by Susan Conley
“You’re the new smoking police,” I tell Thorne when he sits back down. “From now on you can give out citations.”
“What is a citation?” he asks, and takes a drink of Sprite.
“A ticket,” Tony says. “You can write up smoking tickets and hand them out on the street to anyone you see smoking.” Thorne laughs, and then the dumplings come and they’re boiled, not steamed or fried, and a little doughy on the outside and delicious. We dip them in a round dish of soy sauce and vinegar that sits on the table, and our little ship is righted again.
After the dumplings, I feel emboldened. I leave the boys with Tony at a small bike shop and head over to the Jingkelong that sits at the end of the main street. It’s time to do a little retail work. For starters, I need apples. There were no apples in the hutong market. I also need a hair dryer. My requirements for this are simple: the dryer needs to be able to dry my hair. Until now I’ve air-dried and then tied it up in a black elastic and forgotten about it.
The Jingkelong is big (think Costco or Walmart) and intimidating. It’s filled with lots of people speaking fast Chinese, plus four whole floors of live carp and bulk rice and woks. There are so many people in here I could get lost in the appliance aisle, and Tony would never find me. I stand on the third floor and shyly motion to one of the uniformed clerks, who reaches for the hair dryer I point to. But she doesn’t give it to me. She writes out a receipt and waves me to a cashier, who takes the slip and makes copies of it in triplicate.
I think capitalism smells different here. It’s old-school. They hardly ever use credit cards. Instead we walk around with big wads of cash. Still, it looks as if everyone’s buying things like mad at the Jingkelong. It just takes longer. Money is a bigger deal. That’s what happens, I think, when you still have nine hundred million peasants living on the equivalent of less than five U.S. dollars a day. The transaction gets scrutinized.
After the cashier hands me one of the receipts, I’m led to another cashier (they’re all wearing matching blue polyester pantsuits) at another counter, where I’m supposed to come up with eighty-five yuan (about twelve U.S. dollars). I hand over the money, and she gives me a different receipt—something to document the sale, maybe. Then I pass both receipts to a runner, who heads to a stockroom, then reappears carrying my hair dryer. This has all taken almost three-quarters of an hour.
On my way to the produce section, I see turtles swimming in cloudy tanks, shells big as Frisbees. Dark eels float nearby. In the cleaning products aisle, different salesgirls are dressed up in costumes: short red skirts and matching jackets and high, shiny red boots. One girl tries to sell me a new kind of synthetic floor mop. She wears her microphone on a headset and calls to me in Chinese to come watch the demonstration where she takes off the mop head and washes it.
Who knew supermarkets could become impromptu talent shows? There’s the man who wants me to watch him fry an egg in a Teflon wok, and then the teenage girl further down who’s calling to me to watch her use a bagless vacuum cleaner. I make it to apples. I would like to buy a dozen to keep in a bowl on my new kitchen counter. The boys have been asking for apples all week. There’s an old man looking at the oranges who has a small bird in his jacket pocket. I can hear it chirping. I grab a plastic bag and fill it with apples. I fill another bag with pears because they look so ripe. Then I head to the row of cash registers. I have my hair dryer in one hand and the fruit in the other. Things have taken so long I’ve given up on the salt I need. But the teenage cashier wants nothing to do with my fruit. She keeps pointing to the back of the store—way, way back to some hinterland where they must have a scale that I won’t know how to use because the directions are in Chinese.
I smile at the checkout girl. I will her to show a little empathy—to see that I’m reaching here. Stretching. I’m going to learn more of the language, but for now I need this nice checkout girl to ask some other nice person to help me weigh my apples and pears. But the girl does not smile back. She stares, and the look is hard and impassive. She tells me something fast again—something that sounds mean and important. Probably about how I’m wasting her time and would I please go weigh my apples myself.
More people stare. I would stare at me too—flustered foreigner with a big bag of unweighed apples. I think I’m closing in on my first public Beijing cry. And so I walk. I leave the apples and pears in their clear plastic bags on the metal checkout counter. Soon I’m just a figment of the checkout girl’s imagination—I’m at the automatic doors and then I’m back on the hot sidewalk with the motor scooters and rickshaws. I’m thinking China is relentless.
