North of Beautiful

by Justina Chen Headley

  “What does he want?” I asked Jacob nervously.

  “You to be one of the beautiful people inside.”

  I laughed, not believing him. But the bouncer gestured more emphatically and started to unhook the red velvet stanchion barring the door. For me. I shook my head, no thanks, conscious now of the swing of my blond hair. As strange as it was to be a foreigner, so obviously different from everyone else in this land, it was also strangely freeing. Back home, everyone knew about my port-wine stain. Here, I was a blond, blank slate.

  Jacob and I had fallen behind the rest of our group, silent now as we passed a handbag store, then a shoe store where dainty sandals were displayed like sculptures atop pedestals.

  “This is beautiful,” I said, ignoring the shop windows to trace the gleaming stone walls fronting another boutique.

  “You know what’s funny?” Jacob asked. He didn’t wait for my answer. “You can see beauty in everything, except for yourself.”

  Deflect, deflect. Heat rose to my face. “Oh, you mean that bouncer back there?” I gave a self-deprecating shrug, bunched my hair in my fist and laid it over my right shoulder. “That had to do with me being different, that’s all.”

  “Exactly.” Gently, he brushed a strand of hair off my cheek.

  I swallowed hard. Erik thought my body was beautiful, Karin that it was enviable. At random times, people had noted that my hands were beautiful, or my hair. The Twisted Sisters had called my art beautiful. Mom had the best intentions and always told me before and after my laser surgeries that I would be beautiful. But no one had ever said that I was beautiful, all my parts taken together, not just my bits and pieces.

  Jacob had stopped a few steps back, but I hadn’t noticed, just forging fast ahead, until I sensed that our comfortable silence had become merely silence. I found him behind me in the middle of the alley, his arms spread wide.

  “So how is this any different from that neighborhood yesterday?” he asked, meeting me halfway as I starting walking toward him.

  I knew what he was talking about: that warren of dirty streets outside the Yu Garden, the ones filled with chamber pots and random debris. This neighborhood must not have been all too different once. It wasn’t hard to imagine this alley, filled with trash, smelling of urine and grease.

  “Someone saw its potential,” I said. “That there was beauty in the old.”

  “Isn’t that weird? Someone noticing is all that saved this neighborhood from being neglected like the other one?”

  “But what happened to all the people who lived here?” I looked across the alley to a boutique, filled with couture clothes I could never afford. How could most of the people who lived here in China?

  “That’s the Chinese way. You raze the old to raise the new.”

  “So they were kicked out?”

  “Presumably relocated.”

  I felt guilty for standing here, belly full, preparing to take Mom to the silk market for another mini-spending spree in Beijing. Guilty for the packages Mom was toting far, far ahead of us now. “Isn’t there a middle ground? Like making the living conditions better without booting out the people?”

  “Take what you have and just make it the best it could be?” he asked.

  I nodded; my reflection — that distorted copy of myself, blurred from both the shopwindow and my thick makeup — did the same.

  “That” — Jacob took my hand in his and squeezed — “that would be ideal.”

  He didn’t let go. Neither did I.

  Chapter twenty-five

  Prime Meridian

  IF THERE WAS ONE THING I refused to be, it was an insignificant footnote in some boy’s history. For one frightening moment, it seemed as though I was going to be an insignificant footnote in Beijing’s 3,000-year history. As Jacob, our mothers, and I crossed the busy intersection, separating modern Beijing from its old city, we narrowly missed getting flattened by a fleet of speeding bicyclists. It was one thing for them to have a death wish, pedaling around without helmets, and another for them to kill us. Instinctively, I yanked Mom onto the sidewalk, looked back. Jacob was at the rear — he literally had our backs — so he’d be the one hit, not us. He met my eyes over our mothers’ heads. “You okay?”

  I nodded.

  Norah yelled at the bicyclists in Mandarin. They ignored her. Still, she glared righteously at them. At least she had the satisfaction of shouting insults. Meanwhile, Mom trembled at my side, she was so scared. I didn’t blame her.

