by Susan Conley
At ten o’clock, Rose rings the doorbell. It’s the first time I’ve seen her since we’ve gotten back from the States. She embraces me in the doorway and then we each laugh. I tell her in English that she looks great. Her hair is longer, and she’s changed her glasses. She now has a smaller, sleeker black pair with “Gucci” on the side. I try to tell her in Chinese that I have not studied my Chinese all summer—that I have been bing le (sick), except the translation doesn’t really work. Because I haven’t really been sick. I’ve felt fine, in fact. I’ve just had cancer, but I don’t know how to say this.
“It’s okay,” Rose keeps repeating to me as we walk to the couch. “It’s okay.” Then she asks how I am and tells me she is glad to see me. “Do you have the charm?” she asks me then. “The charm I gave you?”
“I keep it with me always,” I say, and she nods, and this is all we mention about my disease.
We sit down and she asks me to repeat after her: Faguo (France), Deguo (Germany), Hanguo (Korea), Taiguo (Thailand), Meiguo (America). We’ve gone over the country names before, but it’s good of her to remind me. She teaches me again how to say “Ni hao. Wo shi Meiguoren.” Hello. I am American. Then she says her boyfriend can be a little bit of a problem. That he bu xihuan ribenren. Which I understand to mean that her boyfriend doesn’t like the Japanese.
“Shi ma?” I say. It’s the closest thing I know to saying really in Chinese.
“Ta yao ribenren hui jia,” Rose says, which means her boyfriend wishes all the Japanese would go home. He lives with his parents now, but next month he’ll take ownership of a one-room apartment he’s bought. “He wants me to move in with him,” she says in English.
“Ni yao shenme?” I ask her. And you want what?
“I won’t move in until we’re married. It is the custom here. My parents don’t approve of him. And besides,” she says, “I’m not sure I ever want to move in. Until we are married, he can leave me and I will have nothing.”
“Do you want a wedding?” I ask her in English now. “Do you want to marry him?”
She laughs her nervous laugh. “I think he is preparing for it. He calls me on the cell phone every hour. He always wants to know where I am. What I do.”
I stare at her. “I think you are too smart just to teach foreigners like me. Too well organized.” I’m convinced Rose could find a diplomatic job if she went back to the States and got a master’s degree. “Would you ever consider going to the United States? Meiguo?” I ask. “There are colleges there. Universities I am sure would take you. Maybe a linguistics program? Maybe a master’s in international politics?”
Rose watches my lips move. “I am not sure what I want to do. Every day I am thinking on it. No one in China ever talks to me like this. About things I care about.” Her eyes well with tears. “Many of my university friends have moved away. And besides,” she goes on, “I care about more than just clothes and cell phones like they do.”
I don’t know why, but I feel an urgency in the room. I want to tell Rose, This is your moment. I want to explain that choices will be made for her if she doesn’t choose soon for herself: she’ll marry the boyfriend and have her one child and never leave. But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Maybe Rose doesn’t want to leave China. Maybe there are hundreds of thousands of Roses now in China. Millions of young women with college degrees who don’t know what to do with them. “Have you thought about teaching young children?” I ask her. She’s such a good listener; she’d make a wonderful elementary-school teacher. “In a school?”
“No,” she says. “I have never considered any other career than the one I have. I learned English and then I began teaching foreigners. My other friends have office jobs.”
“What do your parents say?” I ask. “What do they want you to do?”
“They want me to get a real job in an office. They want me to leave my boyfriend. He did not go to college and they don’t think he’s good enough for me.”
“Have you told your parents that your boyfriend has bought an apartment?”
Rose starts crying now. Silent tears. She says, “I cannot tell them. They don’t want to hear about him. My father has had to move to Shanghai. He was running a rubber factory back home but then was forced out. It was political. He was the boss and then he was left with nothing. So he has gone to Shanghai to manage another rubber factory.”
“And left your mother alone?”
“Yes,” Rose says, and smiles now. She wipes her tears with a small square of tissue from her black purse. “My mother is happy for this. For forty years she has been cooking and cleaning every day for my father—never getting a rest. Now she can take a break.” Rose stands up to leave. I walk her to the front door.
