by Susan Conley
We pull up to the school gate, and the street looks like a construction zone: plastic food tubs and paper wrappings line the road. Cement high-rises stretch as far as I can see. Some are empty shells. Others get air-conditioning units soldered by men dangling on ropes. The total sum of so many skyscrapers has a zeroing-out effect. There’s such a great deal of heavy machinery and laying of rebar that my mind clouds over.
A green bulldozer barrels through the cars and drops a load of brown dirt to the left of our van. The driver wears a black polyester sports jacket and a yellow hard hat. Ten men attack the dirt with shovels. They’re the migrant workers you might have heard about. The ones who’ve left their farms in the countryside—millions of them—to ready Beijing for the Olympics. They’re the ones transforming China. They work for about two dollars a day. The migrant workers don’t march. Most of them smoke while they shovel. Some of them are barefoot. Others are shirtless, and theirs is a story of epic migration—of sleeping along this road under green tarps that line the sidewalk, or in flimsy tin barracks behind the work site.
I lean against the metal school gate and look into the courtyard, and that’s when the school’s security guards leave their posts and begin marching in formation. Their faux-military uniforms—brass belt buckles, long blue jackets, and blue pants—make them look like mid-level army. They march to the open space across from the fleet of parked school buses, where they salute their head guard, which makes me nervous. This is not a military academy, is it? How big a city Beijing must be to hold these contradictions.
The school is called Beijing City International School. We chose it from a Web site. Then Tony took a tour of it when he came over two months ago. The way I see it, this school is a crapshoot. How can you pick teachers from photos on the Internet? The one thing I already like about the place, though, is that few American kids attend. There are Korean children and Taiwanese and Hong Kong Chinese, plus Indians, Australians, Europeans, and Brazilians, but Aidan and Thorne are some of the only Americans in their classroom.
The school advertised a secular curriculum: Chinese language classes every day and a focus on being “internationally minded.” There’s supposed to be art and music and swimming. No marching. Small people emerge from the building—little children who don’t look like they could be old enough to hold their heads up all day. The children’s blue backpacks are bigger than their torsos. Here comes Aidan’s preschool class. And there’s Aidan. He’s a thin bean with sandy brown hair and huge almond-shaped eyes. He’s usually a dreamer who never stops wondering about the state of the universe. Sometimes he lives entirely in his head. But right now he looks tired and cross, and as soon as he sees me, he starts crying. He thrusts his backpack in my hands. “Do you have a snack for me? Do you have water? I’m thirsty. I’m hot.” His teacher, Carmel, is from Australia, and she reminds me of a high-school friend’s fun great-aunt. She smiles and tells me warmly that Aidan’s had a great first day. She calls him daaaaarling. But he won’t look at her. She says he’s just wound up about getting the answer right in Chinese.
Then Thorne rounds the corner. He’s the blond in our family: dark eyes and tan skin and then this shock of bright hair. Thorne likes to be out in front whenever I give up the pole position. He prefers to know the game plan and the score and the names of the opposing players. Thorne and I have telepathy. We’re that much alike. Aidan has come to us from another planet, but Thorne is blood of my blood and milk of my milk. Thorne is our camp director. He doesn’t have time to dream because he’s busy planning the afternoon’s aquatic schedule. He doesn’t have time to think. I have come to view this as a good thing. And maybe a cunning strategy.
Now he sees me and also shoves his things into my chest: water bottle, backpack, sweatshirt. I can’t hold all this stuff, and the water bottle falls. Thorne says, “You should have come earlier. You shouldn’t have come to school so late.” But who’s late? I want to ask. If anything, I’m early. “You should have come earlier,” he repeats, and then tears start down the sides of his round face and I realize we’re in deeper than I thought here. All three of us are overtired. By the time we get to the van, both children have unhinged: Thorne hates his Chinese class and announces he’s never going back. “Never,” he sobs. “You have no right to make me.”
