by Susan Conley
I want to give her something to help her pain, but am I going against a lifetime of traditional Chinese medicine practice here? Undoing the benefit of countless herbal remedies? She shakes her head. No, she’s never had any ibuprofen. I walk down the hall to my bathroom, where I grab a family-sized tub of Advil. I’m now the American drug pusher.
I hand Xiao Wang her first pill and pass her a glass of water. After she swallows, I panic. What if she is one of the rare people allergic to ibuprofen? What if she goes into toxic shock? I ask her if she feels okay and tell her to go sit down in the living room—that I’ll check on her every ten minutes and see if the drug is working. She lies down on the couch and rests. But the first time I pop my head into the room, she sits straight up and says her hip seems much better. So good, she says in Chinese. Hen hao. She gets up and makes herself some tea and asks if she can have more of the medicine.
I wonder what kind of cultural interference I’ve run. I get a Ziploc bag and fill it with red capsules, then tell her to go home and check on her son. I feel uneasy about the ibuprofen. I say in my rudimentary Chinese, “Please don’t come to work if your son is really sick tomorrow. And wait six hours before you take another one of the pills.” She nods at me, gives me a quick smile, and is out the door.
Mongolian Hot Pot
Beijing’s gone crazy for hot pot. There are hundreds of these places in the city—Mongolian-style restaurants with round wells in the tables for pots of boiling broth. Rose calls and tells me to meet her at her favorite, a low-slung place with red couches and dark paintings of Mongols on horses. We sit in a red wooden room that looks back to the street. Rose orders thin strips of beef and chopped chicken, handfuls of shitake mushrooms, tofu squares, piles of Chinese spinach and mustard greens. This is going to be delicious. And even though I pay her for these lessons, I’m calling her a friend. Sometimes she is the only adult I talk to all day.
The idea with hot pot is to let the broth come to a boil so the seasonings mature, then start with the beef, which is slowest to cook. Next you add the chicken and the tofu, followed by the mushrooms, and then at the end, the greens. When the beef is ready, Rose takes a strip that’s floating on top, dips it in a dish of sesame sauce, and pops it in her mouth. Then she asks me whether or not I’m a Christian. She swallows half the word so it comes out “isjen.” “Are you a isjen?”
I’m surprised and poke one chopstick at a piece of tofu. So far no one in China has talked to me about religion. I’ve been waiting for this chance. I have questions I want to ask. Can you even talk about God in China? And did the Chinese really abdicate faith when the Communists took over, or just bury it? But all I can think to say in the moment is, “Are you?”
Rose finishes chewing and announces, “The Chinese don’t believe in God. We believe in ourselves. We believe in our things.” I can’t tell how far we’re going to go with this talk. Mao, after all, banned religion, and now the whole subject, like so many here, seems dangerous. I know that unless you’re registered with one of the Communist Party–sanctioned congregations, going to church here is still illegal.
“So do you believe in an afterlife?” I ask Rose. “Something after all of this?” I point to the rickshaws and bikes passing by the window.
“The Chinese believe in ourselves,” Rose repeats. “We believe in our families and our jobs.”
I’m thinking of that monk we saw in September on top of the mountain and how he chanted for hours inside the temple. I wonder what he believes in. Outside the restaurant, three migrant workers walk by carrying striped plastic bags full of clothes. They wear yellow hard hats, and their pants are dirty, as if they’ve just left the construction site. Each man carries a saw in his free hand. I wonder what they would make of Rose’s statement: we believe in our things.
Rose puts the mustard greens into the hot pot and says she’s only technically allowed to live in Beijing two more years, until her hukou expires. After that she’ll have to get married to a Beijingren if she wants to stay. Her boyfriend is a complaint manager at a Beijing real estate complex who listens to people tell him what’s wrong with their plumbing and heating. From what I can gather, most apartments in Beijing were built with shoddy materials, and there’s a lot wrong with them, so her boyfriend is busy.