“Thank you, Susan,” she says then. “Thank you for listening to me. I have many thoughts going around in my mind now. Many ideas. No one else asks me about these ideas. No one here wonders what I am thinking.”
Ecological Farm
Yesterday Thorne asked me, “Which side is your bad side, Mommy?” and then pointed. So I did jumping jacks in front of him, and then we went outside and had sprinting races on the playground. I’m trying to show them that I’m healed. That I’m no different than I was before my surgery. So that’s why today I am headed on a school bus with Aidan’s entire kindergarten class to what Aidan’s teacher is calling an ecological farm.
I’m dreading the day. It’s possible that the ecological farm is a sham. Maybe I’ve already lived in China too long, but just take the term ecological farm for a moment. It sounds important, but if you pull it apart, there’s nothing left. What farm isn’t ecological?
I’m crowded into the last row of the bus with Aidan. His friends sit near us, punching each other in the arms. Other mothers ride the bus and we smile and nod and realize the limitations of our different languages: Cesare’s mother from Italy is here; and Villiya’s mother from Norway; plus Alexander’s mother from Russia; and Josh’s mother, Karen, from Taiwan, who reaches across the aisle and offers me a salty dried prune.
The bus stops on a stretch of road inside the farm near a crop of green leafy vegetables. I’m assigned three children for the day: Julian, a five-year-old from Austria; Mona, a six-year-old from Germany and Korea; and Aidan. I know Mona. Last year Mona and Aidan sat together in preschool and drew pictures of people with long, pink triangular bodies. At our apartment we say Mona is Aidan’s friend that is a girl. We can’t say girlfriend. That word is already taboo. Mona’s favorite color is pink. Today at the farm she wears a pink dress with pink polka-dot tights and black Mary Janes. Overnight the temperature in Beijing dropped from sixty-five to forty-five degrees. There’s a hard wind at the farm and the children are underdressed, Mona most of all, so Aidan and Julian and I hold hands and huddle around her next to the bus.
Our first stop is the bathroom. It’s the dirtiest one I’ve seen in China. I take it as a bad sign. We’ve been attending Chinese public toilets now for over a year. The boys and I have perfected the squat. At first it was a tricky thing—reteaching a four-year-old and a six-year-old how to go to the bathroom. I remember how I held Aidan by his armpits over the hole in the stinky stall inside the Forbidden City and tried not to fall in. At this farm the toilets are all squatters—brown and crusty with things growing on the sides of the small drain. A row of windows sits above the scummy sinks, and the glass is covered in blackflies. It’s as if a few centuries ago, the farm manager decided to walk away from this bathroom and conduct an experiment on what happens to the ecology of toilets and sinks when they’re used by troops of schoolchildren, but never cleaned.
Our farm leader is a young Chinese woman who makes me nervous. She herds us toward the fields in one direction and then abruptly turns and herds us back. She carries a small battery-operated megaphone, and each time she changes her mind she yells at us in broken English to turn around. Finally she leads us into a long, narrow greenhouse covered in clear plastic. We walk the edge of a broccoli field and stare at the b
ushy leaves. The woman yells something at us in Chinese through her megaphone, and a teaching assistant from Aidan’s school tries to translate: “She says that this broccoli is organic. No chemicals have been used to grow it.”
I look at the garbage on the sides of the fields, and I think of the bathroom we’ve just visited, and I make a plan not to eat organic broccoli anymore in Beijing. I’m in the middle of a crisis of confidence about China’s food chain anyway. The first year I was here, I was able to turn a blind eye. But not now. This month they’ve discovered melamine in the milk—a synthetic that dairy farmers add to make the milk appear to contain more protein. Six children have died after melamine calcified their kidneys. Hundreds of thousands have been hospitalized.
