by Susan Conley
To keep? I wonder. Forever? She takes different ones off the wall and considers them: first a shot of the boys when they were three and five down by the float in Phippsburg and then another where they’re playing inside our old truck in our Portland driveway. She settles on the photo of Winky’s that I love best—the one of the boys arm in arm and shirtless, just after they’ve finished eating Popsicles on the porch by the ocean. Red juice stains Aidan’s chin, and he’s laughing so hard his eyes crinkle.
It’s the photo Mao Ayi likes most too. She says she wants her son to make a drawing of it. He’s an artist, she explains, and makes a writing motion with her hand in the air. I nod to her because I want her to love my boys, and I can tell she’s already beginning to. If there’s anything I can do to speed up this bonding process, then let’s try it.
After dinner, I overhear her telling the boys to hurry up and finish their dumplings because she wants to play badminton. It’s become their routine. I get to keep score. It’s not that I am unschooled in badminton. It’s just that Mao Ayi is better, with a great serve and a spontaneous laugh. The boys need new competition. They’ve been playing badminton against me for a year. I lie on Aidan’s bed and call out: Aidan and Thorne, five. Mao Ayi, ten. It’s a good thing Mao Ayi decided to stop working at that train station restaurant. It was a lucky day for us when she walked into our apartment.
The next morning Aidan wakes up and informs me that what he wants more than anything is a jade necklace in the shape of a dragon. He harps on it through breakfast—asking where we can get one. I’m thinking Aidan might need a Chinese talisman like I did. So I make a deal with him. Thorne stays removed from the sordid, back-alley handshakes Aidan and I engage in. But Aidan loves to barter, to push deals almost to the brink (eat three more bites of pork and you’ll get a yogurt for dessert) just to see what more he might be able to wring out of them. I promise Aidan we’ll go buy the necklace after school. I say I will get him to the goods. But he has to pay for it with money he’s been saving in his plastic pig.
Most people in Beijing under the age of thirty-five wear some kind of jade on red thread around their neck. There may not be widespread religion in China yet, but some scholars I’ve read seem to think consumer culture will give way soon to the “the old ways” of spirituality. Maybe jade necklaces are a kind of harbinger.
They might be for sale in the pedestrian tunnel underneath the main road out front. It’s dark and smelly down there. I walked through yesterday on my way home from Jenny Lou’s. Two families were selling bright-colored beads and small brass animal statues. They had the handsome, dark-skinned faces of Chinese ethnic minorities—the scientific description of anyone in China who happens not to be Han. During the time in the eighties that Tony spent hitchhiking in China, he mostly took pictures of the Yi and Naxi tribes and the Tibetans. These were the photos that hung in our living room in Portland. The people in the tunnel were some of the most beautiful on the planet. They wore elaborate head scarves and chunky silver jewelry and slept in the underpass with the goods laid out on cotton blankets. There were jade bracelets down there and brass Buddhas and wooden prayer beads and fake amber. But no pendants in the shape of a dragon.
I sit at my desk and try to rework the ending to my novel. Mostly this means rearranging twenty sentences. But when it’s time to go meet the bus, the paragraph isn’t there yet. Aidan and Thorne jump off the bus, and I lead them to the van, which Lao Wu has parked outside the main gate. Then we drive down Gongti toward the heart of the shopping district. Cars are stacked up behind the long traffic lights. I lean back in the passenger’s seat and get the claustrophobic China feeling. It’s partly a sense of how far I am from home, and also a realization that Beijing is a landlocked capital. This is when Thorne reads my mind and leans forward to say, “Mommy, I feel like the ocean should be just down the street.”
“I know,” I say and try not to sound too depressed. “It seems that way, doesn’t it?”
“But the ocean’s not here,” Thorne confirms. “The ocean’s far, far away.”
Yashow is a giant clothing emporium: five floors of Max Mara and Nautilus and Prada and Lands’ End and Gucci, all of it fake. Foreigners flock to this place, and so do the locals. Today the parking lot is packed with tour buses. It’s always crowded here. Buzzing with sounds of bartering. It always feels like if I’d gotten here an hour earlier, I would have found the deal of a lifetime on silk nightgowns or Burberry raincoats.