I ask Rose if she wants to marry him, and if she misses him when she’s not with him. “He is too fat,” she says in English, and smiles. “I don’t miss him.” He calls her many times a day. Her choice is a common one—to marry the first boyfriend or not. But Rose’s mother did not have these choices: to move to Beijing for college, to stay in the city and begin teaching Americans, to go steady with a boyfriend of her own choosing. And Rose has men to choose from. Because after decades of a one-child-only policy and a sharp preference for boys, China is experiencing a shortage of girls.
“I love American television,” Rose says to me then. I think she’s trying to change the subject. She never likes to talk about herself for long. “There is a show called Prison Break. Do you know it?”
“No,” I say. “But I don’t watch a lot of television.” When I’m with Rose, she laughs so often, she makes me smile. In many ways, Rose is all lightness. She doesn’t dwell on the past, and this, too, has been a surprise.
“In China we are obsessed with Prison Break. The lead actor, I am forgetting his name.” Rose laughs again. “He is very handsome. And tall. He is someone I would not have to think about marrying. He has money. I would marry him right away. If you have money in China, you can buy anything.”
“Even kids?” I ask, and she nods.
What the really rich do now, she says, is buy fake passports from Canada or Britain or some other Western country. “In 1976, the one-child policy went into effect. Many rich Chinese left China. They fled the country so they could have as many babies as they wanted on the new passports.” She dips her chopsticks into the broth and brings up a piece of tofu. “Minority groups in China can also have more than one child, but the norm is still one-child families.”
My eyes are wide while I listen to her. “You yisi,” I keep saying over and over. “You yisi”—that’s very interesting. Last week I took the boys to the hospital for vaccines, and outside the radiology clinic there was a picture of a newborn baby on a poster with words in English and Chinese below: “Girl or Boy. Let It Be.” After so many home abortions and orphanage drop-offs, there’s a boy windfall here. Villages of unmarried men.
Rose says, “I’ve heard the government might be relaxing the one-child policy. Soon if an only child from one family marries an only child from another, that couple will be allowed to have two children. And,” she adds, “if you have an advanced degree from college, none of these rules apply.”
“What do you mean, they don’t apply?”
“If you have a PhD or some other kinds of master’s degrees, the government lets you have more kids.”
“What kind of degrees do you have to have?” I can’t believe what she’s telling me.
She says it comes down to money in China. “You have to pay big money for your graduate degrees here, Susan. And the degree gives you a certain status.”
“This is not Communism, is it? This buying of babies?”
Rose dodges my question. “It’s changing fast,” she says. “So fast we can’t keep up with it.”
On Friday morning the boys go to school. I clear the breakfast dishes and load the dishwasher. Then I work at my desk until Xiao Wang comes. I meet her in the hall and ask how her son is. No more IVs, she explains in Mandarin, though he still has a bad cough. She also says her hip doesn’t hurt as much and smiles and tries to hand me back the remaining ibuprofen. “Bu yao,” I say. “Bu yao,” and I put my hand over hers. I don’t want them back.
Then Tony calls from his office—he wants to play hooky at a sports bar and watch the New England Patriots on TV. I say I’ll meet him. The Goose ’n’ Duck Pub is on the first floor of a giant new complex called Green Lake just across from us on the Fourth R
ing Road. Inside the pub, the lights are dimmed and the windows are frosted so it feels like midnight. It’s a big place, with five pool tables and as many giant flat-screens. The wall behind the long bar is covered in colorful banners: NFL, NHL, NASCAR, and NBA. There are seven customers when we arrive. Five of them are Chinese prostitutes. They look like teenage girls who haven’t been to bed since the night before. They wear smudged black eye makeup and tight nylon dresses. One of the girls has passed out with her head sideways on the wooden bar. Three others hold pints of beer in their hands and shimmy to David Bowie on the sound system.
The oldest-looking woman in the group plays pool with a foreign man in a rumpled tie and a blue Oxford. I take him for American. Somebody’s father. Somebody’s husband. There is one other customer in the place—a tall black man with a curly beard wearing a knitted skullcap. He nurses a Coke and taps his hands on the bar while he watches a Thai boxing match.
