by Susan Conley
But no one was doing any praying in our house. At least not that I was aware of. I tried praying for a month in junior high because my friends were doing it. But I’m not sure I can call the wish making I did then “really” prayer. Tony is the religious one in our family. He would say no, not religious, but Daoist, maybe, after the years he’s spent studying ancient Chinese philosophy. What I’ve been able to figure out about Daoism in the years I’ve been married to Tony is that there’s one big river we’re all swimming in. The trick, Tony explains, is to not fight the current. To let the river carry you.
So I kneel next to Tony in the temple at the top of the mountain, and I close my eyes and thank the Buddha for our health—for the boys’ hard little legs and stomachs. Then I wonder if the Buddha can help steady us. Steady me. Because I’m feeling a little wobbly in China. There’s another man with his eyes closed in a chair behind the altar. I only see him after I’ve prayed. When I rise from the floor, he rings a brass bell, and it makes a sweet sound that seals in my prayer. It feels like something has been consecrated inside the temple. Like maybe in China I’ll finally learn to give up some control and let the river take me.
Aidan and Thorne are outside, staring at a lime green praying mantis perched on the top of a broom handle. Aidan can’t get over it. He’s so excited he asks me if the mantis was once a person and I say, “Yeah, maybe.”
“Because it looks like a little man, Mommy. A little man praying.”
“What if there were no humans?” Thorne asks Tony. “Just insects.”
“It would be a very different world.” Tony hands each of them a pretzel from his stash. “You never know,” he says. “If you’re Buddhist, then this mantis is a person. A small, bright green person, praying.”
“Maybe Buddhism is for you, Thorne,” I say. “Buddhists believe you come back to this world for many different lifetimes.”
At home in the States we never talked about reincarnation. I take a sip of water and look closely at my children, then down at the green valley below. At home we never prayed. How is it my boys were so quick to get down on their knees inside the temple?
“Maybe I’ll come back next time as a praying mantis,” Thorne decides. “Can I? A bright green mantis who rubs his front legs together?”
The Great Wall Is Older Than
Johnny Cash
The next week is when Thorne starts singing. It’s early September and he walks around the apartment belting out songs in falsetto. I’m trying not to worry. But now that I’ve noticed, it seems like he sings all the time—during breakfast yesterday morning and while we played Monopoly after school. He can’t seem to stop. He mostly sings patriotic American songs—“America the Beautiful” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”—which makes it weirder.
Thorne’s first-grade teacher, Diba, is calling the singing a delayed response to moving to China—part of the same “spillover stress.” Today Thorne repeated the opening of the national anthem at least fifteen times at breakfast: “O! say can you see by the dawn’s early light.”
It’s like watching an involuntary tic. He has different registers for different songs—he also sings with a vibrato and in a wavering operatic soprano. We can’t get him to stop. Except it has to stop. Because it’s driving me crazy. Tony cooks a stir-fry in the wok he’s brought from the States. He finds it relaxing to slice garlic and chop broccoli florets. Tonight he mixes chunks of ginger with lime juice, then adds coriander and fresh pumpkin. “Try this.” He reaches a spoon toward my mouth while I fill the water glasses. “Come on. You’ll love it.”
And he’s right. It always amazes me how much pleasure Tony gets from feeding people, whether it’s a dinner for three or twenty. We’ve always shared the cooking. Sometimes I love to cook. Other times I do it because I have to. Tony cooks because he enjoys it. We sit at the wooden dining table and Thorne sings “Kumbaya” over and over: “Someone’s singing, Lord, kumbaya.” His voice echoes, even with the red Tibetan rug I’ve hung on the wall. We try to eat the rice and vegetables, but Thorne keeps singing. So Tony and I make a rule. We say it’s too distracting to hear songs while we eat. Thorne doesn’t take it hard when we ask him to zip it. Not that he really can stop. He just gets quiet and has a sip of water. Then he announces nervously, “Here we are in China,” and starts to hum “This Land Is Your Land.”