Each of the five floors holds a certain number of dealers. They set up in small stalls—maybe a hundred to a floor—and sell underwear and dress shirts and fabric for sheets and cashmere sweaters and Pashmina. They sell iPods and Xboxes and movie cameras. A sign in the lobby reads: “Jade on Fifth Floor.” The boys and I take the escalator, and then hold hands and begin to circle the stalls. We see a table with jade medallions and bracelets, but no necklaces. There’s another stall full of carved jade animals: frogs and turtles and fish but nothing on string.
Then Thorne takes me by the arm and walks me back to the stall at the end of the third aisle. He isn’t interested in jade, but he’s willing to help Aidan. The girl selling necklaces here looks seventeen. Most of the girls in the market look even younger. This girl spends all day waiting on customers and playing games on her cell phone. She naps sitting up in the corner on a stool. Aidan stands with his hands on his hips, scanning for dragons. When he finds one, he points to it. “Zhe ge,” he says and reaches. “Wo yao zhe ge.”
The girl holds the dragon in her hand so it swings back and forth in the air. She tells Aidan in English that the dragon is the symbol of strength in China. “When you put this on, you become more powerful.” Aidan listens and nods solemnly. How did we get so lucky? This girl is a sage in the disguise of a Chinese teenager. She smiles at Aidan warmly. She’s understood him perfectly—his need for a little bit of power. He hands me his wad of wrinkled RMB notes, all his money, and then he turns and waits for the girl to tie the red thread behind his neck.
Afterward, he takes a step back from the table and asks me if he looks more powerful yet. “Yes,” I say. “I think you’re already bigger.” I want him to be bigger. He’s too thin—his tall body bends in the wind. I want him to be stronger. I want us all to be stronger.
It’s Aidan’s money, but I’m still a terrible bargainer. I take the bartering personally, when I am supposed to approach it like a job. Like a math problem. There can’t be emotion involved. I start worrying about the girl’s home life and if she has a bed to sleep in. So I pay too much. I won’t say how much. Let’s just say my son now has an expensive jade necklace in the shape of a dragon.
We drive back to the apartment. The traffic is worse, and I try to doze in the front seat. Then we eat dinner and take baths and read stories while Aidan holds on to the pendant around his neck. I don’t think he’s ever going to take the necklace off. I go into his room to kiss him good night and he’s worn it to bed.
Breast Behavior
In late October my friend Genevieve comes to visit from Maine. We put her in Thorne’s room, and Thorne moves to Aidan’s top bunk. Genevieve arrives with no map. No list of sites to see. She is a tall, fearless traveler who loves hiking in the woods with her dogs after it snows. I am so excited she’s here. A friend living in the apartment with us. A friend to wake up to. Someone willing to sit in her nightgown in my Beijing living room with me after the boys are on the school bus, and overanalyze the possible side effects of smog.
The first thing we do together is drive to a remote stretch of the Great Wall. The plan is for Lao Wu to drop us off at a place three hours east of the city called Jinshanling. We’ll hike four hours up and over the watchtowers and then down into Simatai, where he’ll pick us up. We leave the city and travel through acres of identical high-rise apartments with no side roads to walk on, just a grid of endless state-planned housing and one enormous Jingkelong market plopped down near the highway exit. This is the New Beijing I keep reading about—the subu
rban dream that hundreds of thousands of downtown hutong dwellers are being relocated to. Slowly, very slowly, the buildings give way to flat countryside and a series of small, poor-looking villages. There’s a purple flower in bloom that reminds me of lupine and a blue Ping-Pong table sitting in the dirt in front of one house.
When we get to the wall, Samsung is running a training session in the parking lot. There must be a hundred Chinese Samsung workers lined up in rows. Each wears a black polo shirt with “Samsung” stitched on it in gray. Some of them carry hand-drawn maps for a scavenger hunt. Genevieve and I stand in the hot sun watching them play tug-of-war with a giant white rope.