The waitresses wear denim overall-shorts. One of them takes Tony and me to a table near the bar. We sit down, and before I can mouth the words Let’s get out of here, the back door to the bar bursts open. Three men pull a large Christmas tree behind them. The Chinese start holiday decorating early. I look over at the girl with her head on the bar. She might be fifteen. She hasn’t moved. No one is paying her any attention. The pool game stops, and the man in the tie makes his way to the bar for his drink. He puts his arms around each girl and dances with them in a circle for a minute. It’s now eleven thirty in the morning. The girls cheer him when he orders another round of shots.
I try not to stare. But it’s hard. I point the blue Oxford out to Tony. “How often,” I ask, “do you think men who work for you end up in bars like this with girls like that?” We’re now having an argument at the Goose ’n’ Duck Pub while the New England Patriots fall behind on the television screen.
“Never,” he says. “I’ve never come near a bar like this with the people I work with.”
“But just know,” I go on, “if you ever call to say you’re staying late to play pool with the guys, this is the scene I’ll imagine: that man over there sinking the eight-ball while the girls in minidresses clap.”
“You’re unfair,” Tony says. “No one who works for me goes to bars with prostitutes.”
“But how can you be sure?” It was a bad idea to come. “And we’ve only just moved here,” I remind him. “Who knows what will happen?” Three teenage delivery boys arrive with takeout: cartons of noodles and fried rice that they place on the bar counter for the girls.
They’re hungry—except for the one who’s still asleep with her head on the bar. They all sit down at the bar with the blue Oxford and dig in, shoveling the food gently into their mouths. I can remember that hunger after you’ve stayed up all night drinking. It was something my roommate and I did in college a few times. You get to a point where you’re not drunk anymore. Dawn comes and you’re starving and, in my case, regretful. Tony steps outside the back door of the bar to take a business call and leaves me alone. The waitress hovers until I order something on the menu called a lemon juice. She brings me a glass of margarita mix without tequila.
The girls finish eating, and the New England Patriots pull ahead in the fourth quarter. I want to get out of this place. Tony comes back, and I’m not sure if we’re speaking to each other. We pay the bill, and on our way out, we see the blue Oxford moving to rack one more game of pool. None of the girls around him seems sure where things are going to go next. All of them are waiting for a sign.
On Saturday morning I leave the boys making paper airplanes with Tony in the living room and walk to the new French market called April Gourmet that’s just opened in Tower Four of Park Avenue. A Dutch woman I know named Anke is there, browsing the three small aisles. She moved here with her two girls and her husband back in August when we did, and I met her on the playground. I smile and wave and then go stand at the meat counter and ask for salami. It’s from Italy, and this is no small development for Aidan. Salami in China. He loves salami.
Anke moves in line behind me. “How are you?” I ask. She looks so thin that I can tell she’s in trouble. The girl behind the counter hands me my slices, and then I ask for two inches of provolone.
“My husband is having an affair,” Anke says, and smiles broadly. “I have three days to decide whether to leave him or not.” Then she laughs. “I’m calling it Project Beijing.”
“Wow,” I say. I do not smile. I know smiling is not the thing to do right now. But I’m at a loss in front of the cold cuts. I make a concerned face.
“I am supposed to go to my husband’s parents’ place in Texas for Christmas,” she says. “I can’t go, can I? I’ve found photos of the woman and their secret e-mails. She’s waiting for him, right now, in Malaysia.”
I stand and stare at Anke and recall that her husband is an American engineer. “Well,” I say and glance at my slices of cheese on the white counter. “Well.” The problem is, I don’t know Anke. There was a time when I wanted to. All fall, really, when I was trolling for friends. But Anke has always seemed distracted. I have a feeling that today Anke could use more than a three-minute talk about her marriage in the April Gourmet deli line. “Christmas can bring out the worst in people,” I finally offer and then can’t believe how trite I sound.
“I’ll snap, won’t I?” she says and looks away. “If I go to Texas, I’ll snap?”
“Probably,” I answer and look her in the eye. She seems jumpy. Unstable. She keeps looking around and smiling.