Yesterday a rumor spread through Beijing that maggots were in the oranges. So the oranges were all thrown out. I’ve already stopped buying eggs. Melamine showed up there too. Farmers fed it to the chickens as well as the cows. The foreign press thinks the Chinese health officials should check the goats and pigs. The possibilities are endless. The Mayo Clinic says breast cancer survivors should eat pounds of green, leafy vegetables like the broccoli in this field I’m standing in. I try to tell Julian and Aidan and Mona what organic means. I say, “Organic vegetables are fed by the sun and the rain and the soil and have no chemicals.” But I think my lesson is lost on them. The woman with the megaphone screams at us to head over to carrots in a field nearby. It’s ten o’clock in the morning.
We’ve got a long day ahead, and the children are shivering in the wind. “How do carrots grow?” the voice in the megaphone asks the children in Chinese. The teaching assistant takes the megaphone again and translates. We learn that carrots grow in dirt, and that is the sum total of our ecology lesson.
Then we’re left to roam on our own. My little tribe heads over to the birds. Aidan says, “I’ve been waiting all day to see these guys.” The bird pen is a muddy concrete situation that’s more disconcerting than the broccoli field. Water and excrement have pooled in places on the cement floor. A collection of sad-looking geese walks gingerly: we count fourteen of them, plus two turkeys, four peacocks, two enormous ostriches, a handful of ducks, and five chickens. The words avian flu keep popping into my head. The birds squawk at us until someone from the farm brings over a basket of wilted lettuce for the children to feed to the animals.
We’ve been told that soon the kids are going to gather chicken eggs inside the filthy pen. We don’t need eggs from those chickens, I want to say to someone in charge. What we need to do is wash our hands with soap and hot water and go home. Because this is not the farm for us. There are pretend handbags in China, and pretend milk, and now there’s a pretend farm. And there’s no soap on this pretend farm either. None that I can find. There are two empty swimming pools, though, and a bumper car ride that looks like it’s been kidnapped from an amusement park and then left here to rust.
This is a farm that dreamed big and fell short. The teachers decide to cut our losses and leave. There will be no egg gathering, and the farm is too dirty for us to sit down anywhere for a picnic lunch. We get back on the bus and I’m given hand wipes to pass out to the children. “Why aren’t we getting to find chicken eggs?” Aidan asks. “I wanted to gather eggs!” He and Julian wait for my answer. Mona isn’t paying any attention. She says she’s pretending to be a water bug. She climbs down on the floor in her pink tights and hides under the seat, which doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.
Aidan and I get back from the farm, and wait to meet Thorne off the school bus. Then we walk home and I heat up leftover pizza while the boys draw with markers at the dining table. Mao Ayi called in the morning and told Tony she had a fever. Without her here, it’s surprisingly quiet in the apartment. It makes me realize how loudly we talk in our new Chinese when she’s around.
Tonight is a normal school night in Beijing. Tony is on his way home from the office, and nobody in the apartment is musing about breast cancer. No one is wondering out loud how you get to heaven. I hear Thorne say to Aidan, “It was awful at school last year. I did not know how to draw a star. I suck at drawing.” I wince. Drawing is not something I’m good at either, and I’m afraid I’ve given Thorne bad drawing genes. His drawings, like mine, are one-dimensional and rudimentary: sticklike humans and narrow houses with thin chimneys.
Aidan calls out, “Mom. How do you spell the word boat?”
“B-o-a-t,” I say and bring the pizza to the table. Aidan shows me his pirate ship and says he’s named it People Who Want to Tear Down the World. There are small, intricately colored flags on his boat and humans with large-fingered hands. Drawing comes naturally to Aidan.
“Nice work,” I say to him, even though I’ve recently read an online article on parenting that urges parents to be specific in praise of our kids. Apparently, children are getting too used to vague praise, and this is making them complacent.
“So, Aidan.” I look at his drawing again and try to back up. “I like the way you drew that anchor in black marker and made it hang down behind the boat.”
“It’s not an anchor, Mom,” he says. “It’s a rudder.”
Oh, really? I want to say. Oh, please. Thorne is next to me, busy drawing more stars. His confidence seems restored. “Here is a perfect star,” he says and hands me his paper. “And here.”
“What good work,” I say tiredly, giving the most vague kind of praise. “What perfect stars.” In truth, the stars look rushed and messy and are hard to discern.
