Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization

by Jan Alexander

  Ming let her own eyes drift. Across the room, Charles was standing beside a skeletally thin woman with a bored expression, despite the fact that she was the one talking. Charles raised his eyebrows in relief when Ming appeared beside him.

  “You should come and see my performance piece next week,” the woman was saying. “The Anomaly. I invite everyone under thirty-five in the audience to splatter themselves with paint because, these days, we know the artist is the message.” She beckoned toward two handsome European men with wind-burned faces and sun-kissed blond locks. “This is Lars and Johann. They are the real estate developers who renovated this palace, and they don’t qualify to live here.”

  “We applied,” said Lars. “We’re a gay couple—wouldn’t you think that might count for something? We read up on art and philosophy for our meeting with the board, but they got us with trick questions. They said we didn’t have reserves of a sufficiently rich inner life, that our views were too derivative.”

  “Somewhere there’s a loophole,” Johann contributed.

  “Turn darling, and show us your steely buns,” the woman purred. “I’m going to be thirty in three months, and it’s time I got to pronounce a living work of art.”

  Ming felt a hand groping her arm and turned to see Fu Gang at her side. He drew her away slightly to whisper in her ear. “You are with the venerated professor, I see? The thought of you fucking the bearded old man makes me want to get to know you better. I won’t suggest coffee every morning for the rest of my life, but novelty is man’s nature, you know, and I hope in your case woman’s too.” His breath reeked of herb tobacco.

  I can make you wake up one morning and wonder why you’re such a disgusting prick. The words came to her but didn’t come out. He laughed at her when she shoved his hand away; anything she uttered would be the words of a lesser Civilizer in his mind. How had she strayed so far, getting stuck down below her godforsaken village while writers like Fu Gang consumed their new-found fame as if it were their due?

  She found Charles and told him she was ready to get out of there. He said he was fine with leaving, too. In the taxi outside his building Charles asked if she’d like a nightcap. She didn’t feel like being alone.

  “These Civilizers are rather drunk with power,” he observed as they sat sipping mint tea in his living room. “Living like emperors. The next thing you know there’ll be a revolution against them.”

  “You think?”

  “You look like I’ve hit you with a shock wave, my mysterious Ming.” Charles was caressing the top of her hand in a strictly friendly fashion.

  She pulled her hand away. “You made me think of business school. In the one class I liked, we examined strategic scenarios. The professor was always saying, ‘But now let’s consider what the unintended consequences might be.’”

  “Well, China’s most esteemed Civilizers might find that the country’s most royal real estate has a price tag. Especially if ordinary people start a backlash. It’s a lot easier to be a successful capitalist than a successful Civilizer.” Charles leaned toward her, then, and tentatively kissed her. She let him.

  In the bedroom he kept his shirt on, tails flying out like a reminder of some important business that would eventually need tending to. Ming had steeled herself for gray hairs and the musty smell of old books, but even when his old-man whiskers scraped her thighs she found herself feeling safe, as if they were somehow protecting each other.

  As dawn began to glimmer, she jolted out of sleep and screamed. On the pillow beside hers was a face in a black mask.

  “Oh….” The man in the mask was upright now. “I have sleep apnea. It’s an asthmatic condition.”

  “Isn’t asthma hereditary?”

  Under the sheet she felt a five-alarm lurch.

  After that, she had to straighten things out. Her older-man lover, presumably, was imagining that she might want to have a baby with him. She made a point of snickering at children in the street and calling them annoying nits. This mission is all for New China and for you, Zoe, she thought. While she never thought of the relationship with Charles as exactly a romance, they made love again, many times, and she began confiding stories from her adolescence so that he’d do the same. He told her about his boyhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his Harvard professor father. He told her of his ex-wife’s accusations that he played cerebral, macho games to torment her, the same kind of games he, his brother, and father had inflicted on his mother. His benighted faculty wife of a mother now had dementia, and even his brilliant brother, a physician who had found a way to restore the memory of a brain-damaged accident victim, couldn’t do anything for her.