Lao Wu smiles at me uneasily and closes the windows and turns on the AC. He seems as unnerved by the crying as I am and keeps laughing and making tsk-tsk sounds with his tongue as if to quiet Thorne. I smile at Lao Wu, but my hands are shaking a little. I need to talk these boys down. I wonder for a second which tack to take—and exactly how much English Lao Wu can understand. Because it’s an odd thing to have your children unravel while a friendly Chinese man you’ve just met drives you through the Beijing stoplights. What will Lao Wu think of us—these American children and their mother crying their way home from school?
Except I am not crying. Not yet. Crying doesn’t feel like an option. There’s too much to get right. Aidan drinks from the water bottle I hand him and begins to give me a list of the reasons the new school is terrible. “Really bad,” Aidan cries for emphasis. “Small bikes, yucky food. And boring. Boring, boring, boring. Nothing to do.”
“Really?” I try not to panic. I look out the window at the passing skyscrapers. Things were good in Maine. And now we’ve gone and messed with it. I would lie down in this Chinese road for both of my boys, but I can’t live in this country with two complainers. I need them to show a little spunk.
“You know why I like my old school better?” Aidan asks.
“No, why?” I say and slightly clench my jaw.
“I like my old school better because it has swings,” Aidan explains. “And I wish I were Chinese. Or Korean, because then I would be able to talk to the kids.”
“But your new school has swings.” I close my eyes for a second. I should state for the record that I have secret mother superpowers. Yes. I have the ability to detach from my children and climb into my own mind at the exact moments my boys might be telling me something they think is vitally important. And I know. I know. It’s not necessarily safe. It’s not necessarily compassionate. But what I do is build a small room in my head—closet-sized—and go inside and close the door. I can still see them; I just can’t quite hear them. I go inside this room so I can think clearly. I go inside because the two boys exhaust me. They never let up. They never go play house or with finger puppets or dolls. They don’t even play with Legos. Their games involve running and jumping and leaping off furniture. And they always want me to be the referee. I go inside the room in my mind because it’s a way to not blow my top and lose it with them. Before I built this room I used to yell at them more. They were one and three or two and four and always climbing on the small tile ledge around the bathtub. No one was sleeping through the night.
“My old school had sturdier stuff.” Aidan sips his water.
“Sturdier?” I look at him closely and wonder about that room in my mind and how quickly I can get in there. Because the machinery in Aidan’s head is testing me. His eyes are a shade of brown that looks wet sometimes because the brown is so dark. You can’t see the irises. He’s four years old—why does his mind spit out words like sturdier?
“Yeah.” Aidan looks back at me again. “The climbing stuff was sturdier.”
Then Thorne chimes in that he doesn’t know anyone at this school. “Where are my friends?” It’s a simple question. And it deserves a good answer. The boys’ urge to belong is palpable. I feel it, too—a primal need to fit in here somehow, to reach some kind of early understanding with China.
By the time we get back to the apartment complex, it’s begun to rain. We climb out of the van and say good-bye to Lao Wu. Then one of our Chinese neighbors approaches on the sidewalk and points up to the sky. He’s an old man with white hair, and he says in English that each time it rains in Beijing, the temperature drops five degrees. That this is how we get ourselves through autumn in China: rainfall by rainfall, five-deg
ree increments by five-degree increments.
The Jingkelong
I wake up in my clothes. It’s Saturday, and I find the boys and Tony sitting on the floor in our living room (the couch the real estate agent ordered at a nearby factory hasn’t come yet). The three of them sweat in the early heat and eat bowls of instant oatmeal I brought from the States. I count over a hundred skyscrapers out the window without turning my head. Tony sees me and jumps up in his blue boxers. “Get your flip-flops on.” He smiles. “I’m taking you all for a walk into Old Beijing for breakfast.”
I stare at my husband and nod my head slowly—why is he so chipper? I still can’t shake the jet lag. Last night I fell asleep in my tank top and sweatpants at six o’clock, facedown on the mattress. It’s 7:00 a.m. now, too early to say much of anything, and I force a smile and head down the long hall to our bedroom to change my clothes. September in Beijing is hot. Even with the AC churning, there’s no way to outrun the heat.