  “God, Mom,” groaned Jacob, tugging his vitriolic mother over to the safety of the sidewalk. “I can’t take you anywhere.”

  A slight man had stopped at the corner with us, dressed like one of the jock-tourists in the Methow with shorts that showed off his muscular legs and a long-sleeved shirt so he wouldn’t burn. “Very impressive,” he said in English, and then switched to Mandarin. For a moment, Norah was all coquettish smiles, laughter, modest shakes of her head. Death had borne down on us a scant two minutes ago and she was flirting.

  Jacob stood close to me, as though he were still trying to keep me safe. On my other side, Mom was chuckling as the man finally left, alone. I thought it was a latent response to our near-accident, a precursor to a meltdown. So did Norah. She asked, concerned, “Are you okay, Lois?”

  “We almost get killed, and you get picked up?” said Mom. “Some women have all the luck.”

  At that, Norah looked surprised, then bemused, her expression finally settling on relief. “I can still work it, can’t I?” Her eyes crinkled as she smiled broadly. “Not bad for a menopausal fifty-year-old.”

  Mom nodded. “You can say that again.”

  “You can, too, Lois,” said Norah before she went back to leading our way.

  Mom looked thoughtful as we strode past a corner crowded with canopy-covered rickshaws. I caught her skimming her hands along her hips, almost like she was trying to reconnect with the athletic body she used to have.

  Before the Fremonts had to leave for the airport in a few hours, we had decided to tour the hutongs together, the ancient, labyrinthine neighborhoods of Beijing. Like the old neighborhoods in Shanghai, these were also threatened by China’s national bird, the crane with its wrecking ball of a beak. A group of rickshaw drivers, all men, stopped their conversation to stare at me. I glanced away uncomfortably, but not before Jacob stationed himself at my side, buffering me from the men, claiming me as his territory. I probably should have been annoyed, but I have to admit, his protectiveness was flattering.

  “We can just walk in the hutongs,” Norah said, dismissing the rickshaws as rolling tourist traps. Past the long row of pedicabs lining each end of the street like anxious wallflowers at a dance, jostling to be the chosen one. We headed toward the alleys, too narrow for cars. I checked to make sure Mom was with me. She wasn’t. Panicking, I stopped, scanning the crowds of tourists being waylaid by the rickshaw drivers. At last, I spotted her half a block down, lingering by the pedicabs, lost in thought.

  “Mom, you scared me,” I said after backtracking to her. I placed my hand on her soft forearm. “I thought I lost you.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” Mom shook her head, freeing herself of her trance. She turned her back on the rickshaws.

  Holding her arm, I rose on tiptoe to search for Jacob and his mom, spotting his blond mother among the mostly Asian crowd. I had forgotten to let them know I was going back for Mom, kicked myself for that oversight. “We should catch up, Mom,” I told her urgently, tugging on her arm gently. Once we lost the Fremonts, we wouldn’t be able to find them, especially not in these unnamed alleys.

  “I’m sorry.”

  That easy compliance, those automatic apologies, made me stop, ask myself what I was doing. I dropped my hold of Mom’s arm, scalded by the realization that I was no different from Dad, rushing her just when she wanted to poke around. He was forever hovering, ordering her to hurry up, get going, don’t look, don’t touch. What did it hurt, really, if we slowed down? So as Mom started toward the
Fremonts, I touched her hand gently. “What were you thinking about?”

  “Oh.” She laughed self-consciously, waved her hand in the air to bat away her dreams. “Never mind. It was nothing.”

  Before, I might have accepted that. I would have rushed to catch up to Jacob. But I waited, giving Mom space to continue. And in that space was my invitation: go on, tell me.

  “Well, if you really want to know . . .”

  “I do.”

  “I was just remembering how my dad took me to New York when I was thirteen. He took each of us there when we turned thirteen, all by ourselves. Susannah first, then Jonathan. And then, finally, it was my turn.” She stared at one of the blue rickshaws, the fringe on its canopy swaying hypnotically in the light breeze. “Dad hired a pedicab to tour us around Central Park, and it dropped us off for dinner at the Tavern on the Green. I felt like Alice in Wonderland.”