  He even talked about his two sons, and said he would have enjoyed having a daughter.

  “Didn’t you do the whole party scene as a teenager?” Ming asked. “You know, when you smoked pot and jumped into bed with everyone?”

  “Oh no, I was what they called a nerd.” He shook his head and looked the part.

  Ming took to coming home late, tiptoeing into the dark guestroom so that she wouldn’t wake her brother and her nephew. Nothing escaped Han’s notice, but he just said, more than once, “You’re chronologically a grown-up, so I hope you’re being sensible.” She wasn’t always with Charles; she made some friends of her own and attended other artists’ parties in handsome high-rise buildings between the Bei Da campus and the Summer Palace.

  Some nights, though, Ming huddled in the guestroom and wrote. Having an affair—that was the term she used in her mind—gave her further inspiration, and she began a novella about Mimi. She had Mimi deciding to run for president of China, against a dozen men. One of the opponents was a pompous real estate executive, the son of a party leader, who kept saying he’d change everything but didn’t say how. Ming attempted several scenarios, including one in which Mimi won the election and then evicted the Summer Palace artists in order to accommodate poor people who needed to learn about beauty to rehabilitate their souls.

  William called from Sunshine Village and suggested a very special research project. “Our village patron lives in Beijing. You should visit him. Up there on the two-thousand ninety-ninth floor somewhere; what do I know about skyscrapers here in our little village?” It was a coded message; 2099 must be blinking.

  “I’ve set up a meeting with the Sunshine Village patron,” Ming announced to her employer/lover Charles a few days later.

  They met 2099 on the thirty-eighth floor of a building in the financial district. He was the CEO of a “boutique investment bank”—as if a bank might sell trendy clothes, and, in fact, his firm engaged in mergers and acquisitions that fit the prevailing fashion. The offices were full of art—everything was full of art in Beijing now—and there was even a larger than life Buddha sculpture in the waiting room.

  Number 2099 looked Ming, then Charles, up and down, as if they might be in possession of something he was searching for. Zoe didn’t like him, Ming recalled. He was friendly, though, pumping their hands with what seemed to be genuine enthusiasm.

  Ming had told him that Professor Engelhorn was writing a book about the transformations life had taken in New China.

  “My life hasn’t changed much,” 2099 proclaimed, gesturing for them to sit on the other side of his massive mahogany desk. “I still try to put companies together in a way that makes sense. Perhaps in a way that makes even more sense now, but you know, we money men have always been the backbone of China, and now, in New China, we are truly servants of humanity.”

  “I see you’ve worked with pharmaceutical clients,” Ming said, eyeing a bronze statue of doctor with a syringe under his arm that adorned 2099’s desk. She knew—because she had invented the idea—that less famous Civilizers were frequently hired as corporate artists, playing live music during the workday, writing entertaining narratives about the corporation, or creating art objects that reflected themes of the company.

 
“Yes,” 2099 replied. “This sculpture came from a pharmaceutical company that’s working on a drug to rid the world of depression and lethargy. Despite the fact that we are living in happy times,”—his eyes searched Ming and Charles’ faces, as if to ensure they hadn’t brought any tainted particles of unhappiness into the room—“people aren’t always content. We are currently assessing potential partners for distribution in China and exporting overseas.”

  It wasn’t difficult, here in 2099’s office, to think of people who could use a good anti-depressant. Han, in particular. It was easy, too, to say, “I know of someone who might be a good partner.” She dropped the name of Jack Duffy and Plenette-Leuter.

  “I’ve heard about Duffy,” 2099 replied, with a regal nod of his head. “I’d like to talk to him.”

  Charles was unusually pensive when they left, looking down at the sidewalk. “I had a feeling he was leaving a lot of things out of the conversation,” he said, finally.

  That same evening, Ming went home and found Han sitting in front of the television, as he so often did after work.