The boys finish the pizza and run back to Aidan’s room to wrestle. I gather up the drawings on the table. Above his stars Thorne has written, “Thorne does not have a girlfriend.” Down at the bottom of the page it reads, “Does Thorne have a girlfriend?”
Later, Aidan rides into the kitchen on his skateboard and finds me finishing the dishes. “Can water feel itself when it’s cold?” he asks earnestly.
“No,” I say, glad to be able to answer something definitively. “Water does not have feelings.”
“What about crabs? Can crabs feel when the water is cold?”
“I think so,” I answer and walk out of the kitchen. “I’m going to take a bath.”
I get in the tub and close my eyes and try to feel the normalcy of the evening rain down. It is the kind of normal I’ve been working toward all fall: a state of mind that does not allow for fear. An apartment where my boys talk about the dimensions of stars and no one asks me if I’m going to die. I hear Thorne greet Tony at the front door with a yell.
That’s when Aidan jogs into the bathroom, sees me in the tub, flexes his tiny arm muscles, and asks me again if he looks any stronger. “Definitely,” I say. “Your biceps are definitely bigger.”
I stand and grab a towel, but I am too late. “When are you going to get another nipple?” he asks me. We’ve gone over this before.
“In June.” I’m intentionally vague about the where and the how, and I don’t explain that the thing will be fake. Or that later on, someone (a tattoo artist who moonlights at the hospital) will tattoo the areola on me. I have a hard time getting my head around this information, which is why I can’t offer it up to Aidan. I almost don’t believe it myself.
Aidan looks at me closely. “In June?” he says. “June is summer.”
“Yep. When we go back to the States for summer.”
“But how,” he asks me slowly as he thinks it through, “can you be sure it is going to grow back by then?” It’s a reasonable question. But this whole discussion is getting too Freudian for me.
Tony comes into the bathroom and saves me. He asks Aidan to finish a chapter of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with him in bed. Then I’m alone again with my fake left breast in China. We dry off. I put on my brown sweatpants and a white T-shirt and say good-bye to the implant.
Thorne is lying on his bed holding Farmer Boy, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. He reports that Almanzo has spent the entire day in the one-room schoolhouse. I turn out the light and lie down on the bed. Then Thorne says he
’s undecided.
“About what?” I ask.
“I can’t decide if I ever want to be ten.”
“And why’s that?”
“Well, if I am ten, it means I am closer to dying. Except I want for there to be a next week because next week we go skiing in Japan.”
“That’s true.” I take a breath. “And you don’t have to worry about dying,” I say slowly. “Dying is a grown-up problem.”
“I wish I could close my eyes and be back in America.”
“Where would you go?”
“To school,” he says. “I would go right to school to see my friends. Don’t you think everyone in America is just waking up?”
Starter Buddha
On Sunday I tell Tony we need more help at the apartment—some kind of Chinese talisman to ward off the leftover cancer juju. Because there’s too much talk between the boys about my disease. “Too much brooding on life and death, don’t you think?” I ask, and he nods. I suspect he would agree with just about anything I said at this point. “I think maybe a Buddha head is what we need.” He nods again, and maybe looks slightly resigned to what the coming day will bring, but he does not complain once. No. He seems entirely game. I think he’s trying to humor me. Trying to see me through to a healthier place, where I don’t have so much anxiety or wake up on Sunday mornings needing to go buy religious artifacts.
It’s a mild morning in October, and our kids are at double playdates. How often does it happen that Tony and I are alone together on a weekend in China? Almost never. And since we’ve made it through the circus that was our summer of cancer treatments, and trips to hospitals to meet different flavors of doctors, it seems natural to me to get ourselves to the biggest flea market in Beijing.
The first one we see is a beautiful Buddha from the shoulders up. He has a large, round head carved from some kind of pale wood, and he’s been covered in white plaster of Paris, which smudges on my fingers when I touch his ear. He’s really only a head—with long, impossibly wide eyes and full, rosebud lips. There’s no body to speak of. I like him. I can tell Tony does too, by the way he’s stopped in the crowded aisle to stare.