At dinner Tony and I do a speed-talking test because the Jingkelong has thrown me. Maybe if that checkout girl had spoken a little more slowly this morning, I could have pieced things together. Tony loves to speak Chinese at home—so much, in fact, that he’s turned dinnertime into a Mandarin-only game, which the boys think is great. So tonight the four of us speak in Chinese monosyllables and eat the spaghetti I’ve made for the second night in a row. Aidan passes Thorne a piece of bread and says, “Yao bu yao?,” slang for Do you want it?
Thorne says, “Bu yao, bu yao” (Don’t want), and laughs. They seem to be catching on quickly.
I’d like to see if Mandarin really is spoken faster than English or if it’s just my imagination, so Tony says, “Ni hao, ni ji dian hui jia?” (Hello, what time are you going home?) at what I would consider average-speed Mandarin, and I time him: two seconds. Then he says the same sentence as fast as he can in English: three seconds. To me it sounds like gibberish. I conclude from this in-depth analysis that what I’ve suspected is true: Chinese people really do talk faster than Americans, and this is why I can never understand what’s being said in this country.
On Sunday morning we head to the mountains in the van with Lao Wu. The idea is to drive to the base of a small range northeast of Beijing, where we’ll hike two hours to an old Buddhist temple. I sit in the front seat and try out my limited vocabulary. I bet this makes Tony wince—my tones are wrong—but I’ve got to start someplace and stop relying on Tony to do the talking for me. I haven’t found a Chinese teacher yet, and each day I try to poach Aidan and Thorne’s school vocabulary words.
My favorite new word is keyi. I’ve learned that keyi generally means okay—as in, everything is okeydokey. I believe, perhaps falsely, that Chinese people are less irritated with my mixed-up Mandarin when I use the word keyi. I ask Lao Wu how his health is in Chinese—it’s one of the first sentences I’ve learned. He tells me things are keyi. I think things are always keyi for him. Or he makes them keyi. The English translation of Lao Wu is “elder Mr. Wu.” To call him Lao Wu is to follow the Chinese custom of showing respect to the father.
Lao Wu is that calm, capable Beijing man who is pure keyi. You would want this man driving your kids around the back alleys of Beijing. He is my new favorite Chinese uncle. Then he raises his finger above the steering wheel like an orchestra conductor and shows me the up-and-down intonations for the four tones: 1, 2, 3, 4: ma, má, ma, mà. The language lends itself to a bluntness I haven’t gotten used to yet. We talk about the weather. “Rain?” I ask him in Mandarin. “Mei you,” he answers, which means no rain. “Wind?” “Jin tian mei you. Ming tian you.” Which means “No wind today. Tomorrow big wind.” Then Tony translates while Lao Wu tells us about the price of chestnuts (high) and the state of Chinese relations with Japan (not so good). When Lao Wu isn’t driving he says he’s cooking—large Chinese feasts of jiaozi and handmade knife noodles for his wife and their adult twins, Xiao Wu (little Wu) and Wei Wang, and their spouses.
I look through the windshield and watch the clusters of high-rises begin to thin. The boys sing a new song, called “Peng you.” Tony says it’s about a search for a friend at school. Lao Wu begins to sing with them. I have a hope this morning that in leaving Beijing, I might gain distance on the place—some purchase on the city—a clue how it got so big. People say Beijing is an unlikely place for a capital city; th
e land is dry and flat and abuts the desert. The trees out here seem to have been felled in the previous century and then replanted last week in a massive reforestation project after the sandstorms had already scoured the soil. Hundreds of thousands of short, thin trunks dot the landscape—poplars and willows and cypress.
I turn and ask Tony if Lao Wu has siblings. I can’t help but see Lao Wu as one small China frame of reference. It turns out he’s a firstborn son, the fourth of five siblings whom he didn’t see for years during the Cultural Revolution. He tells Tony that when he was sixteen he was “sent down” to live on a farm with peasants in the countryside for three years. Every day others died around him. He says he figured out how to forage for food on the farm—looking in the same overturned potato fields each day.