“Isn’t this a great store?” she says quickly. “Today I’ve bought arugula and these nice tomatoes.” She holds up her plastic basket for me. “But if I don’t go with him,” she says, “and I let him take the kids to the States without me, the lawyer I just talked to said I might never see my kids again. That he could keep my kids in Texas with his parents forever.”
“Where’s your own family?” I ask and turn to fully face her. “Where can you go with your kids and get away from him?”
“I’m a nomad,” she says. “We just move around. Tom’s job moves us around. I go wherever he goes. My mom lives in Amsterdam.”
“Can you go to your mom?” I ask. “You should go to your mom.”
“I think Tom’s abusive,” Anke says then. “Mean to the kids and always yelling at me. You know, I suspected him all fall. He kept telling me I was imagining it.”
Anke has a five-year-old girl named Anna and a two-year-old girl whose name I don’t know. I’ve got my cheese now and I step out of line. “Please call me. I can help if you need it. If he gets abusive. Really. Call me.”
“I will,” Anke says, and she seems happier now. I wonder if she’s on tranquilizers. I would be if I thought Tony was going to leave me alone in Beijing with two kids for a woman he’d taken up with in Kuala Lumpur.
The last thing Anke tells me is about a place she knows in Beijing where you can get a great martini. It’s right above the best foot massage place in town. “You’ve got to go,” she says and hugs me. “The very best drinks.” Then she smiles that smile. “I have three days to figure out what the hell I’m going to do.”
“Call me if you need me,” I say again and meet her eyes, then I walk to the counter with my basket of lunch meats.
When I get back to the apartment, Aidan and Thorne have set the table with bowls and Tony has made a broccoli soup. We eat together in the dining room and I eye Tony over my bowl. So much of our time in China so far has been about laying grounding wire—figuring out how to buy apples and salt. Learning how to pronounce Chinese verbs. I’m not sure how I would describe our marriage. It’s certainly a partnership, but there are long stretches here where it doesn’t feel romantic. Instead it feels like we’re running a small overnight camp for American boys in Beijing.
And what am I really doing here? I want to ask Tony. He is out slaying corporate dragons, hiring a staff and meeting with the heads of some of the world’s largest banks. I am trying to write every day, but it’s h
ard to get my mind to settle. Maybe the astrologer was right. Because it feels like Saturn may be casting a long shadow. I’ve been avoiding my desk. I once taught an adult writing workshop in Boston. The informal title of the class was “Ass in Chair.” No one in the group had written in years. I kept finding myself explaining that there’s never any writing—not one word—unless the ass is firmly in the chair.
I take a sip of Tony’s soup and remember to thank him for it. He’s a kind man. He’s made us lunch. Never before has our marriage felt more lopsided. In some ways Tony and I seem to be in a new marriage. The old one was changed when we got on the plane to come to China. We’re both learning more here than we imagined. Needing Tony so much makes me resent him sometimes. There’s a lot we don’t say because the words would be redundant. We’re almost each other’s only friend here. Or at least he is mine. How at this exact moment I would gladly trade him for any number of women friends. Tony makes good paper airplanes and stands with Aidan now showing him how to fly them. The kids run down the hall to Aidan’s room to kick soccer balls. I tell Tony about Anke and the woman in Kuala Lumpur. Tony doesn’t lean back into his chair and say, Don’t leave anything out. It’s not that he wants to avoid talking. He just doesn’t share my need to unravel the day’s events through a series of sentences.
I could get frustrated with this. I take another sip of soup and wonder whether or not to point out his deficiency again. I put my spoon down and say, “I wish sometimes we had time to check in with one another. You know—a few spare moments to talk.”
“We do have time. Right now. But you’re talking about walking on the beach.” The line comes from a fight we had five summers ago. We’d landed the rare Saturday babysitter and jumped in the car, but were too tired to go anywhere. Instead we parked by the side of the road in Phippsburg and fought over what we should do: go to a movie or take a walk on the beach. I wanted to be the couple that went for the beach walk and had interesting things to say. I wanted, in some unspoken way, to go back for a few hours to a time when we didn’t have children. When we weren’t so damned tired all the time.
