by Susan Conley
She nods her head. Then she says, “But you haven’t. You’re right here. And Tony and Thorne and Aidan are still at your side.”
On Saturday morning she and I drive in the van with Lao Wu to see an acupuncturist. Britta has recommended Dr. Heng, and Lily comes because she wants to check things out. She’s never had acupuncture before. Neither have I. She says she’ll finish reading a novel she’s brought in her bag while I’m treated. When we step into the tiny lobby, I’m led to a room by a male assistant and asked to lie down in my sweater and jeans on a narrow cot. Dr. Heng enters then. He has a handsome face with alert eyes. He holds my wrist and listens to my pulse. Then he says, “Your body has had some great event.”
I nod at him and wonder how he’s discerned this from my heartbeat. I haven’t told him about my medical history. He goes on, “We have to tell your body it’s over now. We have to tell your body it’s okay to let go.”
Then he begins to chant a song that repeats the word bodhisattva over and over while he slips needles into my calves and my feet. The needles hurt more than I thought they would. I lie there and listen to the singing and feel the needles humming and wonder if things can get any weirder in China and if I am going to cry, and if this is the final thing I’ve been waiting for. The healing moment. When he’s done, I tell him I’ve been lifting weights with Marcus at the gym. “You are thin,” Dr. Heng warns. “You’re not meant to be lifting weights. Only swimming, yoga, and belly dancing.” I nod my head and try to imagine me and the belly dancing, but I can’t. Maybe this is not my moment and I should go.
Back in the lobby, Lily sits in a chair against the right wall, sobbing. “What’s wrong?” I ask, alarmed. “Are you okay?”
Then she laughs and says, “This book is so damn good. But God it’s sad. It’s about a father who doesn’t have a job or money for his wife and kids. He thinks he’s failing them. And he is. But then he stops himself. Just before he crashes out, he pulls it together.” I stare at her in wonder at her ability to be so moved by a book in this crowded little lobby. I would like some of that emotion. Can she just give me a scoop, please? I would like to feel connected like that again to a book. To a person. To an idea. “The ending is so real,” she says, and tears fill her eyes again. “It’s so believable.”
We walk outside and climb into the van to go home. Everyone is back from the swimming pool, and the kids play hide-and-seek in the bedrooms. Tony and Tyler sit with their feet up on the table, drinking green tea and planning the dumpling house they’re going to open back in the States. They’ve been designing this restaurant for years. Tyler says, “We’d have to get Lily and Susan to work the front of the house for us. Seat people and pour the drinks.”
“Yeah, because we’d be out back working our asses off in the kitchen.” Tony nods and takes a sip of tea.
“That is a lot of dumplings to make every day,” I add and sit half on Tony’s lap.
“And just for the record,” Lily says, looking over at me, “Susan and I will not be going into the hostess business.”
“But don’t forget naps,” I say, standing up now. “Aren’t you people tired? See you in an hour.” Then I walk down the hall to my bedroom. We’re planning to go to a noodle-making class tonight with the kids. It’s at a cooking school Thorne’s art teacher opened in the hutong. I lie down on my bed and the phone rings. It’s Sebastian, our lawyer friend.
“Can you and Tony make it to a dinner tonight?” he asks. “There is an American senator in town.”
“Senator?” I say. I knew he had friends in high places.
“We’ll meet you guys at Li Qun Duck at six.”
“We have our own friends visiting,” I say. “Writers. We can’t come.” But a senator. The idea intrigues me.
“Bring them,” Sebastian says. “We’d love to meet your friends.”
I hang up and go stand in the hall and make an announcement. “Drop the noodle plans,” I yell. “I’m calling the babysitter. We’ll make noodles tomorrow. Tonight we’re meeting a U.S. senator at a duck house in the hutong behind Tiananmen.”
“We’re what?” Lily calls out from where she’s lying with Tyler on the air mattresses in the living room. She says the mattresses are surprisingly comfortable to sleep on, and I can’t tell if she’s lying.
“High-ranking,” I call to her, like it’s perfectly normal. “And her husband. We’re meeting them in two hours. Are you game?”