Aidan has turned to music in a different way. For Aidan there’s one song. And one man. His name is Johnny Cash. Aidan has been playing “Ring of Fire” over and over for days. Today I put in a salsa CD just before dinner, then Aidan slipped Johnny back in. I slid in Van Morrison, but by the time dinner was finished, Aidan had won again.
What he does is presses the button on the CD player until he reaches song number fifteen. Then that upbeat tempo kicks in. It’s like a marching band at first, then it moves into mariachi: “Love is a burning thing …” Aidan cannot get enough. He sings along to every word: “I fell into a burning ring of fire. I went down, down, down and the flames went higher.” Just before bedtime I hear the song again. I walk into the living room to find my son lying facedown on the floor near the speaker. “What is a ring of fire, Mom? And did it burn him? Did it burn Johnny?”
I deliberate for six seconds, then I say, “Johnny Cash was having a hard time in his life. He was in love. He was not in a ring of actual fire.”
“So he was not burning? Johnny Cash’s life was not on fire?”
“No,” I say and pick Aidan up off the floor and carry him to bed.
“Will you stay with me?” he asks. He’s been angling for this every night since we got here. “I don’t like to be alone.”
Aidan sleeps on the bottom bunk in his room. Often this month I’ve given in and climbed up the narrow ladder around midnight and crawled under the blankets. He always says he just wants to know I’m there. During the daytime he and Thorne hit tennis balls in here and kick drop shots against the concrete walls. It’s the nighttime that gets to Aidan, when his room morphs into a dark zone he doesn’t recognize. “I’ll check on you in a half hour,” I say, and kiss him on the forehead. “Good night, my sweet.” He opens his arms for one last hug. I leave without daring to ask if he feels like his own life is burning.
On the weekend we drive north with Lao Wu—this time two hours to a small Tibetan-run ranch near the Great Wall. Thorne is still singing. In the car he remembers almost all the words to “American Pie.” Aidan joins, and then Tony and I. It’s a funny thing to sing this long American anthem to rock and roll while Lao Wu stares at the China road.
The ranch is a curious mix of old Tibet meets Manchurian cowboy. The staff wears long, traditional Tibetan silk robes. Antique riding saddles and swords hang on the walls. There’s a stagnant river outside our small guesthouse. The long-haired Tibetan teenager at the front desk says the water used to be full of wild trout. Four vicious dogs stand tied to trees along the path to our room. They look like wolves, and I think they’ll kill us if they break free. Each time we pass, they lunge and bare their fangs and I scream. I want to say something to the other Tibetan teenagers who seem to run this place about the dogs. Something along the lines of, Are you out of your minds to keep wild wolves at a hotel? But I could never speak that many words in Chinese and Tony thinks we might want to play it safe. Don’t want to get on anyone’s bad side at a place with attack dogs. Besides, he says, he knows this kind of Tibetan mastiff, and they’re mostly all talk, though he once got terrorized by one on the outskirts of Lhasa.
We make it past the wolves and into our room. “Back then,” Tony explains as he opens the front door, “when I traveled in China there were so few foreigners.”
“Tell us where you went again?” I bend to take off my sneakers. I’ve heard these stories before, but Thorne and Aidan haven’t. “Where exactly did you hitchhike?” The room is taken up by the kang, a giant Chinese bed of bricks built into the wall, where the entire family—mother, father, in-laws, and children—slept head to toe. And when it was cold in
the unheated house a fire was lit underneath.
We lie down together on the kang. “I hitchhiked overland in Tibet from Lhasa to a town called Ali, along the Indian border,” Tony says with his eyes closed.
“India!” Thorne pops his head out from under the red quilt. “I know where India is on the map.”
“So I spent nine days crossing the plateau on the gearshift of a gigantic Japanese truck, driven by a chain-smoking madman delivering a huge load of lumber. Ali has a strategic spot on the border and China wanted to build the town up from nothing.”
“Nine days?” Thorne asks. “Sitting in between the two front seats?”
“Nine. There were five of us in the cab. We’d sleep outside at night.”