I tell him this must have been very difficult, hen nan. I’m grateful I know this small Chinese phrase, though in any language my words would be lacking. Would be insufficient. But I need to say something to show him how hard I’ve been listening. Lao Wu doesn’t dwell. He laughs and looks in the rearview mirror and begins teaching the boys a Chinese tongue twister about fourteen stone Chinese lions. We pass a tanker truck covered in a brown tarp, and Lao Wu tells us he used to drive a truck as big as that. Aidan and Thorne keep pointing at the road. “Did you drive one as high as that truck? Or that one?” Thorne demands. “Or what about that one over there?”
Lao Wu is measured. He doesn’t drive fast. He explains to Tony that the government has installed a series of video cameras along the highway that record your speed. When there’s a lot of traffic, Lao Wu goes into something I’ll call “the trance.” There’s so much information coming at him from the street—rickshaws and motorbikes and passels of pedestrians huddled to cross without getting hit—that he stops speaking and his face becomes still, almost as if he’s pulled a mask over it. Just his eyes move.
We take a sharp right and head up into mountains shrouded in mist like on Chinese postcards I’ve seen. Or is that smog instead of mist? Dry crop beds line the road, and dark yellow corn roasts in the sun next to piles of bricks. The boys wrestle and then Tony puts Aidan in the seat belt next to him, tells Thorne to take a five-minute time-out in the back, and hands out pieces of chewing gum.
We pass a flock of sheep next to the side of the road. Some are sheared and others still have matted wool coats. The old man tending them wears a straw hat and flip-flops. There’s a truck at the intersection with two fat pigs in the back behind iron gates. The mountains look greener the closer we get. Aidan has to pee, and there’s nowhere to stop, so Tony finally has him go in a water bottle he holds for him in the backseat. Thorne thinks it’s hilarious and laughs so hard he cries, and then he has to go in the bottle too.
There are no houses now, just peach trees. Tony translates a sign that reads “Welcome to the largest peach village under the heavens.” A gigantic plastic peach sits on a boulder. I feel for a moment like Tony and I are on the great China road trip we used to dream about fifteen years ago in San Francisco. Except now there are two small boys in the back of the van begging for apple juice. Who are those children? And where are their parents?
When we first got married, Tony and I took trips from California in his Toyota pickup—to New Mexico, Baja, Colorado, Idaho. We traveled up to Canada and down through Washington State and Oregon, then over to Arizona. We found excuses to drive anywhere we could, and my life felt to me then like something exciting and vaguely infinite. Now we pass hundreds of peach farmers bartering by the side of the road. Traffic snarls. Some of the trucks stop in the middle and farmers get out to eye the competition. We drive slowly around them. “Who knew,” I say to the boys, “that we were going to the peach capital today?” Then Lao Wu begins to teach the boys a song that Tony says is about the twelve different animals in the Chinese lunar cycle.
We park next to a food kiosk that marks the path up to the temple. There’s a man at a table selling aluminum cooking pots and bike tires and a stall next to it with bamboo baskets full of red bean baozi. Tony buys two of the rolls for the boys. A man has fallen asleep on peach crates stacked next to the bike tires. Thorne stands next to him and points to a painting on the side of what must be the local school: a Chinese Snow White and her seven dwarfs.
We begin to climb the stone stairs carved into the mountainside. At first Aidan has nothing in his legs, and I have to pull him by his arm. I’m tired and thirsty and getting crankier. The path is not auspicious: it’s lined with pieces of toilet paper and empty potato chip bags. Tony is on me about studying Mandarin. “When will you start? Have you made any inroads with teachers? Any traction at all?”
I don’t answer because he’s been asking this for days—all week, really. Then I say, “I will. I will learn Chinese. We only just got here so can’t we leave it alone?” It hits me again that we’ve moved so far away from our friends and family as to be unreachable. We only have each other in China. What kind of life is that going to be?
On the Monday before I left for China, I had an appointment with an astrologer named Brie in a small, wooden house in Maine. My friend Lily had given me the session as a parting birthday gift. She and I share an astrological sign—we’re both Cancers. Crabs. Born in the month of July, we carry our houses on our backs. Lily thought an astrology session was the send-off I needed—a way to get some perspective on how my little family might fare in the larger cosmic universe.
