by Susan Conley
Aidan woke at midnight last night crying, and we stood at his window watching the sky explode into multicolored rainbows until I convinced him to go back to bed. I’m not sure how anyone in this city sleeps. By the time Saturday comes around, we’re tired of Chinese New Year. After breakfast we decide that for some reason today is the day to go see the Forbidden City.
We head out to the van and Thorne says “Zaoshang hao,” to Lao Wu. Good morning. Inside the van Aidan leans against my shoulder, and Thorne lies down in the way back. Tony sits in the passenger seat. We set off, and I take the opportunity to read out loud from the guidebook: “Inside the Forbidden City the emperor was served over one hundred dishes at a time, but was only allowed two bites of each in case of poisoning.” I don’t think anyone in the van is listening. Or that anyone cares that we’re going to see the most famous buildings in all of China—an ancient city within this ancient city, where the emperors lived with staffs of eunuchs. And where one poor concubine was drowned in a well.
Thorne climbs over the backseat and the boys begin arguing over who won the latest thumb-wrestling war. Then we hit a traffic jam on the stretch of Chang’an Jie Avenue near the south gate of the Forbidden City, but Lao Wu doesn’t want to drop us off here. The real entrance, he tells Tony, is around the corner, past a giant, framed portrait of Mao that hangs on the wall. In the painting Mao’s hair is combed to the side, and his skin looks polished. His eyes are unreadable.
Tiananmen Square sits across the next intersection of eight packed lanes of traffic. The square itself is an open arena, and Tony asks Lao Wu to loop us around so we can see the government buildings up close. They look like they’ve been imported from Moscow, circa 1972: cold and forbidding. Tony points to the right. “There’s Mao’s tomb.”
“Where?” Thorne sits up quickly in his seat. “What is a tomb?”
Tony points again. “Mao’s body sits in that building, right behind the square. Mao was the leader of China for a very long time.”
“Is it really his body?” Aidan asks.
“It’s his body,” Tony says. “But it’s not alive anymore. It’s been preserved with chemicals.”
“Kind of like a dead animal,” I add. I can’t think of any other way to explain it.
“Human taxidermy.” Tony looks at me and smiles.
“Stuffed,” Thorne says. “Mao’s been stuffed. Just like the black bears downstairs at L.L. Bean.”
“Well, kind of like that, but not exactly.” Tony laughs. “Thousands of Chinese people line up to see Mao every day. I waited in that line.” Tony looks over to the tomb again.
“You saw him?” Thorne can’t believe it. “You saw Mao?”
The van is just to the west side of the tomb. “I didn’t get to stay very long. There are guards who keep you moving. You never stand still. And you can’t take photos.”
“Do the guards have guns?” Aidan asks.
“They don’t ever use them. I had to wait five hours. When I got close enough, I bought a bouquet of plastic flowers from a man near the tomb. After I saw Mao’s face, a guard came and took the flowers from me and walked them back to the man so he could sell them again.”
Tiananmen is the kind of space that plays tricks. It appears open and transparent, but if you look closer, you’ll see the police vans: three unmarked white Buicks. What gives them away are the antennae on the roofs. These vans are ready to whisk you away should you be struck by the bad idea to start calling for regime change. Or if you get down on your knees in the square to pray. From what I’ve heard, the police are on you in seconds. They lift you off the ground and stash you in the van before other tourists register what’s happened.
I ask Tony to ask Lao Wu if he has seen Mao’s body. “Dui, dui,” Lao Wu answers. He tells Tony he saw Mao in 1976, just after he died. Everybody had to go, he says. All the work units in Beijing took the day off to wait in line. It’s impossible for me to guess what Lao Wu thinks of Mao. He goes silent again behind his poker face: his deep-set eyes give nothing away.
Then he’s talking again. He tells Tony that everyone heard the gunshots. Everyone knew what was going on in Tiananmen in June of 1989. Tony nods and translates. Lao Wu says an army tank chased him home on the highway, with its machine gun pointed down at his window. He’d been out in the countryside on a delivery job, and he’d come back to the city unaware that the army had taken over the square.