“Tell them the part about the policeman.” I roll over to my side. It’s cold on the kang, even under the blankets.
“Police?” Aidan says and looks over. Until now he’s been staring at the ceiling, deep in thought, perhaps listening. Perhaps not. But he’s fascinated by police—by anything to do with rules and punishment.
“We finally got to Ali,” Tony continues, “and I went to sleep in a guesthouse but then the police busted in and woke me up and brought me to the station.” Aidan looks wide-eyed. “At first,” Tony says, “the police weren’t nice.”
“Oh no!” Aidan calls out.
Thorne laughs out loud. He does that when he’s nervous. “They told me I was in a place foreigners shouldn’t go. They were mad. But then”—Tony props his head up on his elbow—“the police decided to take me to dinner.”
“Dinner?” Aidan can’t believe it. “So they were not mad anymore?”
“No. Especially,” Tony turns to me and says, “after they plied me with baijiu [a kind of Chinese grappa] and got me to tell them about Cyndi Lauper. Then they put me on a bus to Kashgar.”
I have this new image in my head of my husband as a twenty-year-old, six-foot, brown-haired backpacker winning over the local security. Here he wants to talk to strangers. In the States he was more reticent.
In Boston he’d come alive in a cramped Chinese restaurant called Wings. It was a basement place on a busy Chinatown corner, and the food became Tony’s conduit to the mainland. I didn’t know the names of China’s provinces then; I just knew what tasted delicious. We lived in Boston for seven years. Tony became friends with the owner, Mr. Wong, and his wife, who did most of the cooking. Each time we stepped down into the drop-ceilinged dining room, Tony transformed into a chatterbox—a man who could debate the finer qualities of braised eggplant with Mr. Wong in Mandarin with a rapturous look on his face.
My husband stayed close to his parents after their divorce. His mother is a designer who lives on an island in Maine now. His father made a life as a marble sculptor with Tony’s stepmother in New Hampshire. Tony has a track team of nine combined siblings and a posse of friends across the States, but in 1985 he thought nothing of going off the grid in China’s mountains alone for months.
Tony sits up quickly in the kang and grabs Aidan’s ankle and starts tickling his toes until Aidan screams, he’s laughing so hard. Then Thorne joins in and they wrestle until Tony crawls back under the quilt. “I give up!”
“What did you do in Kashgar?” I ask. I still find it hard to understand how he got around—how he lived on the road without a plan.
“There was this group of older, bearded Muslim men there who tended their gardens in the mornings and talked to me while they smoked in the shade in the afternoons. They were Uighurs. They wanted to hear about the rest of the world. To hear about America,” Tony explains. I try to imagine my husband sitting in a Uighur courtyard talking to the elders about the beaches of California.
Behind our guesthouse is a sign directing us to the Great Wall with a carved arrow that looks like it points straight up the cliff. Tony and Thorne leave to climb, and I convince Aidan to stay on the ground. He is only four years old, after all—two whole years younger than Thorne. Aidan and I walk to the outdoor dining room for milk tea and a bowl of delicious vanilla yogurt they serve here with golden raisins from the mountain. We sip our tea and watch a scraggly white duck paddle in what’s left of the river. “Why can’t the duck fly?” Aidan asks.
“It’s been clipped,” I explain. “Someone has cut one of its wings just enough so it can’t take off.”
The Tibetan waitress smiles when I ask her where the fish have gone. She tells me in English that the restaurants in Huairou mostly farm their trout in freshwater concrete pools. She’s eighteen, on a work visa from Tibet. She misses her family, she says. Soon the ranch will close for the winter. It’s already almost too cold to stay in the unheated rooms. Then, she explains, she’ll take a train for four days across China, back up into the Tibetan plateau, where her people are from.
She leaves to begin chopping garlic and ginger for dinner. I ask Aidan what he likes most about China so far. He says he likes some of the boys he’s met. “The older boys.” And by that he means Thorne’s six-year-old friends. “But I liked the sleeping better in Portland.” “The sleeping,” as we have come to call it, remains tricky. Aidan still wakes up every night with a complaint: new noises, he’s too thirsty, needs water. He’s unsettled.