  “Have you thought about taking anti-depressants? This existential angst wasn’t supposed to last—”

  “Angst? There’s a word for writers.” Han threw a wadded-up paper ball across the room. “How do you know what’s supposed to last?” Then he scrolled with the remote, to

  Tiger News, a new TV cable station that had Bradley Kwan, of all people, as its chief commentator, Monday through Friday at six o’clock. Ruben Spurlock, an American media mogul, had attended the Raindance Party congress a few months before, and been impressed with a speech that Bradley had made.

  “Now China is free, and the people deserve balance,” Spurlock had stated in a news release, above the Tiger News logo—the words Balance and Harmony intertwined.

  “Remember when you were struggling to get rich?” Bradley Kwan thundered now, on the TV screen. “What’s gonna happen when New China goes broke taking care of people who can’t be bothered to work hard?”

  Bradley Kwan from Sunshine Village was becoming a new celebrity. At a recent party, Ming had overheard rumors that Ruben Spurlock paid Kwan via an offshore account so that he wasn’t obliged to share his money. “Smart man,” the woman at the party had pronounced. “You never know what’s going to happen.”

  Ming talked to William and Zoe about it on the phone, and William insisted, as he had so many times, that toleration of dissent was critical. Ming was growing dubious. One evening Bradley Kwan’s delivered his commentary in front of a large green screen with billion-yuan figures rolling down. The numbers, he claimed proved that China had diminishing reserves compared to five years ago. Government figures demonstrated a surplus, but Bradley cupped his hands around his mouth in a way that had become his signature, and yelled, “Don’t trust the government, they’re all liars! At this rate we’re going broke. Ask for answers, not fil-os-o-phee.”

  In late June, Ming received a text from Zoe that said, simply: The summer rains have returned. Was that because Zoe had broken up with William? The two of them had been businesslike in their calls. On the phone, Ming sympathized cryptically. “I guess it’s good for the peasants and bad for you.” She said nothing about Charles; Zoe knew only that Ming had the job as his research assistant.

  But Zoe was chatty on that particular call, telling Ming all about the Kwan family. Jing Yin was finally back in school—but it turned out that the boarding school in the southern town of Liangshan she’d gone off to was a Bible studies institute. Jing Yin had emailed Zoe apologizing for her lusts of the flesh. Worse though, Bradley Kwan had built a massive villa on the edge of town, and rumor had it he was holding Yu Li there like a prisoner, bringing in other women now that he was a star, and telling his paramours that the stooped woman with the blind eye was the gardener and the maid.

  Ming didn’t tell Zoe that Charles was becoming frustrated with his book.

  He told Ming that this New China was too of-this-world to have a basis in Buddhism, and too non-hierarchical to spring from the deep roots of Confucianism.

  “It makes me think of the way the European powers and the US carved up China after World War I. Chinese intellectuals sought to specifically understand what had brought the culture of this once-great Middle Kingdom so low,” Charles droned on one afternoon in July. “But capitalists asking what’s wrong with themselves? Someone might as well have brainwashed them; an extreme version of Mao’s reeducation camps.”

  “I brainwashed them.”

  Charles looked annoyed, not amused. It made Ming truly sad, watching him push papers off his desk because he knew they were meaningless. He wasn’t eating or sleeping much, and his face showed tracks of defeat. And now, that night, she was dragging him to Badaling to have dinner with her parents. He had become a frequent guest at the Chengs’ apartment, and he seemed to enjoy escaping into talk of the past with Mama and Papa, but she knew he’d rather be dining with some hotshot official who’d been privy to the conversations that Charles was sure must have taken place among a select secret group of leaders.

  That night, Han and Bo Fu came too, and instead of dwelling on the past they watched Bradley Kwan’s show. A senator from Washington was his guest. The senator proclaimed that the United States had better eliminate its social programs and rid itself of the federal deficit, or it would end up becoming a colony of New China.