“How can I not be?” she yells. “It’s too good to pass up.”
Then I go lie back down on my bed. Sometimes it seems that since we left the United States, the country has actually begun to get smaller. So small, in fact, that on a Friday night we find ourselves headed to a quarter of the city known as Dongcheng with one of the senior members of the Foreign Intelligence Committee.
“What do you wear to meet a senator?” Tyler calls out before we leave. “I only brought jeans to China.”
“I’ll find you a shirt, man,” I can hear Tony say from the kitchen, where he’s making the kids popcorn. “Maybe a sweater. If we can find you a sweater you’ll be fine.”
Chloe arrives at five thirty and we head out in the van. Part of me wishes I could explain to Lao Wu who it is we’re going to see. I want him to know one of our leaders is here. That our two governments are talking. But I can’t think of a way to tell him that won’t sound self-important.
“We have to be careful about what we say,” Lily decides then. “How much can we talk about? How much Obama?”
“I’m going to ask her a lot about foreign policy,” Tyler jokes.
Tony grins back. “Yes. Let’s talk about two of our specialties, dumpling houses and the Monroe Doctrine.”
“Oh God,” Lily groans. She’s giggling now. “I know this will be hard for you to hear, Tyler, but the senator has not come to China to get badgered with your questions about the Iraq war. We have to be tactful.”
“And exactly what is our line of questioning?” I ask and begin laughing too.
“She’s come to meet with U.S. ambassadors and Chinese leaders, Tyler, not two writers from Yarmouth,” Lily adds. “Please, please promise that you’ll ask her politely.”
“Yes, please.” I repeat one more time. “Because Sebastian and Margaret are our friends. Sebastian hasn’t asked us out so we can embarrass him.”
“I’m on it,” Tyler says. “No worries. There are just a few things I’d like to say about the sale of our aircraft carriers to Taiwan.”
“Oh no,” I say.
“No worriers,” he repeats and smiles.
Lao Wu drops us off at the mouth of a long, unlit hutong alley. It’s windy and cold, and when we open the door to Li Qun it’s dark inside and crowded. When my eyes adjust I see dozens of dead ducks hanging by their necks on the back wall. The hallway is lined with pictures of Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger. Plus a collage of lesser-known American senators, who’ve all eaten here. I spy Sebastian, talking to a waiter. There’s a petite woman standing next to him. I reach them and say, “Hello there.”
The senator leans toward me so we do an awkward half air kiss, half embrace. I feel like I know her, and what a peculiar thing—this false intimacy she must try to convey. Or maybe it’s not false. Maybe this is how she acts all the time—warm and grounded. The round table we’re led to is in a small, tired private dining room. The walls are smudged with dirt, and the tablecloth is greasy. I get up and find the toilet out beyond the open kitchen where the ducks get roasted in a wood-oven fire. This bathroom is so much worse than most of the public ones I’ve been to in Beijing that I wonder what Sebastian is thinking bringing politicians here.
Back at the table, the senator says quietly that she’s just gotten back from a fact-finding mission in Kabul. I stare and try to nod like I’m right there with her, weighing the military options we have against the Taliban, but really I’m studying her hair. How does she keep it in place? I can’t pretend to have any expertise about the Taliban. I’m
wondering when Tyler is going to jump in.
Sebastian is to my right. “I love this place,” he says to me. “Best duck in the city. I always come here.” I nod and try to clean my chopsticks off with the hem of my sweater. Why is it so dirty in here? We’re all a little nervous, I can tell. Then I look over at Tony. He’s smiling his widest grin—the kind I think are called shit-eating grins. He’s staring right at the senator, and I hear him ask her how her flight to China was. But her husband is the conversation master. He’s charming and funny and soon Lily is talking to him about the plot of her second novel.
The night really goes to Tyler, who in the end, after several beers, begins firing the questions he warned us he would. “Are you here to gauge China’s military buildup? And do you see the troops as an inherently bad thing?” Tyler persists. “Because I think too many people fear China when they should just learn more about it. Maybe ignorance breeds fear.”