Our apartment is going to be great—a Chinese take on a Soho loft: high concrete ceilings, large open rooms with empty concrete walls, wood laminate flooring. Tony found it on the same trip that he picked out the school. There’s a new kitchen with a dishwasher, an appliance almost unheard-of here two years ago. There’s also a washing machine, and a bar with a sink that sits right between the living room and the dining room. I’d seen photos of the place on my laptop but wasn’t prepared for the scope—nothing like I’d imagined an apartment in crowded Beijing. “A wet bar?” I had to say to Tony when I first spied it. “You mean like for entertaining?” I asked. “Which would mean a social life?”
The one drawback of the apartment is that it sits on top of one of China’s biggest interstates—an eight-lane, full-press freeway called the Fourth Ring Road. This must be the black snake on the map back in Portland. It’s a bigger reptile than I imagined and makes noise through the day and the night. I decide we’ll buy curtains to cover the windows that face its way, and then we’ll never notice it. Aidan and Thorne haven’t gotten over the thrill that we live in a building with a real live elevator that we ride every day—one that deposits us into our own small lobby. Our front door opens onto a long concrete corridor—the perfect skateboard alley. It’s what sealed the deal for Tony. Because if we have to spend two years hiding out from the Beijing pollution, at least we can play soccer in this hall.
Bedrooms peel off from here—Thorne’s is on the right with a double bed and sky blue curtains. Aidan’s is on the left: metal bunk beds, green curtains, and enough space to hold a basketball tournament. Tony’s and my room sits at the end of the hall. I stand in our walk-in closet and throw on a sleeveless cotton dress, then grab the flip-flops from behind the door. The high ceilings and industrial beige carpet make it almost feel like a conference room in here. From these windows I can look down behind our building: a warren of narrow alleyways and one-room stone buildings. This is an old, tight-knit Beijing neighborhood that Tony calls a hutong. A gaggle of kids kicks a soccer ball in front of a concrete shop that fronts the dirt road.
“Let’s go, Sus.” Tony opens the front door. “You need to eat something soon to fight the jet lag.”
Outside, a small group of men and women is ballroom dancing in black dress shoes next to the stand of poplars in the hutong. Scratchy waltz music plays from a black tape recorder set up under a tree. “Ni hao,” Tony calls out. Two of the women smile at him. They look like they’re having fun. “Zaoshang hao,” he says to two older men pointing bamboo fishing poles into the fetid pond, and they grin. The boys run ahead of us repeating, “Ni hao, ni hao,” and do ski jumps in the air. Three of the people in my family seem happy to be here. I’m still one step removed.
When Tony and the boys flew to Beijing, I was teaching an adult poetry course in a tenth-century stone château on the French Riviera. This is the truth. My bedroom overlooked a slice of white beach and the green Mediterranean. At about the time the boys and Tony were rounding the North Pole in their 747, I was taking a dip in a small cove near Cannes. So the boys came to China without me, and I came to China alone, and so far I can’t decide if this will be the lasting metaphor for how I experience this country.
Not if Tony has anything to say about it. He’s almost giddy with being back. It was no simple thing to orchestrate our move, and he feels the relief of landing us here—work visa and all. He takes my hand and we jog to catch up with the boys, then turn down an alley into a market of food stalls and live animal hutches. There are rabbits for sale and turtles and lots of chickens. A crowd of people moves through the merchandise like a small herd—no lining up. The idea seems to be to shove your way to the front and begin yelling. I hold Aidan’s and Thorne’s hands tighter, and we stop by a table where Tony manages to buy a dozen brown eggs from a man whose chickens peck at his bare feet.
The chickens make me think of the long talk about avian flu I had with paranoid Dr. Moretti at the vaccination clinic in the States. He said scary things while he gave me the shots, like The Chinese will always be watching you. They’ll always know where you are. And other slightly more sane things, like Don’t go to chicken farms in China. Don’t pet the chickens. But Tony is shining today. It’s as if he’s been waiting for this morning for twenty years. He has Aidan’s brown hair and the same big, almond-shaped eyes, and he can’t stop smiling.