  “Not so long ago, we had to work ourselves to the bone just for a bowl of rice,” Bradley bellowed. “We knew the meaning of money, and we respected those who worked hard. Senator, tell me, what do you think is going to happen to a country that pays people to sit on their bottoms and contemplate fil-os-o-phee?”

  “He was out of work,” said Ming.

  “He was a peasant,” said Han, sneering.

  “We respect peasants,” Ming reprimanded her brother.

  “China has always been a class conscious society just below the surface,” Charles pronounced. He knew when he should play referee. “And even in this New China, I can’t imagine that changing overnight.”

  “I hear this ‘peasant,’ Bradley Kwan, has built a fifteen-room mansion just outside of Sunshine Village,” Papa contributed. “He’s still in the running for town council, but some suggest that’s only a ploy, and he intends some bigger scheme. Maybe New China represents the next phase of evolution, but it’s going to take thousands of years to evolve that wiring for facing adversity out of our brains. You know what our staff do on weekends? They go wild boar hunting. It is not as if they really need to hunt. Barbequed boar is pretty tasty, though.”

  Thousands of years? Ming shuddered. “Bradley Kwan’s dissent is conditioning us all for the insanity you can get with free speech,” she said aloud. “It ought to help people learn how to rebut stupidity in the voting booth. We just have to provide them with the tools to come to sensible conclusions for themselves.”

  “Ming invented New China single-handedly, don’t you know?” Charles said. The three men at the table laughed as if they were watching a five-year-old turning somersaults. Papa chuckled so hard he began to turn purple, and Mama had to hand him a glass of water.

  Ming passed the platter of spareribs to her brother, determined to change the subject. “Han, how is the deal business going?”

  Han clicked his chopsticks together like dancing puppets. “Things move slowly, but I’m in no hurry.”

  “Han wrote a great business expansion plan for us,” said Papa, his face beaming.

  “I’m writing a new novella,” Ming announced, and saying that to her family still felt like an act of defiance. Several editors at publishing houses had asked to see her manuscript when it was completed, but nobody around here was going to applaud her for that.

  “I have to write a story for school,” her nephew piped up, “but I don’t like writing.”

  “I’ll help you,” Ming promised.

  “You
see, not everyone even wants to be a writer,” Han persisted.

  “Yes, Charles thinks it’s easier to be a capitalist,” Ming replied.

  “You know all about easy capitalism, little sister. Everyone knows why you came back to China. We know you worked for that scumbag Li Nan and you’re a wanted criminal in New York. Tell me, Ming, do they have wanted posters with your face plastered everywhere?”

  Mama frowned but remained silent.

  “I might not have artistic talent but at least I’m not a criminal on the run—”

  Ming closed her eyes and gripped the edge of the table; the world was blood red behind her eyes and venomous retorts swarmed through her head. She ran her tongue along her Dr. Perlmutter teeth and remembered the reign of fear in Li Nan’s boiler room—and how Han could have transferred some money to avert it all. She’d siphoned thousands out of the New Icarus account to rehabilitate William Sun, and Han hadn’t even noticed. A teapot, still steaming, sat on the table. Her hand reached out with a life of its own, and flung the contents in Han’s direction.

  “Aaahhhh…” Han shrieked as porcelain smashed on the table and hot tea splashed all over his face and torso. “You’re crazy!”

  “We are leaving,” Ming said stiffly, taking Charles by the arm. “And, yes, I’ll be staying with him. And we’re having great sex, by the way!” Papa choked, turning violet as Ming stalked out the door. She heard Charles saying “I’m so sorry,” then following her and grabbing her arm as if to restrain her.

  In Charles’s apartment, he poured two glasses of whisky. Ming sank into the couch. “My brother loved making money while other people starved.”

  “Our brains are wired for the jungle, mostly. We love it when people envy our success,” Charles acknowledged. He sat in a chair, opposite her.

  “I hate my brother.”

  “Did you really commit a crime?”