime minister.

  Bradley Kwan himself was running for town council. He’d even started his own political party, which he called the Raindance Party. Ming went to watch the candidates speak at the village amphitheater one evening in February. She’d hoped a developer would demolish the old amphitheater and rid the village of its raging spirits, but there it remained, atop the fourth hill, moss and weeds cracking through the cement.

  The worst of the spirits, she saw, were alive in Bradley Kwan. “How can you trust a government that made our country a hellhole, and then a paradise? Because, you have to ask yourselves, what are they going to do next? We’re plainspoken folk and we matter!” he thundered, spittle cracking against the metal of his microphone. “We’re the world’s engines—spending our lives stooping down to plant rice shoots, picking the harvest, and building offices. We feed the world with our rice, and some people in this New China would have us think that we should be looking for the soul of those rice plants. How’s that meaning of life thing going for you?”

  Laughter from the bleachers crackled like an old soundtrack, and Ming saw black heads bobbing in formation, as if no one dared sway left while others swayed right.

  “You might ask me—if I win, what am I gonna do about the weather? All we need is rain, my friends, and they don’t want us to have it.” The menacing way Bradley Kwan uttered “they” made Ming’s toes shiver. “We ask for rain in the summer so we can make honest tea, and what do they give us? Poetry. Univer
sity extension classes. Music. Fil-os-o-phee. Health care that they say is free. But I want to know, what is all this costing?”

  The crowd roared like ravenous bears.

  “What do you want? Questions or answers? I’ll tell you the answer, and it ain’t more questions. What good are fil-os-o-phers, and these folks who call themselves ‘Civilizers,’ when your crop has blight? You wanna study useless things at night school?”

  “Healthy dissent,” William insisted, later than night in the bunker. “He’s spouting idiocy, and people have to figure that out for themselves.”

  “We need to get a better assessment of the landscape,” Zoe said. “See if people are discontent in the big cities. Ming, you should go. I know you’d like to get away for a bit.” She rubbed Ming’s shoulder. “And when Ming gets back, I’m going to take a nice vacation myself. With Sun Two, if you won’t go with me, William.”

  “I could take a road trip!” Ming cried out. “I could get away from this damn town. I’ll take a slow train to Beijing.”

  Zoe was plotting something, Ming could tell by how magnanimous she was being. “You have to let Professor Engelhorn know you’re there. He’s writing a book about the New China and he’s looking for people who know how it happened. Tell him you heard he’s looking for help. You could tell him what he should know and find out what else he’s heard.”

  Ming could barely answer; her hands were trembling, imagining the illicit love affair that might have been, and now Zoe, with a look of innocence that Ming didn’t believe for a moment, was sending her to his door. “So why don’t you go?” Ming asked when the words came.

  Zoe looked her squarely in the eye. “He’ll want to know why I’m not immersed in my dissertation.”

  A few days before Ming left, Zoe let her know, as if in passing, that Professor Engelhorn and his wife had split up, and he didn’t quite know what to do with himself these days.

  Ming stared in the mirror that night and defined herself aloud. “Writer, yes. Feeder of false information. Counter-spy, maybe? On the road, at last. I’ll be a love vagabond.” Love on the road. I’m going to be a vagabond. She repeated the refrain in her mind, and felt almost happy.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Ming left on a Friday in March, Year Three. The immortal lovers spent that weekend underground, indulging in acrobatic love and smoky music. Only once in a while did an occasional alarm interrupt them, and they’d have to stop and zap a number.

  William had allowed Sun Two a bonus weekend of roaming free. “He’ll get laid, sure, but I told him to stay away from Jing Yin or I’ll never give him time off again,” William assured Zoe. She chose to trust that her lover’s copy would have that much sense, and lost herself in a cloud of incense and sweat, the electric mix of Nina Simone and saxophone jazz and samba. They drank champagne in bed, and she pondered her own madness aloud.

  “I sent Ming off to have an affair with the man who could be my father. Don’t you wonder why?”

  For William it was a blip in the cosmos. What he said was, “It was rather sensible, I thought, to send her off to gather intelligence.”

  In truth, the dissertation and the professors who would judge it seems a million lifetimes away. “Well, I kind of felt like this could be a test of human nature. Is Ming loyal to me or her own quests for whatever? I told her tell him you heard he’s looking for help, but what he actually told me is he’s looking for a research assistant, and he’s going to think she’s applying for the job. She’s going to be pissed, or maybe she’ll play along.”

  “And you’re the director from afar? Darling, we’re not gods, and gods are flawed themselves.”

  “It would be good to be a benevolent god who was really in charge,” she admitted. He said isn’t it enough to be a sex goddess, and proceeded to levitate a few inches above Zoe, pulling her up so that they lost themselves again, making love in mid-air.

  But Monday morning came, with inevitable news from the world outside. William summoned Sun Two to the bunker, and the lovers went aboveground. A story in the New York Times quoted an international bond-rating agency analyst who claimed the New China had a staggering amount of debt, and that it was time to downgrade the A-grade rating on their sovereign bonds; bonds which the outside world had bought to help finance the grand social experiment.

