by Susan Conley
I make a pile of onions on the cutting board. Xiao Wang seems relatively pleased with my work. She nods and reaches for the wok, and then the doorbell rings again. The maintenance men are still chatting in Thorne’s room. I haven’t wanted to interrupt them. Who could this be now? I look through the glass peephole. There’s a man in a green China Mail uniform.
It took a while, but by now we’ve all but forgotten that there was ever a time in our lives when we got regular mail, or that there are countries where people check their mailboxes every day. Because we don’t get mail in China. Haven’t yet. But this man seems to be asking me to open the door so he can give me the big box he’s holding. I say, “Hao de. Hao de” (Good. Good. Okay), and reach for the doorknob.
I carry the box inside. My mother has sent a gigantic care package of kitchen sponges (I can’t find any here) and maple syrup (liquid gold at Jenny Lou’s) and two alarm clocks (missing from every department store I’ve cased here). There are also jelly beans and chocolate kisses and late Halloween cards for both boys saying she misses us so much she can’t stand it: When should I come? she writes. Because I’m coming and I can’t wait much longer!
On the packing slip she’s written the tax-happy “Used office supplies” in the description box as a way to bypass Chinese customs officers. Getting packages is better than getting e-mail. E-mail can be a tease—it forges an intimacy that leaves me wanting more when it’s over. I hold the jelly beans in my hands, and our life here doesn’t feel as isolating—doesn’t feel as remote.
The next morning there’s snow on the ground. Maybe just an inch, but the streets and alleys around the hutong are slushy, and the tops of the stone roofs are dusted white. Beijing looks like a winter postcard of Maine. I put on a Dan Zanes CD to get the boys and me through breakfast. Tony has flown to a southern city called Shenzhen for meetings. Thorne finishes his Frosted Mini-Wheats and then stands up to dribble a basketball in the hall. I’m thinking things are going reasonably well for a school morning. No one’s fretted about getting on the bus. No one’s had a time-out for hitting his brother. I yell, “Five minutes before we leave!”
This is when Thorne says casually, “I’m ready to go back now.”
I have no idea what he means. “Ready to go where?” I look up at him from the floor, where I’m tying my shoes.
“Ready to go home,” he says. “Back to the USA.”
Good God, I think. Where did this come from? And then my next thought is, So am I—I’m ready to go home too. Maybe all four of us are? But I need to stop. I need to reassure Thorne. And the fact is, we can go back soon—but not just now. Not when Tony has started this new job. Not this year. So I ask Thorne about swimming class and which backpack he can fit his bottle of Chinese iced green tea in. This is when he says things aren’t going well at recess.
“How do you mean?” I ask.
“The boys say I can’t play tag because I’m too fast.”
“What if you tried not to win all the time?”
“But why would you do that?” He looks at me like I’m deranged. “Why would you ever try to lose?”
The rest of the week Thorne finds something to cry about every night before he goes to sleep. His teacher says everything Thorne is going through is within the parameters of relocation stress. Completely normal. Even the crying? Even the part where Thorne is mean and insulting to me? Because that’s going on too. Diba says she sees it all the time with kids who relocate and that I have to be patient. More patient than I’ve ever been in my life.
But now that Thorne is unraveling every night, I am unable to find that patience. Or that small room I built in my mind. I want things to go well here for Thorne. Part of that desire is self-serving—when the days are smooth for my children, they’re that much easier for me. And it’s hard to see him struggle. Some of my frustration has to do with the fact that Tony is not here. I can’t quite hold the pieces together.
On Friday morning, I get the boys on the bus after a fight and walk back to the apartment under a thick white sky. I sit at my desk and stare at my novel, which makes me miss Keith—my great Kentucky friend on whom I’ve based a main character. Keith loved to iron clothes and pore over the National Enquirer and before he died he once made a memorable birthday speech: Susan, go get busy in the baby-making department because with Tony’s dark coloring and your long neck you’re gonna pop out some beautiful babies.