Then we take an old gondola to the top of the mountain. I can tell that Genevieve is the perfect China tourist—part mystic, part inquisitor. “Let’s see if we can camp out here some night,” she says to me before we get off. “I already love it here. I can see why you wanted me to come to China.”
I’m glad to have a friend here who understands me and does not say things like, “Why are you still sad when you have two beautiful boys?” Which is what my friend Gretel asked me last week over coffee. I’m still worked up over it. She added, “Why can’t you be happy for what you’ve got?” I could not find a way to explain that cancer doesn’t work like that. That cancer is sometimes sad. I wanted to stand in that small café with Gretel and pick the table up and throw it.
The gondola makes me think of ski resorts in the 1970s. It’s old and rusty and sways in the Chinese wind. Genevieve says, “I had no idea it would be so beautiful here. You tried to tell me, but I had no way of knowing.” There are women on the wall trying to sell things. They carry Cokes and Sprites and Hershey bars in canvas bags. One woman zooms in on me and tries to tell me how old this part of the wall is. She’s hoping I’ll pay her to be my guide. I say, “Bu yao, xie xie,” when she gets out her collections of postcards. “Bu yao.” This woman must live in the village down below. I don’t begrudge her the chance, but she’s not making money off me today. I want her to leave me alone. I’m tired of the way she keeps rubbing my arm with her arm while we walk stride for stride. Tired of telling her bu yao bu yao. Bu yao. I am becoming the rude foreigner. “I don’t want your help!” I finally say loudly and move away from her.
Genevieve and I walk for hours. It’s hard going—the path is steep and narrow and sometimes there are no sides to the wall. To fall looks to me like certain death. The mountains ripple out for miles and there’s hardly a house to be seen in the forests. Hardly a road. “You’ve taken me deep into China, Sus.” Genevieve laughs. “Wyo and Graham would love it here.” Her two boys wait for her back at home. “They would think about the wizards and sorcerers who live here in caves.” We stop and get out our water bottles. Three women selling Evian circle us on the watchtower like crows, trying to sell us more. I remind myself that they’re doing their job, and that these women have children of their own they’re trying to feed.
We set off again, up steep stairs that take thirty minutes to climb. I use my hands and feet, as if the staircase were a stepladder. That’s when Genevieve begins to describe the amazing book she’s writing for her two boys—a story about the powers of five sacred stones. Each week she reads a new chapter to her boys, and each week they beg her to write more.
Near the end of the hike, there’s a uniformed man at a makeshift gate, which marks the entrance to the Simatai section of the wall. He says we need to buy another ticket to enter. There’s a small group of Italians gathered around him, refusing to pay. I think if Genevieve and I just show the man the tickets we bought down below, we’ll be able to continue. But the gatekeeper wants twenty more RMB from each of us before he’ll let us pass.
I’m out of money. I yell at the guard in Chinese that it isn’t fair to charge us more. I try to barge past him, but he blocks my way with his body. “There are no signs telling us we have to buy more tickets,” I scream at him in English. “You’re just stealing our money.” Then I shove him with my shoulder. Damned if I am going to be hijacked on the Great Wall by a teenage guard in an oversized military uniform. And what if Genevieve didn’t have forty more RMB in her pocket like she does? What was the guard going to do with us then? I feel the rage well up as Genevieve pulls my arm back. She tells me that she’s just going to pay him. “I’m worried he’ll get the police involved if we try to make a run for it,” she says. “It’s okay, Susan. I’ve got it.”
I’m angry now for all the times I haven’t had the right ticket in China. Or the correct permit. Or accurate directions. Or the perfect words. I scream more nonsense in Chinglish about how it’s not fair that we have to buy more tickets. Genevieve gets out her RMB notes and pays the man off, then leads me away by the hand. I’m crying, and I’m not sure why.
Near the end of the path, we cross over a wooden footbridge that dangles above a river. At the far end there’s another gatekeeper who charges us more money to cross his bridge. I’ve given up. I wait for Genevieve to pay again. I don’t say a word about extortion.