I try not to stare too hard at the senator when she answers. I feel none of the remove I’ve had earlier this week. This conversation is too surreal to stay removed from. The senator. Right here.
Tyler’s voice begins to rise. He’s getting emotional and heated, which means he’s breaking one of the cardinal rules of talking policy with a senator at a dark and dirty duck dive in an old corner of Beijing. “Why should we fear them? What have they done to us that would make us distrustful?”
I look over at Lily, and her eyes are wide. She’s staring at her husband. I try to change the subject by saying to anyone who will listen, “Did you know that Lily’s second novel was featured in People magazine?”
“Oh really?” Margaret says. “That’s fantastic.”
Lily looks over like she wants to strangle me. She hates this kind of attention. I can tell she’s really mad. But I was only trying to take the attention off Tyler. That’s when Tony asks the waiter for the duck carcasses to be brought to the kitchen and chopped up with a cleaver. “There is a Chinese tradition,” he says to everyone, “of sautéing the bones with garlic.”
In minutes the waiter hurries back with a heaping mess of cooked duck bones. The plate makes its way around the table and we all try a bite, cracking the small bones in our teeth.
“This is disgusting,” I say. What a gross idea—cutting up the carcasses and eating them. Everyone is laughing now. In this China moment, everyone is inside the conversation. I laugh so hard that my eyes fill with tears. I haven’t thought about cancer for hours.
When Saturday comes again, Lao Wu drives us back to the airport. Up until the moment we say our final good-bye, I keep thinking Lily will find some way for them all to stay. They’ve liked China so much—every single one of them. Our lives will be quiet in the apartment when they’re gone. Lily hugs me and thanks me again. “It’s been one of those life-changing trips,” she says. “And I hadn’t expected it. Wasn’t looking for it. I want to come back to this place. To this amazing country.” Then she adds one more thing, and it’s what I hold on to after she’s left.
“Sus.” She speaks slowly, standing on the curb of the departures terminal. “I’ve been waiting to say this all week.” She pauses. “I know you’re struggling. Reaching. I know you are thinking. All the time still thinking about your disease, and I’m not sure you can think your way out of cancer.” I nod at her; I know she’s saying something important. Something I can’t quite find my way to yet. “Maybe this is the time to let go and just be,” she goes on. “Maybe it’s not the time to think.”
The United Nations
of Second Graders
It’s difficult to figure out how to celebrate birthdays in this city. But on November 27, we reinvent the birthday party wheel. Thorne is turning eight. We can’t have all the kids to the apartment. They won’t fit. Who could have predicted that by this time Thorne would have so many friends in China? Or that he would join the swim team and the soccer team and love them both? Or that he would tell me that he thinks he’d like to stay in China until he’s a teenager?
Who could have known we’d have this good kind of birthday problem on our hands? So what we do this year is invite seventeen boys and one girl (Molly) to a soccer game at the school gym. It’s the United Nations of second graders: Korea, Taiwan, China, England, Bahrain, Cameroon, the United States, Denmark, and Germany are all represented. They play for an hour while Tony runs around with a whistle on his neck, refereeing.
When the games are over, we break for lunch at the Noodle Loft around the corner from the school. Tony blows the referee’s whistle to stop and start the herd of eight-year-olds as they run down the block. Eighteen kids at the Noodle Loft gets a little crazy. I pass out a box of metal magic rings I picked up at a kiosk under the pedestrian tunnel last Friday. The kids play with the rings for about two minutes and then begin drinking Sprite through their noses.
Thorne’s friend Simon’s birthday is also today. Simon’s father e-mailed me four days ago and asked if Simon could have his birthday party with us. I told him to join in, but maybe we could keep the numbers below twenty. Because what on earth do you do in Beijing with twenty eight-year-olds?
Tony had asked Simon’s parents to take care of the food at the restaurant while we manned the soccer at the gym. “Just order the noodles,” I’d said to them as they left. “The kids love noodles.”