Lily is a writer. She’s published three novels mapping the fragile ecosystems of families. Brie’s reading of her chart that summer made Lily feel she was on exactly the right creative path, doing precisely what the stars had determined for her on the day of her birth. So I figured Lily understood this astrology thing. “Besides,” she yelled as I backed my car out of her driveway and headed off to Brie’s, “having your chart read is fun! You’ll love it!”
I sat in Brie’s house the day before my flight, listening to the alarming news that I’d come into this lifetime carrying a cosmic wound. “Don’t worry,” she assured me. “We all carry this scar.” Brie was a sunny, compact woman with strawberry-blond hair and a round face. Her daughter played outside in a sandbox. Brie said we’d all lived on this planet many times before. Then she told me, “Your chart shows Saturn squared to Mercury.” I nodded. I had no idea what she was talking about.
Brie explained I am partly ruled by Saturn, which is not conducive to a writing life. “Saturn will want to try to take over your creative mind,” Brie explained, as if this were a completely reasonable way to consider my future. There was hope, she said. Neptune. But only if I vanquished Saturn. I sat baffled—unnerved by the cosmic battle shaping up. And this was a gift from Lily? I laughed out loud, and Brie eyed me oddly. “Saturn is all about order.” Brie seemed kind of excited now. “And don’t think moving to China is going to automatically make you closer to Tony,” she warned. I leaned back on her small white couch and tried to resist the urge to flee. She said I was going to have to embrace Neptune to get what I wanted in my marriage and in my writing. I wondered what was wrong with this woman, giving me such heavy news on the eve of my flight.
Halfway up the mountain, the boys find their legs and begin to race. They put each other in headlocks and pour water down their foreheads from their water bottles. It takes us two hours to get to the top. Down below are the peach trees of China. The tiny villages stretch out like connect-the-dots back toward the highway. My life begins to look more finite the longer I stand there. It’s a sensation that has to do with the passage of time—the series of choices that landed me north of Beijing, with two boys and a husband, on the top of this green mountain.
The temple is small and square, and Tony translates the carved wooden sign above the door for us: “Welcome to this holiest of shrines. Pray your sickness away.” There was a time right after college when I was lucky enough to go to Asia. My grandfather had died that year. He was not a rich man, but a generous one, with a giant laugh. He wore silver wire spectacles and had croppings of white hair
around his bald head. He lived for the tomatoes he grew in his gardens and any history of John Adams he could get his hands on. He wore flannel shirts buttoned to the top in high summer and called his wife of sixty years “the Madame.” He died of heartbreak months after she did and left each of his children a small sum of money. When my mother gave part of hers to my brother and sister and me, she decreed that we had to travel on it. She knew the good that came from packing a bag and hitting the road. So that was the deal. In 1990 two thousand dollars went a long way in dive hotels of India, Thailand, and Indonesia.
So I have been inside temples. But never with Tony. Never with the boys. And I am not a religious person. The surprise of finding ourselves standing in this dark stone temple with the smell of burning incense is not lost on me. There’s a monk who never stops chanting—he tilts his head slightly toward us when we step inside and keeps banging a small drum in his lap with two sticks. It’s a high-pitched roving song he sings. I look up and there’s a gold Buddha staring down at us. Peaches and coins sit on the table below him. I watch Tony slip to his knees on one of the yellow prayer pillows. A Chinese man kneels next to him with burning incense sticks in each hand. He holds them up to the Buddha and then raises his head and begins reciting a prayer. The boys drop to their knees and lean their small bodies toward the floor. How do they know how to do this?
I kneel down too. It’s been so long since I’ve prayed. When I was growing up, our farmhouse sat down a long dirt driveway at the edge of a field. On Sunday mornings we’d watch cartoons and chop wood or feed the sheep. Then my father would drive my brother and sister and me to Ron’s Superette for the newspapers and Sky Bars. My dad is a third-generation Mainer by way of County Cork, Ireland. He grew up sitting in mass and resigned from church when he turned eighteen. My mother comes from a tribe of Welsh and French Episcopalians. More than religion, what consumed many of her people was music and how to better teach the deaf. My mother has played the oboe since she was young, and it was the hymns that drew her out every few Sundays to church. She said singing hymns with a real organist—uplifting hymns, not those somber dirges, mind you—was as good a way to get a handle on your life as any.