The sky is blue and so clear, I can see the ring of sloped mountains beyond the city. From here they look earth-colored and inviting. Maybe they got the air pollution thing in China all wrong. Great big rafts of cumulus float by, and the sun shines on the tall willows in the park beyond. We pass a stall selling pink carnations and sunflowers and then a shop with a sign in English that reads “Adult Health: Bondage Toys.” The rest of the signage on the street is in Chinese characters, and when I look at these signs I end up feeling like I’ve dropped down into some Asian netherworld. Some essential Beijing at the epicenter of China. Tony raises his eyebrows at the sex shop and we keep walking toward a dumpling place we’ve heard about. We pass five stalls with open woks set up on the sidewalk. The plastic tables are different colors—yellow and green and turquoise—and come up to my shins. The stools are smaller; adults perch on half their bottoms, slurping noodles from white bowls.
The smell is of garbage and open sewage and garlic. A kind of Chinese Muzak blares from one vendor’s transistor, and all that marching of waitresses and security guards I saw on Monday feels like a memory. Like it masks the real China, which might be here in the two straw baskets of fresh chestnuts a man balances off his shoulders from a wooden yoke. He would like me to buy some. “Bu yao xie xie,” I say to him, relieved that I’ve already memorized the phrase for what I don’t want in this country.
We sit at one of the round tables fit for preschoolers, and Tony calls out for the waiter. Everywhere we go in Beijing there’s an epidemic of soft drink consumption, and now the boys beg for Cokes. We’re breaking the rules from home, and it’s exhilarating. “Fuwuyuan,” Tony yells again. And then louder. I cringe at my husband’s moment of American imperialism—he’s usually so low-key. That’s when Tony tells me that the only way to get a waiter in China is to yell. There are no menus, and what you do is get the attention of someone who looks like they work here, and ask them what’s good to eat. “They won’t come until you scream, Sus. It’s the custom.”
Sure enough a teenage boy jogs over, and he and Tony begin a shouting match about which dumplings are best and if there are some with shrimp, not pork. Aidan hears the word shui, which means water. “Sprite, at least,” he begs. “If we can’t have Coke then at least Sprite.” I look at Tony and am perfectly willing to give in to Sprite for breakfast. I’m tired, and everything here is open for bargaining.
It’s a heady feeling to think we’re going to live in this city for at least two years. Where will we buy toothpaste? How will we find a way to feel like we belong? I want to mark this moment somehow—the four of us sitting in the alleyway for the first time, waiting for dumpling
s. Because time is already moving ahead; I can feel it. Winds of change are sweeping through Beijing while we decide whether to have soda for breakfast. It’s hot in this alleyway and I have a headache coming on. “Give them soda,” I say to Tony. “Soda will be our friend this morning.”
A circle of men in their twenties huddle around the table next to us, and when they finish their dumplings, they all light up cigarettes. I look around and most everyone else out here is smoking if they’re not eating. Some are doing both. This is when Thorne begins to worry. “The smoking,” he says. “It’s making me sick.” I try to brush it off. I say they do smoke a lot of cigarettes in China. “But they’re killing themselves,” Thorne explains. Which is the mantra we’ve always told the boys, who think of cigarettes as something close to heroin.
Maybe this kind of schooling is a mistake, because now Thorne gets up from the table and storms away. Tony runs after him. Thorne must be trying to piece it together—how it is we came to be here, and what we’re going to do with our days. But I’m projecting. I’m often guilty of that. Maybe it’s me who’s trying to figure out where we’ve landed.
Aidan puts his head in my lap and begins to count in Chinese. If you can get from one to ten in Mandarin, then you’re on your way to one hundred. The numbers seem to make Aidan’s brain feel good. Aidan already has the purest Mandarin tones of any of us. Tony says it’s because he’s the youngest. I can’t make the sounds Aidan makes in Chinese. He’s laughing and gets to fifty-five (wu shi wu). Wu is pronounced almost like wooooooo. Aidan says it perfectly, cutting it off the way you’d stop a horse: whoa.