Then just as quickly as he began talking, Lao Wu is quiet again. There’s nothing more for him to say. He slows the van and lets us off with a smile. Two strangers on the sidewalk point at the boys and ask in English, “Two boys? You got two? Good work.” We cross a moat and arrive at a small square in front of the ticket booth. It’s crowded with hundreds of tour groups and guides who hold up different-colored flags and scream in Mandarin into handheld megaphones.
It’s warm for late January in Beijing, maybe forty-five degrees Fahrenheit. We enter through two tall red gates and walk into the enormous courtyard. It takes a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the scale of the buildings and the mob of tourists. The courtyard is wide and long and much bigger than I imagined, with a red, lacquered hallway on either side that seems to run the length of the compound. In the middle of the yard is the Hall of Supreme Harmony, resplendent in shiny red paint. We cannot go inside, but we stand at the dirty windows and peek at an old kang and several high-backed wooden chairs in a big, dark room.
“I’m thirsty,” Thorne says and sits on the side of the stairs. Then we walk on. The next courtyard leads to the Hall of Central Harmony.
“I’m tired,” Aidan says next. I look at a map posted on the wall and it doesn’t take long for me to realize how many more courtyards and pagodas and palaces await us: the Hall of Preserving Harmony, the Hall of Heavenly Peace—each amazing architectural feat following the next. And who really lived here? What was it like to take a nap in the Hall of Literary Glory? Or a meal in the Palace of Union and Peace?
Tony says we have to pick up the pace. “I’ll race you to the next set of stairs,” he calls out to Thorne, and then they’re off, with Aidan sprinting to catch up. We make it through half the city like this—racing from landing to landing, going back in Chinese time. Then we break for Cokes at the café installed for tourists like us who are wondering if their kids will make it to the other side. There’s a gift shop next door that sells fake vintage Mao alarm clocks and ceramic sculptures of Mao saluting. There are Mao T-shirts and Mao postcards. Mao stuffed dolls. Mao is a cottage industry here—it’s one great big uneasy shopping trip. Didn’t the Cultural Revolution end just thirty-four years ago?
Some of the staircases have stone ramps worn smooth over hundreds of years, and the new game that gets us through the second half of the Forbidden City is climbing to the top of each ramp and sliding down on your sneakers. Sneakers or bums, Aidan decides after he falls and makes it the rest of the way down on his bottom. We finally make it out and walk away from the crowds until we find a fast-food place around the corner.
It’s China’s version of McDonald’s called Yummy’s: a packed dining hall with rows of plastic tables and an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. Chicken tendons. Chicken feet. Chicken heads. The boys keep getting up for more chicken fried rice and fried chicken spring rolls. I drink some apple juice from a soda dispenser. We’re the only foreigners here. I didn’t know there were so many fat people in China, all crammed into their seats while a hostess with a headset on tells the long line of people that tables will be available soon. Tony picks at a few fried chicken drumsticks, and when the boys are finished I ask them to never talk me into coming to Yummy’s again.
After lunch Lao Wu drives up to the curb in front of Yummy’s and slows just enough in the moving traffic so we can all jump into the van. I’m hoping to go to this homemade-yogurt shop I’ve read about that’s deep in the hutong. On the way Thorne wants to hear a story about my grandfather. “Why him?” I ask with my eyes closed.
Thorne loves to hear family
stories. “Please tell me about Nona’s father again.”
My grandfather was a stern dad who morphed into a soft grandfather willing to build a series of rabbit hutches out of chicken wire in our backyard. He always went to church and belted out hymns, but he rarely seemed satisfied with the preacher. His last twenty years he typed a weekly letter, mimeographed so his four kids and eleven grandchildren could read his views on the state of American politics (appalled) and his hopes for his pruned bonsais (high). Named Albert Lewis Edgerton Crouter at birth, he went by many aliases: Sandy and Alec and Big Al and Opa. He was Gimpy to me. I’d call him from California and he’d yell into the receiver, “Hold the phone! Hold the phone. You’re actually living in that godforsaken state? Judas Priest, girl. Why did you move so far from home?” But I think he was happy to know I was the traveling kind.