At eleven o’clock, Rose comes for our second lesson and teaches me the Chinese phrase for “I think”: “Wo juede.” What happens next is kind of crazy. I learn that in Mandarin, “to think” and “to feel” are the same word sometimes. Interchangeable. I get two verbs for the price of one. I cannot tell you how much this pleases me. I can now think and feel in Chinese. I’m certain this one verb is going to light up the entire language for me. “Wo juede” is going to crack the whole thing open. It feels like a turning point, because now I will be able to make unfounded judgments. And isn’t that what being a foreign visitor is about? Forming ridiculous opinions about the new culture? Now I will be able to make more friends. Now I will be able to fit in.
And it’s true—the new verb does help. I can now say “Wo juede tianqi hen hao”: I think the weather is good. And I can say, “Wo juede ni jiantian hen lei”: I think you are tired today. But then I begin to wonder about the other things I wish I could say in Chinese—more complex things about how hard it is to trust the government’s air pollution rating system, and where to find fresh bread, and why the Cultural Revolution was allowed to happen. But I digress.
I’m always nervous when Rose arrives because I’ve never studied enough. Today she teaches me how to say “My two sons go to school” and “I am forty years old.” Halfway through the lesson, there’s euphoria. It only lasts for seconds—but in that brief time I grasp the intricate machinations of the language. Its fun shortcuts and slang. Rose smiles and lets out her high-pitched laugh and I feel I’m gaining.
But then she says I’m not pronouncing the words emphatically enough. This is the thing about Mandarin—you have to speak it like you own it. When you say you’re hungry you’re supposed to act like you’ve been sucker punched in the stomach. Some words are meant to be spoken so loudly you’d think everyone was in a nasty argument. I like to speak Chinese quietly. I’m embarrassed by the sounds coming out of my mouth.
Rose teaches me the word chabuduo, which means “more or less.” I decide I’ll throw it into as many Chinese conversations as I can. I’ll be able to say I like the architecture of the Ming dynasty chabuduo, when I don’t really have a clear picture of how the Ming differs from the Tang. Chabuduo helps, because nothing feels precise here—not the cost of apples or the traffic on the way to the boys’ school or freedom of the press. It’s situational and changing hourly. So I can say to the taxi driver that I’ll be back in two hours chabuduo. What I’m really saying is I’m untrustworthy—that I’m not sure what I’m talking about. And here in Beijing both are true. Chabuduo.
“How to Handle the Stress
of an International Move”
Just before Thanksgiving, I get an e-mail from a woman I sort of know from the boys’ school inviting me to a “sweater party” at her house. “Well, what is this?” I say out loud. A sweater party? I’m supposed to get to Netti’s apartment at ten o’clock on Tuesday morning. Netti lives in a new building in the center of town called Seasons Park, across the street from a megamall. The e-mail goes on to say that at the sweater party, a woman will examine samples of any sweaters I’ve brought from home. Then this woman will knit me more sweaters, just like the ones I’ve brought, in different colors and yarns. All for super cheap.
Netti is on the ball. She is, for example, the person in charge of the bake sale at the upcoming school Christmas bazaar. I’m not sure we’ll attend the bazaar, though Netti’s signed me up to bring a cherry pie. I have never made a cherry pie in my life. I’m realizing that even in China, I’m not always a joiner and that meeting other women can
be exhausting.
But I cancel Chinese class with Rose on Tuesday and make my way to Seasons Park for two reasons: one, I’m curious about what happens at a sweater party, and two, I want more friends here. Making friends in Beijing has been harder than I thought. I don’t seem to meet the right women—or rather, I hardly meet any women at all, and it can get lonely here.
So I go to Seasons Park—another high, shiny black skyscraper in a cluster of skyscrapers under construction, and rise to the seventeenth floor. I put my coat down in the front hall and learn that the Sweater Lady has canceled. No one knows why. Now eight women stand around in Netti’s living room clutching plastic bags of sweaters. We are, as expats go here, very international (two Americans, two Australians, one South African, one Cambodian, and one Korean). I’ve made small talk with half these women before at school.