  This Alice looked like she was regretting climbing out of the hole, leaving Wonderland. “Mom,” I urged, “go on a ride.”

  “Oh, no.” She shook her head instantly. “It’s too expensive.”

  Hiring a rickshaw was expensive, for us at least. Merc, out of guilt, had tried to push some money on us, but Mom had her pride. I did, too. We declined his cash. Even though we were on a strict budget, I wasn’t going to let money get in the way of making another memory for Mom. We’d scrimp on a couple of meals, no big deal. “We’ll only be here once.”

  She hesitated then and looked down at herself as though remembering now that she wasn’t the skinny girl of her youth, or the toned woman who’d ride horses and hike the Cascades for miles just three years ago. “I’m too fat.”

  One of the rickshaw drivers must have sensed a tourist getting away, because he waved her urgently to his pedicab. Her weight clearly wasn’t an issue.

  Again, Mom demurred. “We should catch up.”

  I took a deep breath and approached the driver, an underfed man who was all corded muscles in his arms, his calves. Between Norah’s language, Jacob’s sense of directions, and Merc’s English-speaking driver, I hadn’t had to navigate on my own or try out my meager vocabulary.

  “Duibuqi,” I said, feeling silly to be using the few phrases I had mastered from the Mandarin language tapes I’d checked out of the library. For all I knew, my tones were off. But, surprise, the driver smiled and responded in a spate of fast Mandarin.

  I blinked at him: Huh?

  He repeated himself, slower now.

  I shrugged helplessly.

  He tried again, louder, hoping volume would help me understand. Now what? I looked helplessly at Mom, embarrassed and frustrated, ready to give up. It would have been so much easier to walk away, but Mom smiled in encouragement. So taking a deep breath, I turned back to the driver. What I couldn’t express in words, I could try with a combination of hand signals and charm. I smiled, pointed to his rickshaw.

  He quoted me a price slowly now. I knew because I heard yuan — but clearly, I should have studied numbers more. I had no idea how much yuan he had asked for.

  Flummoxed, I rubbed my neck nervously. And then I remembered my notebook in my heavy messenger bag, which I handed to him now. The price he wrote was more than I remembered reading about in my DK tour book. So I shook my head, countered on paper. At the end, he smiled. I smiled back at him, even though I was certain I had overpaid.

  “Nice, Master Negotiator,” I heard Jacob saying behind me. I spun around, my face hot. He and Norah had listened to my lame negotiations? Were they groaning that Mom and I had succumbed to a touristy experience? Then, I decided that I didn’t care. I had done my best, I secured a rickshaw, and Mom was finally doing something she really wanted.

  “Aren’t you coming, too?” Mom asked me nervously.

  “Oh, no,” I said, even though it did look fun. I just didn’t want to admit that she was too big for us to share a rickshaw, and we couldn’t afford two of them.

  If only she didn’t look at me with such pleading now. So I reassured her. “Mom, it’s totally safe; all the guidebooks say so. And it’s just an hour.”

  “Why don’t we all go with your mom? You kids can share a rickshaw,” offered Norah, already pulling out her wallet. “I’ll be the grand pasha of my own.”

  I shook my head, not wanting to accept any charity, however generously offered.

  Norah protested vehemently at that, and with much more efficiency than my negotiations, Norah sealed a deal for the rickshaws. Just as I suspected when she whipped out some cash, I had overpaid and felt at once inadequate and cheated. Norah caught my look and said, “Think of it as the dumb tourist tax. Any time you travel, you just figure that you’ll be overcharged at least once. It’s part of traveling.”

  I caught Jacob glancing at the drivers — some of whom looked like they could use a good couple of hours in a dentist’s chair and then a week’s pass to an all-you-can-eat buffet — before jerking around, purportedly to study a sign.

  “You know what, Mom? I want to walk around,” Jacob said firmly. In his pause, I heard his unspoken by myself and then saw his second swift look at the drivers. A lot of the drivers weren’t all that much older than the two of us. In another life, would Jacob have been one of them? In Jacob’s place, I decided I wouldn’t have wanted to ask one of these guys to haul me around so I could gawk at ancient dwellings either.