I sit up in the van and tell Thorne, “Every night when he visited, Gimpy would tell me a story about a horse named Mr. Snodgrass and two mice who lived under a general store with their parents.”
“And he’s dead now?”
I had a feeling this question was coming. I say yes and close my eyes again and hope that’s the end of it. I want to rest. Why didn’t any of the guidebooks mention that the Forbidden City is not kid-friendly?
“Did Gimpy get put in a grave or thrown in the water?” Thorne asks. I open my eyes and he’s staring at my face. It must be Mao’s tomb that’s sparked them.
Then Aidan leans over and says, “Yeah,” as if he’s been part of the conversation all along. “If Gimpy was put in a grave, then we can visit him.” This is Aidan’s way—to be sanguine about the big stuff. It’s the small stuff that sometimes snags him.
“He has a gravestone in Vermont,” I say. That much I know is true. When my grandfather retired, he and the Madame lived full-time in a wooden house on Lake Champlain, where they canned beets and fished for trout with worms. Vermont was their holy land.
“Mommy,” Aidan says now and takes my hair in his hand. “When it’s time, you can choose a gravestone, and then we can come and visit. We’ll just move the stone over and look down at you.”
“Not exactly,” I say slowly. We’re in deep here. “You can’t really move the stone.”
This is when Thorne announces, “I don’t want to be buried. I want to be stuffed. I want to be stuffed just like Mao.”
“Yes,” Aidan says. “Stuffed like Mao.”
Before I decide whether to laugh out loud, Lao Wu pulls the van over in the alleyway near the yogurt shop. There are four flavors to choose from today: vanilla, wheat germ, almond, and pistachio. Tony orders one of each and we carry the bowls to the one open table. It’s a light, creamy yogurt, and we all want more, so Tony rises for another round. The line now reaches out the door. After he’s eaten his second bowl, Aidan has to pee, so he and Tony walk outside to find a public squatter toilet.
Thorne and I finish our second yogurts and then he asks for one more. “You like it that much?” I say, and I hand him the coins and watch him stand in line. Six months ago he would have balked at the idea of waiting with strangers in a Beijing yogurt shop. Now he gets to the counter and I hear him ask in Chinese which one is coffee-flavored. When he and I step out into the midday haze, bottle rockets are zinging in the alleyway behind us.
Aidan rounds the corner. “Mom, Mom. You’ve got to come! You won’t believe this.” Thorne and I follow him around the yogurt shop, where Tony kneels on the ground with three Chinese men, trying to light a fistful of sparklers. They’re the long kind I’ve never let the boys handle before. The dangerous sparklers. But then they’re lit, and the men hand one to each of us, and the men’s wives come out of the house now with a whole other bag of fireworks and everyone is laughing and waving sparklers in the air.
I’d heard that for years the government banned fireworks in Beijing because of the danger, but the outcry from the people was too great. I watch one of the men bend to light another bottle rocket with a lit cigarette dangling from his lips. Each time there’s an explosion the sound echoes off the stone houses and careens back. I put my hands over my ears. One of the men gives Thorne the lighter and motions for him to set off the next round. I’m over by the doorway—trapped in a parenting moment deep in the cultural vortex. I could yell out, “No!” and insert myself, explaining that my kids don’t play with fire. I could say that fire is dangerous. Or I could just be quiet and let this unfold.
It’s a learned skill for me—this notion of stepping back. Of dropping into that Daoist river. But it’s also something China demands. I have a small camera in my bag, and I take it out. I’m able to capture Thorne as he bends down close to the bottle rocket with the cigarette lighter. Tony is beside him. Aidan is to Tony’s left, and the trio of other men is next to Aidan. I take more pictures. It helps me to stay busy. Even the wives lean in close now—trying to explain to Thorne how to light the thing. Through the camera lens Thorne looks scared. I’m not sure my son wants to be doing this. But I do not say one word. And then it’s done and the rocket hisses and burns and zings in the sky above us. I glance up quickly and then back over to Thorne. I could swear he’s standing a little taller—and that he’s wearing one of those small, private smiles, imperceptible perhaps to everyone but his mother.