  “This is how Wall Street can stop the progress of New China,” Zoe cried. “Danny told me about it. When a country swings too far to the left, some right winger on Wall Street is sure to counter with a statement that that country doesn’t deserve a high credit rating. So then China has to repay its debt at higher interest rates, so the debt mounts, and the whole bullshit analysis becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and wealthy investors stop buying Chinese bonds. We need to use the chips on Wall Street powerbrokers!”

  “Not before we’re ready,” William insisted, and lost himself in one of his distant looks. “Do you remember, when Janis Joplin came to Nirvana? She went on stage and poured her very soul into her singing, never knowing if the audience was going to swoon and sigh and smother her with adoration or stomp all over her. We hung out with her after that. She told us, ‘I’d rather be the audience than me. They’re seeking pleasure. I’m begging for love.’” Zoe must have rolled her eyes, because he glanced at her just then and said, “Don’t look so impatient, I’m making a point. We suffer; we shape our creation, which in our case is the New China, and we fine-tune it; we let critics stomp on us, but we persevere.”

  “Speaking of, I wonder what jagged shards he left behind him in the village.”

  William agreed they should go on a village crawl that evening. They had dinner in the Nirvana café while a violinist played. After dinner they strolled along Market Street. The night air carried the fragrance of wine and spices. Lovers laughed, a classical quartet played, and a group of teens in canvas jackets and hemp pants were gearing up to play drums. Then a singer stepped up to the mic. Zoe did a double take.

  “It’s Jing Yin!”

  The girl held the microphone and raised her arms as if in some kind of worship. She wore a tank top with a pitchfork in rhinestones; emblazoned below were the words “Unschooled and Proud.” A roll of young fat hung over her pants.

  “They wanna reform this town,” Jing Lin began, her voice husky, her palms slapping out the rhythm of her rap on her hips. “With their mental masturbation. Yo, Will Shakie-speare, what you hear? Was you queer? Bet you fuckers got no hoe. What you say now we got dough….” The youthful group gathered about Jing Yin began to stomp their feet and whistle their appreciation.

  “What is that?” asked William, shaking his head.

  Jing Yin, surveying her audience with an almost-diva-like appreciation, caught sight of William and Zoe. With a guttural noise, she hurled a thick wad of yellow phlegm from her mouth, landing with an unsavory dribble on William’s shirt. “What the hell?” he muttered.

  “Promises, promises,” Jing Yin resumed her rap-song. “Don’t never believe a man.

  Lyin’ eyes say it’s me. Lyin’ cock say she and she and she—”

  “Let’s go,” Zoe hissed, seizing William by his arm and pulling him away. “It’s gotta be your copy.” They fled from the village square, the fierce laughter of the young rebels echoing behind them. “I had a strange dream last night,” Zoe told William on the way home, “that we broke up because you were fucking around with Lady Godiva.”

  William offered a melancholy smile. “That was eight hundred years ago. I thought I was entitled to everything and everyone. But you did break up with me, and I was miserable, wandering around without you. I started talking to you as if you were a ghost that was haunting me. I could hear you laughing except you weren’t there.”

  “But you had a subconsciously wandering eye, didn’t you? It never went away.”

  They stood on the road to his house, silent and indecisive, until Zoe began to walk away in the dire
ction of her own apartment.

  William caught up, though. “You want me to hurry up with more chips. You want me to change his face. You’re in such a big hurry for everything. Is this what you learned from your New York mother and your New York schools, find true love, then nag him to death?”

  “You think I’m a nag…?”

  “You always nagged me, actually.” He grinned.

  “Where I come from Sun Two could go to jail if he slept with Jing Yin. She’s a minor.”

  “I don’t think he slept with her.”

  “You don’t know that for sure. You can’t control him.”

  “You say he’s part of me, then you say he has his own mind.”

  And so they fought again, with no resolution.

  “The peasant girl has begun to live,” he insisted. “She’s had her first crush, and turned it into street poetry. There is something rather grand in that.”

  “Her name is Jing Yin. Why do you and Ming persist in calling her ‘the peasant girl’?”

  “Yes, we’re a class conscious folk here in China, haven’t you noticed? We even had a little revolution where the intellectuals were supposed to learn about life from the peasants, but the peasants were still peasants. I’ll bet if I were to whisk you off to your beloved New York, sooner or later I’d hear you condescend—you’d look down on someone who prefers a beer and a ballgame to spending their nights studying Mandarin. But what’s wrong with a little class-based tribalism? Your Jing Yin could become a guru of peasant hip.”

  Zoe spent the night in her apartment. She had been happy, and now she wasn’t.

  As the co-head of Sunshine Finance, though, she practiced discipline, pushing away the urge to touch William and rage at him all at the same time. The two of them had a meeting with a contractor the very next morning to look over the construction of the eco-resort across the river. The contractor had assured everyone that the main building, atrium, conference rooms, and twenty guest rooms would be ready by June, as long as the weather stayed dry. Walking together and fighting the magnetic force between them, the CEO of The Sunshine Group and the co-head of Sunshine Finance walked around the foundations and examined the blocks of Ferrock—composed of recycled steel dust and ground-up glass—that would make up the floor. They toured the patch of land that would be planted with moss and host the guests’ morning yoga and qi gong sessions, and the frame for a natural rock bathing pool. Zoe drew in a few particles of contentment, imagining splashing amongst the rocks someday.