  I nudged Norah as I climbed into a rickshaw with a teasing, “After traveling with three women, he’s probably sick of our chitchatting.”

  Jacob nodded slightly at me, relieved, and I knew I had guessed right: he needed some head time, especially before hopping on a flight that would bring him one step closer to his orphanage and his past.

  Norah agreed slowly, “We’ll see you here in an hour.”

  With a grunt, the first rickshaw driver pushed off, pedaling Mom away. I heard her abrupt bark of laughter, couldn’t decipher if it was fear-driven, but they disappeared around the bend. Even with us following, it was as if Mom’s driver had ridden off with my heart.

  “She’ll be fine,” said Norah, and she swept her hand in the direction where Mom had vanished.

  “I know,” I said, softly. I had to let Mom go on her own just as she would have to let me go in a few months. I glanced at Norah’s anxious face. “He’ll be fine, too.”

  Norah nodded, her body stiff beside mine, practically restraining herself from returning to Jacob. And then as if she were blessing his journey, she repeated, “He’ll be fine. He’ll be fine.”

  Getting ready for the trip and waiting for it to start had seemed in-terminably long, yet already we were saying goodbye to Jacob and Norah.

  “It’s just for a couple of days,” I overheard Norah assuring Mom from across the table where we were finishing lunch. Plates with the barest remnants of fish, eggplant, fried tofu covered our table, Norah going a little gourmand on us, ordering five dishes to sample. I had tried not to worry about the cost of this five-star restaurant that Norah had been eager to visit based on one of her foodie friend’s recommendation. Now that I was stuffed, I couldn’t muster enough care to worry about our budget. I didn’t want to see Jacob and Norah leave any more than Mom did, any more than Jacob wanted to go. He couldn’t have looked more morose than if he were back in his Goth getup.

  “Here,” said Norah, pulling out her pen, “let me write down all the names of the silk market stores you have to visit tomorrow.”

  The promise of shopping buoyed Mom’s spirit at least. As they bent their heads down to confer, Jacob pushed away from the table. “Do you want to walk outside for a bit?”

  Mom glanced up and nodded her permission at me, though she watched us leave with a slight frown. What was that about? I started to wonder, but then I remembered. Be fair to Jacob, she had told me. Even as I chose to ignore her perturbed expression, I could feel her concern as palpably as I could the memory of her smooth hand on my forehead whenever I was sick, measuring my temperature with her mysteriously accurate mother sensor. “A hundr
ed and one,” she’d pronounce, Dad insisting that she check with a thermometer. Her intuition was always right.

  As it was now to be concerned . . . because Jacob held the restaurant door open for me, waited for me to walk before him through the restaurant’s small bamboo grove, as solicitous as any boyfriend. More solicitous than mine who was back home.

  Be fair to Jacob.

  I assured myself that it was only natural for me to accept Jacob’s hand over the last bumpy step on the stone bridge, sided by pockmarked rocks. But Jacob kept my hand in his even when we reached the busy lane fronting the lake. Nor did we let go when we joined the other couples meandering the shoreline. I could no more release Jacob’s hand now than I could have canceled this trip, despite Dad’s best intentions to scare us into staying put.

  Alleys radiated around the twinned lakes of Hou Hai and Qian Hai, surrounded by the last holdouts of ancient courtyard houses, some seven hundred years old. There was very little concept of street appeal here; mostly the houses presented flat blank walls since they faced inward into their namesake private courtyards.

  “Is this what you expected?” Jacob asked me.

  At first, I thought he meant us — that we would fall into this very familiarity. But he was looking out at Beihai and at the green-striped paddle boats in the middle of the lake.

  Reading about this city and this country — and talking to the Twisted Sisters, who had all traveled here one time or another — had been one thing; being here a vastly different experience. It was like describing color to someone born blind. Even at their best, words were only a feeble approximation for the real thing.

  “I didn’t know that the world could be so mind-blowingly beautiful,” I admitted.

  Jacob turned his gaze from the lake to me. “Neither did I.”