“How great is it that you already have friends here?” I ask him. “How great is China?” He eyes me with a steady, noncommittal gaze, and then takes a sip of tea. I look down at the menu. “When Thorne and Daddy get back,” I say, “we can choose yak or venison or Mongolian beef for dinner.”
“But not fish,” Aidan reminds me. “We won’t have fish, because there aren’t any left.”
In the morning, we take a taxi to the Great Wall, and Thorne hums the melody to the Erie Canal song. The funny thing about his singing is that sometimes when I recognize the tune, I can’t help but join in. So I sing, “Low bridge, everybody down. Low bridge for we’re coming to a town.” Then we wait in line for the cable cars. A crowd of Chinese tourists swells behind us, and when the cable finally starts up, we become part of a small, inexplicable stampede. I try to hold Thorne’s hand but lose him in the rush at the turnstile, and he calls out my name until I squeeze around a dozen bodies and grab him by the arm. A line of empty cable cars sits waiting for us. I want to yell at the crowd, “What is wrong with you people? Can’t you see there are enough for all of us?”
We slide into a car, and three middle-aged Chinese join us: a man and his wife and their female friend. The two women examine our clothes and our shoes and our hair. When they decide they approve, the smiles come. Then they insist on taking our picture and get bossy. “Move,” they urge us in Chinese. One holds the camera close to her eye and shoots. “Move closer together.”
When we get to the wall, we’re quiet at first. I am not sure how to approach the wall. How to be on it. Do we walk normally? Slowly? Do we touch the stones? Sit down on the sides? It’s so compelling, this wall and its geometry. And so overwhelming. It may be the scope—it stretches up and over the mountains as far as I can see—but this wall asks you to relinquish your hold on things. To give up the reins. We’re speechless for whole minutes, and then the four of us are running and jumping and taking hundreds of pictures. It’s stunning up here—rural China spreads out below for miles, sun-drenched and russet-toned. We eat soft baozi rolls and cold eggs from a picnic bag the cook at the ranch packed.
From this vantage everything on the wall feels ancient and sacred—even the old men peddling cheap plastic flags. The boys say they’d like to live up here. In tents. And keep watch for Mongol warriors. Then Tony tells them that an emperor from the Ming dynasty oversaw the building of most of this stretch of wall we’re on. Aidan asks how long ago this Ming emperor died. “Hundreds of years ago.” Tony stops to take a picture.
“So this wall was built before Johnny Cash died?” Aidan wonders.
I look down at my son, and he’s not joking. Should I be worried? Who knew how far “Ring of Fire” was going to take Aidan. “The Great Wall,” I say slowly, “is ancient, Aidey.” Th
en I smile at him and take his hand.
“So that’s good,” Aidan decides. “That means this is a very old place. That means the Great Wall of China is older than Johnny Cash.”
Building a Chinese Boat
On the Monday after we get back, my new Chinese teacher, Rose, arrives and says I should think of learning Chinese like trying to build a boat—a long and deliberate process. I suppose she means you go slow. You want the thing watertight. She tells me that Mandarin has a simple grammatical structure. “Don’t think too much,” she says, and smiles. “Don’t make it more complicated than it should be: subject, verb, object.” She is a petite twenty-three-year-old, with shoulder-length, straight dark hair.
The gray living room couch arrived the week before, and we sit on it together. She has a quick smile and a great, high-pitched laugh. She wears red-framed eyeglasses and a purple sweatshirt with cartoon writing. I want to tell her that I often make things more complicated—that it’s my nature. But now I’ll try to follow her instructions. I’ll try to build the boat.
It’s important, here at the outset, to be realistic about Mandarin. Because Chinese is an old and vast lexicon, and there are thousands of those hand-drawn characters. And then the tones—four different intonations on rising and falling syllables. Things can get murky with the tones. You can say you’d like to go to the grocery store. Or at least that’s what you think you said, but because you missed the fourth tone, you said something about a boyfriend in high school. This language is slippery.