This guard has laid sardines near the edge of the bridge to dry in the sun. Maybe he’ll eat them for dinner. I think he lives in the small cave I see above the bridge. Maybe I’m out of my mind for yelling about twenty Chinese RMB. What I would like to do is start over and leave as much of my anger as I can behind on this bridge.
The next day, Genevieve and I walk the boys to the bus stop. They’re mesmerized by her because she tickles them under their chins and has taken to talking to them in her bad college German. Thorne now calls her his German aunt. Once the boys are on the bus, we flag a taxi to Dashanzi to see the art galleries. We stop for tea at one of the outdoor cafés that sprung up for the Olympics. Time Out Beijing has put hip-hop star Kanye West on this month’s cover. I flip through the pages while Genevieve looks at postcards she’s bought of old Chinese cigarette posters. I learn that Kanye will be in Beijing next month to perform at the Workers Stadium. Then I find a half-page article on breast cancer called “Breast Behavior.”
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but I’m not used to these articles. Time Out is a magazine that tries to be cutting-edge. It caters to expats and has a contest every season for the best new restaurant in Beijing and a schedule of mixed-drink specials at local bars. “Breast Behavior” sounds like a salacious title for China’s Communist Party readers. A title that’s trying to sound hip about breast cancer.
Just to the left of the article, the editors have included a photo of a beautiful woman named Mu Yeilang in a sleeveless tunic. The caption says Yeilang is a breast cancer survivor and the founder of Beijing’s Pink Ribbon Group. Genevieve is busy watching the Chinese tourists on the street. We’ve already walked through a show of large-scale color photos of garbage sites near the South China Sea.
“Breast Behavior” says breast cancer diagnoses in China have increased 23 percent in the last ten years. It explains that close to two hundred thousand women in Beijing have been diagnosed. But the tone of the piece is dispassionate, as if it’s describing a new weather pattern off Hong Kong. The two authors—a man and a woman—write that the real killer of breast cancer is “ignorance.”
Genevieve takes out her pen and begins to write a postcard home to her husband, Tom, and her boys. I don’t think ignorance is a good choice of word. There must be a better way to say it. Breast cancer, the authors explain, “is easy to treat,” especially if Chinese women would practice early detection methods.
Who are these authors, I want to know. Teenagers? I can barely stay in my seat I’m so mad. It turns out I have not left my anger behind on the Great Wall at Simatai. There is still plenty left for me to sort through on this warm morning back in Beijing. Did the authors think they were writing an article about premature hair loss? “Easy to treat”? I got lucky, my doctors kept telling me. I found mine early. But there’s no litmus test to prove that a woman’s been cured of breast cancer. There’s just the waiting. Waiting and living and living some more.
Homework
Ken and his wife, Vanessa, are a fast lesson in cultural nuance for me. They sound Chinese and speak it to each other on the phone whenever I overhear them. But Vanessa is Taiwanese, not Chinese, and this is a crucial distinction. Ken moved to Long Island from Taiwan when he was twelve. He’s a hard-core Yankee fan who often seems more confused by China’s byzantine rules than I do. I keep trying to remember that Ken is watching how things are done here just as closely as I am.
Dawn is also at the bus stop. She’s the Chinese Irish woman who warned me to eat organic food last year when I told her I had cancer. She doesn’t talk to me much. I’m not sure why, and I try not to think she’s avoiding me. “We never see you anymore,” I say and stand next to her.
She seems hurried. “It’s because we have homework every day. No more playing,” she says. Her children are five and three. “Every day it’s homework. But Henry likes it,” she points at her son. He’s small for a five-year-old and wears an eye patch. “But it’s hard on me. Because I have to do the homework with him.”
For some reason I’m still programmed to initiate small talk with people about subjects I’m not interested in. This is another habit I am trying to break in China. I don’t want to talk about homework for five-year-olds. I don’t believe in it. I want to go home and make oatmeal for breakfast and click on “Real Clear Politics” to see if Obama’s seven-point national lead is holding.