We sit down on the white sectional and smile at one another and work to find languages we can speak and subjects we can handle with our limited, pooled vocabulary. We tend to use a very punctuated English with some Chinese thrown in. Netti puts out store-bought cherry Danishes and a homemade pumpkin soup. I’m too old for this. Some of the women look disconcertingly young—like they may, God forbid, still be in their twenties. I decide we’ll either talk about something interesting soon—say about school, or the Chinese government—or we’ll head home. (And that is my secret hope.)
This is about the time Netti suggests we play video games. More specifically, she wants to plug in a video game system called Wii. Several of the women jump up, excited. They’ve never seen Wii but they’re already thinking of buying it for their families. Netti gets out the equipment: handheld gadgets and cartridges and remote controls. There are interactive cooking games, and knights-in-armor-going-after-dragons games. There are soccer and Ping-Pong games and a garage rock band game.
She turns on her large plasma TV (every new apartment in Beijing seems to have at least two) and we stand and help move the glass coffee table. Then I sit on the couch and watch four of the women play a game of video tennis. They hold white remote controls and swing their arms like they’re holding tennis rackets. The ball pings.
I keep thinking someone is going to laugh and turn off the TV and then maybe we’ll talk about what’s going in South Africa or Cambodia. (No, I am not holier-than-thou. I’ll make do with some good gossip about the teachers at school or a great new restaurant near my apartment.) But these women are not near stopping.
My kids would go bananas over Wii. That’s where my conflict lies. Because for me the games involve too much standing in front of the television—an overdose of what my boys have come to call “screen time.” The South African woman hits a forehand. She’s sweating and turns to say the game is a real workout. Then Netti tells me she likes Wii, “because it’s something to do as a family.” Her words bother me. There have to be better things to do in Beijing with my husband and kids than this. I stand and say I have to go. Then I take a taxi home and chew on the Wii party for a few days. It makes sense that there are so many electronic gadgets here. As a journalist here recently wrote, the fancy Beijing parks are designed for emperors and concubines, not for active seven-year-old Chinese kids with soccer balls. And the winters are long and cold. So what seems to happen in the tiny apartments is a whole lot of video gaming.
Today I’m heading out into the city again. There’s a seminar at school for parents. It begins at 2:00 p.m. Maybe I’ll meet a new friend. The subject for discussion is “How to Handle the Stress of an International Move for Your Family.” I want to tell the school counselors that they offered this too late.
At the seminar, a Taiwanese woman named Sunny invites us to her house for dinner on Saturday night. Sunny is Aidan’s friend Max’s mom. She and her husband, Roger, live with their two boys in a large complex called Global Trade Mansion. Max doesn’t speak any English yet. He has wild, dark hair and enormous eyes—he’s the kind of boy you spot in a crowd and want to say hi to. The last time I took Aidan to school, Max ran over to us on the playground so he and Aidan could press their foreheads together until their noses almost touched. This is how they worked out saying hello.
On the way to the dinner in the van with Lao Wu, Tony tells me he’s nervous about work. “We have a press conference on Monday,” he says. “Financial reporters will be there to interview me in Chinese.”
I lean over and rub his shoulder in the front seat. “It’s going to be great,” I say. “It’s going to be so interesting.”
“It’s about two different ways of doing business,” he says. “I’m trying to bring analytics to banks that until now have operated on intuition and big personalities.”
“You mean hunches?”
“Yeah. They may do some analysis of the market, but then they discard it. They still say they have to trust their instincts instead of data.”
When we get to the sixteenth floor, we ring the bell and Roger greets us holding slippers. We take off our shoes and put on the slippers, and then the boys run to Max’s bedroom to play superheroes. Three other families from Taiwan are there for dinner. The men work at IBM together and have recently taken a trip to Japan, where they drank a lot of red wine.