The Three T’s and the One F
Today the Internet says two hundred people are dead in Lhasa and Tibetan monks have taken to the streets. We can’t get any YouTube footage of the riots in Beijing. Each time I click on a photo of the fighting in Lhasa, my computer screen goes blank. It’s an unsettling feeling—as if some government censor has gotten inside the apartment and is standing in my bedroom, leaning over my shoulder. What’s really happened is that by typing in the word Tibet, I’ve tripped an alarm on an Internet filter at the government’s mother ship.
The Chinese have kicked foreign journalists out of Tibet and are bringing tanks into Lhasa today. These edicts come down just a mile or so from our apartment, in the government compound that circles Tiananmen, but Tony’s and my lives go eerily unchanged. It’s an odd thing to be so close to the mechanisms of war, but to learn about them only in stolen Internet moments.
We meet Sebastian and Margaret for dinner again—this time at a Yunnan place called South Seas. Their friends Gwynne and Alex join us. Chloé has come to babysit for the second time, and the boys have planned a badminton tournament with her in Aidan’s room. Gwynne is a petite woman with shocking blue eyes and a great, throaty laugh. She says she’s here to research Internet use. When she puts out her hand to greet me she asks, “Has anybody been able to get on the BBC Web site since the protests started in Tibet?” Her husband, Alex, is a journalist for an American magazine.
I sit next to Gwynne at the square wooden table, and during dinner she tells me she’s learned there are four things you can’t talk about in China. “They’re called ‘the Three T’s and the One F,’ ” she says. “Tibet, Taiwan, Tiananmen, and Falun Gong. Bringing up any of these topics”—she smiles and takes a sip of beer—“will not win you any friends in the Chinese government.”
I keep looking over my shoulder, wondering if any of the waitresses here are spies, but no one seems to be paying us any attention. “Do you ever worry about your husband in China?” I ask Gwynne after we’ve polished off a small plate of garlic and mushrooms.
“I worry about Alex, but never about the things I should be worried about. And right now he can’t get a flight to Lhasa. No one can.”
“I read today that the protests have spread over Yunnan,” Sebastian says. “And that monasteries are organized all across China.”
“Good luck and Godspeed,” Margaret says then. “I feel like this is the Tibetans’ last stand before the Olympics. Their last chance for world attention.”
Gwynne nods. “Did you know that when the government here isn’t busy shutting down Web sites about Tibet, it’s trying to control the speed of our Internet search engines? Take this week, for example; they’ve ratcheted things down so th
at even if you get on a sanctioned Web site, you won’t want to stay because it’s so slow.”
“So that’s why Yahoo has been creeping along,” Tony says.
“And they don’t do it to punish anyone, just to make sure everyone knows they’re there, watching,” Gwynne adds.
When Tony and I get back to the apartment after dinner, the restaurant outside our bedroom still has the lights on. It’s a long, low family place with big picture windows. If we look closely, we can see the noodles people eat for dinner. We go into the living room and Tony turns on CNN. We get five seconds of Lhasa riot footage before the screen goes dead again. We switch to the BBC. It’s blacked out too. “I can’t believe they do this!” Tony yells. “As if we won’t get our news somewhere else.”
But I’m thinking about what Gwynne said—that this kind of censorship slows down information access to the point where we give up trying. It makes things just difficult enough tonight so we go to bed early. Tony and I lie under the sheets. There is the sound of a small electric drill in the ceiling above us. We’re never sure if our apartment is bugged. Tony and I aren’t important enough for that. Still, earlier today the property management office called and said maintenance men would be over again to “fix some problems with the air-conditioning.” These “problems” are confusing to us—the AC has worked fine since the first week. Tony and I hold hands and fall asleep listening to the sounds of hammering in the air duct.