That was our plan—simple bowls of noodles. It is a noodle place, after all. But then platters of duck start arriving. “It is Simon’s favorite,” his mother explains to me. It’s a tricky thing to serve whole roasted duck to hungry eight-year-old boys. There’s a lot of food preparation. Too much. Tony and I get busy cutting and distributing meat and thin pancakes and plum sauce. Thorne’s friend Ali comes to the party late and with no warning and brings Rashid, his eleven-year-old brother. I smile at Rashid and recall that he is the boy who taught Aidan and Thorne the concept of “getting sexy.” What a gift. I tell Rashid to grab a seat too (he has a sweet face) and this bothers Thorne. He says, “The party is getting out of control and Rashid is too old to be here.” This is how I learn it’s a delicate thing to introduce a fifth grader into a second-grade scene.
We seem to recover, and I make a point of never looking Thorne in the eye again during the party, because each time I do, he makes a mad face at me. There are things about mothering I’ll never understand. It’s the weight of it—the subterranean pull between my children and me. How can I set Thorne off with a look, when I’m the one who dreamed this party up and invited all these kids? I stay away on my own side of the room, handing out duck to Gustav and Mads and Eric. Each time I sneak a look over at Thorne he’s playing with Jiho and making farting sounds with his hand under his armpit while he eats his noodles.
After the party Lao Wu announces that he’s taking the boys to a live animal market to buy Thorne a turtle. How can we say no to such a nice offer? He parks the van in a crowded street not far from his own apartment. Then he tells us he keeps two turtles at home, and that we will like having turtles. They’ll grow, he says in Mandarin and spreads his hands in the air. Hen Da.
Lao Wu takes Thorne’s and Aidan’s hands, crosses the street, and strides into the crowded outdoor shopping center. Luckily, this is not the live reptile market I’ve heard about where snakes are for sale. It’s a market for tropical fish in glass tanks and hundreds upon hundreds of turtles. How will Thorne ever choose one? Tony and I walk behind the boys, and we circle the entire market twice. I’m not sure what we’re looking for—what characteristics mark a good turtle from the rest of the lot. This place is dark and smelly and surreal—dozens of men and women sit inside their tiny stalls arguing the case for their own turtles. How can you tell the difference? I want to ask. The turtles all seem to be stoically swimming for their lives in giant, scummy glass aquariums.
Lao Wu looks like he’s enjoying himself. He doesn’t let go of the boys’ hands, but he pauses from time to time in front of certain stalls and gazes up at the stacked tanks. Then he points out a yellow-bellied turtle and then lat
er one tinged a darker shade of green. Thorne finally decides on a member of a hardy-looking troupe of lime-colored, palm-sized turtles. Lao Wu asks the vendor how much. Then he scoffs at the price and the two men go back and forth negotiating the sale of this one little guy who’s running in air now, suspended by his shell in Thorne’s small hand. Of course Aidan wants a turtle now too, and how can we deny him when the price is much better if you buy more?
When we get home, the turtles will not give any of us the time of day. I can tell that they don’t like us. Every time we put them down on the wooden floor they scramble frantically. And who wouldn’t? It dawns on me that we’ve got new responsibilities here. We’ve got two turtles we have to keep alive until we exit China, when hopefully we can give them away. Thorne puts them in their glass bowl near the sink in the living room and they instantly shrink into their shells.
“Tony,” I call out. “I’m glad we finally found a use for the wet bar!” Then Thorne sprinkles brown food pellets into the water and watches each turtle poke his neck out of his shell to swallow. Aidan wants a naming ceremony, and I tell him to think on it and we’ll vote at dinner. Then Tony comes out of the bedroom smiling. He likes the turtles. We have pets now in China. Some of us are feeling more and more at home here.
VI
Hall of
Preserving
Harmony
Homing Pigeon
In early December my mother comes to Beijing for three weeks, and every day is like a small celebration. Every day is like a holiday. We don’t get much family all this way around the hemisphere. “She’s here!” both boys say when they get off the bus and spy her standing there. She’s here! I say to myself. She’s tired, too, but what better time could there be to play a full round of Monopoly than after you’ve just flown thirteen hours up and over the North Pole? We go back to the apartment. She will sleep in Thorne’s room—he’ll sleep on Aidan’s top bunk again.