“This will be a wine-tasting party,” Roger explains. “Red wine and Taiwanese food.” There are bottles of Cabernet and Pinot Noir on the table in the living room, along with an assortment of snacks I’ve never seen. “This,” Roger says, pointing me to a plate of shaved meat, “is duck throat. And this”—he picks up a small bowl—“is dried chicken tendon.” I take a sip of wine and make a mental picture of which bowls of food on the table to avoid. Roger and Sunny are warm, open people, and they understand that boys, at least our four, will run wild. And that is what these boys do—they change superhero costumes and switch who’s chasing whom, and they crash about.
Sunny pulls me toward the dining table. She used to be on television in Taiwan and she wears beautiful, complicated clothes—three layers of black shirts over a dark pair of jeans. She has a round, lovely face and enormous eyes. She’s put out so many dishes. “Start with the chicken soup,” she says. “I made it this morning.” It looks delicious. I ladle broth into my bowl and out comes a large chicken claw. I try not to jump. I don’t know Sunny well enough to make a joke out of it. I look at the soup and the chicken’s whole head is now on the surface. I’m staring down into the beak.
Sunny points me to tripe and then to what looks like duck’s feet. “We are eating well tonight,” she says. “We are eating the specialties.” I listen to the other women talk in Mandarin and try to sip my soup without letting my spoon touch the chicken claw. I’m thinking about how in America we don’t often know where our meat comes from and how sometimes that’s easier and what a hypocrite I am.
It’s late now. Long past the boys’ bedtime. There’s a mobster shootout playing on a flat-screen in Sunny and Richard’s living room. The men sit silently, plates in laps, watching the movie. Tony joins them on the couch and kids come and go. I stand in the hallway, and each time I look over at the screen, someone is getting shot or maimed. I would like to go turn off the TV, and that’s how I know it’s time to leave the party.
Max and his brother seem immune. They glance at a man’s bleeding head on the screen, and then they start eating duck throat near the snack table. Aidan is there too—laughing and drinking green tea. How is it that my boys seem more comfortable in China than I do? I don’t know Sunny and Roger well enough to say I’m leaving because of the movie. Nor do I know them well enough to say how glad I am we’ve met. These new friendships have boundaries. We’re feeling each other out. And now I can’t find Thorne—where is he? Sunny and I say good-bye at the door and we hug, even though I’m pretty certain hugging is not the Chinese way. Tony slips back inside and finally locates Thorne over at the snack table chewing on a chicken tendon and liking it.
After the weekend, Xiao Wang arrives on Monday and tells me her son is sick again with a bad cold and is doing lots of coughing. The b
oy has been ill every week I can remember this year. He coughs so much that he throws up and then gets dehydrated. It’s gotten so bad, they have to give him IVs at the local hospital. Xiao Wang says they try to stick the line in his hands, but when that doesn’t work they try the boy’s feet, and yesterday they had to put the needle in her son’s head. The boy begins crying as soon as they drive up to the hospital on Xiao Wang’s bike.
I go find the local Beijing guidebook and give Xiao Wang a list of public hospitals in the city. Some of them focus on pediatrics and sound like they might be free. I tell Xiao Wang to stop slicing ginger and call these places. I say in my bad Chinese that maybe her son needs more than the traditional Chinese medicine they offer at her hospital—more than compresses and fluids. I worry that the boy needs Western drugs. And will that even be enough?
Xiao Wang herself has a bad hip. Today she puts her hand on her right side and grimaces. It hurts. I ask her if she’s been to the doctor and she says yes, to a Chinese doctor. After the X-ray, he put some cream on her hip and some heat but didn’t give her any medicine. It sounds like a muscle pull. I know Xiao Wang is worried about cancer and thinks she’s going to die suddenly like her mother. It’s implicit in her worry. I ask her if she’s ever been given ibuprofen. I find myself saying the word loudly to her, and then I spell it out, i-b-u-p-r-o-f-e-n.
